Title pretty much says it all, I’m just curious to see how everyone else is enjoying the game.
I bought this game primarily to tune and hotlap and I have been enjoying it. So far I’ve been picking a division tuning 4-5 cars in that division testing/placing each car on 1 track then moving on.
I want to spend time going through each track/division on the LBs but I’m nervous that; A. there will be a leaderboard wipe as some people have speculated or B. T10 will change how the LBs are set up, or do something else with rivals that erases current LBs. So I don’t want to spend a ton of time running boards to have it erased.
I’m in a bit of a delemna and thought I would see how others are enjoying FM7. Key word enjoying, there’s plenty of other threads to complain on.
I’d hotlap more if every Leaderboard was its own Rivals event, like in Forza Horizon 3 and Forza Motorsport 6, and if there were class-based Leaderboards as well. Right now you can’t race against other peoples’ ghosts or examine their Replays.
Personally I don’t see the point in hotlapping anymore, as getting a Top 100 is not much of an achievement for “hotlappers” if only 1000 people bother to do a Ribbon/Division configuration compared to 50,000+ in previous titles.
There is also no overall ranking for performance across multiple tracks, no API to allow the community to create stat-tracking websites, no Leaderboards on Forzamotorsport.net, no local Leaderboards, no way to create private Rivals events (see: Driveclub), no telemetry export/analysis tools etc.
In FM6, easily 90% of my time was spent hot-lapping on my own. Didn’t enjoy the career racing at all and online racing…well, no point talking about that. So far in FM7, there have been enough improvements to how the career stuff goes that I am truly enjoying the time actually racing. I think the biggest factor for this is the option of Long and Extra-Long races. A real game changer of an addition for me. I’m also not finding the AI as bad in FM7. They are certainly very far from perfect but there are improvements. And having the extra race time does allow for some strategy to manage their issues. So not as much hot lapping.
I almost exclusively hot lap, right now I am working toward driving every car in the game. once that’s done ill see what has been done to the game via patches.
so far my favorite car/track combo is the aston martin vanquish on road America.
I just did some lapping in the standard Ford Transit van on Road America. I don’t really know why I did this but I am sure an old lady on a bicycle rode past me a few times.
Aside from a quick blast on Rivals, not at all. Leaderboard functionality has been neglected since FM4 anyway, culminating with the ‘Why did they even bother?’ system we have in FM7.
As a relative newcomer to the Motorsport side of the game, yes. It is critical to learn the tracks default layout to avoid stupid errors online. It might even help the drivatar ai when you do longer races that are cleaner.
Since you have to get into the car and go into free play to check the leaderboards, if you checked one leaderboard per minute it would take 207 hours just to look at them, or a full time job for four weeks.
Now if you wanted to run a lap on each one, Forza 8 might be out before you were done.
It would look like there are far too many divisions to have them all on rivals mode but without the rivals we had on previous games it’s seriously harming the games playability. If they introduced leaderboards for every division on every track the most populars 1s would thrive, things like modern gt, touring cars and p1 would explode with competitive times.
I used to like Hot Lapping the Ovals, and there was an overall Leaderboard beside the Individual class Leaderboards, but when a lot of Oval Hot Lappers started “Drafting” to get faster times, I then gave up.
I was able to get to #39 on the overall Oval Leaderboard in Forza 3.
That was with using the XBOX 360 Microsoft FF wheel, which was not too great for racing on Road Tracks.
My 12 year old grandson can beat me with the controller, but the Thrustmaster TMX Pro Wheel setup is now great with Forza 7.
Too bad Turn 10 doesn’t care much for Oval racing, or they would have more Ovals in the game.
I hot lap every race in single player because the AI is terribly slow even on unbeatable with no assists. I run long races so I don’t have to smash my way through the pack, and would rather run clean. Problem is the AI is so bad that I pass them all about 4 laps in and then it’s just me pulling away for the remainder of the race. It makes it quite boring but long races are the only way to make some decent money.
That being said. I would love to have proper class leaderboards, proper class rivals, and proper class hoppers online. This was one of the things made made Forza what it is/was.
Hotlapping is all but dead. We still can but it just seems pointless. I’d rather be #100 on a heavily populated leaderboard than #1 on a poorly populated leaderboard.
It’s funny, I’ve seen certain leaderboards that have less than 30 times posted. Absolutely disgraceful.
But that’s okay, we have our monthly Bounty Hunter and Forzathon to help populate the boards.
Those are probably because they are from the ‘Open’ series in campaign and chances people select different homologation of cars and therefore for that series of races there aren’t many time posted. As opposed to standard series where everyone has to run a given homologation for the given tracks.
No because I have no interest in running any of events listed in rivals. Way too restrictive.
I would hotlap if you could hotlap for the homologation leaderboards, but I cannot stand having to go to free play to do this and I don’t like not being able to select a ghost in free play.
Idiotic game design = less play time. After I’m done with achievements, I’m done with the game. I have little faith leagues will be done well. I will take part in FRC though.
Thankfully there are a bunch of other good games out and I’m pretty excited to get back into achievement hunter mode.
It makes it quite boring but long races are the only way to make some decent money.