To be honest, I’m not sure if the developers have noticed, but Forza Motorsport is getting a bit boring, especially in the GT category. A game that’s supposed to be fun and dynamic ends up feeling tedious. The issue is that each event requires 25 minutes of practice and 30 minutes of racing, meaning you need a full hour just to complete one race. On top of that, if you try to join the next circuit with only 5 minutes left before the race starts, there won’t be more than 5 players in the lobby. This forces you to go through another 25-minute practice session before racing again.
Any medium lenght lobby got this problem not only the GT’s one. The comunity it’s already quite slim in number and, more often than not, we end up in empty lobbies.
Personally I rarely see empty lobbies
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Does it?
There’s no expectation to do any Practice, or even Qualifying.
It helps (especially Qualifying as that determines your grid slot) but this game’s fuel/tyre simulation is simplistic enough that a full race strategy can be calculated from two Qualifying laps.
Most Series (GT categories included) tend to have one or maybe two optimal strategies, that ultimately boil down to “what’s the fewest amount of pitstops I can get away with”.
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I on the other hand think that the 25 min practice should be extended to 30-35 minutes. GT is super competitive and people should practice before hopping on to a session.
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This is the annoying part. If anything, it should put you in a filled lobby. Not in an empty one that won’t fill in 1 remaining minute anyways. Sometimes you have to rejoin the playlist a few times to get a filled lobby. But it makes no sense because you should be in that lobby the first time you try to join.
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In that, Gran Turismo is much more dynamic.
Because there are no more races of the same event until the current race is over, giving you a 5 minute margin to join the next race, thus guaranteeing a full lobby and no need for practice.
In Forza, however, while you are racing one race, another race in the same series will be running.
Gran Turismo
15 minutes races: cycle every 20 minutes.
25 minutes races: cycle every 30 minutes.
Forza
8 and 20 minutes races: cycle every 15 minutes.
30 minutes races: cycle every 20 minutes
60 minutes races: cycle every 35 minutes
Forza has less players, but twice as many races in a row and three times as many events.
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Agreed, Forza Motorsport’s structure hurts its attempts at matchmaking full and balanced lobbies.
I feel they’re either in too deep to realise this, or afraid to make major shakeups to the structure incase they alienate the few committed players they have left.
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In GT7 qualifying is done in your own time under static conditions as well. So when you jump into an event, you go right to the race as well. I prefer Forza’s format, bit even in LFM, you usually only get 8-12 minutes to practice/qualify unless it’s a bigger event.
I agree about the problem of overlap creating too many events, but with the current matching system it hardly matters. I’m probably more likely to get into a lobby with a competitive racer with fewer people in the event and lobby hopping, whereas with larger numbers in more likely to end up in a lobby full of lower skilled drivers as the matching system haphazardly fills the lobby.
People say the system doesn’t work because there aren’t enough players, but if argue it doesn’t work period and even with GT7 numbers and fewer events it would still be broken. We would need Call of Duty like numbers for it to semi-work, which was never going to happen even if motorsport had Horizon like numbers.
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There’s a clear technical problem when leaving a race and immediately rejoining a new one. It will routinely put you into a lobby with 1-2 other drivers (or sometimes none) and a couple of minutes left on the clock. This is despite the fact that there are often multiple other lobbies with spaces left open and drivers you have just been racing with get shoved into other, different, equally empty, lobbies.
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If there’s a thread on this I’d vote on it.
It’s something I’ve noticed before where if you daisy chain into a lobby from the podium you go into a ghost town, yet quitting and rewatching puts you in a busier room. It doesn’t make much sense.
I probably won’t do MP until S comes back around but I’ll put together some evidence of it then and create a thread.
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I think that increasing the cycling time between each race can help to concentrate more players in the lobbies (when you continue with the next race) and make the level between players more even.
Without the need to change the current format, except maybe matchmaking to match by level and not so randomly.
I rather do race after race, than spend 30min doing nothing and W8 for race to start.