Is anybody listening?

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
1

This game is terrible. I find myself here again and again, complaining.

I’ve just had a great time doing the seasonals on FH4 this week, but by crikey, this FH5 seasonal treatment is seriously bad.

Are any of the devs from MS or Playground listening?

There are so many complaining about the issues that i feel okay to voice my concerns too.

I hate to say it again but i really feel i’ve been conned into paying the money for an inferior product and left without any options to claim a refund.

What a complete and utter swizz.

There is no seemingly meaningful attempt at providing a fun gaming/racing experience, it’s like having to go to the dentist to have a tooth pulled every time i click on “Start Race”…

Sooner or later i’m going to stop doing it.

I’ve already cancelled my live membership because it’s so c**p. And boy, how the hell do you complete the challenges in freeroam whilst in solo? The drivatars are seemingly suicidal and spend all their time crashing into you or bunching up to avoid letting you achieve the necessary speeds for the traps etc.

What a complete and utter dustbin of a game.

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2

It sure doesn’t seem like anybody is. Same issues over and over and nothing being done to fix it. The drivatars are a nightmare, I get t-boned at ever turn to start races, it seems they are programmed to play like the lovely online players that think it is fun to ram everyone on their team in a team race. Several times I have had cars pull up next to me and make a hard 90 degree turn into the side of my car to ram me off the course. Who would design AI to drive like that???

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3

It was like that in FH4 too, I had AI traffic crash out of the woods right at the start of a speed zone to try and wreck me up or they just happen to spawn in front of you just as you are approaching the speed trap.
The AI in racing is the worst because they don’t have the same physics restrictions we have, you can’t push them off a checkpoint to get them off you because they are not required to go through s checkpoint like we are. I used to avoid crashing into them in FH4 but in FH5 it’s almost a requirement to smash them if you even hope to win. And let’s not forget they use the same nitrous powered cheats players use to speed up on you and try and run you into the wall.

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4

I think three months is an extremely reasonable time table for players to expect major issues to be acknowledged. Not fixed, just acknowledged.

Some people are being unreasonable, for sure, but even reasonable people have a lot of justification to be irate at this point.

Just because you listen to us does not mean that they listen to you. There are plenty of companies that have breakdowns in community communication, and it’s rarely a community managers fault. Just like there are plenty of companies that have breakdowns in QA, no matter how hard working and thorough a QA department is.

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5

I’m here daily and reporting community feedback to the team. This week we published a list of fixes and improvements in the works, and responded to player feedback about the Forzathon Weekly event that just started.

Realistically we won’t be able to satisfy every player’s concerns on the timetable they want, but we’re working behind the scenes to improve the game experience for everyone.

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6

Could you also report the fact that I’m no longer able to access the forza support page after trying to talk actually to someone, because everything I was writing had the same response, and when I say the same response, I mean that I realised they are bots, and nothing was happening.

I am still, with the same problem, but now something shocking is that after reporting in a very serious and exposing way the way support is just doing nothing to help, and how bad is the experience with support, after spending money, I am unable to access the support page. Why? As soon as I log in they rederect me here, as I would be restricted from there? I don’t know, but what I know is that

!!! I AM UNABLE TO PLAY ONLINE SINCE I BOUGHT THE GAME !!! And I was ping ponged between forza support and xbox because xbox said they see nothing wrong with my account, while forza was giving me fixes that didn’t work. I AM ABLE to play forza horizon 4 online, eveerything workss there, but on forza 5 I keep on getting the unable to join session error saying I was disconnected from the server, even if I am never even joining one, just instantly recieving this error.

It’s a shame cause I have screens of the way the responses were just the same everytime, even if I was trying to state that I would need help from a human, on a chat, or something, because nothing worked, and even by trying to ask them to do this thing, because they should support you, I was recieving pre-writed messages, that were just repeating, so I realised I am talking to an AI, probably, or a bot, because I did not recieve one unique response.

The problem is I am still unable to play the game multiplayer, to hop on servers, and I spent 60 euros(-$ whatev) on this, for a singleplayer experience, something that I could have recieved by playing a cracked version, FOR FREE, because they exist :slight_smile: Eitherway, never would have I cracked a game that is related to an online experience and that’s why I bought this game, to play with friends, but yeah, they are shocked too how am I unable to play this game, can’t join them in sessions, if I try to hop into dominator it finds me a team and then freezes and gives me an error as I am unable to play. Yeah, now THIS IS AN EXPERIENCE WITH A GAME. GOOD JOB TEAM!

0.01/5 stars FOR THE SUPPORT and GAME EXPERIENCE- even if someone would come to help this experience is already going since 17th of november, when I first wrote to support :slight_smile: GOOD JOB!

THANK YOU SUPPORT, YOU ARE AWSOME, AS EVERYONE IS STATING HERE, AND THE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE GAME IS A “STRONG 10/10”( in a paralel universe).

7

Max, interesting thing I noticed this week in dozens of solo races. Two nights ago, the AI were like FM7 or FH4. No rubber banding or griefing. I had no problem winning against unbeatable AI using various cars. Last night, the bad AI returned, with rubber banding and griefing on steroids and almost impossible to win against unbeatable AI. Are the devs doing online testing? If they are, two nights ago was great. My hopes were high. Last night, my hopes were crushed. :wink:

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ChihuahuaParty, I also had a string of good races against unbeatable AI ( a couple of posts above yours in the other thread). When I ran again last night - as the season had changed, the weather on the track was different - I put the difference down to that. I could still beat them but it was harder and less consistent than the previous night.

Not sure if that’s a factor in your experience or not?

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No. For me last night, the AI was insanely aggressive with ramming and T-boning. Rubber banding was bad, to the point where normally-slow AI cars in D500 races were blowing past me on long straightaways doing at least 200mph.

10

I suspect, and I have no proof in this, that it is down to the servers…in FH4, if there was someone in the Trial races with a dodgy connection, the AI would be more haywire than normal. I have noticed the connection issues slowly creeping back in the last couple of days so put it down to that…shouldn’t happen in Solo Play, true, but then again this game is beholden to the servers and online connection

11

I had the same thing, actually thought it was the weather too, when it suddenly went from dry to wet and back again you immediately noticed the difference

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12

O.k. well that wasn’t my experience last night - I was running on Los Jardines circuit (also in D) and they were pretty much doing the same lap times as they had been the night before but now in storm conditions.

Which seemed to mean the track was wet but drying throughout the race - didn’t see any actual rain. I was hampered by the track conditions but they were for the most part running the same times they had been in the dry.

13

I’m semi-convinced it’s a bug related to how our vehicle is tuned. Last night, I used different cars than the previous night. I’ve seen before where the AI acts radically different based on how I tune my vehicle. The Ford Transit Mk1 comes to mind.

14

There was a rider in Moto GP who would state his complaints about his bike in debriefs after races and practices. The engineers would listen attentively and make changes but things seemed to never get better. Over the winter, they developed a new bike based on data and feedback but it was worse than ever. Management had to step in and and called a meeting to find out what was happening. Turns out, although they all spoke a certain amount of english, the Japanese engineers weren’t understanding what the Spanish rider and team were asking for and they thought it impolite to ask for clarification so they proceeded based on the information they had.

I doubt it’s a language barrier in this case but there can be all kinds of issues that could contribute to this kind of disconnect.

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15

Hey all, it’s going to take time before things get fixed. We also just came out of Xmas wheich is a time when many people take extended leave. Give them another week to settle back in then they will hopefully start fixing bugs every 2 weeks and not reintroduce new bugs.

16

The thing is (and please correct me if I’m wrong) they have never spoken of, acknowledged, or even eluded to any issues with the AI in this game. After 3 months of people posting there issues with the AI there is dead silence on the other end. I’m glad there is a T10 rep here monitoring the situation but what he said in his short post was a lot of nothing about the problem at hand. I do realize Max is just a small cog in a big machine and I appreciate him taking the time to let us know he is here. Instead of communicating with there community and dealing with big issues they pander to people that may have a little discomfort driving a car 100 miles. This gives me little to no faith of these huge game stopping issues being addressed.

Like I said please correct me if I’m wrong. I would love to see a detailed post on how these AI problems will be fixed.

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17

i stopped playing everything except rivals. couldn’t care less about playlists or accolades or acquiring all the stuff. but i hear you. grinding isn’t fun. bugs aren’t fun. loading screens aren’t fun. badly behaved AI isn’t fun. there’s a lot in this game that just isn’t fun.

my biggest problem is the lost sense of community. i loved fh2 because it was the first game where i really felt part of a gaming community, and each horizon iteration since fh2 has done more and more to divide that community. i’m thankful some players have taken it upon themselves to create communities in other places, like the rivals thread on this forum and the many discord servers, because any sense of community that i once derived in-game is long gone.

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18

I’ve been on the forums since FH3 and it seems by and large from what I’ve seen community management has been quite poor. Are the devs listening? I would say yes, we have seen features in FH4 and FH5 that were added as a direct result of community feedback, but in general communication with the playerbase is often abysmal and it does come across like they don’t really care about the game or the playerbase (which I’m sure isn’t broadly true excepting some staff that only care about how much profit the game can make relative to how little money was put into it who seem to be the ones in charge now and directing the community response).

It’s really sad honestly, Forza has gone from a franchise developed by car enthusiasts for car enthusiasts that also welcomed new players with open arms to a me-too race to the bottom mess catering to the lowest common denominator of players in a futile attempt to appeal to the maximum number of players at the expense of anyone who actually cares about cars. This started happening largely in FH3 when spectacle started becoming more important than anything else and car exclusivity was weaponized to coerce players to log in weekly for fear of missing out, which also seems to coincide with when community management started going downhill. I wonder what changed internally around this time.

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19

Their community management is done in game and on social media sites like Instagram. They seem to post a brief message every 2-3 weeks saying sorry we understand this weekly challenge doesn’t work, please accept our apology with these shiny Forzathon points.

These posts are fine but what I would like to see or would have thought should have been done was clear communication on their part around the most common issues raised by the community. Aswell as their plan to address said issue.

For example if there is a 10k view post about drivatards which largely contains complaints/issues/concerns by players then maybe it’s a legitimate issue that needs to be fixed. In which case review it, acknowledge it’s an issue if deemed so, and then inform the community what plans if anything they may have to address the issue.

Unfortunately not much if any of this is happening. It’s a big guessing game. Will they fix it? Who knows? Will that improve this? Your guess is as good as mine.

This is what I believe you mean by your post anyway.

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20

That’s a part of it, but it goes deeper than that. I find that a lot of the community communication feels …dishonest for lack of a better term. It’s mostly PR speak, where they’re quick to try to put a positive spin on the game and changes they’re making (go watch some of the cringe-worthy Forza monthlies from early in FH4 where they’re trying to talk about how great the festival playlist is and you can see in the dev’s faces that it’s all forced), and try to downplay real issues with infrequent communication/radio silence hoping people will forget about the problems and move on, and maybe some token credits/FP/gift cars/etc if they can’t hide it rather than properly addressing fundamental issues in most cases. Like you said, they’re so reluctant to acknowledge issues (and forget about an apology) that it’s hard to know if anything will actually be fixed.

There’s also been times where downplaying issues has gotten to the point of moderators actively suppressing critical discussion here on the forums and on discord (I don’t pay attention to the other social media channels) sometimes with threads being closed without warning and messages being quietly deleted on Discord such that they hope you don’t notice. Thankfully I haven’t seen that behavior in awhile, but it felt super toxic in here like you couldn’t even really bring up issues with the game without fanboys and moderators jumping on you. I think FH5 has woken a lot of people up to the true state of the franchise which is why we see so much more negativity and criticism being allowed on the forums, the game honestly deserves a lot of it and the powers that be know it and know that they need to let players vent their frustrations.

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