Welcome to the Candy Crush Saga Community
Do you have a question or need help with your game? Ask the Community.
They are exactly the same as they have always been, just that the images are no longer there.
The other players in the Episode Race and in Candy Royale are recordings which King have picked from their enormous database, for us to give us a sense of competition. It's an illusion of a race. What we have to achieve to win is determined at the beginning by King and they choose other players from files according to how long King choose to allow us to play the entire episode or how much gold they will award us if we succeed in finishing Candy Royale. In this sense the other players are not real and never were real, so having just blank faces just makes this more obvious now! They might as well be bots, given how many other players King have on file it really makes no difference to these events.