I’d like to think it was linked to time spent in editor, designs shared and downloads. Its odd but not too fussed by it atm.
Let see what they say once they know! (that’s the odd bit if they don’t lol)
[AB]
I have some new information about it. looks like the downloads and usages will increase the price when selling cars in auctionhouse. looks like this has nothing to do with the designer level.
Now i reached the 20k download mark with 90 designs and still level 4. I give an update what happens when i reach the 100 mark, it will took 1 or 2 days, cause i still don’t want to upload simple designs which do not fit my style. i like to do some itasha things and maybe this week i make some cars with halloween tattoos or something like that.
But I think i can say that downloads, usages and likes do not count for the designer level, i have not got a single point for my 20k downloads. i just get points for uploading, i try to find out what happens when i spent an hour or something like that in editor.
There simply has to be more to it than just uploading designs. Otherwise, how do you explain painters who have not uploaded as many designs as you have yet are a higher level painter? Every time someone has a theory about how this system works, I can show you ten examples right off the bat that don’t fit the theory.
I know that when I imported and shared my Vinyl Groups I went up to Rank 4 immediately, without sharing a single Design. Other than that I’m in the dark, there seems to be very little logic in how things are tracked and tallied and absolutely no explanation as to how or why my Influence stat does or does not increase.
10 designs and 8 downloads, stuck at rank 3. If it was time in the editor I’ve tallied up to maybe a solid 3 or 4 days or more… I’ve lost count personally, of the hours spent in the editor. Wish I knew how the ranking in the creative hub worked. Sigh.
1 Like
25.000 Downloads, 100 shared Designs, rank 4. Need more to say?
I got 115 designs, 520 downloads in total!
Rank 4 and not seeing any increase… But I have noticed that when I DO get downloads for a new design, it happens only the first 24 hours.
Got a knight rider design up(eventhough others did it prior to mine) got 41 downloads the first day… after that nothing.
Same with my Hooniscort design, 39 downloads the first day… nothing after that, and I have not seen any better designs on that car to be honest…
Same with my Centinario… nice simple design called Deep Purple, 71 downloads the first day… after that, nothing
I have more uses than downloads on a daily basis, so atleast it seems people keep my designs:-)
Would be great if they finally would tell us how all works 
I have 90 shared designs and around 90 vinyls. Overall downloads around 21k and still rank4.
maybe it´s because 85% of the downloads and likes are on around 5-6 cars?
or maybe cause they are all very similar (though its my main design on nearly all cars i drive, just sharing for the money - i say as it is 
)
this where the 1st ones i shared on launch.
all other designs don´t have that much downloads. if one has 100 it´s been lucky.
maybe they don´t show up anymore after sharing - no ideas.
A bigger issue for me really is not necessarily how the painting influence system works. It’s more how the recommended designs i.e. the 20 slots of designs the game presents to you when you buy a new car works (or doesn’t work really).
I’ve just got home from work, booted up the game and collected my car pass cars. On the Lambo out of 20 visible designs for me to pick there are;
1 player has 5 of those slots
another player has 3 of those slots
another player has 3 of those slots
another player has 3 of those slots
So 4 players, who as soon as they could uploaded a number of pretty plain colour variants are taking up 14 of the available 20 slots. That pretty much means the rest of us have no chance of getting our designs seen, unless they make some serious changes to how the sharefront works.
I can’t even blame them for doing it. I almost feel like I’m the stupid one for spending time in the livery editor painting away. The least popular of these ‘designs’ has more downloads on it than my whole design catalogue - because, well players see these every time they go to buy a new vehicle.
You have to know what I’ve painted and go looking for it.
This sums up my feelings exactly. I´m a slow painter and take my time with the few designs I share. Last time I checked I had a staggering 30 downloads across the board. On a good day I make around 1000cr on my shared designs and layer groups.
One livery won the weekly comp but that did little to nothing to my downloads. Last time I checked my design did not show up among the other recommended designs. And meanwhile almost all of the recommended designs on that particular car has some color slapped on it or has some standard fonts. It´s so frustrating. But hey, at least I get to show off my stuff here 
I’ve been pretty enlightened as to how lucky I am for my receiving about 20-40K on average daily. That is just upsetting. The way the contests work now are pretty bum for real creators, reccomended is stuck on the oldest liveries. Gotta say I’m hopeful though as there has been a response from Turn 10 on a thread in the Horizon discussion that was discussing this.
And this thread explains perfectly, why I’ve chosen to pull everything, including my shared vinyl groups.
I’m not even producing paints in the background, expecting things to change. For the time being, I’m actually done!
Yeah, this whole thing is a joke. I checked out some guy’s Creative Hub last night. He had the highest downloads for a car I was interested in buying. The car was painted one color but had a ton of downloads. Curious, I looked at the rest of his shared designs, they were all basically the same; however, he somehow managed to amass more than 500,000 design downloads. Crazy!
To add insult to injury, I watched as a friend tried to download one of my liveries. First they searched by file name, then by gamertag but was unsucessful in either case. Could it be that the indexing of the search function is also broken?
This^^ is what makes my head want to explode when trying to figure out this whole thing. Since my last posting, my total number of design downloads have increased to 19, and my vinyl downloads 10. I have shared 15 designs and over 45 different vinyl groups and still rank three. I don’t get how the designs that have had 5,000 or more downloads manage to accumulate so much. Maybe they sit there re-downloading their designs over and over on to the same car… who knows…
Don’t you love that? I’ve got designs that are doing alright (one of my Pagani ones has , last time I looked, about 9k total dl/ like/ uses) but they’re designs that I spent many hours on, doing vinyls etc. Then I look and see a paint color upload with more downloads than my total number.
I can’t remember exactly how it worked on the storefront on FM3 but there was some kind of decreasing algorithm, which for your design to be displayed to other players or to continue to be displayed, it had to maintain a certain rate of downloads.
It was also possible to sort by new designs, popular, highest rated.
All we see now is popular - which they will be, when it appears to the average player, that they are the only available choice.
Just a random example here, not saying this is how it actually worked.
Day 1 = 100
Day 2 = 75
Day 3 = 50
Day 4 = 25
Day 5 = 15
Let’s say you upload your design Day 1 and it get’s 100 downloads, that might have given it an ‘invisible to everyone’ score of 10,000 points.
If it got another 100 downloads on Day 2 of it being on the storefront. it might only raise it’s ‘invisible to everyone’ score by 5,000 points. Meaning it now had a ‘design score’ of 15,000 total.
On Day 3 it again receives 100 downloads but now downloads are only worth 50 so it’s ‘invisible to everyone’ score is still only 15,000 points.
On Day 4 it’s maintaining it’s steady 100 download per day total, yet it’s ‘invisible to everyone’ score is now starting to decrease and is only worth 10,000 points. It’s now starting to slip down the list of visible designs to those players who are on day 1 and receiving say 101 downloads that day as they are on day 1 and have a higher score with fewer downloads.
By Day 5 even if it miraculously maintains it’s steady 100 downloads per day, it’s ‘invisible to everyone’ score is only worth 7500 points. It’s definitely struggling against those other new designs now to maintain it’s place in the queue.
It wasn’t perfect and to be fair players who like to ‘game the system’ just would upload the same design every few days/ weeks to keep it up there.
It just seems at the moment it’s first come first served on those 20 slots. I would love a dev to come in here and tell me I’m wrong.
EDIT
It might have also helped that we were limited in storefront slots - so you could only have so many designs listed at once. If you filled your available slots and painted something new, well something had to get the axe. Again not a perfect system but at least it would discourage players from uploading umpteen different designs for the same car as soon as they could.
Looks like you were right with time spent in paint editor. Or kind of. I think the game counts the number of layers you put on a car, and when you share this design you get more points. I get 100 points for an imported design and had something like 800 for a new created one.
Is there no official answer how it works? I have 28k DLs now, still need 6300 points to reach level 5.
Quick update. It seems that something has been changed with the recommended designs function. It now appears that the first 5 slots of the 20 recommended designs are new designs. Then, starting with slot #6, designs are sorted by most downloads. I verified this last night on about 5 cars by checking the 20 recommended designs and found that this was the case for all of them.
Anyone else want to check for this to confirm what I’m seeing now?
Did you notice if contest-winning designs are now at the front of the queue when you buy a car? That’s one of my main concerns.
That’s one of the things I checked specifically. I checked several contest winners and found some that were not shown in the initial 5 slots or in the entire 20 recommended slots at all. That was as of last night. So it appears there is still work to do for the devs.