Hi everyone, with the release of the new balance I thought I’d try something a little different and provide you all with a little bit of an insight into the testing work that’s gone in behind developing the rebalance of the stats and the challenges that we faced.
Testing things like this in general can be very difficult for the volunteers, as great efforts are made to ensure we get no useful information out of the test to give us an advantage when playing the game. While this is right and proper, it can make it difficult to give useful feedback!
For nearly a month we were racing the same track every night trying various balances and feeding back how it felt, We had a few little inchidents along the way… One race we couldn’t get heat into a tyre at 45C on the highest push level on the softest compound (or wet compounds!). All the tyres froze, and it felt like driving through treacle. Not many managed to stay online to the end of that test.
Then at the other end of the scale… some of you might have noticed the lap record at Hungary got smashed well out of reach of standard play, that was us… very sorry! Somehow Lap times ended up massively accelerated, about 50 seconds per lap and that had all sorts of peculiar side effects. Boost lasted for 3 laps when held down from 100 to 0%, DRS did nothing. Everything overheated and I felt slightly nauseous watching it all.
Eventually we found a balance which seemed to work in principle, and we set about pushing it to its limits. You would be surprised how finely balanced everything is, the smallest change can take something that previously “Felt Good” to “I hated every second of that.”
Then we had to make sure it worked across a broad range of car designs, in both NRF and RF, in rookie, pro and elite, and try it on different tracks as well to make sure it worked across the board. And then after more fine tuning, we were done at last… or so we thought...
Next up, we started running competitive races under the conditions and competitive guys being what they are, they quickly flushed out issues we wouldn’t have found in months of additional testing, which we had to put more work in to try and address.
And now we’ve released it, and I have no doubt you will all find yet more things we could have done better and we’ll be happy to have constructive feedback. All I ask from you is please be nice! It might not seem it, but I guarantee hard work has gone into doing the best we can for this.
