I don’t think anyone is saying there should be a top 100 hopper and a 100-250 hopper etc. but for example if at any given time 40 top 500 guys are racing a class they should be put in the same lobbies based on lb position and connection. Forza is hard and not many people have the time or patience to improve. But I think putting people in lobbies with people near their skill would make for the most fun for everyone. How could it not
Precisely!
Not only that it fixes the you didn’t pick the right car to play with issue as well. e.g. You like to drive that honda in forza which you had back in college. Its your baby. Guess what… your rival times will reflect this and put you into an appropriate hopper where it is still fun to drive that car. You see what happens here, if you want to get smarter and more skilled at forza, great! wonderful… if you don’t, have kids, commitments, etc… thats cool too. Your online play is always competitive and geared towards where you are right now. Regardless of what stage in development you are.
for some people they just enjoy seeing “you win” on the screen. if there was a “push a to win” they would push it before the race even started. i pretty much stopped playing forza because the r class lobbies were full of beginners and it was a wreck fest. i decided if i had to play with beginners anyway i should go play with those who knew they were beginners and were looking for tips, not trying to give instructions from last place. i figured might as well help out the noobs for a bit. went in the beginners room and the average driver level was over twice that of the regular lobby, people with high levels wanting easy wins against the noobs. the noobs had been chased out of their own lobby, i guess they figured that if they have to race pros anyway might as well go for the pro room where the payouts are bigger. i remember the old days when the average player tried to help the noobs not take advantage of them. it was a mistake to try to bring more casuals into the game. most casuals want to win the game more than play the game.
It is hard, but alot of the trouble is self inflicted. Car selection is key. Too many no aero over powered under tired cars flying around recklessly on the track creates most of the problems online.
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I agree but the best car and tune in the world isn’t going to make someone 5-10 seconds off pace much more competitive. The last few hoppers I played I had to run a stock 99 viper just to give the rest of the room a chance to not dnf. Luckily not long after someone quick joined and I had one person to race with but the lobby suffered as a result
I’ve gotten good advice from better racers in MP especially the long races, and given advice to newbs whenever I can. Lost out on the camaraderie when our mic glitched out; hoping the new XBox Headset fixes that for this weekend.
Private lobbies might be a good workaround, but I don’t have a lot of Forza friends, fewer still who would even see me in the rear-view mirror after turn 4. I was hoping between T10, XBox Gold, and maybe VIP or car-pack cars, we’d self-select into a community that could be administered for “smart placement” into races where we’d all get decent competition and our preferred racing style. In almost every 8-16 car race I’ve been in, 1/3 to 2/3 of the racers are DNF, mostly because we’re too slow to finish within 45 sec of the winner. I don’t feel great about making the “top 5% club” wait 45 sec after every race, and I’d rather not a couple of us lose that precious Bronze when our trailing pack is in sight of the final turn. Seems like a smarter way would be for the XBox MP servers to pull us DNF’s from the lobby and drop us into our own, now competitive, “bottom 95% club” lobby.
And I’m sure the stigma associated with lb cars isn’t helping the cause, people afraid to use the best cars even though that gives them the chance to at least try and keep up
5-10 seconds slower in one lobby. 4-8 in another still doesn’t level the playing field. This isn’t cod were you got six players on a team. You either learn or accept your place at the back of the pack. If people understandably have rl commitments, I’m pretty sure there gaming expectations aren’t that high.
No matter what spin you put on it, at the end of the day FM requires repetition. No one else can make you better. Rivals based lobbies won’t change much, still will be those who feel if the run an “oddball” car and finish, that thy are world beaters and would beat the faster guy if they were in the same car. Still will be the fast guys running lb cars in the lobby. You can’t police every body. Competition is what drives us, the lack of the past few FM titles has driven us in the wrong direction. It’s is long over due to recognize that there are some truly gifted people in all aspects of Forza that are just better than the next guy and should be respected.
I spend most of my time now in rivals mode. I stopped playing online due to the mass dirty drivers. And the drivatars are more infuriating than anything getting put maneuvered with each pass really pisses me off. So now rivals time attacks are all i do. I still spend more time on forza 4 than 5.
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Well said. I’m not trying to police anyone tho, just trying to find some competition outside of organized racing series so when I’m sick of preparing for the next series race I’m doing more than hot lapping in a hopper
I don’t think your really grasping what a hopper based on rival times, or a qualifier, if you will, provides. Either that, or your afraid of the competition.
You mention competition, yet say that some should accept their place at the back of every hopper… Thats not competition. Thats a DUF. (designated ugly friend). I was with a cousin this weekend to enlightened me to that little gem. Its the good looking girl/boy, bringing along a lesser in the looks department friend to make themselves look better. While I thought it hilarious that she and her friends had actually named this time tested maneuver…
when it comes to sport…even video game racing sport…thats total bovine flop.
Being in a hopper based on qualifying times(rivals), fosters competition at all levels. Remember, each time you look for a hopper its based off of your current time. That is, it grows with you. This close competition will also increase the rate of which peoples skill levels improve making it a better experience for all.
Remember, to have competition and all of its benefits you need to be more than merely in the same room as someone better…you have actually be relatively close to them…otherwise its just hot lapping. Some in the front, some in the back…all alone…
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We don’t know what the Hopper matching criteria is for FM5. In previous versions, it was based on TrueSkill ranking - a Microsoft developed method of assigning performance skill levels based on the skill levels of your opponents.
While the TrueSkill algorithms produced extremely accurate results and worked very, very well for some games, with other games (Forza in particular, for many reasons) it did not.
When the XBox One launched, MS was promoting Fair Play and Better Matchmaking. Is it working? Hard to say… As always, with these types of discussions, the number of people posting here on the forum is a small subset of the people actually playing the game; comments here are anecdotal (we don’t have access to server data); and different people certainly are having different experiences.
- Don
Grasp it, understand it, Just see the flaws in it. You’re a funny guy in regards to your competition comment. Forza basically has 10-25 guys who are the true meaning of fast. After that it is pretty even. The real difference from those in top 100’s from those in top 250 is skill. You and only you can get better getting blown out will still happen. You could put everybody from position 1,000 -1,100 in a lobby the guys at 1099 and 98 will be in the back still. The guys in the front will be in the front barring accidents and mistakes. Just like any old lobby now.
I know you think you’ve cracked the Da’Vinci code and will be considered Forza royalty. But your concept is just moving things around in a pile and saying it’s different. If you don’t like being in the back you’ll get faster, if you don’t then you probably don’t really care. Look at Lou. He wanted to improve and did. Why is he different from the other hundred of thousands of people?
Give credit where credit is freakin due. Some of these guys are just naturally fast. The rest have hot lapped and raced hard to LEARN what they are doing wrong and CORRECT it through repetition.
Again, I really don’t get why we are getting stuck on the top guys, they really do seem to matter the least when it comes to hoppers, in so much as I’ve previously stated, they are most often likely to be more organized, and less in need of assistance. That said, they would benefit, same as everyone else, from this sort of system. As for the top 25…went over to check the leaderboards, and after a couple quick filters, it appears there is about 2ish seconds which separate them(rough quick avg purely for conversations sake). Not seeing much gap there, and again not seeing the relevance as a reason to not base hoppers on rivals times. If I’m being dumb please explain it too me…only had 2 coffee’s today…still need at least one more before becoming semi human :p. Back to the point. Why wouldn’t those guys want to predominately race with each other, over lesser skilled drivers? or to flip it a bit…why would they want to race the noobs if they didn’t have too. I mean…isn’t that just as boring as being at the back of the pack? Your certainly not getting any better by racing the average/below average guys…if anything that creates a tendency to get cocky and sloppy…because…boredom. You mentioned Simmo’s points regarding player behavior and while I agree…to me at least…these behaviors stem from an expected lack of real competition in the lobbies. Simply put, people are thinking that its going to suck anyway, so might as well be a jerk too.
I guess what Im trying to say is why wouldn’t you want a system which at least attempted to make the hoppers more competitive right now…not in a year and a half with fm6. The only answer I can come up with is; you believe the message to reinstate user created/run hoppers must held tight and anything which would improve the relative failure the hoppers are weakens the pressure on t10 to bring them back. Personally, I think user created hoppers are a good thing and don’t see why both of these things couldn’t work together. Heck, you could even go one step farther and determine the grid of races based on rival times too. Its not a proper qualifying round, but good enough for how the game works.
…end of the day, the current system isn’t working so great, the powers that be don’t like user run hoppers…but their solution has been to make it suck for everyone, rather than just for some… They want approachability which its totally reasonable, this does it(generally of course) without alienating any particular group.
To me its like this… why in the world, in 2014, would you be getting chucked randomly into a hopper when the game collects(and process), so much data about each of us…kinda weak sauce…
CPL’s were in FM2 they were removed in FM3 to the dismay of a great deal of people. Put back in FM4 and were not used (read in T10’s eyes) enough to warrant keeping them. I wholeheartedly agree the hopper system can be made better.
I differ from you in the fact that rivals times isn’t the answer. In COD with the skilled based system, the developer of that game was constantly nerfing or boosting perks and weapons based on peoples gripes when losing. I really don’t want the people outside the top 1% bitching about a car and then that car is banned from lobby use, then the same happens with the next car so on and so forth. The proverbial slippery slope.
Two seconds in the same car is alot. If the best of the best are still separated by two seconds. When you start to pair off those same spreads will repeat themselves. Artificially making people faster. Two seconds per lap so multiply that out over the course of a race, it still won’t be close.
The change will come from the community. We all try to inform people here about fast cars, driving and tuning techniques, etc. The information and help is there, whether or not people decide to use it is a different story. Fast guys in public lobbies driving lesser cars helps even things out. People taking two seconds to use some common sense and realize that no aero 600hp cars on stock tires aren’t the best for Alps, etc. will help. But those are choices made by players, to police that seems very wrong.
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so true, and in many more aspects than just forza
I get what he is saying. Back to referencing cod, black ops 2 actually had league play which put you on lobbies with people of equal skill. There were still people who sand bagged so they could dominate and everyone pretty much had to use the best “cheesiest” guns or they would be letting their team down which is basically the cod equivalent of what loco is saying about forza. But it was still better than being paired up with a bunch of randoms and getting slaughtered by a full clan in the public lobbies but that was pretty rare