On the other matter - the bugs are still there in S46.
They’re not game breaking but just weird.
Did another H&S earlier and again in Guanajuatu the tunnels were marked with the usual grey/white blocks on the initial starting map but just plain white roads in gameplay.
The menu missing info still persists along with a few others that elude me at this point but the series definitely has some bugs in the system.
This is interesting, especially considering the fact that this is a sprint, not a circuit race.
The 12th follows ahead of everyone 
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yeah, happens from time to time because reasons
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Forza Magic 
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Possibly caused by a cheater using a mod menu. They can port drivatars which can lead to strange situations like in this case as the AI doesn’t knows what to do as it missed a checkpoint and just keeps driving. Sometimes drivatars will also get teleported of track and then try to join the race which often ends up with them getting stuck behind a barrier or the like.
Mod menus seem to run wild since a month or so again. I’ve read about new leaderboard shenanigans but since I don’t really care for stats I don’t check these. My personal experiences are mainly from Horizon Tours and I saw some funky stuff in the last few weeks.
Cheated prestige levels are a thing again.
But there also seems to be new performance enhancing stuff around which is visibly identifiable by certain patterns of strange car behaviour. Like strange bouncing, leaning and “crab walking” cars.
Bouncing - You can somehow see it after 0:59 mins in with the red Viper but it becomes apparent with the other one after 1:57.
Leaning - Observable for example after 0:57 mins in. The car simply keeps leaning left after coming out of the righthander for the whole passage even when opposite steering input is given. This leaning is an observable pattern which I saw dozens of times by now and it only happens with players with questionable performances.
Crab walking - It’s difficult to make out because of the quality but the car in front of me is acting partially weird after 0:43. It’s not really performing a “crab walk” as this would involve steering rear wheels but the car isn’t pointing in the direction it’s driving a couple of times.
It’s also behaving strange in so far as it seems like the back is stuck to the road. It looks a bit like the center of the rear axle is attached to the surface much like with these Carrera toy race tracks. I know there are tunes which facilitate such behaviour (the “nose up, back down” tunes) but these are mainly drag/topspeed tunes that don’t perform like that through corners. This is different and an also observable pattern which just popped-up not that long ago.
I know there are people that will tell me I’m seeing things and that this is lag/latency or related to the tunes, assists, input method or what ever but I’ve about 1.200 hours behind the wheel with over 300 on the first place mainly achieved in Tours presumably. I also know clean fast(er) players and they don’t exhibit such strange behaviour. To me things like this stink. If you’ve a different opinion about that fine but that mod menus exists is a fact unfortunately.
Which brings me to my final example which is really hefty.
Disconnect - This happend about a month ago already. I suggest to watch the whole race because you’ll notice a certain pattern mentioned above but you can also fast forward to 2:34 mins in and then see what happens shortly before I cross the finish line. Now make a connection with the username of one of the players and count one and one together. I’ve reported this incident and got a “after investigation we’ve taken action” answer from the Safety Team. So no, I’m not making stuff up here.
The support is aware of what’s going on and interestingly two of my tickets going into detail about these issues, that were marked “solved” a couple of days ago already, got pulled to the top of the list again and show a “last activity” from 2 hours ago. Seems somebody had an interest in them again for what ever reason.
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It’s unbelievable that after all these YEARS of ridiculous scores the mods still can’t clamp down on them.
I recall one of the HW Speed Zones just in the past few of weeks or so, maybe longer (I think it was a waterslide one - maybe Forest Flume Speed Zone in S45 Spring) where somebody had the top spot on Rivals in a Speed Zone in water at over 16 MILLION miles per hour !!! How is that not picked up immediately ? The top 1000 places also looked really dodgy in that one as well.
It’s crazy that the players can all see these dodgy (ridiculous) times and still not act.
Your examples of modded driving in a race is just pinpointing that this is going on and needs to be addressed.
Yep - just rechecked - look like stock cars as well.
HW Forest Flume Speed Zone -
#1 - 162,355,588.04 mph - S1 813 Porsche 911 Speedster -
#2 - 2,630,515.22 mph - S2,932 Wuling Sunshine -
Seriously ? As said the other 998 scores are also ridiculous…
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It’d be trivial to put some sort of ceiling function on accepted scores, like “this is the fastest speed that is physically possible in this game.” Of course then you’d have a bunch of hacked scores right at that maximum, but at least it would show there was a modicum of care put into it.
Not quite sure what you’re pointing at here.
I wasn’t suggesting a ceiling score for any event but things that are clearly impossible should be removed. Let’s face it - 16M mph for any speed zone or trap is a clear indication that something is not really a true score. That would be a modicum of care on the devs surely?
On a side note - that’ll probably get moved to another part of the forum - why is this sort of thing being ignored whilst my request to fix the whole clutch / ebrake issue that I asked to be be sorted out being ignored?
Every time I load the game I have to switch to M/C, do a few E-brakes, then back to M to get my E-brake to work? (E-brake mapped to clutch pedal on wheel).
So many game affecting issues that just get ignored whilst the rampant Rival scores remain.
Even when I was checking the HW zone times, I went back to Mexico and got hit with a server connection issue even though everything was available online except the fact that there were no players on the session.
Guess I need to do a full shut down of the console instead of just a quit game then restart?
I am fairly sure the connection issue was, ahem, “solved” recently.
stock options, series 46 “Cinco de Mayo”, week 3 winter/dry season
[loose basis for approach; cheapest car that’ll do the stunts, least-driven car for races]
weekly “Mexican Supercar” – VUHL 05RR (Hotel 152.25 m)
trial “Carrera de Resistencia” – Porsche Carrera (beat 5 robots then 2; my counts 4 then 2)
eventlab “The Sierra Annual River Run!” – #240 Jimco TT (good one – but no enemies?!)
eventlab “Hotdog Dash” – Nissan Z '23 (nice one)
danger sign “Heights of Mulegé” – Renault Clio ‘13 (fairly easy; 144.87 m)
speed zone “Atlantes de Tula” – M-B CLK-GTR FE (slightly tricky; 177.01 mph)
championship “Offroad Tour” – #122 AC Class 1 (wins; 1 slightly tricky then 2 easy)
championship “Weather Perfect” – Toyota Tundra (fairly easy or easy wins)
treasure “On Top of the World” – Huracán Sterrato (3 stars at Puerta Pétrea)
RA danger sign “Palm Forest” – Toyota Celica’94 (easy; 260.05 m)
RA championship “Rally Around” – Can-Am Maverick (easy 1st, difficult 2nd, easy 1st)
HW drift zone “Horizon Nexus” – Toyota Sera '91 (easy; 141,438)
HW championship “Time to Play” – Lotus Exige '18 (very easy wins)
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That’s exactly what I’m suggesting, having a ceiling for valid scores so that any obviously-hacked ones can’t be added to the leaderboards in the first place. Right now there’s obviously nothing at all like that.
In the first attempt I managed to infect 1…in the second attempt I managed to infect as many as 5 people! I was overjoyed, because I don’t really like this mode. I play alone and I don’t have any friends.
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That thing with a 12th place drivatar leading the pack is something Ive seen a lot driving my highway circuit race event lab with just me and drivatars. I dont know what causes it, I thought it might be a drivatar missing a checkpoint and just keeping on, but I dont know. Its not just a thing in specific to multiplayer races, though.
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Went through more of the trial car options and decided to take a RWD McLaren F1 GT to Llanuras Sprint rivals, which is the first trial race. I got it to #242, which is the best F1 GT time on the board by a little more than 0.400 seconds. The next F1 GT time was a really nice drive but my tune, with what looks like the same build, seemed to have a little something extra.
So Ill leave an open tune for it here, for anyone to peruse, use, tweak, make better or whatever. Easy to drive RWD, doesnt spin tires when launching, can stand on the gas. Just … keep at least 2 wheels on asphalt. And if you want to skip the explanations, theres a full build list down further, and a tune settlings list a little lower.
Build:
Race weight reduction is a lot, and rally tires are a significant upgrade over stocks, so those are the starting points. First the things I know need to be done …
Race weight reduction
Rally tires
Max rear tire width … almost always a given
Max rear traclk width … always a given
Doing that puts the car at S2 908 PI, so we need to see if we can add stuff that reduces PI.
Adding a spoiler usually reduces PI, but with the McLaren F1 GT, it actually adds a fraction of one PI. I noticed that its one of the cars where a spoiler set at minimum downforce actually increases top speed and reduces the lateral G numbers when compared to having no spoiler. That might be beneficial, but it doesnt look right and I didnt test it.
So I looked for other stuff to decrease PI.
The next good place to look is transmissions. In AWD cars, choosing the 10 gear race transmission drops PI a little. Comes in handy. In RWD cars, the sport transmission sometimes drops the PI a good amount … for reasons I dont get. Same weight and the ability to change the final drive ratio is just better. In this F1 GT, choosing the sport transmission dropped the overall PI to S2 902. Nice.
Add sport transmission.
Now on to wheels.
Larger front wheel size adds a little PI, larger rear wheel size decreases PI a little. Using the largest rear wheel size decreases PI to S2 901. Sometimes doing this can impair handing but it works on the F1 GT. It also makes the car slightly faster.
Another thing to do is to choose heavier wheels. If you choose the largest rear wheel size, you need to choose wheels that are +11 lbs (5 kg?) over the stock wheels to get the F1 GT to S1 900. If you dont want to change the rear wheel size, you need to choose wheels that are +24 lbs. I went with:
Max rear wheel size
+11 lbs wheels … I went with +11 lbs Enkei wheels that looked a lot like the stock wheels
Then I noticed that adding race suspension still keeps it in S1 class. Yes please.
Add race suspension
Now its at S1 900 as high as the PI will go while staying S1. The last thing to do is change the differential. All the differentials are PI neutral. You want an adjustable one, and for this car, the drift differential had the best acceleration numbers. I tested both race and drift diffs and turning felt exactly the same to me. The other ghosts I raced, and tunes I saw available for download, looked like they were using the race diff. When I choose the drift diff I wasnt losing anything to other ghosts in turns, but I gained a few car lengths at the start. The drift diff seemed to be they way to go.
So the full build is:
Race weight reduction
Rally tires
Max rear wheel width
Max rear track width
Sport transmission
Max rear wheel size
+11 lbs wheels
Race suspension
What I didnt test was using the heaviest wheels and seeing if that would allow PI for an engine upgrade. And I didnt test performance with a rear spoiler. But if you want to try the rear spoiler, you can use this same build plus the spoiler, but you need +24 lbs wheels instead of +11 lbs. The spoiler itself adds +9 lbs to total weight. Trying the spoiler is interesting because it seems like adjusting the downforce can make the car faster but with less handling, or a little slower but with more handling. Im going to build a different F1 GT with a rear spoiler
Now the tune settings:
Tire pressure 26.0/28.0 (f/r)
Final drive ratio 2.65 (2.82 allows it to hit top speed but 2.65 was better for Llanuras … for 5th gear)
Camber 1.0/1.0 (f/r)
Toe 0/0
Front Caster 6.5
ARBs 30.00/15.00 (f/r)
Springs 432.8/690.0 (f/r) … default felt good so I didnt change anything.
Ride height … minimum front and rear
Rebound Stiffness 9.8/14.9 (f/r) … default again
Bump Stiffness 6.1/9.3 (f/r) … default again
Diff acceleration 40%
Diff deceleration 44%
With the diff on RWD you want as high as possible without braking traction. Increasing the percentage promotes oversteer. On RWD power builds, lower settings can help but this F1 GT is pretty under control. These settings just felt good to me. And the deceleration I chose was a little higher than acceleration to get the car turned in a little more while decelerating … a tiny bit more oversteer to get the backend out a little bit for entering corners.
This is what the rivals drive looked like:
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That’s ace!
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Did one run of the MB speed zone and didn’t get that close. My PB in general is like 172 and that was with the insane grip of the Valkyrie. Hmm.
I had something similar on the Goliath trial this week. the last place AI (I was second to last because I missed a checkpoint) was teleporting just ahead of me (I could see them) then far behind me (I couldn’t see them) and ended up not finishing the race
All the way through, they were listed as last and there was no actual race between us.There are definitely issues with the game
I didn’t record the run unfortunately but I do recognise the issue you describe
I watched the whole video and that was one bad race. The behaviour was just bad and there is definitely something dodgy going on there. At one point (about 29ish seconds) a car randomly levitated and you are right about the odd handling of the vehicles. Rubber banding is also evident.
I have noticed a lot more lag this week in the trial (on xbox one local SSD and cloud) and I did have big issues with input not registering on the xbox one but I don’t think connection/lag can explain all of what you are talking about
There will always be cheaters in games and the more you make games online centric, the more it will negatively affect players who want to do things properly
Cheating in single player is bad but not the end of the world. Cheating in multiplayer ruins the game for everyone
I don’t think there is a simple solution to the problem of cheat menus et el but there does need to be something done about it
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go in from the end that doesn’t have the sharp-ish turn and go in with a LOT of speed, the CLK-GTR FE holds the road very very well so you don’t have to slow down that much until right at the end where you have to do the sharp-ish turn
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