What do you do every day? Sleep? Eat? Drink? For 2,600 harness racing enthusiasts, their daily routine also includes spending time using the Off And Pacing app for iPhone and Android which reached one year in existence just last week. Launched on January 18, 2017 as a beta application, Off And Pacing started with a handful of people according to creator Ryan Clements but quickly grew to over 1,000 testers in just the first month. Since the official launch in late April/early May 2017 (depending on the platform), Off And Pacing has seen its user base grow to 3,500 to 4,500 people who use the app every few days and over 7,500 who have opened the game at least once in the previous 45 days. “For the first time we are seeing lots of casual players,” said Clements. “We have also seen players who won’t enter for an entire season (26 days) due to work or vacation plans. The beauty of this game is they can go away and return with their stable intact. “I think 20,000 active users is achievable once we make sure the game plays well to all demographics. There are a ton of untapped markets in general, in addition to a lot of geography and user base we haven’t reached.” In many ways Off And Pacing has come a long way since its initial launch, but Clements admits that the process of building out the game hasn’t been quite as smooth as he expected. “In many ways it has exceeded my expectations, but we’ve hit a lot of roadblocks,” said Clements. “We have a long way to go until I’ll consider it done. There is so much I still have planned. “We hit a hurdle when it came to race simulations. I thought the driver AI (artificial intelligence) would’ve progressed further by now. What happens is we move forward and find another hole. We take two steps forward and then two steps backwards.” There is no doubt that the driver AI is worlds better than when the app was initially launched and each update seems to address a few of the issues. Clements felt they took a huge step in the right direction with a new generation of driver intelligence released in December and made even more progress with a mid-January introduction of new drivers, but the list of improvements that can be made remains a “mile long” according to the Canadian resident. One of the most difficult challenges for Clements and his team of seven programmers has been keeping the server that runs the game running smoothly. “People don’t see the amount of work that goes in behind the scenes to keep the server going,” said Clements. “For example, the USTA has to track 100 races or so a day and keep data on all of them but at Off And Pacing we have 6,000 races a day and close to 1,000,000 horses to record stats for. As the amount of data increases it becomes more and more difficult to pull all of the individual stats for all aspects of the game.” One of the unexpected challenges for Clements has been coping with complaints from users, varying from occasional slowdowns in game play or alleged cheating by other players. “I never expected so many haters at both ends of the spectrum. It really wears you down and comes at you from every medium you can think of,” said Clements, who was still able to put a positive spin on the negative experience. “As soon as you create something that people are passionate about you are bound to experience strong opinions.” Clements also addressed the naysayers who think that the post position draws in the game or any aspects are anything but randomly decided by the algorithms of the program. “There is no reason for us to cheat anyone. I’m not assigning 6,000 races a day by hand,” said Clements. “In real life you only enter a few horses a week but in the game some people are entering hundreds a day. It’s like online poker versus playing live in a casino. Because you are dealt so many more hands per hour online the patterns can seem odd and you think it has to be rigged.” As Off And Pacing embarks on its second year, Clements is very excited about the future. “I’m thrilled where it is headed, possibly more excited now than during the beta stages,” said Clements. “Pretty much every aspect of the game has gotten better and all of our resources have gone into making it better. I think the year-two progress will be very noticeable.” For those diehard players and newbies alike, there are plenty of changes on the way for the app. The team is working on updating the in-game graphics and will hopefully release some minor look-and-feel changes in the next update on or about January 31. Tracks will have pylons, in some cases a grandstand and overall facelifts. That same revision is expected to include a new section Clements called “My Office” which will be a one-stop page where users can find their trophies, stats, claims and something new, achievement badges. These badges will be a sort of guide for new players to help them accomplish certain goals. Eventually users will also have a stakes management section where they can pre-enter big races or plan out their schedules. Future updates are expected to introduce more sound into the game, like background noise (hoof beats and crowd) and eventually a race call. A winner’s circle view at the end of every race is in the near future and the team is trying to work through some technical challenges on better animation for drivers. One of the biggest knocks on the game is that horses tend to quickly lose their ability during the middle of their 6-year-old seasons. Clements pointed out that was done by design to keep a horse’s career wins total within the reality of real-life racing. “One hundred wins is a great milestone in real life and we thought it should be similar in the game,” said Clements, who added that any adjustments to how horses’ age would require additional changes. “It would have to be grouped with horses racing less often. A 2-year-old in real life races about 8 to 10 times a year while in the game it is closer to 50 starts.” Each year Off And Pacing seems to turn out one superstar caliber horse. In season 14 it was Yannick Gingras’ YG Jewel, and while she continues to dominate with 84 wins in 91 career starts, season 15 has brought us Dank Sphinx, a 2-year-old filly who has yet to taste defeat in 16 starts for Dank Racing (Jay Hochstetler). Of course everyone wants to have the best horse in the game but the odds are certainly stacked against it happening. “It comes down to the coincidence of the way the bell curve works. It’s the reason there weren’t two Somebeachsomewhere’s,” said Clements, who estimates the chances of getting the best horse in any given season at about 1 in 95,000. “The key is, how do we market those top horses? We have to give people a better opportunity to see them race and become fans of those horses. These horses are more than just pixels on the screen” said Clements. “We very much had our heads down in the first year working on programming and we missed a big opportunity to make a splash. We developed some track partnership that we’d like to take further. We’d like to work with some tracks to show our races on their toteboards. We’ve had a few preliminary discussions with smaller tracks that seem to be wide-open to the idea.” To use another poker term, Clements is certainly all-in on Off And Pacing. He views it as an avenue to not only entertain but market the sport in general. If the initial year of improvements is any indication, 2018 could be a banner year.