Pit Stop – eRacing

Now I’ve always been fairly interested in how eSports are progressing. Recently a number of games have adopted various forms of league play, strategy games and even first person shooters have this kind of feature available. You qualify and get placed in a league and work towards promotion, I do like this kind of gameplay, it fuels my competitive nature. I’ve yet to see any racing game have any kind of eSports feature, which is a shame as it’s really built for competition so it would probably work really well. But what is the best way to get this implemented?

At the end of the league you could also get awarded various accolades, least collisions, quickest lap times…

I’m going to look at Black Ops II. The league play mode they’ve implemented works like this: you have to play 5 matches at the start of the month to get placed in a league. You’re matched against other random players who may or may not already be placed in a league. Based on your performance you get placed in a bronze, silver, gold league etc. Once placed you continue to play league games, if you win you move up the league towards promotion. Again you’re matched with anyone looking for a league game. So it’s entirely random who you’ll end up facing.

With a racing game, qualification could be really simple to implement, you just need to get players to set a few laps around a certain track, take the best time and use that to decide where everyone should be placed. Now when matchmaking you do kind of want to be placed with players who are around the same skill level as yourself. It would be pretty unlucky if you kept facing gold racers when you’re at a silver level, you’d never stand a chance! Though this may not be practical, it could take a long time to get players all at the same level together and you don’t want to be waiting around for ages just trying to get a game going. So I can see the complication there, so for speedy access to games you need to get matched against people at random levels. One way to balance out the leagues is to get more points if you beat someone a league higher than you, less points if you beat someone in a league lower. At least that makes it a bit fairer.

So that could work as the basic format. At the end of the league you could also get awarded various accolades, least collisions, quickest lap times etc. This would make online circuit racing much more enjoyable I think. Instead of the current form of just matchmaking and taking part in a race. It would certainly make me much more engaged. Fingers crossed a developer takes a look at some of the recent games that are introducing this kind of feature and follows suit, it’s one genre for which I think it would work really well.