Approved

Reduce Female Pilot Advantage

Hi there. This is less of a suggestion and more of a request that the current gameplay balance for drivers be reviewed, and a case for why I think this is necessary.

Since the dirty air switch on it’s become more and more apparent that female drivers now have a significant pace advantage over male drivers. Potentially tenths of a second per lap on most circuits.

It’s fairly common knowledge that historically tall drivers have been the best and since they have a higher max height and a more frequent spawn rate these have been the prime drivers. To be clear I am not against a particular driver type having an advantage, it is the SCALE of the advantage that is the issue here.

So far I am pretty sure that a 175cm female driver has a small qualifying advantage and a significant race pace advantage over a 192cm male driver. These gaps only get worse as the female driver gets taller. I’ve tested up to 188 and have seen 190 and 191cm women in action and the pace they have is frightening!

The only explanation I can come up with is that driver weight now has an impact. But if that is the case I think this is a problem. Assuming that driver weight and ballast function the same way now. Having a female driver now has the same impact as removing 5kg of ballast (or having a man is like adding 5kg of ballast if you look at it the other way).

5kg of ballast is judged to be sufficient handicap to balance a manager, tech and design level gap of 4 levels so it is an extremely strong advantage to have. In my opinion this is too strong and needs to be examined.

Since this is suggestion I will provide a proposal. A 1kg advantage would probably be sufficient to provide the taller female drivers with an advantage suitable to their rarity. I have no idea how easy this would be but to my mind, the quickest solution would be to reduce the minimum weight of men to 47kg and leave everything else as it is. 

Edit: Or alternatively set it to 46kg same as women and forget the difference between genders. That may end up being the best option.

There is actually no need for female drivers to be 46kg.  Just make 51kg the lowest weight any driver can have regardless of sex

Completely agree with that.

This is a very good suggestion.


Makes both height and weight effective. A well managed 192CM male driver can still fight the shorter females and the 190+ women get to keep their advantage for being so rare ?.

Agreed, edited my post to include the option of fully equalising weight. But I have suggested reducing the minimum weight of men To 46kg as i suspect this would be techically easier to achieve than modifying every existing female drivers weight to be 51kg.

Yes, equalise both at 46kg or 51kg

Bwoah, I don’t know if it’ll work because the height isn’t as influential as weight…

I have one of these "Tall female drivers". I've won the last two races, Spa & Japan. I thought I'd figured something out with the game. I have two top level Racers in my Division & to beat both of them while 5 levels behind them. Yeah, I'm a little special lol Then I hear & see this and it does take a little away from the game and the sense of achieving something when you win.
I would just do away with both height and weight. I thought shorter drivers where faster as the car was easier to design around them :/

Well the top guys in your league are L20 so if my theory about it being the same impact as ballast is correct you pretty much beat them on an even footing so don’t let this take anything away from you ?

Then I won't Lol
Cheers

What I believe to of happened here is, and someone who knows for definite feel free to confirm or correct this but, driver weight has been turned back on. So now you are getting that -5kg benefit with a lass behind the wheel. As the 46/51kg is actually added to your car. And if you remember back to when you were in Pro and leveled up, one kilogramme of wieght can make a worlde of difference.

This game is becoming absolutely ridiculous.... We just play a game where in China (for example) there is no possibility to make different strategies because of these new tire wear... 3 stop strategies and full S everywhere. DRS in Spain, Austria and Monza absolutely no sense... Now there is also a shame bug about the gender of a driver... You are able to make a bug even about gender of drivers.... No words 

This will mean a race for imps, as they would weigh less and be faster. Gender problem solved, height problem reshuffled 

The weight needs to be equal. And it should be done as quickly as possible. 

After seeing this thread now i can't unsee how much faster my female driver is over her male counterpart lol. Not just in Q but also in race pace - especially in race pace i'd say although it seems like their gaps in Q have increased too.
I think as pointed out in this thread by Kevin and Antonio, a good solution would be to cap the minimum weight depending on the driver's height, that way we'd also get rid of any gender gap performance between drivers (then maybe a certain height-weight ratio would be better than others but that'd be another topic); as someone who normally prefers using female drivers it'd be appreciated that they have the same performance as male drivers - unlike some time ago where 190+ guys were the best for example.
PS: i love how after such a long time trying to find a 190cm guy now that i got one tall boys suck ? ? ? ?

While I don’t disagree with the principle of the solution; it would certainly reflect the real state of things more closely. I’m concerned the impact of weight is just too strong at the moment, the advantage provided by height isn’t enough to offset the advantage provided by weight.


For your proposal what would the range for different minimum weights be?

My own perspective right now is that 1kg difference is enough. Any further and you are getting into the realms of ballast penalty impacts for manager levels. And that’s too much in my opinion.

Perhaps if the impact of weight could be divided by 10, you would have a good range of 10kg to work with on offsetting the different heights and the amount of ballast applied to cars could just be increased 10x to keep that element the same.

This is far too over-engineered.  Make minimum weights for male and female driver the same.  Problem solved.

Sorry that you feel that way. You’ve made your point twice now and I agreed with you the first time that it would fix the current situation.

But there’s nothing wrong with figuring out something which may with a bit of work function better than the current system and certainly nothing wrong in constructive discussion in general.

There could be a situation where everyone agrees on a way forward (unlikely as it is) and in the meantime the impact of weight could be switched back off to allow the work to take place and stabilise the current problem.

Sorry, I could have made my point clearer.  I was commenting on both yours and Kevin’s ideas.  I think sometimes people look for complicated solutions in the belief that they work better.  Usually simple solutions are more effective.  


It’s a shame though we are even having this discussion as the Devs must have been aware of this issue from their own testing.  

We have a qualifying bug that favours tall male drivers, this still exists, but has now been superseded with the situation with tall female drivers which now clearly impacts on race pace as well.  I also suspect (admittedly from anecdotal evidence) that the impact of these bugs varies by track. Add in issues such as pit stop bug, lack of dirty air and overpowered DRS creating race long trains we have a game which is sadly looking more and more broken.  Some suspect this all down to the changes needed to introduce 3D racing and maybe there is some truth in this, but personally I think it’s more likely to be multi factorial through the cumulative impact of updates and patches over the years.

No one’s  view is necessarily the correct one, but we are all agreed that there is something which needs fixing.  Unfortunately the only ppl who can fix this are the iGP team and so far they have been silent on this.