Suggested

Change qualifying system

Hi Adam, I hadn't seen this thread, and frankly haven't been able to venture in to the forum much at all these days. I tend to rely on the moderators and community manager to keep up to speed with what is going on. That's not how I want it to be, I used to be very active in the forums, but it's just the nature of the scale of things now. We even have all of the English language forums replicated in Spanish and Italian now, getting just about as much activity too.

As for the suggestion - my first thought when I read it was "didn't we used to do that before?", years ago, when iGP was just a browser game. The reason it was changed was that it actually didn't make things as interesting as you would think. If you ran a really heavy car, you'd always qualify last, slowest, and never make up for it. By changing it to how it works now, letting everyone run on the same or similar fuel in qualifying, suddenly you could spring a high-fuel stint further up the grid and make that competitive.

Until we introduce the safety car I really don't think it will do anything to spice up the racing. I think qualifying might end up more exciting than the race, and the race will just be a procession, much like it is / has been in F1 for years. Qualifying's gain becomes the race's loss. Before you know it, there is an "optimal" strategy, which is to run SS or S and low-ish fuel for stint 1, and everyone does it, because the advantage of being further up the pack is too great to ignore. Running heavy at the back behind slow cars ends up making no sense, and you have to waste boost to get past, by which time you're completely out of the running.

Many suggestions, like this one, at a glance seem to be obvious no-brainer solutions to big challenges. "Just change this and that will happen, simple!". We hear it on just about every topic, but in practice, it turns out nothing like you would expect. Even when we think things through in detail, it's never quite the same as when it goes live.

I understand that in leagues that are ridiculously competitive qualifying can seem erratic, but it's still a simulation with mostly factors within your control, and in some ways it adds excitement to the results and races, the element of surprise. I know that's not a conclusive answer, or a good enough reason on it's own, but combined with the fact that we've actually tried this and seen what happens I think we need to consider other options.