What TZ are you? Since H4 it’s rather hard to find a partner for Playlist.
The OP already made these points well, but I’ll reinforce them.
If you are good driver consider using a weaker car to lower the average drivatar car. if you are a weak/average driver ensure you are using a OP tune for the track conditions and opponents. there are tunes that can absolutely crush unbeatable drivatars.
Don’t always try set a track record when in first place. Use tactics to help your teammates catch up. Slow down in front of drivatars and block their pass.
ALWAYS let faster teammates pass. be aware of your surroundings, if a teammate is on the inside, do not block their line, make sure they have room to catch the checkpoint, that means do not hit the checkpoint apex turn if you have a teammate on the inside! keep wide, give them room!
Don’t be afraid to quit if your team is losing because YOU are in last place. If you quit you will lower the drivatar score and that might give the remaining human team the win.
Likewise if you are a good driver, don’t be concerned if your team is missing players. It lowers the potential score of drivatars just as it lowers your team’s potential score. Actually it makes it easier because of the scoring. You can win if you are the only player just by hitting third place.
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How to have a fun and successful co-op experience:
Don’t play co-op.
As long as winning is required to get the reward in this, it will not be fun. Mostly because there will ALWAYS be players who can ruin it for everyone else. Ones who sit in the back, don’t, or can’t, race. And if not for them, the team would win. As long as there’s no penalty for this other than the same penalty for the other up to 5 players who actually TRY, there is no reason to do the co-op.
I agree that it is annoying that people feel forced into the trial to get the exclusive car rewards that you cannot get any other way. I am not 100% sure, but I think the rewards from the last two could also be gotten from Wheelspins though, right?
As far as penalties go: The only way to make this fair would be to have a (secret) ranking system that would match everyone with similarly (un)skilled players and then adjust AI difficulty to match the rank of the players, giving everyone a fair chance of beating The Trial.
The result, however, will be that people abuse this system (because… people) and make sure they have a low rank so they can have an easy trial against worse AI.
If you try to do penalties any other way you lock a serious amount of players, some who really try but just can’t, out of The Trial. That is not something you want.
Also I have noticed that if you are a really good player, the Trial is less of a problem. Mediocre players who don’t have the ability to really make a difference suffer (and likely complain) the most, because they are more dependent on the skill of the rest of the team.
I noticed this in FH4: As my skill increased, the Trial became easier to win. If I could give the team 650 points, the rest could be less skilled and we would still win. However, if I could only do 400, I needed the team to step up more.
Sadly I found I am not that good in FH5 anymore 
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If you was able to beat Trials AI in FH4, you will be able to beat it in FH5. Give yourself some time 
If you want we car run next Trial together to compare. I’ll be online around 16:00 GMT
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Haha thanks. I am sure I’ll get better, but the AI is a lot faster than they were in FH4.
I am probably on quite a bit later, depending on how much work I have to do.
With the exception of one frustrating Warthog Trial in FH4, I’ve always found beating the Trial to be achievable in 2-3 attempts with many being done first time and I always play with randoms.
I also rerun Trials I enjoy quite a few times sometimes 10 or more over a weekend.
I find one really big factor to be timing.
In my local time (UK) from ~ 9pm to 11pm on the Thursday , Friday and even Saturday generally gets me a good lobby.
There will still be people in base cars or who may not score points, but frequently I will get a 1-2 fast players or 3-4 that can score a solid 400 points each.
I’m generalising, but day times and early evenings there tends to be a lot more contact and a lot less braking for corners, very much an over enthusiastic playground of wall riding and drift tackles which seem aimed at the AI.
Later evening, past 11, I tend to get some fast but more competative players that seem to want to be the fastest player rather than just beat the AI so they will make efforts to sideswipe you out of checkpoints, rear end on turns etc.
Once you get later in the week the lobby tends to be a lot weaker and so team wins become more difficult.
I am thinking of also adding a recommended car for the trial for each week. Please post your cars + tunes here! (starting Series 1, winter)
just managed to complete after 5 tries, jesus, s2 class is especially bad, nothing but bumper cars and ai is on rails, i got rammed by teammates at the checkpoints on the corner because they don’t use breaks but just wall riding and i happened to be on that corner, absolutely horrible, ai will try to ram you right at the start if you faster at launching
didn’t had any problems completing all the previous ones from first try, this one was traumatic experience to say the least, christ
I’ll be honest, while I would love to take part in trials and get those points, I know I’m not a good enough driver. Somehow I always find myself in the way of my teammates and I feel more of a burden than anything else. I tried in the first challenge and somehow my team carried me through even though I ended up dead last every race. I felt really bad and don’t want to try again. I wish I could do better and be more confident in my driving but I get super nervous. So no points for me…as much as some people might enjoy it, I wish they wouldn’t make trials part of the seasonal objective. JMO of course…
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It sounds like an experience thing. Getting better at tuning and driving takes time. As long as you aren’t trying to sabotage your teammates like way, way too many people do I’m perfectly fine with carrying a player or two, especially since I usually ride with a group of high quality drivers. That’s a big part of what makes me a good driver though, I’m constantly PvPing and testing myself against high quality drivers, and that process (while frustrating at times) hones driving skills and knowledge a lot faster than solo play would.
You may want to consider trying to find a group that’s a good fit for you that can help. A tall order on the internet I know, but there are discord communities of all shapes and sizes catering to different types of games. Not only could a group help make you a better driver, but it could also ease the feeling of guilt knowing you’re going in with people who are consciously volunteering their aid as opposed to feeling like you’re forcing yourself on randoms.
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Well that’s how it should be, tune your car, and you stand more chance of winning, but that was FH4, and this is FH5. In FH5 the Ai copy your tune, so now tuning a car is worse than not tuning a car.
My second point is taking a slow car into the race like a B class, or A class. You might think it’s a good idea, but actually you are just putting a car in the race to lose the race for the rest of the team. You have to expect one person at least to put an S class in the race. There was a B class in my race, and they just came last all the time, but we came 1st, and 2nd in S class so we won anyway.
It took me 3 attempts, but I must say it was fun, and rewarding to win. 3 attempts in a game is reasonable. However PG need to fix the Ai copying our tunes.
I’d much rather have someone on the team who doesn’t score, or who scores 1-200 points than some knuckle head who won’t brake, rams me out of checkpoints, blocks me from passing when I’m clearly quicker and actually have some chance to catch the next AI, or has to get past when I am the lead car and we are ahead of the AI rather than being a helpful rear gunner. (not so much this week)
It really helps to learn the tracks, if you go into the event and look at details, it will tell you which tracks and the conditions.
Run them individually 3-5 times to get the basic layout. There are usually a couple of ‘Custard Pie’ corners where you really need to brake early enough so even knowing these can make a big difference and getting used to a glance at the mini map will help you spot these coming. Just avoiding these can really help your race.
Have fun and if you are dead last with zero points and the team is going to lose the round (especially round 2 if you already lost round 1), you can always quit before the end which will take 600 points from the DT’s and actually really help your fellow drivers at no cost to you.
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Yeah exactly, as long as teammates look like they’re trying to do things properly I don’t mind if they struggle, I’d rather that than some knucklehead trying to destruction derby their way to the front, like a guy on my team yesterday was flying into every corner far too quickly in the 3rd race that it had to be intentional.
The moment I passed him I thought ‘Bet you any money he’ll fly into the next tight corner trying to slam into me’ and sure enough on that very tight one near the end as I’m exiting I see an Elise GT1 hurtling into the wall.
What is the thought process of people like that? If you mess your teammates races up you’re potentially harming yourself as well in the trial, even if it somehow worked and you got the full 650pts it’s meaningless if you’ve ended up causing half your team to be unable to get enough points for the team to win.
I tried this trial about 50 times ! …at least it seemed so…over and over and over again…fail.
I never even made it to the third race!
In the end, I got in a convoy with 2 other folk…we all got a800 Ferrari’s and got it first time.
We were paired with 2 guys on s2 900 MacLaren senna .
We lost the first race…that is definitely the hardest of the 3 races…and won the other 2 . Thank goodness for that!
The trial was much harder this week compared to other weeks, and the s2/x999 anything goes mentality really made it impossible.
Even the season al championships were much harder…maybe pg games have nerfed all the ai cos they are fed up with us moaning about all the broken crap in their half baked product.
Managed to get the reward after a couple of tries. Also just quit in some others.
First tried the Pagani and Senna in S2 class, RWD. Managed to get up to 3rd but the others failed. Then i switched to a Lotus A800 AWD.
Ended up dead last but luck has it i was in a very competent group which managed to be at the AI minus top 2 postions, twice. AI crashed and beeing last i manged to keep them there for a good 10-15 seconds. They never reached my group .
Then i did the trial for testing; really recommend the senna and veneno. Dont do x999 , I never seen anybody beeing able to beat the AI x999.
It was brutal, not fun and i got lucky.
I have to agree with that - x999 is no fun. I tried it several times with a senna at S2 998 AWD and I have to say I wasn’t that bad and could have stayed almost under the first three places. Only one race I had to quit after being rammed straight into a 90 deegree corner from a teammate. He passed by and I was from second place thrown back to the last one - it was the third race with first race won by the AI and second won by us. So I quit to let the others win. But that was the only race with no x999 in it.
If you go to a race with a x999 level car, you should have to win that race or even try it. In all the races I have done yesterday always some beginners show up with a x999 Senna or Bugatti and every time they places last.
I am really lucky that I finally had a chance to get into a group where almost every driver was on the same level - we lost race 1 but for the two other races we managed to get the places 2 to 6 as the first place won always the AI with an X999 class car.
So I do not know if its a clever idea to mix classes in the trial - though everything would be fine if the player could beat there AI counterparts in their specific classes. But if a X999 fails to nail a S1 900 AI we are all doomed…
X class should have no place in any Trial, there’s a good reason why it was never used in FH4.
My humble and somewhat messy attempt to demonstrate some of these guidelines in a video format on this week’s Trial: https://youtu.be/OJUejs0qp40
Cool!
I like that it is somewhat messy as it also illustrates that you don’t have to nail every corner to be successful in the trial. I’ll add the video to the first post.
ps: I updated the first post and tried to formulate some sort of recommendation. Please, everyone, let me know if you have ideas about the recommendations this week…