All I really do is race leagues these days. I have been playing/improving quite a bit the last month or so. For some reason I am still in Elite in the Ghost League this week but got bumped up to Pinnacle for the others. I just checked the leaderboards.
Elite Ghost League: 686 Players
Pinnacle GT League: 46 Players
Pinnacle Spec League: 44 Players
Pinnacle Porsche League: 0 Players
NASCAR League: 4 Players
So basically, it’s back to the normal hoppers for me. 
Pinnicle racers will only race what they feel comfortable in
Did you.every races Eclass?
…or they dont play FM6 anymore. Does anyone know how long it takes before you get downgraded if you dont play the game anymore?
You don’t. I have been inactive in the FM6 leagues since FH3 was released. I just checked the other day and I am still in Pinnacle.
I’ve been trying to get bumped back down to Elite from Pinnacle for over a year now. It seems that if you win a race, it’s almost impossible to get bumped back down. I started another profile so I can race in Elite if I want. And I usually use that second profile. It’s anyone’s guess as to how long it can take.
All you have to do is is keep losing and your Truescore will gradually get reduced to where it becomes eligible for the previous division.
You can’t lose a race if there’s no one else playing.
Really, really it’s true. To win I needed to finish alone!!! Where is the best players? Today i’m back to Elite. But next week who Know???
Only ghost i’m Elite Others hoppers I’m Pinnacle cause today, I win a lot.
Hey Papis,
Man, I’m in the same boat! I was just ‘promoted’ to Pinnacle last night and there isn’t anybody out there! Right now, I am still on Elite in the Ghost League, but maybe this is because I already started that league for the week? Anyway, I am unhappy that getting better actually penalizes you, because now I can’t even race in leagues!
I’m thinking I may have to use my son’s GT so I can get back to Elite, where the action is.
Snowman
Thank God I suck and will probably never get into Pinnacle.
Here is what’s happening to the leagues. The way you are ranked is a little cattywampus compared to a year ago when a lot more people were racing. I raced in Elite months back and struggled to keep up with the leaders. Lately I am dnf ing people,and winning races without a lot of trouble. People are moving up into elite class too easy,and it shows by the quality of racing etiquette in the non collision leagues.
There are ways to get moved back to elite from pinnacle. Regular lobbies do effect your league status. One thing you can do is enter the c-class ghost Lonnie and use a car that isn’t competitive and dnf. Or you can enter a ghost league in pinnacle and just do poorly. I’m saying do this in a ghost lobby so you don’t effect other racers that are trying to do good. But remember that once you get back into elite you are going to be better than most, otherwise you wouldn’t have been classified as pinnacle in the first place. I understand why you would want to go back simply because the lobbies are bigger.
So when you do go back to elite,have a little etiquette and maybe don’t use a leaderboard car! Or build your cars to where you really have to push them to be competitive. Racing can be just as fun,if not more fun when you have a few other people just a few hundredths difference in speed. There are people that only want to just whoop the whole field by 15 or 30 seconds. Those people don’t know what racing etiquette means!
There is a guy racing in elite now that clearly belongs in pinnacle. He beats the whole field easily by 20 seconds and generally dnf’s half the field. A few weeks ago I would see him purposely not pit in the league where pit stops were required. He was trying to stay in elite. Apparently that doesn’t work because now he is using a different profile doing the same thing. This is just my opinion,but that is just sad and selfish.
I think this is something that we will all have to get used to,because it will probably not change or possibly get worse until forza 7 comes out
RACE TO HAVE FUN. BUT YOU CAN HAVE FUN WITHOUT HUMILIATING OTHERS.
The ranking system hasn’t changed since leagues began, it’s a rather simplistic system based on your hidden TruSkill rating - RBW Triton posted some info on it quite a while back.
Put simply, if you place well or finish high up in races your hidden rating increases, if you place poorly or finish down the bottom your hidden rating goes down. Your hidden rating dictates which division your in. To go up a division you need to do well in races, to go down a division you need to do poorly in races, if you don’t race at all your hidden rating remains the same and you stay right where you are no matter how long you wait.
As far as hoppers affecting your hidden rating goes, if you’ve never raced in leagues then yes theres a separate hidden rating for hoppers which is used as a seed the very first time you race leagues. Once you start racing in leagues however, only further league races (of any kind) will affect your hidden rating for leagues, so racing in say C ghost hoppers is futile in trying to change your league division if you’ve raced in leagues at any point in the past (even if years ago).
Unfortunately using your finishing position doesn’t quite lead to the situation of all the fast guys in elite/pinnacle and slower people in enthusiast/professional - had they chosen to use lap times instead of finishing position to bump up/down your hidden score it probably would but alas it doesn’t work this way.
With the pinnacle division being an empty baron land where its near impossible to find a lobby to race in, you’ll see people purposely stay in elite so they actually have people to race against not because they like to beat the field by xx seconds as you describe. Don’t hate on the player for this, hate on the game and system behind promotion/demotion which causes people to do what they’re doing simply to avoid the baron land of pinnacle.
Ask yourself this question - if you went to play leagues but could never find a lobby because of the division your in, and if you knew for a fact that you would always be able to find a lobby in the next lowest division what would you do? stay there and just not play or find a way down to keep playing?
It is shambolic that if you do too well in your favourite game mode, you can basically be promoted out of it so that you can’t play any more.
I’ve actually tried looking for league lobbies at random occasions over the past few weeks. My problem hasn’t been that I can’t find a lobby with enough people, it’s that, purely by the luck of when I’ve looked, the leagues have always been closed completely. On Sunday night, all 4 of the contact leagues were closed at the same time. It’s bad enough that T10 stupidly chose to arbitrarily shut down these hoppers for 2hrs at a time, but running them all on the same schedule so that both (or, at the weekend, all 4) contact leagues are closed at the same time is unbelievable. Or it would be unbelievable in any other game made by any other studio.
Haha yes! i completely and have the same thoughts since leagues started. Online games should be on demand so players can play whenever they have time, not the other way around where some silly schedule set by the studio is what players must juggle their life around so they fit the mold.
It’s all too often i’ve jumped into a league lobby an hour or so before it closes, it starts medium sized and by the end it’s nearly full right when everyone basically gets ejected/leaves since no further points are gained. Talk about killing the party just as its getting started - this also isn’t helping the dwindling player number issues either.
I can only imagine it’s related to some deep legal fear of being partially liable for a WoW like scenario where if the lobbies never closed there might be someone who is so focused on racking up the most points they drink energy drinks endlessly, continue playing for 4 days straight and eventually drop dead at the keyboard (or controller in this case). And yes this really did happen to a WoW player apparently but there would have been so many other easy ways for them to curb this problem like a maximum limit on races per day that you earn points for just as a start… it’d also make it a bit more fair for the people who can’t play 12+ hours a day to top the leaderboard. But that’s just my hunch…
If Pinnacle is baron due to the fact that those guys only like to race in car’s they fancy (I’m guessing here; Modern GT, Global Touring, … basically any race car spec), then perhaps T10 should work out the TrueSkill factor based on a number of car divisions or range of cars? I race in Elite, we are nearly always full. At peak time the lowest number is usually about 11. In Elite, I notice that the higher numbers of league participants are in the lower classes (ex-Modern GT - that always pulls a crowd).
Losing races or creating new Gamertags to race in a lower division - I get that. If ever the day comes that I get promoted I would consider it as I like to race in all types of cars. It’s sad that you can ‘promote yourself out of the game.’ Perhaps there can be incentives for staying in Pinnacle: exclusive pinnacle paints, free entry to eSports leagues. Or maybe there could be a league structure for each class.
But if it’s true that Pinnacle players only stick to a certain type of car, because it’s the cars they’re good at, or simply that these cars capture their imaginations more than other cars I don’t think you can blame the game for that. This is not very sympathetic to those recently promoted I grant you.
It’s silly to say that Pinnacle is dead because those players don’t like the cars. Do the thousands of players who were promoted from Elite suddenly stop liking the format when they move up? There are certainly some Pinnacle players who don’t play for that reason, but I don’t see why the proportion would be higher than at any other level.
I reckon it’s mainly just down to numbers. The thresholds were set so that there were always far fewer players in Pinnacle than in the other divisions. Aside from a couple of blips (prize weeks, basically), it was rare to find more than one lobby in Pinnacle at any time of day, while in Elite there could be 3 or 4. That’s just not enough critical mass. It only takes a few regulars to drop out and suddenly the lobbies are only half full, which puts even more players off and now they’re basically empty, and so when new players are promoted up there’s no one for them to race, and they lose interest too.
This problem was first aired pretty early on and T10 fiddled with the thresholds and promoted a load of people from Elite to boost the numbers, but all this achieved was lower the standard of racing so much that loads of the fastest guys quit and it was back to square 1.
Of course, the format of the leagues has a lot to do with it too. On average, Pinnacle players are more likely than other levels to be seeking the things that leagues were intended, but failed completely, to provide.
Leagues didn’t provide cleaner racing than hoppers because there were just as many corner-cutters and rammers, because TrueSkill.
Leagues didn’t provide any more competitive element than hoppers because the scoring system was so utterly meaningless.
For the first year at least, the races in Leagues were just as idiotically short as they are in the hoppers.
Leagues didn’t provide more balanced grids than hoppers. Even when restricted to division there was still usually one totally dominant car/build/tune.
Leagues basically solve none of the problems of the public hoppers, and throw in some extra restrictions into the mix (play windows/ downtime, unable to join off friends, unable to play with friends in different divisions, only one choice of car per week, no track voting, etc). If you were a good player who wanted a better standard of racing, you still had to rely on private lobbies and organised leagues like TORA, and if you were a good player who was happy with the public lobby experience then you had no incentive to play leagues anyway. This is less true for players in Pro and Elite. Those guys are less likely to feel ready for organised leagues, are less likely to know enough other good racers for private lobbies to be viable. Also, they are less able to run at the front consistently in the hoppers and so are more affected by all the nonsense than the fastest guys who can generally stay ahead of it most of the time.
Basically if you’re a mid-level player, there are some good reasons why you’d choose to play Leagues, but not so much if you are a top-level player.
I must say, i too have been a bit frustrated with being promoted to pinnacle. Don’t get me wrong i appreciate the recognition of putting many hours in to improve to this level. However every time i try and enter a league, there is either one guy waiting or it just fails to find a session.
Also i might add that my favourite league is spec racing (which tends to be lower classes) and i race far more in production racing than any race car lobbies, i don’t quite understand the point regarding pinnacle drivers and higher class cars?
Pinnacle was never hugely populated even when more people were playing the game. League’s were a good idea but in my opinion they were very poorly implemented.