Gift Cars ..... N100s?

[crashbangouch]

67 Gift Cars and only 2 N100s, the Honda Beat '91 and the Abarth 500 '09

I gave up waiting for the N100 gifts so I just bought the lot. 19 plus 2 I'd bought previous (Sambabus & Copen) and the 2 gifts. I didn't realise there's 23 N100 cars! And now I have them all

 

[Baka_Marimo]

I've been spinning the wheel every day for just over a year and keeping record of all the cars that were on it. Here's how many times I've seen the (cheap) N100 cars that I'm still missing:

Mazda Roadster S (ND) '15: 4 Times
Fiat 500 1.2 8V Lounge SS '08: 3 Times
Honda S660 '15: 2 Times
Volkswagen Golf I GTI '83: 2 Times
Honda Beat '91: Never

Just to put that into perspective, here's how many times I've spotted the most expensive cars:

Ford Mark IV Race Car '67: 7 Times
Jaguar XJ13 '66: 5 Times
Ferrari 330 P4 '67: 3 Times
Ferrari 250 GTO CN.3729GT '62: 1 Time

Players give the wheel a lot of hate for being stingy with pricy vehicles but according to my experience that's only part of the truth. The wheel has a strong tendency to give out race cars which makes sense, seeing how heavily the game relies on them in competetive play. However beyond that I've been struggling to pinpoint any specific tendencies towards (or away from) cars of a certain price range.

 

[Famine]

wheel has a strong tendency

While it might appear that way, it almost certainly has no tendency to anything. Everything we know about it strongly suggests that the wheel is simply showing you the result of you progressing from one number on a billions-long list to the next.

Put simply, every car in GT Sport has a CarID number. I don't have a full list of CarIDs (I ran out of interest in it), but I can say that sometimes it works how you think it should, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it switches between different ways that make sense. Sometimes it seems alphabetical (Abarth 500 is one of the lowest at 1973, but the Alfa Mito is lower at 1933, and so is the Audi R18 TDI at 1965; the lowest I checked is the Eunos Roadster at 0201), sometimes in groups (BMW Gr4 is 3245, Bugatti Gr4 is 3246, Chevrolet Gr4 is 3247,Citroen Gr4 is 3248, Dodge Gr4 is 3249, then the next Gr.4, the Ferrari, is 3263).

The Wheel of Misfortune simply seems to have an enormous list of CarIDs and when you meet the requirements (driving 26.2 miles in one calendar day) you get the next number on the list.

It also seems like some CarIDs on the list aren't valid CarIDs, and when it encounters a non-valid one it probably pulls the nearest valid CarID to that. This explains its behaviours - one of which being how it changes what car it gives you after a content update - and also allows for expansion of the list through adding DLCs.


To make this as simple as possible, imagine GT Sport has two cars, CarID 0001 and CarID 0002. The WOM has a list of numbers from 0001 to 0002 and moves from one to the next every time you meet the requirements.

You can easily see how that would, over time, give you exactly what you expect: half the time you get 0001 and the other half you get 0002.

Now imagine that PD planned to expand the game with one more car, so it gave the WOM a list of numbers from 0001 to 0003. Initially, 0003 isn't a valid CarID, so instead of picking 0003 it rolls over to 0001.

That would result in 66% 0001 and 33% 0002. To you that would look like the WOM is programmed to give you more 0001s than 0002s, but that's just a consequence not an intent. Then along comes an update, the car with CarID 0003 is added, and now the WOM gives you each car a third of the time; it hasn't changed at all, but the cars it produces have.

You can see how that gets dramatically larger with a larger list of CarIDs. Sticking with just the two cars but a list from 0001 to 0005 would give you the car with CarID 0001 80% of the time. Add a third car with the CarID of 0004 (not 0003) and you'd get 0001 40% of the time, 0004 40% of the time, and 0002 20% of the time.

That gives the impression that certain cars are favoured - and which ones are favoured changes with content updates - but it's just not the case. It's an emergent behaviour, not something intended.


I don't know the range of GT Sport's list, but I can say that the CarID range is at least 0201 to 3364 (because that's all the numbers I found before I stopped caring) and probably much larger. That's at least 3163 CarID numbers for at most 323 cars (the WOM cannot give you 13 of the cars: the Pace Cars and Gr3/GrB Road Cars), which means that almost one in ten CarIDs on the Daily Marathon list are invalid and will be skipped.

This is almost certainly what generates the wildly disproportionate appearance, or lack of appearance, for certain cars. It looks like the Gr.3 and Gr.4 cars are clustered around certain regions of CarID numbers, so you are far more likely to see either the first or last (depending on how WOM finds the nearest CarID, looking up or down) cars in those groupings than you are to see others in the middle. There may well be other patterns in how the CarIDs are grouped, but I haven't looked any further into it once I realised how largely pointless it would be.

 

[HarVee]

After reading your informative post Famine, I wonder what conditions need to be met to trigger the WOM to give you a unicorn car? I've tried getting one since I got the game last year and I've yet to get one from the wheel. I've tried everything from having no cars in my garage to having them all except the unicorns. I've tried having 20mil in the bank and having no money in the bank... nothing worked. I was lucky enough to get the P4 as a birthday gift on an alt account, but I feel that may have just been a one-off random chance.

 

[Famine]

I wonder what conditions need to be met to trigger the WOM to give you a unicorn car?

None at all. It only cares that you have done your Daily Marathon/Workout of 26.2 miles. If that happens, it moves to the next CarID on the list - assuming it works the way I say I think it does.

We do know that it can't be influenced or changed by anything else you do though - that's part of the evidence behind it.

 

[HarVee]

Well that sucks. But thanks for confirmation. 👍

 

[Baka_Marimo]

@Famine What do I need to do this kind of research? A jailbroken PS4 and/or datamining skills?

 

[Famine]

@Famine What do I need to do this kind of research? A jailbroken PS4 and/or datamining skills?

No idea. Ultimately it's a theory, which is why I'm not stating it definitively in my post. The key bits of evidence are the fact you'll always get the same cars in the same order if you start a new game within the same game version number no matter what you do, the distribution of CarID values, and the fact that the GT5 Used Car Dealership did literally the exact same thing (but it seemed to start everyone off within one of two small ranges in a four billion-day long list).

It might be totally wrong, but it entirely explains every observed behaviour: the preset nature, the seemingly non-random vehicle distribution, the fact it changes each update, and so on.

I absolutely cannot even begin to guess where the other three cars on the WOM come from though. Could be a totally random process, but it's immaterial because you'll never win them.

 

[crashbangouch]

I've been seeing this a lot on here, but what is a Unicorn car? Is it a car that no one has seen but it's in the system somewhere?

 

[Famine]

I've been seeing this a lot on here, but what is a Unicorn car? Is it a car that no one has seen but it's in the system somewhere?

It's just gaming parlance for rare (usually expensive) things. In this case it's the super expensive old cars - Jaguar XJ13, Ford MkIV, Ferrari 330, Cobra Daytona, and so on.

 

[Satomiblood]

After reading your informative post Famine, I wonder what conditions need to be met to trigger the WOM to give you a unicorn car? I've tried getting one since I got the game last year and I've yet to get one from the wheel. I've tried everything from having no cars in my garage to having them all except the unicorns. I've tried having 20mil in the bank and having no money in the bank... nothing worked. I was lucky enough to get the P4 as a birthday gift on an alt account, but I feel that may have just been a one-off random chance.

Ive been playing since launch and have never once scored a unicorn car on the daily wheel. Every once in a while, I’ll see the silhouette of a unicorn car, but it’ll always dole out the one right before or right after said car. And usually, the car that I do end up winning instead is almost always a variation of the Toyota 86 (N200 or Gr. 4).

 

[05XR8]

One thing I have done to see what I get, are multiple accounts(mine and using family members that are linked to my PS4, but don't play GTS). Some accounts before and after updates.

My main account from March 2018, is the only account that has given me the Megane as my First Car. The other accounts have given TTs(2), Genesis(2), WRX(1) and EVO(1).
In those accounts, doing Circuit Experience, I've gotten more race cars. When doing DWG, I've gotten more high priced cars. As Famine mentions, the added cars play into my main account when I start a new game. However, I've mentioned in other threads, I get the same Circuit Experience, Driving School and Mission Challenge cars. BUT!... in a past new start, I usually got a black TRD Tundra after that update. With a restart, I got the Miura that is before the Tundra, once.
Now, for the past umpteen restarts, I still get the Tundra.

My main account is the only one that gets more N100 cars than the others.

Edit": The two N100s I got back to back.