Real Racing League Play Guide

By Nacho Andrade, USA
for www.touchgen.com

Published: June 11, 2009

While playing the Ad-hoc build of Real Racing, Firemint sent out this great guide about it’s league play. Rather than try and re-invent the wheel, I’ll just re-post the email here:

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Leagues are possibly the trickiest to understand, yet potentially the most exciting and innovative component of Real Racing. Leagues come into their own as the server population grows, and will serve as a kind of massively multiplayer racing career meta game (or MMRCM!! that will add immensely to Real Racing’s replay value.

So, what are Leagues?

Leagues are like playing out a real racing career against real people. You can join leagues on the Cloudcell site, and you can play in many leagues at once (see http://realracing.cloudcell.com/League.php) Each league can contain all the people playing Real Racing worldwide. Players who sync with Cloudcell will automatically join the default league, but the other leagues will have varying size populations. Players compete in groups of 20 at a time.

Leagues are limited in time, with a season consisting of a group of races that must be completed by a set date or time. Once all races have been completed the season is over, and the next one begins after a brief rest period. Drivers get points in a race if they place well, and at the end of a season the driver with the most points wins (points also determine who moves up and down between divisions - more about that later!)

Players complete each race in the season whenever they like (within the allowed timeframe) and can continue to retry for a good result until the deadline is reached and their best time is automatically locked in. At the end of the race when players sync their result, they will see their own time as well as all other drivers in their group. An animation shows them moving up or down within the group (playing in the studio we found this animation incredibly compelling!). Players can also watch a TV footage-style replay from anyone else in their group right on the device.

Real Time vs Asynchronous Leagues

Our leagues are designed to support different modes of play and evolved out of the ways we have been playing the game in the studio.

- Real time leagues are fast paced, with perhaps 10 minutes to submit your best lap time for each track. These leagues are the most exciting when the submission time is ticking down and you frantically start another lap, hoping to finish and submit it before the round ends. See the Eldhert League for an example: http://realracing.cloudcell.com/League.php?nId=7 These leagues lead to intense 10 minute ranking competitions, as you can see what your opponents are doing. It feels like real time multiplayer, except that you’re racing against 20 people at once.

- Asynchronous leagues consist of multiple lap races and give you much longer to submit your best time. You can race in these leagues when you are not connected and submit your results next time you have a data connection. See the Brennstoff League for an example: http://realracing.cloudcell.com/League.php?nId=6

Divisions

To allow for potentially large numbers of competitors, leagues have a tree structure. Within a division, drivers are initially randomly assigned to a group of 20 people from around the world. Each group has a “parent” group in the next division up, and two “child” groups in the next division down (so there is 1 group in the first division, 2 in the second, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth and so on). At the end of each season, the top 4 drivers in each group move up into the parent group, and the bottom 8 move down into the two child groups (4 into each). People in higher divisions have earnt their posiiton, so the competition toughens up the higher you get.

League position earns a driver CR, Real Racing’s “ranking currency” - the more CR you have, the higher you are in the global driver ranking. The more leagues you play in and the higher you finish in them the more CR you earn. A 10 minute league can see you play a championship in 40 minutes, and you could work your way up to worldwide number 1 within a few hours. However when you leave it for a while, you will slowly lose your league position and your global ranking. This way the competitions will stay fresh. The longer leagues are more ongoing and you can maintain your position with just a small time commiitment. Use these to build up your Rank.

There’s quite a lot in leagues to get your head around, and you may already have caught glimpses of some of the features described above. The best way to get a feel for leagues is just to play them!

Review disclosure: Any games reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note: the resulting review score is never impeded by this fact, all opinions are that of the TouchGen reviewer and not the developer. This is in keeping with our O.A.T.S oath. Read more about O.A.T.S here

2 Comments on "Real Racing League Play Guide"

Jay on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 5:29 am

I love the league system

legend.inc on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 12:10 pm

me too!

Real Racing League Play Guide

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