In an online protest, GT Sport players have started to boycott the game and upcoming pro races. The main reason being recent changes to the penalty system and also general dissatisfaction with the development of the game.
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Some of the best GT Sport players are currently running an online protest against developer Polyphony Digital. In an online document, GT driver Alessio Ivan Pusceddu calls out severe mistakes in the game and encourages other professional drivers to boycott every FIA GTC race until a patch hits the servers fixing all issues.
“I wanted to make a great 2020 season and qualify for live events, but as soon as I seen how broken this game was, I decided that the health of the community is more important than this, because if the game will remain like this, what will slowly die with it will be this: the community, the family of players which surround and compose the live events, it will be gone and replaced by dirty opportunistic drivers that doesn’t give a damn about the others.”
Criticising the penalty system
The main topic of the protest is the penalty system, which hasn’t been working well for several months. After Polyphony Digital adjusted it around Christmas 2019, there have been almost no penalties, which led to a lot of chaos in the game and in the matchmaking system.
Since mid-March, many players have been complaining about another change in the penalty system. The drivers are getting unreasonably hard penalties in the game, many of them for racing incidents that are not their fault or usually not worth a penalty.
In GT Sport, any penalty will have a negative impact on your Sportsmanship Rating, which is a primary factor in the game’s matchmaking. Since all players are currently receiving many hard penalties, the overall ratings of the players are decreasing, which leads to a huge mess in the matchmaking process.
Although Polyphony Digital announced a patch with an adjustment to the penalty system on 20 March, the protest in the community is still going on. Besides the recent troubles, Pusceddu also criticises other changes to the game:
“As you may know, many of us GT drivers are getting really pissed off about how the game is getting toxic by time, especially for the broken penalty system (…), but also for all the changes which has been made since 2018, with small but continuous mistakes which ruined an almost perfect game like it was in the first ever season.”
Broad following for the protest
From GT series world finalists to national competitors around the globe, more than fifty professional GT drivers have joined the protest. The most prominent name on the list is David Greco, Team Manager of Musto GD eSports Team, official physics designer for F1 at Codemasters and a widely known name in the esports racing scene.
Pusceddu and his supporters are very clear about what they want to achieve:
“I want to change the situation of this game, but i can’t do it all alone, so i’m here to ask you if you want to join this protest against a rotten devs team like Polyphony Digital that literally ignores the feedbacks from our community and puts us in a situation of not manageable pressure.”
So far, there hasn’t been any reaction from Polyphony Digital to the protests and most criticism coming from the community. Given more drivers stepping back from official races, the next weeks and the development in this case will surely be interesting.
Images source: PlayStation
