Gran Turismo 7 has offered a perpetual ebb and flow of good news/bad news for players and seemingly none of that has changed with the racing game’s latest 1.15 update. On the good news front, GT7 received some new cars, new missions, and a new online time trial. On the bad news front, however, the latest credit changes to legend cars have once more inflated the racing sim’s already stingy in-game economy.
Taking to Reddit to discuss the changes, players have been tracking just how much more expensive the top tier of vehicles have become, with GT Planet tracking an over eight million total credit rise across all legend cars (at time of writing). In the patch notes, Polyphonic Digital has stated that “prices have been revised according to real world valuations under guidance from Hagerty.”
Hagerty, an American company that insures and valuates classic cars, partnered with Polyphonic Digital for Gran Turismo 7 and is featured in the game’s legend cars dealership. Including a real-life metric for car valuation in a racing car simulation would likely be met with open arms by players if it didn’t result in having to use a money glitch and exploit a credit grind just to avoid paying for microtransactions to afford digital cars they’ve technically already paid for.
Despite Polyphonic Digital CEO Kazunori Yamauchi’s promise to “constructively resolve” credit grinding, these latest round of changes have seemingly only incentivised players to grind harder. Aside from raised prices, the latest update also fixes how GT7 calculates transmission settings, effectively bringing to an end one of the game’s most popular credit grinding methods using a tuned Tomahawk X VGT. So far, Polyphonic Digital’s solution to the grinding problem seems more crushing than constructive.
Players still have plenty of other options for grinding, just not so many as effective as the Tomahawk strategy. For example, Reddit user Echo_of_Light suggests a method using a tuned Mazda LM55 Vision that should net the player nearly a million credits in just under half an hour of play. With any in-game economy there will always be players looking to find new ways to counter the system, but with an economy as volatile and restrictive as GT7’s, even honest players are going to have a hard time ignoring the allure of the grind.
“We have 34 tracks and only 4 events that pay decently,” states Reddit user dcloko in a plea to Polyphonic Digital after the latest changes. With in-game pay-outs favouring marathon-like races with mid-tier cars, honest players are forced to sink hours of time racing on a handful of tracks to get anywhere near enough credits to afford the game’s pricier cars. Thus, exploits that allow faster cars to run the same circuits have emerged as a means to allow players the option to gain those credits a little less tediously.
Grinding has been a problem for the game since the very beginning, even getting a mention in our Gran Turismo 7 review. Since then, players have had to contend with incidents like the servers going down for 24 hours back in March, as well as a deeply unreliable roulette ticket system, and it seems for as bumpy as the road has been, it doesn’t look to smooth out anytime soon for GT7 players.