19.0 UPDATE PATCH NOTES
Welcome to the Top Drives 19.0 Update Patch Notes!
We’re adding a new car wave, new car images, new features, bug fixes and more! Read on to learn all about it.
NEW CONTENT
New Cars - Pacific Coast Highway
A new wave of cars from the USA join the race with Pacific Coast Highway! Featuring cars from AMC, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, Hudson, Lincoln, Mercury and Plymouth, there's over 130 new American cars to collect and race! Here are a few of our favourites:
The Ford Thunderbird is an iconic looking land yacht from the mid-1960s, with its 300hp V8 engine giving it respectable performance for a Common on standard tyres.
Thanks to a vast 8.3-litre V10 engine shared with the iconic Dodge Viper, the Ram SRT-10 has the fastest 0-60 time of all the Super Rare pickup trucks in Top Drives.
The 300C Touring Hemi combines plenty of horsepower with strong handling, making this Ultra Rare a rapid Wagon on standard tyres.
Designed to fill the niche that is ultra-rapid SUVs, the Legendary Durango SRT Hellcat is now the most powerful road-going SUV in Top Drives thanks to its brutal 710hp supercharged V8 engine.
Also, be sure to check out the car correction list to see how some cars have changed!
NEW FEATURES
New Filters
We’ve made some changes and added some filters when searching for cars.
The “Tyres and Drive Type” filter has been renamed to “Car Attributes”, and now contains the following filters:
Tyre type
Drive type
Ground clearance
Engine Position (New!)
Front, Mid, Mid Read, Rear, MIxed
Drive Assistance (New!)
No TCS & ABS, ABS Only, TCS Only, Both TCS & ABS
Weight (New!)
Slider of lowest to highest value
Only factors in non-upgraded weight
Removed RQ Rarity Tab and Added the RQ Slider to the Rarity Tab
Added ‘Number of Fuses’ filter slider to the ‘Status’ Section of the Filter
Users can select 0-5+ fuses
Applies only in My Cars (Slider is functional in All Cars, but will just display zero cars if used)
Car Image Changes
This update features another batch of updated car images! Here are a few of our favourites. You can find the full list of changed images over on the car corrections document.
RQ Changes
RQ is graded by looking at a car’s performance on sets of challenges across three surface categories: dry, wet, and off-road. From these we derive a win rate. We use the win rate to sort cars into 91 different RQ groups (from 10-100).
The system puts most cars in the correct rarity and RQ, but some cars are specialists, so their RQ does not reflect the true ability of the car. These tend to be manually identified and rebalanced as time goes on. Though more of these are detected in advance, it’s still a manual process.
Now, we’ve built a semi-automatic system to adjust cars’ RQ (PER/SLK tyres for now) using a detection system that finds cars likely to have an RQ that is too low. We do this by looking at four core stats: 0-100, handling, weight, and 0-200, and comparing the car’s stats to other cars within its RQ neighbourhood.
We then have 3-4 comparisons to a car’s neighbourhood. We identify the car’s best stats to those of its neighbourhood, and if they’re sufficiently superior, we update the car’s effective win rate and thus RQ.
There’s another example of cars underrated by RQ, and that is cars at the top of the RQ scale. Such cars win nearly all the time, so there’s no context for how much they win by. It’s like having a car that lapped the field. Knowing they are first doesn’t tell you by how much they are first. Identifying cars too good for their RQ neighbourhood also finds these cars. However, we have no RQ room to differentiate between these cars.
And so, we’re trialling new car RQ for high RQ cars, giving more RQ granularity between them and surpassing the 100 RQ limit. We’ve restrained the differences for this initial trial. The highest RQ car in 19.0 will be the Porsche 919 Evo (2018) at 114 RQ – but probably it’s even better than that. We can tweak and rebalance as necessary, but we can at least see how these RQ values play for a few weeks first. RQ allowance won’t be greater than 500 RQ.
Collection Series
Art for one new Collection Series, Immortalised in Carbon.
Full-size pick-up trucks
For the 19.0 update, several models have had their handling scores revised to make them more realistic when compared to regular car models.
Tap to see Challenge Pack Details
Tapping a pack in the Challenges and Events screens will now show pack details as it does for packs in the Pack Store.
Bug Fixes & Game Changes
Changed name of “Pontiac Trans Am 3” to the correct “Pontiac Trans Am 35th Anniversary”
Fixed an issue where events with the minimum races per prize tier feature would not count races that end in a draw towards the minimum amount of races.
Fixed an issue where event names on the prize board screen could overlap
Tokyo Drag, Waterfront, Ocean Short, Ocean Long, dry and wet challenges (8 in total) have had their points accumulation reduced by 25%
Two cars that are prize cars are becoming regular non-prize cars (Jaguar XK150, Bentley Continental GT Convertible).
Known Issues
The "Collections & Tags" Filter does not currently display all tags.
There are a few issues with some tags like Muscle Cars still misaligned.
Rotating Device will trigger portrait mode, even if Go Rally is not enabled.
Fusion menu does not appear if player has an unlocked Legendary duplicate but fewer than 3x Epics/Legendaries are unlocked total.
Some Challenge Panels appear slightly cropped.
Blank space appears beyond the finish line on certain tracks.
There is an issue where losing the first match of the first-time user experience will cause the game to get stuck.
Event names on the prize board screen can overlap.
The holding pool UI can appear in the wrong place.
Comparing vehicles around the boundary where we're testing the new RQ assigning process (cars above and below 92 RQ) can be a bit tricky, so comparisons work best for similar cars that are both over that boundary. We hope to revisit RQ in Update 19.1.
That’s all for now! If you enjoyed the new update, let us know on Discord or social media!
