After the change to 4x tire wear in medium length lobbies, hards no stop has become a dominant strategy in the GT hopper, with some exceptions.
Reverting the tire wear change while keeping the extra lap added in update 13 would probably solve the issue and introduce more interesting strategies into the mix.
Adding a mandatory pit and/or a forced compound change would also force different strategies
We did a ton of testing last night and around most tracks it’s not even close. The occasional soft-soft strategy is viable and faster if the pit lane is super short but otherwise no-stopping hard tires is unmatched.
This makes the game incredibly boring in medium-length races. Nobody likes driving around with minimal grip for 20 minutes straight just to have a shot at a decent result.
Adding a mandatory stop would just force drivers into the cars that can run a soft-soft strategy, so I don’t think that solution by itself works. I’m hesitant to ask for the tire wear to be bumped back up to 6.0x because that would effectively force drivers to run a medium-medium strategy and suffer through severe tire wear for a lap or two which no one wants.
Increasing tire wear to 5.0x and mandating a pitstop is probably the only viable solution that allows for some degree of creative freedom with the strategy. Races would feature medium-soft or soft-medium strategies.
If you consider making a change, please test this extensively or ask the community to help test this. It should not be difficult to get accurate data on the expected race times for every track and strategy permutation. It really only requires two people of comparable pace driving the same track on different strategies to figure out whether there is a clearly optimal strategy or if the varying strategies are competitive.
Worth sharing findings in the discussion thread so more people see it.
I haven’t tested yet (outside of a few races in the M1 Procar) but I reckon no-stop is the optimal strategy in all short/medium races now across all playlists. It was already marginal in high wear Short races before the update.