5 patches? As far as aware only 1.01, 1.02, 1.03 & 1.05 exist. Patches are great and Kaz is only trying to make a perfect game even better and I appreciate that very much. We all pay good money for games and we do expect developers to spend time on the game after its release. PD is doing a great job and I cannot fathom how patches are a negative aspect.

I've been hugely impressed with this update so far.

There's an actual reason to race properly online now!!! All this time I'd just muck about with my friends and just crash and bump into each other just for fun. But now that we get rewarded, back to serious buziness lol.

And thank god for the improved rewards!

Cool. He is a good man. I only want one thing more, online championships. That would be really fun.

Cool.  Will need to fire it up then.  I want to see how badly vehicles can get totalled in the game.

Not to say they are making it better not fixing it... you can have a very pleasant play without any patch (which is untrue to a lot of other games), in GT5 case they are making it better for you and you don't even need to patch it.

@michael_stutzer: there are online ranking, online races, GT Academy and some other competition... probably in the near future we will see some kind of championship, but with a 4,5 Million users a championship with a lot of races and pontuation would be really hard... but maybe they could put a quallifying method in the first semester and the 16 best would race the second part of the year for the title of the best of the year each year. (much like soccer's championship that warrant you a spot in other championship).

People are REALLY complaining about the number of patches? Most games get a patch day 1. Even a game like Black Ops that has used almost the exact same engine for several years of sequels has been through a series of patches already, and the online was badly broken for almost a month after release.

Yes, the game was in development for a while. You are only saying 5 years because thats how long ago GT4 released. Early developmental stages comprised of just planning and layout can take close to a year. Do I think that development took TOO long for the end product? Sure. But I'm not going to complain about the patches.

Why? Because bugs were going to be found regardless. 5 years or not. For some simple math... lets say they had 25 people play-testing the game for 3 of those years, for about 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. In total, thats 117,000 collective hours of play-testing.

The game sold over a million copies on day one. If EACH of those buyers played the game for a mere 10 minutes on the first day of purchase, then the cumulated play time would be greater for those 10 minutes after the release than it was for the entire 3 years the game was playtested during development.

I'd say that after a week, with ~2 million buyers playing the game for on average just an hour a day, thats 14 million play hours, or roughly 120 times the amount of play time the game received during testing. Bugs were 120 times more likely to be found in the first week after release than during the entire development process. 

Sorry, but patches were going to happen. Even if the game was in development for 10 years, the figures still wouldn't add up.

How does one turn on damage in the arcade mode?  Is it that you need to unlock it in the regular mode first?

After you pick your car/track and the options menu pops up asking you to pick your transmission, tires, etc... go to the bottom and choose what type of damage you want.

When you select the race in arcade there is a option in the specs (where you change tires) before entering they ask you what configuration you'll use... in the GTmode pratice you can also use it.