scottishwildcat

You do have the right to report them. Each of the services you correctly say you're paying for provides their own way to report cheating, bullying, and anything else that goes against their terms of service.

Public lobbies have been like this for as long as I've been playing racing games.

They've had years to fix it, and either they've chosen not to or it's just not feasible with their current game engine. Either way, there's no chance they're fixing it in a patch.

Anyone else who wants to bid for the licence has always been welcome to do so. In the meantime, I wouldn't wish financial hardship on anyone.

They did. It wasn't particularly good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndyCar_Series_(video_game) Nowadays, with a much smaller potential audience than F1, it's hard to believe it would be worth their effort.

Well, what you missed for the first few months was an incredibly buggy game, even by Codemasters standards. Took them about 6 months to patch out the worst of them, but it was really the modding community that kept it playable after that.

Depends what you call an F1 game, but probably the unplayably-hard 3D Grand Prix on the ZX81 (1983). Chequered Flag on the ZX Spectrum (1983) used licence-dodging cars and a handful of real circuits, but it was time-trial only. Nigel Mansell's Grand Prix on the Spectrum (1988) went one better with one licensed car and driver and a full 16-race season on the real circuits. After that, Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix (1991) on the Amiga took it to another level, and the rest is history... Honourable mention to CRL's Formula One on the Spectrum (1985): possibly the first ever F1 management game, a grid of real (though presumably not officially-licensed) cars, tracks, and drivers, and a pretty good effort for its day.

I doubt it's a lie, but it was probably a slightly misleading thing to highlight to an audience that's mostly not all that familiar with software development. Each year's new game is likely branched and being worked on some time before the previous one is finished anyway, so the "two years development" is maybe only worth an extra 9 or 10 months to start with. That probably included a few weeks of deciding exactly how they were going to work the new F2 stuff into the game, so maybe we're down to 8 or 9 months of actual extra development time. With a whole new bunch of F2 cars to model, all the Devon cutscenes to cast, script, and mocap, the F2 voiceovers to contract and script, all the new Leagues stuff to implement, and the extra QA effort required for all of the above... it likely didn't really leave much time to do anything more than they usually do to the F1 part of the game between releases.

Occasionally fire it up on Xbox, then remember Grid Autosport is much better and play that instead.

They will likely release one major livery update like they've done in the past, but each car will still only have one livery that's used in all races.

There's already at least one thread about that, and it's nothing to do with this patch, so please discuss it there.

I've played all of them up to and including 2017, and the 2018 beta. The last time I could be bothered finishing more than one season was 2013, though... it wasn't perfect, but with some classic tracks in addition to the classic cars, plus Murray Walker AND The Chain, it was pretty close 😉

This was confirmed many years ago, though admittedly the terms may have changed since then.

Would need quite a redesign. There's way more information in any one page of the current MFD (which is already far too small for many of us to read) than would fit on the steering wheel currently.

Well spotted. It's a video game, that people of all ages and abilities play for fun.