Sorry this going to be a bit of a rant but does PG truly care about its players?
Reason for asking is that there are so many things within the game which takes the fun out of it for the average player.
We have the online score boards which are plagued with times that are obviously unrealistic where you report them over and over again, yet nothing is done… ie:. Trail blazers done in 5 secs in non tuned cars (seriously?). Fix, have a system in place which can work out if times posted and or distances (for jumps) are possible, if not then flag it as suspicious and wait for confirmation before allowing it on scoreboard, or even easier take away the ability to post on boards when not online.
Auction house which has been took over by automatic scripts wrote in c++ which run a sequence of steps over and over again, until a said car is available and bang within split seconds it’s gone. Sometimes before a human response can react. Simple solution to resolve (Time limit searches… example 2 searches per minute, which would stop the scripts or at least give a Human a chance to snipe the car they are after… or maybe taking away the buy out button? Which would get rid of the stupid 20 mil auctions?)
Sound issues on Xbox, since launch the game has suffered with this annoying bug, normally caused due to syncing with servers to load data, which brings me onto number 4.
Lack of servers, waiting upto 5 mins to enter a race, for only to be booted out when servers fail. Solution is easy fix, invest in more servers? Or better hardware?
As said at start sorry for the rant, but 4 examples above with what would seem easy fixes have been left for so long makes me wonder if we are really cared about?
2 search per minute how drunk you need to be if cant search faster than 2 times per minute? Depending on car i can make 5-7 search per minute only using controller maybe that’s why i have been able to snipe all rare cars what i have missed.
Just use an exponential delay. Add 1.25^n milliseconds of delay to the nth attempt (resetting on the daily reset). This would allow 75 searches a day, but someone doing only 25 searches a day would see less than 2 seconds of total delay.
In response to the original question, it depends on how you define PG.
If you’re talking about PG as a corporate entity, they probably really don’t care at all whether players actually like the game or not. They’re beholden to their corporate overlords (who are in turn beholden to their investors), and their goal is first and foremost to make as much money as possible with the minimum amount of effort. So long as players continue to play the game and they’re making money, they have no vested interest in fixing the myriad problems with it and will only put development resources into features or fixes that they perceive will have a direct financial impact. For example, developing new DLC, fixing exploits that shorten the grind required to obtain everything, and things like the Festival Playlist to coerce players into playing online more (so they have better numbers to show).
However, if you’re talking about PG as a collection of individuals, then I would hope that most of them do care what players think of the game and try their best within the restrictions and requirements placed on them to build a good product.
Unfortunately with larger companies the employees have to be very careful what they say to players due to NDAs and such, so most of the communication we do hear comes from carefully curated PR announcements (and devs talking on livestreams where they’ve been coached beforehand on what they can and cannot say). Since the management that makes these PR decisions are apparently completely financially motivated and don’t appear to be gamers/car enthusiasts themselves (and probably couldn’t care less what players actually think since they don’t have a passion for the game themselves), this is the tone that’s set for the whole studio even if many of the individual developers share our same frustrations and can’t really share that with us.
Pretty much sums it up. Some of the programmers and support staff may care about the game and helping people, but the bottom line is money, so the company focuses on how to get more, not fixing bugs or improving the experience for customers. There’s bugs on this game that have not been fixed in 6 months. Other developers would have patched them over in a week, as they do actually care.
This game really has been a shambles and I will be steering well clear of anything to do with this company in the future.
100% agree. Microsoft were touting those sales numbers proudly. [Mod Edit - Abbreviated profanity, profanity and profanity that is disguised but still alludes to the words are not permitted - D]. The next game wont come close to the sales of fh4 without some huge feature such as true 32/64 player free roam. But that wont happen as crappy xbox’s cant render that many people at once. If they do release such a feature I can see them marketing 32/64 player lobbies as Xbox One X and PC exclusive. Getting people to ditch the crappy xbox one. Which currently runs this game at a crisp 30 fps on low settings. Also re vamping the multiplayer to something more similar to FM7 would be a HUGE improvement IMO. I might actually buy another copy just to get the game I wish FH4 was. If they don’t make substantial changes it’s a solid pass from me.
Voice chat has been broken on pc since release. My biggest gripe. Also to counter the scripts in the auction house they could write some code that detects repeat patterns in commands and blocks the user from the auction house for 5 min when detected. A human isn’t nearly as consistent as a script so the false positives would be very low. Advanced script makers might be able to get around that if they add some variance between each key press so its random but still quick idk.
There is not much point in repeating what has been said over and over again, but I agree with 99% of it.
According to the forum a lot of people have gone back to FH3 and a lot will not pre order FH5, I guess if they don’t care now they will when it affects sales. Its up to them to take these threads seriously.
Major companies spend millions on market research to cater to their customers needs the best they can to increase sales. In these forums we hand them the same market research for free !
FH3 lasted me over 2 years playing everyday & purchased every DLC, map, VIP & expansion - those upgrades are worth more than the initial game in profits.
FH4, yeah i bought the base game, i hardly play it and don’t purchase anything for it due to it being barely playable and having no real freeroam - its lost the feel of a social game for me. And when i do get around to turning it on it always has to do an update.
I was addicted to Forza titles - thats money in the bank for PG.
FH4 is like rehab, I am making a full recovery and actually going outside in my spare time this year.
Fully agree with every word you’ve said here. Post wasn’t as such to repeat what’s prior said, it’s more to state the easy fixes that could technically be done overnight that are being missed. It’s a shame that FH4 is missing a lot of features that the older games brought to the table.
Forza isn’t Fortnite and needs to refrain from this Fortnite way of thinking… fixing these minor frustrations would do wonders in reassuring the community that ‘we’ are listened to and our free consumer feedback is welcomed. Without customers you have no company.
Forza has been my first exposure to what I see now is an industry-wide trend to manipulate and exploit the consumer. It surely cannot work as awareness increases as to what is going on.
There have even been patents filed on exploitation methods:
Some of the things in there are quite similar to elements of FH4, e.g. making it excessively grindy so that people buy VIP, making it so you can’t unlock some cars without Xbox Live Gold etc.
The reason it won’t work is because there will be competition from people who aren’t using these exploitative techniques, e.g. the legend Ian Bell:
“As for exclusive titles, the CEO says it will be up to the developers.
“We think exclusives are ‘exclusionary’ but given that we’ll be shipping a cross platform engine to all developers it will be their choice,” Bell wrote. “As of now we have no plans to pay developers ‘incentives’ to exclude other hardware vendors.”
Exclusionary practices aren’t really in line with the thinking of Slightly Mad Studios, based on what Bell told us.
“We think the industry is a little too much of a monopoly or a micro oligopoly,” Bell explained.”
I live in hope that people with his mindset will win out in the end.
There’s already been a lot of backlash to this sort of behavior which really started in earnest with EA’s Battlefront 2 a few years ago (and has even resulted in legislation to limit the worst of this behavior). Every new game that comes out with these methods adds fuel to the fire, and I’m glad to see that gamers are getting increasingly intolerant of these behaviors. Hopefully it will reach a critical point soon where game publishers take notice so we won’t have (as much of) this in the next generation of games.
PG Games want to sell the max possible because this they use the time make a lot of S*** for the ramdom players instead of making this racing game focused on racing (ramdom players is how i call this people that arent gearhead fan of racings they play the game because its on game pass or get on the bundle birthday… They dont even know the difference of a Ford GT Honda NSX and a Ferrari but they liked the graphics and season change)
