Personally I have not seen much conversation about how bad the private lobbies can get. I would like to shed some light on them in hope of these getting fixed. It is beyond me how some of this stuff doesn’t even get caught by QA when all this stuff literally happens every week for our league races. After having one of the worst lobbies we’ve had since we started back in January I thought this would be a good time to post.
Communication issues
-Most of the time when there are 12+ people in a lobby we can all hear each other. But then when going into the race., many people seem to get left out and can not hear other people.
-Robot Voices (Enough said)
-After the first hour or so in a lobby or after one race, the next race seems to have crazy com issues such as only 2 or 3 guys being able to talk to each other but not anyone else. This turns into a game of Marco Polo on the coms “Hey this is me, can you hear me? I cant hear you” “Yeah he can hear you but you cant hear him” ect. ect.
Lag
-When there are about 12 or more people in a game, the game can have some pretty bad lag spikes.
-The way Forza 5 deals with individual lag is beyond me. Why not just ghost them until their connection is resolved? Instead it’ll fly them 50 feet high and put them all over the track usually causes the most terrific of wrecks and makes for some pretty annoying restarts.
Lobby Setup
-No qualifying setup (Yes I know this is a wish, but you should be able to set up a grid order manually)
-No races over 50 laps (You have to do a timed race if it is over 50 laps)
-No ahead/behind (Pretty critical for leagues)
General bugs
-When the host is changing settings and other players are picking a car there is about a 90% chance that both the host and other player will get dashboarded to the home screen and Forza shuts down.
-If a player shows up as still “choosing car” and the lobby starts, the player/s that saw the other player still “choosing car” will no longer show up in race. Resulting in an invisible driver for some players and also can cause some pretty crazy crashes because the player’s car is technically not there.
-Invite system is still bugged. Even though a player will send an invite the other player may not receive it.
Anything else that I missed would be greatly appreciated. Please do not let this turn into a wish list. Just trying to shed some light on some very bad technical problems that need to be fixed ASAP.
EDIT: Examples added to main post
Here is an example of a lag spike that effects the whole room, from two views:
And here is an example of a lag slowdown that effects the whole room:
I agree with HEF51, these issues are major for the league type racers. To many times during a league race has the game slowed to a crawl then speed back up out of no where sending your car to oblivion.
been wondering if they have been doing work on the back end as lag over the past few weeks has grown considerably. Will some of the crashes have been hilariously absurd from this…I’ve got a replay of my car getting blasted hundreds of feet into the air with about a 3 second hang time. Not funny if your in a serious race…but…makes for great replays ;p
None of this is important to the larger percentage of Forza players. Most copies were given away with the console as a bundle or bought alongside as a race game to go with the console. The organised side of Forza racing is a very small minority for T10 to look at these issues otherwise they would of fixed the issues a long time ago. Anyone remember the multiplayer poll on the old forum? And what was done?..replays were added.
“little johnny” who threw his dummy out because he only plays Forza now and then gets the whole financial infrastructure changed and given the cars he sat there and worked out it will take him 6 months to buy. And where is “little johnny” now? Not playing Forza that’s for sure!
You wont see lobby points systems added in FM5. You wont see the distance meters coming back in FM5 and Tracks will still be cutable/wallrun. Reason why…you are not the core players, you are the minority. If any of this appears I will eat my Forza disc.
You are totally right and I think it is wrong on them to only cater to the larger casual community. Who are the people that fire up the game everyday to test and tune their cars. Everyday to run some rivals laps. Everyday to practice with their friends and get better. Most of our league is on this game everyday for some amount of time and if we cant get a freaking private lobby to work half the time what is the point of league racing on Forza? Don’t they want their "hardcore’ community to be happy?
This is only partially true. League racers are only the minority in terms of numbers, but they are part of what you would call the core players. You don’t often see the casual player purchasing car packs, you won’t see continued use from them either. You don’t make game updates to get people to buy your game, you make updates to keep your core players playing.
And league racers aren’t the only ones experiencing these issues. The whole multiplayer community witnesses these issues, especially when in a larger lobby. Ignoring multiplayer issues is a good way to see a large series fade away. Don’t get me wrong, there are some games that do well without great multiplayer, but those games have a significantly greater single player experience. With Forza 5’s career mode leaving much to be desired, multiplayer needs to be fixed. At the very least, to the point where it is playable. League racers can work with what’s available, but it has to be able to work as intended. The lag issues are such a big issue that this whole aspect of multiplayer is nearly severed at the head.
You would think that since Forza 5 uses dedicated multiplayer servers, this would be a bigger deal to them. That was the whole point of dedicated servers, to have a less laggy multiplayer experience, was it not?
bravo! Well said. Like I’ve said before, this game only uses at the most 350kbps download and upload. Don’t know where the dedicated servers that Turn 10 & Microsoft are using for this game, but it stinks. Something has to be done. I tried to do a race online yesterday, straight lag fest. Horrible! I didn’t even bother finishing the race. Open NAT, Port Forwarding, assigned IP address for Xbox One & when I do a speedtest.net, my ping is 35ms (on servers a reasonable distance away. Why would I want to connect to a server that isn’t East Coast USA?).
Turn 10 or Microsoft needs to do something about this. Only game I own that has a flat out terrible online connection/experience.
This is a great post Vin. Exactly as you said its not about the multiplayer features or lack-there-of. We can work with that but the multiplayer severs should work as advertised. As of now I would compare it to Battlefield 4’s launch. The game kinda worked but not as advertised.
Can we please not get into features (lobby points, distance meter, etc) that aren’t a part of the game. This thread is not a wishing well, it’s a call to Turn 10 to improve the reliability of a feature that is in the game, Private Lobbies. Please don’t get side-tracked and force an unneeded thread ban.
Not a wish list. It was a statement of items missing from previous iterations of the series and the fact they won’t be back. I gave up “wishing” a long time ago when the back was turned on the racing, painting and tuning community. Long live the casual player…down with the hardcore.
+1
Don’t forget the file cap on tunes, paints, etc. along with the no gifting of anything. There’s also a glitch where someone can see another person but they can’t see them, this ends up in the inevitable almost every time: the person who can’t see them running them over completely.
-If a player shows up as still “choosing car” and the lobby starts, the player/s that saw the other player still “choosing car” will no longer show up in race. Resulting in an invisible driver for some players and also can cause some pretty crazy crashes because the player’s car is technically not there.
yeah I’ve seen it without the choosing car thing though, just flat out can’t see them. I’ve also seen people show up in a different car then they’re actually running lol.
For what it’s worth, I don’t disagree with you. That said, bringing up features that aren’t currently a part of the game is pointless. This thread is here to shed some light on the fact that an actual feature of the game is in shambles.
You nailed it Hef. I am glad to see that my league is not the only one having these exact same issues. During the last series we had to postpone 2 races. The items in your “lobby setup” we’ve been talking about since December. If there were going to do something about that they would have done it by now.
