auction house blowouts. The top painters with their LE paints, and let the bidding frenzy begin
prize money. Being able to pass on prize money won by individuals for winning HLCs and other comps
raising funds. For prize money
releases. Being able to buy a complete release in one go (car+paint+tune)
bargain hunting. Nothing quite like grabbing the odd 100+ thousand cr car for less than 10.
just reward. Painters and tuners could dictate their own price we should pay for a paint or tune. Rather than a few thousand a day.
Bad things:
very very small minority used it to unlock paints and/or shift dodgy credits.
littered with insignificant cars for obscene prices.
The auction house being excluded from Forza seems a lot like burning down your house because someone broke in. Why not just improve security? Rather than punish the masses because of a very small minority.
The AH and SF were central to the whole community side of things for many in Forza. Failing to bring them back in some form - definitely not the current share front system which even now lists plain black cars as top designs rather than actually good well designed liveries - would be a huge mistake in my opinion. I just hope T10 give the community what they want, rather than what they think we want.
Then you must be able to do so whilst keeping the design locked.
I know what your saying about maybe not need the AH, but then how do you get the exclusivity of cars back? The DLK lads used to put only certain cars in the AH. They went for silly money, and it was an achievement in itself to get one. Same with Monkey and many other painters.
It will be very interesting to see what t10 does in this regard
I can make this very simple… Why is FM4 still going strong this long after launch? The auction house, storefront, and gifting. Why is FM5 already dead? No auction house, no storefront, and no gifting.
Hate to break it to you guys, but without those three features Forza is doomed.
This is a very compelling argument because it completely ignores the encumbrances of having to consider the installed playerbases of each game and any other salient contributing factors while at the same time not being in any way bogged down in objectivity.
More than half of my friends list has played FM5. Every single one of them says they stopped playing 5 and came back to 4 because of those three features I listed not being present in FM5.
Not every argument needs a thousand different statistics and studies for the point to still be valid. It’s a very safe bet that, among other things, the lack of the three features (AH, SF, and gifting) in FM5 is what hurt its longevity. FH1 lost longevity due to its wonky storefront system and lack of an auction house. I still play FM4 solely because of those three features I’ve listed. Take away those three features, and just like that community comps no longer function, the community no longer interacts, and most importantly, the game loses its longevity. FM2 was actually very busy until they shut down the auction house. Once the auction house went down that game died.
It is my strong belief that Forza has been successful so far thanks to its community features and their ability to keep fans interacting with each other. Again, you kill the community features, you kill Forza. Too many modders? Then get more Moderators to clean the game up and stop whining that it’s too much work. Myself and hundreds of other people would gladly take on the duties of dealing with modders if it meant we could keep our community features.
I will never agree with the arguments for not including the community features because they’re, in my opinion, completely asinine.
PCars will most likely do just fine because it’s meant to be a racing simulator, though also having Forza’s community features would make it unstoppable. Forza suffers when the community features are taken away because it’s a social car game more than a simulator, and therefore is driven by its community.
Again, with Forza: you kill the community features, you kill the community. You kill the community, you kill the game.
I never really used the Auction House. I sold a few cars, bought a few cars, saw good cars being sold for 20K CR, saw Veyrons being painted white and having 500mil CR buyouts. I’m more than aware that the AH was the main (or at least a significant) distribution method of wares for many painters and tuners in the community. There were also people who flipped cars like it was going out of style racking in millions of CR a day. If it were to come back, I probably still wouldn’t use it. I’d scan it once in a while to maybe find a car that I’ve been saving up for for cheaper, and that’d probably be the extent. If it were to come back, I’d still be happy though. The community can make or break a game. An excellent game not backed by a happy community is (IMO) worse than a subpar game backed up by a happy community. Part of the reason I liked my Art History (coincidentally AH-initialed) class in college was because my fellow students actually participated and cooperated. The class in itself was meh, but I actually enjoyed going to it because of the other students. I’d like the AH to return to save the community. Strengthen what’s left, and hopefully gain back members previously turned off. Look at games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends. Why are they so popular and so beloved? Strong community (cooperating devs help too). I’ve seen great games collapse akin to the Roman Empire because the community (the good aspects) died out (Combat Arms…Battlefield Heroes…I’m looking at you.) I’d like to think a return of the AH (storefront and gifting included) would signal the return of a great many players, although of course, some may be held back purely because they don’t have the XB1, some may still resent over FM5, some may not even care anymore about Forza. Forza’s time is limited in this world, and while it may be hard to believe and hard to take, there will be a date when T10 announces that there won’t be a new Forza the following year. Keep a strong community alive, and that date can be postponed.
So if FM6 has none of those features people won’t buy it? Even the people that whinge about those things are still saying they will. I rarely used those features in previous iterations, so I couldn’t care less if they’re in FM6. Once a new game is released I don’t go back to the old one anyway, I can’t be the only one.
The affect on sales will more than likely be small, which is why Turn 10 won’t care about bringing the features back. My point is that the lack of the features kills the longevity of the game.
GTA V is an awesome game, but once you finish the story mode you’re done, absolutely no reason to continue playing it outside of achievements. But GTA Online has enough features and gameplay to give it so much longevity that I’m still playing it and still getting new gear. I would’ve looked back on GTA V as a short lived thrill ride, but GTA Online changed that to an endless adventure. Longevity is what matters to me, that’s my point.
We’re obviously different then. I play Forza because I like racing/driving cars, not selling them in an auction house. As long as I get a couple of years out of a game I’m happy.
It is not possible to pick out a single reason why FM5 does not have the longevity of FM4.
In general FM4 was a game produced on a mature platform with high levels of content.
FM5 had way too many issues and we can all pick from a long list of reasons why we may not play it more now:
It got boring due to content levels
It got boring because of the rally engine
Drivatars
Losing saves
Online did not have a system / tools to set up and control lobbies the way people wanted
I am sure there are others.
I would not pick out something like the auction house etc as a reason why Forza may be doomed. It will be if improvements in a few different areas are not forthcoming and if the competition delivers.
The Auction House was great, one of the best things I remember doing on FM4 was getting a 250 GTO for 1K buyout. But there were loads of people with glitched/hacked money, so I get why people don’t want it back. As long as people can’t get hacked money then there’s nothing bad about having an Auction House, the people who dislike it aren’t forced to use it and those who do like it can use it.
The ability to shoot a design/car to a team mate with the appropriate race number while NOT taking up space in your storefront/sharefront was critical to team based activities.
The ability to pull up a specific person’s paints all at once was huge for promoting creative work. You’d go in for one paint and see 6 more you wanted. Not possible today. Eben if you stumble on a painter for a specific car, you have to cycle through your cars one by one and HOPE maybe he did one of your other models…
The ability to pick up a TVR Sagaris in the auction house for 9k, drop a limited one off on it and put it up for bid to sell at 150-200k (some of us aren’t paint godz) was a great way for me to raise money for more cars to work on, prize money for comps, prize cars for comps, and even cars to hand out to those that simply needed a hand. Comp chatter and activiy drove a significant portion of what used to be this community.
Even the ability to pass a car back and forth for a paint collab or a tune collab is gone and makes it one step harder for some.
Were there idiots thatabused the system, undeniably. But the coders should be able to figure out something that will reduce or eliminate the problems AND enable the perks.
The current system, from a creative point of view is clunky, akward and stifles creativity in amazing levels worthy of something produced by someone that doesn’t understand the very game.
I would love to see everyone get the game they want, with the features they want, for the price they want.
That, unfortunately, is not going to happen.
Cheating and stealing from the game itself is a problem that needs to be addressed, cheating and stealing from fellow players is an entirely different kettle of fish and simply cannot be allowed.
Fixing the problems inherent in the sharing of UGC through various means has been and continues to be very difficult. Thousands of hours have been devoted to tracking down and trying to dissuade people from cheating the system. Thousands of hours by Snowowl alone and it’s likely that none of you will ever truly understand the dedication and hard work he personally has invested for everyone else’s benefit. Thousands of hours by our current and previous moderators as well as thousands of hours of Turn 10 staff time. The problem has always been far greater than most can imagine and luckily has taken place outside the view of the forums and the game at large. Throwing more time, more effort, more coding and more bodies at the problems over the years only ended up shifting the problem around without making any real progress. Until now.
What has changed? The nuclear option of removing gifting, storefronts and auction house. It’s stopped the problems of people cheating the UGC system dead in its tracks. Don’t believe me? Track down Rowdy or Ben and ask them how their businesses are doing these days. Track down the folks behind the modding systems that do not need to be named here and ask them how things are going with Forza on the XB1 these days.
Was this the ideal solution? No, but it cannot be denied that it was stunningly successful at throwing off the parasites that have long preyed on UGC.
Will we ever see an auction house again? I wouldn’t fancy the chances of ever seeing one again but you never know, perhaps a new and better solution is out there.
My hat is off to snowowl and all the other mods that have tried to eliminate the hackers (snowowl has gone out of his way to clear a couple of things up for me in the past), I truly appreciate what they have done as I am one who knows all too well how much work goes into a paint. As much as it guts me to have a paint stolen it guts me even more to loose a game I love. I know I could buy fm5 and start painting again but whats the point if there is no community to paint for? I am sure at the very least we can agree that the traffic to the FM5 painter forums isn’t even remotely close to what it used to be, and there has to be a reason for that.