Please implement skill based match making if ranked races will not be introduced.
Concept is simple. Each player has a hidden ranking that goes up or down in the same manner it would for ranked races.
The benefit being players race against others of similar skill level.
Yup, would make the game a lot more enjoyable for some of us more mature people who don’t have lightening reflexes any more.
One potential downside of this is that you can’t enter Horizon Open as a Convoy with friends.
I’m sure this form of matchmaking would be good, but I feel there’s a few other issues with Horizon Open that need resolving first, like player groups splitting after a championship ends, or there being no way to choose car class at all.
Could be that I misundertood, but you can certainly enter Horizon Open with friends in a convoi.
Our group did so for the “get 5 ultimate drift skills during any HorizonOpen drift event” challenge.
Just don’t expect that you are friends during the race. 
One downside is that not all convoi members might make it into the race when the event is already full.
One of us was left out, but we were twelve participants with outside guests.
My understanding is that the system is supposed to do skill-based matchmaking…from an article about it just prior to the game’s release:
“Public-facing ranked multiplayer is gone so that players focus less on arbitrary numbers, but skill-based matchmaking still means you’ll go up against players with similar experience or skillsets to you.”
I do wonder whether it simply isn’t working currently…maybe that is related to all the online issues etc
One of the pitfalls of any matchmaking system is the number of concurrently-active players.
Let’s say you have 5 “good” players and 5 “weak” players who all matchmake and nobody else is attempting to enter a session at that moment.
There’s 2 options here:
Neither are ideal solutions, and I have a feeling Playground would prefer people racing in full lobbies where possible.
A knock-on effect of this is that the players who chased those arbitrary numbers may not be interested in multiplayer at all now, as “stakes” are a thing that appeals to some people (myself included).
That in turn means fewer competitive players to matchmake against to begin with.
I understand Playground’s reasoning for not having Ranked in Forza Horizon 5, however I feel Horizon Open as it stands isn’t a suitable alternative for competitive players, and private convoys aren’t built for competitive multi-race sessions at all which leaves players who want that kind of action looking elsewhere, be it Forza Motorsport 7, Assetto Corsa Competizione, F1 2021 or somewhere else entirely.
Or FH4 of course.
Rammers will have the best rank, I guess. It’s always cool to get stuck in a house because of some skilled player.
As simple to implement now as it was when it was FH4 …
and if it was not enough, Fable was not a FH resources dark hole at that time …
Fable should have (should being used loosely) no bearing on Forza Horizon in either a positive or negative way. Playground opened up a second studio (I believe they bought an existing studio and just retained the staff) in 2017 to work on Fable so it wouldn’t impact on FH. However, given Fable is using the Forza engine, it is curious as to how much overlap there is etc. Given Playground still consider Horizon to be their main title, I doubt they would let it interfere
The problem are people. You never have enough smart people. Fable have to affect everything for sure. Sad I don’t play RPG anymore and don’t need it. Rather another Forza spinoff, like Forza Rally.
If skill based match making is in place right now then I could only assume the system doesn’t wait long enough for similarly skilled players. So it just ends up throwing whoever is queued into the next lobby.
If skill based match making similar to ranked in fh4 was in place then you could tell because you would expect to wait longer for a lobby the more you win. Obviously because there should be fewer high ranked players queuing. But what currently happens is you queue and then you join a lobby within 30 seconds.
While I’m sure some staff do double-duty on Fable and Forza, Playground’s expanded into a second studio and has plenty of Forza talent at their disposal.
I would like this too.
I wholly, agree! Im getting tired, of playing the game, like a simulator, and having all these people, I’m grouped online with, clearly, playing as an arcade game. I turn off all the assists. Isn’t there a way to group players together, in lobbys, based on how we have our game difficulty settings? I don’t have the time to do the stupid chat messages, when I’m focused, on my shifting, or losing grip, without traction control. Makes me not even want play Horizon Open mode.
Fastest people in Horizon Open don’t use assists. Assists are a disadvantage online.