Spaces are filling up fast! TypeRacer now only shows one entry per player on the list of 20 Latest High Scores (each player’s entry is his or her best score within the past hour). This means there’s now room for more people in the top 20!
Many of you have asked for this change, because you didn’t want to see the scoreboard totally dominated by one or two of the best typists. I was looking forward to this as well, but alas, my high score of 81 wpm was still knocked off the list in just a few minutes. Hope you type faster than I do!
TypeRacer Blog 
That’s alright
I was wondering, was it possible that you guys could make an option that when playing with a friend.. one could add a text of your own choice? In a language of your own choice? 🙂 Thanks in advance
Superb Game btw.
Hi, i wish there was a feature where you can see the quote that you just typed cuz sometimes I like the quote and want to read it again.
thx
Dropping out of the race should count as loss. Abandoning the race whenever you make a mistake in order to maximize your average wpm seems to defeat the point of having a high scores list.
Argh, every now and again the windows (such as user info or how to play) do not disappear and you are stuck with them in the next race, covering the text!
Great game, great site. Four suggestions:
1.) Allow a once-an-hour (or more) “forfeit” that doesn’t count against your record. It’s frustrating to have to make a person wait for you to finish a round (especially at the office). Or, devise a system to remove statistical outliers based on your history. For example, if I’m a 106wpm typist, and one race I get 32wpm or even 0wpm, they could automatically be removed.
2.) There is a countdown disparity on different passages. Some passages, the game begins exactly when the counter changes from :01 to :00, and on some, it begins the full second after :00 as it should.
3.) I’m not sure if this is possible, but have an option for the typist’s text to scroll without removing the words that have already been typed. This is useful when recovering from a mistake.
4.) More passages!
Also, it’s happened a couple times so far where I’ve won the match (had more wpm) but came in 2nd.
>> “I was wondering, was it possible that you guys could make an option that when playing with a friend.. one could add a text of your own choice? In a language of your own choice?”
JiB – this is a great idea. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time. Hope to make it possible soon!
>> “Dropping out of the race should count as loss.”
ovt – Yes, it should count for something. When you leave a race, you don’t get your score counted at the moment. I totally agree that it should have some consequences. I’m thinking of adding a new statistic called “races abandoned”.
>> “Argh, every now and again the windows (such as user info or how to play) do not disappear and you are stuck with them in the next race, covering the text!”
adante – I’m aware of this rare possibility and will be adding a “close” button to these popup windows.
Jared – thanks for your comments. I’ll try to address each point:
>> “Allow a once-an-hour (or more) “forfeit” that doesn’t count against your record.”
This is not necessary right now. If you leave a race early your stats aren’t affected.
>> “There is a countdown disparity on different passages. Some passages, the game begins exactly when the counter changes from :01 to :00, and on some, it begins the full second after :00 as it should.”
This isn’t actually related to the passages. We actually released some small improvements last night that should fix this.
>> “I’m not sure if this is possible, but have an option for the typist’s text to scroll without removing the words that have already been typed. This is useful when recovering from a mistake.”
It’s possible, but why not just use the full text mode if you want to see the words you’ve already typed?
>> “Also, it’s happened a couple times so far where I’ve won the match (had more wpm) but came in 2nd.”
Yes, this is possible but very rare. What happens is that the winner really did type faster, but the screen just doesn’t accurately show the 2nd place finisher’s score sometimes. This will be fixed soon 🙂
Thanks for your comments, everyone!
Keep up the great work!
this is so cool can sum1 so to the chattin a play game room please im lonely!
Someone pointed me to typeracer this morning, fun way to give my Model M a workout. One little feature I’d like is tracking of winning streaks – I just played a few races and won them, it would be kind of nice to know.
While I’m thinking about it, an option for longer passages would be nice too. Maintaining 100wpm for 3 minutes straight becomes a rather different challenge.
A problem that I just started having recently: every once in a while, during a race, the cursor will click out of the textbox input and the page will scroll to the bottom. I used to think that I accidentally tapped my touchpad, but after it has happened several times, I now think it may be a browser/typeracer problem.
Has this happened to anyone else? I’m using Firefox3 on Linux…
Also, I think it’s better to have easier texts; I think most people would prefer typing easier texts, and it allows people to type a bit faster (which makes it more fun.) It also would decrease some of the practices which people are concerned about: easier texts mean that people won’t leave a lot of races (since they’ll make fewer mistakes–as OVT was saying above), and there will be less motivation to only race on “easy texts”. I’ve seen lots of people leave races before they begin, because the text is very difficult.
I know that if I only raced on the easiest texts, my WPM would go up by at least 15… having difficult texts just rewards people (statistically) for avoiding them.
Pretty new here and practicing daily but
something new is happening today that is making
it impossible to practice. I noticed another
comment about it so I know it’s not just me.
The tab markers, (type here) are covering the
first part of the sentence. You cannot see what
you need to correct. It stopped doing it for
about and hour but is there again now. Just
productive this way and too frustrating.
I love this game. Our teachers make us play it for school and it is soo much fun. Thanks for a great website.
How about some team games?
A team race where each team has 4 members, each member gets a diff paragraph of the same document. All team members type at the same time and their score is the total WPM of all of them put together
or a relay race? that would be fun, too.
I type a very consistent 120-140, and I’ve been seeing many people with a full win percentage drop out on me mid-passage. Very poor sports, and it’s frustrating to an honest player like me, who has typed to the end even when it’s clear I am about to be bested by a typist similar in skill, who just happened to get their peak on my race.
I think that in addition to tracking abandons, you should also count abandons as finishing the race with 0 wpm. It’d be a nice way to punish those who currently exploit it, yet not be particularly damaging to a casual typist. I don’t see why the option to voluntarily abandon is even there, really. The passages are only ever a few sentences long.
ahahahaha, warming up is scared of me
that makes 3 in a row you’ve quit on me. Grow up.
Steve — I agree with you completely. The high scores have been polluted in my opinion. It seems obvious to me that many people in the top-20 have cheated by leaving races with poor scores.
I know that I am capable of achieving scores in the 140-150 range, but these are only my best scores. If I wanted to, I could race for an hour or two and leave every race where I didn’t get 140-150, and then I’d be in the top-20. This is I expect many of them do.
There’s no reason to legitimately leave in the middle of a race which takes less than a minute! (OR, rather, such circumstances are rare.)
hello everyone i am not that good at typing so yeah just to let you know 🙂
yesterday i prove playing in group with my friends but the box to chat is very small, everything is ok.
Really not bad
Is there a better way to filter names when people register? Last night while playing someone used the name “nigger” and made it to the high score board.
Great game a beautiful interface! The site was mentioned in the latest MacWorld, which is why I’m here 🙂
please get rid of the obvious cheaters like kyle stearns
Hi Steve, Valikor, thanks for voicing your concern about people who abuse the system by leaving lots of races unfinished until they find an easy text to type. I think what we’ll do is limit the number of abandoned races someone can have per hour or per day, to encourage people to finish their races.
To the anonymous user who complained about Kyle Stearns – I don’t think Kyle is a cheater. He, most likely, just picked 10 easy races to get his “last 10” average really high. That’s why he’s topping the scoreboard. His all time average is 140 wpm, but there are folks out there who can type 200 wpm on occasion when they get an easy text. I think what we’ll do is change the “Fastest Typists” ranking to use the “all time” average by default.
What does it mean when some of the names on
the scoreboard is underlined??? Anyone who
knows? Thank’s….there’re a lot of cheaters
here, but that’s their problem. I type on
non-mine language and I’m better than many of
those who types on mother-language.
there is a vb program available which types in the text for us.. i suspect all the top people with speed more than 100.. 😛
Ok well kyle stearns, pwnage, etc are cheating very obviously, leaving races immediately that they don’t have scripts for, then when they do race getting nearly done with the race at way over 200, then presumably hitting the last character to end up at whatever speed they can pass the check test at. If anyone can do 200 reliably, put it on youtube or I call bs.
Anyway nice site.
“What does it mean when some of the names on the scoreboard is underlined???”
These are links to those people’s profile on MySpace, Orkut, and other social networking sites.
>> “kyle stearns, pwnage, etc are cheating very obviously”
Don’t forget that it *is* possible to type 200 wpm. The official world record is 212 wpm. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people on TypeRacer every month, it makes sense to have a few who can actually type that fast.
Also, keep in mind that one already needs to type very fast in order to pass the anti-cheat test ( https://blog.typeracer.com/2008/05/19/new-speedometer-and-improved-cheat-protection/ )
Big fan of the site, but I would like to see a way to ban or remove quotes from your upcoming races. I get sick of reading U2 and Al Gore
Not related to the current discussion, but the “current world record” is from 1985. The Guiness Book no longer records the record for fastest typist. Since this site is creating a bit of a “typing community”, we might consider lobbying them to add this category back to their books.
I predict if they recieved 500 letters over the next few months asking to do this, they would consider. This is quite attainable since 500 is such a small pertencage of Typeracer’s current registered users (less than 3% I believe).
plus, 212 can’t be the current world record since Noah/licahfox has a top score of 213.
I’m not sure if I believe he typed 213, but I have raced him before and know that he’s very good 🙂
kinda fun
im the best typer eva.you guys are jealous!(:
hi anybody let me know how you all guys typed
so fast with more than 100 words/min.I have been
practicising for few month but could not cross
50 once.Please let me know how can i improve
my speed.
If we’re making suggestions, I wouldn’t mind seeing more levels… it seems like 75% of all people are “Megaracers,” so maybe adding 5-6 new ranks (and maybe little symbols near cars, so I can see who to watch out for) would be nice.
Also, I second the U2/Al Gore comment. More texts, or options to ban texts. Not that I mind Al Gore, but I’ve seen it so much.
Rob–I think typeracer automatically matches you up against people of the same “rank”, which is why you always race against megaracers.
But, you’re definitely right about banning quotes or something like that. I never do the U2 quote because it takes like an hour to type and is no fun. 🙂
Another option (which I’ve stated before) is for all quotes to be easy… that will keep scores more consistent and make scores higher (and thus more fun)
I always like typing games and this is pretty cool.
But after 60 some odd games, I’m finding it more than a little discouraging that, with a 57 wpm mean, I get lumped into a category that goes to the upper limit. I’m getting trounced again and again by people who are typing 80 to 110 wpm. Pretty frustrating.
And I always finish my races. It’s just good sportsmanship.
well, my DAUGHTER AND I WANTED TO PLAYEACH OTHER, BUT CAN’T FIND EACH OTHER. put in thecode, but says no such code or code exists…??? don’t get it..
There should be more skill levels, I’m a frustrated mega racer that can go 55~65, and almost never won a race, and my mother, 20~30, won many races. Cause in my level, people can go 115, 130, 190 … this is too bitter.
Some jobs require 80 wpm, and others 95, so these could be different levels of racers…
Great game, even so \o/
i was wondering if we could like add pics or if we can’t can you guys change that???
My 213wpm score was due to a glitch in the system. On that particular race there was some kind of JavaScript lag which I’ve been unable to duplicate since, but it turned a ~150 race into 213.
There is undoubtedly heavy text selection occurring with the highest scores. It’s not possible to type some texts at 200 wpm – those with repeated letters, frequent Shift-ing, and so on.
The “world record” is not really in question here; there are not enough restrictions. For instance, definitions of WPM are varied: some set it at 5 characters per word, and others define it as literally one word per word. I could type 250 wpm with a very favorable definition and phrase.
Also, there’s the question of whether mistakes are allowed. My highest legitimate speed on regular TypeRacer was in the low 170s, but I’ve exceeded 180 on the cheat test since it allows for a few mistakes.
To our esteemed programmer: I’d suggest creating categories for quotes – political, movies, philosophy, and so on. I realize the categorization is somewhat arbitrary, but I’ve seen a number of complaints about certain quotes and those could be filtered out by removing the category. The user would have an array of checkboxes where they could turn categories on or off.
I’d also suggest the option of expanding the all-time top 20 to 100 or more (200? 500?) just to provide lower-ranked people incentive to try to improve slightly.
Any chance of some type of forums being set up? These blog comments seem to be sort of a disorganized quasi-forum.
Thanks for many hours of fun!
Hey, this is Kyle Stearns. Someone buy me a webcam and I’ll gladly make a youtube video, haha.
Free webcam for the win.
Regardless, I sort-of have an edge on the typical user here anyways because I have a special keyboard. I play sometimes on my laptop and can only get like 140wpm. check user –> xkylevax
And I agree with Noah on his suggestions. :thumbs up:
The funny thing is this blog does not have a link to the racing arena. Anyway, the typeracer is my newest minesweeper (e.g. timesweeper).
I really love competing here…found it through an Earthlink Newsletter. My speed has definitely improved. It is annoying that some of the fastest typists abandon ship early in the game to improve their scores. I would love to see a chat area for players and additional passages. The same ones over and over again is a bore!
I can maintain 140-150 wpm on my language, but
since English is not my mother-language my
hi-speed is about 130 wpm. Kyle Stearns maybe
type on Dvorak-keyborad which is keyboard for
hi-speeds (over 150 wpm), but even if someone
have a fast-fingers, the brain is problem here.
The brain doesn’t have that speed. You should
add some symbols (for example the players
with > 100 wpm). Sorry, if I’ve made some
mistake, I’m not Englishman, or American(o) 🙂
this is cool and really helps pick up my speed!!
Will we be seeing the facebook application any time soon? Last I read you were aiming for the end of August, any update?
It would be interesting to do a survey to see how many people use QWERTY vs Dvorak (or some other configuration). I average about 90-95wpm on a QWERTY.
I agree there need to be more levels. I mean, to lump a 55-60wpm typist with a bunch of people who can type much faster isn’t fair.
Hello dear member of the production, I would like you to add a classification for those who encouraged many to be a race classification for the number of completed course thank you in advance for answering my request.
Latest High Scores— My Scores— Fastest Typists—Number of Races Completed
Some advertisements are extremely distracting when trying to type the selection on typeracer. Ads for videogames are particularly distracting, with lots of movement and shifting colors. I understand that the site needs money to operate, but when the ads come at the expense of the site’s purpose, it not only results in lower scores, but makes me specifically NOT want to purchase the item being advertised.
Just a thought- Don’t you think if you’re
doing the anti-cheat thing, and you get 100%
and you score a faster WPM than you do on your
race, you should get credit for the anti-cheat
score instead of your race score? I’ve done
that a few times.
I know I’ve already made this comment, but I’m going to say it again: I’d recommend trying to make the texts easier in general, since this would discourage text selection, encourage people to complete their races, and give people faster are more consistent scores in general.
Plus, it’s more fun!
On the other hand I would like to see and option for full keyboard texts including numbers and simple special characters ($,#,%)
I’d wager the folks that are typing over 100 wpm would slow down considerably using the full keyboard.
Anyway it could be a cool option – full keyboard or no…
I disagree with Valikor’s comment regarding easier text. Part of the fun and challenge of this site is getting text of varying complexity. If everyone gets faster speeds because of easier text, nobody will win more or fewer races since everyone’s speed will jump accordingly. It’s like giving everyone in America an extra $10,000. Relatively speaking, nobody will be any richer, and inflation will increase to compensate for the extra money in circulation. Garbage in, garbage out… What I *would* like is a wider variety of text. I’m tired of typing quotes from U2, Pink Floyd, Al Gore, Obama, McCain…
http://play.typeracer.com/index?room=dHI6a2lpcnJraw**
This is just what I’ve been looking for !!! A place where I can practice my typing skills, and when I get good enough maybe I’ll compete! Thanks!!!
In response to Mashny’s comment, I’d like to say that one of the problems that currently exists is that users intentionally “game the system” by selecting texts by difficulty (that is, they only race on easy texts). I thus disagree with your statement that it would give everyone a boost. Instead, it would boost legitimate players (the majority), and take away an advantage from illegitimate players (the minority).
While you think it’s fun to have texts of varying difficulty, I think it’s more important to have a “high scores” with integrity, and think this would make it more fun as well.
I, for one, find incredibly complex texts which yield slow scores to be frustrating, rather than fun.
Valikor: Even if the texts are made “easier,” within that easier new text, people will find some text easier than other text and will continue to avoid races where the *relative* difficulty of the race is greater. Unless all races consisted of text like, “The nice cat jumped on the little red house after eating the big, bad spider.” there will be certain text that could be avoided. Frankly, I don’t understand the obsession with high scores; it’s nice to do well, but when the system is gamed to guarantee certain results, an element of challenge is lost.
What *is* needed is a way to penalize those who drop out of races they feel they can’t win and, truth be told, I’ve been guilty of that.
It would be nice to show a Done button if someone wants to drop out – or maybe I missed it? I had to wait for the last person to finish and it was agonizing. Fun site!!
Michelle:
To get out of a race, just refresh your screen (cmd-R on a Macintosh or ctrl-R on a PC), or you could click the refresh icon at the top of your browser window. Or, at the bottom of the race screen is a link that says, “Leave race.” Any method will work.
Thanks for all your comments. Haven’t had time to respond to each one individually lately (getting ready to release some important updates to the site – look for a new blog post soon!), but definitely noting all of your suggestions.
The main theme in this comment thread concerns the fact that quite a few players seem to be leaving races early. This makes it less fun for others, and I would prefer that if you want to pick and choose which texts to type, you use the single-player “practice” mode.
In the future we’ll be limiting the number of multi-player races you can leave early.
The soon-to-be-released update will include approximately 60 new texts for each skill level, so this will add more variety. Valikor – I don’t think we’ll be making all the texts equally easy, because, as Mashny pointed out, we don’t want all the text to be too simplistic. I think we should keep the variety of quotes lengths that exists today. For the Megaracer level, the quotes range from about 200 to 450 characters in length, making some really easy to type and some harder. Of course, I’m open to criticism.
One person said that you should get credit for your anti-cheat score.. And ahah, while I wish it was that way it shouldn’t be. Because my highest score is 204wpm, yet on the anti-cheat i’ve gotten over 225wpm.
Because it allows mistakes and whatnot I can just skim the text and just breeze through easily and get a much higher score easier.
hi >> “Dropping out of the race should count as loss.”
ovt – Yes, it should count for something. When you leave a race, you don’t get your score counted at the moment. I totally agree that it should have some consequences. I’m thinking of adding a new statistic called “races abandoned”.
If anyone is curious about what the “average” typing speed is, you might want to check out this link: http://www.readi.info/TypingSpeed.pdf
>>If anyone is curious about what the “average” typing speed is, you might want to check out this link: http://www.readi.info/TypingSpeed.pdf
This study was done about 12 years ago, before computer use had become widespread. While the study describes people typing over 68 WPM as in the top 10%, I would put that figure closer to 20% nowadays.
Good point.
You should make the all-time list larger.
Lots of fun. I think it would be great to play against my co-workers.
Hey, could you make varying skill levels? It’s an idea that I think would totally rock, because I end up winning most of my races (and I’m not even that fast of a typer, only ~110 wpm). I want a challenge…
<>
Mashny–
In theory yes, there will always be texts which are “easier” than others (even if all texts came from kids’ books).
But, I think you’re overstating the significance here. There’s very little variation (for me, at least) between the texts which I consider “pretty easy”, such as the “Terminator” quote, the “Way of the Peaceful Warrior” quote, the “Matrix” quote, the “Across the Universe” quote, the “Dubliners” quote, the “Hackers and Painters” quotes, etc (I could go on). Though I suppose it would be possible to perform some sort of complicated statistical analysis to decide which ones are actually “harder”, the variation is slim enough that that it’s negligible, and subsumed/overridden by other factors. The point is that all of these quotes are reasonably easy and fun to type, and that most typists can type these quotes at their usual speeds.
But, on quotes like the aformentioned “Al Gore” and “U2” quotes, they are so much more complicated that it is essentially guaranteed that you will receive substantially lower scores.
The reason I made the suggestion I did was because
A) It solves the frustrations of numerous other people who have already said (on this blog) that they are tired of exceptionally difficult/tedious quotes
B) It eliminates the cause for this particular type of cheating, which is generally the best way to eliminate cheating (For example, if you want to truly eliminate cheating, eliminate the high scores!) It is better than trying to force people to type the quotes they don’t want to type. Ultimately, even if the number of races one can leave per hour is capped to X, the cheater could still just leave X races every hour, whenever he encounters one of these texts. It seems pretty obvious to me that people will cheat as long as it benefits them, which is why my solution makes more sense. (Granted, there are still other types of cheating)
You say that the diversity in difficulty is fun, which is fine. But, the basic point of multiplayer is that *competition* is fun, which is why the multiplayer mode should seek (above diversity) to be as level and fair as possible. If you want diverse texts, you could still do it in single-player mode. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Typeracer some day allowed people to use their own texts in single player)
do to a weird html formatting problem, the top part of my last post was supposed to (but didn’t) say
“In favor of eliminating the most difficult texts”
Valikor: How about we just agree to disagree :)?
Ummm, that was supposed to be a smiley face, but I guess I didn’t put in the right characters…
I would like to see the quote that was just typed after the race. Thanks
type racer is kind of boring don’t you think
The new fade in/out effect on the countdown timer is def improvement, good job!
I have two requests.
I fully agree you should have some sort of
conciquence for the “cheaters” who leave races
to find easy ones (even though I am one of the
guilty parties), but you should also then
consider getting rid of those redicilous races
that I get 75-85 wpm on (when I average 135)
and everyone else with high WPM’s get
redicilously low scores.
My other request, is when you’re doing the
anti-cheat and you get 100% and you score a
higher WPM than you did on the actual race,
that score should be counted as your race WPM.
Love the site, thanks for bringing it!
Ben
Sorry to spam up your board :S I just had one
more suggestion.
I LOVE the accuracy percentage you’ve added.
Maybe (and I’m sure you’re already considering
it, I just want to voice a public opinion) you
could add an accuracy leader board. Only problem
is that it would be too easy to get 100%, but
I think you should consider only listing those
with >50 races and also list them in categories
such as members with WPM 0-50, 50-75 75-100
100-125, ect.
Again, sorry to spam, it’s not my intent.
There should be an option to delete races from one’s statistics. For example, my keyboard acts up horribly sometimes, running words together and failing to register keystrokes. This creates typos, drags my accuracy down and causes my speed to fall from about 120 wpm to under 100 wpm, hence my average speed of 114 wpm. Such races do not reflect my usual speed at all, so it would be good if I could delete them.
Also, is there a way to account for American and British spelling differences?
Sorry for not posting this before, but keyboard lag just transformed my “I would never actually” into “IDDVER”. So that’s why I dropped out. Sorry.
Sorry to keep posting comments, but sometimes a race starts without any text or text box displaying. Of course, I am unable to type anything without a text to type, so my score stays at 0 wpm. Meanwhile, everybody else apparently sees the text and races ahead.
fewffcasdawsracsddzrgeafdv
typeracer is the coolest and the best
game I have seen….. among all the things….than
Huzzah!!! No more of the same person!
how do you change your password
We do that some people dont want to be on there but if they do then they might not play it any more