Talk:Le Mans: Ford/@comment-83.24.116.104-20160618142626

That's it, I'm done. It's been fun, it's been annoying, it's been ridiculous, it's been challenging, it's been a pain in the you-know-what. But now I'm finally done with it and never invested anything else in the game than my time.

I've been playing since Real Racing 2, which i bought and enjoyed playing from beginning to end, it was at it's time the best racing game on the iPad and so it felt natural to jump on board of RR3 as well. In the early days I had no problem with the optional paying for gold coins, it was nothing more than a shortcut for impatient players. It would have been perfectly ok for me to pay for additional tracks and cars down the line if it would have been a one time payment, but what happened after the acquisition through EA was so over the top, that I only kept on playing to "beat the system". And I only blame EA for it, not the firemonkeys. I even suspected them for a glitch which enabled me to harvest gold coins on time trials at any series, does anyone remember this? The 100% of a series were achieved, but if you stayed on the time trial screen, it never saved it and jumped back to 99% or whatever it was. So you could race Melbourne (which I chose, but any time trial would have worked) 50s and earn 3 gold coins - that's what I did. 1000 fucking times. Which enabled me to buy the remaining cars and finish all series at 100%. Nothing happened. No Congratulations! screen, nothing. Which was ok, but a bit underwhelming.

Then came the LeMans update two years ago and I blew my 100% for the new track. I started harvesting races on the 10 lap track, all before I discovered this forum. And if not for you guys here, I would have quit much earlier (on the Formula 1 series to be exact, where it was clear that without additional gold I was done with winning the second Ferrari). Force quitting, cloud save restore or bot management never occurred to me as a possibility before, but it helped significantly as did all the other great tips and upgrade strategies - even better: the fun came back. Sadly it didn't last long, each upgrade proved more than the last, that the main idea driving EA was forcing us to spend gold coins, completely insane amounts, unreasonably, of the charts. On my end my first rule, to never spend a single cent on this game for gold coins and to patiently beat the system by harvesting gold, stayed untouched.

Then it got even worse. The application started to hang on my iPad 2 more and more often, so that I would have to switch to offline mode for any races, which worked for a while, but it's almost unplayable now, with the server time sync stuff, application hanging just after finishing a 30min harvesting run - it became annoying beyond reason. So with harvesting gold as a possibility gone and my reserves dropped beneath 200 gold coins and another 9 challenges with no off-track allowed I have reached the point to be done for good. But not without thanking you all for making this crap playable again, for keeping company and everything. This meant a lot to me, because this is living proof for what communities are for and how they work, no matter how much EA showed being full of crap. I understand that the need to make money, I understand that they buy smaller companies, everybody wants to make a living for his work, but this is far beyond reason, they know it, we know it, but still the game goes on. Well, not anymore. Driver Level 220, 118 cars, 750 hours played, 100% completion before first LeMans, and ending it now, 2 years later at stage 6.3 - a top speed unreachable with only two gold upgrades done, which together were already too expensive. It's not about driving skills at all anymore (and not since yesterday, a year back or even further back in time), even with bot management. It just sucks throughout.

I'll return to what got me started in racing games in the first place, Colin McRae by Codemasters, their Dirt 3 got reviews which sound like they brought back the old glory, and I am happy to give them my money. With RR3 I am done, as with any other game that has "gold"-plans in it. When I'll think back of it, I will remember this forum and a game, that started out brilliantly and was slowly turned into a nightmare, that proves only one thing: greed destroys all things, good and bad, it slowly poisons everything and it's time for me to walk away from so much negativity. Thanks everybody, and don't forget other options for enjoying life.

May there be other roads for all of us to be driven by for joy and fun. I'll meet you there.