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A sharp drop a results

Where to begin? I read the entire first page of replies, and constructed a response to every key point, I have not read the second page but skimmed it, as it seems nothing substantially new was added and it was getting repetitive. Hopefully I can shed new light on the conversation, here we go!


Actually, that's entirely possible and depends what tactics they are deploying. For example, some managers don't add any design upgrades to the car early in the season, this allows them accumulate a huge amount of points from Research, more than you, while also stockpiling the same number of Design Points. Then, they apply all the Design Points halfway through the season, and they will have a superior overall design. They could jump from being almost nowhere to the front.

A recurring assumption in threads like this is that all managers are playing the game in a similar enough way that results should remain fairly linear and static, and therefore it must be random if the results change dramatically. As with the example above, there are many ways that performance can legitimately change dramatically for a team from one race to the next, without any external factors.

I'm the lead developer of the game, working on it for almost a decade, and to this day I still am amazed to discover new tactics that players use to gain advantages. If I, as the lead developer, am still being surprised and don't know everything about how to play the game, it's safe to assume this is true for people confused by their results. There are likely many ways people play that we probably haven't considered trying.

Qualifying is the only time that there is a degree of luck involved, because drivers make mistakes, and they don't all make the same mistakes. To be clear though, there are absolutely no mechanics in the game to manipulate the results, they are purely what comes from the simulator when a car runs a lap of a track. When the margins are very small between the teams though, qualifying can sometimes feel quite erratic, when driver mistakes make all the difference and managers are not in control. Imagine F1, if every single driver had a Mercedes, it would be the same.


That is correct. Handling is very beneficial at Monaco, for example. This is another way that performance could change from one track to another. If I have developed Handling heavily while you have developed Acceleration, maybe you'll be beating me significantly at Spain, the round before, but then we arrive at Monaco and I'll be very competitive. This was intentionally designed in to the game so that managers have to work out the best car for a season, and not just developing linearly in the same way for all tracks.


Ballast and Resarch (two things visible in the UI) are the only handicapping / balancing mechanics that exist. There is no such thing as a 'handicap system'.


We're really busy working on it, and it's not just building a game anymore, there is an entire business behind it while we are still a small team. This means I am spinning many plates and do not spend my days on the forum currently. It's unfortunate and I would much rather be on the front-end with you more often, but that's the reality of building a rapidly growing business and community.


We intentionally designed the game so that a level 15 could compete with a level 20, for various reasons. One, it would be extremely dull waiting several months to be competitive otherwise, and two because it parallels real life. In iGP as in real life, levels have a much larger impact on performance when they are lower. The scale for this goes across all levels - every level gained is worth less than the last one. The difference between 19 and 20 is almost negligible.

This may even be the source of much of the confusion, because there is not a huge difference between a level 15 and 20 team, but there is a big difference between a level 1 and level 5 team. Perhaps this means many of you are getting the expectation of what a level is worth at lower levels, and then are confused when the levels don't make much difference at the high levels.

This design was also intentional to make Elite leagues the most intensely competitive and close, and so that Rookie managers (new to the game) can "feel" the gains they are getting with every upgrade. This is much like real life, where starting any new activity we see big gains in the beginning, and they gradually become smaller and harder to obtain as we progress, whether that's in our hobbies, career or so on, this is a fact of life and definitely a factor in designing and building a racing car or being a racing driver or team owner. In the beginning, you make huge gains of seconds with every improvement, then gradually you are fighting for thousandths of a second at the top level.

This leads nicely in to the next comment:


The numbers only set out your baseline performance, and there is a huge amount of influence that a manager can have simply through good management and tactics. As I've illustrated above from the opening of this post, there are tactics that many of us don't even think to try that some creative people will deploy to gain an edge. Many of these people I've discovered are mathematical geniuses in their own right, so it's not that the numbers don't matter, but some people are able to find more numbers than you can see in the game. They make their own spreadsheets and calculations that essentially reverse-engineer the physics and game mechanics and ways to maximise performance. It's incredible the lengths some people go to. I'm not suggesting that is the case every time, but I think you'd be surprised how many at the top of our HoF match this description.


I believe you are referring to drivers who were higher level than they actually appeared. This is a very old bug / incident you are referring to from 2017 or so. After a single race or training session the true level of such drivers was revealed, and so it's not likely that this is still a factor in the game at all. The level you see on any driver is their actual level.