Just to touch on something about AI difficulty in your first paragraph. Beforehand, I personally don’t have a problem with the difficulty, I’m still racing on 95 with no assists including cockpit cam. What I would ask anyone who thinks it makes sense to increase difficulty so the best players can race AI is… Do you honestly think the BEST players waste their time racing against AI that are flawed anyway?. I can guarantee that while they may make the odd YouTube video racing against AI, they will otherwise not touch ANY offline single player mode so to adjust AI difficulty for players that aren’t going to touch it doesn’t make an ounce of sense beings they’ll purely race online competitively.
@drewgriffithsWell, it really depends about which level you are talking about. The aliens don't really play against other humans either, apart when participating in championships or special events, just because they are so good that they cannot simply find nobody to race against (if not just to have some fun), aside from other aliens like themselves (that however seldomly race without a specific reason, as for most of them sim racing is a job). Aliens mainly do laps after laps by themselves in preparation for whichever competitive race they will participate next. Sadly that's the nature of sim racing: the more you advance and the less options you will have.
Apart from them, even very good players have different things they like and I know many, in fact, that actually like to play against AI, it is just that very few sim racing games even care to put time on developing challenging AI and practically only the CM games actually have a true dedicated championship like experience with the AI. Hence more than not having good players liking to play against AI it is that simply there aren't many options around to do so in a meaningful way, especially in the more "hardcore" sims.
I have to disagree on all points made and here’s why
Firstly, racing against AI won’t raise their profile. Take Jarno for example. Racing AI won’t raise his profile, racing against real F1 drivers would. Secondly, it wont keep them sharp. AI behave differently to humans and drive more robotic and predictable. AI in Grand Prix 4 was better and that game was out more than 20 years ago. Thirdly, racing against 110 AI isn’t more reliable than the human opponents they’ll take seriously. No eSport player worth their salt will practice their skills against randoms or AI and call it good practice. They’ll personally know who they practice against and they’ll all be very competent players. To support this, I’ll switch sports and please bear with me on this. It’s been a few years since I played proper darts having dart it is but I reached a very high level where I started to average over 100 at proper tournaments and was told to go to PDC Q School to get a Pro Tour Card, I even played against Phil Taylor. I would never practice using an app against AI for the same reason why eSports drivers shouldn’t practice against AI. Robotic and very poor decision making. AI might put up good laps by themselves in racing like putting up 100s, 140s and 180s in darts but then in racing, AI get bullied too easy, don’t properly defend, brake too early and hand you positions just like AI in darts make terrible decisions while on scores like 303, 306, 343 etc. My point is, regardless of the sport or even eSport, any top competitor worth their salt should be practicing against similar skilled human opponents. Jarno will know this so won’t bother seriously practicing in open lobbies or against AI that behave differently and make terrible decisions routinely.
Agree to disagree I think
