rscsr wrote: ↑12 Sep 2018, 11:14
Sierra117 wrote: ↑12 Sep 2018, 07:36
The approach of aggressively attracting casuals always ends badly. Just look at what's happening to the UFC.
What is happening there?
Heavily OT so I hope this one post answers it all, don't want it to get removed and all.
Basically Liberty are doing what WME have done with UFC.
The UFC adhered very much to a merit-based system like most sports and leagues. Unfortunately they buried a whole lot of stock and power into the trash talkers who are popular with casual fans. The problem is that while you will gain much in the short term, your turnover will be greater as fans will lose interest if their favourite isn't fighting. The trick is to find the balance. Unfortunately the UFC kept giving title shots to those who trash talked a lot and that meant divisions got held up, interim belts were created on the fly and the actual merit of fighting the best became devalued. So in terms of what Liberty is doing, it's looking eerily similar. They removed the important telemetry data that us fans enjoy, reducing it to something like from a kiddie racing game. I get changing aesthetics for a refresh and branding and all that since that's what I do myself but there's always a way to do it tastefully and I really think they could have done so without removing features. It seems to have calmed down a bit but yeah, it's kind of a let down for me personally. The thing that really grinds my gears is those idiotic videos they put silly mario kart sound effects on for every position the driver gains or gets in the pits while drowning out the engine and actual racing sounds in awful music. Lots of car companies make the same sort of music-drowning-out-engine-sound promos for their new cars, it's really quite odd. But anyway yeah, I hope they focus more on creating interest in F1 as a whole rather than just a casual series of wow-moments that dissipate very quickly. For instance, it would be great to have more teams.
So that's what I think. Others will think differently but that's just what I've noticed that they seem willing to alienate hardcore fans in favour of casuals. Hope I'm wrong.