It’s here!

So, the new era is upon us with the release of the new web app on igpmanager.com. I’d like to open by thanking everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response to the new game, and your understanding during this transition period as we migrate all of the teams and data.

It’s very important to us that the game remains as balanced as possible, and while we are actively working on many things behind the scenes, we’re doing our best to resolve early issues from the migration quickly and take decisive action.

Today, we’ve applied some significant re-balancing effects across the board to level the playing field.

Re-balancing: Levels & Tokens

During normal gameplay, a manager joining the game is level-capped and has to race to earn XP and unlock higher levels. This progress cannot be bought and it prevents any pay-to-win scenarios. For example, if a new manager spent £1,000,000 on tokens, he would not be able to reach the same level as another manager who played for two weeks and spent nothing. That is because you can’t raise the level cap with tokens, only accelerate some items up to the level cap, which is experience-limited.

One abnormal situation created by the migration is managers up to level 20 arriving as “new” players with level 1 facilities. Reaching such high levels would normally take months, and so you would have progressed far beyond level 1 facilities in this time.

Another abnormal scenario from the migration is drivers and staff having skills above the manager’s level cap as they were brought across.

So, to re-balance old teams in the new iGP we have done the following:

• Reduced all driver & staff skills which exceeded a manager’s level cap down to the level cap value (excluding Talent), this should bring the overall levels also in to alignment and massively balance out leagues
• Raised all facilities in the Headquarters to 70% of the manager’s level cap to prevent Token spending on upgrades handing anyone an unfair advantage (Note: If you had spent tokens on an upgrade of a facility, we’ve automatically reimbursed them. You may need to refresh the web app to see this)

[EDIT: It was brought to my attention that not every team had their driver levels reduced appropriately, so I ran a second pass just now (21:23 GMT) over driver skills which will have reduced any that were missed first time around]

Now that we're confident nobody can gain an unfair advantage by using Tokens, as we've levelled the playing field, my personal focus for the remainder of today will be getting the shop online. [Update: As of 16:00 GMT the shop is now online for Tokens purchases]

Over the next few weeks there will be more balancing challenges, but we can anticipate what they will be and we are already working on solutions. For example, a new spies system is in development (although it will not arrive for at least 2 weeks, most likely) which will significantly reduce the advantage that high level teams have if they are in the same league as a much lower level team.

The XP gained after each race is also set to be dynamic very soon, and based on the level of the opposition, meaning you will level up faster if you are racing higher level managers. This will also act as a competition leveller over time, and a good incentive to seek out the strongest opposition.