User blog:Quiksilvr/The date-time synchronisation error and what you can do about it

So I, like all of the other guys who are hooked on to RR3, was terribly frustrated by the things we didn't know about while signing up for the update, like the one I want to address currently. Apparently EA/ Firemonkeys have decided to play watchdog and keep an eye on our servicing practices through their servers. There was confusion, initially, when people thought it was a bug but then someone here posted a screenshot of FM's response to his query on fb saying that it's a new feature they have implemented. Naturally, I was outraged like the rest, as we should have been made aware of it in the 'What's new in this update' column before we chose to update the app.

Day before yesterday, I came across an anomaly in this server sync process, that I thought that can be exploited and I put it across in a couple of threads. But surprisingly, no one seemed to be able to replicate my results. I went over it again today, and I've finally deciphered what was going on. Before I tell you what to do to take advantage of this 'so-called-feature', here is how the server keeps account of your car service schedule.

You put your car on servicing and your device intimates the server about the same, which makes a note of it. So while your device starts counting down the minutes till your car is fully serviced, the server is performing a twin countdown. And the programming is such that the server won't allow for the servicing to complete until the countdown on the server has run down to zero. And since none of us can influence the server's time-keeping, theoretically, we can't tamper with service times by changing time locally on our device. This is also why many of us would have experienced that sometimes the countdown timer freezes if we are offline or temporarily disconnected from the internet. But once we go back online, the countdown syncs with the server countdown again, and we get our car serviced back to us on time, if it's due. So it's a harmless feature, or so FM would have us believe. It's not like that if a car takes x minutes for servicing, we have to be online for the entire duration of x minutes. You can be offline for a while, and come back online anytime after x minutes have passed and claim your serviced car. But the server ensures that no matter what we do, we can't get back the car before x minutes. A pretty solid way to stop us from cheating..or is it?

This is where the error prompt comes in. The moment your device is not able to reach the servers, you gets this thing flashing on your screen, telling you that the sync has been interrupted. And herein lies you oppurtunity.

The moment the servers are in the dark, they have no idea of what you are doing in the game. And when the game does go back online, it has a stack of data of what you have been doing all this time, that it passes on to the servers. Among other things such as your race statistics, what races you ran, what trophies you won, and how much R$ and fame you accrued, it also hands over the list of cars queued up for servicing, but not WHEN the car was put on servicing. And this is the important bit here. Say, for example, you want to race the Porsche 919 Hybrid 2014 on the 10 lapper of LeMans in Endurance Kings, which takes slightly under 30 minutes, and then you put it on servicing which should take you a further 02 hours. Normally, whether you race online or offline, nothing changes. But now because the servers are calling the shots, and not your device, you can fool the system if you race offline. Because the moment the server reconnects with your device, and sees that your Porsche is in queue for servicing, it doesn't listen to your device telling it that the servicing needs 2 hours. Instead, the servers decide that they must count down from the moment that they lost contact with your device, so as not to cause an time keeping error. So if you have been racing offline this entire time, the time that you spent offline including the time you were racing also gets included in the service time-keeping, and you have to wait that much time less. So, if you went offline just before the race, and took 28 min to complete the 10 lapper, put it on servicing, and then went online, you'll see that the countdown timer now shows ~1h 30 min instead of 2h that was counting down while device was offline a minute ago.

"All this is great, but how does it help me?!!", you might ask. This knowledge doesn't let you farm additional gold coins, for sure, but it lets you save time. Consider a situation where you want to race a bunch of cars, of which car X has the maximum servicing time of 90min. If you race offline for 90 minutes, you can race all these cars within this time period, and get back the cars fully serviced instantly by going online after the last race provided you went offline before racing the first car, even if car X was the last car you raced and put on servicing just before going online. Say, for instance, you can't help but go offline for 6 hrs (Work, sleep, commute/travel, movies- take your pick), when you come back to RR3, don't go online right away. Race all your races, and put them in servicing. And then go online. Since none of the cars in RR3 have a service interval of 6 hrs ( The max is 5h 25min, I think), you'll see that all your cars have been magically delivered back to you the moment you go online.

Here is how to do it in a step-by-step manner:

[Step 0: Give the game a rest! You need to build up a reserve time for servicing before you can utilise it. And you reserve starts ticking the moment you quit the game or go offline. You need to be offline atleast as long as your target car's service time. (The target car is the one with the longest service time, which you want to be instantly serviced for racing again) For this example, let's settle on Porsche Hybrid 2014 as our target car with a service time of 2 hrs.]

...

Initiate Step 1 two hrs after quitting the game/last online gameplay.

Step 1: Go offline and launch the game, or force close and reopen the game if it's already running. Ensure that you are offline before you launch the game. If the servers manage to sync with your device before you start racing or while you are at it, your servicing reserve time is lost! That means NO cloud save!! So save your game before step 0, if you wish to.

Step 2: Race any number of cars (with a service interval of 2 hrs or less) that you want, as many times you want and in any order that you want, including the Porsche Hybrid. Remember to put the car on servicing after you are done with it. It doesn't matter if you put them on servicing at separate times or together, as long as you are still offine.

Step 3: After the entire lot of cars have been put on servicing, quit the game and force close it.

Step 4: Restore net access to your device, and relaunch the game while online. You'll see that the cars have all been fully serviced, and available for another round of racing!

This loophole can be best exploited on the go, if you are planning a batch of long races, where instead of waiting you can keep racing offline for two or three hours on Le Mans ( An hour yields approximately 20 laps racing with a LMP racing/ ~16-18 laps with other cars) and have atleast some of them returned back to you instantly for re-racing, except for the ones which take longer to get serviced, more than the two/three hours that you just raced.

And just to reiterate, if you have been offline for five-and-a-half hours or more, any and all cars you put on servicing before you go online, will be instantly serviced! Let me know how it worked out for you. Cheers!