With the 2025 Gran Turismo World Series set to get underway with an Exhibition Season soon, Polyphony Digital has announced a raft of changes to Sport Mode.
In total there’s three relatively small changes but each could have rather a large effect, with two likely to alter Sport Mode generally rather than just the World Series.
Arguably the most significant in terms of World Series participation is the shift in nation classification in North America. This change will see Mexico moved from the Central and South America region, where it’s the northernmost outpost, and into the North America region to match its normal geographical classification.
The only effects from this will come in Nations Cup, where players from Mexico will now compete within the North American region races hosted on the servers in — last we checked — Virginia rather than the CSA servers.
It will also change the established order for qualification to live events, which have exclusively been the preserve of players from Canada and the USA until now, and give players from Mexico an increased chance of qualifying. In fact the only Mexican player we can recall having ever qualified for a Nations Cup event was Eduardo Trevino, at the 2018 Americas final in Las Vegas…
Two other changes will affect all players, by way of changing some of the details behind how Driver Rating (DR) is accumulated.
Firstly, the DR cap is being raised once again. This would be the second time since Gran Turismo Sport launched, bringing Sport Mode and Driver Rating into our lives, that the upper limit on DR score has risen.
Originally the cap was 75,000pt, but this increased to 100,000pt in April 2020. What the new limit will be hasn’t been shared — indeed PD doesn’t share precise DR values anywhere any more — so this is one we’ll have to discover when it’s implemented in the upcoming January 2025 update.
This could potentially have further consequences when it comes to how DR classes are divided (although it didn’t last time round) and the Leagues used to divide the player pool in World Series events. Currently the top A+ rank is applied to players whose DR is anywhere above 50,000pt, or the entire top half of the range.
Finally, and probably the deepest change of all, is a recalculation of how DR changes in World Series races, which will now see much larger swings.
The formula for DR changes has been pretty well known since Gran Turismo Sport. It’s effectively an Elo system, which sees DR given to players from the players they beat according to the difference between their DR at the start of the race. That results in no net change in DR across the whole lobby.
From the wording of the announcement, this looks like it will remain the case but with a multiplier applied so that there’s more points available — and at risk — in the World Series events than in the Daily Races, but again this will be something we’ll need to keep an eye on once it comes into play.
With the next Exhibition Season getting underway in just under a week’s time, we’ll learn more about all of these changes in pretty short order. Keep an eye on our forums and the dedicated GTWS threads for more!
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