If Stage 10 had one of my favorite events, Stage 11 has two of my least favorite. Any nice things I may have said about the monkeys recently I take back. First, the basics: 7 challenges, 7 events. Porsche 919. 40 gold completion bonus. Five of these challenges (reach 220 mph / 2 endurances / no collisions / elimination) are potentially challenging depending on the bots you get but, in my opinion, shouldn’t pose a problem. The 220 mph one may require an upgrade or two though.
Two of the challenges (5 & 6) require racing without going off-track (6 adds in the requirement of placing 3rd, and at night). The first one had me throwing my iPad down in utter disgust, which I’ve come close to doing many times but never actually went through with until now. It was a good thing I was on my bed. The bots in this challenge will do everything they can to push you off the track. I even had one rush up to me from nowhere in the FINAL turn and pit me, spinning me off. That’s when I lost it. It took a few infuriating races to get this one.
Challenge six is where I gave up. I am absolutely not kidding when I say I raced this one event for almost six hours, failing EVERY SINGLE TIME. First, in about half the events I get pushed off track within the first few turns. With those at least I can cancel quickly and replay. The other half I ran all 3 laps, and despite racing the track correctly and finishing 3rd, I get the big FAIL message at the end. How do I know I’m racing it correctly? I was able to get back into the Endurance Kings series (had been locked out for a few days for unknown reasons), and ran the 919 TT there several times, looser than in Le Mans and with no off track issues. So, I’m convinced that either I’m missing something incredibly obvious in the night race that I have no problem with during the day, or there is a bug in the event that simply makes it impossible to achieve. Maybe they coded it as placing 2nd but wrote it as 3rd. Who knows. Of course you get no indication of where you’re going off track or why you failed, so you have to run the entire 10.5 minute race before finding out your result. I can’t wait to see if anyone else has issues.
I also tried upgrading, hoping to be able to get some kind of advantage. Nope (no difference observed, btw). I slowed to a crawl at almost every turn before proceeding. Nada. I let the whole pack get a head start to avoid issues at the start. Bupkiss. I hooked my bumper to the back of a bot to follow its line exactly. Zilch. I even ran a lap in last place at 50 mph and examined every foot of track looking for a hidden edge. Zippo. So I caved and played my SKIP card. Cost me 45 gold, but at least I’ll never have to see that event again. I hope.
This was a bottomless, sucking pit of monkey greed. Between constant servicing, upgrades, and my final skip I laid down about 900 gold to try and win an event that I never could. Seriously, I wish all of you luck and hope this was just me being an idiot or was something with my setup. If not, and if you’re short on gold and/or time, I’m not sure this is possible to accomplish. I least I have reruns of Welcome Back Kotter to help me recover.
By the way, thanks to everyone who tried to help in separate post for help on this. I do think the Arnage turn is deadly, and turning the brightness up on my iPad was a great suggestion.
Pics on the way.
