I am beginning to think PD is passive-aggressive against hosts. They want to discourage our rooms in favor of their rooms.
By the time I starting hosting my nightly room in May 2011, GT5 had everything I could have wanted. The PP system, custom tracks that I could change at will within the room, a race timer, and even shuffle racing with random cars (which I never used).
GT5 turned into GT6 and they took away shuffle racing. No biggie for me, but a lot of people loved hosting and racing in shuffle races.
Also in GT6, they greatly improved custom tracks, and the sharing of custom tracks became much easier, you no longer had to be a person's friend to copy their shared custom tracks. But they took away the host's ability to change to a custom track within the room. I very rarely used them, maybe after the room crashed and I had to start a new one. If they had freely allowed the use of custom within rooms, they could have been huge.
Now comes Sport, and restrictions for the host are the greatest they have ever been. We are forced into running rooms divided into categories. Now, I know we can do HP and weight rooms. That is how I started, but PP rooms Made for much closer, fun racing.
Today's update shows me that they don't give a crap about hosts. In fact I believe they are trying discourage people from hosting. Running a room full of people without a race timer is very frustrating. It is like herding cats. Add to that, I have no idea, if people are in the garage, or tuning or what they are doing, do they see when I type 'starting'?
It just infuriates me That they have not added a room timer. What is this whole TAG Hauer affiliation about?
I think they want to discourage hosting, because they want us to do their races. Isn't it funny that their races, ARE ON A TIMER!