What i can't understand is how it is still allowed to happen after so many updates.
I think that makes it quite clear this is how PD intends for the system to work, then.
The game should match drivers equally. D with D, B with B and so forth. A D-S driver should only ever be matched with a grid of other D-S drivers as should A-S drivers only be mixed with A-S drivers and the same for every other combo too. Seriously, how hard can i be to implement a fair system?! It totally puts me off racing when you know you cant make any progress.
It should — and in fact, that’s how Sport Mode was/is advertised. But it doesn’t. For whatever reason, there’s a large preference for the game to populate lobbies based on SR and seemingly no (or little) consideration for DR.
Part of this is likely due to the number of players just not touching Sport Mode. But it’s exacerbated by PD’s algorithms.
You should relax and accept the fact you aren't the fastest.
I've spent several evenings as a B-S driver racing A+'s and S's. If you're not the fastest you have to learn to accept that and pick your battles.
That’s odd advice, given one of the major selling points of GTS was that it would do the (fair, supposedly) picking for you.
Populating a room with 20 racers spread across over a dozen seconds on their qualifying lap alone, for a four-lap race that might last 15 minutes, doesn’t produce close or exciting racing.
It’s a shame, because when I have been paired off with genuinely similar racers in
both ratings, it’s often resulted in the sorts of races that have me repeating “just one more race”. But it’s a bit of a crap-shoot to be honest, and there’s a lot of little aspects of Sport Mode that I think make it unappealing to the majority of the user base (which, judging by trophy percentages, it is):
- Piddly pay-outs: if it's the most important mode of the game, which is what we've been told a few times — specifically about the name of the game — it shouldn't have the worst pay-outs.
- Inconsistent match-making: I had a race yesterday where I qualified fifth, and thanks to a very consistent race and some accidents up ahead, I won. I managed to improve my qualifying time by 0.25 between rounds — and was put in a lobby with the fastest person 1.5 seconds faster than me, and I qualified down in 12th.
- The dire lack of races. It's quite honestly mind-boggling that PD believes three races (not counting the FIA events) is enough, and it's doubly bad now that it's a weekly selection. If casuals don't like the selection, they won't touch the mode for an entire week. I didn't bother with them last week because none interested me, either.
This is actually the biggest issue the 'slow and average' drivers have imho, much more than matchmaking. If you think you've reached a 'peak' whilst being over 5 seconds a lap slower on a normal lap then you've mentally given up already. I wouldn't say 'lazy' because I saw someone get grief for that a few weeks ago, but he wasn't far off.
It tends to be the aliens that think other players just aren't putting in enough effort when they talk of not being fast enough. Some people will simply never be able to match the reaction times and hand/eye coordination of others. Hell, I know I'm not as fast in racing games as I was over a decade ago, when I managed to win a province-wide competition in GT4.
There's also the small matter that these are still, at the end of the day,
video games. A balance between fun and work ("git gud") is necessary — and admittedly, everyone will find the point between the two to be different. But this is a game where the main USP was arguably "race against people of a similar skill level to you"; if that's not working, that's not the players' faults.
