PG, we need to talk: How does the algorithm that is supposed to find amazing liveries actually work?

Because in all the contests I see so many beautiful liveries that I really want and when I actually try to find something, I see liveries that my grandma could deliver in 5 minutes work. Even when I choose to use the search engine and for example search for 1) Racing 2) Realistic, I find anything but realistic racing liveries.

On a sidenote: You could make it really easier to find a featured livery. When I don’t want to buy the car with it, I sometimes have to guess the car, which is not easy for me. Or am I missing something that makes this easier?

1 Like

it helps to know who did it … if you see one you like note down who did it
in the paint forum people often showcase their work …
also in AH you can search for the car you want to paint and see if there is anything there you might like, as it lists the painter. This is a lot more hit & miss tho’

I agree , the basic top level collection of liveries for a given car, have cars that are just painted one colour with no imagination
I have painted some cars and given them nice wheels …I’m sure they have probably shown up but that isn’t what I have intended

I have raised the question, because in earlier versions, I always got a ton of liveries that were amazing in the very first screen. Since this is no longer the case, I thought that noone is painting any more. But then again I see all those amazing liveries in the forums or in the contests and I wonder why they do not show up.

There’s a huge difference between opening default “Find Designs” dialog and using Search function.

When you are in the car you want livery one and hit Find Designs it will show you stuff in roughly following order:

  1. Anyone you follow (so make sure to follow painters you like)
  2. Livery contest winner(s)
  3. New liveries that got picked up by Trending Today algorithm
  4. Popular liveries (those with highest all time downloads+like+uses count).

This generally gives you a good selection of really nice paints.

However, if you use Search, none of that seems to apply. I have no idea how the display works there but I found it very difficult to find anything good unless I specifically search by description (e.g. I’m looking for Star Wars, I’ll find a bunch of Star Wars liveries and some will be brilliant).

Hope this helps.

Quadro … May be more accurate to swap 1 and 2 as T10/PG featured paints should always be shown first. And while livery contest winners make up the vast majority of T10/PG featured designs, they can and have in the past featured designs that have not entered or won livery contests for whatever reasons they choose to.

Thanks a lot… but while in the other games there were always almost all liveries so good that I would want them, it is still hard to find a nice on in FH4. So if the algorithm is really the same, the number of great liveries must have gone down substantially. Or is this a false assumption?

The explanations above … while accurate … do not paint the complete picture when it comes to Horizon 4. The algorithms, categorizations and featured design setup explained above is indeed in place now … but it was not for whatever reason at game launch. And it was not fixed until earlier this year with one of the updates. So, for the first couple of months or so while all this was broken, the only paints that anyone saw either being featured or by searching … were those with the most downloads. Many painters for the first few months figured out that all you had to do was be the first person to share a paint on any car and your paints would show up near the front of all paint searches and you’d get tons of downloads no matter how good (or bad) your paint was. So the storefronts are now proliferated with all of these thousands and thousands of ‘quickie’ junk paints that people put up during that time frame to quickly get to legendary status.

Another unintended consequence of this early broken sharing/featured design system was that as a result of all the ‘junk’ paints getting all the downloads, when better painters who actually cared about the quality of their work and took the time to put out good paints finally shared their work … none of them saw the light of day and therefore got no downloads. As this went on for the first few months, many of the better established painters were so discouraged at the state of things that some just quit sharing paints or left the painting community all together. I have spoken personally to some painters where this was the case.

So … combine the broken system at game launch which led to tons and tons of junk paints being quickly shared along with many legitimate painters losing interest early on … and that’s why you don’t see as many quality paints in Horizon 4 and the paint scene is not nearly as active as it was in previous games.

I think it’s depend on what car designs try to search when looking design for cars like S15 Silvia there is many great designs and it’s hard to choose but in some cars browse all 255 most popular ones and after that think “nothing wasnt something that i really want”

I frequently find myself settling on odd choices for the search tags because sometimes none of them really fit. I imagine many just leave it on the default choices without even trying to categorize.

Search works fine if you are happy to go through all of the cars one by one. There is no real clever algorithm in the game, in fact the opposite is true, plain cars do better in the search than nice designs.

You’re right Wildcat, I just checked - featured show even before followed.

Please get back the sort of “new” “popularity” “rating” at least.

In the past Forza had this system. That’s even with the XB One generation.
On the top page, friends and followed creators are displayed, but in the search results, etc., the livery that has been frequently downloaded is displayed with priority.
I think that this is one of the reasons why the livery just changing the body color has spread. And even a glitch that changes the console time setting to get a car that hasn’t been released.

I do not care about the number of downloads of my livery, but the current system prioritizes speed over quality, so I feel very inconvenient when searching for data created by other players.

What kind of sorting on search results are you asking for? The first featured designs screen that you’re shown already sorts designs in the method you ask for. Are you asking that all 255 paints shown in the search results also be broken down into the same categories and sorted within them? We already have that … only limited to 20 instead of the entire 255.

At launch it didn’t … but there was an update a couple of months later and now the categorization, search and sort works the same as it does in previous games to my knowledge.

Search results, more specifically in search results such as keywords.
I know that the result of getting in the car and doing the initial design search is improved.
However, in search results such as keywords, there is no such sort, and designs with many downloads are always given priority.
In the past Forza, was able to sort more after keyword search, so it was easier to find a design that matches the purpose.