Official

Coming next week: New scouting system

There will be substantial changes to the way drivers are scouted from the young driver academy next week as a new scouting system is brought in to place. If you have any young drivers idling in the academy that you wish to promote, then I would recommend promoting them this week, before the changes come in to effect. If you want to scout new drivers, then it shouldn't make much difference. I'll explain more below.

The changes start with a fundamental shift in the philosophy behind the scouting process. As with the proposed changes to the transfers system, which are still in development (and won't arrive next week), we are trying to ensure that when Tokens are used they provide convenience, accelerating an activity or making it easier. The current/old system has potential to lose Tokens in bidding and scouting, and that's something we have wanted to change in this redesign. We want to make every Token count. I have seen players use 100 Tokens to scout the ideal driver, so the changes to the system are intended to address this while keeping the economy balanced.

After the change:

• The Offices & Hospitality HQ will scout young staff (Chief Designers, Doctors and Technical Directors), like the Youth Academy for drivers.


• Scouting will generate a new list of scouts, free of charge, every 48 hours. The purpose of the scout button will shift to skipping the wait. This will also create a good reason to check out the HQ every couple of days, to see what new scouts have arrived, injecting life in to a new area of the game.


• The cost of the 'Scout now' button to skip the wait will decrease with time, just like accelerating HQ builds. If you want to skip the last 2 hours of the wait then it'll cost much less than skipping the entire 48 hour wait.


• The cost of the promoting drivers and staff to your team will become dynamic and based on their rating. The higher the level the higher the cost and vice versa.


• The cost of promiting an ideal driver or staff to your main team will be set at around the average combined cost of scouting and promoting an ideal driver currently. It will be higher than the current promotion cost, to ensure it balances with scouting becoming free and the fact that a whole team can be recruited from the HQ alone. You will always know exactly what you are getting beforehand, so it's your choice and not a game of chance.


• Drivers that are already in your academy scouted more than 48 hours before the changes come in to effect will be replaced with the new list of scouts. I recommend promoting them now if you have any idling in there. The second reason is that the promotion cost will be higher (if they are high level) after the change than it is currently. If they are very low level then it will actually be cheaper after the change, due to the dynamic pricing


• EDIT: In response to posts below, we will be doing an additional day of development to ensure that you are able to keep drivers in the academy indefinitely that were generated before this update. The original warning still stands though: they are going to cost more Tokens to promote after the update if they are high quality, due to the dynamic pricing system.

In development, currently I have it set to scout 5 new drivers/staff per HQ (5 drivers and 5 staff, 10 total) every 48 hours.

It will be, yes. Those are separate updates though. There are some tools currently in development to allow us to rapidly tweak and review the impacts of changes in car design and performance balancing. Once they are ready we should be able to tweak things like this much faster.

We're methodically stepping through key updates at the moment, one by one. A lot of work is still being completed to allow us to work smarter and more efficiently. It will pay dividends though, because everything is going to keep moving at an accelerated pace.

It's a fair point, thanks for raising it. I appreciate your concern, also know that it was not intentional, just a side-effect of what the system would do with anything from < 48 hours ago. You're the first person to raise any great deal of concern to me so clearly. I consider the point you have raised serious enough that an extra day of development will be devoted to writing some special code to keep these drivers. I will ensure they are available indefinitely. We will delay the update for it if we have to, to make this possible for you all. However, the point still stands that the act of driver promotion itself will cost more Tokens after the update than currently, if they are high quality. This is the other reason I issued the warning.


There will be no changes to what impacts a good/bad driver after the update. It's only a change to the Youth system.

Something which has been lost here: The changes were not made for the sake of drivers, they were made for the sake of staff. Drivers have just been swept up in the changes. There is going to be a new option to scout staff or scout your entire team from the HQ without even using the transfer market. In the process of designing the staff scouting system we rethought how it works. Then it made no sense to keep the driver system working differently, so both got the same system.

As for the driver height, when we revise all of the car performance (designs attributes, tyre balancing) we will look at driver attributes like height too. I want to do a comprehensive review of racing when we modify it, not just tinkering with one value. To do this we need to use the new tools that are in development. They will allow us to rapidly test and deploy updates to the balance of attributes and tyres, in a way we have not been able to do until now. It is not an exaggeration to say that the tools, once complete, will allow us to make more progress on balancing in a day than we've probably made in the last year. They will remove a whole range of deep technical limitations that have prevented us from making such updates efficiently and reviewing their impacts before putting them live. We learned a lot from the release of 3D and how critical such tools will be going forwards.

That's correct. The discussion has become fixated on drivers (for obvious reasons) but the real point of the update is to add the scouting of staff. An entire team can be scouted now as an alternative to the transfer market. During the process of adding that we rethought the scouting system to work more directly (e.g. the free refresh every 48 hours), Tokens only being used for positive interactions (directly to buy the ideal driver/staff or to cut down the time to the next refresh).

As the posts above have alluded to, in the old system many Tokens were used just to find a driver before you even got to the point of deciding to buy them. The new system will generate a new list every 2 days and then for a dynamic fee, based on the level/ability, you can buy them directly.

Correct. I'll delay the update for it if I have to, I understood your concerns.