[Mod Edit - thread merged - MM]According to Xbox Live, 0.84% of active players have achieved 100% in any of the Series' Playlists
Yes, this is yet another rant on the Playlist.
Now we have metrics to evaluate it, as Playground kindly added an achievement for us to base our data upon. Under the assumption that all of these accounts are owned by different players (alts and smurfs are a thing on the Xbox, deal with it), FH4 had 4 million active players as of August, which is a lot, and 12 million players total. Among these 12 million, according to Xbox Live, 0.08% have the achievement for 100% in a single month, which is around 9,600 players in the world. Do the math for 4 million, assuming everyone who got this achievement has remained active until last August, and you reach 0.84% of active players who did 100% in any of the Series. Less than 1%!
This number will certainly increase, as there are many prolific achievement hunters on Xbox One. Currently there's less than 600 tracked people with this achievement on TrueAchievements, which is about 4% of their total (about 15000-16000 tracked players). 4% in a community known for achievement hunting. Chump change. But that's beside the point.
People don't care about the Playlist.And, if people don't care about it, it's because they enjoy doing other stuff in the game. Achievements for winning all seasonal championships have been earned by more players, yes, but as soon as they get their shiny 50% car, they go back to doing the things they actually want to do in the game. There is an achievement for winning all the prizes in a series, and 0.68% of the player base has got it, which makes it 81,600 players. Too little in a game with 4 million active players.
Worse: we see cars locked behind Trials these days, which is unfair to Xbox One owners as they have to pay for online interaction. 8.84% of the player base has the achievement for beating a Trial (at least one of them), a little above 1 million players. But this achievement has existed ever since the game's release and the first Trial to give away an exclusive car was back in December with the Mosler MT900S as the prize. Even taking into account the active players, and assuming every single one of these players has been active throughout the game's lifespan, that's 75% of the active playerbase who don't have access to DLC content unless they search the AH for the cars and inevitably frustrate themselves at the current state of the AH, which is overrun by players using macros on their PCs.
At this point, I ask myself: what's the point of locking these cars? Is it for the challenge, the feeling of accomplishment, as some say? Certainly not so, as the Apollo has been awarded as a prize for one of the hardest Trials in the game, but has been made available in the Forzathon Shop twice now. Grinding Forzathon Live to rack up FP is one of the least fulfilling things this game has to offer. No Playground Games have awarded newly released cars during the time we had the Playlist, and these are pretty challenging and can go either way. Ranked placement in Leagues doesn't offer newly released cars either. Seasonal championships with cars as prizes have had their minimum difficulty toned down to Highly Skilled down from Expert months ago. The idea of "working for your rewards" is a badly-made excuse.
In light of such data and facts, my only conclusion is the team is so much enamoured with the features it tries to bring to the game that the people in it completely fail to realize people would probably keep coming back to FH4 if the cars were properly free. As in, update arrives, you get the cars in a permanent state (as in FM7 and Gran Turismo), and that's it. People play this game for the great things it offers, like the graphics and the gameplay.
Sadly, the Playlist is not one of them. The team does not accept that people have different goals, different uses for the game. I wonder why the forums and Discord are treated as a "small community" when it comes to criticism, but significant enough when they offer praise?
The time spent on coming up with ways to lock cars behind events could've been redirected to ensuring the newly-added content is glitch-free. Every other new addition to the game is bugged in some way. Some cars are paid content and have been bugged since day one.
tl;dr Do your magic with the game world and the physics, and let us take care of how we want to have our fun. This is not 1999 anymore. Gran Turismo-style grinds are boring. Get over it.
Edited by user Friday, October 18, 2019 6:51:56 AM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
May the forced induction be with you.
Alice >>>>>>>>>> Keira