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Research impacts now scale with manager level

To help low level teams remain competitive within leagues with high level teams, the research system was introduced. It has since been refined through several iterations to strike the best possible balance for all teams and ensure fairness.

This latest update gives lower level teams a slightly larger research impact than higher level teams. As higher level teams can buy higher level facilities, drivers, boost and DRS, this is offset by the advantages of having higher levels.

The values can be tweaked from here to any degree, to strike the perfect balance. For those who want to sink their teeth into the numbers, I can reveal that a level 1 team can receive up to 40% of the difference in any given area of design whereas a level 20 team will receive 20%. This is a fairly conservative starting value because we are mostly recieving praise about the system as it is, so it is clearly working quite well on the whole.

That doesn't just sound excessive, it sounds like a bug. It looks pretty much isolated to you going through the logs, interesting...

I've applied a patch that should address this, it seems something in a calculation needed to be wrapped in brackets because it was forcing a formula to be calculated in an undesired order. E.g. X - Y / Z is now (X-Y)/Z. This should resolve the cause of the problem hopefully.

Regarding those who gained excessive amounts of points from research, I will probably run a script to roll back the design gains made in this race and re-award the design points for the race so you can re-assign them. This might not happen until tomorrow though, as I've probably run out of time for tonight.

It turns out the two leagues which reported issues will be running again shortly. I've run out of time to roll back the designs as I had planned to do for you guys. So instead, I'll leave it as it is, and if you feel it is causing problems let me know. If I were to roll them back now (10 minutes before the race) I could see more complaints than if I just leave it.

The system should restore the balance within your leagues soon anyway, but as I said just get in touch if it's not better after a couple of races.

Lower level managers get better effects from research, that's what was changed in this update. But they also have to maintain 5 stars just like everyone else for the full effect. At lower levels you are levelling up very quickly and need to change staff often, so it is more work to earn those extra points too. It's not intended to give anyone more or less design points than anyone else, but to keep things balanced with good management.

The idea is that it will compensate for having lower level drivers and HQ somewhat, as higher level managers have advantages in all of those areas, with more design points, boost, DRS, and driver skills by default.

Well, a lot of the progress in your current season would've been under the last version of the system. The gains are less now for high level teams, meaning this will be tougher next season. We can't stop people from maxing out attributes when you can get up to 20 points per race, anyway. If you threw everything at one attribute a team will always be able to max it out.

As long as teams don't get maximum in all areas then I don't mind that so much. It's something we can tweak in response to whatever happens.

There was 1 day where there was a bug and some people got tonnes of points, it was quickly patched though. Did that hit your league?

It's obvious you'll be maxed out in your league soon enough, so we'll need to work on balancing for the top level teams. One solution would be lower starting levels at the beginning of a season. Another would be to scale back research impacts further for top level teams. Currently the maximum you can obtain is 25% of the difference as a level 20 team, maybe that could be scaled back to 10%.

There are no end of season rewards. That's a myth, which I've seen repeated in a few threads.

I just changed the way research is applied to reduce the overall impact at all levels. The gains will become very fine as you near level 20, making the design HQ more important. Hopefully this will make it take a little longer to reach 100.

I see the level 15 manager has really good drivers with 19-20 stats across the board. It is intended that a level 15 can compete with a level 20 and it seems to be working well. I certainly don't think he's winning *because* he's level 15 or becaue of end of season rewards (since they don't exist). His level can only be a handicap when you factor in boost, DRS etc.