Thread:IFresternoch/@comment-25956839-20180408101410/@comment-28169398-20180409022900

The whole idea of pay out per minute is untenable. There is far too much variability in player ability levels, Assists versus unassisted, cuts versus clean laps, TSM bot draws or even Off-line bot lap times. Players need to race faster against darknezz than they do against The Brioche.

Take into account that bots can pit other bots and you can't really determine if an average difficulty bots time is representative, as you have no way of knowing if that bot is pitted, damaged, etc. Also average bot really does nothing for you either. It would need to be the time of the second place bot, as you have to beat that bot to get the benefit of the best reward. And again you will go from Existent to Auralpod and there will be a huge variance in those race times.

You could try to get data from many racers and average that, but there will be significant spread in the data, and the average would be meaningless to both tails of the distribution.

Also the constant adjustment of TSM means that the more you try to optimize Reward per Minute the more difficult your races get until you reach a point where you will face bots you cannot beat or don't want to put that much effort into beating. This means reduced payouts and loss of Crew bonuses, which significantly reduce the Reward per Minute for the race.

I see the benefit of this list as an assistance to career strategy. What cars do you want to get when? What series and cars should you skip? What cars should be upgraded and to how much? Basically it should be a list that leads to the must have cars and the must unlock series and races in the game.

I also don't think Reward per Minute is a useful metric, because it masks the races to run with bonuses, such as first race of the day bonus, agent 2x, etc.

There is also the situation that running a "shorter race" that has a higher "Reward per Minute" may actually be disadvantageous, because you end up with Start and End screen sequences that usually aren't included in the calculus of Reward Per Minute and would be completely lost with the use of an average bot time. Even this is variable. The screens take considerably less time to load on my iPhone 6s than they do on my iPad Air. So add another variable that it becomes device specific as to the Reward per Minute.

Then there is the consideration that you may not be able to run enough of the lower lap more profitable races to make up for the reward from a single race, due to repair times. You could get around this by never servicing farming cars and slowing the races to the point where they are winnable, but this would yet again defeat the purpose of stating Rewards per Minute.

The best approach would be simply to list the objective data and then instruct people on how they can determine their own reward per minute. This means #Laps, Distance per lap and car stats. And they could be instructed to take into account all of the variables above and why they should be considering them in their calculations.

As for the criteria, I would list at most 2 to 3 races from each group that were the most profitable single races for that group. So in Amateur it would be Event 14.3 Street-Spec Skirmish. For Expert 22.3 in Accolade Open, etc. In Legend of course it is the three 10-lap races.

Unguaranteed payouts should also be excluded. So no perpetual endurance races.