Huge F1 23 Bug Compromises Competitive Integrity

F1 23 Jarno Opmeer Mercedes-AMG.png
Image credit: Codemasters/EA Sports

A bug found with tyre wear on equal performance has ground the F1 23 league racing season to a halt. Concerns have arisen regarding exactly how long this bug has existed for.

Codemasters F1 games have never been without their issues, some bigger than others. But this new one is perhaps the biggest that has ever plagued the games, and it has thrown the competitive scene into disarray.

Premier Sim Gaming Leagues had already run their first two rounds of the season with the top F1 Esports Pro Championship drivers. But it has now been discovered that, even when set on equal performance, the tyre wear between cars isn’t the same.


Unequal Tyre Wear​

For those who have never raced on the F1 games, more often than not, online races are set to equal performance. This is how a Williams, AlphaTauri or Haas can run up with Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari.

There are minor differences, variety in wheelbases can result in a car navigating a corner with more pronounced rotation or with more stability. But in terms of car performance, they’re effectively all the same car.

Or at least they should be. However, it would appear that isn’t the case. A graphic shared on the F1Game subreddit highlighted how a Red Bull can take soft tyres a few laps longer than a Ferrari.

f1 23 equal performance tire wear.png

Tyre wear is different on equal performance mode per car. Image credit: u/zecik87 on Reddit

Ferrari Esports driver Bari Broumand reported to have run a Grand Prix on equal performance with a car other than a Ferrari. Using the same setup he has for the Ferrari, the results came back as claimed, with the Iranian suffering significantly less tyre wear.

If that wasn’t enough, it would appear this has carried over from F1 22. In a post from LeagueR_News on Twitter, another graphic shows the differences between the cars on equal performance using medium compound tyres. Red Bull are still the top dog, but Alfa Romeo are suffer the most on the mediums.

Naturally, these revelations have led to significant questions. Has this hampered the F1 games for many years? How long has the F1 Esports Pro Championship run with this imbalance of tyre wear?


League Seasons Delayed​

After running their first two rounds, PSGL have voided the results and suspended their seasons indefinitely. They were already running with formation lap disabled due to issues it has presented since F1 22, but they have decided that this tyre wear imbalance is detrimental to the competition.

Former PSGL champion and reigning F1 Esports champion Lucas Blakeley led the standings after a win in the first round. Shanaka Clay won the second race after Otis Lawrence – who had started 18th – incurred a post race penalty for clipping the pitlane entry line.


Many other leagues are expected to delay their seasons with the revelation of this tyre wear glitch.

Speaking to OverTake, PSGL’s head Connor McDonagh had this to say on the matter:

“It’s a sense of deja vu for PSGL as our season has been compromised once again by factors out of our control. When we learned about the tyre wear imbalance and equal cars not being equal we acted very quickly in terms of announcing that the first two races would be voided, meaning they wouldn’t contribute to the Season 34 championship.

It’s obviously incredibly disappointing and frustrating for us, particularly as it’s unclear how long we will have to wait to resume our season given that there will need to be a patch to fix it."
Codemasters and EA are yet to acknowledge the issue publicly as of the publishing of this article.

UPDATE: After this article went live, EA stated on their forums that the issue is now being looked into and is set to be addressed for a new patch on 10 July.

What do you make of the F1 game’s equal performance tyre wear imbalance? Tell us on Twitter at @OverTake_gg or in the comments down below!
About author
Luca Munro
Biggest sim racing esports fan in the world.

Comments

Race cars only have "the same performance" if they are actually "the same" physics wise, so stating they are the same but they have different wheelbases is a somewhat strange statement.

Yeah, surely on equal performance the physics should ignore the physical appearance of the car and just act like a single one of them. Literally doesn't matter which.
 
I find the game to be simulating real life to the T.

As for EA's bugs carrying over from one game to the next, if anyone has been at least partly involved with the FIFA or Battlefield series the last 5 years, they know that this is simply EA's business model. I've been with the company for 2,5 years.

When people will stop buying their crap which passes as "simracing" around here, maybe they'll stop making one every year and have enough time to iron out essential bugs before the next iteration. They're not the ones at fault here. Or if someone insists, they're only guilty for pressing a button which fills up their accounts with billions, while those who pay are left ranting.
 
I find the game to be simulating real life to the T.

As for EA's bugs carrying over from one game to the next, if anyone has been at least partly involved with the FIFA or Battlefield series the last 5 years, they know that this is simply EA's business model. I've been with the company for 2,5 years.

When people will stop buying their crap which passes as "simracing" around here, maybe they'll stop making one every year and have enough time to iron out essential bugs before the next iteration. They're not the ones at fault here. Or if someone insists, they're only guilty for pressing a button which fills up their accounts with billions, while those who pay are left ranting.
You mean Codemasters business model. These bugs are from Codemaster Time.
 
Premium
Yeah, surely on equal performance the physics should ignore the physical appearance of the car and just act like a single one of them. Literally doesn't matter which.
If you do that, you still have to somehow convert the physical model to the visual one which will cause all kinds of issues.
 
That's why I prefered organising leagues set on realistic car performances. I'd put the quickest drivers in the slowest cars. With a full field it was a blast and pretty competitive and everyone stayed interested more than on equal car performances.
 
Or maybe for these league races CM coukd create a unique generic car with all the liveries in order to avoid this issue.
 
Or maybe for these league races CM coukd create a unique generic car with all the liveries in order to avoid this issue.
Yeah but that would be a far too sensible and strightforward thing to do!
What they'll probably do is break the differences in the cars for the singleplayer portion of the game to remedy the league racing issue.
 
Yeah but that would be a far too sensible and strightforward thing to do!
What they'll probably do is break the differences in the cars for the singleplayer portion of the game to remedy the league racing issue.
If the article is right, wheelbase has an infouence on the cars behaviour, so it mayvhas something to do with the tire wear rhythm. So any adjustment on the cars to erase that effect would change other aspects of the physics. That's why it would be safier to provide e a single genric car. But maybe it is possible to disconnect the the shape of.the cars and their behaviour and give them all the exact same.parameters, but why would it not have been done in the first place?

What is sure though is that the tssting peocesses of these games are absolutely amateurish. How come a league discovers something so obvious, at the base of their mechanics (after many yearly iterations of the same game)? I assume it should not be difficult to launch 100% races with each car, alone on track, disabling AI mistakes and mechanical failures, just to check they perform the same way. No human ressources involved, just computers and energy. What is sure is that soemone at CM hasn't done his job...
 
I ran hundreds of F1 20xx leagues for more than a decade at a sim racing site I owned, and I can say for sure, this isn't even close to the biggest bug. We've always known equal cars aren't actually equal. They've never been equal. Outside of the ability for the game to easily be hacked on PC, the biggest one we ever encountered (or maybe the funniest), was after qualifying, when everyone went to the grid, and the race started, everyone's tire life was down to 0%, and it felt like everyone had worn slicks on a wet track. It was undriveable, and I think every single car crashed before the first corner at Australia :) That was maybe back in F1 2012 or thereabouts.

Codemasters do not deserve the F1 license if they want to use it for esports. A second developer needs the license to make a sim. This is not unusual, and we've seen it with various other sports, such as the NBA with NBA Live from EA, and NBA 2K from Visual Concepts.
 
It's a shame that this game is used at all for esports or anything that results in prizemoney or driving kudos. Quite why all the track surfaces are smooth as a snooker table is beyond me, let alone bugs like this.
 
All this talk about equal performance, but nobody seems to be asking the real question I want answered:

1688505513733.png

Is George Russell a Sith Lord?? I mean...look at him! :confused:
 
This is something I've come to expect in sim racing these days, uneven conditions... Only AC and ACC seem to be immune from it due to their less complex physics... iRacing hasn't even implemented the rain yet so we'll see how well they tackle it...

rF2 has had some track sync issues in some major races that weren't there a few years ago and anything on the Madness engine is all over the place with it's track conditions for the practice and qualy and then the weather is different in the races as well... AMS2 still has these bugs and really dilutes the ability to compete fairly on it...

To expand, some drivers will experience a drying line in the rain, to the point that some corners are dry from white line to white line and other drivers will have a completely wet track with not even a hint of a drying line...
 
It might be a major bug if you like online racing and esports, but personally I still don't regard it as 'perhaps the biggest that has ever plagued the games'.

For me, there have been other, more game breaking bugs, such as pitting and being given worn tyres; pitting and being stuck unable to move out of the pits; game failing to save your progress forcing you to re-run a whole GP. All of these were consistent, repetitive bugs, repeated year after year and affecting everyone, not just online players.
 
What is sure though is that the tssting peocesses of these games are absolutely amateurish. How come a league discovers something so obvious, at the base of their mechanics (after many yearly iterations of the same game)? I assume it should not be difficult to launch 100% races with each car, alone on track, disabling AI mistakes and mechanical failures, just to check they perform the same way. No human ressources involved, just computers and energy. What is sure is that soemone at CM hasn't done his job...
Chances are that this bug has been introduced only recently. If this bug really had been in the game for a longer time, eSports drivers would've noticed it way earlier.
 
If you do that, you still have to somehow convert the physical model to the visual one which will cause all kinds of issues.
They should have made a standardized F1 league car, all the same, but with different liveries.
Like all the other series do for many years, for a good reason.
As everybody would pick the fastest car anyway.
 

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