When will 1.09 be released?

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@Man0maN13000 wrote:
If you fix something you might as well make a patch, and when you fix something else you might as well make another patch.
Already the small patches bring bugs

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And that's exactly the problem: When a developer fixes something small in a project this big (i.e. any major video game release), if they are inexperienced they might assume their change can't possibly break anything else in the game, but that's rarely the reality. The smallest change in one place can have big knock-on effects in another place. If they're careful, they might catch additional problems that might arise, but usually something slips through. And even if they do catch the new issues, they take time to fix too. And cause more issues. And so on.

So for even the smallest, quickest changes, ideally you would check everything, all over again. But what does everything mean here? Are they going to test all 10 seasons of career, co-op career (with players on LAN, on WIFI, in different parts of the world?), My Team (what about starting new with an existing team versus starting with your own team, or loading old saves and seeing if they still work?), League racing (5 lap races, 25%, 100%, 5 players, 20 players?), test every time trial track (with equal cars; realistic cars; in the dry; in the wet?). That list is basically endless.

So when the community finds an issue and demands a patch, and the team goes off and reproduces that problem and comes up with a potential fix for it they can either:

1. Immediately release a fix: This will almost definitely create a new problem somewhere else. And the new problem could be worse than the thing they were trying to fix in the first place.
2. Wait and test their fix properly: During this period other things will likely get fixed, which means testing takes even longer, and they'll probably find new issues along the way. So at some point they have to decide if the remaining issues should be fixed before releasing the next patch, or just to get the patch out sooner and deal with the other issues later.

So that's how we end up with issues like the tire temperatures on the formation lap creeping in: The team trying to get patches out to fix issues the community keeps complaining about every day. This is why some games only get patches every few months: They team is making sure they've fixed everything without adding new problems.

Not to mention, it takes ages to get patches out, especially on consoles. You need to send your patch to Microsoft/Sony, who will test it themselves thoroughly before signing off on it. If Sony turn around four days later and say that there's a problem (for example, imagine your new patch broke the trophies on PS5), the team has to go back, find that issue, fix it, build a new patch, test it again, submit it again, wait another week etc etc. It's a really looooooooong, tedious process.

First lap time problem is very annoying. It's breaking fastest lap times.

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@Man0maN13000 wrote:
And also the games that receive updates several months later are not annual games, if players cannot take full advantage of an annual game before the release of the next one, they will no longer take this annual game, so I think that the annual games have very large and efficient teams for the patches otherwise it kills their license.

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Just because a game is an annual release, or not, doesn't change the decision making process that the developers have to do: They either continuously rush patches out and cause new problems (e.g. you're talking about the automatic gears issue that got introduced by fixing other issues like the traction issues / AI straight line speed issues), or they wait a bit longer and try to make sure that nothing worse is introduced. I get that you consider the automatic gears issue to be critical to you, but I'm pretty sure you'd rather wait an extra week to get that fixed if it means it doesn't bring in some new, way worse issue (e.g. imagine them accidentally introducing an issue that corrupts the career save every few races).

@TribladezI agree with you, but you will also agree with me that an annual game if they release an update every 6 months, at the 2nd update the next game will already be released. That's why I think the update team is strong and we had an update every 15 days (on average)
And I honestly think that the bugs that appear once the update updated, it's because it's only then that we can see the bug and not before by the control team, because we are thousands of beta testers, I think that all of us players 1 day of games represents several weeks of testing by their teams, this is also why they are very attentive to comments on the forum and why moderators, admins and those who report bugs are very active.

@IleleeeThe annual games should find another format.

I will take the F1 games for example:
I think they have to find satisfactory graphics, a good physics engine and for 5 years bug fixes and only license updates (drivers, teams, cars, everything that needs to be updated) every years and the 5th year, new graphic engine, new physics and new things like F1 life (even if I don't find it incredible in the state) or other like use other driver for F1 hulk, vandoorn, de vries, and other in contract with f1 team.

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@Ileleee wrote:
@TribladezAs somebody who has worked in the software industry as developer, designer for over 20 years

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Well, hello fellow designer (I'm also a games designer/programmer for 20+ years)  🙂

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it's usually not the developers who do these decisions, it's the managers.

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I'm also trying to keep the conversation high level so I'm using 'developers' (as in 'development team') to cover the entire team, from the producers to the QA leads to the people doing the actual implementation. Obviously this is a big, complicated problem with lots of moving parts/people involved, and I'm simply responding to the earlier point in the thread of 'why don't they just immediately throw out every fix they have as soon as its ready to go'. We both know that approach is likely to do more harm than good.

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@Man0maN13000 wrote:

I agree with you, but you will also agree with me that an annual game if they release an update every 6 months, at the 2nd update the next game will already be released.

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Oh, I'm not making any point in either direction about how fast I believe they should/shouldn't release their patches and you're totally entitled to your own opinion about it. Obviously I'd love to have the issues I'm experiencing with the game fixed ASAP (although I'd prefer the game didn't have any at all to start with, but that's unrealistic). As I said above, I'm just pointing out that throwing things out as soon as a fix is created is not a good strategy and these things take time to do correctly.

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@Man0maN13000 wrote:

this is also why they are very attentive to comments on the forum and why moderators, admins and those who report bugs are very active.

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Definitely have to disagree with you there. I've personally spent multiple hours collecting information about the bugs in this game, putting together videos explaining exactly what is happening, when and why, and creating/updating detailed posts on these forums and I've yet to have either a developer or moderator of these forums even once acknowledge any of the issues that I've mentioned, let alone give me any sort of update as to their status. I genuinely don't know if they have found the issues themselves, have any intention to fix them, if they are on a list somewhere, or if they have decided they're not worth fixing / can't reproduce them. Certainly none of them have appeared on that community issues list, although one of them did get (partially) fixed in a patch (although again, it was never acknowledged either in my thread, or in the patch notes, so I assume it was already tracked internally before I posted anything about it and got bunded under 'some additional fixes').