Sony is doing it
Forum infra/solution is so old
None feedback is acknowledged by anyone from team for more than 6 months now.
People posting are very often the same
Forum provides visibility on game weaknesses that PG/T10 would certainly prefer to keep unnoticed
Discord is very preferred for the same reason of easy hiding whatever is information wished to be buried quickly.
I am not asking question to PG/T10 here, they won’t answer because won’t read, question is to you guys posting on this forum, what do you think ?
No, too great a resource for casual and newer players. Not everyone has Tilo-depth automotive knowledge and the learning curve is very steep, not to mention the very little how-to info provided in-game. I share your concerns, but consider the all nuance detail/information discussed in various threads by experienced players such as yourself that a newer player would not otherwise come across and learn…basically think of alllllll the stuff the game doesn’t tell you that one can find all throughout the forum…
In response to this thread about the forum not working on iOS a moderator said “Better thing are coming.”
I guess that could’ve just meant better things for iOS users in the near term (forums did get better on iOS) or it could mean better things for the forums in general.
Or “better things” could be closing the forum, since better is pretty subjective and things is pretty vague.
Yeah I remember seeing that thread; I almost always access the forum via iOS but didn’t experience the same issues at that time. You are right, “Better things are coming” is as vague and useless as the day is long. Just to add perspective, the mod’s prior post said the devs were asking for a corrective update “for years” and that “the wait continues,” …that would seem to indicate that “whatever’s next” is not close to happening, so mothballing a useful tool without the successive replacement doesn’t sound like a productive strategy. Better things could’ve been referring to Retro’s change in position/responsibilities before she left. Perhaps a dedicated iOS app, a la Forza Hub. Perhaps it was just looking forward to the next release. I’m just not sure how useful it is speculating forum closure by way of lacking developer communication (to base’s desire), waning player posts this far into the life of the game, and/or whatever Sony or any other company with a gaming platform decides to do with it’s communication strategy.
I wish other developers would be so comunicative as PG/T10.
How many devs has official forums for their games? And what does it mean nobody read stuff on this forum? Car wish list sure does work as far as I know. The same goes for the support part. They do read and they do care.
It is the fan base that is spoiled. The worst are those that want everything personally tailored to themselves. Is there a single benefits to close this forum? And why do we need conspiracy theories everywhere? Devs want to shut down forums just to hide some stuff that you can easily access trough other media? Those nasty companies.
Are you serious with that statement? Even when RetroKrystal was still around, all you could read were “thanks for the feedback, we’re working on it” or “don’t discuss this here, closed!” type of comments.
There are so many issues with this game that it’s not even funny. There have been problems with certain aspects of the game since day 1 and they haven’t been fixed yet. Just because some random moderator or CM responded in a thread with generic comment doesn’t mean they’re communicative. It just means they post comments just for the sake of posting it and having people like you think they’re working on it and being responsive.
Here are a few random issues that haven’t been addressed and never will be, some of them are more than a year old at this point:
you still can’t use game capture in OBS to stream the game
there is still no actual matchmaking, it’s 100% random
you can still enter online adventure with a different class than the one that everyone else is using
you can still lose points after winning an adventure in team ranked
convoy matchmaking is beyond broken
points are unbalanced in team adventure, they refuse to acknowledge it & roll back the update that caused this
ranking up is bugged, you may have enough points for e.g. league 10 but you won’t get promoted, you’ll need to do additional race(s) to get the promotion / rewards
don’t get me even started on engine sounds
Forzathon Live requirements are still not adjusted based on # of participants
hundreds, even thousands of glitched/hacked leaderboard times on rivals & other leaderboards
Xbox/PC desync issues, enjoy coming in first but actually finishing second because driver behind you was actually (apparently) in front of you the whole time
I could keep going if you’d like? Their communication is atrocious, development is rubbish, Q&A is horrible and project management is non-existent. I got my moneys worth and I will buy the next Horizon game because I’m a sucker for racing games, but that doesn’t change the fact that this game has more flaws than any developer would ever like to admit.
Yes I am. Like I also believe this forum is meant for us to use rather than a media to communicate directly to the devs. While I do agree with you that there are still a lot of issues I do believe they are listening. The Track Tor ban, the PO cars gifted for everyone, the first garage expansion. Those are all requests from community. So they do listen. And of course we all have different standards. What is good to me not necessary is good to you. But to call communication atrocious and development rubbish is not an opinion, it’s a lie.
Not exactly the subject here but just for sharing info, the track-tor / BS subject was investigated by a player who made stats and communicated those directly to team, how he had that access, I have no idea, what I am convinced of is that none of the thousands of posts shared on this forum had any impact, he did that investigation and 2 months later the BS and TT were banned. For the garage size, revival of rivals etc, I hope this forum had an impact, sincerely, given the number of times I posted on it, I do, but so long ago now …
I admit I am rather of the kind having a feeling and trying to find out the info that confirms it. On the other hand I share here to know if others have equivalent value opposite signs
FH Forum looks to me like an old pub in a village close to route 66, few first day fans & lost souls looking for help.
I agree with you guys, this place is great for beginners to find info, we can go deeper in subjects as we will never do on Discord, Microsoft login removes most of haters, project team could find tons of great ideas … if they wanted to, could just catch some people here for having a chat with etc BUT I have rather the feeling the game industry leaders want to go to mobile online store mode. you take it, happy, put a like, not happy go … you know …
Here is a list I made recently, FWIW. I’ve probably forgotten other issues too.
Bugs:
in an event, sometimes ‘rewind’ does not work at all.
sometimes ‘rewind’ does work in an event, but only for a limited amount of time, after which it will no longer work at all.
sometimes Danger Signs do not trigger when you drive through them.
before some events, your avatar will be shown sitting in the car as well as simultaneously standing beside it.
when using M+C and after hitting an object like a tree, which is a common occurrence in Eliminator, the car will literally refuse to respond to your inputs for 3 seconds. This is apparently a built-in artificial delay which does not occur when using M. 3 seconds may not sound like a lot, but it is an eternity in a tight race and does lead to frustration and lost races. I endeavour to remember to use M for Eliminator, but I would prefer to use M+C all the time.
sometimes tunes show PI of an additional 1 point which puts them into the next class. So you may have an A800 tune which the game now decides is S801. If you install the ‘S801’ tune on the car again, it will then show the correct PI of A800.
rare, sometimes the car will fall through the world. Has happened to me a few times in Eliminator races, I’ve hit a tree, fallen through the world and by the time the game has recovered its composure, the race is lost.
in the auction house, a car you have sold and collected the credits for, can remain in ‘my auctions’ as ‘complete’ but you can’t remove it.
BMW engine sound too loud, so if another player is using that car, their engine is louder than your own.
sometimes a livery when viewed in free roam, will have errors like misaligned or truncated vinyls which appear perfect when viewed in the garage or livery editor.
Issues:
AI can be absurdly aggressive and hostile, especially in the Trial on unbeatable. They also have a ‘force field’ around them at times.
even in non-team races, the AI acts as a team and will drive slowly or brake in front of you to make sure their AI friends get a lead. The AI do not show any intent to win in their own right, only to slow you down.
can’t choose a mix of metric and imperial. For example, in the UK we use metric for temperatures but imperial (or ‘English’ in US English) for speeds and distances. In this game we can’t do that. Some people also for example would like to use kilometres for distance and speed, but use lb/ft and bhp for car performance figures.
when cars roll over, which is a regular occurrence in Eliminator particularly, they reset too quickly and often way too far back. Not uncommon for a car to reset when it was just about to land on its wheels. Ability to choose when to reset rather than have it forced should be an option.
even when using manual gears, the car sometimes, but not always, chooses to shift into 1st when you are stationary in a high gear but press downshift once. If I am in 3rd gear and press downshift twice I expect to go into 1st, not into reverse. In Eliminator particularly, this is a hindrance when you hit an object in a high gear, come to a standstill and downshift a few times hoping to get 1st or 2nd to get moving, but instead go into reverse. It doesn’t behave consistently, so you’re never sure how many times you need to downshift until you try it. Bad design which we should be able to disable. I chose manual gears, I don’t want the car to second guess me.
unskippable cutscenes in ‘stories’. Also if you have the radio turned off, the game re-enables it so you have to spend the start of your event messing with the radio to turn it off.
inability to zoom out of the map so you can see the whole world on screen at once. Test Drive Unlimited allowed this on last-gen hardware so I can see no technical reason for its omission.
game does not let you turn music off, nor turn the music volume down. All you can do is set ‘radio’ to volume level 1, but this does not affect the music throughout the rest of the game. Particularly annoying in Eliminator where the car drops have loud music playing. Using ‘streamer’ mode does not stop that music either.
when choosing a car paint, the game shows you all the paints you have for every car, rather than showing the ones for the car you are in. It should at least show you the ones for the car you are in, FIRST. Forza Motorsport 7 does this.
start splash screens are long, unskippable and the sound is very loud. Lots of people have complained about this and it should be self-evident that it will annoy people. There is a good reason most games do not have lengthy, unskippable and LOUD intros!
when you are in free roam and you select a car to get into, the game then asks if you want to have the car delivered. This is a redundant step because of course you do.
Eliminator
Bugs:
finish line sometimes disappears both in the world and on the mini-map.
opponent sometimes disappears from mini-map, game will tell you that you are in 1st place the whole time, but then you lose.
finish line sometimes disappears from the world, but NOT on the mini-map. When you drive over the finish location, it does not trigger a finish. Both players end up getting knocked out by timeout.
game often puts car into reverse after winning a H2H.
sometimes you cannot challenge other drivers. Was previously ‘fixed’ but remains an intermittent issue.
you should have 10 seconds to choose a start position, but sometimes this is 2 seconds or less.
Issues:
finish line always disappears when you get very close to it, which can lead to disorientation as you aren’t sure exactly where it is. You are reliant on peering at mini-map to ‘find’ it, to trigger the finish.
finish line is not visible enough, it should be something like flares as it is for the car drops, or for street races. The thin white line can easily get lost among objects like trees, especially in winter.
When you start an Eliminator match, a big message comes up telling you you are in an Eliminator match, which obscures your view of whether there are car drops nearby. This message is entirely redundant because there was already a prior screen telling you you were in Eliminator mode. Also, hiding the HUD is a hindrance because you need to QUICKLY see where other players are, who may be about to challenge you, or who you may want to challenge.
when you choose to activate a car drop, it doesn’t respond for a second or more. I’m not talking about loading time, I mean simply the game giving you a feedback that it has accepted your button press. This is important because sometimes the game will ‘miss’ that you have pressed it, perhaps because it deems you have driven into it too fast. I find you have to tap the button a few times to make sure it works. Bad design. Also cars take too long to load (could be a technical limitation, but I question the value of having the helicopter animation which wastes time).
when you get a car through a car drop, or when you win a H2H, your HUD disappears and you are momentarily disorientated, not knowing which way you are facing, where the edge of the arena is, and whether there are opponents nearby.
particularly near the end of an event, if a H2H finish line is near the edge of the arena you may inevitably drive outside the zone due to your momentum. The game then disorientates you by hiding your HUD and you can get knocked out very quickly due to the timer. The game should instead warp you back inside the zone, because the game should know very well that the only reason you are outside it is because you just won a race and the game itself prevented you from getting back inside the zone while it messed about loading your next car which you won’t be able to use anyway. Bad design.
other players can interfere, wittingly or unwittingly, in your H2Hs because they are not ghosted. Adds an extra level of randomness and annoyance to H2Hs as well as giving a green light to griefers.
finish line distance can show that you are literally miles away, when you are almost right on top of the finish line, because it calculates it by road rather than a straight line. This can lead to confusion and disorientation.
some finish lines are inside tunnels, arguably a bad design choice.
text on screen is TOO BIG and obscures your view at crucial moments, such as at the start of H2Hs, this can easily lead to hitting objects like trees. Also it lingers on screen too long, it does not need to say GO! in huge letters for 5 seconds. This is a really bad design choice.
sometimes a car drop will not show you what the car is, until you drive into it. It is supposed to show you when you get near it, not just when you drive into it.
at times, ALL other players’ white triangles/arrows will disappear from the mini-map simultaneously, even if there are still dozens of players left in the event. It is not because they have all chosen that moment to stop and go ‘dark’. It is either a bug or a strange design choice. This lull can last a minute or more.
Online adventure
Bugs:
PC and Xbox users are not synced, meaning PC users launch slightly earlier, but also then must win by a clear car length or more, or be deemed to have finished 2nd.
in the above instances, on the podium screen your avatar will be shown standing by your opponent’s car, and vice versa.
in team playground games, if one team wins while there is still a lot of time left, the game makes you wait a long time, like a minute or more, before showing the end of race screen. There are often fewer players when this screen does appear, presumably because they quit thinking the game had crashed.
in ranked, when you get enough points to progress to the next rank, the game doesn’t award you the rank until you get even more points.
in ranked, when you lose points, your avatar will still do a fist pump of celebration like you’d won.
rank points do not always save on completion of an adventure.
ranked leaderboard ‘near me’ does not work, it just shows the top 11. ‘Near me’ does work for other leaderboards in the game, but not for online adventure.
in ranked, sometimes when you rank UP, the game will show that you ranked DOWN. And your avatar will still ‘celebrate’ despite ranking down. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdOkWQRA2w0
Issues:
for custom adventures, should have the ability to select ‘any’ for any of the fields we choose. For example, Road Races, class ANY, freeroam rush off, collisions ANY. Because without a server browser or similar feature telling us how many players are in what game type, how do we know which is the most populated and will give us a full field of racers? Letting us choose ANY for the fields which are of less or no importance to us, would solve this instantly.
Rivals
Bug: sometimes the flags will be missing, meaning you can dirty a lap for missing a checkpoint.
Issue: once in rivals mode, you are unable to choose a rival, car or tune. Also cannot view the leaderboard any more. The only way to do any of these things is to quit back to free roam and rejoin rivals from scratch which is convoluted and time-consuming.
Using Game Capture in OBS/Streamlabs doesn’t work, it either crashes the game or screen is black, there are dozens if not hundreds of threads about it on this forum and reddit.
You can of course stream the game by using Display Capture but that’s something completely different and not preferred but vast majority of the streamers for multiple reasons.
If you’re a real game developer then the forum is a way to improve your game to make more money from your next game. If I was working on Forza Horizon I would check here every day. The forum is really worth millions of pounds to a game developer who is actually interested in their game development.
I don’t think they will close the forums, but I wouldn’t be surprised, if they do.
Closing the support subforums was a very stupid move in my opinion, because it contained a lot useful information and often was the place to get player to player help with some of the issues. Threads from there came up in search engines, whenever people searched information regarding the issue they were having (even years later). Now it’s all gone. Now you have to create a ticket in a closed environment and maybe get an answer (not necessarily a solution or fix) few months later. From support forum you might have gotten useful information after several hours from other players or red a thread about the same issue and got your answers there. On discord you ask for help and, if nobody answers to you right away, it gets buried under the wall of text in hours or sometimes even minutes and that’s it.
As for slow activity on here, it’s 1.5 years since the last FH game and 2.5 years from the last FM game and no new information about a new title - so the slow traffic here is understandable.
As much as I like games having official forums where devs occasionally hang out and we can get “official” support and info, from a technical and logistics standpoint it doesn’t really make sense to maintain a forum with the popularity of places like reddit where fans will run and moderate their own forums.
Information on Reddit is just as accessible via a search engine as any other forum, devs can still lurk there to get player feedback and a feel for the state of the game community, and because it’s not “official” they can distance themselves from what is said if needed, and likewise generally can’t censor what has been said or stifle discussion (which unfortunately has happened quite a bit on these forums).
So going back to the OP, I do think you have valid concerns that the forums may very well be shut down at some point, but at the same time even if that were to happen the community would likely just migrate to places like Reddit. I think the Forza Reddit community may already be just as large, if not larger than the forum community, and the devs have referred to it multiple times over the years and already recognize its existence.
Reddit is not a good forum. Why, various reasons. Any ‘unpopular’ opinion will be downvoted to oblivion, while feelgood stuff or memes will rise to the top, so the forum ends up being the tyranny of the majority where groupthink rules and everyone else is too afraid to speak. Also posting in existing threads does not bump them, nor even do posts in a stickied thread rise to the top of the thread but are lost hundreds of posts below. Unless you post when the thread is young, your post will be seen by nobody or by very few people.
I think they may do it. But in my opinion, I want the forum to survive.
I have a discord account, but I do not intend to actively use that service. Because it is too inconvenient when compared to a forum. Finding logs is hard. The search function is very inconvenient and useless. And above all, discord does not officially support the translation function.
I use the translation function to browse websites written in English. It is not always accurate, but very useful.
However, discord cannot use the translation function in both browser and application versions. It is possible to use translations with unofficial tools, but this is a violation of the discord rules and there is a risk that my discord account will be banned by using this tool.
Of course, I can copy the posted message and paste it into the translation service, but this is very inconvenient due to the nature of the discord service.
Easier to read the post log, and relatively easy to read and use even users who do not speak English like me. This is the great advantage of the forum over discord.
In recent years, T10s and PGs have been actively using discord, but we want them to recognize the importance and convenience of this classic service.
I stopped posting here (different GT) because of the over moderation …
I had a ban for typing a letter followed by asterisks - considered profanity - when ban was up every post was moderated .
The problem was I would post and it wouldn’t appear for hours - so any attempt to have a conversation was killed… so I became a consumer here just dipping in occasionally to have a peek & moved to Reddit - not perfect but not over moderated either
Mod wouldn’t even enter a conversation about it - the forum deserves to die
Peace
I totally disagree. Not only do I agree with the level of moderation here, there are times I think more moderation is needed.
Those of us who follow the rules do not get banned and therefore do not experience the issue you have/had.
Reddit is a garbage can and a totally unsuitable replacement for these forums. Honestly, I don’t find Discord to be much better that Reddit.
I much prefer this forum because of how the posts are organized. You can find the topic you want and add a comment. Thus, all the comments about a certain topic are grouped together (unless, of course someone starts their own thread, and even then it doesn’t take long for one of the mods to merge the threads).
I the 10 or so years I have been a member here, I have had no issues at all with using the forums, and do not agree that this forum needs to die.
I don’t like moderation done on this forum, too much censoring steps taken, no dialog, … many things BUT, like for FH4, challengers are missing. Forums are still the best place to go deeper in subjects and share opinions from people all over the planet.
Forum are part of freedom we, as internet users, have and should cherish. Many people don’t like it, one will want to ban any bad words, another anything political, another anything Climate, another … aggregate all and see what you get …
So sure, I am 100% for keeping this forum even with the current ‘moderation’. Just, how long before some cost killer says, look, this forum has a cost, Sony removed it, we have to be competitive, let’s do the same ?
