Rivals to me has become an enduring success. With the addition in FM5 of the class rivals, this is the one feature that I really felt I could get behind, although I didn’t utilize it as much due to other parts of the game taking my attention (the achievement hunter in me). I’ve always wanted car challenges for every car (not spec, or at the least, capped with some requirements) and I feel that is as close as I’ll see it.
In FM6, this needs to be part of the core focus. The best way to implement it is to create community competitions involving Rivals, like has been done in the past. This time, it needs to be weekly, and if you can’t find a T10 employee (Has Dan Greenawalt done this?) or a forum leader, randomly pick an in-game user (and give them clear and visible in-game messages that they are picked and the community will depend on their involvement).
Don’t wait several months for when your ratings go down to try and revive them. Do this initially, with tiered and valuable in-game rewards. Get people hooked on coming back on a weekly or monthly basis for these comps. Run photo and paint comps in concert with it.
Don’t make this always class based. Utilize the options available, such as HP, Weight, specific cars or car families, or even combos of the options like that. Make these restrictions visible in the Rivals screen, and link it to the possible cars so I don’t have to rummage through several screens.
You have a world of community potential. It’s time for you, T10, to make it kinetic. It’s time to make that leap from FM4 with this that you didn’t do with FM5. The community can run the small comps but you are needed to run the big ones with larger rewards. You are the ones that can have meetings on how to put this together and have the sources and time to execute it with higher proficiency.