The recent Gran Turismo 7 update 1.46 has again thrown a spotlight onto one of the game’s least-loved mechanisms, which we think is long overdue an overhaul: Invitations.
It’s come to the fore again due to the new “Ferrari 12-Cylinder Engines” Extra Menu Book, which sets you a challenge of collecting specific three cars on this theme. They are the 365 GTB4 ’71 from the Legends dealer, the Testarossa ’91 from the Used Car lot, and the Ferrari LaFerrari from Brand Central.
However the LaFerrari is one of ten cars in the game, from seven European manufacturers, which you can only purchase if you happen to have an Invitation from the brand to do so.
It’s actually a neat idea, which mimics how some brands sell certain high-value cars to their real world customers. The implementation though is endlessly frustrating for players, and a glance at the GTPlanet forums reveals it’s among the most complained-about features in the game.
Invitations have two fundamental issues. How you get them is pretty much blind luck, and once you’ve got one you’ll find that they have a built-in expiry date of 30 days. This means you’ll often need to get grinding to drum up the money before losing the ability to buy the car — or cars, with Ferrari’s trio costing 7.7m combined — until the next time random chance smiles upon you.
You can only pick up an Invitation through a Roulette Ticket, earned from daily mileage or collected from Extra Menus or Weekly Challenge events. In order to be in with a shot, they need to be four- or five-star tickets, and with your daily mileage you have different odds of landing those tickets depending on what Collector Level you are.
Basically the higher your Collector Level, the more likely you are to get four to six-star tickets. On average, a maximum level (50) player will receive a four-star ticket just under 60% of the time, while a five-star ticket comes 5% of the time. The odds of each type of prize are also set, with 10% of four-stars and 8% of five-stars generating an Invitation.
For the mathematically inclined, that gives a Level 50 player a 6.2% chance of receiving a brand Invitation from completing their daily marathon every day. By the law of averages that adds up to just about 23 Invitations a year if they manage to hit 26.2 miles every day for a year.
There is a further sting in the tail to this though; it appears as though the seven brands represented in the Invitation system have an equal chance of being selected, with no known way to influence them. That does still output four Invitations for each brand each year if you’re compulsive about your daily play.
In practice it doesn’t entirely work like that, and regular players don’t put in that kind of time either. Coincidentally, we’ve been logging our tickets and rewards over the past three months, and the picture is a little different.
From a combined total of 62 tickets (and excluding the item-specific Six-Star tickets) over 90 days, we received two Invitations: Aston Martin and Citroen. That’s about half the on-paper odds at 3.2% and, less scientifically, that feels about the typical rate. We did get substantially more three-star tickets — which don’t award Invitations — than expected though.
Again, by the law of averages, it would extrapolate to eight Invitations a year from our usual play patterns. Someone who gets their daily mileage in for half the time would be down to six per year. This would mean less than one per brand per year on average.
As we regularly get comments from players who’ve been trying to get specific Invitations for almost two years (since they were all gifted to all players as compensation for a glitch), this rate too seems somewhere between optimistic and about right.
Not only is that frustrating, it’s not how real-world brand invitations work at all. Aston Martin doesn’t allocate purchase slots for its Valkyrie to 150 random people around the world through a lottery, but to specific individuals it selects through its own critera.
This, we think, is something PD could do with refocusing the Invitation system to leverage — as there’s plenty of actually fun ways to implement it, and even hang PSN Trophies off the achievements.
For example, Ferrari famously only invites customers who own or have owned previous examples of its halo supercars and track toys to buy the next one (and usually before it’s revealed to the public). In-game this could be replicated by locking the Ferrari Enzo until you own a GTO, F40, and F50 — and holding the LaFerrari away until you own an Enzo, and so on.
There’s other ways too. Ford fans may recall the requirements for a Ford GT build slot included previous fast Ford ownership, promise to drive it, and social media clout. Oddly, the GT isn’t one of GT7’s Invitation cars, but PD could do something similar by requiring players to share, say, at least five photos of Ford models with the #ford hashtag and earning 50 likes/reposts/comments on them before they could be invited to buy the GT.
Preventing players from selling the Invitational cars in the Used Car Valuation service for at least a month would also be a neat way to replicate real-life attempts to stop buyers “flipping” their in-demand toys. Not that you’ll turn a profit in GT, but it does show how things work in the real world…
Of course none of this may be possible in GT7, and in any case it almost certainly won’t be changing for the current title. Hopefully the idea will be revisited in future titles, as it has merit — just not so much in its present form.
Meanwhile PD could mitigate the immediate issue with a specific Invitation-only Ticket (like those for cars, parts, and engines) that players can collect through the Weekly Challenges, especially if Invitation cars are going to show up as Menu Book requirements like this…
