Official

An open letter to the community

Is this a response to my forum post and the blog post?

Finally Jack said something which is very touching~ Yup, the devs & mods should more focus on listening new suggestions & approve some of the logically suggestions as the future plan (This's why we feel our stories didn't listen by devs and mods and always get ignored when posting a new suggestion) instead of fixing bugs.

Nothing perfect, but you guys sure are close. Game is beautifully balanced. Keep up the great work.

Is the new reputation calculation system based on our finished race time compared with other managers in other league, the performance in our current level, or somehow else?

I gotta say, Jack I agree with everything you say
except the patching topic, there’s a middle term like add an update that fixes the problem, there’s a post I did some time ago to add a “pit team staff” (I know the name isn’t good, but that’s easily fixable) a staff that does an impact on 
your pit times. I got a lot of support from the community, but it didn’t reach the devs hears. Of course that’s more complicate but it fixes both your problems. But keep up! And make IGP manager great again!

Ok, I mean community managers.

Hi Jack,
I have been playing since 2017, and as you said well it was a roller coaster ride. Unfortunately, the line of wanting to add new things rather than solving previous problems has led to an accumulation of both old and new bugs, without the resolution of them.
Of course I would have expected, and perhaps also the community, the resolution of the old bugs that still persist, such as the championship filters, which should have absolute priority, considering that they are the first tool that a new player uses, and that inserts it in the world of igp ... but you are talking now of "no priority", and you continue to insert new things, such as the hall of fame, which is not a useless update, but surely could wait ...
Without priority in the things to do the organization fails, and without that, chaos is created, honestly the game has currently become quite annoying in competitive leagues.
Your words and your actions on modifying the game make me think that you have decided to abandon this "platform" to create a new one from scratch, and rather than "patching old bugs", you are inserting new things to be tested ... in practice you are using us as a tester ... a little more transparency would probably help us understand.
Thanks for your attention and good continuation for the work that needs to be done.

Keep up the good work guys ♥️

Yes, I know that. I do know your making an effort but I think some priorities are bad. Like per example. What does the community want more a new hall of fame system or do they want 
another thing like a new pit system, some new tracks or any other thing. Let’s ask them. And another thing I ( but I think other people think this to) prefer you to take your time and do a great update with no bugs, than a bunch of update with a lot of bugs in one month

I had to address it as "another useless update" to make you actually talk and interact with comments and feedbacks. But I'm glad you're here now.
The reason why I said this update was useless (maybe I should have called it "unnecessary" instead) is that numeric reputation in this game counts absolutely nothing in my eyes due to its earning/losing reputation system, which doesn't actually give merit to the best players but depends on the leagues average reputation. I can get to 10K reputation even if I never win a race, if I race in the correct league. And I can lose it or never gain if I race in thrle wrong league even if I win many races and championships. So there's a basic problem in my opinion. This update surely is helpful to give some more motivation to the ones who actually care. But I don't. And many other people don't. And I'm sure, just as many people have found an easy way to get to 10K reputation very quickly in the past, other players will find a way to exploit the new system to get super reputation numbers and win prizes even if they don't even actually play against other managers (private leagues plenty of personal accounts). The new Hall of Fame won't fix the actual reputation system problems. And that's why I think it's an useless update and numeric reputation in this game is highly overrated, to say the least. 

You also said something about pit stops, talked about a patch that will be live today. I'll hardly find out what is it about cause I'm currently not playing, I'm just having a few races now and then with junion teams in lower tiers. But I'll eventually find out reading feedbacks from other people. Many players complained about pit stop queues as the main problem about pit stops. I don't know how are you gonna sort this out but that wasn't the problem in my opinion. Cause it often happens to gain or lose several tenths or even a couple seconds during pit stops even if there's no queue. Just a few hours ago I watched a video showing only two cars pitting at the same time with only a few tenths gap between them, no traffic, no queues. When the two cars left the pit lane and got back on track there was a 3 seconds gap between them. What happened there since you said all of us currently have the same pit crew level in the game? I would like to know.

I don't know if you remember, but once I made a suggestion about tyres, back in 2018, a few weeks before the infamous "tyre update". You also replied to that topic and you said that was a great suggestion and you were gonna test it with your team of devs. I don't know if you actually did some tests about that, but you completely ignored it at the end and only reworked tyre performances (huge mistake in my opinion), apart from the "scaling tyre wear on race duration" thing. I HATED that update. And I stopped playing after that. I only randomly came back now and then cause I always loved the game and I miss it when I take long breaks. But the "tyre update" only made it easy for everyone, in my opinion. Back in 2017, it was HARD and FUN trying to master the tyres management. I LOVED it. And it wasn't true Hard tyres were faster than softer tyres, they have NEVER been. The only problem was the huge and umotivated gap in % between different tyres wear, which made hared tyres be more efficient than softer tyres after just a few laps. Tyre performances were way more balanced before the "tyre update" in my opinion. You only completely reworked their performances amd made them very easy to manage for everyone, also making the Hard tyre completely useless. Even in races with very high air temperature Hard tyres are completely useless. You can only have fun using with them in easy leagues against unexperienced players, just for the fun of playing with push levels running Hard tyres (FUN!). And that's a shame.
I don't know if you actually remember what my suggestion was about but it was a very easy one here it is:
Just reduce the huge gap in % of wear between the different tyres. Nothing else. And I made examples.
In my opinion, tyre wear and performance between different componds should be way closer to each other. But it would be useless now with the new tyres performance after tyre update, cause people would only pick SS and S tyres and nothing else, if they had an ever lower tyre wear now. And that's why I say tyre performances were way more balanced before the tyre update. If you didn't touch their performance but only reduced the difference between their % of wear, we would have now have a mega fun game to PLAY (and not just to watch for most of the live race), in which people would have had to learn and master the push levels system to compete with the best players and there would be an enormous number of different strategies to pick from.
This is my opinion about tyres and I STRONGLY believe in it.

I think you're already aware of the enormous number of bugs and things to fi, that are currently in the game. But here's a reminder, just in case:

- Flags and VSC.
Apart from being completely useless in this kind of game (a 100% strategy game and NOT a live racing game), there really are several problems with this. Green flag is never a green flag for everyone but depends on where you are on the track. Kers and DRS systems are unavailable even with green flag if you don't pass the finish line first and this create different conditions, opportunities and advantages/disadvantages for players, depending on where they are on the track.
Some backmarkers and lapped cars are even slower than the VSC speed limit and this is a big problem, cause here's what happens very often: if you had a few seconds gap ahead of the car behind but you find yourself behind a lapped car under VSC condition, you will go even slower that the VSC speed limit cause you can't overtake the lapped car and you now have your direct opponent right behind you. And if you were just a few tenths behind the car ahead but there's a lapped car in between in the exact moment VSC shows up, the car ahead pulls away and you stay behind the lapped car losing several seconds to your direct opponent. This is a joke. And can completely screw your race up after you worked so hard during the whole race. VSC should keep the distances. It doesn't.

- Turkish GP.
Istanbul Park is (was) a magnificent track, in my opinion. Both in game and in reality. And it was my absolute fav track in the game due to its characteristics. Now it's broken. Pit stop exit is broken and cars brake and slow down at Turn 11 (😭). Why they brake and slow down there? Real F1 cars used to fly at 320km/h at full throttle in that corner.

- European GP.
Pole position in the European GP is P2 and not P1. On the same tyre, the car in P2 ALWAYS overtakes the car in P1 at the very first braking at the beginning of the race. This is a bug and can't be otherwise.

- Malaysian Wet Race.
Simply the most unplayable race in the whole game. Wet tyre easily overheats at minimum push level.

- Height is the new Talent.
Even tho some players recently said they noticed drivers height no longer affects qualifying results, I can still notice it does in my private league where I parked all my teams and am currently doing experiments about car developing. And this is (was?) a supreme idiocy. Why on Earth taller drivers should be faster than shorter drivers? Who said that? What's the reason? I've been fooled for months since you removed drivers random mistakes from qualifying. Everything I tried with car developing was useless, I always qualified behind, cause I ONLY have dwarfs as drivers and I didn't know about that. I couldn't understand why everything I tried was useless, no matter what. And when I found out I went checking the current "best" managers in the best leagues: they all had 190+cm tall drivers. I LAUGHED a lot. And I explained myself a lot of things.

- Qualifying.
A few months ago you removed random driver mistakes during qualifying and said now the car was the only thing that matters. But it's not true. Cause Qualifying results are based (for the most of races) on the single car parameters and NOT on the overall car (in a few races Quali have no sense at all - Malaysia for example). Qualifying should be based on the actual car performance, if it has to be.
Or just introduce an option to manually run the Quali lap (I will LOVE you FOREVER if you do that). You can run the Quali lap whenever you want (your problem if you do it in the wrong moment) and for those who can't be online just before the race and still didn't run the Quali lap, the AI will simulate it just the way it happens now.
Please, think about it... 

- League Search filters.
They simply don't work and have never worked. Please fix them. Make it like ALL leagues that run at 3:00pm will show up, if you search for races at 3:00pm. Order them by reputation, by number of participants, order them the way you want but let ALL leagues show up. Make pages, make it as you need to scroll down and they will load, but please do it.

I think these are the most important issues currently in the game. I hope I haven't forgotten any. I'm typing in a rush as I'm at work and I need to come back working.

I LOVE this game. Been playing it for years but took long breaks very often cause I've only seen it falling down after the "tyre update" and after all these new addons, while old known bugs are still there.
But I'm confident you guys will eventually fix all the bugs, broken things and improve what needs to be improved.
And PLEASE, play the game. You and your devs team, find yourself a little time to play the game in public leagues against other managers and not only in testing leagues, so you can easily find out what actually works and what doesn't by yourself, instead of trying to do that by feedbacks from other players (who very often give wrong feedbacks about something they simply don't understand).

Thank you for reading. 

Hi Jack and the DEV team

Hope all is going well, especially during these current times with the global pandemic situation.

Just my thoughts really, as a loyal player of this game since September 2017 (I will try keep this as short as possible! ;-) )

I, personally, am getting increasing concerned about the direction of the iGP Manager game, and in particular (looking in from the outside perspective) the concerning decisions to develop suggestions made by (some) inexperienced managers, some of whom make it quite obvious they have little intention of learning how to play this game in detail.

iGP Manager will now foresee an important change in the new concept for the 'Reputation' rating, which will see the reputation gains past 5000 halved each month.

My deep concern is how this will effect the many managers who have spent years learning to play this game, and spent countless hours in the races racing live, to see their 'Reputations' drop from 10000 to c. under 6000 in the likely space of 3 months, and whether these long time, loyal players will accept this loss, and continue to play this game.

My concern (and my actual thoughts) is that this new concept depicts the 'Reputation rating' even more inaccurately than the current system. The halving (and gaining) of Reputation towards 5000 will lead to all tiers, in all leagues, reaching a very similar Reputation rating.

It will eventually lead to the highest Reputations in the game, being only achieved in the Rookie tier (as these tiers are less competitive, meaning more Reputation gains are possible, compared to a very competitive league with strong managers)

A solution maybe to change the naming of 'Reputation' to 'Score' as with this new concept proposed, as the word 'Reputation' no longer can be used to describe a player's true skill level and rating.

As such, iGP Manager will stand to lose the player's true skill and rating system (although far from perfect) with this new proposed concept of halving and gaining Reputation to 5000 each month.

Managers and players who believe or believed this game (iGP Manager) was a true eSport, with a continuous rating system between players, may no longer feel this is the case, likely now replaced by a monthly slot machine system, rewarding strong players in Rookie leagues.

PS. There is a solution for this, regarding a fair ratings system. A simply switch from the Harkness Rating system to the Elo Rating system, along with an uncapping. Of course, in a game where secondary accounts are permitted, other solutions will be needed alongside.

Hey Guys,

Thanks for taking the time to reveal the information you can about the game and the processes and development you are going through. For one, I really appreciate your openness, time and honest, where possible, in explaining what is going on and having the humility to accept the short falls. 

I've played the game for a while and recently started a League with my Brother, which we are thoroughly enjoying! As you said earlier, you won't be able to keep everyone happy, and I'm sure that won't change, even after all the hard work. There are issues and as you have said, you see/read them and are aware.

Thanks for ploughing on and sticking to the vision you will unveil soon. I for one am excited to see what it is and to have some idea of the dream your are trying to create! Keep going :) and Thank you.