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update app very important

We did everything in our power to try to avoid this outcome, but it was inevitable and unavoidable, once we began running through the implications.

Firstly, it was delayed by months, partly because we spent many weeks over the original deadline trying to get league rules working in some satisfactory manner on older devices and app versions. In the end, it was clearly not possible and we had to cut our losses rather than continue a wild goose chase. There were several reasons for the final decision:

1. Strategy UI was completely incoherent on old apps - with 'no refuelling' rules and stint lengths set in laps, old apps said you were editing 'litres of fuel' instead (since we can't go back in time and make it recognise the new rules). They sent weird values to the servers, and the UI/UX was totally incoherent.


2. During testing, complex interactions between old apps and the servers also caused races to crash, kicking everyone in the race out. Sometimes this didn't happen, but when it did it meant just one person using an old race viewer could throw 30 other people out of the race with them. We couldn't totally eliminate this behaviour. A mandatory update was an instant solution, but spending months ensuring app versions released 1-5 years ago could run the races with a completely incoherent UI simply stopped making sense.


3. This is sometimes a tough but necessary decision you have to make as a developer. When the choice becomes one between annoying 99% of the audience or 1%, eventually you have to cut your losses and admit that you have to cater to that 99%. They can't be kept waiting forever.

What would we gain from that? We know it alienates people who can't or don't wish to upgrade their device. It's unfortunate, and I sympathise especially with anyone who isn't able to upgrade, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

We maintained support for old devices and app versions for several years beyond reasonable expectations. Most other massively-multiplayer games I play are forcing updates on me frequently, even monthly. They aren't going out of their way to try to make a phone from 2010-2017 work in 2022 and beyond, and sometimes it's not possible. Even within a span of just a few years, computer chips and hardware become incompatible with modern SDKs and libraries. I'm not talking about 3D or some flashy new feature either, I'm talking about stuff like the software that sends notifications to your phone (e.g. Firebase, from Google). Even Google at some point stops supporting old devices, and we use their software inside our software. This means that quite often third-parties whose software is embedded inside our software force us to drop support for old devices. In those cases it's not actually us forcing you, but them forcing us.

Regarding any other criticisms that we have more control over, they've been noted. Thanks for your feedback and I can only apologise that we can't cater to everyone all of the time, I can assure you that we tried our best in this instance.

Hello Andrea,

Looks like something is missing from your translation to your mother tongue.

We tested this update with older versions and it wasn't possible to make it work. The UI from older versions was made to play with the OLD/DEFAULT league rules (refuelling, free tyre choice and without bonus point). If a player with a old version joins a race with any of the new rules it would have obsolete and erratic UI, for example, you wouldn't be able to see you're going to be disqualified for not using two tyres compound, wouldn't be able to do a right pit if refuelling is banned, etc. More important than this, you would make the race to crash and stop for everyone if your car performs a pit, since it would try to refuel when it's banned.
Backward compatibility wasn't possible for the reasons mentioned above, we tried our best, testers can confirm you.

I understand from your point of view it's easy to put the blame on us, in fact, that's the case. We let players to use old versions for a lot of time when that isn't the game standard. I bet you can not find any game that's mmo and they allow backward compatibility. It's not possible. It's no longer possible to keep supporting versions from 2-3 years ago even if we allowed that for a lot of time. We don't want to force people to buy new phones, we don't get any profit from that, in fact, it's negative for us, even if it's just less than 1% of our audience we want to allow everyone to play. This said we can't freeze the game and don't make new updates for the rest 99%.

I recommend you to translate my message with DeepL, it really seems something was lost in translation from your previous comment.

Hello,

I didn't say 1% dislike the update, we don't have ways to know that. I did say 1% of the players wouldn't be able to update to the latest update due to their devices being obsolete. Again, something in lost in your translation Andrea.

Hello Andrea,

What's the metric you're using to know this "from today most people haven't possibilty to watch race ever for most problem into the last version"? We would like to help, according to our metrics it's far from being "most". Thanks!

All the recent reports and issues related to the latest version have been fixed, you can see the forum and check the labels.

Additionally I would like to hear something constructive, what's the alternative you're suggesting? Remove League Rules (one of the most demanded updates) so the other 1% of players can play? I would love to hear your proposed solution! Thank you Andrea. :)

Hi Andrea, that's a different discussion, and it seems a lot is being lost in translation. I don't think any English reader of your earlier posts understood that you were referring to a 2020 phone that has an issue loading a race. If you have a bug, which it sounds like, please make a bug report in the forum with a video or screenshots showing the problem. I don't think we can rely on communicating it via text as the language barrier is quite big in this thread.

That said, we have heard a couple of reports of problems like yours that were resolved by using a VPN. If you have a VPN on your phone, try using a server located in another country before launching iGP Manager or a race in-game and connecting to the race server using the VPN. I am not suggesting this is a permanent solution, but it would be useful for us to know if that works to understand the nature of the problem.

FTR, in the time since the update was released and enforced the playerbase has grown. It was a difficult decision, but objectively the right one, even in hindsight.