Rally (part 2)

You have a couple options when playing racing games: you can race against computer-created opponents, generally called “AI” or you can race online against other humans. For the latter usually the game will connect you to a server that shows you upcoming races and some details about them (e.g., start time, virtual location (aka track), how long, how many people registered, etc.). You can then jump in and start racing, which usually ends in tears (aka lots of crashes) because it’s anonymous and random. You may be driving next to someone who’s been playing for years or someone who bought the game 10 minutes ago and is just messing around. Or worse, someone who wants to cause mayhem and crash people on purpose. Game designers try to put controls in place (e.g., safety ratings, rankings, etc.) to keep races clean, but it’s a difficult problem to solve. Which leads me to another aside that I think is unique about racing games.

In a typical video game, you try to dispatch your opponents in whatever way you can, as long as you follow the rules. Racing is weird because while your goal is to be faster than your opponent, you also need to cooperate with them. It’s obvious that to be fair and within the rules you can’t run people off the road or crash into them. But less obvious is the delicate dance that happens when you’re truly racing someone. For example, you need to give opponents room when you’re side-by-side in a corner. You can’t dive-bomb or make moves that are unpredictable and dangerous. You need to respect the other driver and cooperate with them, yet still compete with them.

As you can imagine, doing this online, even in the best of circumstances with people you know and race with a lot, is fraught with problems. People make mistakes or over-estimate their abilities, which causes crashes. Or there are simply different interpretations of “who owns the corner” or if a move was fair or not. There are a thousand other scenarios that can end someone’s race.

Here’s probably the worst scenario when it comes to league sim racing. Say your league has a weekly race that everyone knows about in advance. You spend hours practicing and working on your car setup. (Yeah, literally, hours.) The night of the race comes and you spend an hour doing the pre-race practice session with everyone. Then there’s a 20 minute qualifying session. You do well and are in P3, right in the second row. The race starts and you all rush down the main straight towards the first corner. As you enter the corner someone behind you has missed their braking marker and hits you from behind. Your car spins around and 25 cars rush past you. Your car is damaged and you can’t really drive it so you have to retire from the race. So the 12 hours you spent preparing for the race are over in 35 seconds and you finished in last place.

This happens frequently enough to where it can cause you to question why you spend the time. But it’s not all doom-and-gloom. There are times when you prepare for a race and it ends up being amazing. You have a bunch of intense and respectful battles, survive the race, and have a great time. And this is why you keep racing online with other humans – you’re continually chasing that high you get every now and then when the stars align and something magical happens.

Rallying, though, is a different beast since it’s only time trials. So the format works really well for online racing. You can create a rally event with multiple locations, each with a certain number of stages. You set a start date and an end date for each location and participants simply need to complete their stages before the end date. No hassles trying to find a time for 30+ people to race once a week. No races ended by someone else smashing into you.

Some of the best things about the previous Dirt Rally 2.0 were the daily, weekly, and monthly online rallies that were built right into the game. Every day you could start up the game and find a few different rallies to race. Some only had a single stage, but others had a few stages. Some only lasted the day and others ran for a week or a month. It was really cool to practice for the stages and then see how you compared to other drivers.

Unfortunately, the new WRC game doesn’t have that exact same setup, but they do have this concept of clubs, which is really cool. (I think DR2.0 had clubs as well, but I never really used that feature when I played it.) Anyone can create a club and setup whatever rallies they want, choosing the car class, location, weather, time of day, number of stages, etc. People can then join the club via the Racenet website and get access to the rallies right in the game interface. I’m really impressed with how slick it is and that the website has built-in telemetry and comparison data for all the runs. It’s really, really neat.

Racenet combined with Discord has allowed a bunch of different groups to create pretty vibrant communities that run daily/weekly/monthly rallies and special event rallies. I’m starting to get involved in a couple of them and will probably be writing about it more. Now I just need to get my driving up to speed.