Thoughts on Safety Ratings

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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Firstly, very excited for the forthcoming Forza Motorsport!

I’ve been reading about the safety ratings for multiplayer and whilst I’m sure it’ll have some kinks to iron out, I’m glad of its inclusion.

It does make me think though, is there no scope to introduce something like that in singleplayer and make it a single safety rating score for the entire game and maybe even educational to a degree? As long as there is a toggle off (with drastically reduced prizes for doing so to encourage you to keep it on) then the game can still be accessible and fun when players just want a sandbox destruction derby.

There are a few camps of gamers when it comes to console games like this ranging from newbies, to trolls, to sim races and everything inbetween but the one commonality is everybody will (most likely) be spending at least some time in singleplayer, certainly at the beginning. For newbies especially a more educational based safety rating system could not only teach them how to race fairly but could even make them faster helping them along the learning curve that bit quicker. Something like this may just help condition players fresh out of their singleplayer campaign to race more cleanly when undertaking their initial multiplayer ventures.

In terms of it being educational it could range from on screen text tips reacting to infractions that have occurred, to videos or even training events similar to GT’s license system.

Anybody got any thoughts on the safety ratings?

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Yeah so my understanding is clean racing in singleplayer will amount to better xp and/or rewards, but it doesn’t actually affect your overall safety rating.

Primarily the safety ratings are a gatekeeping system for multiplayer to try and segregate the trolls from the clean drivers.

I guess really what I’m getting at is using singleplayer more as a tool for educating players on clean racing so by the time they get to multiplayer they’re at least familiar with the systems (even if they choose to ignore them)

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I hope that the driver and safety ratings are also counted in single player. I don’t think that the players that will race clean and serious will troll in single player and the players that troll in multiplayer won’t be driving more cleanly in single player.

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While I don’t think Safety/Driver ratings apply to Single Player, the race regulations do.

In the various footage shown, when you’re selecting difficulty you get to choose between lenient, standard and strict race regulations and they will affect your race.

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I’d like it if all areas/aspects of the game strongly discouraged unsportsmanlike driving
…which would also mean no party modes like infected where players are encouraged to ram each other.
It should be clear that this is not a game for slamming into things, and the game should make it difficult for players to make any progress or gain any benefit from driving like that.

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I think a safety rating system is both great and necessary. The question is, how does one build their safety rating if everybody starts at the same level, and novice races will surely end up in destruction derbies, like in previous Forza games. It’s hard to drive in a safely manner when you’re always pushed off the track / into the rest of the cars at the first corner. Currently there is no automated system which can distinguish between being involved in an accident or creating it deliberately. The best these systems can do is to punish everyone who have a collision at given velocities. But if you’re innocent and merely pushed into the pile, your safety rating will still go down.

As Forza Motorsport will be a Game Pass poster child / “game of everyone” title, it’s guaranteed that at the beginning the majority of players will be casuals who will crash many times, often into players who’d otherwise drive safely. So, how we can get ourselves out of that “casual mass” and into safer categories and lobbies is a big question for me. In previous Forza Motorsport titles, avoiding accidents had more to do with luck than skill and intent.

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Indeed. Safety ratings have been in racing games & sims for years, but they’ve always been problematic, so I’m curious if & how FM8/2023 will improve on the concept.
I seem to recall them mentioning something somewhere about new & improved machine learning applied to FRR (Forza race regulations) for determining fault & penalties.

Common industry practices have taught me to expect rough retail launches, with some fixes possibly coming later, so I’ll wait until I see how the launch goes and how issues get handled.

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I’m not sure how the safety rating has worked in other games, in my mind if the scale ranges from A-E for instance then all new players to the game should start at the mid point C rather than the bottom at E with the opportunity to move to B and then A for clean racing or demoted to D and then E for dirty racing.

Make it pretty difficult to get from E to D. Quite easy to get from D to C to B and then difficult again to get from B to A so that in theory most players will hover somewhere between B-D ratings with trolls hanging out in E and elites in A.

A penalty system is only as good as a rehabilitation system though. I think it’s important for the game to not only explain to players why they’ve received penalties but also maybe give some tips on how they can avoid it in future. If players are just penalised with no explanation and it was an ambiguous situation then how can they learn and improve. Probably asking too much of the consoles to do some kind of machine learning algorithm at this stage so I guess it would have to just be tips based on certain triggered events.

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This is what’s extremely hard to program I think. What the system essentially sees is the relative speed of the cars, and the points of contact. But when someone crashes into you from behind, and pushes you into the car in front of you, then your relative speed compared to the third car will also be too high, and it’s still your hood crashing into their rear. Telemetry also doesn’t necessarily help, because this can happen in a split second, and you might well be still accelerating when the one behind you smashes into you. The system will then see that you’re accelerating + crashing into the one in front = you’re getting a penalty.

When there’s only two cars involved, it may be easier to determine the culprit, but the biggest pile-ups happen in the first corner, or in situations where several cars are racing for position. Also, in a two-car situation, who’s to say it was not the car in front that deliberately blocked the way, or forced the car behind off the track, leading to the crash? I don’t think there’s any system that can reliably filter malicious behaviour on track. The best these things can look at is the point of contact, and maybe penalize the driver behind, assuming it was them causing the accident. But that’s not necessarily the case. And it doesn’t help in group pile-ups.

Another thing, you can’t always position yourself strategically. Firstly, it’s still a race, so you’re supposed to be racing from the start and try to gain positions. Secondly, when you’re in the middle of the field, it’s very hard not to get involved in whatever’s going to happen in the first corner. Thirdly, Forza races are usually not very long. You can’t build up much safety rating in a 3-5 lap race if you’re involved in 1-2 huge crashes in most of them (even if because of others). This is not like ACC where you’re racing one or several hours at a time.

I don’t envy the developers trying to make this work. I think the biggest problem is that the very nature of Forza multiplayer is casual and crash-happy, unlike many other, more serious racing games. I’ve always had a very hard time racing cleanly online, and even gave up on FM7 online for this reason, because it became completely pointless.

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Well for me, safety rating has to be very dynamic. In Gran Turismo Sport/7 it is way to easy to keep an A/S safety rating while smashing folk off track and racing like a drunk with his hair on fire.

It needs to punish severely the bad driving, especially heavy collisions, but needs to be aware enough to not punish you for hitting a car in front that has lost control and you can’t avoid.

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Not just that, in GT7 the bad drivers brake check and then you get a penalty. This can’t happen in FM.

The penalty & safety rating systems will make or break this game.

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True, but we need to get the obvious stuff right. No system is perfect, but the big obvious stuff is far more aggravating than the small stuff.

Big - Brake checking in the middle of a straight.
Small - Somebody breaking a bit too early. (This will always happen in most races)

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See this is where I think a global penalty and safety rating system would really help. We won’t ever cure trolling but on the whole if players receive penalties in EVERY game mode and those penalties result in hits to their safety rating then the consistency of that should help to drive players to race more cleanly.

Want to incentivise players? put a prize modifier in place based on safety rating too. Watch how many players start to clean up their act for a chance to get bigger prizes

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What about disqualification? Chris Esaki said that if you have a repetitive bad behavior on races, you eventually get disqualified (and probably your DR and SR is going to get a heavy hit if this happen). Should that be enough?

Hopefully within the 5,000 incidents they can sort the intentionals vs honest accidents or if you get involved in chain reactions (T1 incidents).

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A single player is not the same as with multiplayer. It seems to me that this score should be recorded only in multiplayer

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ye like iracing, it’ll be a lot harder to gain license than to lose it. Once incident can lose you a lot of progress, so let’s say you crashed into someone and that lost you like 6 license points, it’ll take you like a good 10 - 15 clean laps so to say to make up for that crash and gain those 6 license points back. That’s the type of systems I’d like to see in the game.

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Unfortunately, racing games have historically done next to nothing to teach, encourage, enforce, & reward racecraft & sportsmanship.

One of the most common complaints in multiplayer racing games & sims for the last couple decades has been: rammers ruining races.

…Yet racing games often advertise spectacular crashes in their promos, have hostile AI/NPC drivers, include party modes that require/reward ramming, & do next to nothing to discourage rammers in races.
It’s like racing game creators actively encourage unbridled carnage instead of fostering racecraft & sportsmanship.

• Imagine if other sports games like FIFA & Madden allowed players to freely punch, scratch, bite, choke, & eye-gouge their way to scoring goals & wins with no regard for the rules of the sport.

• Imagine if other sports games like FIFA & Madden had AI/NPC that freely punched, scratched, bit, choked, & eye-gouged players in offline/solo modes.

• Imagine if other sports games like FIFA & Madden had party modes where punching, scratching, biting, choking, & eye-gouging was required.

• Imagine if other sports games like FIFA & Madden showed off punching, scratching, biting, choking, & eye-gouging in their advertising.

…That would be absurd, but it’s always been common in racing games.

It should be one of the highest & most obvious priorities for motorsport-oriented games to inherently & strongly prohibit & omit anything involving blatantly unsportsmanlike contact - but instead, it seems like it’s always barely been an afterthought.

It’s woefully inadequate to only have a loosely-enforced code of conduct that puts the entire burden of diligence on players for evidence collection & reporting.

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Ah that’s interesting I hadn’t seen mention of lasting penalties in singleplayer other than FRR docking rewards

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I agree in part and that’s why I think any enforceable penalty system for singleplayer should be something that players can disable with them taking a hit to their rewards.

But on the whole I’d like a consistent penalty approach with wider reaching repercussions. It helps to train people’s behavioural habits

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Sadly, people will just create alt accounts if they’re banned