It appears that, no matter how many times I keep repeating that not ALL offline players are kids (of all ages, I’m primarily referring to the behavior, not the age), so many here seem determined to be offended by including themselves in the whole. That’s YOUR choice, folks, not mine. The fact that you’re here on this forum makes you part of the ‘elite’ some use as a diss (if not, we would have millions posting here!).
Many point to the fact that they don’t like their limited time playing ‘ruined’ by the occasional bad behavior on online, but have happily played GT for over a decade against an AI that ruins the game by being laughably slow and predictable. Personally, I never started to enjoy GT until there was an online component…
Sadly, I feel that the worst thing to happen to the online community has been Sport Mode, and the rise of un-stewarded racing. Iirc, was it GT6 that introduced the ‘Quick Race’ concept of rooms that had artificial stewarding, rather than rooms hosted by actual players, with actual rules, and the ability to kick players who violated them? I remember GTPlanet’s own OLR becoming something of a standard, used in many room titles (‘GTP Clean’).
Quick Race had none of this. Very similarly to Sport Mode, you joined, waited until the room was full, then the race started, and it immediately turned into a kiddie puntfest. Nobody back then took it seriously, the clean online racers were in the well hosted rooms and Leagues. Even then, it was obvious an AI stewarding system was completely incapable of enforcing proper racing etiquette. Personally, I don’t think it has improved one iota. Without a human reviewer, any auto stewarding can be circumvented.
GT Sport started the rot, took Quick Race and turned it, despite it being the least popular form of online racing (you could wait forever for a Quick Race room to fill up, online ‘clean’ rooms filled up rapidly), into the main focus of the game.
The truth is, if you’ve never gone online because of how bad Sport Mode is, join a league. Maybe a Sophy-like AI could be trained to better steward online, but that might be beyond AI’s abilities for another few generations of consoles.
In the meantime, having to nerf your car to ridiculous levels to simply give the AI a chance against you strikes me as no better than going into Sport Mode and taking your chances against the rammers. Neither are in any way believable for a fan of real life motorsports.
That 95% of players (if that stat is believable) choose the lesser of two options doesn’t exactly make me think it’s racing fans, but rather ‘gamers’. But, as part of the ‘elite’ that bother posting about GT, please feel free to try and explain that 95% to me without including yourself in it. You’re here. You care. But you’re not in a League or involved in clean racing rooms…