Suggested

Transfer Market

The transfer market time being increased is a big negative for most managers. If you were short on time you could log in and have a good chance of winning a new pilot on and if you lose then you could have another chance in 4 minute. Now you have to be lucky enough to be active at the right time or have so much free time you are on iGP all day. If I go on at 10 minute past the hour to bid, I have to come back at the end of the hour to make sure I win. This is not fair to people who have jobs or little free time and can not do this.

The thing that worked best straight away with the last update was the transfers, but now it is just gearing the game towards players with so much extra time. It is a management game, and playing races more should give you an advantage over others. The admin stuff should not need to much time and commitment to be competitive. It is forcing players out of the game.

From reading about the new updates I understand that Jack wants to have a balance between casual players and hardcore players. The new league options clearly are for hardcore players, but the default things for every player should be aimed at the casual players. The transfer market lasting so long really goes against this. Could this please be changed back if the vote indicates people want it to be?

Thanks

It is very clear managers prefer the old system. There were no complaints about it before because it was one of the few areas of the game that worked really well. Now it is changed for no reason. There were whole hours yesterday when there was not a single 40 talent/100% talent driver on the market, which would not happen with a quicker refresh time. People are unhappy with many things in the game, mostly atrophy, but things which are fine and have no complaints about them are changed without asking managers and made worse. It was not broken, no one was asking for the change, no warning was given of the change, it has made things worse in the game. To keep managers playing and interested they need to have faith in the game and those behind it. It makes no sense that this was changed, so restore that faith and revert it.

Personally can't think of anything worse than a 24 hour transfer period. It would massively slow the game down and lead to ridiculous prices. At an hour it is already about 8 tokens+ per auction, and that is mostly the people lucky enough/with the free time to be active at the end of the hour screwing over other people who are around earlier in the hour. The previous quick system was one of the best things about the game - after a very long time of the market not working it seemed to finally have been sorted and now it has been totally messed up again.

My memory of the transfer system back in 2018 was a version of this; auction period lasted 3 hours, with a 1 token bid option or a 9 token buy now option. If someone placed a bid then the buy now option was unavailable to everyone. This kind of worked though was deemed to be too slow so the refresh period went from 3 hours to 4 minutes.


The key difference was that you were only competing against players the same level as you, the market was done by driver level as iGP wasn't unified back then. As such the 10 token buy now was reasonable as no auction was likely to go above that. Now you are competing against every player in the game so you are getting near 10 tolens in 1 hour.

The buy now option was removed about 1 year ago to try and stop people moving resources between accounts, so I think it is unlikely to come back. Also, if it came back then it would advantage people at the start of the hour rather than the end, though would be fairer than how it is now - but it might result in all the good drivers being picked up in the first 5 minutes of the auction and then 55 minutes of stagnant market. Personally I could get behind a buy now option at 10-15 tokens being brought back in the style of old auctions.

Overall, I think the fairest thing and way to keep the game moving is the 4 minute refresh period. It has the fewest flaws of all the transfer markets I've played with on this game.

Multiplying the length of the window by 24 is not a balance at all. It certainly doesn't remove the last online advantage either. Any window which is longer than someone might reasonably be online for 5-10 mins is going to have that advantage.

As for a 50 token buy now, that is an astronomical price to pay for anything in the game. It's nearly 20 days of racing everyday, and given in 1 hour the token prices are getting up to about 10, in 24 hours it would be ridiculous. There would be no value because the bid would get so high. It is a terrible idea and would be a massively regressive step in the game.

I was vehemently against the removal of buy now when it happened a year ago, and given the reasons, I doubt we will get it back. At 50 tokens it wouldn't be worth having anyway. For the current 1 hour period, a 15-20 token buy now would be fair as around double the price of the usual auction, but the most sensible move and the fairest is to return to what worked very well until it was changed without good reason last week.

As is, the whole marketplace is deadly stupid and doesn't make any sense for various reasons.

First: Does it offer useful items? Why 50% of staff has one star? Who is so stupid to buy a one-star driver or td? I would be happy to hear the rationale behind this choice. Solution: Show only relevant staff.

Second: Why offers are public? Who said that I can win an auction with a single token offer put when countdown was close to finish visible to anyone? Solution: offers are secret and when auction is over, every player involved will receive an ingame mail showing all players and their related offers sorted by largest offer. That's what an auction should be.

Third: Is it really a problem the duration if it doesn't matter applying 1 and 2? It can even last 6 hours.

Fourth: Do you think Jack will change the marketplace? He promised to take a look at it and meanwhile 4 years are gone...

Right now there is just a single max. talent driver on the market for an auction that lasts for an hour. How is this an improvement on constant, quick refreshes?

Is this an AI response? Marco is like one of the best and most complete managers I think I’ve seen in the game!


The transfer market has nothing to do with manager skill, and all to do with having the patience and resources to sit around most of the day doing the mundane tasks that Jack for some reason wants to keep changing.

Reasonable complaints…

Child?

I think you got the achievement. Now stop bringing noise in a serious discussion.

Please, stop arguing among ourselves. Everyone has their own preferences and they must be respected! Digital Druid, you can't call everyone who thinks differently from you crybabies and lazy. Enough is enough. No one is insulting you here. Did you say your piece "1h + buy now"? Okay, stop. Most people (including managers who have been playing this game since it was born) think differently and prefer the 4 minutes like it was before? Okay, stop. Jack will make his decisions later.

I think to be an evolution it has to be a fix for something that didn't work before; the auction system before worked, and the change is a regressive step to what it was like quite a while ago. Therefore, I can't consider it evolving the game.

I was watching the transfer market pretty closesly between 6pm and 7pm GMT, and there was a lot of activity and a good number of drivers being sold. What I couldn't help but notice was that the people who won a lot of the auctions turned up within the final 10 minutes of the hour, whereas people who had placed bids earlier on were simply inactive and lost out even if they had bid first. There was a single account I noticed that was consistently active through the hour in bidding as soon as they dropped away from the top - but requiring that level of dedication to get a driver is excessive in what is a game that should primarily be about developing the best car and turning up to live manage a race, executing it with the best strategy, and hopefully winning. Getting a driver off the market should be a simple formality, and if you lose you shouldn't have to wait another hour to try and win again.

I will have a try to have a look again this evening to see if the same thing happens again, but based on my observations thus far today - and on previous days - this system is really unfair and works way worse than before.

For a matter of fairness it would be interesting to have a "lock-off" system where if a driver only has one bid, the auction ends after half an hour instead, or if it has two bids then after half an hour only those two bidders can bid in the next half hour, and if it has 3+ then it gets to 50 minutes and then locks off bids from anyone yet to bid. It would require managers to have an active interest in the driver rather than just rolling up with 3 minutes to go and bidding up the price continually.

As I have said, I favour the previous auction house system, but am trying to provide as many alternative suggestions in case they garner some greater popularity than what worked perfectly before.

EDIT: Having watched the situation on auction for another couple of hours it is just the same thing; a few people bid early, then get usurpsed in the last 10 minutes by guys who hadn't bid until then. There is one poor guy who clearly only has 2 tokens because he is bidding 1 token on 2 different drivers at the start of every hour and missing out.

It's totally crazy to have to sit around for an hour of your life to just win 1 driver. To dedicate so much time to a bit of the game which is nothing to do with management is crazy. The transfer system had problems before, but Jack had made it perfect with 4 minute refreshes and no-buy now option to stop farmers. It's crazy what has been done now and really stupid to need to spend so much time on something like this. Clearly the players don't like it and want it fixed to how it was. Will Jack listen to the people who support his game? I hope so, because now it's crazy.

I am happy to see so much activity and support on this when I am not around.

To me it is clear what the players want. That is for things not to be changed for no reason when they work. Things worked before and people were happy and not complaining. Developers listening to feedback has become a lot better, so I am hopeful this will be fixed. At the moment it is totally broken, takes up too much time and you get "bosses" with loads of resources coming in at the last moment. This needs to be the next fix on the list.

The fact that it is just the last minute before the hour that's important is a pretty good indication as to why this long auction system doesn't work. There is no point in making it that long if such a fraction of the time is actually relevant. Having to set an alarm to come back is also problematic and sometimes just not possible if you are actually busy. 

Starting an hour long auction every five minutes does mean that there is always one ending - but I don't see how this actually works in practice. Does the auction area just have a list of 10 or so auctions with "ending in: 5 mins, ending in: 10 mins"? And once again, if they start every five minutes and you only get to see the final five minutes, this is the same as having five minute auctions. And, as you said, if the most interesting one has just started then you have to wait around or set an alarm to come back in an hour.

The ability to set up an auto-bid seems nice, but if you went on and bid then the auto-bid just immediately beat your bid it would just ramp up prices which are already ridiculous and allow accounts with massive resources to just set a 200 token limit at the start of an hour and walk away knowing they would win the bid - it is anti-competition.

I agree on the buy now/farming point. The accounts doing it could easily afford a 50 token buy now. There's a reason it was removed.

I don't know if anyone has ever been to an actual auction, but they aren't long drawn out affairs like this. It is a quick process where a lot is brought in and bidding starts, and continues until no one wants to top the leading bid for a period of about 20 seconds. They are fast paced and don't rely on people waiting around for an hour only for a final minute to be relevant.

By far the best auction system is quick fire refreshes and it is evident that players want that. There will always be competition because the system is now game-wide and not limited to level, it just won't be favouring those with excessive time and resources on their hands who can make sure they are there at the end of the hour.

The very fact that you stated "it's just the last minute before the hour that's important" is a pretty clear indication that the auctions should be quick rolling processes, not long and drawn out. If only 1 minute is important, why waste an hour? And then you have to waste another hour when you lose to someone with more free time and more money and tokens on their hands.

Jack has been extremely good recently at taking manager's feedback onboard regarding the implementation of atrophy; league boosting; and has held votes on changes to sprint races, push levels, DRS, pit crew impact. This is something that was changed without consultation and it is evident that the managers prefer what came before. If he wants to put it to a second official poll like he did with everything else then I would support that, but the change was definitely not what players want.

I take your point that real auctions have that announcing and display period, but that is because the stuff being sold is usually highly rare or desireable; not like iGP where drivers are just drivers. You don't need an announcing and display phase, just the fast bidding.

I think there are four questions to ask here:

1. Did the system before work well? Yes. It was fast paced, the market was well populated and you had an equal chance of doing well regardless of level, resources or availability to spend time on the game. If there was nothing on good on the market you could wait a few minutes for it to refresh. Now there are whole hours of this - it's like being back with the really broken 3 hour auction system of several years ago - though not quite as bad.

2. Was anyone complaining about the system? No. There are always players who care a lot raising issues on the forum, but none of the main or popular complaints in the last 3-6 months were about the transfer market. It worked about people were happy.

3. Do managers prefer the new system? No. Often things can be changed without managers complaining, and they prefer the result. This is clearly not one of them.

4. Is the new system better or fairer? No. It screws over anyone who isn't active at the end of the hour, and massively advantages better resourced account because all the prices are being driven up from a reasonable 4 or 5 tokens to usually 10-15, though I have seen above 30 on the new system.

I cannot see any rationality for this change when it comes to the enjoyment or playability of the game. Is there a middle ground of ten minute refreshes or thirty minute refreshes? Possibly. But this new system is not one that managers like or are happy with, and the previous one was such. Why make a change to bring yourself under fire and make the game worse?