Suggested

driver's level need to be capped? what if it wasn't? NEW IDEA

I've wanted to read through this thread for several days but it was always going to be a big commitment, finally got there now. It's very difficult to handle balancing challenges like this while at the same time keeping everyone happy.

In the short-term I can easily implement changes like at 1 level above the manager progress is 3% per session, then 2% when 2 levels above, and 1% beyond that. Perhaps this would go some way to levelling the playing field, a bit like when I raised the driver/staff level cap by a whole digit. Maybe this will give us some more time to hammer out ideas and discuss things.

The obvious looming question over all of this is should drivers be level-capped at all? But then you get an inconsistency in the game, where some things are level-capped and others aren't. We want things to remain consistent.

There is another way, going completely outside of the box of where everyone is thinking currently. It would keep things consistent and work in a similar way to staff, where their relative rating matters more than their absolute rating. What if the drivers star rating and level relative to the manager became the most important factor in the simulation of their driving ability, as opposed to the numbers themselves. Taking Dan's example, if you were a level 12 manager in Elite but had 5-star drivers and they have 12 on all their attributes, they effectively perform the same as a level 20 manager hiring a level 20 driver. My only concern about this concept is how abstract and confusing it might be if we keep using absolute level numbers.

So, there is something (an idea I've also seen in another game) that might tie this all together. What if instead of absolute levels, all levels in the game were relative percentages? Every attribute on the driver would become a %, relative to the manager's level, as opposed to a rigid number. So, if you are level 12 and hire a 12 talent driver, that would read as 100% talent in the GUI, and if you hire a level 6 talent driver, that's a 50% talent driver, and so on.

As has been pointed out already, higher level managers would still maintain other perks and advantages, such as getting more design points every race, and higher level Boost / DRS. These advantages could remain, to avoid handicapping the higher level managers who have frankly earned some perks due to their commitment to iGP. There definitely needs to be an advantage to being higher level, just not an insurmountable one, skill should always be a factor.

Also, another reason I like that idea is that it would address another matter which I wasn't looking forward to handling - promotion and relegation balancing. Under the current system a level 20 driver could be taken to Pro by a relegating Elite manager, which is obviously unfair. Under a relative rating system, that driver would only be as powerful as the ones the Pro managers could hire as well, keeping things fair.

Without such a system, it might be necessary for drivers to leave a team during relegation to keep the game balanced. While that might be more realistic (Hamilton won't move back to GP2, for example) it separates managers and their drivers. We all know how attached we become to our drivers!

Staff ratings would also be updated to use a relative rather than absolute rating system, keeping everything consistent across the board.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. It might even make more sense for me to create a new thread on it.

I've just implemented this.

Interesting feedback. I thought I'd throw the levels as a relative percentage idea out there since I'd seen it done in another game to handle the same scenario.

There still doesn't seem to be a strong consensus on what the best idea is, though. As it stands I'm just going to leave it at the training change and give that a few weeks to see if more issues crop up.

I am still concerned about relegation bringing overpowered teams down to lower tiers, though. That is something which might push this to be addressed sooner rather than later. My original solution for this was to simply have them leave the team and complain that they didn't want to race in Pro for example, if they relegated from Elite, and were well above the Pro level cap. But my hesitation about implementing such a feature is that it would separate managers from drivers who maybe they have invested a lot in, which is never nice.