What happened to actual racing??

[Ba55line]

After doing some investigation I have found that for the most part, BOP is a little bit of a joke, as @dnlnnhs has pointed out if they wanted to make it fully "skill-based" every car would fundamentally be the same. Funnily enough, however, polyphony seems to almost agree with that ideology as every car runs near identical setups on EVERY TRACK (small camber changes and some deviance in natural frequency between cars). How can that be balanced? A car with an inherently stiffer platform will perform better at different tracks than those with softer platforms and this encourages people to jump to the Meta for each respective track. Also looking into power to weight ratios cars like the GTR GT3 and the Atenza have a significantly higher power to weight than cars such as the Alfa 4C or BMW Z4. I can appreciate an element of this is due to the physical dimensions of various cars. But if every car is running the same setup, how can they not have equal power to weight? The BOP system is a lazy excuse for people to "put driver skill over being able to tune". The way I look at it now, if you spend 15/30mins on the game when you log in working on tuning (in which you still need to drive the car), eventually, you will have some sort of base tune for each extreme of track type. Like with anything, these are just my opinions, but I don't think it can be stated enough that this glorified BOP system is inherently flawed. Not as much effort has gone into it as people seem to think.

As a sort of tangent to this thread, I would like to see some changes in GT7 where there is a more intense organised online mode for those who wish to invest the time into setups and turn it into the Sim Racing E-sport that it's currently trying to compete with. Keep the current iteration of the sport mode for more casual players that don't have the time or the inclination to pursue such things, still have competitive E-sport circuits for both. Most leagues and online lobbies in GT Sport as it is now are tiresome and lobbies die after 1 or 2 races. It would even be nice to see team-based racing maybe if lobby sizes increase (which lets be real, on next-gen it should be grids of at least 25/30). Having a team of two or three and racing in an organised series operated by the game with up to 10 or 15 other teams respectively (fairly realistic) would be a game-changer and dish out incentives for drivers to do testing and commit to a car for a season, punish those who change their car every race, just create a bit more realism. Anyway interested to see people's thoughts.

And just in case people wanted a little bit more proof of how broken the BOP system is. Based on some admittedly limited testing using BOP and stock setups (Group 1 used as the testing pool), it's very obvious that the BOP system is tested and applied in a way that doesn't have the cars driving in any level of anger. We ran out of the box cars just on the pause menu, allowing the AI drivers to race the track. Every car we tested ran to within at around 1.0 seconds of each other with a maximum of 1.5 seconds at the very lower end.

First off, while balanced to an extent for the older cars, it still leaves a massive performance gap. Not exactly driver skill first mentality.

Second of all. Anybody has played GT for any length of time knows that the Ai couldn't drive in fast if you told them their mother died. How does anyone expect an accurate system when the cars aren't being pushed? You can't base a system designed to benefit slower racers and hinder faster ones when the system doesn't even appear to take the potential of top end racers into account?

 

[dabz343]

There are some quality pervious posts describing legitimate reasons for/against tuning. My thought is, why can't we have both in Sport?

Why doesn't PD expand Sport to include a separate tuning allowed category? Adding content that broadens appeal will certainly elevate PD's bottom line, so why are we to settle for--and argue over--the limited content that Sport is currently?

I say, evolve Sport by offering a dedicated tuning championship...offer the guys who have the time, desire and knowledge of tuning a great experience and expand PD's marketshare against competitors.

At the end of the day, give the players more choices.

 

[Ryan Sandall]

Having no tuning is the best way to have a quick, fun and fair race.
As soon as tunings allowed then some cars will become out of reach through tuning to the nth degree

Casual but serious racers (fast enough to be A+ let's say and don't have the time to be messing around with every other car for the sake of diversity and or to tune it) will be put off.
As even when it becomes a meta for the best tuned car for the track they will jump into their stock one and not have the time to figure out why they are falling so far, or whatever

If you want to do tuning leagues and races and lobbies go for it
But sport mode works very well for casual players

If everyone's driving the identical cars then it's only the driver that makes the difference which I like, and it's clearly worked considering the games pretty old and there's still lots of activity on each race

Also if you want to exercise a tuning urge in competition I'm pretty sure there is always a time trial with tuning allowed to play with

 

[ShiftingGears]

Tuning has its place.

I thought the Fugu Z Nations race was just awesome.

 

[azrilnazli]

Tuning will create a new business opportunity. For those people who don't have time, they can buy the setup, like they did in iRacing. Google :

1. iRacing VRS
2. iRacing PDS

 

[KepleroGT]

PD setups are garbage by default - see the ludicrous rear toe. Literally, take that toe off every car and they actually handle. No tuning racing is only good if the tune that is provided is good to begin with. With a better base (or hell even just the toe adjustment) we wouldn't need the FWD's to be super powerful OP on straights as they could actually turn. RWD wouldn't want to kill you at a turn.

FWD just does not belong together with AWD and RWD. Period.
AWD is a stretch that I might be able to accept, but there is a reason not a single series in racing except one make series like Mini Challenge and Trofeo Abarth 500.

 

[Junkman55]

Real race car drivers are not tuning their own cars. They have engineers for that who are incredibly skilled at eeking out every millisecond of performance from a car through its setup. The drivers know enough to know what impacts what and how the changes can make the car behave, but they usually are not the experts and aren’t making all these tweaks themselves.

Enabling tuning changes races from being about optimizing your individual driving skill to optimizing your ability to fully exploit the tuning capabilities available.

If tuning-enabled races are what you are after than there are private leagues that allow for that, and there are tons of incredibly fast drivers who participate in them.

Hey I am a real race car driver I took Friday and Saturday nights to tune my corvette to race on Sunday at my local drag strip . I tune my Go kart, change tires , Make adjustments and repair damage. Sometimes every night before race day on Sundays . At the age of 14 I had to bum rides to the track to race My go kart . I can tell you ENGINEERS DID NOT setup my race cars any time in my 15 to 20 years of racing.

 

[ScottPuss20]

FWD just does not belong together with AWD and RWD. Period.
AWD is a stretch that I might be able to accept, but there is a reason not a single series in racing except one make series like Mini Challenge and Trofeo Abarth 500.

The BTCC would like to disagree with you. They have FWD and RWD cars.

 

[KepleroGT]

The BTCC would like to disagree with you. They have FWD and RWD cars.

I didn't know about that, maybe I should've researched a bit more. I wonder how the FWD cars are doing
My point still stands though. They drive completely different from other drivetrains and you can't change the weight balance for some reason in this game.

 

[Granadier]

Hey I am a real race car driver I took Friday and Saturday nights to tune my corvette to race on Sunday at my local drag strip . I tune my Go kart, change tires , Make adjustments and repair damage. Sometimes every night before race day on Sundays . At the age of 14 I had to bum rides to the track to race My go kart . I can tell you ENGINEERS DID NOT setup my race cars any time in my 15 to 20 years of racing.

Sorry. “Real” was a poor choice of wording on my part. What I intended to refer to was factory and privateer drivers for racing teams. Which, while some have the skills and know-how to do all the tuning themselves, usually rely on engineers to handle that aspect of car setup.

 

[Junkman55]

When I was growing up in Long Island NY their were more tracks with in a 60 mile radius 3 Stock car tracks , 2 drag strips , 3 midgets tracks , then there was Brighamton a sanction sport car track , let not forget the Go Karts.

Most of my friends and family were spectators and more then a few were drivers. The best of all The Vanderbuit Cup Race drove through my town. There are parts of the original Motor Parkway being use today.

Racing has change where only a few lucky ones get to drive, and the rest of us look on . PD has put its finger on the wannabes that’s why we go out and buy wheels and pedals and cockpits. Just think of all the YouTube videos that are becoming drivers we look up too . I think Simulator racing has brought back the good times.