Good plan, and sorry for getting off topic. My brain tends to run away from me sometimes.
I have to agree that the issue, if it’s legit, seems to be communication here. And I have to agree that I really don’t care about what’s said somewhere I don’t go. BUT, information about Forza should be readily available here IF it’s available anywhere else. I mean, it says Forza up top in the link chain, and has that cute little Forza logo at the top, right?
I also acknowledge that everyone at T-10 is probably busier now than perhaps anytime prior this year, and it’s going to get even busier, so I get that.
I do wonder if T-10 has an official person that communicates between the forums and the developers, like say Blizzard does on their forums. Oranges/Apples maybe, but just wondering. And no, moderators aren’t that person.
Anyway, a comment or information from a member of the development team certainly carries more weight and influence than probably anything other than perhaps a recorded interview. And with that weight an implication of attention to the players here supporting the franchise.
They do, its Brian. Being the community manager he could alter all of this, if he wanted to.
Ian isnt alone in this issue.
My thoughts on this debacle, are as such, Their outreach to other websites as Ian described should be a bit more of a priority to bring more people here, we here at ‘the home base’ at it were, will always have ways of getting and sharing the information about the game and bringing it here for others, the Devs know this. That alone shows they aren’t ‘out of touch’ with their community , if anything the community has become out of touch with the Developers and just want things handed to them on a silver platter. It’s the whole ‘spoiled child’ syndrome.
“ERMAGERD, we at their own forums should this, should that…” They provide it as they can, but they are trying to being more people to the fold, as some people in other communities really don’t want to sign up somewhere else for things, kind of like how I am with some things, so I totally understand this. I understand now that some giveaways are for other sites to generate traffic there, just as they are trying to do here.
It’s a brand new game, they want the hype train chugging full force everywhere it can. It is already doing that here. It is just surprising to me to see what I am seeing , and who I am seeing it from. I can only imagine how some of T10 must feel.
Except its not like that. This thread has actually appeared a number of times before at prior e3’s when the same thing continually happens and subsequently ended up buried.
Dont you think that the fact there is a number of ex mods in this thread with the same complaints/opinions/perspectives that this is more than you are trying to allude to?
Its not as worm already stated here vs there, its more why not here also?
T10 bury their head in the sand and dont care. They dont want to deal with the issues.
Ian wont be back in this thread.
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Firstly, Verruckt, I deeply respect your membership in this forum and often side with your arguments; but, here, I cannot possibly agree with your logic and your attempt to point fingers back at the community.
Certainly, if Ian was the whole Community Team himself charged with the responsibility of targeted consumer outreach, I would understand the split involvement between internet communities; however, by my count, there are at least six Community Team staff members (Brian, John, Fred, Javier, Ian, and Little Vixen) - plenty of manning to appoint someone as the ForzaMotorsport.net forum liaison. Additionally, by your thinking, all Community Team members should be scattered about extraneous forums in an effort to maximize recruiting. I can tell you, that simply is not the case. Furthermore, are we so quick to suggest that Microsoft Studios’ marketing and advertising departments can’t do their job and, therefore, the existing fan base must be given degraded treatment so a studios’ team member can do what is intended of a larger-scale, strategic marketing campaign?
The best metaphor I can think of to describe our situation is this: our car (the community) has run a flat and, instead of attempting to fix the tire, Turn 10 appears to have left to fetch fuel from a gas station on the other side of town. Now, I know we are supposedly a committed fan base who has all the information we could possibly want or need provided by our peers; but, take a look around … our tire is still flat. Look at the monthly competitions; they rarely (if ever) exceed one page of entries. Have a gander of the news threads; even the most popular ones were only active because of the giveaways, not because the community felt compelled to take part in a discussion. Want more evidence? Look no further than the sub-forums for the media section, liveries, and tunes … the level of involvement is bleak. Of course, you’ll probably blame that on the community members themselves for not participating; but, honestly, it’s because this place is now uninspiring, repetitive, and left to entertain itself.
Now, I think its cool that Turn 10 wants to provide the additional content in the form of HMAs, RVMs, Twitch broadcasts, so on and so forth; but, if this community is not allotted the attention it had come accustomed to and doesn’t, dare I say, receive a level of interaction from the Community Team it warrants, Turn 10 Studios is going to lose the single most meaningful form of marketing there is in the video game industry: word of mouth. You can take that to the bank.
Lastly, I find your “spoiled child syndrome” anecdote to be a tasteless and offensive label for your peers. Like many here, I am a hard working, middle age adult who is passionate for the Forza product and what it represents as an icon of today’s car and racing culture. At the same time, I understand where the line lies between irrationally acting out and voicing my opinion with civility on a service that once was the staple of this community. On top of that, my professional experience extends into community management for industries of broadcast media, nonprofit donor development, and government communications. As a result, I find great value in community members voicing their opinion in an effort to bring about awareness for change. So, if you have no issues with the way things are, great! But, calling those of us “spoiled children” for conducting a civilized discussion about our thoughts on the community’s status … well, that just shows who belongs in the crib.
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I would like to see more T-10 interaction on the forums even if it’s just friendly banter about nothing much.
The community fell apart in FM5 because of the lack of community features in game, not T-10s lack of interaction. I don’t recall much interaction in FM4 but the forums had a nice community feel to them. I doubt much will change since a decent portion of the community interaction involved the AH, SF, or gifting in some form.
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Dan and the community team had much more interaction in FM4 if I remember correctly. They would address the communities concerns when necessary. It seems to have fallen off after FM5, perhaps because no one was really happy with that game an they realized this. Hopefully they will be reading all these posts and will return to staying in touch with us here on the forums. After all, we, the members of this community, are what keeps Forza alive and well!
@Worm, you will never be done here bud, you know you can’t stay away!!! 
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The developers are there to deliver a product to the community and presumably sell enough copies to be profitable and/or create goodwill for the xbox brand.
Therefore there is a need for the developers to be in touch with the community. A statement that the community may be out of touch with the devs makes no business sense.
Now it is possible there are sub communities eg hardcore, casual, drift, drag, painters etc. If they have different needs then it gets tricky but here all we expect is that official info on the game be provided via official channels here as well as elsewhere.
Under the hood articles maybe that summarise whatever official info has been released around the traps.
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Just thought I would point out that Ian has posted some good info in the E3 thread including that distance markers ie car in front, behind are making a return.
Thanks for the interaction Ian.
No problem!
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Exactly, they are doing what they need to, and I for one, thank them for it. I know they are greatly busy with all of this, so them doing what they must around here and dozens of other sites and even E3, well… it must be like running a triathlon and then some.
Thank you as well Ian.
That’s good news indeed. Does that mean split times for the car in front and behind aswell?
If you ask businesses what is their most important asset many will respond by telling you it’s “their people”, “their facilities”, “their USP”, “their proprietory this or that” - all wrong. The most important asset of any business is its customers. Not next years potential customers, or their competitors customers but their own cash wielding punters. If, as T10 does, a business promotes itself via its website and makes a concerted effort to attract people to participate in its own in house forum then without question this is where ALL news and information should originate.
There are issues however and this is not directly the fault of T10. Although I’ve played since the original Forza I didn’t visit the forum. More recently I did because I was looking for some info. What I encountered was nothing like a community forum should be. Way too much moaning and bitching, frequented by too many people who don’t seem to much like the game/s, the developer, Microsoft, the XBox and in some cases life in general. The forum is over moderated and this has stifled the fun out of it. It is I’m afraid to say, quite boring. Is it really the end of the world if someone makes a thread or post containing the phrase I wish or I hope. Hasn’t anyone realised yet that the wishlist threads are a monumental wast of time and all you succeed in doing is ensuring that any good posts are flushed down the pan with all the drivel. Moderation is essential to police a forum to ensure conduct and decency is maintained. Moderation isn’t required to decide what topics are interesting and worthy of discussion. Nor should it be the role of a moderator to inhibit discussion or speculation until a time he or she thinks fitting. If you impose this level of restraint and control you actually hinder the purpose of having a forum in the first place.
Some people seem to blame T10 for “destroying” the community like its some abstract thing - well here’s some news guys - we are the community. The community isn’t the odd game feature, it’s the people who share a common interest - namely Forza Motorsport.
What I’m trying to say is that this forum needs a shake up and to get back the “buzz” it apparently used to have (and this has nothing to do with AH being in the game or not) and the Staff need to start positively interacting with this forum as I’m sure was their original intention. One will feed the other.
C’mon people - feel the love 
And so ends my 2c
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@Dadiodude – I agree with part of your post and disagree with another.
The official wishlist threads are far from pointless. Let me paint a scenario.
THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL
Turn 10 decide to put out an expansion for FM6 for Christmas. It will include the 3 most requested tracks and 20 most requested cars.
You are employed to come up with the lists and you need to look back to FM4 – FM6 requests.
Your life is easier if they are all in a total of 6 threads. Now you may say but those threads are 50 pages long. Well that equates to 1000 posts. If those posts were scattered in many threads, some of which are even labelled correctly then your job is a lot harder than if it all resides in wishlist threads.
Now once the official wishlist threads exist the responsible Turn 10 staff will automatically go there so it is important to make sure wishlist posts are posted there.
The moderators therefore have a role to train new users to post there. How should they do that. Now this is where I agree with you that discussion is stifled here.
Some suggestions deserve discussion but I accept wishlists do have a very important role. Getting the balance right is tricky especially given how some posters go about their posting behaviour.
But to suggest wishlist threads are not a good thing really misses how hard it can be to read complete forums versus individual threads.
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I wouldn’t say T10 “destroyed” the community. I will say that T10 did nothing to prevent the community from dying, and being out-of-touch was just the tip of the iceberg.
One thing I’ve said for a long time: T10’s involvement in “community” contests and what-not unfortunately has been based almost entirely around Solo play. Hot-lap contests; painting contests; photo contests; tuning contests; guess the DLC threads; comment on blog posts to win unicorns (back when those were around). The only “contests” of any sort based on Multiplayer (you know, where people from a community get involved in actually playing the game together) were entirely member-run.
This is not something new, Dadiodude… it’s been going on for a long time.
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That isn’t entirely true. With the Twitch broadcasts, Turn 10 has made it a point to involve the community and has done so with public and private lobby race events. Unfortunately, a lot of these events – driven by Fred’s desire for great production value (kudos) – are few and far between because the team likely doesn’t have enough time to execute on a recurring basis and, a result, their efforts are mildly successful at best and soon ditched.
OK Don, so arrange some races.
We’ve all got a choice - sit around moaning and blaming others or get some people together for some fun racing. Hell! They’ve given you some great cars and tracks and you can go set up a race of your choosing and you’ve even got a forum to arrange races on. Just start a thread - but for goodness sake don’t start by saying “I wish” Lol
I have done exactly that by amassing over 1,500 followers on my Twitch channel since July 2014 and by setting up traditional hopper events and full-on endurance races. Participation included some of the fastest and more renowned members of this community and, let me tell you, those efforts have not made a dent around here. Heck, even the most popular Forza streamer, Raceboy77, has presented his contributions through self-created events and this community still struggles.
Frankly, it takes more than just you or I, or Jack or Jill to create some multiplayer race events to revitalize an entire community. The solution now requires resolute involvement and innovative community management.
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Ever consider we are sick of having to ‘work around’ the issues?
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