I did most circuit experiences Thursday evening, just after the patch 1.11 was out. My goal was to quickly grab the bronze reward credits on first tries and move on. My overall feeling was that I got a “deep bronze” trophy on first try most of the time, meaning it was just a little slower than getting silver. Which feels fine for my skill level (which I consider to be average) . However some trophy requirements are completely out of whack :
too hard :
- Tokyo Expressway Central Clockwise - I failed to even get bronze after 3-4 tries for the full lap experience. And my best attempts were pretty decent. In all honestly i should at the very least already have gotten bronze, probably already even silver. My individual sectors are bronze, bronze, silver, bronze.
- Le Mans sector 5 (last sector) - Same thing as above, 3-4 attempts of which some were pretty decent and I didn’t even get bronze. Should have already been bronze and possibly silver as well.
too easy :
- Monza sector 5 (last sector) - First attempt and bam: gold. I wasn’t even thinking about the proper race line or corner speed, just quickly did it to get bronze. This is a case of gold being too easy.
- Tsukuba (entire lap) - Gold on first try! Seriously. This should not be that easy.
full lap harder than individual sectors:
* Dragon Trail Gardens - the only one I did before patch 1.11. I was planning to get gold on everything, I did so for the individual sectors, failed on the entire lap after 5 decent tries (got silver though).
full lap easier than individual sectors:
* Red Bull Ring - I got bronze on all 3 individual sectors and then silver on the entire lap. That’s all from first tries. I can’t say my entire lap felt any better than the individual sectors.
The above are just a few examples, there are more cases like that. But, there are also circuits where I would say it’s fine (at least for getting bronze)
For the record, I also did play GTS for the first couple of years in its lifespan and I golded everything there (granted with better effort than just quickly grabbing bronze now in GT7) except the Nordschleife full lap (only got silver there but close to gold - If I was more determined I could have gotten gold over there as well.) and I didn’t bother with circuit experience with most of the tracks that got added to the game after the first year. My overall feeling is that for GT7 they made it harder, in my personal opinion a bit too hard. But if that’s the game decision PD made, ok fine. But as you can see from the examples above, the difficulty level is all over the place for a lot of the maps.
I do hope PD rebalances some trophy requirements. And the only way they can do that is by looking at player data. If for example 90% of the people who tried Le Mans got Bronze or better for sectors 1,2,3,4 and the full lap experience, but only 50% got bronze on sector 5, well that means the difficulty of sector 5 doesn’t match with that of the other sectors and it should be adjusted.
I’m not here to complain and state I want to get the gold trophies easy. But for the bronze trophies that should be the case. For my skill level, even if it’s mediocre at best, I should not need more than 3 tries to even get bronze on an individual sector (excluding collisions, going off-track or resetting and attempt.
I got my bronze credit rewards on most of the tracks. I’ll revisit these circuit experiences again after many months with some more serious attempts and try to get some more gold trophies. Same with the licences and missions, I quickly grabbed the bronze rewards from that and leave gold for whenever I feel I’m in the mood to do these (probably next winter or so).