Hi everybody,
I don’t normally make a habit of making big criticisms towards a game or anything else that I spend my time doing. Often I think it becomes too adversarial instead of it being an honest discussion on the state of something. Also I don’t usually consider myself an expert on anything much, when it comes to IGP I have had a couple of accounts in the past on and off going back maybe going back five or six years but my current account I’ve been racing daily for around two years. So I hope I have enough experience in the game to feel that my experience is worth something. Also until now I have never really felt the need to say anything about changes good or bad because I feel the long term direction is good.
I have carefully considered over the last week what follows and I also apologise in advance for what I imagine at the time of writing will become a fairly lengthy essay for such a topic.
I guess the first place to start is that during my time playing IGP Manager the overall trend has been great, whilst there have been bumps in the road in general steady improvements have been made to the game and things that don’t work as intended being changed as time constraints allow. Whilst I wouldn't say I have agreed with everything that has been done I believe over all the direction of the game has been positive and I have derived a lot of enjoyment during races.
When I first read about the package of changes or the roadmap as it’s being called I was fairly optimistic. I thought much of what was being looked at could be improved, some things to do with the tracks definitely did need improving and some of the new features such as league rules sounded wicked. Things like that in particular sow the seeds for elaboration later on so that was all a big positive.
When it came to the racing things like DRS being mentioned I thought great because the entire time I have been playing ipg DRS has been something that for me just takes too much away from the strategy side of things. It’s long been the case that the fastest strategy on paper can lose to a slower strategy if enough cars pick the slower strategy and get what I call a DRS train going. As in F1 it’s my belief that DRS should be an aid to overtaking a slower car not a feature where every lap anything between 1-3 cars just keep leapfrogging each other for up to a second gain in laptime or even slightly more at some tracks. There should be no real race time advantage from a DRS train if it’s just a overtake aid primarily helping those on lighter fuel loads or softer tyres make their strategy work. So when I read that it was an area being looked at I assumed it was going to be toned down. In fact what has happened is it has seemingly been intentionally made worse.
Today's race at Canada in my league was kind of the final straw in terms of not saying anything, at times there were quad and I can’t stress this enough QUAD DRS overtakes lap after lap with just a massive train of cars. It didn’t matter what your fuel load was, it didn’t matter what condition your tyres were in, in that DRS train you just sat there for nearly 50 laps. There is no in race stratergy involved, there are no tactics involved to do with push levels or boost to get past people. None of that matters, you just sit lap after lap in this massive DRS train giving you all the time in the world to wonder why am I attending this race? I’ve basically attended the race to do nothing. Stint 3 was a particular highlight for this problem. Having gradually got more fed up in previous races I had a hunch that when in such a train you could seriously overfuel and the DRS along with the dirty air changes would ensure that despite being 3 or 4 laps heavier you would stay in the DRS train comfortably. So I added fuel, enough fuel to do 3 to 4 laps extra on the stint than most other teams and yes, the answer as I suspected was that I could stay in the DRS train with all the extra fuel without any problem. Not only did I never have to use any boost to keep up but I didn’t even have to push my tyres at all. And not only that but at times the train was so close together I actually put the push level lower than optimum because I could save the temps for pushing harder around the pit window.
I’m also sure the reduction of the dirty air effect is a big part of this problem, I didn’t really find a big problem with dirty air before. In normal running it was fine and actually helped make having fresher tyres or less fuel a small advantage on track. Which isn’t that supposed to be the case? In wet racing it was perhaps too strong, you would need to have a lot less fuel to get past just running normally. Although a tactical use of boost was of course there to get past a slower car and solve that problem. So maybe a minor tweak for wet races if possible would have been fine. But for sure the drastic changes have contributed to this DRS train boredom. Again today in Canada you had about 10 cars going into the last corner within about 3 seconds of each other for most of the race. That is just a bit absurd to me.
Another problem I have noticed is that cars that are clearly lighter can’t get away from the train when previously they would be able to do because of not carrying as much fuel even if the tyres are more worn. Now this has several causes, first is the wear curve being flattened. Again this is a decision that has come from the left field because the wear curve was what made harder tyres faster towards the end of a stint. This change seems to have taken that away from tyres that were underutilised before, making them worse. The supposed changes to the hards haven’t made them useful although we are in winter so they may become useful on a handful of tracks in the summer but they are still too slow to be a useful race tyre. The Supers are a little better in some ways but not in others, I’m not sure I prefer them over how they previously behaved as whilst they last longer they don’t seem to pull as much of a gap over soft runners. Although that could be because as you would carry more fuel on supers and less on softs than what used to be the case the gap just isn’t there anymore. I’m not sure they are quite differentiated enough anymore but that’s a minor thing. But it doesn’t help with regards to strategies being different enough to avoid the DRS train.
To me this is both rather boring because it takes away pretty much any slight variation in strategy but also isn’t how racing should be simulated. It also doesn’t match up to F1. And the game being called igp Manager I'm at a loss to understand why these changes have been made because the end result is that there are less strategy decisions to make as well as less tactical decisions to make during a race. I think that when you add in other changes to push levels, fuel and probably one or two I haven’t mentioned I would probably say it’s far too many changes to do at once. How all these changes interact with each other is important and so many of them seem to me to interact with each other to make the racing worse that it’s also hard to untangle. Some of them are definitely contradictory like changing how Supers and Hards perform only to flatten the wear curve. So knowing what to suggest or sort of where to go from here does not have an obvious answer because I think too many parameters were changed at once. Only thing I know for sure is that we had some pretty great racing before in our league and now we just have one big long DRS train where everybody sits for the entire race. Strategy variations don’t matter. That isn’t fun.
Perhaps what I would do is roll back all the changes to before the update with regards to racing, decide what we are trying to achieve and then change one thing at a time with that goal in mind. For me strategy variation is a massive part of the game and it’s also what seems to have motivated the recent update, the problem is the changes as a collective have done the exact opposite of what the intention must have been. As a slight aside it is interesting to me to read that the changes were apparently tested by experienced managers for a few weeks yet what I see as a huge problem with the DRS wasn’t raised seemingly by any off them. Yet as soon as I read the announcement on the exact changes before doing a single race I surmised that the changes would make DRS completely overpowered and would probably make races really dull. To me that seemed a fairly obvious conclusion to draw.
Now of course I’m completely open to the fact that for whatever reason DRS has been altered intentionally in this way. Of course I would be interested to hear any reasons for that because I think it’s taken so much away from the game. This aso isn’t an I quit this game is pants and the people in charge are numpties rant, that isn’t the case at all. As I've enjoyed the game in the past and things generally get fixed in the long term I feel sure they will again. But for myself I feel given from my point of view the drastic drop off in how fun the game is that has happened with the changes that have occurred. it’s important enough to me to start a discussion over it. I hope that whether other people feel the same or not that we can maybe work through the changes and have some ideas about what is or isn’t working and that this might help improve things going forward, because I don’t think I’m going to get a huge amount of enjoyment in the near future from attending races.
There is more to say on some of the changes but I am aware this is maybe already far too long so perhaps it's best to draw a line for now and discuss further issues if they become relavent to any discussion.
