How To Escalate Support Issues

Troubleshooting Hub Legacy Troubleshooting FH4 Troubleshooting
1

Hello Retrokrystal.

Please can you advise what we, as players, can do when receiving poor service on the support site. What process do you have for ticket escalation?

For the past month, I’ve been opening ticket after ticket after ticket. I think I’ve only ever received actual help once.

What usually happens is I get ignored for a few weeks, then someone will come back with a wholly inadequate response and try to close my ticket.

Here’s the latest inadequate response, received yesterday on a ticket I opened four weeks ago, when I asked:

WHEN DRIVING NON-LEGO VEHICLES, I SEE MY USUAL AVATAR. WHILST IN ANY OF THE THREE LEGO VEHICLES, MY AVATAR BECOMES FEMALE AND LOSES ALL CUSTOMIZATION. THIS HAPPENS WHETHER ON MAINLAND OR IN ANY OF THE DLC EXPANSIONS. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

After four weeks, someone finally replied and asked if I was still experiencing the issue, and if so, please send a video clip in support of the ticket. Which I did.

24 hours later, this was the response.

"There is a different specific Lego minifigure for each of the Lego cars. There is a girl in the Lego Mini, and different guys in the Lego Ferrari and Lego Senna. There is not a way to customize the Lego driver.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with us. Your feedback has been forwarded to the appropriate teams to consider.
I am marking this ticket as “Solved” as we do not require more information from you in this ticket and the information has been passed along.
Thank you for being part of our Forza community!"

I’ve not had any explanation as to why I still see my regular avatar when trapped in The White Place, only to magically switch clothing and gender when it’s time to race.

But I don’t expect to because it really sounds as if someone just made this response up to cover up yet another bug. If it is Working as Designed, given all the emphasis on avatars and clothing, you really do need to get some better designers because this is very, very slapdash.

So, Retro, please can you confirm whether this really is Working as Designed.

2

Having a young son with nearly all the Lego Speed Championship sets, and the 4 within the game, I can clarify that it is doing as coded or requested by “Lego”

The sets do have their own Lego figures which are different for each vehicle. As such PG are confining to Legos instructions by changing your character to that of the actual mini figure for that Lego set.

Hence the reply giving by support. Not a bug, nor glitch.

2 Likes
3

Thanks for your input, but Imma wait for someone from PG to tell me this is WaD.

If so, it’s just bad game design on so many levels.

4

They already did with the reply they gave you. Unfortunately you are refusing to accept the “Lego” aspect to this.

1 Like
5

So you think that showing my usual, male, customised avatar standing alongside my Lego Mini whilst trapped in The White Place, only to switch clothing and gender when the race starts is what they were aiming for throughout the design and development phase of this game?

This, in the game in which they introduced clothing and avatars, whilst making a very big deal about how awesome they were, and how important this new functionality was in making players feel connected to the game. You think that’s what they were aiming for?

Because if so, that is appallingly bad game design.

6

I can see your point, however as a coder I’ll try explaining in more depth why this is occuring

  1. The base game prior to Fortune Island and the Lego expansion was coded for the drivator to wear the clothing you picked, it was also coded to look and appear as you wanted.

  2. The “Lego Expansion” arrived and Lego not PG asked that the driver of said Lego car appeared as that of the “Mini Figure” that came with that set.

  3. As the hard code “Base Code” was already in depths of the game PG had to code around this, in doing so your drivator is showing prior to the race commencing “As intended by the Base code”.

  4. Modifying the Base Code to show the “Mini Figure” in place of your drivator in these “Cut Scenes” would no doubt cause serious issues with the “Base Code”.

  5. Work around so as to not interfere with this “Hard Code” meant they’d show your drivator as intended in the “Cut Scenes” whilst simply displaying the mini figure in vehicle as required to by “Lego” for all other aspects.

One thing any coder will hesitate to do without a serious flaw (Example: Game not loading) is go back and interfere with the “Base Code”. The slight inconvenience caused by showing your Drivator in a “Cut Scene” then a Mini Figure in the vehicle, doesn’t justify the risks of messing around with the “Base Code” to fix.

That doesn’t mean though no one is looking into fixing it.

But they will “if” they are looking at resolving this “minor glitch”, do so away from a development platform in order to protect against damaging the “Base Code / Public Release / Update Code”.

You could imagine if they coded it as you wanted, then broke other aspects of the game which “Seriously Prevented” how the code runs and game plays all hell would break loose.

To a coder a minor inconvenience to a handful of players out of a million plus players simply doesn’t cut the mustard to mess around with… Added to the fact it would take coders away from pushing out new cars, playlist features and development of other projects in the pipeline.

Saying all that, I do know how frustrating it is when something looks out of place, but when I think logically about what effects messing with code deep within the games structure code could result in, the odd “Funny glitch” is soon forgotten about.

After all it’s all about racing not Chicken Suites or Mini Figures.

I hope this helps clarify why PG doesn’t see it as concerning to them at this “present” time.

P.S any mod and or staff within PG please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, or any other coder.

2 Likes
7

I’d accept mostly everything you said if Playground Games, sometime around October or November, said to themselves, “Great. Now the game is in production we can finally get round to deciding what the expansion packs are going to be.”

But that’s not how game design works.

Anyway look, the only reason I used the Lego avatars as an example was because it was the latest in a long line of useless responses from the support team. I couldn’t care less about the avatars. What I do care about is quality, value for money, and perhaps a half-decent level of customer service.

The main issue I have with Support, the one in most need of escalation, relates to Forza Horizon 3, and how the game was rendered almost unplayable by the Windows 2017 Fall Creators Update.

I bought that game at launch, and it was always pretty ropey in terms of performance. But on my R9 270x, I could just about get it to run on medium settings without too much drama. I say that, but there were often crashes, both in frame-rate, and to desktop. Truth be told, it was a bit of a nightmare, but the gameplay was so good I stuck with it.

Up until the Hot Wheels expansion came out, and the graphics were an absolute disaster. At that point, I just gave up and found another game.

Then, in August last year, I bought a new machine, far more powerful than my old one. Every game I installed recommended ultra settings as default and ran spectacularly. Except FH3, which, bizarrely, suggested low settings. FWIW, I am running an 8gb RX580 with a Ryzen 7-1700.

But that was the least of my concerns. Even on low settings, the game just wouldn’t stop crashing. There was no rhyme or reason to it, just completely random crashes. I tried all the suggested fixes, both on the forum and on reddit, but to no avail.

After following all the official workarounds/solutions offered by PG, as well as providing them with several Windows crash reports, PG’s advice was to buy another 8gb of RAM. Which I did.

Unfortunately, it didn’t make a blind bit of difference and after that, they stopped replying to my emails.

But, hey, all that was before the all-new, super-shiny support process. So last month, I thought I’d have another go. To see if the level of customer service had improved at all.

In a brand new ticket, I asked, “Why is FH3 so badly optimized? On my RX580 Forza Horizon 4 runs flawlessly at 1440p, with HIGH settings, at 60FPS. Whereas I’m lucky if I get 30FPS on FH3, with the same settings, on the same rig. It’s always been unstable, but it’s been much worse since the Windows Creators Update in Fall 2017.”

I attached a video showing the game struggling to get above 15 fps. After three weeks, this was the reply:

“Hello, FH3 and FH4 were developed at different times and the team learned and implemented updates to FH4 to improve performance on PC. Please review the recommended specs for FH3 and FH4 in our support articles In addition to the store pages.”

This response is typical of Support’s general lack of basic care when assessing tickets. My specs, provided to them via dxdiag, clearly exceed the recommended specifications shown on all support articles referenced, as well as the Windows Store.

After pointing this out, I’m now back to being ignored again.

Oh, and both the minimum and recommended system specs have since been mysteriously removed from the Windows Store app.

SMH.

8

Again I understand your frustration, we all feel at times our support requests are being ingnored.

In regards to your PC Specs, I’m unable to say why this is occuring however I do know that the below all come into play not just Ram and Graphics Chipset.

  1. Hard Drive Type
  2. CPU
  3. Ram
  4. Graphics
  5. Motherboard
  6. Cooling

Many times I’ve seen people complain because they’ve bought an off the shelf PC believing it can run anything throwing at it. Unfortunately this is far from the truth. You don’t mention the manufacturer, board, CPU or Hard Drive specs, nor if it was pre-shelf or built from scratch by yourself?

Optimisation can occur from generation to generation but I’d be apt to believe that FH4 should require higher specs than FH3, after all technology moves at lighting speed, so I’m apt to think something is a miss with the response. However I’m not the developer and or staff within PG to see if this actually is true. Best guess it’s not as newer games tend to require better specs.

This is although is diverting away from the original post which I believe PG and myself have gave the same explanation.

Here is a real shocker though, coders don’t always know the “Path” in which directors etc will take things… Even PG admits the “Non Disclosure Policy” within their office, I’d happily say a baseline coder won’t have a clue on what’s occuring further up the line, until a document saying “Code This” is dropped into their mailbox… and directors who make high-up decisions sometimes have no clue on how code works… Damn I’ve had a few of them myself.

9

I have an HP Omen desktop, can’t remember the exact model. I bought it direct from HP at a cost of just under £1500.

It can run Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on ultra settigs for eight hours straight, without any hint of a problem.

The ONLY games that ever give me any technical issues are the Forza Horizon games.

Hmmm.

10

Hello,

For Support, please visit https://support.forzamotorsport.net
Our current hours of operation are Monday - Friday from 6:00am-3:00pm PST / 9am-6pm EST
Posting in the Forums is not submitting a ticket.

You can find more information here: https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postst132742_Read-First–How-to-contact-support—Updated-July-26th–2019.aspx

Thank you!

11

Hey @audiodrifter. I am facing the same issue. Did you find any solution to this problem?

12

You can’t run it at all. For me the game never ran great at all, ever. FH4 max/min settings: always 80FPS
FH3 minimum settings: 20FPS. No matter what PC, or even my friend’s awesome gaming PC, he has everything and FH3 and with a 3090 it is 50FPS. I don’t get it. If you hate FH that much, I suggest moving to Asseto Corsa. Also I don’t get why so many people whine about avatars. The point of the game is to race with cars. The team probably puts avatar support very low on their list.