User blog:RomGuyony/Why I Quit RR3

If you’ve made it to this part of the story, congratulations! You’ve unlocked the bonus Director’s Cut! All jokes aside, this is probably going to be quite long so if you don’t have the time, I completely understand (short version is here). No hard feelings :) Also, I originally planned to link everything I talked about to the relevant pages on the Wiki, but I can’t be bothered after having written all this :P

For a little bit of background: I initially started playing RR3 during v1.0 (I’m not sure many people still playing can claim that!). I still remember the old vertical layout as opposed to the current horizontal one, the servicing in 5 different categories (oil, bodywork, etc) and being able to progress at your own pace :P I know that’s the version I started with, though I didn’t play from Day 1, because I remember the Corvette ZR1 was meant to be a surprise during the first content update, but FM messed something up and while the car was not yet available or revealed – I seem to remember it was under a sheet, like a silhouette – you could race against it in what must have been Modern Sports Classics or RWD Open Revolution, or their equivalent since series changed around a bit. I guess that was the first glimpse of FM’s carelessness.

It was a really fun game, though a far cry from what was available on consoles or PCs and could be played for free! After the second content update (Dubai), came the third: Prestige Update. That was the first time I deleted the app.

The reasons why have become a little blurred, if I’m honest (July 2013 seems very far away), but as I recall, the gold awarded for unlocking tiers disappeared and the experience (Fame) gained for racing was cut in half, or even by two thirds. I was racing with the Lexus LFA at the time, I still remember the internal debate I was having, before I decided that the extra effort required was not worth my time. I promptly wiped my data, overwrote my save with a blank profile and deleted the app.

Ha! What a mistake that turned out to be! If not for that, I might have eventually reached 100%. It wasn’t until the Supercars Update, 6 months down the line, that I installed the game again. I had to start over once again, but I didn’t mind, because it was fun. I think they had fixed the Gold conundrum by awarding it when leveling up. It didn’t take me long to get back to where I was and I had reached Elite (I think) by the time Road To Le Mans came out. Wasn’t that exciting? I mean, FM had been adding and tweaking features for a while, but this was their first try at bringing story into the mix, even awarding the car! o_0

Unfortunately, I was at the time still on a Sony Xperia S, with 1 GB RAM. Le Mans was a challenge for that poor thing and back then, ads were omnipresent. In the menus, post-race, etc… Now, I realise I was playing a “free” game, so I could put up with them. However, they started to make my phone crash, at the end of every other race, if not every race. The problem was that even though the race was technically over, the results didn’t load and therefore didn’t save. Coupling Le Mans and ads meant crashes of various kinds stopped my progress. Stage 5 onwards turned out to be impossible! I had seen text during loading screens claiming that third-party ads would disappear if I made an IAP. Well, I couldn’t ignore that, £1.49 for an LMP1 car seemed like a sacrifice I would have to make (I didn’t know at the time it would cost me so much more than that). While I was now free of crashes from ads, I still had to deal with crashes from Le Mans. This ultimately lead to me never winning the car :( So many complaints flooded the RR3 FB page, which at the time still allowed users to post on the page’s wall (rather than just commenting on its activity) and FM gave a 50% sale on the 919. I think that was the first example of FM’s trickery. I say this, because a few months after I had accepted that sale (for 475 Gold, a small fortune at the time), they added RTLM into the career mode…

So then I went on, progressing, playing, enjoying the game, even if some aspects of it were very frustrating. A year later, around May, I had discovered the Wiki, Le Mans – Pursuit of Victory was imminent and I had completed 95+% of total events. I thought I was well on my way to completing the game :P I now knew how to farm efficiently, make use of sales and how (more importantly) to manage my resources in order to be ready for sales, special events,… I still remember attempting to create the first iteration of the 100% Completion guide. It was mostly just text and a few of the strategies were less-than-optimal. Less than half a day later, the page was deleted without an explanation. I was very unimpressed with my first contact with Kuzz, the active admin at the time. Michael was there to tell me not to take it personally, that this sort of thing happened regularly and I do understand now, I’ve had to delete a fair share of items that just didn’t fall in line with the rules and some people probably dislike(d) me for it.

Not long after (around August 2015), when I came back from a holiday to Turkey (where I had not touched the Wiki for over a week), I started noticing that Kuzz undertook a reduced approach to editing, restricting himself to one contribution a day, until a point in September where he just dropped off without a word (part of the reason I’m writing this). This was also during the NASCAR Update and I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. A lot of us don’t have nice things to say about that update, whether it’s the tiny differences between the cars added, the repetitive nature of the Special Event, races and series, or the high Gold cost for completion (nevermind the cost if one missed the SE and had to buy the cars outright). Around a month later, after much debate on the Wiki about how to handle Kuzz’s absence, he came back and a few days later, asked me to take on the role of admin before saying his goodbyes. A few days earlier, Michael had asked the founder if he could be admin to make sure the Wiki was upkept and it so happened that within a couple of days of yours truly being made admin, Michael joined me to mean this was the first time this Wiki had more than one active admins at once. Had Kuzz considered another admin prior to deciding to leave, he may have stayed for a while longer. Doing all of this on his own wore him down way too quickly. I understand he also had real life things to worry about, which I can relate to.

It was definitely a learning curve and while I didn’t think I would get as involved as I did, as I said on the Wall of Remembrance, I can’t half-a*se. I know I’ve spent about 65 days in-game, I’d hate to think how much time I’ve spent editing, because I’m pretty sure it’s a whole lot more than that.



Unfortunately, the NASCAR Update marked the beginning of the end for me, I’m kind of surprised it’s taken this long to get there. I was at the time playing on two profiles on my own device (one signed in, one not, which is no longer possible) and during SEs, even played on my girlfriend’s tablet (two profiles there as well), to get all the information necessary for the Wiki. People were complaining because of having to run the same event four times to get all the cars, maybe they should have tried running it sixteen times :P

Not long after, I started to get a few health problems (generally fine, now), with a few consultations, surgeries and check-up appointments. I had had to make sacrifices in my daily routine, dropped things like magazines, other games, stopped exercising, etc… just to give myself more time to achieve what I wanted on the Wiki and game. One night, I was about to go to bed to finish Stingray Evolution with one stage and two hours to go, when I realised that my sutures had come undone and that I was (let’s not sugar-coat it) p*ssing blood. I remember being in the shower so the blood dripping could be easily cleaned up, wondering how I would both fix the elephant in the room and finish the SE. I ended up having to get to the hospital and finish it while doctors were “fixing” me. I realised at that point that I needed to drop all but one save file, as the “dependency” to the game was apparent.

FM had, at this point, started to release update every 6 weeks and as more and more content was being added, more and more time had to be dedicated to racing and editing. The challenges started to become more restrictive. What used to be achievable with R$ upgrades and a challenge with none, started to become impossible without Gold upgrades and artificially easy with them. I started to dread new releases, not look forward to it, as my work on the Wiki meant having to check everything twice, to make sure every tiny, unadvertised change by FM (innocuous to most users, but paramount to me) was reflected on the site, meaning acquiring a hacked file for an emulator to record information which was no longer available to me in my save (unlock requirements, upgrade costs and time, etc…). This took a lot of time and effort, but with help from the community and especially Michael, we got to a point where mostly everything was correct. Things still remain in suspense, though, such as rewards for races, which have changed several times over the years, with no easy way of recording other than actually running the races.

The end of 2015 also marked the first and perhaps only time that the community all came together to make FM understand they couldn’t be obviously messed around like they were, followed by a public apology and a retraction of the changes. Well, I say “apology”, but it wasn’t really, they claimed they were trying to fix issues, or it was a bug or something like that. It happened when the cost of hiring Crew was increased in later categories (5 Gold for 10-lappers, for example), while rewards were halved. There were a few other issues (perhaps trivial in comparison) so I tried to find the post I wrote about it at the time, but the video has since been deleted! It doesn’t mean that FM haven’t made similar changes since, they have just been sneakier about it, knowing that if just a minority of players caught on to it, the majority would not notice, believe it, or care enough to take action. For example, the ads I’ll talk about in the next few lines.

We get to 2016 and the Venom Update. FM advertise that there was an increased availability of “Free Gold” ads. What was advertised as an increase in availability was merely a re-balancing between regions, while also adding limits. Location used to be the biggest factor, with some countries in Eastern Europe getting perhaps two or less and some parts of the US getting as many as triple-digits per day. From that update onwards, people with few ads started to get more, whereas people able to get hundreds a day no longer could. It started to become apparent that some people could get up to 5 a day, while others were receiving about 20 a day. It didn’t really matter, however, because those that received 5 a day could get 15 more by signing out of social profiles. After a while, the app started to automatically sign the user in to social accounts, making this difficult. With a subsequent update, the user IDs changed somewhat and this trick was no longer possible. Those destined to get 5 would get 5, while the rest would get 20 Gold per day. At some point during the Venom Update, someone mentioned IAPs as a potential factor. Now, I honestly cannot remember who it was (it could even be me, though I have a feeling it wasn’t), but that set a chain of events in motion and I decided to create a poll (which retrospectively could have been made a bit better, but I was angry and tired) to get data in order to understand whether this theory could be backed up by evidence. To this day, out of 883 people, 95.81% of participants fall within the range of that theory. Having attempted to question FM about this and been met with flat-out denial, my (and others’, I’m sure) opinion of FM took another massive tumble.

If you’re still reading this, do you remember the £1.49 purchase in July 2014? I believe it awarded about 14 Gold coins. Since not being able to sign out to collect 15 more Gold, the benefit of the currency was negated within the first day of this change. To this day, I’ve lost out on 1,515 Gold through this.

During this time, FM have shifted the philosophy of their released content: new cars needed to be upgraded (sometimes-fully-upgraded) for 100% completion. Existing cars became worthless in new series, new cars started to need a lot of Gold upgrades to be acquired “for free”. They were also costlier to buy and upgrade. Before this update, I had no doubt in my mind: once I’d done a consecutive year on the Wiki, I’d be gone. This Jaguar Update nearly changed my mind. Nearly. From what we could see, upgrading new cars wasn’t wholly necessary, or cheap if it was. But I’m not fooling myself. Positive changes from FM usually mean a negative one down the line, I don’t doubt this will be the case again.

At the end of the day, I can’t fault FM or EA for what they’re doing. It’s their intellectual property, they are free to do what they wish with it. And they must be doing something right, because there is still a very big, active community around this. In their eyes, this is a winning formula and is very clever when you analyse it. Free-To-Play or Freemium models can actually be poisonous in my opinion, they require so much of the player’s time and attention, at regular intervals or at a constant, instead of money. Players tend to think they’re getting a good deal by not having to invest much currency, in some cases (like mine), forgetting that time is a much more valuable resource than money.

Regular content updates mean people will keep flocking to it. It doesn’t matter if they are existing, new or returning customers, it will work for any of the three demographics. They possibly make enough money through advertisement alone, as it’s pretty much everywhere. In the regular game if someone hasn’t made IAPs, to reduce service/upgrade/shipping times, to earn free Gold, it’s everywhere. On the flipside, IAPs still exist and while I assume the majority of players will never pay for anything, a lot of people will still spend a little bit of money and a few people will spend a lot of money. The constant updates keep players hooked in order to chase 100% or to keep enjoying new additions, though sometimes players (like myself, right now) reach a breaking point.

Another factor in my decision to quit RR3 is that before, my phone was my main outlet for video games. Since this Summer, my girlfriend made me the outrageous gift of a PS4 (no idea what I could get her that would come anywhere close, btw) and I am now faced with the pretty tough decision of which racing game to invest in. Yes, it is much more expensive than a free-to-play like RR3. But how involved I get will be my own decision, I won’t be pressured to finish series before special events arrive, to do Special Events, one day at a time, during the timeframe FM choose, or to log in everyday and to farm constantly to get more resources, in order to get closer to 100%, before more content gets added, resetting it all.

The experience of a game like Gran Turismo, even losing the instinctual steering input of tilting since I’ll be using a controller for a while, is something that RR3 could never, ever replicate. The graphics, gameplay, collisions and more are simply superior on a console. While RR3 can be played for free, it comes at the cost of time and stress. If I were to invest as much money into RR3 as into a console game, my enjoyment of the former would be ephemeral. The gain of 1k Gold versus a whole console game? They can only compare in terms of cost, not much else.

I realise I’ve said far too much already but there is far more that could be said. The lack of quality control in released products resulting in constant glitches, crashes, bugs, etc is wearing incredibly thin. One bug that seemingly keeps happening (one of so many but this could be the worst) and is making the devs look like a bunch of amateurs, is the disappearance of cars and/or their upgrades from the player’s garage. It’s happened to me and I keep seeing reports of it happening to other people. There is no other way to fix it than to contact the clueless support, who – when they’re taking breaks from giving out wrong information, being condescending or accusing the player of wrong-doing – will most likely try to dissuade the user from contacting them, through incompetence, until finally caving after days or weeks of dialogue and returning the user’s property. EA and FM separate themselves from communities through social pages which are very superficial and an incapable “support team”. A game without a community is close to nothing. When devs interact with the community, incredible things can happen. Take for example, Notch as one of the founders of Minecraft. It’s one of the most successful games of all time (which is incredible enough as a sandbox-game without much of a story) and would never have been that way without its community and the relationship between Notch and the users. There is a tremendous amount to complain about with this game (RR3) but there simply isn’t enough time to list everything. Everything I’ve listed above, the Time Trial Reset (which meant a lot to me), OMP being completely and utterly broken, hackers/cheats and so on. A lot of users which have been around a while will be able to think of some more off the top of their head, but their head would be a metaphorical iceberg.

Is Real Racing 3 a good game? It would be acting in bad faith if I said it isn’t. But it could be so much more and I feel like EA are more at fault than FM on this. In the same way that our goalposts keep changing because of FM, I expect their own move just as much because of EA. Yes, it’s a good game. It’s perhaps even a great game. It could be an excellent game, it really could. But I doubt it ever will.

One thing is for sure, EA/FM should realise how lucky they are to have such a forgiving, active and dedicated community. They sure don’t deserve it as it stands.

With that, thank you to everyone I’ve met on this site since joining. I wish you all good luck and happy racing.