I think there is something a bit fake about the weather conditions but it's hard to know what is really going on as the game doesn't have a wetness indicator like GT7 has.
Yeah I think they need to work on this, and open up controls to us a bit for free play/private lobbies.
It's pretty vague which tire you need to be on right now for a lot of players at a pretty good skill/experience level, so I can't imagine a lot of more casual players are getting along with it. I'm fine if they want to make it a little vague, as a big sign that says "YEAH IT'S WET BUT JUST USE THE SOFT TRUST ME BRO" would kinda take the "adventure" out of it a bit too, but they need a more intuitive way to figure it out than just looking at some rain drops and guessing whether it's bad enough to need wets.
One issue is the look of the surface itself. They seem to overdone the wet surface, as it looks like there is standing water on it when the slicks are still fine to use. Not a subtle or natural looking transition as it starts to rain really. The standing water doesn't seem to matter though either, as there is no splash or pull when you run through the puddles.
In private lobbies, you don't even get the grid thing to look at the track like career/Featured Multiplayer, you have to guess from pitlane which is even covered in some cases. It also doesn't appear to auto-equip wets like in Featured Multiplayer, or at least not consistently, as just tonight I did a race with a friend testing it out a bit and it put us both on slicks for a quite wet track.
It makes the "variable" weather feature not that useful for private lobby racing (and free play too I think?) as there isn't really any way to make an educated decision on which tire to start on. Tonight we tested doing a single lap as a sort of "reconnaissance lap" but found that every single time it changes the weather settings so the 1 lap has nothing to do with whatever race that will follow so that's useless... Or sorta useless, there is currently a bug where the first race after people join the lobby, they might not be able to see certain other players, so doing the 1-lapper before starting the actual race should make sure the grid is synced at least.
If they at least let us choose what the starting condition is for variable weather, it would allow us to have everyone start on a level playing field. It would be nice to have more control over it, even if we could just choose something like:
Starting condition: Clear/partly clear/rain/etc
Change time: early race/mid race/late race/random
Potential condition 1: clear/partly clear/rain/etc
Potential condition 1 chance: 10/20/30%/etc
Potential condition 2: clear/partly clear/rain/etc
Potential condition 2 chance: 10/20/30%/etc
Then you could set for example to start with cloudy skies, then mid-race have 20% chance of raining hard, and 50% chance of raining medium, and 30% chance of staying cloudy... or something like that. It would be enough options to make things unpredictable without just feeling totally random.
Some would argue "but sometimes it rains in real races when you don't expect it!" but that's kinda missing the point, as in basically every series you can walk out of the garage and look up, or pull up the radar on your phone to at least make an educated guess which tire to start with, as well as whether it's better to stay out a few laps longer and wait and see what the weather will do.
Since the weather isn't truly dynamic and appears to just be a modification of the transition system from FM7, I guess they can't really do a forecast like ACC and have it feel authentic, but they could still use the "Track condition: greasy/damp/etc" info before starting.
I dunno it's late and I'm tired so I'm just rambling I guess, tldr plz T10 make weather more fun to play with I love racing in the rain.
but I'd like to think my cross-title experience, and significant real-world experience in cars across the performance spectrum helps me in that regard.
