I have been an FM enthusiast since FM2 when we had tuning garages and a huge painting community, etc. and that is the feature that really drew me to the series. I don’t recall when in the series we switched to the “curated content” model that they pushed (was it FM4? FM5?) but finding liveries was soooo much better before that iteration.
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There used to be a “sort by rating” option when showing search results so that you could see the highest rated (read: the best) liveries up front without having to sort through all the junk (and there’s a loooot of junk since FM offers for you to “share” a design every time you change a paint color). Why can’t we have this back? Every release I’ve figured somebody would have the foresight to stick this little feature back in and every release for the past ten years or so I’ve been disappointed to see it’s still missing.
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The lists of liveries appear to be requested from the server in groups of 8 at a time, which is fine, but why are the servers still so slow a decade later? This isn’t even a new problem, it’s been like this since day one of the new UI. You scroll through 8 designs that are barely even considered liveries and then have to wait ten seconds for the next 8 to load. It has been like this for me for a decade now with two different high speed internet providers – it’s not a problem on my end, it’s absolutely the FM servers. And the resulting images aren’t even high resolution or anything fancy, why does it take so long to download eight tiny images in 2023?
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Why can’t you view a livery at full size or at different angles before “applying” it? Why can’t you “preview” it on your car before saving it to the car? The thumbnails are taken from a corner offset where you can’t even fully see any of the surfaces that are painted (side, hood, etc.) and they are terrible low resolution quality as well… you can barely tell what the design looks like from the thumbnail in the first place and definitely can’t tell if it’s well done or a hack job, so you have to select a livery, wait 20 or 30 seconds for it to be applied and then view your car from the garage to even see what the end result looks like. Who thought this was a good idea?
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On a related note, why does it take so long to download and apply a livery? What is going on behind the scenes? Aren’t these just a collection of vector shapes?
I feel like the curated designs UI had a significant negative impact on the painting community when it was released and it keeps getting worse. At least in previous editions you could keep an eye on the forums for good liveries and go to the game to search for them by creator, but I don’t even see an FM2023 painting forum on here, am I missing it?
In the age of GamePass where MS is trying to get people to stay subscribed to the service, I would think building community would be more important than ever, but FM is definitely heading in the wrong direction entirely in this respect. I’m less likely to hang around for the meta (like painting, tuning, etc.) because the interface is so restrictive and has dis-incentivized putting effort into this aspects of the game for creators almost entirely.