From time to time the Forza team may supplement the Suggestions Hub with a focus on community feedback around a specific feature in Forza Motorsport.
For this topic we’re looking at Matchmaking in multiplayer.
Click the polls to give overall feedback and then reply with specific details:
What do you like about the current matchmaking system?
What would you like to see changed or improved in matchmaking?
How do you feel about matchmaking match quality in Featured Multiplayer?
I dislike it very much
I dislike it somewhat
I neither dislike it nor like it
I like it somewhat
I like it very much
No Opinion or I haven’t used this feature
0voters
How important is being paired with similar/equivalent skill and safety ratings drivers to your gameplay experience?
Not at all important
Somewhat important
Very important
0voters
Please continue to use FM Report New Issues to report bugs where matchmaking isn’t working as intended, and use the Multiplayer / Online section of the Suggestions Hub to upvote any suggestions around features. The Suggestions Hub is our primary resource for tracking community requests.
Don’t prioritize filling a lobby to have 24 people. I’d rather have a small lobby of clean drivers.
Don’t drop a players Safety Rating just because they haven’t played for a day or two. It’s demoralizing.
More tracks in each lobby rotation, randomized and not a static list. We know the total track number is low in the game but some feel like they never show up for weeks.
I can party up with a group of players and the game averages out our rating, so that we can join Featured Multiplayer together. My Club (Casual Racing Mondays) is currently built entirely around this premise and we tend to have excellent racing most of the time. ^
Negative:
Once we have matchmaked into a group, any friends who didn’t join in time either have to wait until we all back out of a Practice session, or they can’t join our Party until after we finish a race. That’s not ideal if a player has a crash or connection issue during the matchmaking process.
Observation:
When I have raced on my own (currently S/4975) in Featured Multiplayer, I have been surprised at the lack of racing etiquette from other players.
Based on my rank I am in the highest Safety bracket, and near enough the highest pace bracket too.
I would not expect to see the usual lap 1 craziness (and sometimes griefers beyond that) with a rank like that, yet they’re quite prevalent in some playlists.
Granted, as mentioned several times over the past decade, Forza doesn’t adequately teach etiquette so I don’t expect everybody to know it, but surely there’s enough mature racers out there to the point where there’s enough concurrents to fill up a room at this rank.
^ Apparently this is bugged, but being able to join as a group is still by far the best thing about Featured Multiplayer for me, please keep it.
I’ve gotten up to an S Safety Rating several times now, put the game down to focus on other things and came back to a B Safety Rating. Unless this is some random bug only I’m encountering, I’m going to say it’s a thing.
I think the current matchmaking isn’t even the big problem,
it’s more that the Safety Rating is super easy to improve, so many people in S tier aren’t driving super clean or don’t have the highest race craft and still they get an S, even though that should only be given to the most epic drivers.
Therefore it’s quite obvious why the matchmaking isn’t good,
it puts me into lobbies where I get kicked off track or somebody tries to pass me super aggressively and doesn’t get a penalty and also no decrease in Safety Rating.
The matchmaking is just looking at the Safety Rating and Skill, but those ratings are usually incorrect because of insufficient AI that gives either no penalty or it’s giving penalties to the wrong players.
→ If you’d fix the AI system behind it, then I think the match making wouldn’t be that big of a problem anymore.
the current matchmaking does not work, im currently the highest you can get S safety at 4,999 rating and ive been paired up with people at lowest B safety with 4,700+ skill, i dont know if this is intended to fill up lobbies to 24 but to answer the next
id like to see safety and rating be A LOT MORE involved in how players get matched up together, id rather a smaller lobby of people who know how to actually drive, rather than have people with skill and safety rating that is no where near mine get paired up and it ultimately means I’m 20 seconds ahead of P2 unless I’m playing with friends
I’m unsure on if this is how matchmaking is intended to be but if races are based off ‘sbmm’ (skill based matchmaking) then id like to see SO MUCH more involvement to implement the actual safety ratings we have along with skill to match us against them exact people who have the same skill as me
There needs to be more tracks in each lobby rotation, I have seen more tracks get added into some featured events as of late BUT there’s so many tracks that haven’t been in these rotations that it would be beneficial to have in my opinion all tracks in rotations but not so much limited to a static 4 week rotating like we have now. i know this isnt matchmaking so to say but it needs to be drastically improved
I think a big design flaw is everyone starts at the top rating instead of the bottom. Why they did this i dont know. The other issue that cant be fixed with a patch is player count. When leagues were introduced in fm6, the top splits were empty so much so that people would purposely drop down just to race someone.
Penalties need to be adjusted, they need to do a better job with identifying and penalizing rammers. I do think serving penalties on lap would help this as those accruing penalties early on would be forced to the back within the first couple of laps.
I think its a horrible idea to gather data from “long time competitive” forza players, firstly what qualifies someone as that and two competitive players dont crash into people and for the most part dont get crashed in to. The biggest issue are people getting pit maneuvered and it apparently isnt a penalty.
Its not easy to do but the work should have been put in. Its the same with the ai, they relied on machine learning to create something that required an actual person. They supposedly gathered player data from fm7, where did it go, why wasnt it used, how is this system not much better than the past one, how are these issues that are instantly recognizable within a lap, not recognized.
What do you like about the current matchmaking system?
Not very much. It doesn’t even feel like the game has SBMM right now. With the open class races in particular the top few players will often be 4+ seconds a lap faster than the mid pack. Also good luck if you qualify in the middle, there’s always that one guy that tries to play car bowling on turn 1, even though I’m usually at S safety rating.
What would you like to see changed or improved in matchmaking?
The main issue is that skill and safety rating are nearly useless right now. They’re hyper-inflated and move far too easily. I can move +/- 500 skill rating in one session depending on which hopper I’m playing. I can go from a B to an S safety rating in 3 races.
The matchmaker needs to prioritize matching similarly skilled players over filling lobbies. I would much rather be in an 8-player lobby with similarly skilled drivers than a 24-player lobby where P1 takes off into the sunset while little Timmy tries to ram me off the track.
It would be very helpful if players were put in a race lobby after qualifying based on a combination of their time and safety rating, instead of being locked into a lobby when entering practice. Other than the obvious result of closer races, it would encourage people to actually qualify instead of starting from the back and often causing chaos trying to get past the slower drivers.
What’s happening is the game will not always update your safety rating during a session. If you’re S rated when you log on and drop to B rating, it will continue showing S rating until you restart the game.
Also once we’re in a lobby can we please stay with the same people until we decide otherwise?
It’s been a little bit better lately, but it’s a real disappointment when you have a great race and then the next lobby has none of the players you were just with.
A lot of stuttering, game crash or connection loss, specially pre-race or at the beginning of the race.
Penalties is a joke sometimes, there’s plenty of players who just intentionally ram others and get no penalty at all.
STATS: This would be the most important one, every game needs to have a stat system, otherwise it’s empty matchmaking, just for fun, which tends to bore people in the long term, it’s always more fun and addictive when it gets competitive and that’s what stats are for, such as races played, races W/L ratio (Or average placement), podiums, most played circuit, stats by circuit, class and so on. Being aware of how you perform and being able to compare to others is key for any matchmaking game.
This is more a personal opinion but I could be wrong here. R Class should be permanent, I feel like there’s always more players on this category and it feels great, there’s a ton of good cars here, gets super competitive and feels close to P and X class somehow. To me it’s super fun and the best one to play, but again this is just a personal opinion some other players might not see it this way
Single player needs the same, actually singles player needs a lot, just look at FM4 and that’s some GOOD single player, this one is the opposite, however since it’s a MM feedback I won’t get into it.
First of all, there is no matchmaking system at all.
Why talking about a feature that does not exist? Or it’s not working at all, people that have 4000 of skill rating and rank E can race against people who its 4999 and S.
I think as it stands, player numbers seem to be so low that you either get a huge range of player skill on the lobby or you get players from all over the world and the ping is just awful. Most of the time, you get both.
Matching people base on skill is an absolute necessity. Racing, or good racing is achieved when people are a similar skill level/pace.
I can be 2 full seconds per lap faster than some people with an identical skill rating of 4999. Which makes it worthless in its current state.
A maximum rating should not be achievable and/or should not exist.
Practice lobbies need to be ghosted too. The effects of no separation of skill levels makes practice a horrific experience.
One thing that makes the whole matchmaking process a bit opaque to understand is that we don’t know the ratings of opponents.
Perhaps we should be able to see the Safety Ratings of all drivers, and also a +/- when they gain/lose rating after a race or incident.
I understand not surfacing peoples’ Skill Rating to others (because it changes the psychology of racing and makes people care about points too much), but Safety Rating should be visible to all.
I think it was by design to hide the fact that the ratings dont actually mean anything. Its been pretty obvious since the beginning that lobbies were a mix just as theyve always been. Unfortunately things have gotten worse as people know how to hit people without getting penalties and they also know how to increase their rating pretty quickly by using the self driving assist.
The way matchmaking currenty works, lobbies are effectively random. Skill rating are too high. I’m 4999 and still 1-1.5 seconds off the top guys, yet most of the time I’m the fastest guy in the lobby by 1-2 seconds a lap. There aren’t enough people joining at once for matchmaking to work. I joined and left 5 lobbies in 2 minutes, new lobby each time. There are plently of people playing to get a large amount of splits going, but it need to match you with everyone from the whole event regardless of when you joined.
Safety rating is a mess too, but a lot of that is the penalty system. Either way, it sure feels like I’m in the same lobby as E rated drivers. So I’m in lobbies where I’m usual;ly the fastest guy and usually by a second or too, there are guys 7-12 seconds off the pace in my lobbies, and many of the drivers behave like they have an E rating, whether they do or not. Few are even trying to drive clean.