GT Sport Penalty System Under Fire Again as Official FIA Season Begins

Ignore me if i'm wrong but maybe this penalty system can be great for the gts E-sport world tour. It make it more epic and replace the penalty that car crashes give to you. :banghead:
 
It’s a shame top drivers can’t be trusted to drive cleanly when the penalty system is lenient. Although I guess there will always be one to spoil it for the rest.

There was a 6-12 month period when most driver seemed content. Still didn’t stop some top driver’s whining each time they came out on the wrong end of a 50/50 clash.

Just roll back the penalty system and concentrate on what this game really needs. More single-player events, stronger AI for said single-player events. And a handful of modern race cars in Gr1, Gr2, Gr3, Gr4.
 
It’s a shame top drivers can’t be trusted to drive cleanly when the penalty system is lenient. Although I guess there will always be one to spoil it for the rest.

There was a 6-12 month period when most driver seemed content. Still didn’t stop some top driver’s whining each time they came out on the wrong end of a 50/50 clash.

Just roll back the penalty system and concentrate on what this game really needs. More single-player events, stronger AI for said single-player events. And a handful of modern race cars in Gr1, Gr2, Gr3, Gr4.

Offline racing is the last thing that needs to be worked on in this game right now.
 
Last edited:
Please note that this update mentioned in the article appears to be server side work, no actual game update file is mentioned so it must be related to the penalty system or the actual servers given recent disconnect issues et all.
I haven't mentioned tomorrow's 'update' in the article.
 
Last edited:
Last week the race B in the TRI-Oval at BlueMoonBay superspeedway seemed directly inspired to the "dirty races"of the lobbies thanks to this penalty system.

Unfair players were been awarded every time they pushed some one against the wall.. I collected many seconds of penalty for doing NOTHING, the clean line was punished by this system especialy when "not capable" players blindly made turns without braking.

IR
 
Please note that this update mentioned in this thread appears to be server side work, no actual game update file is mentioned so it must be related to the penalty system or the actual servers given recent disconnect issues et all.
And after the update the penalty system will hand out 5s penalties if you're side-by-side with someone for too long.
 
Wish a dev could chime in on what should be done with the penalty system.
Cause all we can do right now is guess.

Yeah. With such an emphasis on online racing there is almost no communication with the community from the devs. Compare this to so many other online multiplayer games with huge patch notes explaining in details each and every detail. "We increased this stat for 5% because of this", "we decided to revamp the system because of that", stuff like this. No community managers as well. Point this out to me if I'm wrong (I am not the most active player out there) but the most in-depth info on penalty system we receive is in these vague, concise patch notes.
Talk to us, let us know what's the problem, let us know that you at least care and trying. No, nothing.

Online game without a proper communication with the active community is just ridiculous.
 
It seems like they start from scratch every time they adjust the penalty system. They can never find a happy medium, something always has to be to the extreme. It's getting old.

Lobby races aren't even that enjoyable either. So what's the point of playing this game?


edit: Agreed with the post above, this day and age they NEED to communicate with the players in a better way, pretty much every other developer does this already. At least post here or make an official subreddit. It's FREE.
 
Last edited:
The penalty system has never been perfect, but every time they change it, it seems to be worse than previously.

The game has been out for ages, and I don't understand how they can continually get this one aspect of it so wrong. The rest of the game is brilliant, but this one issue often completely spoils online racing. It is so blatantly wrong, I wonder why it is not picked up in game testing?
 
It seems like they start from scratch every time they adjust the penalty system. They can never find a happy medium, something always has to be to the extreme. It's getting old.
It's not so much that they start from scratch. All along, the system has only worked with extremely simple conditions. Contact, change of position, leaving the track etc. All they have ever done, in the time I've been playing, is basically turning individual conditions on or off, and reversing who gets given the penalty for any condition. E.g. we had one version where the car overtaking with contact got a penalty. Then it got turned off. Then it got turned back on but then the car being overtaken got the penalty. On. Off. Reversed. It's all that ever changes.
 
I'm not sure they know how to fix this penalty issue, otherwise it would have been fixed in the previous 4 versions we've had. So I wouldn't be getting my hopes up. I have a feeling they will pretty much remove penalties all together so top split races can go ahead without too much interference.

PD has to be one of the worst companies when it comes to communicating with their very loyal player base. The only reason a lot of these top drivers are still playing is the lure of being flown around the world to play video games, not because they're enjoying the racing with the current slipstream/penalties/points.
 
Agreed. If there’s anybody that PD would listen to, it’d be the prominent FIAGTC players.

I know it's very hard to get a system that works fairly all the time but when players who do nothing wrong and are victims of dive-bombers get stupid penalties it just takes the piss, not mention it's impossible to race side by side without someone getting a penalty. This nonsense just makes players move to another game like ACC for example.
 
"Fix it quickly" might be what led us to this shambles in the first place.

Not sure what quickly is. The "gaming the system" problems started in July 2018 with update 1.23. The good old tap a car from behind then go off or tap a wall to give the car ahead a penalty. That persisted until 1.53 in December 2019 with only minor tweaks in between.

1.53 switched out wall taps as criteria to position loss which meant any sort of contact after which positions changed (no matter what reason) caused a penalty to trigger. But you could grind/punt people into walls as long as you didn't pass them.

1.54 landed 3 weeks later promising to turn the sensitivity down. And that it did, penalties were pretty much non existent, everyone to SR.S

1.55 came another 3 weeks later turning some side contact penalties back on yet still no SR Downs and punts were fine.

1.56 came a month later (end of Februari) and didn't appear to have changed anything initially but now it looks like it introduced the ability to update the penalty system on the server without maintenance. On March 16th, start of this week, the penalties changed again to what we have now.

"quickly" :lol:
 
Been SR.S for almost 2 years straight and am one of the cleanest drivers almost to a fault...but last nights Manufacturers was a joke I started P5 in a High to mid A lobby ...all good for half a lap then got grazed and I mean grazed didn't even feel it from behind BANG 2sec penalty after that everytime I got even touched was 1sec ...2sec..all said and done still managed a P10 with 20 sec worth of BS penaltys..but went from SR.S to almost SR.C..this is just not enjoyable and dang right infuriating to say the least.
 
@Sven Jurgens you're completely right, its literally been since summer of 2018 since we've had something like the original system. Kind of miss it to be honest, but even then it wasn't perfect. Before the penalty zones, which dont really work right. If someone is harrassing other players, they usually have a whole lap of opportunity before they can be penalized, but of course its usually their victims.

I really just wish they could find a way to penalize dive bombers, barge passers and punters. Drivers coming from BEHIND who have full VIEW and CONTROL of whats about to happen, hitting, bumping, nudging, pushing, smashing into other drivers who have NO CONTROL of the situation behind them. Other than predicting and by driving in their mirrors as opposed to the track ahead. Its the reason people need to drive so defensively, blocking and weaving instead of just driving, because they know that they will be doven on and probably barge passed by lazy drivers with impunity AND probably given a penalty for their inconvenience.
 
and I don't understand how they can continually get this one aspect of it so wrong.

The system clearly needs work at this point, but part of the problem is the unrealistic expectations. No penalty system they design is going to be anywhere close to flawless. Even real life racing stewards decisions are hotly debated and disagreed with, and these stewards often have 20 minutes to make those decisions using multiple angle slow motion replays and driver cockpit cams, etc. Conversely, GT Sport has milliseconds to make a decision with far less input from drivers and other sources. I think people underestimate just how difficult a task this is when using nothing but algorithms.

Now, that said, I completely agree with the criticism that the system has seemingly gotten worse instead of better. That’s a fair criticism IMHO and something Polyphony should be called out for. I hope they can find a way to improve the system. My expectations are realistic in that I do not expect the system to never miss, but hopefully it can at least return to being more consistent. Perhaps more like what we had closer to launch, although let’s not forget that people endlessly complained about it back then too. ;)

I agree with many others that a lot of this frustration could be muted a bit if Polyphony would communicate more openly about the issue.
 
Online game without a proper communication with the active community is just ridiculous.

It really puts into perspective how utterly poor Polyphony has been, and probably always will be, especially when you consider that a game of this magnitude and this amount of online gameplay needs a semi-active developer giving information to fans in a somewhat timely manner, instead of dumping everything in cryptic and frankly stupid silhouette tweets once in a blue moon, and tipping their hands for the next wave of content in quarterly World Tour events.

Look at any other developer. Ubisoft especially, they're on the ball when it comes to informing players of new content, and especially changes to new maps, in the case of Rainbow Six Siege. Even within the racing game space, Forza has always had the Forza Weekly stream, blasting patch notes for both Motorsport and Horizon across social media, and then having the Forza Monthly stream where new content is revealed and shown off.

It consistently baffles me for as much as Polyphony more or less forced people to accept or tolerate online racing as the new standard for GT Sport, to the detriment of the single player fans they continue to give the middle finger, even with the content added (really, to save their own hide) the way they act with regards to English (and probably Japanese) language communication with fans and media is puzzling. It shows to me at least that as much as Polyphony likes to say that they are a changed developer with regards to their methods, that ultimately they still have a disdain for showing fans anything that isn't on their own time, whether it be content, or in this case, rule and penalty system changes. And by that point, why bother with post launch anything if you aren't going to have the ability to tell fans about changes in an honest and forward facing manner?
 

Latest Posts

Back