72 player servers, will it ever happen as advertised?

I’m not sure how severe the issues are on the backend, but nearly every live server I’ve been put into has only around 10-30 other players, which is a mere fraction of the 72 they were talking up prior to release.

And every time I look at the player list after a few minutes of cruising around, the numbers will have gone down. Until enough time passes that there’s single digits remaining. I’ve never seen it increase once! Every server seems to bleed players until it’s a ghost town, more than ever now that traffic online is also practically non-existent at times, and also the fact that the other players are ghosted. But the real problem is how the low amount of players in your potential pool makes creating and initiating races and events for the servers next to impossible. Even if they manage to see the hard to notice notification, and were willing to stop what they’re doing to join up on you, there’s a good chance there wouldn’t even be enough to even fill out half of a match.

Has any dev acknowledged any of these server issues yet? Is there an ETA for a fix? I wouldn’t be surprised it remains like this for the life of the game considering it was a new experiment and all.

Anyway, it really makes me miss the Lobby system in FH1 and how quick and easy it was to get into FULL races and events directly, in any class / car type with other like-minded individuals and groups looking for the same exact things. So good and so much more effective than the random nature of FH4’s server lobby and incredibly restrictive player amounts. It’s crazy how backwards pure and basic multiplayer has gone in this series from the first one which got all of that right from the start, but needed work with the open world / free roam aspects. Went too hard on ‘improving’ the free roam world stuff to the extreme detriment of everything else in the course of creating FH2, FH3, and now FH4’s multiplayer feature suites.

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I can’t recall but one time seeing under 30, most often in the 40-50 range. But like me, perhaps some people just want to go offline to increase traffic.

While I don’t think it’s strictly related, be aware that there are a lot of players (like me) currently unable to connect to online for unknown reasons.

That is most likely hurting the amount of online players.

However, I do think they could just pull up more players into a single session, no matter if there are 1000 peeps online or not. I guess they’re just doing load balancing: If we have 300 people online and 10 servers, split them as evenly as possible - instead of filling less servers with more people,

It’s just a guess, though. Take it for what it is.

Normally servers are completely virtual on Xbox Live. They get created when they are needed. So it looks more like an issue with server load. I have never seen more than 56 players, often less than 20. I don’t really care as long as someone does Forzathons, but it does feel a bit empty at times. Been playing a bit Horizon Solo due to the game regularly crashing when online for me, and I have to say it is more interesting that way. Offline traffic is of much higher intensity and they even use all lanes on the highway and overtake others. In Horizon Life they are just stupid.