As some of you may know, Forza Motorsport 6 stopped being my “game of choice” a number of months ago, as I started to become dissatisfied with the direction the game was going. I won’t go into the details here but one of the things that made me stop playing was the frustrating Mutliplayer Hopper experience. There are many threads despairing about Multiplayer so no point elaborating on the issues here as you’ve read and experienced them all already.
Fast-forward to this week and after a few months of varied gaming experiences I had cleared my Xbox backlog, completing several games in the process. The next 2 games I will be playing are F1 2016 and Worms W.M.D. but having cleared my backlog a week early I “had nothing to play” and booted up Forza Motorsport 6 to see if anything had changed while I was away.
I went into my first Hopper expecting the worst and was… pleasantly surprised.
Over the week of Hopper racing I have done the racing has largely been clean, with few intentional wreckers showing up. I was also not getting involved in many Lap 1 incidents and had close battles with a number of drivers. While I am not Forza RC material I am still a reasonably quick and clean driver, and can easily hold my own in most Hoppers. That meant I was starting and racing near the front in most cases, and getting involved in fewer incidents than others.
After the week of play I have come to some conclusions:
I suspect that the majority of “dirty players” are currently distracted with the Forza RC Leagues, and have moved over there to try and win some prizes. That may have resulted in fewer problem players taking part in the Hoppers.
“Problem players” may have also started moving on to other games, as big releases like Overwatch have been quite popular online. Other players may have just left Forza Motorsport 6 like I have, which could be another reason for the smaller lobbies.
The racing in B and A-Class Hoppers seemed the cleanest. Anything faster would bring up issues whereby people were driving cars too fast for their skill level.
The sweet-spot for lobby size was between 10 and 16 players. Any more than that resulted in pileups on Lap 1, and any less would spread the field out too much for there to be any battles on-track.
The Forza Race Marshal system might be having an impact. Personally, I saw no Marshals in any of the rooms I competed in (except for when I joined a Raceboy stream) and players didn’t appear to get kicked at all.
Lime Rock South Chicane had new tyre barriers installed at the chicane section, which have caused a lot of accidents. That portion of the track is now barely wide enough for 1 car to get through there cleanly, and if said car hits the barrier any cars behind it will get collected in the resulting pile-up.
Despite the cleaner Hopper experience I have been getting, it’s not enough to get me back into playing Forza Motorsport 6 regularly. I have “done everything”, am still dissatisfied with various features and Turn 10 design decisions and have other games that I would like to play. Forza Horizon 3 might be worth playing, but I will be keeping a keen eye on Forza Motorsport 7 once it’s announced as right now I don’t have the faith in Turn 10 that I used to; the series is no longer an insta-buy for me.
So to kick off a discussion, have the Hoppers been any cleaner for you recently?
I think you’ve just been lucky. I’ve had enough of the opposite experience over the past couple of weeks that I’ve ended up turning my xbox off after a handful of races even though I’d intended to play for a couple of hours.
I pretty much only play in the ModernGT hopper nowadays. On the odd occasion I venture into a class hopper I am reminded pretty quickly why I don’t race those any more. It’s not that GT is actually much cleaner, but with 3X longer races and a mandatory pit stop there’s a tiny bit more patience, and it’s at least semi-recoverable when it does go wrong. If I’m still stuck with the frog people at the end of the 1st lap then I pit early and if I can blast a few clean laps in I’ll generally leap-frog the mid pack when they all pit.
Actually this format was run in the leagues for a few weeks and it was head-and-shoulders the best public racing I’ve seen in Forza - we had several weeks of actual proper racing with 24-car grids - but T10 don’t seem to have taken that on board and have reverted back to running idiotic crash-fest 3-lappers in the leagues again, with completely predictable results. Personally I think if they changed the lobby settings to 2X for B,A and S class and 3X for R,P and X with one forced stop the whole multiplayer experience would vastly improve overnight, but they won’t.
Dropping the grid down to 16 players and leaving 24 for private lobbies would also help massively, but there’s 0 chance of that happening either.
Aside from that, ABC’S can be pretty clean (mostly because you’re only actually racing 3 or 4 other people) but it’s a bit of an acquired taste.
Some are, some aren’t. On a given day there are, on another given day they aren’t. I would definitely say that the amount of intentional wreckers has declined, but the real problem is the constant stream of new players coming to this game. I’m honestly surprised at how often I see a level 10 or lower on here with barely any gamerscore, meaning that they just got their xbox with the Forza bundle. A lot of wrecks that seem intentional are actually just inexperienced players who don’t know how to drive yet.
I think there’s idiocy in every single race, it just depends on where in the pack you are. Jf you can make a break and either beat everyone to turn one or simply luck out in the ensuing melee you can have a clean race. Most of the turds\wreckers thrive in the back of the pack. You just have to worry about them when you eventually lap them.
We had a couple of blatant wreckers in a few races in a C-Class lobby and a Turn10 Race Marshal showed up pretty quickly on request, but by then the Forzatards started behaving themselves. I’m not sure if it’s because of the Race Marshal’s Turn10 badge or not.
If anything the situation in public lobbies is more a reflection of the people playing it, not the developers. It might be nice if the developers got a handle on the ghosting and back marker issues, but for the most part if even 20% of the people playing the game are clueless, entitled monkeys with zero empathy you’re not going to have a consistently clean, fun experience in multi-player.
This is true, but when the game forces players (either by design or omission) who want to race properly to play in the same lobbies as players who want to pretend to be armed chimpanzees, then that is 100% on the developer. That’s a choice they’ve made.
Yep, I think it’s still a mixed bag. I race in the Leagues at Elite level, I don’t think a level 10 with a low Gamer score would qualify here (happy to be wrong on this). I do agree that there appears to be fewer intentional wreckers. I see mostly a clean race if you are able to avoid or get in front of the first corner pile up. But occasionally, everyone gets round that first corner and a great race ensues. This tells me that most drivers intend to be clean. I agree that longer races are cleaner. But I shouldn’t kid myself: those races where you race alone are by far less enjoyable for me than when there is traffic.
I think another possibility is that some people may have dropped FM6 whilst waiting for H3 or Assetto Corsa. Some may have already jumped to F1 2016.
On that does anyone know if Project Cars is any better?
The ForzaRC certainly attracted the crashtest dummies. But I now try to join on friends in a private lobby to avoid the mayhem.
I spent about 20 hours last week monitoring lobbies and cleared out plenty of weckers, but in my experience they were more prevalent in hoppers. Leagues were full of incidents to be expected with a full grid of skittish open wheel cars driven by imperfect players trying to fit five cars into the same racing line.
I raced quite a bit in the A and S hoppers yesterday and the racing was pretty good. I tried some racing in the R hopper and it was terrible. Half the field had cars they could not handle and many were out just to cause problems.
I think depending on the time of day/night, mainly if you race european players the racing is usually cleaner amd more competitive. Also as im sure people will know if you start in the front theres a much better chance of avoiding much of the chaos. I cant say that i see any more or less crashing than before its pretty much been a constant since launch.
I honestly dont think anything is really going to change. The culture in forza has changed drastically from past games. People just expect to be hit and act accordingly, no one has any patience. Every time theres contact no matter how small it was on purpose and a war erupts.
It really has become a depressing grind. I also rarely play, usually only popping in here or there only to find myself disgusted by the state of this game and then i turn it off.
I have been mainly playing Modern GT and I don’t know how anyone can say that lobby is clean, it is absolute chaos 9 times out of 10 . I expected it to get better over a few weeks like the Forza 5 GT lobby did but nothing has changed since it opened.
I know it’s been said before and I don’t want this to be a knock against the people who play that game, but infusing Horizon with Forza has brought a different mindset to the game. I know people love Horizon, and that’s fine and I understand it - but I think the gameplay in that environment is a lot different from competitive racing. People might say Forza isn’t a real simulation racer and they’d be right, but it’s a lot closer to a simulation than Horizon is.
I’ve said before that it’s the GTA\Need For Speed crowd that disrupts real racing. Maybe I’m wrong (it wouldn’t be the first time), but those games are true video games in that consequences of ones actions and rules don’t really exist. I don’t find anything appealing in those games what-so-ever, and I’m not about to purchase one simply so I can observe the behavior and playing style of those games, but it’s got to be a wild crash fest.
In real racing there is a certain respect amoung drivers (or at least drivers of similar skills). They trust each other not to smash into them in the first corner of a race, they trust that other drivers will, for the most part, give them room and concede a corner if a wreck is imminent. A lot of that respect is due to the real risk of serious injury and the resulting real-life expenses that are sure to follow a wreck, but those scenarios are not present in a video game.
I was in a race with someone over the weekend in the C-Class lobby at Sebring and for 3 out of 4 laps we were never further away from each other than 10 feet. It was close and clean and we never even bumped once (until a bunch of Forzatard backmarkers started smashing people lapping them). About 3 laps into the race I was thinking that this is what racing should be like. Even if I had lost to him it would have been fun to be involved in such a close, competitive race and not have wrecked each other.
My mindset is apparently a lot different than some, and that’s probably the biggest source of frustration for me but if even 1 out of 10 races turns out like that it might be all I\we can hope for.
This is where T10 are missing a trick though. If they had half the enthusiasm for motorsport as they obviously do fo cars they’d be celebrating and gamefying racecraft in a way that tangibly rewarded players for racing well and punished them for racing poorly. It could and should be a part of the ethos of the franchise, but it’s completely absent.
This
This x 1,000,000,000,000
If T10 wanted clean racing, they’d be able to get it as sated above.
THE NUMBER ONE PROBLEM WITH FORZA is now the online racing experience.
It used to be a lot of things, those have mostly been fixed: open wheel-check, rain-check, night-check, track variety-check, car choice-check, all of it has been fixed, except for the online experience.
I have not purchased a COD game since BLOps1 because of the way that MP functioned. I by everything GoW, because I love how that MP functions. I will continue with FM series, in spite of the online experience. I am assuming Assetto Corsa will be little more than a science experiment filled with buggy netcode, so that will likely be a nogo. I now treat the first lap in MP as a mini-game. FM is like playing Mario Party, you play the game, then you get tied up into this stupid little mini-game of trying to pick your way through the frog people.
One way, use career mode to give them racing lessons.
Teach them what shift, braking, and turn in points are.
Show them how to follow without getting rear ended, or rear ending somebody.
The MINI-game should be in the Career mode, not in the MP experience.
Give them access to the hoppers, but make them have to qualify to race at the higher levels, through career mode, or through the baseline hoppers.
No, the lobbies are no cleaner now than they were months ago, but I have not been involved in as much wrecks as I have months ago either, if you do something enough you will get better at it, in this case avoiding wrecks. Also helps if the idiots give you a warning before…
I was at Watkin’s Glen in the Nascar hopper the other day, been right on 1st place’s bumper for a number of laps now and couldn’t find away around him, he defended too well, we get on the start/finish stretch ready to go onto the final lap, just so happens that this one kid who was talking with 1st place and others (and wrecking) all race was just ahead and moving slow. The kid quickly realized that 1st place was one of the guys he’s been talking too and sees me on him, so he asks the guy if he wanted me off his back, the guy yelled at him telling him no and to leave me be but the kid either didn’t hear him due to others talking or didn’t care (could’ve been mentally slow too) and started turning over to hit me. By this time I knew he was coming so I moved over to the pit lane wall, when he hit me he pinned my back end between his car and the pit wall, which really did nothing to me and instead sent his car spinning the other direction.
