GT7 vs GT4. An unlikely, but necessary comparison.

The custom race tool is a great addition in principal, though sadly it is poorly executed in too many ways (AI, difficulty and payouts all being very poor). However, not everyone wants a sandbox, curating the content into a game play design is content. I get your point, but you need to understand opposing views as well. Ultimately, why not have both. But as it stands, GT7's custom races aren't great, and the career is even worse. PD have done a hash job on both.

Personally I want something like a custom race tool to be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself, that should be the main career aspect of the game. Others would prefer everything to be unlocked at the start and for it to be one big sandbox. I am fine with that, that's just a case of personal prferences differing.

In a perfect GT I'd like them to implement custom races and championships you can create, share and add to your career mode with payouts and rewards comparable to the rest of the career. They should also give full control over the AI difficulty, race format (grid starts, chase the rabbit, rolling grid etc.) as the custom race tool currently does. Having custom races/championships made by players avaialbe for everyone to download where you can set the AI to be easy as the Sunday Cup races or as hard as some of the Clubman Cup + races would be immense. However, it would also destroy PD's plan of drip feeding content to us over time keeping whales engaged.
Custom races are objectively better than that conga line garbage PD put's out, some of us have made genuinely great races. Some of you think adding 300 conga line races will make the game better. Wow, a new event that involves me starting in the back and passing every slow car except the rabbit by turn 3 ? WOW, what a banger! Let me do that 300 more times!

IF PD allowed us to share events with the community and gave us a bit more presets in custom race GT7 would **** all over every other GranTurismo ever made! In theory, they already have that technology as the race IS saved in a replay file for any one to view, iveries and all. There are entire games that rise on UGC and Polyphony is on the cusp of that.
 
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Custom races are objectively better than that conga line garbage PD put's out, some of us have made genuinely great races. Some of you think adding 300 conga line races will make the game better. Wow, a new event that involves me starting in the back and passing every slow car except the rabbit by turn 3 ? WOW, what a banger! Let me do that 300 more times!

Where did I say that? However, for the absence of doubt I fail to see how the actual racing in either is better than the other. The conga line races often present more of a challenge, but yes they aren't great nor do they represent most actual motorpsorts. This is also a major criticism of mine. But the AI in custom races don't put up a challenge either, if I'm not ahead by the end of lap 1 I've usually made a mistake.

IF PD allowed us to share events with the community and gave us a bit more presets in custom race GT7 would **** all over every other GranTurismo ever made! In theory, they already have that technology as the race IS saved in a replay file for any one to view, iveries and all. There are entire games that rise on UGC and Polyphony is on the cusp of that.
Agreed, if we had the level of control and freedom from my previous post it would improve GT7 immensely. GT7 clearly has the potential to be the best GT game to date, but the decisions made make it arguably the most frustrating/dissapointing one instead. It's not the worst, but it has failed to meet expectations.
 
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With GT4 I want to add one important feature this game has: A-spec points!

This is basically additional game in the game. With all events completed and 100% progression made I found tons of fun and serious challenge in winning races with cars as weak as possible for maximum A-spec points.

There was even 100.000 A-spec points club on this forum back in the day (still is deep in the archives) as reaching 100k points was a feat in itself.

Actually I found a screen of my final GT4 status with my points tally - still proud of this one.

GT4-gamestatus.jpg
 
Where did I say that? However, for the absence of doubt I fail to see how the actual racing in either is better than the other. The conga line races often present more of a challenge, but yes they aren't great nor do they represent most actual motorpsorts. This is also a major criticism of mine. But the AI in custom races don't put up a challenge either, if I'm not ahead by the end of lap 1 I've usually made a mistake.


Agreed, if we had the level of control and freedom from my previous post it would improve GT7 immensely. GT7 clearly has the potential to be the best GT game to date, but the decisions made make it arguably the most frustrating/dissapointing one instead. It's not the worst, but it has failed to meet expectations.
I have made plenty of custom race's with fast AI, which did not involve me handicapping my car aside from running a lower compound tire to make up for the fact the AI has all assist on. The AI is decent in this game PD just never gave it a chance to shine outside of some chili pepper races .
 
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I have made plenty of custom race's with fast AI, which did not involve me handicapping my car aside from running a lower compound tire to make up for the fact the AI has all assist on. The AI is decent in this game PD just never gave it a chance to shine outside of some chili pepper races .
You shouldn't have to handicap your car at all to be able to have a good race. I've already addressed that there are some good races in GT7, but they are few and far between and we cannot create great custom races with the AI at that level. The AI don't even use full acceleration in custom races and they also follow scripted behaviour to enable you to catch up if you are behind late in the race. It's not good what we currently have outside of a very small number of races in World Circuits.
 
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The AI lets you catch up even at the last straight before the finish line. I had a few AI on Professional slowed down to a crawl and let me pass them when the finish line is just right in front of them.
This was when I set up a group C race in Nordschleife with all cars being stock.
 
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You shouldn't have to handicap your car at all to be able to have a good race. I've already addressed that there are some good races in GT7, but they are few and far between and we cannot create great custom races with the AI at that level. The AI don't even use full acceleration in custom races and they also follow scripted behaviour to enable you to catch up if you are behind late in the race. It's not good what we currently have outside of a very small number of races in World Circuits.
The AI is handicapped with all the assist on and their throttle is limited to 90%, so no you are 100% wrong, I'm not handicapping anything, I'm making the race fair. Also rubberbanding has been thoroughly debunked outside of endurance races.

If you can't create a good race you are bad at making races, we have people there making races where the AI finishes ahead of them by fractions of a second, and the spread between car groups is incredibly close. How is that not a good race?
 
The AI is handicapped with all the assist on and their throttle is limited to 90%, so no you are 100% wrong, I'm not handicapping anything, I'm making the race fair. Also rubberbanding has been thoroughly debunked outside of endurance races.

If you can't create a good race you are bad at making races, we have people there making races where the AI finishes ahead of them by fractions of a second, and the spread between car groups is incredibly close. How is that not a good race?
My point....




Your head.

You are absolutely confirming I am 100% correct. You have to handicap yourself to make a race competitive.
 
My point....




Your head.

You are absolutely confirming I am 100% correct. You have to handicap yourself to make a race competitive.
No, you are intentionally ignoring the fact the AI is at a disadvantage to the frame of what I am doing as handicapping myself. The AI are inherently at a disadvantage due to having ALL the assist turned on which makes them slower than anyone who disables the assist. That's like saying I'm handicapping myself for lowering the HP in my car to have a fair race when the AI car has 100 hp less than me. A handicap by definition is giving the unskilled competitor an edge over me, I'm not giving them an edge at all though because I'm already at a huge advantage without running assist on as my cornering speed is much much higher than theirs with the same compound, I'm simply reducing MY unfair advantage NOT giving THEM an advantage and thus I am not handicapping at all.


Handicapping, in sport and games, is the practice of assigning advantage through scoring compensation or other advantage given to different contestants to equalize the chances of winning.

Also, let's just ignore the fact people have posted close races on the Custom race thread. if you adjust the AI by the power to weight and have similar gearing, the races are pretty spot on.

Some of you don't even own the game so you can't speak on that either.
 
No, you are intentionally ignoring the fact the AI is at a disadvantage to the frame of what I am doing as handicapping myself. The AI are inherently at a disadvantage due to having ALL the assist turned on which makes them slower than anyone who disables the assist. That's like saying I'm handicapping myself for lowering the HP in my car to have a fair race when the AI car has 100 hp less than me. A handicap by definition is giving the unskilled competitor an edge over me, I'm not giving them an edge at all though because I'm already at a huge advantage without running assist on as my cornering speed is much much higher than theirs with the same compound, I'm simply reducing MY unfair advantage NOT giving THEM an advantage and thus I am not handicapping at all.


Handicapping, in sport and games, is the practice of assigning advantage through scoring compensation or other advantage given to different contestants to equalize the chances of winning.

Also, let's just ignore the fact people have posted close races on the Custom race thread. if you adjust the AI by the power to weight and have similar gearing, the races are pretty spot on.

Some of you don't even own the game so you can't speak on that either.
Handicap: "act as an impediment to." you are acting as an impediment to yourself. You are also using worse tyres to allow the AI the advantage of having better tyres to equalise the chances of winning. So both the general definition and yours back me up.

But importantly, you only have to do this because the AI is poor for various reasons (and no, even without assists the AI at 3 chillies isn't competetive against a half competent player). That is my point. You are both admitting to this and arguing against it in tandem.

I'm not ignoring anything, but close custom races are not as easy as picking an event, which is what the game should be offering. None of this justifies that both the custom races and world circuits events are not done as well as they should be.
 
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Handicap: "act as an impediment to." you are acting as an impediment to yourself. You are also using worse tyres to allow the AI the advantage of having better tyres to equalise the chances of winning. So both the general definition and yours back me up.
100% agree here. You shouldn't have to go down a grade of tyres for a decent race.
But importantly, you only have to do this because the AI is poor for various reasons (and no, even without assists the AI at 3 chillies isn't competetive against a half competent player). That is my point. You are both admitting to this and arguing against it in tandem.
While the AI are still poor in many respects I'm not fully in agreeance here. The AI aren't competitive in the 3 chilli races if you use the best cars but they can be if you don't.

It's sites like this one (with all due respect to this great site), YouTube, Reddit etc that make it far too easy these days to find out that 'best car' that are part of the issue here. There would be, and can be without internet searching, far more trial and error to get that perfect combination of car, tune and strategy to win many of the races without this advantage.

I wouldn't necessarily call this handicapping, and it's how I play the game... well, every game really. I only ever resort to internet searches just before I put the controller through the TV (so to speak :P), but I'm also very patient (and stubborn) so that could be after weeks of being stuck on something until I figure it out.

Sometimes, and this is where the stubbornness comes in, I just get that determined that I'm going to beat a race with a particular car, and it's usually a car I just love to drive that fits the race criteria rather than it being handicapped, that it's ridiculous (and this holds true for all race games, not just this one). :embarrassed:
I'm not ignoring anything, but close custom races are not as easy as picking an event, which is what the game should be offering. None of this justifies that both the custom races and world circuits events are done as well as they should be.
Again, 100% agree here. As many of us here have been saying for years, the two slider system that many other games have works extremely well so why not include it.
 
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