There was no strategy involved though. The races aren't long enough to force pitting in and the AI just power on through on medium tyres.
But if you still don't have to pit, how is the tire wear multiplier a problem then? Not trying to be difficult about it, I just haven't done this Featured Tour yet so I was assuming it was like the Endurance ones where the wear was aggressive enough you had a few different options.
The public lobbies run at 6x tire wear though so yeah I guess it wouldn't work out to be very interesting if the career races are around 8 minutes or so like normal. In public lobbies, softs usually last like 6-8 mins depending on track, so I guess the challenge could be making the softs last, and the softs being fast early and slow late if they wear versus the consistent pace of the mediums, but if the AI just stick to mediums and you are the only one doing anything different then it isn't as intriguing.
To some extent, yes, but this can be addressed with a combination of offering different types of race, and allowing people to do the ones they like, rather than forcing them to do things they don't like to obtain FOMO cars.
How does GT7 address these issues?
1. You have events that are significantly different:
Tokyo with identical conditions each time, starting wet and drying out
Sardegna with identical conditions each time, dry and sunny all the way
Le Mans with random conditions, mix of dry and wet
Spa with twice the duration, random conditions, mix of dry and wet
Personally, Tokyo was always my favourite as the identical conditions each time mean you can compare your total race time, but some people liked Le Mans, others liked Sardegna.
2. The FOMO cars are all bought with credits, meaning you can do any race you want, as they all pay credits, and credits are all you need.
So in this way GT7 has the two elements needed to cater for people wanting different things. A range of events to appeal to different tastes, and FOMO cars obtained with a currency that you can obtain by doing the things that appeal to you personally.
Setting up races in free play doesn't achieve the same thing in FM because you'll never get long forum threads where people share their setups and race times if the race isn't offered as a fixed race by the game itself, and also, you can't obtain the FOMO cars that way in FM.
(You may ask - why don't I just play GT7? I prefer FM's physics and the fact I can run it on my PC)
Switching to a different model to earn the FOMO cars that allows some freedom in how you earn them would be a massive improvement, as we have gone over in this thread a few times.
I'm not sure the credit thing would create the "engagement" T10 are looking for though, as the economies in these games have always been pretty screwed up for a variety of different reasons depending on the title. Changing to a "points" system like FH5 has could work though, and you earn points from doing basically anything in the game. Earn points for each race you do based on how long it is, whether it's in multiplayer, free play or career. Rivals mode could offer a point for setting a time in the top 50%, 2 points for top 25%, 3 for top 10%, etc to incentivize people to spend a little time and try harder to get up the board. It would be cool to find a way to reward people for making and sharing cool liveries too, but that would probably just result in a flood of zero-effort liveries.
Making the time limited content locked behind the points instead of the Tours would then free the Tours up to stay permanent as well. Their main purpose would just be to provide some new career stuff to do for people who want to earn their points for the FOMO cars through career mode.
I know one problem with doing FOMO stuff on normal currency is that people save up, then log on, buy the new stuff and play with it for 20 mins and then turn the game off until the next update, which doesn't help their "engagement" numbers much and often leads to price creeping up. Generally, people who do a lot of multiplayer will have more credits as the races are more replayable and those who do organized multiplayer often do practice/test sessions with friends and rack up a bunch of credits. I'm sitting at 56mil right now so I'd absolutely love the ability to just buy the FOMO cars with credits and skip the awful career garbage. I suppose the ones who already have the credits in hand likely play enough to drive up the engagement numbers already so it wouldn't be any loss for them if we didn't have to slog through the career for a few hours, and the ones who don't play much at all would still have to put the extra time in.
I was speaking more about free play as a separate issue from the FOMO stuff. Lots of the career complaints are that it isn't big enough, and while I do understand/sympathize to some extent, free play allows everyone to race endlessly. Sure, you don't get a fancy little gold sticker after you complete a free play race, and I guess that's where I disconnect. I race because I enjoy it, so if races are fun then I race, if they aren't fun then a gold sticker at the end won't make them fun and instead I will do something else.
The sharing of times and tunes and stuff is something I haven't seen since like Gran Turismo 3 or something though (although I haven't owned a GT game since 6, and only venture to that part of the forum for the photo threads), we used to do that as we had no multiplayer. While it's a nice idea, I don't really see it happening much in the modern era... Although that does raise another question for T10: what happened to the career leaderboards? In FM1 (or was it 2? or both?) it used to compare your time to complete the races in the career with your friends, if I remember right both for the individual races and the combined times for the series. That could be a good (and seemingly somewhat simple) way to make the career more engaging for some people.
