Be as it may, this doesn’t account for the people who have zero problems with it and thus aren’t complaining.
The point of the auction house is to get rid of cars you don’t want to buy cars you do want. But if there’s no currency, you can just get the cars you want. It’s the currency that makes the auction house necessary, not the other way around.
The same goes for tuning and painting. If there were no credits, you’d have no need for compensation. Now would people still make tunes and liveries? I don’t know. I’d like to think yes, I’d like to think deep down they do it out of passion or for the art.
Again, it’s the currency that makes compensation necessary, not the other way around.
To me it’s clear that it does. A starting point would be to measure on average how much money you can spend to buy a car and upgrade it to participate in a career series, double it, and then that should be at minimum the total payout you get at the end of it.
Because half the time I’m losing money by playing the game normally. And I’m playing with the VIP bonus. I can’t imagine standard edition plebs’ faces when they come out of a career event poorer than they entered.
I’m ambivalent on the subject of credits. On the one hand I can see why the developer needs them more than ever as most of their revenue will come from playtime in GP I’d suspect.
On the other hand, video games have always been unique in the entertainment industry. You own the content, yet can’t use it how you want it, it’s always struck me as a bit odd. Be like buying an album and having to listen to all the way through to listen to the last track.
As for how this game does it, I think it strikes a decent balance. You can’t have everything all at once but I can get what I want and need by playing, mostly having fun and getting rewarded for it. I appreciate collectors may feel differently and as with all video games I’ve ever owned I get the argument that you’ve paid for it so want to use / consume it how you see fit.
Maybe there is a car collectors game out there, where they give you 1000 cars and you have only to click on them to get and make photos of them. That would be the game of your choice. Feeels like someone complaining about the missing hockey part in a soccer game.
I think the auction house became its own mini game. I think many people enjoyed grabbing some hard to get car for a cheaper price, or selling a car with a cool paint or tune. I really dont think it was mainly for just selling cars because in many motorsports you were able to just sell it, the auction house was just another option.
I think your economy idea makes sense in a bubble, but people play this game differently. For instance tonight i decided to do the open series career races with the same car. I bought a ford puma for 30k credits or whatever and started in d class, did full practice sessions so i didn’t pay for parts. I dont know how much i made, but it was surely more than double the 30k i paid for the car.
Many people may choose a car with upgrades they already own, so these races will cost nothing. Some people might buy the most expensive car in its class, then pay for upgrades instead of using car points, this might not be the best financial option.
I personally feel balance is needed when it comes to things like this. Swaying the balance towards the extremes isnt going to benefit the most people. Its a difficult decision that will always receive criticism. They just introduced the challenge hub which gives credits with some pretty easy goals, so maybe this will give some players the increase they want. Either way only time will tell, but i dont see them getting rid of the credit system.
The challenge hub definitely seems like an improvement in that regard.
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on the game’s economy. But if you’re mostly or only playing the time limited events, acquiring the necessary cars could cost cost more than what you’d get back.
Now compare that to the cost of some of the cars in each game (especially the vintage car dealer in GT7). GT7’s “real world” economy necessitates the higher credit earnings.
Both earn OK (for me) at a “do my own thing” level.
Last night in GT7 I was tuning and upgrading some 60s American Muscle cars. I think I ran the same race 5 times, different builds each time with a Camaro and Charger. Just running the race those few times, I made back more than I spent on upgrades. Then I bought a Mazda Atenza for $40k, some tires and basic air filter upgrades. Earned it back in two (3 lap) races.
Similar situation in FM. I go buy a Honda, and then spend credits (not waiting to grind car points) on upgrades. I can earn it back in 5 to 8 races, usually.
But for me, things change when it comes to the FM weekly events.
Often the weekly event cars are 150K or more. Then I drive them for 3 to 4 races in the weekly event, but that’s not enough to recover the higher cost of many of the weekly cars.
This means I need to go drive each weekly car in another 4 to 8 events to recover the money. And honestly, many of the weekly cars aren’t what I am interested in, in the first place.
There are some months when the cars really didn’t interest me (and there were like 5 to purchase at $200k each…) that I just didn’t participate at all in the weekly series events. I wasn’t going to drive the cars enough to recover the costs, and didn’t really want to have that large expense on my credit budget.
To be certain, the same thing can happen in GT7 when completing menu books. But the menu books have no time pressures. The GT7 weekly events often include at least 1 or 2 events where I can choose a car that I like. I just skip the weekly events with cars I don’t like, same as FM, except in GT7, I do get incremental rewards if I complete some events.