Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-29746749-20190409133748/@comment-28169398-20190409172153

RR3Level500 wrote: I had some quesitons that Game Changers may be able to answer. Please, no speculation. If the answer is unknown, that's fine too.

1-For upcoming releases, when is it decided which cars will get ES? As in, how far in advance before the release drops to those decisions have to be made? I guess a better question is how far before the ANNOUNCEMENT do these decisions have to be made?

2-How far before the next release are these decisions "locked in" and the ES decision can not be changed?

3-Not that FM would ever do this, but is it technically possible to make changes after the official announcement? I don't care about the ethics of the question, just whether it is technically possible.

For example, lets say (HYPOTHETICALLY) that FM wants the new Caddy to get an ES in 7.3. But later on, they want to change it to one of the new Hondas. How far before the official update announcement can they do that?

Thanks in advance. 1- We haven't been told about ES's in advance. However, given that releases are ready to go at least approximately two months in advance of the release, and they were planned several months before that, Matt and team likely have decided which cars get ESs 6-12 months ago.

2- It can take a few days for them to tune the difficulty levels for a series. They need to run simulations for each race/event with each type of car in it. So realistically probably a week or two before packaging. Again, Game Changers have been given an explanation of the general idea of the process, but none of the specifics to actual timing.

3- No, unless a game killing bug shows up that needs to be fixed. As I said above, the release has been set and ready to go at least a month before the announcement is made. The release is sent to Apple and Google and it needs to go through a validation process there before the release date. Any changes, in other words a X.X.1, X.X.2 that gets sent to the app stores incur additional costs and would therefore only ever be done in the event of a critical bug.

That being said, events within series can be changed with a data push, as you are downloading all of that data from FM after you download the Update, but the framework is within the update from the appstore, you are only getting the details from the FM servers.

Some of the ESs for older cars that you have seen recently are based on data. If a car is under represented in the player population then the decision may be made to add it to another series, if it is a fit, or an ES as an additional incentive to get new players to get the car.

Remember there are costs associated with the license for each of the cars. If there are fewer people owning the cars all with fewer upgrades that you estimated, then you are losing money on that license and offering a rebate in the form of Completion Rewards to a new series is a way to try to get back to even.