Right, I know it’s quite hard to win and everyone wants it, so the obvious place to look is the the good old Auction House.
I’ve already got it myself but figured I have a look in the AH to see if anyone was selling theirs.
So all last night, up until around 2:00am I was checking the AH and low and behold there was loads popping up (only one at a time though, which was weird).
What was also weird was that the it was the same seller each time, with “Freecar” or “Giveaway” as part of the sellers’s username.
Checked again this morning and the same thing. There was even one seller with the name of the car followed by “Dupe” and “LOL”.
What is going on with that?
Hackers selling off their booty perhaps now the Apollo sale ban has been lifted?
It is not like you will be able to buy it anyways. Yesterday I tried about 20 times to buy the Apollo, the same 4 or 5 people bought every single one within seconds of the auction being posted.
Some have suggested pc players using macros to autosnipe cars from the auction house. Either way its completely broken, in the 8-9 months I’ve been playing this game I’ve seen ONE 2004 WRX and ONE R34 GT-R on the auction house and they both were instantly sniped as I attempted to purchase them.
I follow all the official streams and Playground has made zero comment on the matter unfortunately.
Fundamentally, this is what happens when you try to merge offline solo gameplay (which means the savegame and most of the processing is done in the client) with a persistent online economy. Lots of MMOs and other online games have everything to do with the economy processed and saved entirely on the server so save tampering in the client isn’t possible.
Excluding PCs won’t totally solve the problem either, as it’s still possible to export a savegame from an xbox and edit it on a PC.
I would much rather see a stronger separation between online and offline gameplay, to the point of having them be two completely different game modes. Solo gameplay would be more story driven like FH1/NFS and could still allow for limited coop play with friends, but doesn’t link into any sort of persistent economy so hacks/mods/exploits would be local to that system.
For online play, there could be a completely separate multiplayer profile that’s saved on the server so it couldn’t be tampered with locally.
Months after release, I believe developers are more than aware of what goes on in the Auction House, just as we are aware that they are interested in the ongoing participation of players.
Just like players coming back over and over to the game in order to complete their daily #Forzathons, and unlock the latest cars on Thursdays - a powerful motivation to keep us engaged with the game, that one - they also check out the AH if that one car they seek is being sold, in order to complete the collection. Sometimes players miss out on a Playlist reward and have to get it the hard way.
What if I told you they haven’t fixed this stuff, because they don’t see it as broken? What if I told you they’ve been tolerating the shenanigans all this time because they perceive them not as a defect, but a feature?
Consider the following: what if superhumanly fast input algorithms used to snipe stuff instantly stayed, but car cloning was removed? Wouldn’t it be even more difficult to purchase the few exclusive cars? Wouldn’t they be fewer to begin with? The artificial increase in supply brought by cloning is what passes for a “solution” to the instantaneous sniping.
They’re not putting all the cars in the Autoshow for players to purchase because the players seeking to buy and sell exclusives keep coming back to the AH, buyers in particular keep trying day after day. I wanted to point out how all the players with the macros and the high demand make sure the exclusive cars we sell are sold instantly. Since demand is so high, and I happen to sell my duplicates in a matter of seconds, I am interested in selling my stuff, then. Perhaps one day you’ll get a car you desire from me.
They want busy players. Players that keep being interested, playing, and coming back. This sorry excuse of a “market” for exclusive cars is one such way of accomplishing that goal.
Which means the “market” is not going away, perhaps when the support for this game is more or less discontinued, all the game’s cars might be on the Autoshow, but this will most definitely not happen now that the second expansion isn’t even out yet and there is no formal announcement of a sequel…
Or… just imagine this… the playerbase is so big and healthy, that many people are sniping the same car. How about that? Would explain everything that is going on without conspiracy theories. You can believe one thing: PG and T10 are interested in happy customers.
The Forzathons, the new cars, the exclusive cars, the trials and seasonals, all this helps the game to keep a healthy playerbase. If you just sell one Forza with fire and forget, the playerbase will decline after 3 months normally. So you would not have a lot of players to play with right now if they followed your idea of gaming.
This is by far the Forza title that I played the longest and a big reason for this is design route they are following now. If not for weekly and seasonals, I would have been gone for a long time now.
I’m not entirely sure where is your post supposed to contradict mine. Far from me to ever claim many people are not sniping the same car, especially when I’ve seen garages stuffed full with 30+ Apollos within a week since it’s been made available. Additionally your post provides no explanation as to why would car cloning, macros and the like continue to work for months uninterrupted by the developers, who know all, yet do nothing, about them. Finally, given the negative reaction to this week’s Trial in particular, and FH4’s playerbase reputation in general among the larger racing game community as well as its very own opinion of itself, “healthy” seems to be too strong a word for FH4’s playerbase. I won’t argue about its size, especially without the numbers at hand.
Sadly, I find myself agreeing with this. Which is a real shame, it’s hard to see how hard FH4 has embraced many the worst aspects of gaming simply to “increase player engagement”. Especially with how hard they’re bending over backwards (censoring songs) to hold onto their beloved E rating so they can be “kid friendly”, while simultaneously doing everything they can to fill the game full of addictive hooks. Sickening. I really hope there’s a reckoning for many of the game publishers/developers who have gone down this path (and all the backlash over the last few months leveled at games as a service in general makes me hope it’s sooner rather than later) to discourage this sort of awful game design in future titles.