It is becoming a little annoying when you join a race an it has 6/6 racers, but time till race starts is 58 minutes. Can we get an update that cuts the time to 1 minute once the race becomes full? Or 2 minutes even.
official races all have a 1hr countdown, starting from when the first racer set/joined the race. Custom race start times however are set by the starter when setting up the race and can be much longer wait times than official races.
If you dont like the wait time on a custom race just leave and start your own with a shorter wait.
Just curious what you think they are? I can only come up with exactly one reason for the delay. You can change your car and/or quit if you change your mind about racing. This can still be accomplished with much shorter delay times. I dont see any benefit really unless you wanted to limit racing progression but for the 2 merits and zero money i just do not see why.
Edit: You are Baldr I read all your guides you rock! thanks!
If you went to a concert, and were told it started at 9:00, so you show up at 8:45, would you want to be told "Hey, the band was ready, so they started at 7:30"? Have you ever seen a sports game start because both teams were there, instead of waiting until the announced starting time? These are official races, it makes logical sense they would start at the announced times.
More important, when new drivers first hit A class, they tend to be around driver skill of 5 or 6, in that range. But people who have been here awhile have much higher skill. Mine is 31.0, for instance, and I'm not anywhere close to the top dog. When Torn matches people for races, it attempts to keep them grouped in fairly similar skill ranges. So new class A drivers don't have to race against people like me and the ones that have even higher skill. If A class was a free for all, and the first 6 to sign up were all thrown in the same race, then new drivers would have a very, very difficult time gaining points to upgrade their cars.
So there is a time delay, and that gives the chance for the game to match people up a bit as it's assigning races.
In theory, you could do that, and still have the race start when 6 people are assigned. But the higher level racers would benefit a lot more from that, because there are more of them signing up. So for higher level people, the races would all start pretty quick, with no wait time, but for the lower level racers, if you wait until 6 with low driver skill sign up, are going to have longer wait times. By making it a standard 1 hour, it gives the new players more of a level field.
Another consideration would be how much faster people can generate racing points if you let the race start asap.
You'll learn to deal with it. Or you'll decide that racing isn't for you. And that's fine. Racing is a very small part of Torn, if you skip it you'll be fine. Or just do it enough to get the merits and then stop racing. Lots of people do that.
You also have the option to set up custom races, and on those, the wait time is something you can set.
It's not likely to change. The wait times are pretty much the same now as they were when I started racing.
i am not that old. so my run up there race classes was not that long ago. and even when i was first starting all the rooms were full within 10 or so min. so i under stand that u can't make the timer go away when it is full...but shorting the wait time to 30 min would not hurt the new racers and shouldn't be a hard change.
I am old and have worked hard to gain the points I have, 30 minutes would just mean a flood of points for people to upgrade with after very little effort. Not every race is full in 10 mins, especially once you get up the DS levels.
I joined a race a couple of days ago and was delighted to see I only had three and a half minutes before the race started. First time below 50 mins i can recall.