Thanks for the responses, fair amount to talk about and I do want to make clear that I am merely expressing opinions and that we are probably seeing the same objective truths in subjective ways. I don't think there's a right or wrong and ultimately the best solution would be to have choice in what kind of races we have available.
Because this system punishes people who simply have less time to play. It’s basically the same as when people complain that in the real world mediocre drivers get to F1 because of money over actually fast people with no money. I want a racing game to judge and rank me based on my driving ability, not the fact that I can throw an hour every time I race to find out a good car/tune combo.
I want to race people in my skill level, not worse drivers who simply make up the difference by having more time and in game currency.
Is this not missing the point that the vast majority of people aren't making their own setups, they are simply copy and pasting what they find online. It can be done in 5-10 minutes and once you find someone who's tunes you like, just bookmark their page so it's even quicker to get to racing.
I don't know why you are struggling to make sense of me wanting to drive with people with a similar skill and similar racecraft instead of people that can match my speed because they are better with setups. I am not playing F1/GT3 Manager. It's OK to disagree though. You asked for someone to help you understand why they like BOPped races, well this is it for me.
I'm struggling because ultimately I think that if you are consistently getting close competitive racing, that's all that matters. There is good racing in every level of DR, I don't agree that having your DR drop slightly because you refuse to tune is going to have a significant impact on the quality of racing you come up against and/or your fun.
It was still possible to overcome the difference between meta cars and the rest, if you have a favourite car you enjoy driving.
Not so much here as so many things are ignored when setting a flat bhp/kg for every car that the gap can be seconds, not tenths.
There are so many exaggerations in this post it's hard to know where to begin. There were cars in Sport that had setups so bad that it was simply not feasible to ever be competitive with similarly skilled drivers.
With regards to GT7, there are cars that are genuinely competitive with minimal tuning and zero setup changes (911 GT3s). I tried using a number of setups that were copied from people online, they were all better than their relatively uncompetitive stock setups, but the only one that was genuinely faster than my stock 911 GT3 lap was a GTR tune, and that was by a couple of tenths, not seconds. I suspect that you are referring to people using bugged cars or exploits, like the Peugeot VGT, which I think we can agree are probably best to ignore in this discussion as they will probably be patched.
You are confusing tuning with setups.
I think most people are to be fair. Gr.3 cars have minimal options for tuning, and yet as evidenced in this thread, lots of people are still turned off from doing races that don't have locked setups.
Your question completely ignores the fact that even with tuning, you are still going to have meta cars that are heads and shoulders better than any other option. This was the case with GT Sport whenever tuning was allowed (see Road to GT7 series for the most recent example) and GT7 is looking to be not that much different in this regard.
But we have that even with BoP? So yeah, it doesn't really make a difference does it? Except I can definitely get closer with non meta cars in tuned lobbies than I can in BoPd lobbies.
Because depending on what car is meta and how much it costs, grinding for the credits can take up a solid portion of your available playing time. I'd rather do 3 BOP races and 3 random career objectives than 25 laps of fishermans ranch. Then if someone finds an OP tune for a new car mid-week, the whole process starts again.
Look at last week. Race A - the car was easy to get, but needed 100,000cr worth of upgrades before you could be competitive. Race B - you needed to spend a fortune on one specific car to have a chance. If I did that, I'd have no credits to participate this week.
But how is this any better with BoP sorry? There is a dominant car in every race, with BoP it is impossible to iron out deficiencies in non-meta cars. With BoP turned on, Race B would still be dominated by the Peugeot VGT (basically zero tuning options on that car), because it's bugged. If the bug is patched, then the 911 GT3 RS would have been dominant. Each track has its meta Gr.3 car and although there are consistently competitive cars, like the Supra was in GTSport, you still need to drive the meta if you want to be absolutely certain for some reason that the reason you aren't winning isn't because you aren't in the fastest car, it's because you aren't actually as good as the other people you're racing.
