Please at least add some AI racers to fill the spots since it's impossible nowadays to get people to join, It has some of the best dailies for horse content yet you can't even complete them.

Obviously the horse races shouldnt be a lobby and should be a queue more like it used to be where it teleported you to the race when there were enough people. No one is going to sit around for 5 minutes waiting hoping that someone might join eventually so that they can sit around for another 5 minutes waiting for more people. I would have laughed in the face of the individual that suggested this but at PA the idea is funded, developed and moved to production.

The current system isn't ideal, but it would work well enough if the interest were actually there. The core problem is that it's pretty much just horse trainers who care, and there aren't a significant enough number of them for the current system to work very well. Pretty much the only reason it works at all right now is because the horse training discord set up a way for folks to organize races, and even that doesn't work very well. PA clearly overestimed how much players would want to do horse racing when they last redesigned the races, and when your assumptions are bad, design decisions that might work fine under other circumstances can be very poor in reality.

PA likely didn't do a queue simply because it was harder to make work than what they currently have. It's basically the same system as what you get with RBF except that you're stuck waiting for the race to start instead of being able to join midway. Of course, it would be easier to implement a queue than AI, and a queue might be enough to get horse racing to work for those who care, but we'd probably have to actually be able to test it in practice to know for sure. If the interest is low enough, not even a queue would work.

Regardless, hopefully, PA can either implement something that makes it so that those who want to do horse racing can actually do it regularly, or they provide an alternate means of getting the same rewards, because it's very annoying to have so many horse training items effectively unobtainable simply because PA chose to use horse racing as the method of distributing them while simultaneously failing to make the horse racing interesting enough or rewarding enough for players in general to bother with it.

Well there supposed to be alot of life skills changes coming so lets see if they make it fun 

Hmm AI racers would certainly be a neat solution I'd be in favour of, this might be a little too much of a deviation so I apologise if that's the case.

Personally I wish the races were just time trials where you can see the other participants. I'm an avid trainer and wish I could gain access to more stonetails and fiery celerity draughts but being forced to use the race horse that feels like it has nothing to do with the training I've done, instead of the horses I've put my time and effort into and then to end up potentially with 1 coin whilst helping someone else get 24 coins is kinda silly. Let me use my own horses and challenge my own times at different horse tier levels, not get completely destroyed by the same few people that are excellent racers and know the course extremely well, you only have to look at the hiscores to see the problem there, or to have played racing games against someone particularly good at racing games, you will lose, everytime; but I don't want nonsensical catch up mechanics, let players have their own goals to work towards, their own records to beat, sure better players will get a better reward, but not 24x better.

It really feels like they forced the community aspect of the races, let me do time trials whenever I want and maybe I'll meet some cool people on the race track doing the same thing, then if they really want to push people together just create a hot time event where you get 20-50% more at peak times.

They don't need to do all this, but they definitely have to do something and AI racers would certainly fit the bill also.

This is literally what put me off trying it when I came across it. I'm sure other new players would have the same reaction of seeing the idea of the race, thinking it looks cool, looking into how to do it, and discovering you'll either wind up waiting alone forever or nuked by 'pro' racers. Obviously a self-perpetuating cycle, since if more newbies did it, there'd be more chances of getting races with just other newbies, or even 'normal' level players. But no one wants to spend time slogging through the negligible-or-no reward (given you may not finish in the 10 secs after a superstar does) for maximum time investment period to maybe, eventually, get a race where you have a chance to get something notable.

Solo time trials on the course would give people the ability to 'practice' without risk of losing the reward because someone else was so much better, and give people the ability to get the rewards (at a lower rate than winning races, obviously) when no one else is racing. That would actually make people more likely to want to queue once they know what they're doing, and give a different route for those who want to race for rewards but cannot find a race to get their stuff.

AI in races in every game is...questionable. They're either undertuned and easy to beat (meaning people quit out of races with other PCs to try to get an NPC-only easy win), or overturned and defeat the purpose as you'll just lose. It'd take an incredible amount of conditionals to make the NPC fillers be both a challenge to the best in the queue and beatable by the worst, and I honestly cannot think of anyone who has succeeded in that, so I wouldn't expect it here. Having Solo Time Trials as an alternative to the races solves the unending queue with no payoff issue without that stumbling block. 

@GojuSuzi

It's like you say, it's hard to pull off and do correctly. The only reason why people want to do the horse races right now is because of the rewards. Since the rewards can be obtained by other means, it gives very little incentives to do although you could participate to gain more of said rewards.

Whenever you hide rewards behind a mini-game, people will find ways to min-max it and draw out the fun that might actually be there. By making the rewards only availble by achieving a certain place like first place let's say, you wouldn't be encouraging people to play more, you would be pushing away people from playing the mini-game.

If you add PvE to the mini-game that replaces human players, people will quit and try again until they're not queued with other players.

If you add instant queue from anywhere, more people will want to try it but if you add PvE then peopel will just quit and try again later even if you add a penalthy like you can't try again for 30 mins (FF14 does this for dungeons). If you increase the penalty then people will be forced to play through it and may or may not participate.

Ultimately, you need to make a mini-game that is addictingly fun. Something where people go to have fun without a care if they rank first or last. But even still, people won't participate? Why? Because there is a very finite amount of time that you can spend in the game per day. People like to min-max as much as they can whether they use spreadsheets or just figure out how to make more silver per hour, they will treat it like a job which shouldn't be the case but when you design the entire game like BDO, that's the mentality people will eventually adopt. You don't have that mentality so much in themepark games like FF14 because money is easy enough to obtain but it's also not designed for a toxic mindset. You're free to spend 95% of your time decorating houses for yourself and others if you want.

Does BDO have meta communities? Maybe to some degree but it's nothing like some other games. I think because this game lacks meta, horse racing will never really be interesting to people. There's very little community incubation here and I think that's the biggest hurdle they will have to overcome if they don't want to keep releasing dead content.

I kind of liked it as a none horse trainer... till I worked out the catch up thing.... then why player it? I could sit at the start for 30 second and probably win, even upgrade gear was pointless, just time the last bit correctly and bingo.

I know this put a lot off people off. You where not racing, you where planning the last 10 seconds.. the gear, the rest of the ‘race’ that was meaningless filler.

(hence you did not need to participate fully in the race, you could wait at the start, afk then use the catch up for the last part of the race and win, factual and recorded – or you could RP is a real race, with the knowledge its not.. most don’t RP in BDO)

If you wanna get the none trainers in there, who aren’t doing it for materials. Then it needs to be a competition of skill. Else it’s a silly game that only people who need materials will bother doing... and not for the competition but for the materials - and another system could be doing that instead.

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So change it to somthing diffrent, not sure about adding AI horces, for why? extra server load for a system no one orgranicaly is intrested in? or make it a skill based game and see if more play it?

They thought BDO players wanted a ‘Feelgood’ race system where everyone could feel like they nearly won. No hurt feelings

The issue with making it a queue would be the same result.  People would queue for the event and wander off to do some questing.  They would drop out of queue when notified their race was ready.   AI racers might work but some players would complain about being beaten by the stronger AI.  I own 2 race horses, I would like to run them in a race some day soon. 

I think the better solution might be to have a sign up for "race day" here on the forums.  Some place on a thread, where you plan to be online and tell others to seek you out for a friendly horse race.  It wouldn't need to be set in stone, just a line like; Family name, character, date, time, duration.  Others would just have to be understanding that we all can get blind sided by funerals, weddings, child birth, etc.

Have fun!

I just wanna bump this. Please do something that we can do races again. Whether it's AI or being able to race the clock for rewards.