So, I've been doing this for a few hours today and as is the GT7 model, it's as I feared; the public online experience is a poor second best to GTS.
This is because of several reasons specific to the design of GT7;
- A larger majority of players are now of course playing through the story mode collecting cars and this has decimated the number of lobbies. They are running at about half GTS capacity from what I can see.
- if you want a full set of tyres to use in a public lobby you need to buy them first, meaning to start with at least, you have to do single player stuff to win money to buy all the tyres.. for each car.
- The PP system appears to override car class, meaning you find many lobbies that have a non-class car beasting round several seconds faster than anyone else. E.g. I just came out of a GR4 lobby where someone had that Alfa 155 touring car, which is legal and lapping 5s faster than I could go.
- or there is a race class but tuning is now an option, so there are more lobbies with tuning on and souped up cars, reducing the number of proper/fair/balanced race lobbies.
- mistakes are now much more common and this appears to have dramatically increased rage quitting. E.g. I won one 5 lap race that started with 14 players and because I was not making mistakes, I was the only one left in the race by lap 3!
- PP ranged lobbies take aaaages messing in car setup to actually get a car legal and competitive, by removing mods... by which time the host has started the race.
- and PP ranged lobbies are worse if you mess around and find you need to buy mods... which means leaving the lobby.
I could go on all night. I knew this would be the case because of the way GT7 has more single player elements but nevertheless the online experience has diminished, depopulated, become laborious and frustrating. I fancied a random online race and I would've been far more successful starting GTS. The future of gaming is online not offline.
If a lobby is set to "gr4" then it should just be current/modern gt4 cars and tyres at least should be free and maybe mods too.