Remove Winter altogether (You can’t be having realistic weather conditions but unrealistic car mechanics. It’s unacceptable when you don’t know if you’ll need a ford F-150 or a Hypercar because of the track conditions)
Remove teammate collisions (I’m tired of fencing in my teammate against a wall because I’m taking the correct line and he manages to be on the outside)
Remove street races or at least the AI that drive on the streets
Each collision from an opposing team deducts 10 points from their final score
Do these and your online player rate will increase in a matter of minutes.
I don’t agree with all of these, though I do think having clean racing have an effect on the team’s score (either by collisions lowering score, or by having clean racing give bonuses) would be really nice. On balance, I also agree that Freeroam Rush should be taken out of ranked. I struggle with this is a bit, since Horizon is mean to be a bit of an arcade-like game and point-to-point racing can be a fun arcade-like challenge. So I’m okay with it being in quickplay, but on balance I’d say it shouldn’t be in ranked since it’s largely a game of who accidentally hits trees.
One big thing that I think is important for ranked is to not require all 12 people to accept in order for a match to start. I’d say at least 1 person fails to accept about 90% of the time, which can make getting a ranked game at all take an excruciatingly long time.
It should either allow the game to start with a lower number of people accepting (let’s say 10, for instance), or it should automatically have you accept, like it does in quickplay. Both options have their downsides. Lowering the number of people accepting could result in matches that are 6v5 from the beginning. That’s not ideal, but games can and do often become that anyways, so it’s not a huge deal IMO. Automatically accepting runs the risk of putting AFK people in matches. Overall, I think allowing matches to start when only 10 or 11 people accept is probably the best way.
One additional solution to the above problem is also to give slightly more time to accept. Loading times in this game are pretty long. I suspect people are sometimes doing something where their game is literally loading the entire time they’re given to accept, so they can’t accept. Raising the time to accept by 5-10 seconds may get more 12-person matches. I don’t think it’d fix the problem itself, though, since I think plenty of people just decide not to accept. So maybe allow matches to start if at least 10 people accept, but give people 5 more seconds to accept?
More class options should be on the list all day. I miss C, B, and more A. MUCH less S1/S2 poofest.
Penalty for quitting early needs to be added. Sick of players leaving after we lose 1 match because they don’t want to take a chance of going backwards.
Right now I think their MAY be a penalty if you use the actual QUIT from the menu (I’m not saying there is, but maybe), but there is no penalty if you quit out of the game or shut your Xbox Off.
Staying in Lobbies should also be an option, why back to Freeroam after every set? Why cant we keep playing - Mix up the teams and invite more and go go. (you know… like most racing games)
I’m not a fan of Freeroam Rush either, as it warps the metagame towards off-roaders.
Allow it for Dirt and Cross-Country Adventures, sure, but maybe remove it from Street Racing and Road Racing playlists.
Adapt. Make sure you have a car prepared with Snow Tyres and select it when Winter shows up.
Tell your teammate to not be there, or adapt your line so that you don’t impede them.
Street Racing is the only playlist that doesn’t have an issue with wall-riders, as there are no walls to ride. Adapt to the conditions and learn to deal with traffic.
You will end up with griefers who not only grief their opponents, but also drain their own “teammates” scores. Not a good solution.
Doubtful.
Agreed, the racing in lower Classes can be fun too. They’re probably less popular due to the fact that most supercars start in the higher Classes, and they’re the more popular cars amongst the community.
I’m fairly certain there’s a Ranked Penalty for dropping out, as I’ve seen people claim they’ve been banned from matchmaking.
Those that “can’t take a loss” likely don’t care about their Rank to begin with.
Sounds like an exploit.
Mixing up the teams isn’t really viable when Convoys want to match up together.
I’m guessing we get booted back to Freeroam as otherwise the increase/decrease in Ranks after an Adventure would affect matchmaking.