Weekly Race- Is it fair or is it fake?

christinewupp

What we know for sure:

The other players we compete against do not compete against us or see us in their games

We have known this to be the case since our friends still featured as opposition.

What I believe from evidence gathered this week ending January 26th 2025:

King choose our opponents according to some algorithm, to make the game "bespoke" and "challenging"

I believe that the players are recordings in the same manner as the opponents in the episode race and Candy Royale

christinewupp

There is evidence to support this in this thread:

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/483968/all-my-weekly-race-opposition-are-new-players-under-level-200

Cookiemae shared two screenshots of identical leaderboards one from her own game and one posted on social media: Same players, same scores except the player whose game it was. I don't see how those players can be real time opposition. (We had similar strange opponents who stopped advancing in "Beat the Buffet" and "Jelly Streak" when those events were first launched)

Out of my opponents most stopped playing shortly after the race started on Monday morning. The opposition seems to be chosen so that we can get into the top three slots fairly easily but coming first is harder.

So is it fair?

I would argue that it probably is fairer than it would be if the other players were real. It's a controlled event now, controlled by King in the same manner as Factory Frenzy and the Episode Race. I just cannot figure out how the player cards fit in. Fake player cards are a concern to me.

christinewupp

To test out if my theory hold up on this, take a note of your weekly race opposition at the start of the week and check if their scores and level increases later on in the week. In the past week I found that only two or three of the others were serious crushers, the other players did not advance in the game at all. So it should be possible for any player to end up on the podium in third place if you play as well as you did the last few weeks. If you want to get to first place you will probably have to crush more levels than you did the previous few weeks.

King may have made these recent changes to stop nonsense scores in the thousands showing up in some players' races.