Suggested

Transfer Market

The transfer market is totally ridiculous. This is a racing game, about setting the best strategy and managing your cars to league and sprint wins. Basic admin tasks like signing drivers, staff and sponsors should be the work of a moment, but we are forced into the ridiculous system where buying new drivers is a once per hour opportunity vs every single player on the game. The current system of atrophy has increased the requirement for buying drivers more often, but the opportunity to buy them has decreased massively. The prices are driven up a stupid amount by people who spam 10+ bids in a row to try and force other players to withdraw from the auction. Maybe the system would work if markets were limited to just your own league or your own level or if we never had atrophy, but as the game is, it does not work and is not fun at all. It is the single worst thing that has ever been done to iGP Manager and makes basic admin a more stressful and harder fight than actual racing. If your concern is making money from people being forced to buy tokens to compete with the stupid prices the game has now then fine, but I am going to quit the game unless this farce is resolved. If you care in the slightest about fair play then this is a totally indefensible system. It is an admin task, just like signing sponsors which takes no time at all. Let's fix it for drivers and staff too and go back to short auctions and end this rubbish so we can go racing and actually have fun on this game.

I quite agree. It is the biggest problem with the game now, the lack of refreshes make the market stagnant and there are whole hours where nothing worth buying comes up, meaning that you have to go back at the end of the next hour and prices are higher.

I find myself in the same boat as you regarding continuing with the game. It is a shame, because my league has been going eight years and collectively we have spent hundreds of pounds on the game - if not more. However, the current state of the market and the prices mean we cannot compete in auctions whilst waiting once a week; the number of tokens we get per month is twelve vs ninety-three for people who race every day. I don't think it is a viable solution to scale bids to number of races so I don't suggest that, I find the only sensible thing to be to return to the very good auction system we had previous - quick refreshes so admin tasks are not a chore and racing is the main focus.

I have been a vocal complainant about the market for a while, as have many others. It seems to be the most common complaint I read when I go onto the forum since the amendments to atrophy. Jack listened and (for my money) resolved atrophy, I hope he can do the same on this.

Yep. Seems very clear what the players want. I need another new driver but don't have time to sit and wait for the market to keep refreshing only to lose on the once an hour chance cos I'm not online at the right time. Should take me 5 mins at most but nope. The free moment I had just now 5 mins after the period ended 😂 now I've gotta try remember to come back in 50 mins 

i think imma just quit the game. its no fun like this. just lost one of my staff because i didnt get a red reminder to renew. second time i've had that. it is not worth anyones time or effort to wait until the end of an hour to try and outbid everyone in the game for something. stupid system designed by someone who doesnt have any concept of what its like to be an actual player on this game. i need to get a couple of new drivers and new staff. as you said, it should be quick like sponsors but realistically it will take me three hours at a minimum to be able to win three seprate transfers. whoever designed this system didnt have any concept of how to play the game. if it isnt put back to 4min or less transfer then yeah im done with this stupid game now.

finally managed to get new staff but cos i had to do 2 races with default 1 star staff my season and the next one are basically screwed now. getting your team ready to race now takes longer than actually doing a race itself, this is just dumb and i can't get why anyone wants to play like this. the change to the transfer market is the single WORST change ever made to this game. instead of being able to sort out losing staff because the contract wasnt renewed instantly, you have to wait until the end of an hour and then fight off the whole game and stupid prices. if you aren't free at the right time then you just lose out. i'm quitting, there is no point with trying to get 2 new drivers on this broken system.

Consigue comprar un piloto dos semanas despues de cuando quería. Ahora necesito más tiempo para recuperarme, no compensa el tardar tanto además de que suben muchísimo las apuestas teniendo tanto tiempo y solo 3 tokens por carrera, podrían subir los tokens y el dinero. Gana lo mismo el último de una liga que el ganador y el 10° me compensa no jugar y no perder tanto tiempo en hacer estrategias para poder ahorrar lo mismo

It simply is not worth it anymore. I am a regular reader and poster on the forums and the market is the most frequent complaint. The system before was absolutely fine - I know about two months ago Jack said that the system then made it easy to grab a bargain but doesn't work now with universal ratings. I disagree on both counts; firstly, it was not about grabbing a bargain. As mentioned repeatedly in this thread, signing drivers, staff and sponsors are a administrative task - they are something that should take very little time and allow you to go racing - which is the point of the game. The time and effort now required to simply get your team into a state where you can race is far too much - it takes more time than actually doing a league race, which anybody can see is the wrong way round. So, no, the four minute refresh was nothing to do with getting a bargain, it was about not having to invest a huge amount of time a resource into administrative tasks. I understand that, due to the complaints about pricing, that it seems like this - that is a bi-product of the change. The second point mentioned earlier was that the four minute refreshes would not work with universal ratings. It takes a few moments of thinking to realise that the opposite is true; previously, you bid only for a few drivers of your level against other managers of your level, now you are bidding for every driver available against every manager on the game. It is this which is partially responsible for pricing many managers out of the game, the supply has gone down drastically, but the potential purchasers has gone up by x25. Further to that, there is no unpredictibiltiy in the market anymore; everyone knows when the auctions end, so every auction will now be won by the most well-resourced managers who now know when to come online to actually win whatever is on the market.

Secondly, the need to replace drivers has risen. Atrophy and the associated training mechanics reduce the life-cycle of a driver. Previously you could enter a driver competitively up to the age of over 40 (like our F1 race winner yesterday), now with atrophy - and the absurdly low recovery rates meaning you cannot train back one stat a day on drivers over about 29 years of age, players are having to discard drivers in their early-30s rather than being able to keep them for longer. This then puts additional pressure on the market because even more players are looking to buy drivers even more frequently. Once again this will drive up the prices of drivers and favour the most well-resourced managers, as I race once per week, the tokens I get in a month are fifteen compared to 93 for other players. Why should I keep playing the game and enter this snake pit in a situation as it is?

So, no, it was never about grabbing a bargain. It was about being sensible and pragmatic with gameplay, making a simple task take a small amount of time so players can go racing and (additionally) not be bankrupted by trying to set up a team. The argument that the previous system would not work with universal ratings is patently false - it would clearly work far better now. The frustration with how ridiculous, clunky and unfair the current system is is driving players away from the game and - very sadly - this may include myself unless this is satisfactorally rectified. Having already spent a lot of money on the game - and knowing I must continue to do so for league boosts, why should I (and everyone in my league) also have to spent loads of money to have a chance at being able to sign new drivers.

Two months ago, when Jack laid out the reasons for the current period (which any reasonable person reading this can see are not valid reasons for the purpose of gameplay) he also said he was open to finding a middle ground. In addressing this I say: the previous system was absolutely fine and will work better now with universal ratings than before; the first point of call should be to revert to this. However, should this not be the case, the period needs to be very short anyway for two reasons - firstly, to allow managers who lose an auction to have another go straight away - this is an administrative task and should not take all day - the period should be short enough that someone who is busy most of the day can have the chance to come online for fifteen minutes and get at least two cracks at an auction. Secondly, this shorter period will stop the prices being driven up astromically and make the game fair across the board. Thirdly, the refresh period needs to be unpredictable; at the moment, every player knows that the auction will end on the hour which skews the odds in favour of players with more resources. The refresh period should be something which does not divide into 60 so there is no predictability as to the times the auctions end, yet they must be short enough to allow players to have a couple of goes at an auction in a short period of time so they can set up a team. The race is not signing drivers, it is doing league races. The current period is totally indefensible from a gameplay perspective and all the arguments put forth to defend it are weak. The other issues with the game have been resolved now, let's get this one fixed before there is a massive exodus of players.

You go and look on the market now and we're not halfway in through the hour and drivers are already at nearly 50 token bids. It's just ridiculous, what's the point in playing the game? I want to sort a simple admin task so my team can be more competitive but it either costs a billion or there's nothing on the market and you're just stuck in this loop waiting for days because people don't have time to sit around all day. Do the game makers not understand that people actually have stuff to do in their life and can't wait all day for a chance to buy stuff? This is a real-time live game, it isn't a game you sit down and play a couple hours of in the evening or whatever where the game works around your life, the stuff that's admin has got to take a moment to do so people can actually start to enjoy this crapheap again.

Players ask for changes, they get ignored. Then we get these massive updates which no one wanted, asked for nor cared for when introduced which make the game worse and change stuff no one complained about. The activity level I'm experiencing compared to before the massive update in December is down, and compared to 3-4 years ago it is virtually dead. If the game makers want to keep making changes no one asked for and then ignore the things they want, especially a reasonable, simple and easy to introduce one like this which is popular and makes the game more playable for everyone, then it's not going to be long before this whole game dies. 

I agree that there needs to be one ending every four or five minutes so that in the reasonable period of being online a player can have a few chances, I also agree with the pool needing weeding - but if fifteen auctions are running simultaneously that may mean that the pool gets even worse. Usually with twelve minutes to go in auctions, as you mentioned, the bids are somewhat reasonable, it is only once you get to the final ten seconds that it ramps up to the point of being ridiculous.

The target price being 70 to 90 tokens is just far too much. It is fine for those who are daily racing because you make that in a month, as someone who races once per week that would take me half a year - it is not possible to compete against people who race every day, and I think that adjusting bids based on how often you race is also a silly idea. Youth academy drivers are a luxury and should cost much more than anything from the market which has a much shorter lifespan and much higher salary. Anything more than about 40 on the market is getting on for too much. As I have said, racing once per week makes it financially unviable and I am likely to close my league after eight years very shortly because of the current dreadful situation.

I cannot stress how much I strongly disagree with the suggestion that it is not a basic administrative task. This is not a real racing league, the drivers in iGP are nameless, interchangeable entities. To hire one absolutely should be the work of a moment and should not be as hard as actually managing a race. It adds an extra layer of rubbish to cut through getting in the way of playing the game and makes it a far more frustrating experience. They are not pillars of performance at all, because the drivers you are buying are not known to you at all; it is just a shot in the dark based what is available on the market. I would agree that they are pillars of performance if driver transfers worked on the basis of being able to approach managers and make offers for their drivers, or if there was an internal league-only market, whereby a manager could see that a driver was a reigning champion or multiple-winner and push very hard to sign them to their team. In this way, it would be more like a real motorsport manager game where you are signing drivers based on their reputation and results inside your series, rather than a random person who happens to be up for auction. In this scenario, bidding against fellow managers in your league for a top driver or negotiating hard with another manager for a top driver would absolutely make a hard graft acceptable for signing a driver, but in the current situation it is not.

Considering everything, unless a league-only or approach-based market is implemented, then you have to come back to two things: needing an auction ending every four or five minutes, and everything happening in the final ten seconds. As is very clear, the need is for a return to the previous market system. No one complained about this, and it worked extremely well. Now we have a situation where no one is happy and it is the most frequent complaint from players. You do not have to be a genius to know what to do to make the players - who ultimately the game relies upon to exist - happy.