It's been 8 months and Ranked mode is still trash

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 4 FH4 Discussion
1

I’m honestly wondering if you guys at Playground Games know how to make a ranked gamemode. Matchmaking for Ranked is a mess and hardly works half the time. Let me explain to you all the problems with this.

  1. Takes too long to find a game for the rewards we get in certain lobbies. 11/12 players found? oops one guy didn’t accept gotta restart the entire search.

  2. We don’t get to pick who we race against, so if we’re a bunch of high ranks stacked against low ranks, there’s nothing we can do to stop ourselves from losing points.

  3. Players can still be pushed into barriers and receive slowdown penalty as long as the one pushing is not touching the victim.

  4. We should never gain less than 10 points for winning a ranked game, REGARDLESS of how low the other team is ranked, this will fix the problem of players being eternally trapped at ranks 15-8 because high ranked players don’t come on anymore.

  5. Players should never lose more than 50 points for losing a ranked game.

So, in order to fix these problems, it’s pretty simple.

  1. Give the player that doesn’t accept a 30 minute ranked ban, and find another player to replace the AFK one.

  2. As stated above, we should never lose points for winning, as we can’t pick the team we race against. 10 point gain for winning minimum. I shouldn’t waste my time with a 20 minute adventure just to lose 1 point.

  3. reduce the penalty of hitting the wall by 50% at least. It can be extremely hard at times. For example. I hit a house due to understeer, I’m already penalized by hitting it, now you wanna stop me from accelerating for 8 seconds? My race is now forfeit. Even if you slam right into a wall at a tight turnl, it shouldn’t be 8 seconds of penalty, it should be more around 4, as that is more than enough time for other players to go by.

  4. Se 2.

  5. I think 50 points for losing (max) is generous, though it depends on who you’re playing against. Players of low/new rank should reduce your points by 50. Moderately ranked players (15-10) should reduce it by 30, so on and so forth.

I really don’t see the difficulty with balancing here. Go play a blizzard game and see how they balance things.

5 Likes
2

Remove wall crash slowing when crash is your fault and it’s happened not directly.

3

My friends spent a week getting around 80 points, just to have them removed in one bad championship. Where is the incentive?

4 Likes
4

I’m that friend that lost 80 points. A couple of friends and me ( Including SuperHornetA51 ) have been queuing for the last week or two trying to rank up, most of the races we’ve had have been against people under league 15 and all the way up to league 20, 0 points. It’s not fun for them nor it is fun for us, it is just a waste of time and at the end we receive -1 point for WINNING. As he said, there is absolutely no incentive unless we’re guaranteed some points, as minuscule as the reward may be, at least it’s a reward for winning a game and spending some time trying to win it.

The point gain is also absolutely all over the place, a friend in League 11 gained 32 points for a win whereas I gained 65ish points for that same win, being League 9, but the third friend gained around 130 points if not more and he’s in League 6, or was at the time of that race. I’ve multiple screenshots of us being matched against players of all skill levels, but 99% of those screenshots are against League 15 or under.

In the past 20 or so adventures we’ve had 2 adventures where people were similar or close to our rank and it was somewhat of a competition, every other adventure was us being put against players in lower leagues, the matchmaking is all over the place, if it can be called that in the first place.

5

i played SO MANY races last series…, but this time, i couldn’t care less (if anyone at Playground Games or Moderators think i’m lying & just “trolling”, then maybe do some research about that), due to the fact that it SERIOUSLY does not feel rewarding enough, plus the unnecessary punishment for losing, that “True Skill” has brought in the mix.
Maybe when the Reward Points are changed to the Actual Points in the Race/Championship Standings (Like in Formula 1), & the Punishment Points get scrapped…, then maybe i will consider putting more time into it again.

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Yeah, the wall slowdown definitely needs tweaking. It’s an improvement on the prior situation but it’s intensely annoying to get tactically slammed into a wall and watch the culprit speed off whilst you are speed restricted. As you say, it also completely wrecks your race if you do happen to make an error (usually in my case in X country) and hit a wall head on, as you get a double hit. Given wallriding is only really possible in road (and maybe some dirt?) courses, I’d probably remove it entirely from other race types.

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Does anybody know, how points are shared in free for all ranked? I’m trying to get to level 10, but it seems to be impossible.
For example yesterday I won, but i got reduced -16 points, why?

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Is this the system they’re using for FH4?

Microsoft TrueSkill System

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Yes, FH4 uses the TrueSkill scoring system. However, there are not nearly enough players in ranked adventures to provide proper matchmaking, so the system expands the search to include a large array of scores to be matched against each other. This results in highly lopsided matchmaking, making it extremely difficult for high level players to gain points (at the risk large losses if they lose/disconnect). See below for two key Q&A items related to the difficulty of ranked progression in FH4:

Q: A couple of days ago I managed to get into the top 350 (in PGR 3 online career) after winning probably 25 of 30 races and that brought me up about 120 spots. Now tonight I have had 5 races: 2 wins,1 second,5th (got spun twice) and a 4th on one of the Vegas tracks. Because of this pathetic record (that is how the TrueSkill formula sees it) I have gone down 115 spots. How is it fair that 2 bad races basically dropped me down almost as many points as 25 wins out of 30 races took to gain all those places ?

A: There are two reasons that can cause this problem (although the latter is probably more responsible for this “phenomenon”):

-Ranks displayed in PGR 3 are the position in the total leaderboard. That means, if you are rank 659 then there are 658 gamers with a higher skill (estimate) than you. This number can vary without a gamer actually having to play a game; for example, if some (legitimate) “Gotham star” gets to the top 100 players in the world whilst you are not even racing, then your rank goes down to “660” without you doing anything wrong. This “rank” can never be guaranteed to be “stable”.

-Roughly speaking, the change in your skill estimate depends on how “surprising” the game outcome is. If you happen to be (among) the player(s) with the highest skill in each of the games you played, then the 25 wins were not surprising and hence none of these games provided a significant increase in your skill estimate. However, if coming 5th was a rather unlikely outcome in the game were you actually did come fifth, then your skill needs to be adapted significantly. Another way of seeing the issue is that TrueSkill does take the strength of the opposition into account. One cannot simply compute the win ratio and equate this with skill; if all wins happen in the (sometimes) unavoidable unbalanced games then a win is not really testament to your (even) high(er) skill!

Q: Well there must be a bug in the system because I jumped into a 4 person race with 3 lower ranked individuals, won the race and my position in the league I was in dropped about 50 spots.

A: Surprisingly, this is not a bug and it happens when players with very small σ but widely varying μ get matched together (thanks to rugdivot for figuring this out).

So, what is going on here? Between any two games of a gamer, the TrueSkill ranking system assumes that the true skill of a gamer, that is, μ, can have changed slightly either up or down; this property is what allows the ranking system to adapt to a change in the skill of a gamer. Technically, this is achieved by a small increase in the σ of each participating gamer before the game outcome is incorporated. Usually, a game outcome provides enough pieces of information to reduce this increased uncertainty. But, in a badly matched game (as the one described above) this is not the case; in this case, nothing can be learned about the winner from the game outcome (because it was already known before the game that the winner was significantly higher ranked than the other gamers he has beaten). So, conservatively speaking, the winner’s skill might have slightly decreased! Note that this can only happen if the gamer is not matched correctly so that he can “prove” to the TrueSkill ranking system that his skill has not changed.

10

I uninstalled this game back in January because of how horrid the multiplayer was. Of course this was before they FINALLY updated it to fix the vehicular warfare racing. I reinstalled it like 2-3 weeks ago and I’ve played it twice since then. I just can’t get into it at all. Removing the old points formula for online just killed the fun the series had going for it IMO. Not to mention trying to find a custom room with collisions off only worked once for me. And when I finally found one it was just 1 other person for 3 adventures in a row. Booooooring!

I know this thread is about ranked racing and I share your frustration without even playing it anymore. I remember it taking anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes to finally get in a ranked room only to be blasted into on every corner or pushed out of checkpoints. In H3 I can be in and out of an adventure in like 2 minutes if I don’t like the class its in. I know the latest update has helped but griefers are always going to take advantage of anything they can. Hence bumping you into a wall and they speed off with this new “fix.” As much as some people complained about the old points formula for online it did promote clean racing. The points meant something and you wanted to win but without collisions. It made me a much better driver. Now the points mean nothing so the incentive to drive clean is gone.

And last but not least the points system in ranked is atrocious. It’s all over the place. Why even play it if you’re going to be punished for winning more times than not? As stated above why should you be punished for who the game groups you with?

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I can’t even connect to a ranked match when I’m in a convoy with someone! we tried for hours

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Played quite a lot of Team Ranked Racing today and kept track of results. Won 10 lost 4. Of the four I lost, I could have only affected the result in one by doing better (made a mess of the second FRR in a 3-2 loss). My personal results out of 47 races were 7 wins, 15 seconds (about half of these I could have probably won if needed), 5 thirds and only 6 results in the bottom half (all Freeroam bar one X-country). The net result of several hours of effort? My ranking is within 5 points of where I started.

Also decided to track the pattern of drop outs as my suspicion was that I’m often against short-handed teams. Of those 14 adventures, my team was never short-handed. The opposition was a player down at the outset or after the first race on 5 occasions. Two of the defeats were to short-handed teams - from 2-0 and 2-1 up - and I’m pretty certain both would have been wins without the drop out(s).The first one hit me with a fairly big points loss as well as they had started short-handed. How hard is it to fix the system so that short-handed teams don’t have a clear advantage?

Anyway, I’m continuing to enjoy my low Level 13 ranking with seemingly little prospect of moving anywhere (have now been within 1740 to 1900 points for the past month, whilst playing pretty much daily). The lack of progress is irritating but the races are mainly enjoyable. Anyone got any tips though for how to get better at FRR? I feel I’m adequate at it and the nature of it means there is going to be a bit more randomness but it’s notable my results are much worse in those events.