Tournaments

Hi folks!

The tournament races is one area of "Need For Speed" that we haven't taken a closer look at yet, so let's see what we can gain, and where the "traps" are - the hooks to get us to pay real-world money.

Structure

Tournaments are time-limited events that have their own "fuel" - race tickets. The standard amount is five tickets, recharging slowly (about 1h each), although I've seen sudden full recharges occasionally.

Usually, the range of cars is tightly restricted - from "all street cars" to "only Ford Mustangs". There is a single track that's being raced.

Winning a race gives you points, losing a race removes points (usually about 1/4 of the potentially won points).

Ranking

There are 15 ranks or levels. By gaining points, you can rank up to the next level, which gives you an increasingly valuable prize. The higher level you get, the more difficult opponents become, and the more points you need to get to the next level.

Independent of levels there's a "global rank" of all players participating in the tournament. When it ends, you'll get a prize depending on your rank in the global highscore.

Multiplayer

Tournaments are set up as a kind of multiplayer experience - you compete against other players, real people, mixed with the regular AI opponents. But don't be fooled, you're not actually racing live against other people. If you observe the driving behaviour of your opponent, you'll quickly realise that you're racing against the usual AI player, using a real player's car.

To repeat, you're not racing against other people - you're racing against other people's cars, driven by the computer player.

Tournament credit

Usual prizes include cash, visual points, gold for the top ranks and tournament credit. This is a special kind of currency that you can use to shop in the tournament market.

This market is somewhat unique, in that you can't convert gold - you really need the tournament credits to do anything here.

The market contains similar items to the black market - materials, parts, blueprints. With one exception: There are two "tournament cars" in the game, which you can only get by buying the respective blueprints in the tournament market.

Tournament Cars

These cars are the "Toyota Supra" and the "Ferrari F40". The Toyota is especially important since the Tuner Trials change, because you need this car to race for rare (blue) conversion kits, which you need in turn to upgrade rare (5-star) to epic (6-star) parts.

Fortunately, you only need 15 blueprints for the basic Supra, and it's just about enough to race for kits, with a bit of skill. Before the Tuner Trials, the price was at 300 credits per blueprint, which has since been reduced to 166 (500 for 3). So make sure you save up some for this car, as you need it for progressing through the game.

That aside, the parts are usually hugely overpriced (ranking in the thousands), while you can often grab a bargain material for 10 or 20 credits.

Highscore

But let's get back to the highscore list. If I'm diligently racing (making use of most of the free race tickets), and provided that I have a car to get me through to racing till the end, I can normally make it into the top 200.

This is a far cry from the top 25, which is where you usually start getting gold prizes. So we'd have to spend a fair amount of gold on ticket refills (90G for another 5), or real-world money on the game's VIP system, giving us more tickets at some points.

This is obviously the hook to get us to pay up - competitiveness, and once we start spending gold in larger quantities, we're pressured to make it to the top to "recover our losses". As usual, it helps to be aware of how these things work, in order not to get pulled into them.

Given that the game is keeping a lot of state offline, I wouldn't be too surprised if the top people were using cracked versions to provide enough gold for tickets. Can't prove that, of course - at some point, I'm going to run a trial to see if it's actually possible to make a "net profit" out of buying tickets.

Strategies

So, now that we understand how the system works, what's the best way of getting some fun out of it, without unnecessarily reaching into our wallet?

First up, compete, but don't gamble. Use your free tickets to get as much as you can out of the tournament. You'll find that there's actually quite some fun in seeing how far you can push.

Racing

Since you drive the same track over and over, you can try to optimise your time. In the beginning, you'll often have a more powerful car than your opponent, so take note of the time you're making at the end of the race, and the difference towards the opponent's time.

Over the course of the tournament, you should be able to get 500ms to a second better than your initial time, by timing nitro boosts correctly, driving tight corners and whatever other tricks you have.

Once the opponent's car gets close to yours in terms of PR, your best bet is to start driving dirty. You can predict the AI player's position, since they drive "shortest distance / no drift". Push them into the track side, close their corners, have them rear-end you - lots of fun ways to keep them from winning, even if their car is equal or better than yours.

Choice of opponent

You have three choices - an opponent from your level, from one level up, or two levels up - someone from two levels ahead gives over twice as much points as someone from your current level.

Here, keeping an eye on the opponent's time pays off - you'll know if you can still keep racing for maximum points, or if you're no longer standing a chance.

In the end, like all other features, this is supposed to be fun - so treat it as such. Happy racing!