My path to Legendary rank

[Quadro40k]

Hey everyone,

During my time in FH4 I’ve heard a lot of opinions on Legendary Painter rank, from “ah, all you need to do is to spam Momo and Red Bull logos and you’re all set” to “it’s impossible to reach it unless you started with early access”.

So now, having achieved the rank, I decided to tell how I got there. Hopefully it’s of some interest to anyone and maybe it will encourage someone to embark on a similar journey.

My first contact with Foza Livery Editor started not so long ago, back in July 2018 with Forza Motorsport 7. And the only reason I touched it was to get the achievement for getting 50k from design downloads.

Needless to say the first livery was terrible, just slapped few things together and shared it right away. No wonder it didn’t get a single download. Now that’s not something I’m prepared to accept easily so I started experimenting. And as the tool doesn’t do a great job of educating aspiring painter, I started asking around on forums and trying various things until one day I actually liked the result and felt I did something rather decent.

In December 2018 I got into Forza Horizon 4 and exported some of my old paints from FM7. I got a small spike of downloads when one of the paints hit “Trending Today”, something like 300 downloads and 500 uses with quite a bit of likes but then it completely flattened out. I think I averaged 15-20 downloads a day for quite some time. So when I made Senna tribute livery and nobody at all was downloading it for days and weeks I was very frustrated.

That’s when I discovered that Weekly Livery Contests are running on forums and I entered one, and - to my huge suprise - ended up one of the winners. On the first day of that Senna being featured I got close to 600 combined downloads/likes/uses, by day 3 my all time totals have doubled. And so, all enocuraged and enthusiastic, I carried on. Each contest win has given a serious boost on the run rate so now, 2 months later, the average is 1000 a day with weekend days counting between 1500-2000.

Here’s how the standing looks today:

For those interested in numbers, here’s a short (1 minute) video with graphical representation of daily progression, including major milestones:

My overall feedback to anyone who wants to get to Legendary or simply frustrated by lack of attention to their work - don't give up, it's possible and doable. Above is how I did it, PTG Wildcat has put together a nice guide with more tips and details, which I'll post here in full:

@PTG Wildcat

So … I wanted to offer some tips and suggestions for those above asking about how to increase paint downloads.

In my experience, there are a lot of different factors other than just how good the paint is that can significantly affect downloads. And, I would offer that if you want lots of paint downloads, it is a good idea to treat yourself as a painter as if you’re a ‘brand’ and your paints as if they’re your ‘products’.

Some tips:

• Winning T10 livery contests is the #1 way to increase downloads. Your paint is featured by T10 and shown first to everyone looking for a paint for that specific car.
• Choice of a popular car is critical. The best paints won’t get downloads if they’re on a car no one uses. Focus on popular cars, DLC cars, newly added cars. For example, at launch, I knew that the FD cars were going to be popular. So I worked for a couple of months before in previous games to build and prepare paints for the FD cars. Once early access got here, I quickly built and shared those paints in FH4. As a result, I have probably 150K downloads from just those 7 cars.
• Promote your brand and your paints on the Forza website and social media. Set up a gallery on the Forza site so people can easily browse your work. Promote newly released paints on Twitter, Instagram, etc. The more people recognize you and your work, the more likely they are to remember that and look for it the next time.
• Develop a logo for yourself as a painter and make sure it’s on all your shared designs. If you pay attention, most of the long-time established painters in the game do this. Use that same logo consistently across paints in the game, forum posts, social media, etc. With time, that logo/avatar should become familiar to gamers. With thousands of paints in the game identified with your logo, people will begin to look for you and your work.
• Make sure your paints are easy to search for and find in the games. At PTG, we always use ‘PTG’ in the descriptions of all our shared paints or tunes. And we always try to let people know to just ‘search for PTG’ in our social media posts, etc. All anyone needs to do in our case is quickly type ‘PTG’ in the search option and all our work is there.
• Don’t spam paints or immediately release one-color paint jobs on newly released cars. People don’t like that in general and you’ll get a bad rep for doing that and people will tend to avoid your work.

Good luck folks!

[FullNietzsche]

So your advice is to upload some paints and be lucky enough to win a competition, ok

[Quadro40k]

@FullNietzsche

So your advice is to upload some paints and be lucky enough to win a competition, ok

I wonder how you managed to read it that way.

But I don’t mind clarifying: work on your paints until you feel yourself they are actually good and do participate in competitions as that’s by far the best way to get your work in front of the players.

[Honor_Virtus]

Surely that should be Good enough to win a competition not Lucky ? it’s decided on merit not a coin toss