Talk:Speedrush TV Challenge - Season 4/@comment-173.239.232.48-20190516035630/@comment-27123099-20190517162210

@Eyespy:

I never said the fluid difficulty based on upgrades was a new thing. It's definitely been around awhile, still no less frustrating though. Again, SE's were always designed to allow skill to get you the car (at least that's what they claim). When they change the difficulty based on how many upgrades you have, that's not nearly the same thing IMO, it changes from being about skill to being about how much you paid.

Basically, it just makes it obvious how much funny business happens on the back end to ensure that FM gets the amount of GC they want for each event. Make no mistake, it's not about skill, it's about whether or not you paid the toll. Read through the comments of so many players, that's clearly what occurs.

Regarding your estimate of the expected passage percentages based on player level, I'd say that for the recent SE's, that's probably pretty close to accurate. However, does that seem like it's fair? It's cutting out an awful lot of players with 90% having to spend incredible amounts if they even wish to compete. I really feel like FM has spent so much time worried about the top 1/10 of 1% of players and ensuring that they can't skate through SE's with fewer upgrades that they've completely forgotten about the remaining 99+% of players and how much frustration they are giving to many of of them.

As usual, I'm sure there's a middle ground there which would make all sides happier, but FM is rarely interested in those solutions unfortunately.

In the end, I guess we'll just end up with more of what we've already seen. Fewer SE's (they've already been dying out and this one doesn't seem to signal much of a comeback to me), and more LTS's. They don't have to worry about messing with the difficulty on LTS's, no one is getting through them for less than the cost FM mandates. They like that. They're trying to emulate a similar paywall with SE's, but with poor results. The only way it would change is if they introduced required PR's for SE's instead of recommended ones, then they could drop the charade about SE's being about skill. Not what I'd want to see, but based on where things have headed in recent years, I wouldn't put it past them.