LMU community, we hear you loud and clear. We intended Jokers to be something that helped people and not affect gameplay but in an effort to push more features into the product, we got the implementation on this one quite wrong. The inequality to ranking effects isn’t a fair way to handle this. We’re going to make changes immediately and we can’t say that more won’t be made once we have feedback from a live system.

Here’s what we’re going to do right now… we’re making jokers available to all players, regardless of subscription status. We still think that having jokers available for the times that your internet fails or your hardware dies is valuable. We also think they can be of help if you encounter an issue we’ve created (of course we’re working relentlessly to ensure this becomes less relevant). We’re also increasing the gaps between earning cards – it’ll take 10 races to earn your first, 20 for your second and 30 for your third – jokers are meant to be rare and valuable – you can’t use them routinely. You’ll need to give careful consideration to their use. We’ll be monitoring the usage and tweaking the time to earn the jokers as necessary through RaceOS in the coming weeks and months.

For those of you worrying about a decrease in driving standards because you think other players will use jokers to mitigate it – it takes many hours of gameplay to earn one and gets longer after your first and second. Additionally, badge bans and Safety Rank are still in effect and our new protest system and new dedicated stewarding will be handling these players. We are determined to make this release the strongest step forward for helping us get on top of poor driving etiquette. It’s a sim racing problem we believe can be tackled.

We’re always looking to add value to our subscribers – they help us maintain the free levels of dedicated servers for both practice and racing as well as matchmaking for all RaceControl users.

Regarding practice servers, for clarity, they were always still available to everyone. In fact, they’re going to be set up to be twice as long. Practice servers for everyone and a dedicated Practice+ section for subscribers. We know practice is an important component to our online experience and we see all your requests online… we’re exploring what we can do to make them a reality.

Please note: we don’t want to delay the Tuesday release for this change. You will likely still see some UI that refers to the subscription status for Jokers but you will be earning Jokers in the background and we will likely have a hotfix later that week to showcase this correctly.

Thank you

Stephen Hood