Forza Motorsport 2, people were creating a game save, copying it to a stick, auctioning off their cars , restoring the game save and collecting their money from the AH. Even after it was patched people had billions and billions.
Legit players couldn’t afford anything while pirates made sellers lives a misery.
Paint layer limits that were supposed to be 1000 were glitched to hit 5000+ .
Spam paints were everywhere,
We had to glitch paint jobs to get neon lotus green and lambo orange, everyone complained there werent white wheels.
Massive internet fights at least once a week.
Photo gallery just went away one day and never returned (for everyone, all at once without a single word of explanation ever) .
Community races were impossible to Join/Stay in.
I think Foza TV worked for me a couple of times.
People trading unicorns.
Paint layer shifts that made a mess.
loads of paints being unlocked towards the end causing loads of painters to leave.
Secret tricks to make your car go faster (double Clutching ? and boosts off the start? and coasting round corners ?)
Dodgy trading.
Dupe accounts
Cars selling for 999,999,999,999
The community team didn’t get involved enough.
Lost data.
Clique and insular if you didnt know people.
People buying all the cars someone was selling then reselling them 15 minutes later for inflated prices or just to hoard them out of spite.
and then forza 3 happened.
There was lots that was good about FM2 and its community but it wasn’t perfect then either.
There were worse things than dirty credits in the auction house.
There were worse things than modded rims in the auciton house.
There were worse things than profanity, pornography, racism, and discrimination plastered on cars in the auction house.
There were worse things and they couldn’t be stopped by throwing more people at the problem.
Some good info there that I wasn’t aware of, thanks for posting it.
Well now I’m really puzzled, because I can’t imagine too much that’s worse than what you’ve listed… Still, you’ve got more experience with this than I do so that’s that.
Hopefully you understand that my adamancy towards the return of the “main three” features is just from my honest desire to see the community thrive, and the presence of those features are really the only things I can think of to help with that (mostly because they seem to be what’s keeping FM4 alive). None the less, it’s obvious I’m missing something here, so at this point I’m just gonna call it quits with my little campaign and let other people do the talking.
Technically there are. When playing a game, if you access the Help application you get the same information you would have gotten in a printed manual. I think there may even be a mention of this website on one of the generic information selections.
I don’t know, but I am of the opinion we’ve managed to have a rather in-bounds discussion up to this point. With any luck, some of this is being taken into consideration by the powers that be and maybe we’ll see some changes.
I’d bet less than 1% of people even look at those though. I remember one of the best parts about getting a new game was reading the printed manual whilst in the car/bus journey home from buying it.
I wasn’t around until FM4 so I can’t speak about events prior to that. I know in Forza 4 if you still hop on as I do occasionally, you can see paint jobs that have been blatantly stolen. I like the lack of gifting Ito an extent) and the new cloud saving which despite it’s troubles makes it impossible to use outside livery/tune unlockers. These features make it so that when you download a paint job/tune you know that the work is the original product of the party you from whom you are downloading it. I agree that the social media age has pushed us in a direction away from the forums but I think that might have something to do with the fact that these forums just aren’t as attractive as private forums can be. The intense filter makes discourse on this forum more formal which can drive people away. This isn’t something that can be changed but nevertheless we should acknowledge it. Also the fact that the Forza Hub exists drives people away and lastly the removal of certain community features in-game make it less attractive to hold contests here. I know the old days when threads would be on the back page in hours probably wont return but what we can do is groom a new generation to populate these forums. I for one am currently 17 years old. I am an outlier in the demographic here. If we could show people my age the merits of being involved in a community, that you can really get more out of the game, then the forums would draw a larger crowd. As was previously mentioned the games should also go back to having longer life-cycles. FM4 had a full year’s worth of DLC if memory serves and the continued support and community features made that happen. I think FM6 is a step in the right direction though, transferring content from 5-6 is a very important step which for all intents and purposes makes my FM6 experience almost like another chapter of my FM5 experience. When you go into public lobbies start talking to people, get them to the forums and as for the creators, you should keep pointing towards the forums. I like that in FH2 when you load up the paint shop it tells you to come here for advice. Keep doing things like that, lets work hand-in-hand to salvage what was once the largest and most talented multi-media forum on the web!
Legitimate question that I don´t know the answer to - Was the storefront in FM4 a victim of fraudulent activities? Were people selling tunes with modded wheels and alikes? Is such thing even possible?
Regarding the community stuff, I think TORA serves a great example of what happened in FM5. The removal of lobby options, storefront and gifting greatly affected their system. Without gifting it was impossible to share team paints and tunes. Without storefront, there wasn´t a proper place to share replays and the removal of lobby options made the task of organizing a race a nightmare.
Two, very simple, features that affected this club massively. I´m not even going to talk about the lobby options since they are basic for any simulator.
Personally, I don´t see the point of the auction house if there is a storefront. The latter was, for me, the best feature in the FM franchise. The ability to share (locked) everything from paints, photos, replays and tunes to everyone (at a cost) made everything so seamless, so easy. It just worked. The filters for searching were perfect and I always found what I was looking for. That doesn´t happen in FM5.
Obviously, if the answer to my first question is yes, then things are bit more complicated.
Ultimately, I find Turn 10´s solution to these issues sort of like duct-tape? If it doesn´t work then remove it. Hmm.
There has to be a way, even if it forces everyone to be connected to the Internet.
Solving these problems at expense of the community is not a bright idea. That is just giving the victory to the real “cheaters” here.
Dust, the community killed off itself with fights, cliques, and dumb stuff.
Turn 10 didn’t help it flourish by seemingly ignoring discussion and removing features, let alone we mention Che treating everyone like the first coming of Ian Bell.
EDIT: profiteering, greed through LE’s, entitlement, attention grabbing, etc…I could go for days.
Well here I go I don’t come on here much but I have been around since FM1 and I was going to come on here a vent my frustration about the lack of community features that are going to be missing from FM6 but is there much point do they even read this ? Well anyway some of you may know me I would say I a chilled out guy like all of the time. But after all the reading what people are saying sort of angers me For instance most of the features that are gone don’t matter ? Like clubs,AH,SF,LB and gifting you guys have to be joking ! I’m not going to lie I’m buying the game but am I happy with it no all my personal favourite things about the game are gone and seems to being staying that way. For me they made huge leaps forward with FM3 and FM4 but after that it’s a backwards step for the community side which is what makes it special ! But I must the game looks amazing graphics wise and the new things like 24 multiplayer and weather & night are cool but I’m not sure if it was worth losing the rest of the stuff for it .
A community is what you make of it, and how you see it, always see the negative, and that, is all you will ever see and feel. And that will bleed into the rest, thus acting like a poison spreading throughout the population. The toxin within what is left of this once great place, started with the modders. The ruined the economy of the game, thus calling for an outcry for it to get fixed. The means employed by Turn10, was to get rid of the features getting abused. People couldn’t take to that real well, thus more crying came out that instead of a fix, it was outright removed.
The assumptions began. Turn10 never did come fully forward as to why they did as they did. But in reality, obviously what they did try to come up with didn’t work as intended, or just couldn’t be easily undone to their satisfaction. There is far more I could go into, but from reading all that I have here, it would just be pointless anyway. I love this place, and I too am frustrated at what we have now, but we could all sit here, type out in all woe is me , and blame this person and that person or those people for it, or we can take what we have, and make the best of it like we used to.
A community is only as strong as its weakest link, just like a chain. It really is that simple.
I suspect that T10’s definition of community is quite different from the majority in this thread. That it has less to do with the hardcore, the long time loyalists, and more of a simple and general, “all those who purchase this game”. At least that is the direction things seem to have been trending in. I don’t like it, but can’t lay blame either. Projected millions of casual players will always take precedence over a guaranteed, relative, handful. Pretty trumps substance these days, and all I hope for is that 6 has enough of what matters to me that I’ll actually want to purchase.
I wasnt around in the early days, but I honestly don’t see how anyone could argue that this forum hasn’t been in a slow decline for at least the last several years. Since, oh I don’t know, November 2013 or so.
So many great statements being made from the long time forza members. I agree that it will never go back to the way it was in FM2. FM2 was the ultimate team game as stated by Dust. My team alone had from 20-30 members. Tuners, painters, sellers, test drivers, and more painters and our famous mod/add guy. (Love you D) Now with the system we have its like playing by yourself offline…
Tuning/painting comps held by us community members also was a great way to keep community participation up. If you go back and look, most comps needed the AH as a way to payout winners or found the comp. Now we are left with no way to reward participants . No reward= no participants. No participants = no comp. No reward + no comps+no participants = the community in its current state…
For example:
Tune LE car
Have Little Vixen paint it
Place 10 cars in AH.
Cars make 100mil
LV takes 50mil and uses 45mil to buy cars to paint and give away as prize cars or sell them for dirt cheap (see Halloween bash)
Tuner takes the other 50mil and holds tuning/painting comps that pay out the top 3 tuners and painters
Soo many people did this that it kept everybody busy and involved from all ends.
-Tuners building cars for said comp
-Drivers testing the tunes before there sent in for the comp
-Painters painting the comp car
-Comp holders testing the tunes sent in
-Comp holders judging the paints
-Comp holder posting the results and feedback
Winners take credits and hold their own comps for the community
In short, there isn’t very many people who would like to hold a competition for bragging rights, even less people to compete for bragging rights…
I came around in FM4, so I probably never saw the “glory days” of the forum. but on topic
“What killed the community” my opinion
I think there was multiple things, but majority I would put on changing to next gen. I did some calculations, 58% of my former forza friends do not own an Xbox one. and on that list there is multiple names that were very well known among the community back in FM4 days. those names include the tuner I was concidering as best of FM4, and couple painters which I considered being one of the best, not to mention couple very active community members.
I got my copy of FM5 much later than majority of people, and therefore I wasn’t very active for 8 months, but when I came back I was rather shocked as there was “nothing” happening around this place. Since then I have been pretty silent, as I don’t see a reason to hold any competition, as I cant reward any competition winner, if there would be a competition, I wouldn’t win anything, In FM4 I held multiple tuning comps, and took part in multiple tuning comps.
That is the result of AH being removed
I made new friends via public hosted lobby, which was always damage on , assits off, and couple other restrictions (Drivetrain/Weight/Power/Class) me and couple of my friends ran that lobby on daily basis, and we had full lobby pretty much after the first race, and it stayed that way until we went offline. in FM5 I have made 3 or 4 friends and I have been playing it roughly a year now.
That is result of public hosted lobbys being removed.
Sharefront, I actually think is better than storefront, although if I want to see what my favorite painters have been doing I can’t find anything, unless I buy every car and go trough them 1 by 1, with just 250 or so cars it would take days to get trough, same happens when someone is looking for tunes, it just too much work, therefore almost every car I have is either stock color or matte black.
I would say Sharefront is great feature, but it doesn’t work quite as well as it should.
Also I have heard RUMORS that there is/was a mod who used ban hammer on too light reason, I do not know for certain is that true, but if so, that might have something to do with it. At least couple of my friends who were active in here are now gone. (although those apparently weren’t permanent bans). Anyway this is only rumor, and I have heard only one side of the story, those might have been perfectly deserved bans.
Then we have to remember that FM5 was small and rushed game, therefore we couldn’t expect it to outlive FM4 which to date is the largest Forza Motorsport game. I havn’t checked on FH2 side of things, as that game doesn’t interest me. all that much, it has only couple of cars that weren’t in FM5 and that’s pretty much all it has going for me, but as FM6 is out sooner than I expected, I’m going to skip it.
All in all, I was thinking that I could pull a tuning competition sometime after FM6 launch, just to see will that start reviving this place. Maybe it will Maybe it won’t, we shll see what happens, It looks like that some of my old FM4 friends are rejoining with FM6 but at this time we have to wait and see.
Unfortunately bragging right won’t help you progress though the game or recover the credits that you spent build multiple test cars for the comp. I held the first tuning comp in FM5 and about 20 comps between fm2-4. In fm2-4 I didn’t need CR to test people’s cars because they could gift me the test car, but in FM5 I had to buy every car that people used as well as the parts they installed of the tune. (30 cars+part) While the winner gets to brag the comp holders but themselves in debt. ( it’s not like we could sell the car and parts back for credits like we could in the other 4 games)
