The State of Lobbies in GT7

[Touring Mars]

I joined PS Plus last night and had my first crack at using Multiplayer.

Sport Mode was fun, and so was the lobby race I set up, but even from this minimal and brief experience, I had problems.

Firstly, I couldn't seem to start the race because some players had not 'initialised'. I ended up having to kick one player out before we could start, which given there was only 5 people to start with was a bit of a shame. I don't know if I set it up incorrectly or what, but it seems obvious that a race host cannot expect players to sit and wait while one other player has a practice run of indeterminate length.

I also got a hefty 4 second penalty for being smashed into by a rival. Given that the race was at one of my two 'practice' circuits, I've never been hit by the AI at this point before, and I was 100% the innocent party, however I got a 4 second penalty for it. (But I realise that the penalty system is a well known problem area in its own right).

I would quite like to see an option (is there one?) of having controller users only in a race, but otherwise the possibilities of multiplayer mode seem really interesting, but my initial experience was not that encouraging.

 

[danjama]

Constant ****ing micro stutters when people leave or join a lobby. How can you do a clean lap in that scenario??? Wtf

 

[Guffaluff]

The update roadmap PD published at the launch of the game mentions "Lobby Features", so I am sure they will improve, but I fear we will have to wait for long. Sport Mode has the priority at PD for sure. But I'm still baffled by how much is missing from GT Sport.

 

[Nourman5]

When I'm in the lobby in the FREE RUN mode, I cannot use the nitrous! In gt5 and 6 I could.

 

[Voodoovaj]

The biggest issue, and I have said this for literally decades, is that PD lacks good game designers. That is different from game developers. They do great graphics, great physics (despite the debates), and a great presentation. But the design of the game; the way it plays, the player progress, how the player is directed through the game, how gameplay issues are dealt with, etc., has always been poor.

Lobbies earn little money because they could not come up with an elegant way to limit payouts, and (with this iteration) they have put all the emphasis on collecting. Not to go to far off on a tangent, but collecting isn't a game, it isn't even a meta game. Limiting payouts to force credit purchases, to obtain useless cars, ....I mean, where does one even begin?

But, in short, if Lobbies (and Sport Mode) paid out more credits than SP, then this discussion wouldn't even be happening. Players are going to where they are treated best, which at the moment is SP. The racing isn't better, but the access is easier and the payouts are better.

They could easily do a scaled payout for lobbies. They can track the difficulty of a custom race based on setting. They could do the same in Lobbies. Use that degree of difficulty, so to speak, as a baseline value. Then, increase the payouts by a factor based on the number of people in the lobby. It could even increase by the aggregate of the DR and SR in the lobby. It's almost trivial to implement that. If THAT were implemented, the entire world of GT would migrate from the SP to Lobbies.

As an example, if you could win back the 20mil credits you would spend on a 250GTO by winning in a room full of legend cars on CS tires, there would be thousands of servers set up just like that.

Maybe Sony doesn't want to pay for the extra servers required to do Lobbies properly :S

 

[Sarajevo89]

Had another “racing on your own” race last night on Brands Hatch in that red championship. First time since GT Sport days. I hope you know what I’m talking about. Entire grid visually is standing still whole race but they’re of course running in their own worlds so you‘re just driving 16 qualifying laps and hope for the best result in the end. Ended up solid 5th.

Incredible that this kind of developer amateurism still prevails at PD.

 

[Voodoovaj]

Had another “racing on your own” race last night on Brands Hatch in that red championship. First time since GT Sport days. I hope you know what I’m talking about. Entire grid visually is standing still whole race but they’re of course running in their own worlds so you‘re just driving 16 qualifying laps and hope for the best result in the end. Ended up solid 5th.

Incredible that this kind of developer amateurism still prevails at PD.

Exactly.

I can give them a pass because this might be a "race condition" bug, where if the wrong command gets dealt with first, it causes the bug. They are notoriously difficult to track down, but still.

What bothers me is that I can just be riffing off the top of my head on how to solve certain issues, and they are easy fixes (like the payouts I mentioned above). It doesn't need anything other than some value changes.

 

[NikNakTobasco]

They can’t give big payouts for lobbies.

 

[Voodoovaj]

They can’t give big payouts for lobbies.

And why is that? Serious.

Because people might use them to get paid rather than trying to force people to pay for credits? Not trying to be argumentative, but there is some misguided concepts out there.

If the argument is that people will abuse it and credit farm, I say "who cares"? We all paid full price for the game, so I am entitled to reasonably access the content that I paid for. If I farm credits, it's a victimless crime. I can't give them away. If 20 people go join a lobby and take turns winning a race, again, who cares? They are participating together and growing the strength of the community.

Right now, the game pays you based on event value and finishing position. It's trivial to have a dynamic event value. You just assign a value factor to various settings (it's probably already in there). Scale it based on the number of players, so 1 person in a room by themselves get 0 credits. 2 people get a trivial amount, like 100 credits for a win. Etc...just keep scaling so that full rooms with the most challenge pay the most. For example, a rain room will pay more than a dry race.

A game is meant for playing.

Edit - I should add, what the difference if I turn down the difficulty to ensure a win and farm the SP? I am positive the vast majority only play SP because they need the money to buy cars. When this novelty wears off, participation in general will fall off a cliff.

 

[Silver Arrows]

They can’t give big payouts for lobbies.

They can certainly give out more then they are giving for Sport mode specifically, and that's been an issue going back to GT Sport.

 

[NikNakTobasco]

They can certainly give out more then they are giving for Sport mode specifically, and that's been an issue going back to GT Sport.

Definitely. Should be 300k for a race c win.
But lobbies could be so easily abused that it would undermine the entire economy of the game. As the above poster said, who cares? I don’t really but it would effectively mean unlimited credits so might as well not have any credits at all at that point. Again, I’m fine with that but it rather negates any SP progress.

 

[MajorDireRear]

I run a community of 400 and we spend more time trying to get lobbies to start than we do actually racing. 'Players still Initialising' error is getting worse and worse. We are in a full party with 16 people and all exiting and restating the game 1 by 1. It's destroying our community

 

[HGHTCH]

.deleted

 

[DefNotJake]

They can’t give big payouts for lobbies.

If you are going to have an economy the HEAVILY benefits the people who grind, at the very least let us have the option to do that grinding on tracks we like, with cars we like, with people we like.

Oh wait, did I accidentally suggest something that is fun and won't feel like a depressing waste of time? My mistake. It's almost as if the game refuses to pay you well for playing the game the way it was intended to be played (according to Kazunori), which isn't by playing the same events mindlessly over and over again in a dark room by yourself at 3:00AM just to earn enough credits for a virtual car.

 

[PirovacBoy]

Lobbies and especially their Infrastructure is still lacking heavily.
At this point I’m quite sure that PD is aware, but something “Technically“ must be holding them up.
Maybe PS4/PS5 Crossplay using different Codes for Lobby/Host Migration?!
From my personal experience I say that the Servers used for Lobbies in GT7 run pretty stable.
I have not encountered a single freeze on track.
Something which happened in GTS on a regular basis.
Therefore we now have to deal with Lobbies where the Host is not able to start a Race.
Again, something which on the other side as far as I can remember never happened in GTS.
I‘m no Expert in Online Infrastructure, but I doubt that there‘ll be a fix to it.
We‘re over 3 Months into the Game at this point,yet, we still have to deal with the same Issues.
Same goes for changing Lobby Settings once the Lobby is booted and the Server is ready to run.
It seems like these two are somehow tied to each other, hence no changes are possible once the Lobby Settings are Set up.
Very annoying but maybe that’s the price we have to pay for having Crossplay.
Me personally, I’d rather take into account to have less stable Lobbies but therefore interchangeable Settings if that’d be an option.
Or a PS4/PS5 Lobbies only Option if that’d mitigate the Issue.
Though, my hopes are not completely gone as I still hope for a fix, but the more time is passing…well, we have to be realistic and at this point I’m trying to keep my expectations low and hope for the best.

 

[Nebuc72]

Definitely. Should be 300k for a race c win.
But lobbies could be so easily abused that it would undermine the entire economy of the game. As the above poster said, who cares? I don’t really but it would effectively mean unlimited credits so might as well not have any credits at all at that point. Again, I’m fine with that but it rather negates any SP progress.

People are already leaving scripts on the game overnight to grind money, it can't get any worse than that hahaha.

 

[lolofantic]

Now is possible to remove wind in lobby.it's a good idea, at the nurburgring it was always too high, so you also see the lap times

 

[ketiux]

I’d like to get into the road car races. But they’re all open tuning which makes sense but I haven’t got a clue what to do so would be turning up in stock cars at a presumed large disadvantage

You and I should exchange PSN's. This is because my friends and I help people with tunings and race 450PP to 500PP street car lobbies with sport tires.

It's definately worth it, I mean variety never hurt anyone, but I would say wait and see what happens because it's not worth it to get into it right now with this mess of a system.
Because I'm mainly an online player I stopped playing for now but I'm jumping in the moment they make improvements in lobbies or Sport.

I agree with your other post... CS or SH are one of the most fun and fair racing you can have since it will weed out all the Gr.1/2/3/4 people and the ones that make it past T1 at the start of the race, either get a penalty or go off track on T2. They proceed to quit.

 

[DefNotJake]

Extremely underrated feature amongst the numerous in GT5: Fixed timed lobby starts. (Host can make it so the race starts after any set amount of minutes)

Anyone else have any other features they'd like to see return or added to lobbies?

 

[ShiftingGears]

Lobbies yesterday were extremely lagging across three different rooms simultaneously as well. Everyone reported significant jittering for different rooms and hosts. This is on top of the terrible state of lobbies, plus the new de-sync bug and neutered FFB that update 1.15 introduced.

To be making the effort to increase the Hagerty showroom costs at this time is seriously contemptible behaviour from PD.

 

[speeeyskells]

Anyone else have any other features they'd like to see return or added to lobbies?

Yes, the change the track without making a new lobby so we can start championships