I’ve had the game a couple of months now and finally, this week, made it up to Pinnacle. Since then, I’ve only managed to join a lobby once, and there were only 2 people in it. Trying just now, both of the non-ghost lobbies fail to join a room. Is there a problem with my connection or does nobody actually race when they get to Pinnacle?
You can check the leaderboards in the league lobby select screen (RT I think?, it says at the bottom) and see how many people are racing for that week.
FYI: There are about 600ish who participated in Elite this week as of the other day.
Pinnacle has always been pretty quiet apart from the prize weeks. It peaked for a couple of months over the summer when Triton was actively engaging with the community and throwing up interesting categories each week, then it tailed off massively when he stopped and T10 resorted to recycling previous leagues, and it never really recovered. Personally there was a time when all I raced was leagues, but I’ve barely glanced at them in weeks now.
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They are pretty much dead for pinnacle players now. I used to race in them exclusively up until last summer but I lost interest because of division choices, low lap counts and errors on T10’s part. Now I only play in the Modern GT Endurance lobby, but even that is getting stale.
Also, them completely ignoring the league request thread since summer time certainly didn’t help.
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I was also quite active in the Pinnacle League for the first few months of the game’s release. While the racing was largely quite clean I eventually got tired of being “forced” to race whatever Turn 10 decided I should drive; if I could just take my regular cars for each Class into a League Hopper I’d probably still be playing Forza Motorsport 6 today…
Actually, I reckon the Modern GP hopper had a fair bit to do with the death of Pinnacle too, its introduction coincided with a sequence of unpopular leagues and GT was full of super fast racers for the first few months. As Mike says though, it got stale and Triton stopped responding to tweak requests (track rotation, trying a different PI number).
Even then, I would likely still have played much more leagues but I changed jobs and my new schedule meant I could only play Xbox during the times that the league windows were closed, so I lost the habit.
I actually liked the more restricted rosters, both division and spec. The trouble is a week is way too long to be stuck with the same roster when there’s only one at a time.
According to LinkedIn, Triton is still at Turn 10. I suspect that with development of the next title in full swing he’s been pulled away from community interaction in order to develop the game (he has a ton of technical knowledge). To put it another way, Triton is most likely a developer first and community contact second; that’s why you’d see him more often in the early months of a game’s release, as the heavy lifting has already been done to get the game over the line. Same for JonK, who actually used to race in Pinnacle every night.
I’m not sure how tightly staffed Turn 10 is (many companies in the gaming industry are understaffed despite their outward appearance) but I suspect the dedicated community team (a) has a lot on their plate and (b) doesn’t have the right tools to actively manage the Multiplayer Racing community. A dedicated Online Racing Specialist would be ideal, but I highly doubt Turn 10/Microsoft would create such a position which would only cater to 20% of the player base at best.
TLDR: Turn 10 is pretty stacked work-wise and can’t afford to have somebody spend their working hours catering to a small percentage of the player base of a game that’s almost 18 months old. They’ve got a game to make and a Horizon to promote.
Hardly sounds worth getting promoted. I think I’ll cool it a bit. Last couple of nights in Elite Executive Heavyweights has been fun (oooops, that’s cursed it!)
display skill → get promoted → “ban” from competition
I can’t even get myself demoted back to elite, most nights I’m lucky if I can find even one other person to race with.
I wonder if my fellow pinnicle racers don’t like the competition, after all there is only 1 winner and in pinnicle it’s very hard to win.
I don’t mind losing. I’m the weirdo in the hoppers finishing mid pack because I enjoy running oddball cars without engine swaps because I’m bored with the V-8’s sound. The problem with Pinnacle is that most nights I have a tough time finding anybody to lose to, but I love it when people actually do show up because there can be some pretty solid racing no matter where you start on the grid.
I’ve been in pinnacle for a long time and haven’t played since the lambo events.
Usually I just forget about them. Since the change where fastest clean lap will start you up front, I’ve had fairly good luck in finding clean races with similar skilled players with similar car interests. And when the lobby sucks, I get the chance to run some fun slow oddballs. I like D class and there’s so many cars to choose from that it never feels stale.
When leagues were packed, I loved the competition side of things. It was pretty fun and usually clean. The lack of numbers and zero motivation to play, however, has made me forget about them.
For me, if I’m going to race in cars I don’t care about, there has to be an in game reward or long term goal to achieve. Since credits are meaningless and doing well in leagues is primarily tied with playing a lot at peak times, leagues just dont interest me.
If there was some sort of trueskill rating, other lovely stats to accrue, and some sort of skill leaderboard like by lifetime, monthly, weekly I’d be down. I like testing my skills and comparing to others. The current leagues don’t accomplish this for me.
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I have to agree there is zero motivation for people to do the leagues. If only t10 would ask the community how to get the leagues working then just maybe they could be salvaged for fm7.
I just don’t have a lot of time to do league racing. Always practicing for the next series race I’m running or racing in a private lobby.
I know what u mean about practicing for orl. I think if the leagues had been more of success id put all my time into the leagues. Not because orl is hard or anything but because the leagues are much easily accessed
I complain every week, but the window kill me. I can’t play in the middle of the day or late at night. I pretty much get online an hour before they close. Even the weekend I can get on hour before the morning closes. But there is no point by the rthe time you start racing it’s closes. So basically can play up 45 hrs in one week but the window effectively are close 31 hours of that time for me. Then add the bad recycled lobbies. And the fact I could win ever race and get beat by scurb that play all day that never, makes it points to even try.
Ya this for me as well. The windows are just pointless.
Also personally I will never race in a stock car. Also only like A,S, and sometimes R so the leagues generally don’t interest me. I am sure there are many people that think the same and only like C., B etc…
If they would promote the top elite racers to pinnacle it would fill it up. Plenty of people in Elite, less than when the game came out but enough that they can readjust. The main problem is it is promoting corner cutters to Pinnacle which it should not do. It should only promote those who consistently get clean laps and good finishing positions without cutting. Cutters should be demoted to Grass Roots until they learn to drive without cutting.
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I have always been against diluting pinnicle but I have come to the diccission now that pinnicle should be scrapped all together
Although I think they should evaluate promoting some of the top elite. But the have to be careful.
The race series I race ATV in has same problem fillin the gate. The use to have 30 plus had 3 different skill levels. With low turn outs over the past few year, gate was only seeing 5-8 per level. So they decided to put everybody to gather in one big gate. Perfect right? Nope now the novice had to races the national champion pro. All the lower skilled were almost getting lap, and they just end up quiting. Now they have only one 30 plus class with 5-8 people in it. The basically pushed out 2/3 of the racers that stop altogether.
I’m guessing the some top elites will do the same when they becomes the slowest racers in the room.