Suggested

Transfer market

I’m sorry but I fully disagree with this change in the transfer market.
As in real life the market can be a good place to earn money for the team.
Me and my friends we were used to take low level pilots , train them and sell them for higher prices, gaining coins to go on with the transfers. This is simple STRATEGY!

Now with this market is quite impossible to do it again! The amount I spend will be back when I sell the driver, and i’ve Even spent tokens !!!

I hope you are going to go back to previous market.

To anybody reading this, I don't want anybody else to comment on this thread — I'd like for this to be a discussion between myself and the OP only.

How much profit have you made buying and selling drivers? I'm curious to know.

A sufficient one to keep playing, we used to buy 1 , train it and sell it in the market and so on.
Sometimes we got back the same amount of money (probably somebody who bought it using 9 credits), sometimes the auction got longer and we got a gain of 10/15 millions .

Ah okay.

We found players who were abusing the auction system for hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and will not undo the change.

What? O.o
Hundred of millions? How they did that?

But it’s not fair to take away a strategic way of playing for some players who “cheated” (They probably found some way to earn more money from transfers)

At least put a limit that is just the double of the value of the driver...so there will be still a chance to gain some money in a fair/strategic way
Please

A few weeks ago I noticed something unusual as I was examining old support tickets in our internal support system for iGP. One old ticket regarding a player who didn't receive any cash from selling a driver via auction was still in an Open state (unresolved).

I logged in as the user to review his financial history but did not know financial history only goes back to 30 days. I found something strange about his finances though. He has currently $1.5 billion in-game cash. I thought this was unusual, because when he posted a screenshot in the thread I have linked above, he has $278 million. I'm thinking to myself, wow, this player must have spent money on iGP Manager!

I got curious and wanted to know how many tokens he's purchased and reviewed his tokens history. I did not find a single instance of him having purchased tokens.

I messaged Jack and he got out his magnifying glass and discovered multiple players who recently became iGP billionaires. He saw transactions for Signing Fees upwards of $100 million. How?

These players would create their own throwaway accounts and bid on one driver with multiple accounts to drive up the auction's bid price. After several hundred tokens, the bid price can climb as high as $500m to $1b. The money paid from the winning bidder goes to the team that sold the driver. Voila, the abuser now have $$$$$$$ in his account.

It was a pretty sick loophole, which we closed immediately. I don't think the devs will be keen on even loosening the value earned from selling drivers after that.

Stupid act to do though, because it's a huge waste of time to do that. Cheaters aren't very smart. Since the guy in the thread above is in a league of his own playing with all his fake accounts, he gets to live...for now.

Oh Wow...this is a complex system...
Now I understand the change you’ve made!

But I hope there can be a solution in the middle so to let us still have an advantage in buying, training and selling drivers.

Maybe just ask for verified e-mails as it happens in other games.

Perhaps, it could probably be a topic to revisit as the situation cools off.

Ok, thanks for the reply :)

:( there was a driver on my shortlist talent 19 exp 20 I bought it 1 week ago for 8m and 3 tokens. I thought he should be more but nobody knows that he was free... then I just sold it, signing fee was 22,3m I watched the auction on live. then I checked my finance and bummm... I think I lost money... I thought that it can be a bug or smt and searched the forum and I saw this topic :( :( :(

I was going to write to complain about the actual market system, really too expensive for tokens.
Paying tokens to bid is a very questionable method, remember those sites where you pay continually to bid ... where you end up spending money without bringing home anything.
But now I understand why, and I can not blame you, damn cheaters ...
However, it's a system that works against cheaters but it's not right for people who play correctly because tokens are real money, you need a new system.

I'm really struggling to understand what drives the cost of a driver on the transfer market, and if bringing in young drivers, training them up, and then selling them has any worth. I can't see an explanation of this anywhere.

The cost of drivers is random and there doesn't seems to be any correlation or linear cost for drivers based on their levels.

I don't recommend what you're thinking of doing, because you will lose cash, I estimate at least millions would be lost.

I decided to test it with one guy. Purchased for $3.2m + 1 Token. Re-sale value is $2.8m, initially with 1 Star.

Cost Per day of Salary is $140,000.

After 1 day, up to 1 1/2 Star, Resale Value remains £2.8m. Loss to date $540,000, plus 1 star.

I'll update on progress, but not hopeful.

This is a money losing venture, hahaha. Don't do it man!

Am finding the staff marketplace somewhat frustrating. WIth the exception of Driver Academy for drivers, the staff marketplace has a monopoly on staff. Where theres a monopoly in real life often there is some kind of gov't price control.
In the old game, you could fire staff and try to rehire them at a lower salary if you had a good relationship.
Now you hire CD and TD matching your level, but there's a increase in salary every time contract is extended.
For CD, all the marketplace candidates have weakness in one of the important attributes Acceleration, Braking, Handling, Downforce.
Current CD has $840k salary and contract extension will bring that to $940k which is not sustainable. .
Any chance of getting a CD academy, or some genetic engineering/cloniing/3D printing where you can build your own CD or bring in a lower level one as an intern and train them? Thanks

Has it cooled off? I am absolutely not down to LOSE tokens for a bid on a driver. Having them held back for as long as you are bidding is OK but I just lost around 20 tokens because I thought I'd get them back if I didn't win the bidding. You know, like real auctions work. You don't win the auction, you don't lose money... This is a big NO for me and some other people I've talked with about this game also had the same situation. They turned their back to the game just after starting it.
If the problem with the exploiters is still there (the thread is half a year old at last) - Suggestion: Have an algorithm that detects whether or not a player is PLAYING a game or just on the transfer market. Or the email verification thing. But please change SOMETHING because this game is already getting on my nerves. I just started playing it and everything else is so enjoyable. For now, it is the safest bet to just buy the driver right when he is in, without any bidding. Because you'll definitely lose more than 9 tokens when you bid.

ok, thanks

Hi Lennart, sorry for the late reply. The topic you are discussing is very different from the topic being discussed in this thread.

Regarding your comments, it's been addressed by Jack before, the founder and owner of iGP. I don't think we will be allowing tokens to be returned for lost auctions in the foreseeable future. I'll do my best to explain again why returning tokens after an auction is a bad idea. It's been a while since I've had to explain it though.

Returning tokens after an auction would definitely be realistic. However, when it comes to a game, it is very different from the real world — there is no materialized risk(other than buying tokens). Players with more tokens will succeed in hoarding the best drivers and staff, leaving behind less desirable employees on the market that nobody wants.

By not returning tokens at the end of an auction, every single player, regardless of how many tokens they have, now has to think twice if it's worth bidding on a employee or not. It keeps the risk factor there, keeps the game very much away from being 'pay-to-win' and allows the Transfers system to be balanced and equal for everybody. Everybody has the freedom of choice to gamble on spending one token in hopes of winning an auction and saving on 8 tokens, or can play it safe and wait for somebody to come along and buy them for 9 tokens.

I added 14 tokens back to your account since we have not made it more clear that tokens spent on bidding aren't returned if an auction is lost.
If you know which friends did not know this either, I'll gladly send them back the tokens spent on bidding as well.