I absolutely agree with everything you said Pask.
Notice I am also referring only to the online portion of the game. In the offline mode I tend to use the same compound that rest of grid is using and trying to work my way to the victory with the underpowered car. However, that are the restrictions I impose by myself, I am doing that since the GT4 and first introduction of A-Spec points, where me and my friends were competing over the reaching maximum A-Spec points imaginable.
At the end it even led to one of my friends becoming a member of the 100.000 A-Spec Point Club, an achievement so hard that noone who didn't try to reach can even imagine its unique size. But that is another story really.
Above you said truth about tire-grip in GT5, where every *step above* or *step below* adds an X-amount of grip. If I recall well, one of the GTP members calculated that X being 0,6-times more/less grip for every step above/below.
So, although all cars comes with "default" tires, many of them - heck, all of them - have those compounds assigned very arbitrary and under the some "default" logic which we really have no problem with - *stock* cars will forever be the main aspect of GT games - thanx to the fact we can change it.
You are talking about the sliding. And I agree about it, it happens. But I do not find sliding as an consequence per-se, I find it as a way to deliver the information that you're not driving that car accordingly. It is very hard for me to explain, but I will use F355 Challenge game as an example. In order to achieve winning position in F355 Challenge, you had to master the absolute perfection in corner-entrance, acceleration, braking points, overtake sequences, etc. And sliding - and note how F355 Challenge used Racing tires on that one car - was the only way to provide you with the information how you are actually doing something wrong.
That is the exact same logic we try to impose in our GT5 driving. No sliding whatsoever. No touching another car under any circumstances. No leaving the track boundaries under any circumstances (white lines). And no ABS. Which is the single most important factor of them all. No ABS for ANY type of car.
Combine those two principles: imposed tire compound selection in order to match "provisionally accurate" grip-levels - that are "authorized" by our own member who is professional rally racer and car-tester and another one who is professional drifter - with no-ABS and driving etiquette above, results with most memorable virtual racing experience we can imagine.
Here I have to further elaborate on non-ABS to avoid possible confusion. Although vanilla-non-ABS was rubbish, in the current state of the game it is another world really. We concluded how ABS in GT5 is not really an *ABS system*, but in fact some kind of default braking assist that does not simulate ABS-system at all, but just allows more flamboyant braking-policies and - which is most important - drastically kills unique characteristics of the cars.
Of course, running ABS-off calls for proper adjusting of Brake Bias and without it there can't be proper driving sensation. But once you set-up cars with proper balance and take them on the track, whole new world opens. Also, turning off that assist drastically changes the way how car have to be driven and even more drastically changes the in-race behavior of every driver.
Of course, all of us are using wheels, majority having G25/27, some DFGT is here and there and two of us are currently lucky owners of the CSRE. But we can all cope with the same *philosophy* because imposed *rules* are resulting with great focus, great level of immersion and at the end - great races.
Also I'd like to use this particular discussion to quote the picture below, which is the excerption from the GT5: Prologue Japanese manual, where PD took their time to make an *suggestion* about what cars should use which type of tires for making them as close as real-world default tire-compound - that was naturally presented for the vanilla-edition of GT5
. Notice how this chart was made in good will backthen, but after updates in GT5
and in early stages of GT5 release, it could not be used as an guideline. But after the GT5 Spec 2.0 update we again found it extremely accurate.
Values in the left column are proposed default tires while values in the right column are the grip-level of the fitted default compound after the tire has reached it's heated-state (grip peak).
To end this long post I just want to conclude how everyone should drive as he want and great thing about GT5 is how it allows exactly that. We are not really trying to make our racing hard and non-fun - it serves no purpose but self-proclaimed elitism, which is funny by default - we just try to make it as convincing and close to RL as possible. We consider ourselves lucky because we managed to build such small but dedicated community which had enough lure to attract even professional drivers who were very interested in sharing their insights with us. All I written above is product of brainstorming and hours of independent testing of almost dozen of people. And having a possibility to use all above conclusions and have a great races as result is the greatest prize imaginable.
