New enforcement rules rules maybe a tad over enforced?

So i was going about playing forza as i tend to do especially when the season is due to change. As i am a player who has accomplished the ledgendary painter status, I have put alot of time into designing and sharing liveries and aim to get ones up asap for the newly released cars in the game. The season changed to winter so firstly i knocked out the 3 pr stunts which are usually the quickest and easiest way to gain a percentage boostage. Bare in mind this months festival playlist had a new horizon story which was used as a decent chunk of the overall completion percentage. So i believe i was at 31% as the season changed over. I only needed to gain 2% more after completing the pr stunts so i chose to do the showcase remix. I unlocked the Toyota 2000GT and headed straight to the garage. It took me a bit longer than usual to get a design up because layer groups on the front and rear werent matching up with the ones on the hood. Once i was happy with the design i shared it while having a browse at what other players had shared sofar. There was easily 30+ designs up already. I went and started working on a tune for one of the seasonal challenges. Some time had passed which made me curious on how my design was getting along. So i went to find new designs where i couldnt seem to find the one that i shared earlier. Which led me to try and view my creative hub. Which is when i knew something was up because it was mentioning something about that feature is locked or something along those lines. I exited the garage and to my surprise i found a message from forza support mentioning that i have recieved a 30 day ban for accessing a car before its release date. This automatically made me feel sick, as i have never cheated in this game.
I instantly took photos of the cars history which at the time read that it had been owned for 1h 39m and linked them to the ticket i sent to support. In the past i have submitted tickets so i dreaded how long a may have to wait to receive a reply. To my surprise it was one of the quickest replies i have ever received from them.
All i got in return was “the ban has been lifted”.
Not even an apology for whiping all of my shared content from where they were placed by popularity.

My country is currently on lockdown due to coronavirus so i was looking at putting in a good amount of time into the game but after the experience of getting punished for playing the game as its intended to it has really ruined the whole experience. Its like starting from scratch in a way. Worst part is that support couldnt even care less about the mistake they had made.
Which leads me to think how many others have received this cowboy style treatment for doing nothing wrong.

Would love to hear your story if anything similar has happened to you?

Stay safe all!
GLHF

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We are also in lockdown and I was looking forward to spending time on liveries etc to finish the star card.
When I saw the amount of players posting that they were banned I was too scared to start the new season and waited a good few hours before playing and all though I wanted the car, waited till the next day to get the necessary percentages.
It’s sad that PGG / Turn 10 is being over zealous with the new rules.
Stay safe and stay well.

Even sadder that they have no company rep to post on the forums with a simple message of apology and regret.

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The same story have happened with me TWICE. Both times I had to submit a ticket to just clarify the reason I received a ban. Both times it was something about unacceptable shared content. I used to make car liveries and even participated a few times in weekly livery contest. But after a second ban for my car paints (which are always real life copies of racing team liveries or tuner projects) I lost all interest in sharing my paints. I have no idea who got offended so much with ingame car paint to report a player for unacceptible content. Maybe some people just do not like McLaren factory racing team colors? I don’t know

Is it not copyright infringement to copy a real life livery?

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No, there’s fair use exemptions for these types of things. Not for profit, user created content is exempt from copyright (game mods, fan fiction, etc), but if PG were to officially put the content in the game they would need a license since it’s a commercial product.

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The laws regarding that sort of thing differ from country to country. If there is just a single country in the world that the game is sold in where it would be copyright infringement, it would need to be prohibited in the game. The criteria you stated of being a user created copy, and shared without profit, would not be sufficient in the UK to make it non-infringing, as far as I’m aware.

Maybe its not related, but just starting today the mods on the official Forza Discord have been much more aggressive with account warnings for being off-topic. Seems like they got a new community management team who hasn’t quite learned yet to treat their community with respect if they want them to stick around.

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I guess the problem is we are expecting several people over there taking care of all support tickets etc, I wouldn’t be surprise they are very few if several. Being flooded with people complaining of ban error, they/he/she just go as quickly as possible to chain remove bans.
After they have never expressed any loss of user data was of some importance, just look at sync issue management, it’s far worse.

In general, personnel only do what they are instructed to do. Possible poor instructions and lack of oversight are management responsibility.

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