Le Mans Ultimate ties rank protection to a paid subscription

Studio 397 will add an Event Joker system to Le Mans Ultimate in an update on July 28, and access to it is restricted to players on a paid monthly membership. In the days since the announcement, players have argued that the arrangement makes the game's competitive ranking pay-to-win.

Le Mans Ultimate gives each player two ratings: a driver rank, reflecting race performance, and a safety rank, which penalises reckless driving. Both feed into matchmaking when a player joins a race.

How the Joker works

Under the announced system, a player earns one Joker every 10 races and can hold a maximum of three. Spending one nullifies a single race result. If the race was part of a championship the result still counts there, but it no longer damages the player's driver or safety rank.

The dispute is over who can spend them. Jokers are available only to players on the Pro or Pro+ membership, which Polygon reported costs $8 a month. In practice a subscriber can discard their worst finish in every 10 races while an unsubscribed player carries every result.

The player response

Reddit threads titled "The new 'Race Joker' is the worst idea ever" and "New joker system is P2W" collected the objections, and comments under a YouTube video introducing the system ran the same way.

A second strand of criticism concerns safety rank specifically. Because losing safety rank is the main consequence for dangerous driving when intent cannot be established, players argue a Joker lets a subscriber drive badly and then erase the penalty.

Not every objection is about the paywall. Some players argue against nullifying results at all, on the grounds that unfair outcomes are part of real-world racing too. The update containing the system is scheduled for July 28.