Before getting into a big discussion about the pro’s and con’s of putting people of similar rival times into a hopper I wanted to know if it were technically viable. Anyone have a clue?
I suggested this as an idea a few times previously. I don’t know whether there’s enough people racing a certain class hopper at any one time to make this worthwhile is the main drawback. What certainly SHOULD happen is that the grid should be set up based on player skill i.e fastest at the front going to slowest at the back. Leaderboard times would work very, very well to set this up. There’s nothing worse than random grid starts. Some noob running 10-20 seconds a lap off the pace starting out front driving like a maniac trying to hold onto the position, great idea.
And whats the difference in that same noob starting at the back and torpedoing through everyone in turn 1 …
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with this strategy noobs are with noobs, and vets, vets. Lap times, as you know, are a pretty honest indicator of skill at any given moment. Rarely will you have some wild crazy super lap 15seconds faster than your average. Knowing your in a race, with people are known to be competitive with you off the bat, changes the psychology of the event. Besides, a good rival time probably is indicative they have figured out where the corners are… we hope!
Not sure how well this would work. The skill of being on top of the leaderboard and the skill of multiplayer racing are most often VERY different sets of skill. A guy being fast while driving all alone (or against fairly predictable drivatars) might be terrible while driving in the middle of others.
When you drive in a lobby with others, you can’t just stick to your racing line for quick laps. You need to adapt to having others around you, and to adapt to different cars and setups having different braking points and ways to take corners. In fact, a fast leaderboard driver could become the worst wrecker in multiplayer lobbies even though he’s only trying to stick to his regular line and have skill to adapt to other cars around him.
Just throwing it out there, as I don’t think grid position based on leaderboard times makes any sense. At least not as the ONLY variable.
The skill set isn’t that much different. Usually the fastest guys on the boards are the best racers online. Leagues have shown such and I’ve seen such on many occasions. The only difference is being mindful of your surroundings as best as you can. The rest is all down to car control. If you’re that fast, there’s no need to adjust a cars build or tune.
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The skill set isn’t that much different. Usually the fastest guys on the boards are the best racers online. Leagues have shown such and I’ve seen such on many occasions. The only difference is being mindful of your surroundings as best as you can. The rest is all down to car control. If you’re that fast, there’s no need to adjust a cars build or tune.
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Exactly…and it could be done, unless I’m reading it wrong, pretty dang easily. Really just hope they could implement just one hopper and let it sink or swim on its own. Im pretty optimistic, given the chance, it will take off.
-Im ok with the disparity occurring between rival time and competitive racing. Good times in Rivals mean you’ve learned the track. Learning to play with others is the next step. Sure there may be a little roughness, but the skill level is there. These days its a mix of best and worst. All the time. Not really fun for anyone. People say make friends, private lobbies, and thats fine, but T10 have given the inclination to make the game accessible for more. A lobby based on rival times is the biggest step I can think of to create competitive play at all levels for Forza right now. As far as grid position goes, while I think its a good and interesting idea, its kinda secondary to the possibility of the creation of a hopper based around time.
That 10-20sec, if not more, disparity in lap times, is a fundamental problem with todays hoppers. It seems a competitive hopper is a myth, and I’m wondering if this is an underlying reason the crashers are so prevalent.
The reason you see a lot of crashers in hoppers is they can get away with it with the lack of behavior rules. o2R Dsquared 07"s idea of comparing leaderboard times to set the grid is a great idea. It can replaces well the need of qualifying sessions in order to set a fair grid start.
Hoppers divided by leader board times is a good idea but I think that there would need to be overall class leader boards. At a track like spa where I have ran leaderboards I would be correctly placed in the hoppers of people who are in the top one percent on the leaderboards. But at a track like yas marinas where I haven’t ran leader boards and I probably don’t have a clean lap I would be in a higher percent hopper when I don’t belong there. Also the fact that you would have to change lobbies for certain tracks sounds like a pain.
How does an average of all of your compiled rivals times with dirty laps only considered if a clean one isn’t available. Can handicap the dirty ones too a little. After initial hopper entry, the grid would be seeded according to rival time?
Im with you on Overall Class Leader boards. Leader boards in general encourage competition…and in Forza5 they appear pretty basic. Slapping another filter in there should be trivial.
Forzastats.com breaks things into overall class leaderboards, so I’m sure T10 could do the same rather easily. The whole concept doesn’t seem like it should be that hard and I really like it. Putting someone who is in the top 100 on a class leaderboard in the same hopper with someone that can’t break the top 10,000 on any track just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I see that a lot when I race in the D class lobbies. I was jumping around lobbies trying to avoid crashers the one day and Sunderlandshady, Alexiens, XDonkey85X, and someone else (if you don’t recognize the names, they are all pretty darn good in D class) were all on, but in different lobbies. With the idea proposed here, we would have had 5 of the top 100 in the same lobby and racing would have been awesome. Instead we were all spread out, each lobby was a crashfest with some noob that is trying to drive a Chevelle with 500Hp, sliding all over the place, and causing chaos.
Exactly Lou, nobody is competitive in the lobbies, and consequently nobody is happy. People’s tendency to be jerky will significantly decrease if they feel they are competitive. Every time…and correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears enough data to do something like this and then some, is already being collected by Forza5?
Once you look into the numbers it gets pretty messy tho. I thought it was a perfect idea till I did a bit of number crunching. Forza stats is a very elite group of racers. You need a top 500 time to be considered and a top 100 time to score.
Look at the C Class Leguna Seca track I picked it cause I think it has the most times and therefore should give best results. There is over 1,000,000 times times posted. A clean lap gets you top 32,000 or 0.032%. Top 10% including dirty are separated by 20+ seconds a lap! You can be in the top 10% even dirty and be running 25% slower than the number 1.
Not that I like it, but going by numbers getting into a lobby with people that can all run within 5 seconds a lap of each other statistically your very close. If your quick and want competition friends list are the way to go.
Just curious as I didn’t play any other Forzas online but how does their matchmaking and competition compare. Don’t use public created lobbies as an example cause I don’t want to open that can of worms. But are the current hoppers better or worse in comparison to previous versions of “random” lobbies.
Im not sure that I follow. From whats above, it appears there is a decent amount of drivers at each time, making match up fairly easy. Keep in mind, Forza already has these stats as you see every time a leaderboard screen is posted in game. Nothing new needs to be collected to make this work. The big question is can the servers use this data. Given we have 'gamerscore,'s already, I’m guardedly optimistic…but who know’s…
Sorry I guess I didn’t quite finish what I was getting at.
I’m not sure they can isolate the top drivers enough to keep them in close races. There is about a 5 or so second time difference in the top 1000 times on any given track. After that the times don’t vary quite as drastically. You would need to have probably 4 separate lobbies for those top 1000 drivers alone for them to stay in close races. With 24 different lobbies and 10 people in a lobby as a general number in order to accommodate the top guys adequately there needs to be 1000 people capable of top 1000 times in the hoppers at any given time. I just don’t think the numbers are there. … That’s why if your fast and want close races add friends and run privates.
It would be nice to know how they actually set the lobbies up. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they already use this data but have to use a wide range to keep the lobbies fuller. If you look at the time differences in the top 2% the gap is huge.
ahhh, gotcha. I still don’t find that a deal breakers as sorting is always a, best of whats around, operation. That is, when you log on and cue up for a hopper the server would attempt to place your with similar times. If nobody is close to you, then it puts you in with the nearest match. Of course if your not happy with the hopper your always free to quit out and start the process again. At least this way there is a good shot of competition, rather than now where in most races I run at least 1/3 of the field gets DNF’d. Also, I think if people believed that the hoppers were actually competitive, they would frequent them again.
Lobbies are set up according to something called a gamerscore, someone who played previous forza’s could help you more than I, but basically you get a score and it goes up if you beat people better than you, and down if you lost to people worse. Apart from that Im kind of in the dark about the whole thing.
Also, if numbers are a question at this stage in the games and xbox’s release then the situation has already become dire. PS4 doesn’t have a driving game, there’s essentially zero next gen competition. Not to mention most games are pretty lackluster at this stage of launch. Forza should be beating all of them like a rented mule.
Ok yeah I’ve heard mention of gamerscore, I think I recall it being a rating separate from your level that you can’t see. I’m just not sure how it was calculated. If it does go by your position after a race and not your best lap time that might be the issue right there as usually a consistant 3 laps will win a race if the faster drivers get knocked off early and have to fight through traffic. With it not being displayed there’s no way of knowing if it actually does put you in the right lobbies, there’s also no way of gauging the skill level of a lobby at a glance other than driver level.
I don’t think numbers in general are the issue, but there might not be enough people in the hoppers. Lots might be in rivals, career, painting etc. Just a guess as there’s no way of knowing, although if I’m searching for lobbies it usually just recycles the same 3 lobbies unless I switch class.
Yea man, the whole gamer score thing is a big mystery, which regardless of how it works doesn’t appear to do the job its supposed to these days. I think some of that was it wasn’t that important in previous versions. That is, a player would only really be using it in the beginning of their forza experience. After that initial period, people would have gravitated towards their preferred, user created/managed lobbies. This period of limited usefulness probably made these gamerscores seem more useful than they actually are, because as you say they don’t really tell the store of how one races…rather how well they survive.
As for numbers, I agree, both that the people are still there, and that lobbies aren’t exactly doing all they can to illustrated a solid player base, with constantly getting stuck in the same 3 4person lobbies.