Matchmaking 15 mins wait to be put with A+ drivers (i'm B)

[GTNealosONE]

Good grief this game. There is no single player fun to have with the game being so short compared to other entries. Finding what fun I can challenging for 10th place online and now this. I was a second off the pace with my qualifying time. Drove around at back of grid yay.
I think if I have a little break there will hopefully be a big chunk of new content

 

[BloodRaven]

I'm a (very) low tier driver. Sometimes, I'll get put into races with drivers of all levels; A, B, C, D. There's even some with different levels of SR. It doesn't happen often, but it's happened a few times.

 

[Pigems]

And this is why I always say that we can’t have more than 3 daily races when people bring it up. We can’t even properly fill 3 race lobbies now, unless it’s peak times.

 

[xMAXIx79]

Sorry as much as I would like to agree with you on other topics, but I don't necessarily agree with you here.

point 1
They should just "just" put PS5 and PS4 players together.. Seriously, apart from the loading times, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to drive together...every stupid PC online game gets 100% cross play, because you never may require ALL players to have the same PC with the same system software installed.

point 2
There are felt to be "thousands" of players who do NOT want to race in sport mode with this ridiculous penalty system in the current situation.

Point 3.
In my opinion and also the opinion of some that you can read here and elsewhere, there are simply not enough really interesting races ectr. Sometimes the route is unpopular, sometimes the route is popular, but then the vehicle class is not popular.

Point 4.
Missing balance in the vehicle classes, it seems to be getting a little better in Gr3, but there are only a few "really good" vehicles and a lot of "junk" with which you can't be competitive. In Gr4, the picture is even more pronounced and only has a little variance due to the different track layouts, which sometimes do NOT suit the GT-R / ALFA / WRX. In 90% of the Gr4 races it feels like exactly the 3 with which you can really drive for victories in the "high" driver rankings.

Point 5. No real variety in weather or time of day or strategy. How many times have we had wet races in sport mode? How many times have we driven at night? Or even worse, how often are there really interesting races that can be won through real strategy?

 

[PirovacBoy]

Good grief this game. There is no single player fun to have with the game being so short compared to other entries. Finding what fun I can challenging for 10th place online and now this. I was a second off the pace with my qualifying time. Drove around at back of grid yay.
I think if I have a little break there will hopefully be a big chunk of new content

The Single Player Content is what actually keeps me enjoying GT7 since Day1 and I don’t see me getting less Motivation to do so.
So talking about What is Fun is very subjective.
And In my opinion PD should finally start to match Players by their Qualifying Time.

 

[Nuschel01]

And In my opinion PD should finally start to match Players by their Qualifying Time.

Then I could just purposefully drive slower and destroy everyone in the race. The DR/SR system works decently well, but I feel like SR loss should be easier and gain harder. Also DR should never be reset and a new level should only be determined after every x races because it's an indicator of your skill level - and that skill level doesn't really change every race; or suddenly drops massively because you've been reset People need to understand that grinding DR isn't something it's intended for, too.

 

[MOPARbarrett5]

I did over 20 race As last week and a few this week. At A+ S I maybe average one other player of the same rating every 2 races. There was one race that had a player at E D and the average race ends with about 8 players finishing with an average rating of about low B low S. I know race As attract a different crowd now with having no rating loss, but I figured that would incentivize more top players to race just to have fun, test tunes, whatever but it hasn't. I think the solution is to go back to actual daily races so that most people aren't bored by mid week and quit racing.

 

[Imari]

And this is why I always say that we can’t have more than 3 daily races when people bring it up. We can’t even properly fill 3 race lobbies now, unless it’s peak times.

It's hard to tell. If there were more dailies maybe more people would play.

Also, if they had some that were actually "dailies" rather than "weeklies" that might help more casual players be interested in playing more often. Hardcore players probably don't mind spending a whole week getting better on a single car/track combination. Casual players would probably enjoy a more varied selection that changed every day. And they're gonna be jumping into a race with little practice anyway, so it would probably feel better if everyone else was in the same boat.

It's not as simple as "this is why we can't have nice things".

 

[PirovacBoy]

Then I could just purposefully drive slower and destroy everyone in the race. The DR/SR system works decently well, but I feel like SR loss should be easier and gain harder. Also DR should never be reset and a new level should only be determined after every x races because it's an indicator of your skill level - and that skill level doesn't really change every race; or suddenly drops massively because you've been reset People need to understand that grinding DR isn't something it's intended for, too.

Of course you could do that, but there‘d be no point in doing it other than loosing a bunch of DR and most probably risking to get a big bad hit to your SR by trying to navigate through the Pack.
You‘d most probably be matched against Players way below your Current Ranking so nothing to “earn“.
But to each his own if that’s what you are looking for 😅
My Point was that it would make more Sense to match the Players by their Pace rather than by DR/SR.
It could promote much closer Racing.
But what do I know, maybe I’m completely wrong and it would be ultimate Carnage.

Matchmaking strictly by Qualifying Time combined with an overhauled SR System could/should and most probably WOULD be the best Solution.
The non Qualifiers and start at the back crowd People could race amongst similar Minded non Qualifying Folks, and the ones taking the more serious approach should have more competitive Racing.
Again, I’m sitting on my Balcony and enjoying the hot Colognian Sun Rays while having consumed some tasty refreshing Kölsch, so take my suggestions with a pinch of Salt 😁

 

[Nuschel01]

My Point was that it would make more Sense to match the Players by their Pace rather than by DR/SR.

But DR is the equivalent of pace. Or more like it should be...

 

[Pigems]

It's hard to tell. If there were more dailies maybe more people would play.

Also, if they had some that were actually "dailies" rather than "weeklies" that might help more casual players be interested in playing more often. Hardcore players probably don't mind spending a whole week getting better on a single car/track combination. Casual players would probably enjoy a more varied selection that changed every day. And they're gonna be jumping into a race with little practice anyway, so it would probably feel better if everyone else was in the same boat.

It's not as simple as "this is why we can't have nice things".

The fact is, we only have 3 races, and not enough people to fill them now outside of peak times. Splitting those players up more, only thins things out even more than they already are now. iRacing is a prime example, has an almost identical player base size, lots of series to do, but some races only go live, maybe once a week, because they don’t get enough participation to start a race the rest of the time. So there is more proof of my theory, than yours.

 

[B80]

It's hard to tell. If there were more dailies maybe more people would play.

Also, if they had some that were actually "dailies" rather than "weeklies" that might help more casual players be interested in playing more often. Hardcore players probably don't mind spending a whole week getting better on a single car/track combination. Casual players would probably enjoy a more varied selection that changed every day. And they're gonna be jumping into a race with little practice anyway, so it would probably feel better if everyone else was in the same boat.

It's not as simple as "this is why we can't have nice things".

Maybe there should be a Race D that changes everyday whilst the other 3 remain weekly. TBH I like the weekly rotation, as I haven't played gt for years and only know a handful of the tracks well enough to really push it online, unless I want to be a menace to other drivers. if I had to change every day, it may feel like spinning my wheels and may take ages to properly learn the track to a level where I can be competitive. I'd imagine it'd be carnage for many drivers, outside the top classes.

That said, after initially loving online a couple of months back, I've gravitated back to single player past month or so.

Agree with @Pigems though, with no crossplay, doesn;t seem like a good idea to spread the field even further and can imagine numbers will only dwindle further unless PD sort things out; penalties, plus all the other cr4p/negativity thats putting people off full stop from buying the game. And sorting out PS5 supply so more move over to Ps5. I imagine most the 'hardcore' racer people who have a ps5 already have gt7 - the sort of person that'd regularly commit to this game for months, years etc... unlike casual players.

 

[Zero2Oblivion]

I see no problem with being matched against higher DR racers.

I'm also DR B, and if I get put in a lobby with DR A/A+ racers, I look at it as my chance to see how my skills stack up. If there are some A+ racers in the lobby, sure I know I'm probably not going to win, but I'm going to see how they race in real-time as opposed to from YouTube replays.

I know where my skills are, I know I don't have a great chance of beating the higher DR racers, but I'm going to try. If you're not willing to compete against better racers, what you're really not willing to do something that is challenging and can teach you how to be better.

 

[Imari]

The fact is, we only have 3 races, and not enough people to fill them now outside of peak times. Splitting those players up more, only thins things out even more than they already are now. iRacing is a prime example, has an almost identical player base size, lots of series to do, but some races only go live, maybe once a week, because they don’t get enough participation to start a race the rest of the time. So there is more proof of my theory, than yours.

You keep trying to state this as if it's fact. The truth is you don't know what happens if GT adds more or different races.

iRacing is not a prime example, it has WAY more races than GT. So many more that it's not even in the same ballpark. Obviously if you add enough races you eventually run out of people for them. That's just basic maths. iRacing has too many races for all of them to go live all the time with the player base that they have and they know it. The way iRacing is structured for most series assumes that players will do at most a handful of live races per week, and the rest of the time will be spent in practice and time trials. That's why only having a few that go live per week, and probably one that is the known high iR slot, is fine.

But if you go from 3 races to 4 or 5 in a game where it's more about casual pick-up-and-play racing, it's not a given that the player count simply gets diluted. It might. It might go up with more interesting things to draw people in. There might be even less people playing than before, because a bunch of them see the dilution and then stop playing altogether.

You don't know, but you keep pretending you do.

Agree with @Pigems though, with no crossplay, doesn;t seem like a good idea to spread the field even further and can imagine numbers will only dwindle further unless PD sort things out; penalties, plus all the other cr4p/negativity thats putting people off full stop from buying the game.

So should they be preparing to cut it down to two or one race per week? That would condense the same number of players into less races and make more of them have decent size fields and splits with mostly similar skill players.

I mean, if you believe that changing the number of races in no circumstances affects the number of people playing that is. I rather think if you dropped to one race then there's a good chance you lose a lot of players because they're not interested in whatever the combo is on a given week.

 

[Samus]

Remember when GTS was first revealed, and the screenshots suggested there would be regular named special events like single player? Miata cup one day, endurance oval race the next week? Whatever happened to those? Didn't happen. They just have the three events each week and the competitive World Series events, plus the very occasional extra sponsor events like the Porsche one.

I don't know why PD looked at their data for GTS dailies, saw how few people were playing them compared to the entire player base and decided the best way to increase those numbers was to change.......absolutely nothing.

As @Imari says, the hardcore racing fans who want to do the same races for a week, in the same cars every week, is tiny. The general populace are much happier dropping into different races and just having fun. They don't care about knowing the track and car combo inside out, they don't care about increasing their ranking, they don't care about being ultra competitive. They don't want to race the same Gr.3 and Gr.4 cars, all the time. That isn't the Gran Turismo of old.

They just want something new to do each time they play the game every 2-3 days. GT doesn't offer that, not curated anyway.

Even the Time Trial event they added, why is it only one a fortnight? Again, most people are not going to keep coming back to that over two weeks to improve their time. They're going to spend anywhere from 5 minutes to a few hours setting their time once, then done. Why are there not four or five of those available at any time? What about doing what the DIRT games used to do, set up daily "one shot" time trials where as the name suggests, you have one shot to set your time. Come back the next day, there is a new one. Overall Dirt Rally 2.0 had daily, weekly and monthly challenges, a total of 6-7 at any one time.

They're never going to increase player numbers and overall retention by doing the same thing that didn't work in GTS.

 

[KCR]

I think a lot of people just don't try the online part for various reasons, without really knowing what they miss.
From the trophy numbers - 15% of users did one Sport race, 2% did 50 (PS5 numbers). That's incredibly low.

I wasn't planning to play online, but I wanted the platinum.
The first race wasn't fun, in D/B or whatever. Just a big mess.
But after 20 races and getting to C/A, it started to click and I couldn't believe how fun it is.
I would have dropped the game months ago, but still play 5h+ a week.
So GT added a new dedicated online player by just having a "get 50 races online" trophy.

Obviously not everyone cares about trophy, but there are other possible easy ways:

• Give a special part for 20 races
• Give a 5M credit for completing 50 races
• Give a unique car for completing 100 races
• Increase the daily rewards to make them a bit more attractive for people grinding

Not everyone is going to like online, but even if they can convert just 10% of the offline players to do online, that would boost the population by 5...
At the moment there is just not enough incentive to try it.

 

[Imari]

I think a lot of people just don't try the online part for various reasons, without really knowing what they miss.

I think a lot of people know exactly what they're missing. In the case of Gran Turismo's online modes, not a whole lot, because the overwhelming likelihood is that they're not the sort of player it was designed for.

I wasn't planning to play online, but I wanted the platinum.
The first race wasn't fun, in D/B or whatever. Just a big mess.
But after 20 races and getting to C/A, it started to click and I couldn't believe how fun it is.
I would have dropped the game months ago, but still play 5h+ a week.
So GT added a new dedicated online player by just having a "get 50 races online" trophy.

Obviously not everyone cares about trophy, but there are other possible easy ways:

• Give a special part for 20 races
• Give a 5M credit for completing 50 races
• Give a unique car for completing 100 races
• Increase the daily rewards to make them a bit more attractive for people grinding

Not everyone is going to like online, but even if they can convert just 10% of the offline players to do online, that would boost the population by 5...
At the moment there is just not enough incentive to try it.

Not to get too crazy, but what if they made it fun for casual players? You know, not try and bribe them into doing something that is fundamentally not designed for them to enjoy, but just make something that they would actually like to play? I bet you wouldn't even have to give them special prizes or anything! (Although still make it pay out equivalent to grinding single player races, because that's just sensible.)

I know it's not Polyphony's policy for casuals to have fun online because racing online is super serious business full of super serious people racing super seriously. That's why shuffle racing had to die, it was too much fun and people generally liked jumping in and messing around. But I really think they could go somewhere with this idea of players playing something that is just fun without provisos like "after 20 races". I think there's a large population of players out there that enjoy having fun, and would spend time in an online mode that offered it.

 

[KCR]

I think a lot of people know exactly what they're missing. In the case of Gran Turismo's online modes, not a whole lot, because the overwhelming likelihood is that they're not the sort of player it was designed for.

Not to get too crazy, but what if they made it fun for casual players? You know, not try and bribe them into doing something that is fundamentally not designed for them to enjoy, but just make something that they would actually like to play? I bet you wouldn't even have to give them special prizes or anything! (Although still make it pay out equivalent to grinding single player races, because that's just sensible.)

I know it's not Polyphony's policy for casuals to have fun online because racing online is super serious business full of super serious people racing super seriously. That's why shuffle racing had to die, it was too much fun and people generally liked jumping in and messing around. But I really think they could go somewhere with this idea of players playing something that is just fun without provisos like "after 20 races". I think there's a large population of players out there that enjoy having fun, and would spend time in an online mode that offered it.

I'm not arguing that the current online mode is not great for casual player, that's a different point altogether.

What I'm saying is that 15% of users did more one Sport race - meaning that 85% never tried, not even once.
So, no - they don't know what they are missing. I didn't know what I was missing.
Out of these 85% of players, how many would like it if they try?

 

[Pigems]

You keep trying to state this as if it's fact. The truth is you don't know what happens if GT adds more or different races.

iRacing is not a prime example, it has WAY more races than GT. So many more that it's not even in the same ballpark. Obviously if you add enough races you eventually run out of people for them. That's just basic maths. iRacing has too many races for all of them to go live all the time with the player base that they have and they know it. The way iRacing is structured for most series assumes that players will do at most a handful of live races per week, and the rest of the time will be spent in practice and time trials. That's why only having a few that go live per week, and probably one that is the known high iR slot, is fine.

But if you go from 3 races to 4 or 5 in a game where it's more about casual pick-up-and-play racing, it's not a given that the player count simply gets diluted. It might. It might go up with more interesting things to draw people in. There might be even less people playing than before, because a bunch of them see the dilution and then stop playing altogether.

You don't know, but you keep pretending you do.

So should they be preparing to cut it down to two or one race per week? That would condense the same number of players into less races and make more of them have decent size fields and splits with mostly similar skill players.

I mean, if you believe that changing the number of races in no circumstances affects the number of people playing that is. I rather think if you dropped to one race then there's a good chance you lose a lot of players because they're not interested in whatever the combo is on a given week.

I’ve still yet to see you give a better example? So, iRacing is still the closest we have to one. You’re theories aren’t just theories, you have nothing to back them up. At least I have a real example of what could happen.

 

[Imari]

I'm not arguing that the current online mode is not great for casual player, that's a different point altogether.

What I'm saying is that 15% of users did more one Sport race - meaning that 85% never tried, not even once.
So, no - they don't know what they are missing. I didn't know what I was missing.
Out of these 85% of players, how many would like it if they try?

So no possibility that they've played other similar games and decided that it wasn't for them? No possibility that they saw some other people playing online and thought it looked awful? No chance that they made a reasonable decision based on the wide wealth of information out there about GTS and GT7 online and all the other similar games and just steered clear?

It doesn't count unless they actually went on and absolutely confirmed in this specific circumstance for this specific game that they still didn't like it.

Next you'll be telling me that it doesn't count unless they did 5 races, because nobody likes the first few. Or 10 races, because you need to get the proper feel of how online racing works. Or 20 races, because you need that long to build up a decent enough rating to get to the good bit.

I think that most of these people are intelligent people completely capable of comprehending what's going on with a simple game mode like GTS online and deciding whether it's for them or not. Telling them they don't know what they're missing is telling them that you know what they feel better than they do.

That's bananas.

You can say whatever you like about your own experience, but that's you. You are not the entire Gran Turismo player base.

I’ve still yet to see you give a better example? So, iRacing is still the closest we have to one. You’re theories aren’t just theories, you have nothing to back them up. At least I have a real example of what could happen.

I don't have to give a better example.
I'm not making declarative statements.

I'm not the one saying "this is what will happen" like you are, I'm pointing out that there's a range of possible outcomes that could reasonably be expected from adding an extra race to the weekly online set. And that the basis for your assumption that any change to the online structure would result in absolutely no difference in the number of players is just that, an assumption.

But you go ahead and keep pretending it's a fact. I assume you'll be advocating for reducing the number of races to one?

 

[KCR]

So no possibility that they've played other similar games and decided that it wasn't for them? No possibility that they saw some other people playing online and thought it looked awful? No chance that they made a reasonable decision based on the wide wealth of information out there about GTS and GT7 online and all the other similar games and just steered clear?

It doesn't count unless they actually went on and absolutely confirmed in this specific circumstance for this specific game that they still didn't like it.

Next you'll be telling me that it doesn't count unless they did 5 races, because nobody likes the first few. Or 10 races, because you need to get the proper feel of how online racing works. Or 20 races, because you need that long to build up a decent enough rating to get to the good bit.

I think that most of these people are intelligent people completely capable of comprehending what's going on with a simple game mode like GTS online and deciding whether it's for them or not. Telling them they don't know what they're missing is telling them that you know what they feel better than they do.

That's bananas.

You can say whatever you like about your own experience, but that's you. You are not the entire Gran Turismo player base.

I don't have to give a better example.
I'm not making declarative statements.

I'm not the one saying "this is what will happen" like you are, I'm pointing out that there's a range of possible outcomes that could reasonably be expected from adding an extra race to the weekly online set. And that the basis for your assumption that any change to the online structure would result in absolutely no difference in the number of players is just that, an assumption.

But you go ahead and keep pretending it's a fact. I assume you'll be advocating for reducing the number of races to one?

I mean sure, all these people who didn't try online once definitely did a bunch of research and decided it is trash and not worth the 15min to try. Not sure why I didn't realize that before...

 

[Pigems]

So no possibility that they've played other similar games and decided that it wasn't for them? No possibility that they saw some other people playing online and thought it looked awful? No chance that they made a reasonable decision based on the wide wealth of information out there about GTS and GT7 online and all the other similar games and just steered clear?

It doesn't count unless they actually went on and absolutely confirmed in this specific circumstance for this specific game that they still didn't like it.

Next you'll be telling me that it doesn't count unless they did 5 races, because nobody likes the first few. Or 10 races, because you need to get the proper feel of how online racing works. Or 20 races, because you need that long to build up a decent enough rating to get to the good bit.

I think that most of these people are intelligent people completely capable of comprehending what's going on with a simple game mode like GTS online and deciding whether it's for them or not. Telling them they don't know what they're missing is telling them that you know what they feel better than they do.

That's bananas.

You can say whatever you like about your own experience, but that's you. You are not the entire Gran Turismo player base.

I don't have to give a better example.
I'm not making declarative statements.

I'm not the one saying "this is what will happen" like you are, I'm pointing out that there's a range of possible outcomes that could reasonably be expected from adding an extra race to the weekly online set. And that the basis for your assumption that any change to the online structure would result in absolutely no difference in the number of players is just that, an assumption.

But you go ahead and keep pretending it's a fact. I assume you'll be advocating for reducing the number of races to one?

And I’m just pointing out that there is more evidence to prove my theory, than yours, period, end of story.