FM6- The community

Forza Motorsport Legacy Motorsport FM6 Discussion
81

Perhaps a small point, but are you guys factoring in that forums in general seem to be on the decline as other social media formats are becoming more the norm? Add in mobile ease of access and forums are starting to become the “cassettes” of lore…

In Fm3 and Fm4 my group, which was huge, ran a spreadsheet with both euro and U.S. slots for series and no exaggeration, probably had 8+ regular series events a week.
Console migration happened, or didn’t happen, and the group was shattered. Some went to the One, some went to the new PS, some went to the old PS as it was cheaper, and some stayed on the 360. In fact, Fm4 is still easily the most active segment in our group. ( Oh and more migrated to PC as well, this seems to have been the final push to get some to do so.)

But, even through all that, our own forums are way down in activity.

82

I just hope that Forza 6 eventually gives us the ability to gift cars/paints/tunes/layergroups to Friends.

I used to be quite an active livery painter in Forza 4 (example above) and one of the great things about the livery community at the time was that we all shared resources with one another. Each of us would create a “logo car” (a livery file for a Ford Fiesta which contained 20+ logos) and they’d all be distributed to those that took part. That gave dozens of livery designers a solid base of re-useable logos to work from, so that they spent less time creating those logos and more time focusing on the designs of the cars themselves.

Livery painters would make connections with top tuners to collaborate on releases and help each other out in the process, as livery designers don’t have the time to develop top tunes and vice-versa. Racing leagues would send out numberboards to drivers so that their events looked more professional. People like ARMIPOTENT ADAM (one of the greatest livery designers in Forza history) would hold huge livery contests on the forums, give out some exclusive designs to the winners and offer design critique on all the entrants, so that we could improve as a whole. Drifting communities would gift their replay files amongst each other and create entertaining video montages.

I understand that Turn 10 has more data than any end user would have, and I am sure that the decisions they have made make sense for the majority of the playerbase (even if they don’t align with the vocal minority who frequent forums). However as somebody who fell in love with the community that had developed around the time of Forza 4 I sincerely hope that gifting makes a return one day.

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83

1.) Nice livery, always been a fan of your work and this is no exception, actually it’s probably one of my favorites of yours.

2.) I had a logo car that I put out, I received all the logo cars and they had their own problems.

Logo cars were a nice idea but it ended up just being a device to get around having to paint. It was truly awesome that I didn’t have to make all the little logos on my cars and be bogged down by small things but heres the dark side of logo cars.

Everyone would use the same logos, for the most part. In logo cars nobody wanted to give away “car-specific logos.” This is totally fair, because who wants to make it easy for a beneficiary of your logos to copy a specific design? People would only gift logos anyone would have, which flooded the logo cars with millions of iterations of the same logos.


Forza567 by Ace Ventura LeMans, on Flickr

Here’s an example; I’m not giving away the “Vaillant” bunny because it can only be used for one car, Vaillant Porsches. If someone had this they had the key component to replicating a replica I did, I would give them the Bosch and Bilstein logos though because anyone would have them anyway.

The other problem with logo cars was that you didn’t have to be “too” good to get into the logo sharing group. This meant that a lot of people were putting things in and not getting the same sort of quality out of the process and those that weren’t particularly great were getting showered in logos made by top designers. The way some painters quality went down in FM5 or other just disappeared is indicative of this. Essentially people were selling paints that were better than what they could actually do.

I wish gifting would return in some capacity, but I like the fact that in FM5 when you finish a design, you know that everything on the car is a product of your own time. You can really look at the car and say “I made this!” and know that when you look at other’s cars they made it too. That my friends is a good feeling, a much better feeling than the hollow victory of just placing other peoples decals down.

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84

Wow! There’s names being posted that I havent heard in so long lol! In short I guess I am being nostalgic.

Jfiler posted the process flow on how things worked primarily on FM2, but also carried over to FM3 and FM4. The circle of forza life. Currencys were exchanged improperly by some, but you did have guys like Armipotent Adam that could sell a paint at 50,000cr. and get 3,000+ downloads, then turn around and reinvest the profit here. Comps hosted by community members were hosted here on FM.net. Where and why have people like adam left? Most of us know and we won’t discuss that now. There’s a reason though.

85

In the few years Ive been here this is still one of the most imaginative things Ive seen.

People made more of an effort

Even paints that may have seemed quite basic, on closer inspection had flashes of brilliance

Which isnt to say people didnt make good use of the 1000 layer limit

and people got involved in community events

These days when I see a tune going up for the ring 4 minutes after the car packs launched I wonder how much effort it took to create something when you cant even run a lap in that time.

And you cant talk to someone or comment on something without them taking it as a personal attack and throwing their toys out of the pram.

People are bringing up the inability to gift prizes as a problem but Helios and/or LV had threads asking for submissions where the community ran comps and T10 would give out the prizes but those threads didnt really seem to get used.

We have twitch, youtube, big photos, DVR and other tools which Im pretty sure that the community of FM2 would have used with a lot more imagination than how they currently seem to be used.

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86

That Wonka car was my idea, my old gamer tag was Vigilante Rick and I sold for mad tunerz, with NOZ and Swat. That is one of my favorite memories I have from all my years in the forza franchise, we actually got recognized by the community team for our unique giveaway, and it was a ton of work but a ton of fun for the whole community.

87

Yeah, that was a good time.

Yeah, but with all those negative things for FM2 it was still possible to have a good community.

88

Something else that gets overlooked but really might play a greater role is simply the lack of novelty.

I put the odd stripe and number on my cars in FM on the original Xbox but never got much more creative than that until FM2 arrived and suddenly we had a thousand layers a side to use! I joined the forums here the week FM2 released and found my way to the one and only livery forum we had at the time and it was packed with people who had also suddenly discovered this great creative outlet. It was an exciting time with scores of posts each day in the ‘Show Off Your Paints’ thread. Yes, we had a whole subforum devoted to liveries and yet most everyone posted in the same thread until it just became too cluttered to follow. And then the high quality paints by the great painters started to arrive, each with its own thread and each seemingly more revolutionary than the last.

Neubourn’s ‘Nancy’, Jinx’s ‘Starry Night’, Larry’s ‘Mona Lisa Lambo’, Ollie’s ‘Seven Samurai’, Medic Trash’s ‘Hot Chick On Roof’ series of paints, Timmy’s Toys designs, Sassypants’ ‘Superman’, Fruitster’s many paints, Mimic and Dedmon and their superhero paints, etc. And then soon came the replica liveries of Duffman, Maranello, Megawind, Nacho, and so many others I can’t recall and the Race/Replica Livery sub-forum was created to capture that sudden rush of new work. It was an exciting time and so much great work was being produced with each new creation raising the bar on what was possible. It really felt like the paint couldn’t get any better and yet it did, day after day. Paint in FM2 was several orders of magnitude above and beyond what could be done in the original FM that it really sparked a revolution in UGC. While paint has improved, we’ve got new surface style paints and new shapes to work with and new layer limits, the changes from title to title have not equalled the leap from FM to FM2.

Many of those painters have moved on and it’s not because of lack of auction house or inability to gift, they did what they did because they enjoyed the work and they enjoyed the admiration and congratulations of their friends and fans. They’ve given us their best and they’ve moved on to pursue other interests.

The Forza paint community as we knew it might never have been destined to long life. It’s certainly not dead thanks to the work of many great painters still at work today but it may never be able to recapture the spark that produced so much in such a small period of time no matter what resources anyone throws at it.
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89

I would have to disagree about the painters moving on part,From everyone I’ve talked to the inability to gift,colab,share,sell the content they make the way they have in the past is a huge part of why they stopped.Obviously I cant speak for everyone but I’m not talking about a couple people here,I’m talking 100 plus individuals who were big forza community players.In my opinion a large amount of these players would still be here if things were different.
However it looks like everyone will have to accept things move on for whatever reasons.
Forza is after all apparently quite a good racing game as well :slight_smile:

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90

I am one of the painters who moved on and that is exactly why… I used to love to paint because I loved creating something and seeing people use it. In FM2 through FM4 I did dozens of liveries, in FM5 I think I’ve done maybe 3. It was infuriating that if you weren’t one of the first 10-20 people to upload a design for a specific car chances are nobody would ever see it unless (in an unlikely event) it got flagged as a T10 Recommendation. The curated content system is junk, the search system is junk, I hope the changes they make to it this time around are drastic.

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91

X100 I don’t get the big push around here to gloss over the negative impact the lack of community features had on this game. Many would still be churning out UGC to this day had the game retained what it had in FM4.

edit - have they confirmed that there will be no AH or gifting this time around? I mean official confirmation, not moderators who at the end of the day only really know what we know.

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92

Well said Hiero. I can almost accept that as a valid reason lol!

93

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Turn 10 provide the game, the forums, the leaderboards, the photo storage, etc.

Some of you seem insistent on standing around in front of all the lemons, glasses, spoons, water, and ice cubes they’ve provided and complaining about the lack of sugar.

While Turn 10 might have made the lemonade for you in the past, it’s a simple recipe and you might want to give it a try yourself now.

94

Many of the things mentioned in this thread have had a small but cumulative effect on the community here, but I think the biggest factor has been the next gen console and FM5. The new console split the community as many couldn’t afford it or had a wait and see position. I myself only got it about three months ago. In the online world of organized racing, this split the drivers between consoles. Most leagues wanted to embrace the new game, leaving FM4 drivers in the lurch. With FM5 being a nightmare to organize an event, many drivers simply gave up, diluting the field even further. With less activity in the online end, it follows that there is less activity here. While the online racing community does not make up the community here in it’s entirety, I do believe that we drive a lot of the activity. When casual players come with questions, it’s usually the league racers who have the answers for them. When they want to up their game and get involved in more serious racing, they come here.

Hopefully, FM6 will help to rebuild the community and bring us back together. We can only hope that Dan and his team are reading these threads, and give us at least some of the features we think are important to league and organized events.

That said, in the end, we are the community. T10 gives us these forums to use, and as long as we play nice together, we’re pretty free to use them as we wish. It’s as much on us as them to make it work.

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95

Okay, and this might be way off topic, but my opinion is a replica while taking skill, isn’t what I’d define as creative. Is it beautiful, yes, is it that car you loved as a child, or last weekend on TV, sure, does it take painstaking devotion, yep, but it’s already been done.

Creative is using what’s been, or never been done even, in a new way. The “nothing new under the sun” argument to me is a driving force to say “hah, you’re wrong, look!”

Perhaps part of the problem here is the dancers have been too long at the party, it’s all wearing thin, getting old. Which begs the next obvious step in that chain of thought, the problem is then becoming that newer talent isn’t stepping up, and to that I’d have to say it’s gotten a bit tougher for that new talent to step up, certainly to be seen and rewarded IN GAME.

As many of you beat to death with a hammer, this forum is a vocal minority, and yet it’s almost the only way to get your stuff noticed, as previously once someone had your name/tag, they could look at all your stuff, BAM!

Today, it’s what car do I have, did “XXXXX” do one, do a search, no, hmm, maybe a different car, no, hmmm… Unless it’s self promoted here.
That’s unacceptable. And many have walked, or simply shut the doors, some are waiting, others just didn’t.

Certainly just my point of view and opinion, born of a bit of frustration, and waiting to see if someone smarter than myself can make it better.

96

I’d say wrong on both accounts. Do I paint replicas because I can’t do fantasy? No!

Here’s a human ear


Forza660 by Ace Ventura LeMans, on Flickr

Here’s Road Runner from the Looney Tunes


Forza653 by Ace Ventura LeMans, on Flickr

Here’s a cartoon bear for TS Batteries


forza389 by Ace Ventura LeMans, on Flickr

A defeated Confederate soldier


forza312 by Ace Ventura LeMans, on Flickr

Cartoon rabbits for Vaillant.


Forza564 by Ace Ventura LeMans, on Flickr

I have done all of these without anything besides a picture on my laptop of the above logos/characters. Speak for yourself about stepping up, I think that I and many others are “stepping up.” Hiero was more right about the novelty. How many times can you paint starry night on a car? I paint these cars, not because I have something to prove. I love getting recognition from my peers and others, I love jumping into public lobbies and seeing people run my paints but that is not the foremost reason why I paint these. I paint these cars because I want to. I wanted a Vaillant Porsche, so I made one. I wanted to race in an XB Falcon with an ear on the side, so I made it so I can. I like vintage racecars and that’s what I paint. I don’t need to be in a battle to prove I can paint other stuff, I can, I just don’t want to all the time.

Also to Hiero’s point. Believe me, I hate the fact that nobody can accept criticism. At the end of all my posts in which I reveal a new paint I write “Commentary and feedback are welcome and appreciated.” I don’t ask for blind praise, I want legitimate constructive criticism. This new forum, at the beginning of it’s life, had some of the elements of the old forum. If you look through roughly the first ten pages or so of my gallery page:

http://forums.forza.net/turn10_postst282_-PTG-Ace-Ventura–Race-Liveries-and-Replicas–New----BMW-M1-Map-Of-France.aspx

You will see constructive criticism to which I responded by changing things up. People should get a thicker skin, you have no idea how many times I’ve looked at designs thinking that they shouldn’t have used that stock font or this shape for that but then thought better of it and eeked out a “nice job.” Most of the time I truly mean it when I give my praise but there are times when I just wish people were a tad more thick skinned.

97

Well stated!

98

And totally misses the point. If you’re looking at a picture, it’s already been done. Already been created. You replicated something that already exists. Doesn’t short you any on your talent, dedication to detail, skills with the software.

And I never said there were any that couldn’t do both, those that do have my utmost respect and admiration, maybe a bit of envy too. But “creating” usually doesn’t start with a picture, it starts with the guy that perhaps made whatever’s IN the picture.

BTW, I’m a huge proponent of everyone painting cars the way THEY want to, always have been, and IF any of you know me at all, there’s no doubt. These cars, no matter the genre, are a huge time sink, a large amount of time involved in details, angles, colors, shadows, research for some. Why do something you aren’t already in love with before you start?

I’m not trying to get anyone’s hackles up, I just think that the current set up has:
A) Run off many that were used to an easier way to promote and get their stuff out
B) It can’t be any easier for new people to hop in and get their stuff out if the veterans are struggling.

BTW, what battle? I’m lost on this?

Edit: BTW ACE, I have to agree, nothing like popping into a race and seeing one of your own cars on the grid, it rocks.

99

I agree with the rest of your reply by the way, this however I don’t see. By that logic people who paint landscapes aren’t creative because they are replicating what already exists onto a canvas. What we as painters do is replicate or create things on a digital canvas. It’s an art, believe it or not and those who use this medium to replicate should be viewed in the same vein of creativity as those who replicate with brush and easel.

Now…

DOESN’T ANYONE SEE THE IRONY IN THIS THREAD!!!

We are all gathered round to discuss how our community is falling apart but this thread is constantly getting refreshed! I have seen names in here that I haven’t seen in ages or haven’t ever seen at all. If everyone who’s posted in this thread posted regularly around the rest of the forum we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

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100

Not trying to be a smart-alec, but the Irony I see is someone posting: “If this were still an active, vibrant community, we wouldn’t be discussing the fact that it is no longer an active, vibrant community.”

What many people don’t realize is that for YEARS now we’ve been asking for more direct community involvement from Turn 10 staff. This is not something that just happened the past few weeks or few months.

It is also quite noteworthy that, as you point out, you’ve “… seen names in here that I haven’t seen in ages …” That tells me that the “old timers” who were once very active with FM and with this community are still lurking, and many are likely just wishing something would be done to draw them back in.

I fear, however, that as with so many other things around here, that will fall on deaf ears.

  • Don
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