Suggested

Staff without contract

Threads like this deteriorate rapidly from constructive feedback in to talk about motives and mind-reading. We did the update today to stop farming scripts and apps, as simple as that.

Several of the accounts using these scripts have accumulated 50+ Chief Designers with the best possible attributes, as an example, totally unbalancing the game for everyone else. The scripts are instantly rendered obsolete by this update. We will decide separately what to do about those accounts, but that was all we wanted to achieve today.

Within a few days we hope to add solutions to any other suggestions that arise out of this change. E.g. One piece of constructive criticism after the update was that effort previously put in to shortlisting drivers and staff could not be utilised.

We've just deployed an update that makes it possible to sign any drivers or staff that you shortlisted before this recent update, so at least that concern should be addressed. This buys us time to continue working on other improvements.

As was mentioned in the changelog, there will be work done on the transfers list to improve the availability of the sorts of drivers and staff that people were looking for, but within the proper structure of how the game is supposed to be played.

The game was never supposed to be played by running 100 tabs in a browser, automating the input of various IDs in to the address bar, or even by manually doing such edits. That is all stuff you can't even do in the application versions of the game either, disadvantaging the majority of players. We'll work instead on the reasons people felt the need to do that (e.g. finding more quality drivers and staff on the market).

Thanks to those who put constructive feedback, we'll take all of that in to the subsequent updates (which will come within days). The situation at this exact point in time is only a temporary one. We want to get everyone playing the game properly, so first we wanted to shut down all the "silly" ways of playing it that involve scripts, loopholes, opening hundreds of browser tabs, typing in random URLs, or exploits (notice the trend in recent patches).

Now we're going towads improving the systems, like Transfers, so that people won't feel the need to do that to begin with.

I'll also respond to a couple of points to clarify further.

First I'll respond to the idea that we somehow make more money if trading drivers/staff goes through 'buy now' on transfers. We don't. Intentional trading between teams is low volume, a drop in the ocean of overall activity. If there were so many that it would be life-changing for us, ironically, that sort of volume would actually imply you could trade drivers/staff for just 1 Token. How? Look at the size of the transfers list; if there is such volume then all these hypothetical auctions won't fit on that list, meaning nobody else will see most of them. In an auction nobody else will see you can do one bid and get them for 1 Token.

The scarier prospect, apparently, is that these drivers and staff should start appearing on the transfer market. Heaven forbid, we see good drivers and staff on the transfer market. Yet we've been told forever that the reason exploits were necessary is that no good drivers and staff appear there, and now you're concerned that they will be there... I can't be the only one seeing the contradiction.

The main conclusion on those concerns then is we might get a better transfer market out of it. Not quite as alarming as it was made to sound.


It's not that simple. They can change IPs constantly, they can make multiple accounts. Activity can easily be disguised. This is also why a limit on staff won't work, if we limit staff, they just make more accounts.

There was no way to shut it down within a reasonable timeframe other than what we did. There is absolutely no workaround now, the scripts don't work and never will. It's a conclusion on that matter.


This is the kind of discussion we've been having about how to improve the system. We'll look in to it.