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^^^ thx SpikoMCO! just posted i see.

there still isn't one there for the bug fix though.

The bug was fixed on Friday in an Update.

yep, thx!

was just saying there weren't release notes for it. also for today's until now

Oh sorry... communication problem lol.

I don't personally handle the release notes, but I'll pass on the feedback.

Also a reminder for all that the bug isn't to be discussed on this thread but rather this thread instead.

Edited by user Thursday, May 16, 2019 7:55:01 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

great, thx.

i wasn't discussing the bug but using it to identify what two updates i was speaking of in the example of untimely/missing update notes.

noticed you posted the release notes this time. who's responsible so i can properly address it going forward? thx

You can find all the release notes here and if you click into one, at the top it states the "author" of the notes/article post/etc

Hey all,

Thought I post an update -

I'm currently still looking into way inwhich we can provide you all with more information and communication in the best ways possible. You may see a section in this thread called "Dev Diary" which was a potential "coming soon" feature with the mention of it being delayed. I have now started to plan this and hopefully within the next few months I can start presenting this to give you more of an insight into Forza Horizon 4.

Also, for those in the Discord you may have noticed a new spreadsheet appearing. This is a database/community archive for everyone to promote themselves and show off the tunes/liveries and their content (E.g YouTubers or Streamers etc) to everyone. But also to enable a place for players to search if you're looking for tunes/liveries/videos.
I want everyone to have a chance to be seen and show off the amazing work they do.

You can access the spreadsheet here but please remember this is a work in progress.
Important Info: The Spreadsheet will open be 'open for edit' during my office hours. This is to prevent anything inappropriate being posted or the removal/extreme edit of the sheet as I can keep watch.

This is brand new, so let me know what you think by sending a DM! (If it's just feedback on the sheet).

If you have any further transparency & communication ideas & suggestions - Feel free to let us know here!

Edited by user Friday, July 26, 2019 2:47:52 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

If a friend of mine approached me and asked: "What is the best way to tell you about this thing, let's call it 'X', which I haven't told you about yet?" I would reply: "Actually telling me something about this 'X', as opposed to spending any further time pondering what is the best way to do that. I don't care whether you write a text or record yourself speaking to me, call me or pay me a visit in person to do that, so if you have something to say it, then say it, especially if it's as important and informative as avertised. Feel free to choose whatever means of communication that requires the least amount of effort or expense from you, leave the extraction of meaning and whatever further cognitive labor to me. You may speak now, friend."

As Morpheus would have it:



Or rather: "Stop trying to communicate and communicate."

Let's start over from the very beginning with a simple excercise:

"Hello. I am BabySeal363. I acknowledge your existence. I acknowledge you as RetroKrystal. I acknowledge you as a friend. I acknowledge you as interested in me having information you want me to have..."

Edited by user Friday, July 26, 2019 3:36:30 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I think you may have misunderstood my message, it was just to inform.

I believe you also said:



And I acted accordingly.

Once more you are making it sound like you worry too much about the effectiveness of this 'communication' thing, to the point that you would stop communicating altogether. But poor, imprecise, clumsy, and yes, even cringeworthy communication is better than no communication. Better than silence. I pre-emptively forgive you of any of that.

You are a member of the Forza Staff, your words are authoritative and trusted. Whenever someone asks for a source, I can link anything you say whether it's here, Twitter, the Discord, Mixer, wherever, and it will be believed equally. Enough worrying and more talking, please.

To quote that movie again: "Free your mind." And your tongue while we're at it.

Edited by user Friday, July 26, 2019 8:00:51 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

In the support website the "Submit a Ticket" feature is too hidden. You have to click on a link to a known issue and only then will you find the link to submitting a ticket.

Generally speaking the support website could get some love. In my language (Brazilian Portuguese) it doesn't seem to be very well translated. But the biggest issue is making the link to Submit a Ticket not only more visible but also one of the first things you see. If I'm on Discord and I talk about an issue only to be guided to the page, I should be able to skip the usual process with softwares of "none of these solutions helped me so contact support". In this situation the issue isn't a common one so it should be easier to simply go to the Submit a Ticket page.

In fact... We could also use Forza Hub as a channel for reporting issues, couldn't we?

Edited by user Friday, July 26, 2019 3:28:47 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

The reason for this is to make sure that users read through the articles too before they submit a ticket as articles can solve or help most problems. Which therefore is saving you going through the submission of a ticket process.

I will pass on the feedback to the support team.

Opinion on communication:
The PG staff also interacts with the players by Discord. And there was some information that was released here for the first time. (Example: Number of cars included in Lego Speed Champions Expansion)
I don’t claim that all posts should be reprinted. However, I hope that the information useful to many players should be reprinted in the forum.

I have already posted about this issue, but Discord is a little harder tool to find old posts.
Organizing the official information on Discord in a forum thread is very helpful because it is easy to check what kind of remarks were made.

Edited by user Monday, July 29, 2019 11:14:27 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

This! Why a well organized forum is so neglected by the dev team? they always mention discord this and discord that in their livestreams! It seems that the only thing that they use the forum is for the car wishlist thread

Lol.. some people are being accused of misunderstanding the communication being put forward in a TRANSPARENCY & COMMUNICATION DISCUSSION thread.

Something tells me it's not working.

These are really interesting points.

I'll look into seeing if I can make sure posts are spread across all socials.

In terms of the discord - If you click on the top right (should look like a pin if on PC, or three dots > pinned messages if on mobile), you can see the important posts straight away. This should stop and reduce the means of having to search through the whole chat.

The discord can sometimes be a little easier as it's a more active chat. Whereas the forums are post-based and I know most people will have posts moderated/approved as that's the system & process which the forums enable and therefore responses can be delayed.
I know the team who are behind the forums are looking to improve this and have been for a very long time.

I like the concept of this thread and was hopeful for awhile it would accomplish something, but honestly I've not really seen any meaningful changes as a result of it. Like the poster above said, it seems like you guys are so busy figuring out how to communicate just right that you largely end up not really communicating or changing things much at all.

Also, a lot of the focus seems to be on Discord now, which seems more like a way to avoid addressing problems on the forums than anything else. Don't get me wrong, Discord is great for some things like live Q&A sessions with devs and casual conversations between players, but the chatroom nature of it means things get lost/buried very quickly, and the pinned posts are much less effective at conveying important information than a well formatted forum post which provides many more formatting tools and much more visibility.

IMHO, the forums should be the source of truth for everything Forza. Other outlets should link back to the forums, right now we have a mess with game information spread across multiple third party services and no good single reference point.

One last thing, I've seen multiple game developers do this with their forums, where they seem to almost be afraid of their forum community and distance themselves from it rather than taking the time to really address the core issues the forum community is frustrated with. I doubt this is truly the case, but sometimes it sure feels that way.

It's not just that they're not communicating here, but also not listening. I don't get any sense that anything I've said actually gets anywhere near the product owners, let alone the backlog.

THX for for info......................would LOVE to add BUT i get banned..................can't help EVEN when i have done MORE then most............it's now a lottery , have fun yooooooooooooo ppl, it's NOT ! it's SAD !

Edited by user Tuesday, July 30, 2019 6:54:56 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I agree to some extent, that's inevitably part of what happens when game developers distance themselves from their community. I'm sure the gist of what is said often gets passed up (especially in threads like this that are more actively monitored), but whether it's actually considered and acted on, or falls on deaf ears is another matter.

You just witnessed how successful is trying to say "hello" to devs here, now for completion's sake, I'll have you know they would rather have a back-and-forth conversation with people offering to selling them cars for real money on the Discord in broken English:



The only reasons devs ever descend upon us here are:
- damage control, which they're about to attempt again
- any occasional marketing that Manteo doesn't do by himself free of charge
Note how it's mostly him that tells everyone when a stream is coming, what are the contents of the updates, he posts all of this stuff himself, but he's a mod and not a dev - this is not a condemnation of Manteo, I'm just saying he's cost-effective.

As said above the forums do not exist except for one containment topic for car requests. Had they ever felt the desire to talk to us, they would have. The only difference between this formerly official forum, and a forum entirely created and managed by the players, is that the latter would allow you to choose your avatar.

You could imagine this forum to have been stolen from the developers.

Edited by user Tuesday, July 30, 2019 10:57:24 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Retro is not a developer either
She's a community liason officer/wizard

You can chat to us on any form of socials, we have Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Forums, Reddit etc
I'd advise Discord if you do want a quick back-and-forth conversation, forums are also great but I am aware that I think everyones post have to go through approval/moderation as such, Twitter probably isn't the best place for a conversation but works if you're looking for news, and Instagram is just a copy of Twitter but we don't respond on Instagram as that is quite hard. Reddit is fan based and therefore not controlled by us, however I do lurk on there to answer questions if I can.

In terms of Manteo - He does this stuff because he enjoys it. It is up to him whether he wants to post information or not and we're very grateful for the help he has given and continues to give. I'd check his stuff out!

In terms of "Contents of the updates" and "when a stream is coming" - You can see this thread where I post a stream summary and information regarding stream dates. The thread can also tell you which form of social is best for which information. However I am going to work on making sure this is consistent across all socials following the feedback on this thread.
I only haven't done an stream summary for this update as it was quite a small update and all the information will be in the release notes.


Being a Community Liaison is still being a Developer. I am a dev.
(I 'develop' the player base)

Edited by user Wednesday, July 31, 2019 3:06:41 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Should the readers of this topic worry about that "I think"? It cannot be that you forgot how the thing even works.



Apart from the fact the notes are posted on an entirely separate page, away from here, they omit the new language selector, a welcome addition which you talked about in the stream.

Yet once again, we see that players have to join forces and obsessively stalk multiple developers (for those not in the know, there are more than her on the Discord) across multiple social media* to get something resembling the whole picture.

And this is how we know that our fearless Community Liasion, who cordially invites us to, uhm... basically become indistinguishable from internet creeps who would breathe down her neck wherever she goes... is an honest to God certified true professional game Developer, because the community she develops, is developed around the very same collection-based game design Forza consists of!

See? The quest for information follows an intentical paradigm: collect here, collect there, collect, collect, collect until there's nothing left to collect, and the puzzle is complete! Doesn't get any more Forza than that!

*the forums are not part of said multiple social media, so the role of this relic of a long forgotten internet age is a player-to-player , non-professional mutual aid support group, not unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, a "Forza Pseudonymous", if you will. Everything else is deferred to other websites where professional help and actual news can be found.

Edited by user Wednesday, July 31, 2019 4:08:54 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified