Introducing "racing penalties" would be a great addition that would help encourage better driving.

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 4
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Penalties could be introduced into the game and would affect credit income. The worse the penalties, the fewer credits you earn for that race. This would also encourage those engine-swapping rainbow livery loving toddlers to not treat this game like Burnout’s Road Rage gamemode.

Penalties could be:

-driver contact (bumping and ramming, less physical contact the better)
-property destruction (destroying breakable objects, idk how this would apply with destruction skills)
-dirty driving (lots of wall contact, touching checkpoint markers)

For Street races, no penalties apply other than driver contact.

I know this doesn’t sound very friendly to new players, but maybe this could be implemented on higher difficulties, or at least, the first few campaign races penalties aren’t applied.

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I like this.

Just like how they have “Clean Racing” bonuses, and how difficulty modifiers add to your score, they could have damage thresholds akin to having Full Damage Simulation activated. The game will tally that information as if it were taking damage but it would affect the bonus/penalty being applied. I would add a threshold that needs to be exceeded so standard bumping and grinding do not incur penalties, but solid wall contact and vehicle contact would definitely apply. On top of that, if the “damage” is too severe, such as wall-crashing or spearing, there would be the upper damage threshold which if exceeded severely penalizes the payout after the race. Would also be a way to signal to the developers who is driving recklessly (or wreck-fully?) consistently.

Obviously disengaged during solo-play and events like PGG where contact can be encouraged. I’m not sure about breakable objects though. In Cross Country, you often have to go through obstacles, and during other races, they slow you down anyway which is its own penalty.

So wait, what is this about touching checkpoint markers? Is that seriously not allowed? That’s a major part of my driving style. lol

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:+1:t3: Interesting, …though my first thought is that at this point (and depending on the deductable amounts), on one hand those that play regularly already have millions of credits, and such penalties now may not produce the desired behaviors, and on the other hand, newer and/or more casual, part-time players which, in my experience, tend to be more reliably dirty and thus more of a desired target, may not play enough for such penalties to produce same, either. In fact, if the deductible amounts are too large, it could discourage those newer/part-timers from playing/improving. I think it would all come down to finding the penalty amount ‘sweet-spot,’ if there is one.

Ultimately, I think a return to the H3-styled carrots of online play with xp, chains built-in to the championships promoting clean racing would be best. But I like this idea and you might be on to something there; carrots are not always enough, sometimes you need a bit of a stick, too. I can see such an idea getting considerable pushback, but doing nothing and leaving players to their own devices certainly hasn’t worked out very well.

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FH4 is creating a generation of players unable to respect others and that is the worst thing of FH4 as it will affect those players behaviors in all episodes.

The issue start offline when ramming drivatars is of no consequence. It is putting in mind of players that it’s the way to play the game. Clean racing should be a reward multiplier.

For online, just display a hit score and it will change the game spirit. Going further, make applaud screen happen only for the cleanest player / the more clean overtakes and less collisions. It would value starting in the back and arriving first would be applauded when it has a meaning.

For ranked, simple, any contact should result in less points gained and nb of hits displayed on race board, would be enough to change the spirit of this feature.

For ramming, if you hit a car and hit car misses a checkpoint in the coming 2 seconds, you should take the same penalty like 10s stop. Imho, it would greatly improve the situation.

All that said, PG/T10 have demonstrated they were not interested in promoting clean play down to saying on stream that hits were fun … ( just not to say ramming was ) …

FH5 or whatever is next episode is already cooked by the time we discuss. PG/T10 are totally unable to consider player base feedback … that’s how we get some stupid things like the car reset change that is still there despite tons of negative feedback on forum. Therefore I am hopeless concerning a positive evolution on this topic.

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“Hits” are only “fun” in racing, imho, when in an atmosphere actually designed for it, for example like in Wreckfest or a real-life demolition derby, even (WF developer Bugbear totally ate PG’s lunch with that one; I’d happily trade both the H4-version of playground games and the Eliminator for a Wreckfest replacement).

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Yes, but no. One good push can ruin your race. On the other hand, race with many small contacts could be still called “clean race”.

Yes, would like to see that.

Personally I would like to have some voting system for players after race. Some easy system with like/dislike and if you reach set number you get reward/penalty.
However, I know that could backfired with that how quickly people get offended nowadays.
Not to mention that IMO many cases of ramming in braking zones depends on different tunes people are using. Lets say I am using power build and other person uses grip build, so he can brake much later/less, so will sometimes end up in my back. I have been on both sides.

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That’s why I liked the idea of a threshold. It allows normal bumping and grinding but not more aggressive behavior. Will still have some accidental contact come in to play, but that’s just part of it.

This absolutely. I specifically put in the “Sorry” in my chat because I tend to take corners fast, either braking late or sliding through them. So occasionally I am either following a teammate or competitor and they brake more than I am expecting. We are both going for the best line, so we’ll both be on the inside of a turn. Now it won’t be enough to ride him/her into the outer wall, but it is a nudge/knock. Yet during this last Trial, I had a fellow teammate consistently on my quarter-panel, but every single turn, he slid all the way across the turn into the wall. I got in the habit of braking early to get him to slide by then accelerating through the turn. But otherwise, he would have either banked on me to help his turn or just collected me in the crash. So is it malicious or just bad driving? A lot of players are kids, so their driving experience is soley computer-based.

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I always thought the game was weird, and dangerous to give you more points for hitting walls, and things like that.

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Gran Turismo sport has been trying to implement a penalty system for many years, changing it over and over again, and it’s still arguably not even as good as tossing a coin at determining who was at fault in an incident.

The problem is that a system might work okay when applied to people who are driving with no knowledge of the system, but as soon as people are able to test and work out how the system works, they game it, and the system then gets it wrong more often than it gets it right.

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This is the nature of arcade racing, it’s always been like this. NFS was no better in its prime.

However, they also need to create a healthy environment for online and ramming is a form of griefing. It’s possible that Forza Horizon benefits from the FRR that’s implemented in Motorsport, but it requires Playground to focus on that and not on Fortnite.

The first GRID had Demo Derbies and it was a very popular mode. In fact it had some sort of hidden progression that made your car grow stronger with damage. It also had the eBay market where you could acquire cars with differing strength levels.

Happens in FH4 itself. I’ve driven against people who were able to make clean passes by abusing the game’s anti-ramming system. And there’s others who lovetap you into walls… You get the penalty, they don’t.

That’s why the best judge for anti-sporting behavior, at least until technology evolves further, is the HUMAN, but it simply costs too much to keep stewards in all of the lobbies, so companies have been trying to create an AI to do the job for them. I’m not familiar with Gran Turismo’s system but I’ve heard similar opinions to yours, which reinforces my stance.

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This. Rammers are incredibly frustrating, no doubt. However, there is currently a system in place that slows people down for ramming in online adventure which, more often than not, has penalized me for getting rammed. Someone will aggressively punt me into a wall and they speed away while I’m slowed down. They already can’t get it right and now people are coming up with ways for them to break the game further.

It’s far from perfect but it is what it is. Please just stop.

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Racing penalties and in-game incentives to drive clean would definitely help some (along with an in-game racing school and AI racers that modeled good driving behavior), but unfortunately my observation of competitive MP across the board tell me that it’s a losing battle. Outside of a few specific situations (playing with friends or controlled groups of like minded players, professional competitions, etc where there’s RL relationship consequences for bad behavior) random matchmaking competitive multiplayer pretty much always ends up being toxic regardless of the game and genre.

Competitive multiplayer tends to attract a certain mindset of players who want the win above all else (the same drive is in SP as well, but it doesn’t affect other players), and there’s really no way around it. Even in games with extremely restrictive and constantly rebalanced rules, no ruleset is perfect and players will quickly find the meta and exploit it. To me, it’s a lose-lose situation that means I’ll never really enjoy public MP with random matchmaking.

Now if the devs would just stop trying to push players into MP with the playlist…

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imho, the objective should be to reduce ramming, to get a correct balance between under control with ramming killing fun and over control where it’s almost impossible to play.

FH3 was/is way better concerning clean playing than FH4, and ways like from Australia to GB. Indeed FH3 has this thing about drifting in the back, it was as easy to fix as removing points for drifting … ask better, you’ll get worse …

It’s not because we can’t get a perfect solution that we should stay where we are. Sounds to me like, “death always comes so let’s remove hospitals and doctors …”.

For me, not considering collisions in ranked with a clear message on points lost due to dirty racing is just a shame, period.

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Nope. Save the penalties for FMS.

EDIT: I can see a desire and need for penalties in Ranked Adventure…

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Couldn’t agree more!

To all those that think FH4 should be more like FMS, with all it’s seriousness, go and play FMS.

FH4 is fantasy, with no realism at all other than the designs of the cars and that’s what so good about it.

Where else can you bounce over the countryside @ 200mph in a 1977 Ford Escort?

I don’t like rammers any more than the next guy and for that I chose not to play game modes such as ranked wherever possible or against anyone online at all.

Except, that is “The Eliminator”, which although not a fan of BR games as a rule, I’ve grown to like that mode a lot.

It’s not without it’s annoyances, but you have to adapt to survive and it does encourage a bit of Krav Maga style driving, but tha’s half the fun.

It’s all just just fantasy driving at the end of the day and not to be taken seriously.

…and I’m not ashammed to admit that I will definitely employ wall riding to beat the AI in The Trial any other event where it’s still possible any day of the week.

If you want realism and seriousness, FMS!

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if you want mariokart, go mariokart …

I am quite sure you feel like we do when we read go to FMS. it’s not because it is fantasy that it should not come with some fair play, no link there. That said, our opposite positions do demonstrate that there are 2 expectations that are incompatible, wrecking place possibly adding nitro, guns, etc , and the other about racing with some cars in open world.

When game was released, we were many to expect Ranked to be that split. I did qualify expecting that. As a matter of facts, going up in ranked requires to be expert about ramming … I would say that it is the ultimate fail on FH4 and upcoming FH(s) will suffer the consequences of having trained during 2 years players to be expert at ramming.

In the end, if Fh team had done the job properly, this thread would certainly not exist.

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I hear you, doug. I remember how you felt about the pg-quitting-disconnect-cooldown idea/discussion, and i agree with tilo’s sentiments at the core as well, …but it’s getting (gotten) way out of hand and i’m willing to consider anything. “Something/anything” is better than the culture that’s been fostered by having zero enforcement of any kind (imho).

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Fair enough, Squryl. I just wonder how this would sit in a game where there are events where you are rewarded for smashing things (reward boards for one), but yet you are penalized for doing the same thing other times.

This is why I have never taken the racing portion of Horizon all that seriously. I love this game, but I think there may be too much emphasis on certain types of racing events (street racing, aside), especially circuit races, in the more recent Horizon games. I have always considered the Horizon games to be less serious than the FMS games.

However, I can see how those who regularly participate in the on-line Ranked Adventures would want these races to be more serious. (and have edited my original post to reflect this).

As to the other races, given how the AI racers are often overly aggressive to include intentional ramming and wrecking, I really don’t see how/why the non-AI racers should be penalized for doing the same thing. (And while the AI may have originally mimicked the real person it purports to represent, I can show that this simply is not the case in Horizon 3 or 4. The AI is really a predetermined racing style with the name of your friend assigned to it. Don’t believe this? Try changing cars to one with a different PI for race 2 or 3 in a 3 race event and see what happens. Points are the same, driving styles are the same, but the names are shuffled… and this is just one example… but I digress. )

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Sorry for me the difference between FH and FMS is not racing being serious, it is closed world vs open world. if I wanted full arcade, I’ll be on NFS or like.

FH comes with this bright idea to open the gate of the circuits and makes the race happen everywhere, doesn’t mean it has to be corner bombing, wall riding and ramming. FH spirit is not Mariokart,

FH3 may have gone too far in promoting clean racing, up to not considering winning a race as winning a race. FH4 went too far the other way, corner bombing, wall riding and ramming is certainly fun for few, imho, mostly for players not able to exist in the game other ways.

Shared fun requires all participants to have some. Anyone having fun being rammed? kidding, for sure, no, so ramming had to be repressed. They did not do it, many excellent FH players left, online feels like a desert, they had to ease the engine down to putting teams made of stars level 0 facing team of level 6 and more, … anyone to consider ‘ramming allowed’ as a brilliant success?

There are no nitro to collect on the road, no turtles to send on cars ahead, FH is definitely about racing challenge, not simulation, no doubt on that but does it needs to be simulation to be about racing? I see no requirement there.

I honestly don’t care if ramming, wall riding, corner bombing is allowed on Eliminator, that’s kind of compatible with the spirit of that game mode. For racing, I consider that a tight finish line pushing the engine to max, after a full race passing each other with little hits but nothing with the intention to push the other out, … that’s good game, win or loose, that’s the best races for both players. Ramming the other and sending ‘ah ah’ or ‘see y’a’ is just cancer of that game.

I just hope next FH will bring features for both wrecking and clean players and proper rules for each to have fun. As long as they will continue trying to mix those two, they will continue failing.

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I understand your point, Tilo38.

Just wondering if you played the original Horizon. That game had the perfect balance of racing and shenanigans for me. It just needed to be more open world, which we got starting in Horizon 2.

Horizon 1 is still my favorite.

And, if I’m honest, when playing Horizon 4, I enjoy the skills (especially the danger zones), the searches (barn finds, bonus boards, etc) and timed events (such as the various ‘business’ events, such as the taxi and Top Gear) as well as just plain driving about much more than most of the organized racing events. That being said, I do quite like the Street Races as well as most of the Off Road events, but more as a casual event than a serious racing event.

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