So what measures to prevent hybriding did they incorporate into GT6. Source please.
I highly recommend you google my username before you continue to read this. From that you can determine the source and whether I am qualified to answer that question. If after that you truly want specific answers to what they did I can supply that.
How much revenue should they put into it? GT6 conservatively estimated sales would be north of $250 Million how much would you spend to protect that?
Personally I probably would have spent less than they did, or at least spent it elsewhere.
And it did take 4.5 months and here's why. The game was launched December 6, and it was known on day 1 the game would be hacked. If I were running the show, I'd have hired in the fall, a couple of well known hackers and said, "here's GT6, go nuts, tell us what you can do and show us how to prevent it".
As I already stated they did enough already for launch, probably more than any other game out there. Far more than much higher grossing games.
And I'll ask this question again because I've never received an answer from anyone. Why can't it be built into the system that if you go online a "Spec Check" is done to determine if your car is within normal parameters before you enter the track? Why can't they do the same thing for TT's? Seems to me when I enter a Tuning Prohibited lobby I get an instantaneous spec check and it works every time. If I try to enter a TT with the wrong car, be it a single car TT or group of cars, I can't get in. If one parameter is changed I can't get onto the track.
Why can't this be built into the game permanently?
It is not that it "can't" it is more what is the cost (not money cost) of doing so. For one there is the issue of game flexibility. In one-make car races the cars are chosen from a separate data table (as I mentioned in a previous post) so that is easy, you and everyone else get the car specs from the same place.
Doing this all the time would remove all possibility of tuning your cars. As of the 1.06 update there are 1339 cars in the game, each with its own set of variables. With the current editor the are ~484^16= 9.068E42 (9 with 42 zeros) combinations with just the variables it touches, there are much more that it does not touch. That's a much bigger number than can be calculated using 64 bits. If you could have a computer do 3 billion tests per second it would take 3.00e35 (3 with 35 zeros) years to test them all. Of course most of these are invalid combinations, but as you can see even then there would be a huge set to deal with.
They also have the PP system, but they screwed that up by making it a signed int16 so negative PP numbers are possible negating that limitation to lobbies. And getting over 32767 PP is easy, then it becomes negative allowing entrance to any PP limited lobby.
They reduce the load of testing by other means. Right now we see PP, HP, drivetrain, etc. tests and for the most part they keep the lobby fair. Unlimited lobbies are just that, unlimited. They can add tests for common hybrid tricks now that there are hybrids.
With Tuning Prohibited it's easy, the car has a flag that is set if it is modified, the game only needs to check 1 bit to validate the car.
Also note these tests are done remotely, on their server for on line lobbies, for every on line car. Adding more tests puts more strain on the servers too. Moving the checks to the client makes it easy to bypass the tests.
My math is probably wrong but it is only to demonstrate the scope of the issue. Go ahead and correct it if you like.
I hope this helps explains some of the issues PD must contend with and answers your question.
Someone mentioned solutions concerning game save files. As it stands there are no hacks that work directly with the save file. I suspect we will see them soon enough. The current hacks would work even if the saves were cloud based only.
tl;dr;lii