I'm sorry but I don't believe this.
Someone driving a car for 1-2 hours is going to be more competent at handling that car than someone who instantly upgrades it and takes it online without any real experience driving the vehicle.
Whether they suck or not is an issue of a general level of driving skill but I think it's hard to claim that they wouldn't at least be better at handling the vehicle after putting time into driving it.
"They will learn nothing from leveling the cars."
Really? They won't learn anything from driving said cars on track for over an hour? I really just cannot believe that.
I honestly do not think this logic would hold up to reality. (Unless you're basing this on people that don't want to learn and just want to crash into walls and hit cars and honestly I don't see those people even putting in this effort and time to upgrade the cars.)
If we took two novices and had them compete against each other; one with zero experience driving the vehicle and one with 1-2 hours of experience. I'm betting on the person with 1-2 hours of experience every time. Not to mention the person with experience got to drive the vehicle in stock form and then better upgraded versions on multiple race tracks until reaching the upgraded version they will be using to compete.
I understand what you're saying, someone could spend that 1-2 hours hitting other cars and cutting corners, although this ignores the new penalty system to prevent this behavior. That person would still be more competent at driving the car while hitting other cars and cutting corners. I really don't think we should base the entire community and the idea of this system on 15 year old GTA kids.
How about we base this on people that are novices that at least want to race properly?
As far as a comment on the general leveling system, I think a big factor will be how much these manufacturer bonuses truly speed up the leveling process. As a ford guy, If I max out 5 ford vehicles will leveling another one take half the time?
I didn't really mean for it to come off as "people suck no one learns" really, but more that people who haven't learned after hours invested in racing games aren't going to suddenly start learning because of the car XP thing. You said that the system "forces" people to learn, my point was more meant to be that you can't force people to learn. I didn't mean for it to sound like
no one will learn anything. Will a few learn? Sure, but those people likely wanted to learn anyways and would have learned without an arbitrary barrier to parts on their car.
Saying we should base this on people who are novices that want to learn doesn't really fit here though, as this isn't really some kind of tutorial geared for beginners, and there's no option for experienced players and players who have already done it a few times to skip it. It doesn't really teach anyone anything either, it appears just to be a time sink where the little "perfect corner!" things that FM7 already had now give you XP when they pop up... if they pop up, since it has already been confirmed you can turn those off in the HUD.
If we are talking about someone with zero experience in racing games, then sure an hour or 2 of practice would be huge if you were to pit them against another person with zero experience... But again, it isn't just for people with no experience but also something forced on people with lots of experience as well, where there are diminishing returns. Someone with 3 total hours playing any racing game ever will probably benefit from 2 hours of practice if they go into it trying to learn something. Someone with 100 total hours on FM8 likely won't improve much from another 2 hours of driving around a new car, and people with thousands of hours across a multitude of racing games will see even less benefit... Assuming they still actually want/try to learn after all those hours anyways.
I admit the car XP thing is a little bit of a frustrating subject for me so I do tend to go a little ranty on it, as there are many (and I don't mean anyone specific here, just generally across various chatter about the game in various places) who seem to blow off the impact it has on multiplayer, particularly with organized racing.
As someone who has spent hundreds of hours over the years building and testing and balancing cars for community events, I have been through so many car sets where I have to buy 3 or 4 different cars, then build each one 3 or 4 different ways and run laps with them each time they are rebuilt, only to end up scrapping 1 or 2 of them because they can't be balanced well or get weird fuel economy or something strange. It's a process that takes hours, and the idea of adding in an extra 2 hours of grinding per car before I can start the building process is frustrating, nevermind that sometimes those 2 hours will be wasted when the car isn't viable (which is often because of Forza weirdness, adding to the frustration). Then you add in that each staff member working on the project will have to find time to do the same, and every competitor needs to set aside potentially 2 hours per car they want to test drive pre-season to figure out which one they want to run that season. It also makes recruiting people to race tougher as you will get "oh nah I can't race, I haven't leveled that car up." All together, it's a lot of unnecessary time spent that makes the whole process harder for everyone involved.
"Just wait and see" does kinda work in regards to how the car XP will impact the Builder's Cup and integrate with the practice mode before races and all that, but I don't think there is a need to wait and see how it will impact organized multiplayer because basic math can answer that right now; it's going to add 4 to 6 hours of grinding (per testing staff member) at a minimum for series with multiple cars, and around 2 hours for potential entrants to buy/upgrade a car to run in the series, and that's if they only care about trying one car out of the options (which isn't usually the case, most people try multiple cars).
It's not good for regular multiplayer either though, but the "spec racing" thing, as mentioned above, seems like it will probably be the focus there, at least at first. We all remember what happened the last time there wasn't enough class-based racing in an FM title though...
If there is a manufacturer multiplier for XP or something though that could help. It wouldn't help much for small brands with just a car or two though really, but it would still be better than nothing. I'm also curious to see how the assists work with it, and whether we can do the Horizon 5 thing with auto-drive to level up the cars. It would kinda render the whole thing more pointless, but it could be a way around the grind for those not interested in it.
