@K3Tuning like I and most shifter owners said, we completely agree the advantage was not acceptable for FIA races. But what you fail to see is that breaking the shifters entirely beyond use was unecessary when there are several other possibilities which don't break anything while being simpler to implement (and also even balance out BoP better), like improving "regular" shifts or forcing sequential gearbox when BoP is activated. The current system could even be counterproductive.
Right now, the FIA seasons are as far away from being fair as they could be even after this update, mainly because of the whole format and points system (I won't go into details, but expect to see a collaborative work from top players on that subject soon). Add to that the live events, which despite being great from a show standpoint, are utterly ridiculous on the sporting side of things, the lack of real prizes, possibilities for sponsors to get visibility and teams being completely ignored : GT Sport can't be seriously taken as an e-sport in the current state of things, regardless of how hard they try to market it as an e-sport focused game.
And that doesn't even matter that much : a vast majority of players never did FIA races, actually the number of players having entered at least one sport race is extremely low. And that's not even abnormal : it's the same thing for even the biggest titles in e-sports, like Counter Strike, Starcraft or Overwatch. Most of the player base actually never does competitive stuff. These games all make changes to balance things for competitions, but they don't just sacrifice completely something for the sake of fairness. Those games are successful in e-sports because they sell a lot, but more importantly because a lot of people keep playing them. So you NEED to keep the game enjoyable even for those who don't take part into the competitions, because if you lose players, you will also lose viewers. This is even worse in the present case because it touches people who actually spent real life money to be able to use a feature for the sake of enjoyment.
What's baffling me is that Polyphony actually held a meeting with a bunch of last year's finalists, who brought the shifter advantage for road cars to light and explicitely suggested to make the regular shifts faster. They pretty much did the opposite (as they did with other suggestions that were made there, which is driving competitive players nuts right now).
So no, you can't just point and laugh at people who own some hardware you don't have because there's a competitive mode in the game. So far in this poll, nearly 70% are unhappy with that. If all those players leave for another racing game instead, that would hurt the game greatly, including the competitive side.
I get it that some want that pure emersion but this is not the game for that. This is an E-Sports branch off where fairness is priority, I'm not selfish I believe that fairness for everybody is worth the sacrifice.
