How to Enter Races

Once you have a team ready to go, you can enter them into races by clicking "Races" under the "Search" drop-down, or from the Search page. Here you can search races by a variety of factors including race name, team size, race mileage, weather, and start date. If this is your first time racing, you can leave the options at the default choices, as you will be looking for a 2 dog race starting today at a distance of 1 mile. You don't need to worry too much about weather at this point, but if you like, Warm & Sunny and Warm & Rainy are the types of weather the steel runners you start out with are best suited to, and entering races with those kinds of weather will give your sled a higher score when you have those runners equipped.

Generally, you always want to make sure to enter a race that already has other players' teams in it, or use the Race Promotion board on the message boards or the chatroom to organize race times with other players. You will earn no experience if you have no competition (or if the only competition is other teams you own), but you will still be eligible for cash prizes for winning.

Each race has a maximum of 25 entrants, and the more competitors in a race, the more experience every finisher earns, and the higher the cash prize for the top five finishers.

Default races run every two hours at every race distance. If you search for races after 11pm site time, there will be no more races running today and you will need to search races starting tomorrow instead. (You may need to check that none of the dogs on your team have vet care expiring tomorrow, so you can renew their vet care before the race starts.)

You may notice the phrase "Special Races" on your Recent Races page. A special race is just a race in which you tie a special item to your sled (which would boost sled score or your dogs' stats in that race). You can do this a limit of 5 times in one week.

Withdrawing Fom Races

To withdraw your team from a race, click the red "Cancel Entry" or "Withdraw Entry" button on your Recent Races page, the race page, or your team's page. A team you have withdrawn from a race is free to enter another one, and if you had withdrawn them after their race had already started, the team will no longer be locked. Be careful not to press this accidentally; if you withdraw a team, you do not get your entry fee refunded, and if the race has already started when you withdraw your dogs, they will already have lost energy for starting the race. You will also get any alerts for events such as injuries, broken gear and sled damage at the time you withdraw your team.

Race Times

Races run in real time, and you can view your team's progress on the Recent Races page. You can't find out the other teams' times until they finish, however! That would spoil the suspense. You can check on which teams have already finished at any time by looking at the individual race page. All prizes are handed out after every team finishes the race.

Race time is calculated according to a simple formula:

			
Time = Distance ÷ Speed
			

This is how races produce a realistic time finished. If you want to know how long a team of a given speed, X, and a given distance, Y, should take to finish their race, take a look at this useful chart.

However, this simple calculation is further randomized by something called hang-ups, which we will discuss in a moment!

Hang-Ups

You may notice that your team is not finishing races as fast as they are capable, running for longer than their calculated speed should run a given distance. This is because of something called hang-ups! In a perfect world, your 20mph team would run 20 miles in an hour, but our world isn't perfect! Hang-ups are little events that can happen on the trail, making racing more unpredictable! Hang-ups are why two teams with identical Calculated Speeds might have vastly different race times! Here's an explanation:

Hang-ups are basically any accident or incident that you encounter during the race that adds to your race time, like injuries and other problems you, the musher, will have to deal with. They can be quick fixes, or they can take a lot of time to right.

There are two main factors with hang-ups: Number of hang-ups (how many times you encounter a problem on the trail) and Hang Time (how much time it takes you, the musher, to fix those problems).

• A male and female dog (when neither is neutered) are positioned directly next to each other on a team. - In front/back doesn't matter; just paired directly next to each other.
• A dog is wearing the wrong harness type for its personality. - Each of your dogs should be wearing the correct harness that matches its personality. You can find which harness matches your dog by looking at the word in parentheses next to your dog's personality and then matching it to the text on one of the harnesses in the shop. As you unlock better dog shops and personalities, you will unlock harnesses for better personalities. An x-back harness works best for dogs of the highest personalities in races. If you are running a Quest, a freight harness will work for any dog.
• Dogs with poor personalities. - Secure personalities are ideal for all positions, but it's most important that dogs in lead and point positions have good personalities. Dogs with less ideal personalities don't cause many hang-ups in team or wheel positions.
• Dog injuries, gear breaking, or sled damage
• There are also some random hang-ups, to represent things like a dog balking at ice or getting tangled in the line.

Please note that everything on that list can cause hang-ups, but that does not mean they always will! You can have a wonderful run that triggers no or very few hang-ups, and your dogs will run like the wind! That same team can get bogged down at every corner on their next race and take what seems like years to finish if they trigger lots of hang-ups. If a team seems to be taking strangely long or little compared to their usual performance, the reason is probably hang-ups.

Here's a detailed list of each potential hang-up and the severity:

* = both dogs on a 2-dog team are considered lead dogs.

You don't have control over luck, but you can take advantage of the factors you can control to ensure that your team always runs at their best!

Hang Time

The other two important factors with hang-ups are your Sled Score and your Musher Stats. Both of these help determine how long hang-ups take you!

The higher your Sled Score, the better your sled is performing in a particular race, or the less trouble it's giving you, and in turn, the less time you will spend stuck on a hang-up.

Your Musher Stats tell the story of how good you are as a musher! The better your musher stats, the less time each hang-up will take you to deal with.

So, when calculating your hang time (how long the hang-ups you encounter will take you), all these factors are taken into account.

		Hang Time = [ Number of Hang-Ups × ( Musher Stats × Sled Score as a Percentage × Magic ) ]
		

Wins, Bias, & the Leaderboards

Your recent race results are displayed in many places to show off your accomplishments! You can view race history on on your Recent Races page, your or another player's user profile page, on your dog's page on his "History" tab, or on your team's page. The number of races you finish and win are recorded, as well as bias, which we'll explain in a moment.

• Race Results

  You'll get a notification when your team finishes a race, and then once every team is finished running a race, or after the max lock time has been reached, all prizes will be distributed and you will get alerts notifying you of any prizes they may have earned. At this time, you may also receive notifications for anything else that happened during the race (or after, in the case of dogs who reached their age of retirement during the race, and are retiring now that it has ended):

  • Dogs Injured
  • Dogs Retired
  • Gear Broken
  • Sleds Damaged

  You just want to take care of these before your team's next race. The exception is sled damage. It's not necessary to repair your sled every time it is damaged 10%, but keep an eye on its condition to keep it from getting too low.

• Prizes

  Every entrant in a race earns experience at each checkpoint they arrive at.

  Only the first five teams to finish a race get a cash prize, and making any of these five places is counted as a "Win" for the purposes of leaderboards and success statistics.

  The experience your team earns in a race is calcuated by this equation:

  				
  ((race length x competitors)/place)+100=exp earned)
  				

  The monetary prizes your team can earn in a race are displayed when you enter the race, and are calculated as follows:

  • 1st Place: $ = miles x 10
  • 2nd Place: $ = (miles x 10)/2
  • 3rd Place: $ = (miles x 10)/2.5
  • 4th Place: $ = (miles x 10)/3.3
  • 5th Place: $ = (miles x 10)/5

• Bias

  Bias is simply a measure of the length (in miles) of the races you have competed in, to differentiate it from the number of races. Why? Winning ten 1000-mile races is a lot more impressive than winning ten 1-mile races, isn't it? Like the number of races your teams finished and won, bias is also recorded and displayed on your Player Profile and the Leaderboards weekly, monthly, and also in an all-time figure. So, for example, if you won five 10-mile races this week, your race history for this week would say "Races Won: 5 (50 Bias)," since your teams ran 50 miles in those five races.

• Leaderboards

  You can view the Leaderboard on the "Explore" page, and here are compiled everyone's accomplishments! You can view most wins and most races finished for mushers, for dogs, and for individual breeds, as well as prizes for the largest kennels. Awards are given out weekly, monthly, and yearly for mushers in these categories, and any prizes you win will be displayed on the "Awards" tab of your Player Profile. The top five in each category will win medals or ribbons, along with a cash prize.