Change my Mind: The used car dealership is a pointless waste of time.

[dacc10]

For all the talk about car collecting, GT7 sure seems to be a frustrating game to play...

• Want to buy a certain car? Sorry, too expensive ... you have to grind for a month to get it.
• Want to buy a car and have the money? Sorry, only available in the UCD, and it's coming around only every 300 game days or so.
• Want to have a car in a certain colour? Sorry, only the colour in the UCD available. Original factory colours not available either.

Especially for people that actually love to collect all cars in the game and actually have them in your favourite factory colour, that's a nightmare...

(I admit I'm assuming UCD behaviour from previous experiences)

I agree there are some problems with the system, but there are solutions for them.

On one side, just raise the payouts from events, also if the randomized rewards stay, just allow players to sell those cars (in GTS I have 4 of the same race car, and it's pretty much wortheless). Now, with higher income and the ability to earn money by selling duplicates, they wouldn't need to change the prices that much.

Then, make the UCD cars not exclusive to this feature. Give them a fair price in UCD, like 30% of their cost as new cars, and also sell them in the normal Dealership, so players can simply choose between buying cheaper with a bunch of kms on the clock, or full price with 0 km. This would also solve the last problem pointed out.

 

[snowgt]

This actually sounds great to me. When you finally do earn/find it, it actually feels special. The diametrically opposed version of this is that you have every car available from the start...in that case nothing is special. There's probably some reasonable middle ground.

I'm not proposing that every car should be available from the start. That would basically mean getting rid of the whole in-game economy and that's one of the things that make GT, well ... GT.

However, putting the real-life price tag on cars that cost 20 million is just silly when it takes you ages to earn in game. One of the main objectives of the game is, last I checked, to drive the bl**dy things, and making them too expensive keeps you from doing it, unless you invest oodles of time in it. I mean, I do get it, to own those cars should feel special, but that would also be the case, if they cost, say, 5 million. Still takes you a long time to earn that (provided nothing major changes in the game economy), but it wouldn't make you dread earning the money for these cars. Because ... how far will they take this real-life price for historic cars? What if the next 250 GTO is sold for 100 million in real life?

What if you want to organize races with 60's Le Mans cars? In order to do that, you would have to have them all, so you can BoP them etc. In GTS, that literally took you months to even get the cars. That can't be the objective of the game.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

The AH in Forza came back because people who played the 360 games wanted the feature to come back.

Back in the day, the AH was used to auction exclusive creations (paints/tunes), not cars. The car only had value with a unique paint. You could buy a car from the Autoshop, but not "that" car.

In FH3, it was not implemented differently from older games, but the way people used it was much different. The AH, to this day, lets you set higher buyout prizes if you're a content creator, but most people who auction cars gamed their way to Legend and use it just as a way to flip exclusive cars and farm money. This is because, starting with FH3, Playground implemented Forzathon and other mechanics to drastically increase the number of unicorns ("Exclusive" and "Hard to Find"). So what gains value in the AH are very rare cars and, most importantly, cars in popular demand.

The AH in Forza has tons of issues related to legacy features as well as the cross-platform play which greatly favors PC players using macros to speed up the searching process. I'm pretty sure the market was also flooded with hacked PO cars, forcing Playground to ban their auctions.

It's the kind of feature that could be really great, but was very badly implemented as you said. Forza doesn't care, because one of the biggest sources of player engagement is the AH and the flaws actually help the engagement metrics.

I do remember the AH being somewhat interesting when it was the way to "sell" designs. It was a lot more special back then...almost like NFTs in that the author of a particular design could precisely control how many examples of a particular design were distributed. My designs have never been particularly hot sellers online, but I do remember shifting a few back in FM2 (I think it was FM2) and I sequentially numbered each one of them. Designs as of FH4 are just a miserable experience to shift through as the game encourages everyone to upload anything, everything, even if it was just selecting a different OEM color! It's probably, as you say, a function of engagement metrics - "Look how much time they waste spend in the auction house / design gallery! They must be having fun, right?"

To circle back: As an experience, finding a rare color combination of a car in the GT UCD is a more special and more immersive experience than simply selecting that combination in the F series even if it could be said its gratuitous and somewhat arbitrary. It more closely reflects buying a used car in real life, you kind of have to search and wait for the right one to pop up - you don't get to select it from a configurator!

Again, it's a game...but for me a game has to have immersion for me to stay interested/engaged. I want to feel enveloped in the experience, not merely watch it pass by on the screen. GT has always, since day 1, excelled at the former. It's like curling up in an old leather arm chair with a glass of bourbon and listening to jazz. That's the GT magic for me.

@snowgt I never played/owned GT Sport so I can't say I share that experience/frustration, but I get it. For me the most fun part in GT games (at least as related to collecting cars) was winning cars via Championships...not just amassing enough cash to purchase them. I hope/expect this mechanic to play a big part of GT7.