This has been going on for the last two weeks. It’s impossible for me to find any adventures that are not s1. If I’m lucky I might get an A class lobby with 1-3 ppl after waiting for 15+ minutes (while tuning cars to kill time).
So… game dead or what? It’s holiday season over here, so shouldn’t there be a lot of people playing?
If you mean FH4, I could relate to this since there was like 9-10 people login in ranked events but the game is still active, the possible reason is because these players are minding their own business in a convoy, in a Forzathon event, applying decals to their cars or fine tuning them
Custom adventure ghosted is pretty dead currently, yes. Only in S1 road racing you’ll find some players and always the same.
On top it became a very unpleasant experience lately due to lagging cars floating all over the place and these strange “slow motion, then hyperspeed” lags which kill all the fun.
I have found A class ghost in the afternoons (Eastern time) at times. Never past around 6PM Eastern, than you have S1 and some S2 only. It is not heavily populated and the competition can be quite stiff. Most low level players quit pretty fast generally. You really have to know the tracks well in ghost. I wish I knew them better but I just have not played enough. Getting there. Custom I am glad to have but it is a bad system. It would be much better to just have a normal lobby system like Motorsport. Yea it may not be immersive but I would rather find more people. It is too much of a chance of not finding what you want so people don’t bother. It is always the same people pretty much as stated before.
It’s not only ghost also collision races - just without freeroam - seems dead.
Play with collisions. Most people in Unranked are driving for fun, not to win, anyway.
I do. All i turn off is freeroam rush.
The whole feature is failing because most players try the feature and leave or fallback to S1 search in the following 30s with no answer.
whoever has already tried this feature in A800 knows that, once in, people come and go, sometime alone, sometimes 10 …
I would consider worth to test allowing players to start championships even alone. racing alone is already better than waiting for a message to display. And for those searching, it would drastically increase the chances to find a championship.
Another solution would be to add some drivatars when number of players is under … 6 for instance. Sadly this would require to be able to identify who is drivatar and who is not which is a new feature … not going to happen.
Not a bad idea but I highly doubt it the dev will do something about it. They’ve proved how incompetent they are … ¯_(ツ)_/¯
No drivatars. They’re annoying to pass and pose no challenge once passed.
If the gameplay was good, more people would play. Main reasons I think it’s not:
Great idea, Tilo. You may be on to something with the drivatars, too.
A lot to unpack here…
Poor default setups? To what are you referring to, lobby setup or maybe stock cars? Why can’t and/or shouldn’t people learn it?? And why/how is it you think tuning is “obscure?”
because of stupid things like the rear wheel drive offroad seasonal championship… … rear wheel drive offroad? yeah no thanks. see you next week forza.
My 2¢…
The problem here, in my opinion, is twofold. First, there are too many online events/features and the overall pool of players actively attempting to join an online queue/lobby is spread too thin. In addition to regular gameplay queues/lobbies for single player Free-For-All Racing, Team Racing, Team Games, Ranked Free-For-All, Ranked Team Racing, Ranked Team Games, Seasonal Trial, Seasonal Team Games, Drifting and Ranked Drifting as well as any Co-op, PVP, and Game events someone may be trying to host in one of any number of Horizon Life’s, Custom Adventures have further diluted multiplayer by offering too much customization. While Custom Dirt and Cross Country now have no customization options past the race type choice, the remaing race types (Road, Street, and All Racing) can have queues/lobbies going with any combination of S2/S1/A/B, Freeroam Rush On/Off, and Collision On/Off — that’s sixteen different adventure combinations per the remaining three race types (48) plus the aforementioned off-roading w/o customization (2) for a total of fifty (50) different possible custom adventures that may (or may not) have their own line of queues/lobbies running!
All together, that is an awful lot of separate events possibly running at any given time, each potentially having an active string of queues/lobbies…or NOT, and therein lies the second half of the problem - players are blindfolded to viewing the number of queues/lobbies any event has and the number of players participating in each, if any are active at all! And when taking into consideration all that Horizon has to offer, from solo racing to painting/designing liveries to playlist activities and everything in between, time management becomes a factor when facing waiting in a queue for what feels like an eternity. When joining a queue, players are looking for “now” and have the very reasonable expectation that gameplay is forthcoming momentarily; blindfolding them from seeing lobby activity not only amplifys that expectation, but it robs them of productive time management. And while it’s possible to begin doing something else while waiting to join, doing so and then getting interrupted isn’t exactly desirable in the context of time management in a game with a myriad of consuming activities; it is little wonder that players have zero tolerance to wait an extra x# seconds. In short, with so many in-game competing interests, players don’t want to feel like they’re wasting any time, not even thirty seconds of it. Don’t get me wrong, I generally enjoy all forms of most of the online adventures, and I’m glad and grateful we have custom adventures to the degree we do (for the most part), and I’m not bemoaning that anything is unnecessary nor am I advocating for anything to be removed…I’m just making an observation.
Sometimes, less is more. (But never in the case of the number of available playable cars, more is always better. Always. #carpacks)
I stopped by last night to try out an unranked, collision-enabled race and it was a flat-out toxic environment for an event that should’ve inherently been understood by all as a “for-fun” race. For me, online racing in Horizon has been an utter turn-off aside from the unranked, collision-disabled races. So I’ve learned from experience that the best place to do online racing is at Motorsport. FM7 doesn’t even have FRR deployed throughout its lobbies yet the players there don’t race with the sort of unbridled rage that I see in Horizon – and I think some of this may have to do with how players are being indoctrinated into FH4 through example of the “AI”.
Anyway, I don’t think that player etiquette is the main reason (or even a reason) why a good number of Horizon’s online lobbies sit empty. FH4 is a “AAA” title with millions more downloads than FM7, yet there’s much more impromptu, multiplayer activity to be found in FM7 despite it’s large number of racing options. So it’s really up to PG to look at the analytics and to see where people are spending their time in the game, how much time they’re playing the game on a regular basis and the percentage of people who do not return to the game after their initial experience. However, I suspect that the issue of “empty” multiplayer lobbies in FH4 has to do with an existential problem with the game itself, and that it’s something that can’t be remedied or addressed solely through an update.
The initial ghosting at race start and auto-ghosting for impending collisions cured most of the toxicity. If they had come with the game’s release there might be more players around, still.
That, I totally agree with. 
(post deleted by author)
Plenty still play the game
Would be nice to see some actual stats. Not just online player count but detailed for each event.
For me the issue concerning the number of players by feature is not the number feature which is like having different games but the matchmaking. Game has to connect you with people willing the play the same.
That job was partly done by club feature, it has been mostly deprecated, no more message board, no week contribution, fuzzy mix on team/club making it so weird
The difficulty configuration is not even considered for online. Putting in the same race ultimate beginners and veterans is the best way ever to generate frustration.
Possible reason why FH seems empty, top first I see is ‘Summer time’ . there are more people inside house when it is minus 20 outside ( celsius 
)
After the list is long
Custom championship is a great feature, it is done the wrong way.
Anyway game is now far too old to expect any improvement. People complain about normal wheel spin feeling their garage with duplicates, people complain about waiting time between online championships and still, 10 months after game release ,team looks stuck on the way to improve the situation.
Overall, game disregards player’s profile which, at the time of google, Facebook and so on, looks like 30 years late on customizing user experience based on user activity.