New iGP & Open Beta FAQ

Brawn GP was a level 1 team and they won lol

Well, the question remains, how the driver attributes are converted.

If a lvl 8 manager gets to keep his drivers with stats of 15 or higher, while new players will be limited to drivers with stats on their lvl, that might be a problem.

But spies only works on the car, and it takes (in the current version any way) 7 races to spy on everything. By then, the championship is gone.

But even if a lower team spies on everything and brings his car up to pace, isn't he still limited by his drivers being much worse than a high level manager?

Spying can also mean the difference between Relegation and staying in the tier, even if the Championship is gone after 7 races.

The concern is the balance though, not whether or not you can stay in elite.

I'm sure it will be addressed. It's pretty clear they are listening to feedback and there's been so much improvement just during the beta period that I'm excited to see where things go after launch.

Eton you didn't mention what people were finding hard about it btw. Jack was asking so they can look at it.

Quite a few things, but the most common denominator was the general lack of direction or knowing what to do since the game has changed so much in the new version. But that's fine, that just means there is no set META like there is in the current game.

With the current iGP, you kind of know what needs to be done to improve and the design process is pretty straight forward where as the new game you don't, but that will be the same learning curve for everyone, so that can be ruled out.

I think the whole leveling up facilities and limiting driving training based on level was confusing a lot of people, and a few were confused about the fact that you can train your drivers multiple times instead of just the once etc. I know the new way for bidding on drivers/staff was confusing many people too.

tl;dr - In all honesty, I think most of it is just the demoralising feeling of going from knowing everything, to being completely clueless and having to start over from scratch. But that won't last forever. The biggest issue with this is just hoping people stick around through the learning process and don't give up. I do think though that if someone was to make a proper video explaining all the changes and perhaps a comparison to the old game, that might help a little.

I would say that is probably the most important point. How many leagues currently have a thriving Rookie and Pro below their Elite level? I know the league i 'race' in currently has 1 active team in Pro and 0 active teams in Rookie as interest wanes fast if people arent 'competitive'. The less teams in each league, the easier it is to get promoted without being ready (level-wise) for that ass-kicking you will get in Elite against the top guys. 

Does anyone know how many leagues have a thriving Rookie, Pro, and Elite level? Percentage of total leagues would be good!

Lol, not for me! I somehow ended up in Elite at Level 4..... >_< I'm getting my arse handed to me every race. Is there a mechanism to switch tier?

No, not unless you reset your team or find a league with a relegation zone (red zone) to finish a season in. If you can find a relegation zone you can go back to the Pro tier, but you will still probably be at a disadvantage.

I recommend resetting your team, provided you can accept the terms of resetting.

Relegation or reset, as BR said. I made it into elite at Level 7 and got bashed, but not badly enough to be relegated. See quite a drop-off in participation from players at that point in the game. 

I'm not agree with most of what Jack said and I'm going to explain why :

First of all, let's talk about the core of the problem : the level cap. As you know a lot of features will be capped according to your team level including :
- your driver stats
- your design facility
- your boosts (kers/drs)

Before going any further I have to remind you that driver stats have totally changed and the "mental issue" was corrected allowing higher level driver to be actually faster than others.

Ok, here we go : If we take a driver alone we can see that a lvl 12/15 driver stands no chance against a lvl 18/20 driver even if the higher team has poor design or boost facilities and that won't be the case .. Now if we take all features together we can see that a high level team will start with the highest chances and will extend the gap towards other teams by improving his design a lot faster and then will stomp all the teams that aren't at the same level or close.

There are now 8 areas where to put design points we gain after each race, those ones are going to replace the chassis, sidepods and all others.

There will be a design cap caused by your chief designer but that won't make a difference and here is why : My team was lvl 11 with a lvl 8/9 CD and my design was capped around 70 so I assume higher level teams and chief designers won't have cap allowing stats to be improvable up to 100, but let's be safe and let's make calculations with 70 in design cap :
- 8 areas to spend design points
- 20 design points earned per race
- 16 upgrades (first race is the start)

We have a total of 8 * 70 = 560 pts available where to put points
We're going to gain a total of 16 * 20 (team level) = 320 points to spend
=> so it's safe to say design cap won't make a difference.

I also think that decreasing that cap won't be the solution to help low level teams and high level teams will still have a superior average design. As for spies they worked perfectly in the current version because 2 teams with the same design (ex : 70%) were going to upgrade it at the same rate but that won't be the same and in the new version gap between teams is going to be higher and  higher over races when it is quite the contrary in the current igp and also in F1 !

Last thing Jack said was about level cap regarding rookie & pro tiers and here I agree with that point but you all know rookie and pro tiers are more an extended tutorial to understand the game and that a long-term player is going to spend 90%+ of his time in the elite tier, core of the game !

Ok I finished with the first part, for the last one I'm going to talk directly to Jack and especially about the comparison he made with World of Warcraft because I played both types of games.

A typical mmorpg takes approximately 1 to 3 months of regular playing (4/5 hours a day) to reach the max level and in the last years this type of games tended to lower that amount. As for management games, they take more time to achieve the same but they also require less time to play on a daily basis, roughly 3 to 12 months for most of them and current igp is right in the middle.

But with the upcoming changes IGP is going to take about 3 years of everyday racing to reach the max level cap (20) and I'm not even talking about more casual leagues (1 to 3 races per week).

I think this is not reasonable to say to someone he'll have to spend 3 years of everyday racing to have the same chances than a lvl 20 team and that he'll get stomped for about 3 years even if he gets enough experience before. This is why the current system was perfect with no cap for driver training and the best facilities available at lvl 10, it required approximately 3 months to have a very decent team and then the remaining of the time was about team optimization and learning the most advanced techniques that I call "manager experience".

It was also nice to see future good managers coming from rookie/pro and slowly becoming stronger after a couple of months. So why to change that and create new disparities between players ? If I'm new to a game and I see somewhere it will require me 3 years of everyday playing in order to have the same chances against top players I won't continue for sure ..

As one of the current top 10 manager with Tjerk, Marcel and a few others I can say we don't want easier racing against teams that are lower in level but still talented or to lose against very high level teams just because they played the game 1 year before us and are winning races at 90% due to their team level and only 10% thanks to their manager experience.

We want close and fair competition for everyone because this is how races are exciting and how we can take the more fun of the game. IGP has a unique feature that other games don't have or at least not in that proportion : "push level (tyres) and kers management" making it a 80% management, 20% simulation game. And thanks to that as well as the race viewer this is all of what make its own personality.

I think the level cap issue is in total contradiction about what you wanted the new igp to become : something more accessible, easier to play and to understand for everyone with the goal to also attract the new players generation (especially on mobiles).

This is also why I'm rather pessimistic about the future economic system of igp, the subscription was also part of what made the personality of igp and I plus other players were really happy to pay for that service. It was bringing us a lot of fun without giving us an unfair advantage over free players. The new system is going to remove those aspects and players who will pay for tokens won't do it to get fun in first place but more to get an "unfair" advantage over other players. I won't cover it all but for example I found the possibility to get unlimited new engines race after race.

Finally I'll summarize what I expected for the new version and more in general what I think people expect of a new version of a game :
- keep what was working perfectly
- remove bugs
- adding new features
- improving old features

A lot of worked was done to get rid of java for security issues but IGP also lost a lot of old good features and some of them won't be back in the new IGP. The introduction of a soft p2w system won't have the best impact for some of us, I don't think new IGP will lose in total amount of players but I can see "old school managers" leaving and new casual players to play for a limited period.

I know what you've read may seem a little harsh but I've always said what I think either positive or negative feedbacks trying to stay as objective as possible. I'll try to talk to managers in the leagues I'm in and to tell them to give you their feedbacks regarding beta and especially the level cap.

Facilities & Design should have caps lifted, Driver capping should match tier level Rookie lvl.10, Pro lvl.15, Elite lvl.20 or add tier Rookie lvl.8, Pro lvl.12, Elite lvl.16, Super-class lvl.20 :D
I think staff and drivers should have a relegation release clause in their contracts to force managers to buy new staff at the capped level when they are relegated.

another little suggestion Jack.

can we have more minutes between qualy and race? and sitll enter the race view?
some of us like to watch qualy carefully and others like to enter the chat and ask how is life. This last one seems really important for me to help the 'community' :) I've made a lot of friends here and want to make some more :D

In my opinion, the only thing that needed to change was the design system, and perhaps the driver training could have been looked at (the way we discovered mental and technical made drivers slower didn't seem right).

I think back in 2012 or 2013 or whenever it was the new game that was being made at the time was basically the game we have now but with a similar way of doing design from the current beta. This was the best of both worlds imo. The whole tokens thing I am iffy about, the whole driver cap etc I am iffy about, everything seems unnerving to me in the new game.

I must admit, I am kind of looking forward to the new game because after taking a 2 year break and coming back I am actually a little disappointed in the way the current game has changed to the point where after joining up to a new league, I actually have almost no interest in playing. Let me explain a little:

Late 2012ish:
Before we had super softs and mediums, we also used to start stints with stone cold blue tyres, which was never a good thing for AFK racing. Why? It meant if you were AFK for the race you stood absolutely no chance at winning, because you needed to be there to push hard for the first lap or two of each stint to warm the tyres up. So it gave a pretty huge advantage to the managers who did show up. But, is this a bad thing? In my opinion that is the way it should have been. The game is about management after all, so it seemed perfectly acceptable to me for it to grant an advantage to the people who actually showed up to manage their teams come race day. At this point in time, the only thing that ruined gameplay then was when drivers who didn't show up to the race used to qualify on pole or mid pack (since qualifying is automatically done on 5/5 push regardless of what you set), because the mix of their stone cold blue tyres and not pushing meant they just held up whoever was behind them like you wouldn't believe. We saw endless complaints about how this ruined the game for many people. So when you had teams who did the "100% design every second season" it used to totally ruin gameplay, which is why the top league in the game (British Racing League) at the time was ran under pretty strict scrutiny with an 80% design cap rule. Now how did we get here? Lets take one step back.

Early 2012:
You could control your own push level for qualifiying. If you knew you were going to be afk for the race and had to set 1/5, you were probably going to qualify last. This to me was the way it should have stayed. I know plenty of people used to disagree and probably still disagree, but it actually added more diversity to gameplay. Something even a lot of top manager never picked up on was that depending on the days temperature, 5/5 push was not always the best idea to get a good lap in. Bahrain & Malaysia I often ran 4/5 in qualifying, Abu Dhabi I often ran 3/5 in qualifying etc, because often the tracks were too hot for an entire lap of 5/5 push. Qualifying actually had some knack to it. The problem with this setup at the time though, was that F2P managers were not able to control their push levels in the game so they were not able to set 5/5 for qualifying, they only had a live timing board and they couldn't manage their teams at all during the race, so basically if you were playing free you almost stood no chance of winning the race and had to set a push level that suited the majority of your stint. The game was absolutely pay to win in this era - you needed a subscription to win races in an active league. This is why (at least I suspect any way) the free 2 play model was granted access to push levels in game as well as the ability to see their tyre temperatures in game, so they had at least some chance of being competitive.

So the changes then, in my opinion, were already a step in the wrong direction, but could have been easily resolved.

Current 2016:
Now lets step forward to now. We now have lukewarm tyres & qualifying is still done on 5/5. The game has literally been changed more and more to suit AFK managers, and it absolutely blows my mind how many AFK managers can win races by simply making sure they are starting on super softs and having 100% design. It really ruins any motivation I gathered back up to play the game. 90% of the race now is waiting to see if it rains so you can change your tyres accordingly to how wet it is and using your kers in a more sensible fashion than the AI does. It's really dull in its current state, so I'm looking forward to any change that steps away from this.

There was also a general consensus from the top managers at the time for what we felt would make the game more diverse (if any of these changes were possible that is, we never really knew if it could be done), and to help avoid having one set meta to win:

- Add push levels back into qualifying to avoid AFK teams holding up the pack on cold tyres.

- To mix up strategies even more, include your first stint fuel weight into qualifying so if you wanted to start up front, you could start mega light rather than everyone doing the general "8-10 laps softs" and hoping to win qualifying (or the "qualottery" as we used to call it)

- Be able to set your push levels for every lap when doing your setup so if you were AFK, you could still push hard on the first lap of each stint etc. This would give AFK managers some chance to do well in races, and it also meant the active managers weren't being held up by the AFK guys if they started behind them on the grid. It would have been the best of both worlds.

- Change some supplier stats so certain suppliers worked better at different tracks, but also make it so you can only change suppliers every 3-4 races (to stop people figuring out which supplier is the best at each track and changing it every race)

- Adding super softs and mediums to also mix up strategic diversity. This was eventually done though as you all know.

- Adding engine push levels separate from driver push levels, so you could conserve fuel if you'd slightly under fueled or give yourself a boost if you accidentally slightly over fueled. You could also control engine temp separately to tyre temp, so control whether you were quicker or slower at the start ot end of a stint.

- Remove subscriptions, give everyone 2D, and make it so that you could pay for cosmetics or other things that didn't give you an in game advantage (suit designs, helmet designs, custom skins, team uniforms, profile banners, driver profiles, trophy cabinets & other shiny essentials that can be shown on the grid next to your car etc.

- Maybe add a track or two, and make the 2D viewer more aesthetic.

- Remove "next season" design completely, to rule out the typical 100% / 10% managers so that everyone starts every season on an equal playing field. Bare in mind this suggestion was to go in correlation with the new design system which was like the current beta, where certain parts were more important for different tracks. Not the current system where everyone would have just set their bar completely on this season and all be the same every race.

This is what many of us felt the game needed, and I still kind of do. Not a total over haul of the game, but just refining the whole thing so there was more management involved, more customisation and more gameplay diversity, with no pay to win what so ever. You can argue people won't pay for cosmetics (many argued this at the time) but in my opinion, cosmetics sell. Anyone coming from F2P games knows this.

That's done and done. There's no subscriptions in the new game and everyone will have the 2D. Next seasons design won't be giving you 100% cars anymore. To early for my brain to state how it is done but that's different to the old game. :)