Driver pool

A couple of ideas:

* Is there any way the driver pool can be diversified a bit? Last I checked, there are eleventy billion drivers (trust me, I counted), and it seems like they all share the same 20 names. I mean, Mrs. Stanculescu might be promiscuous, but I can't imagine that she's responsible for birthing 480 Romanian F1 drivers.

* I'd like to see the process of choosing and employing drivers a bit more open to chance. Maybe hide a few of the driver attributes from view ("fog of war" style) and increase the penalty for quickly hiring and firing drivers/crew. Perhaps a good way to do this is to create a "Team Chemistry" meter which fluctuates according to team results; a higher chemistry level increases the chance of good results, and the value builds the longer you stick with your crew and drivers. That way, you don't go from level to level constantly firing drivers and hiring the next highest-talent candidate, because even an 8-talent driver might do well with your team because he contributes to overall chemistry better than a 15-talent driver who is a diva.

I know that customizing your driver's name is a perk of the rewards system, but I think the game would be more immersive if you end up anthropomorphizing the drivers than if you simply rename them "Ayrton Senna" or "Norm S. Cox-Zucker" or whatever.

I don't really like the idea of talent being left to chance, and I think it would be a little hard to implement a new system which determines how fast a driver is. However if they started ditching some of the retired drivers and so on, and replacing them with higher talent drivers again, this would help level out the playing field. It sure is getting hard to find young drivers with high talent - There used to be young 18 talents as low as level 8 (or was it even level 7?) as far as I remember, now it's damn near impossible to find 17 talents, and 16 talents are running out fast too. Any new player starting out now will seriously struggle to find a good driver when they get higher in the levels.

Since we're on the subject of drivers, sure would be nice to get a decent set of filters. Age and nation isn't enough IMO. For starters, how about being able to filter to drivers of a certain level? I'm nearly Level 6 as a manager. I personally don't care about any driver who's below Level 4. Seeing low-level drivers only serves to make it more difficult and annoying to find a driver I would actually like, especially with there being over 11,000 drivers that are Level 5 or below. By all means, leave the option to see them all, but if I only want to shop drivers that are Level 5 I should be able to filter for that.

You can search drivers by level? Granted you can't do it with the skills view open, but you can do it without.

I like the ideas that are being suggested for improving the drivers etc.
This is an area that will be developed and improved in the future so any and all discussion is welcome.

Unlike comments on some of the other threads the devs do take note of what is being said.

It's not so much a matter of designing a NEW system - just modifying the current one so that it's not BLATANTLY obvious what you're getting. Right now, hiring drivers is a purely mechanical plug-in-the-puzzle-piece exercise. There's a total lack of intangibles with the current drivers; part of that, obviously, is because the game is still in a formative stage.

I play EHM 2007 quite a bit and one of the things I love about that game, as old and fault-ridden as it still is, is that I can take a flyer on a player who has good mental characteristics but not great offensive/defensive levels, and many times they end up producing more for my team than a "superman" free agent. The OOTP series has taken that a step further with its players having an effect on their popularity based on their performance. Adding a general team chemistry variable and making the drivers and crew staff affect it is in the same vein.

The biggest advantage of doing something like this is making it so new gamers can find success more quickly and hopefully making it so immersive that they stick around longer than many of the current new customers have. It's disheartening to me, even though I've fought my way up to the championship lead in a very difficult league, that my success is largely because I've ticked off the necessary boxes and less about my actual skill as a manager.

i wouldnt mind a football manager style system where as you say a few stats are hid then you would have to scout the driver which would take a day or 1 race, what i would prefer though is to be able to search through drivers by having certain attributes insted of having to trawl through a load of drivers who have 1 or two decent attributes but the rest are poor 

Much of this has already been suggested.

id like to see more overlapping paths,and certainly confidence replacing one of the older ones with a much larger affect rate,also talent needs looking at,its very vague and theres very little progression with it,certainly from rookie stage ,where in real life talent is nurtured and built upon in the rookie stage[mclaren with hamilton is a classic example of this]sure not everyone will make a lvl 20 but then isnt that part of the game finding out yourself,rather than just up 2 lvls by another pair of drivers with better talent and start again in 2 more lvls ,
going back confidence i could see that affecting most of the primary stats by at least a point or 2 either way,in rl it affects on the + teamwork,focus,morale ,all the racing stats and would allow you to attack with less aggression which in turn should increase corner speed braking and wear, and the -neg affecting the same stats ,anyways just some thoughts,hopefully we get to see the new update soon ,good luck

Football Manager system is what I am asking for Jack to develop, it makes more sense than a spreadsheet of names and numbers, especially such things as Fifa's Ultimate Team, where you can use such a design to customize your pit crew, assign specific speed or result stats to designing team, and cost and effiency from your production crew and so on. I'm writing up a highly detailed plan for Jack to read up on for future installments into the game.