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Is anyone able to explain Nitro Glitter's Summary Lockdown Of The Official "Community Support" Forum?

Seems like a lot of perfectly valid topics were just arbitrarily shut down.

Hi there,

We are directing everyone to the support site so we can effectively and accurately track issues within the game. This way, we can better use our support tools to get things fixed faster for the entire community.

Thanks so much for your understanding.

People have been submitting tickets for months, how is this going to speed up the process? We all know about the support site. The game is almost a year old and some of those problems on the support threads have been known issues for a lot of that time. People just want their game fixed, and the lack of communication makes people think no one is bothering to fix it. I put a ticket in May. 2 weeks later I get a response and it doesn't help. I could submit another ticket, but 2 weeks is too long for a response, and other people are sending tickets for the same problem. You guys say it is taking long because of the volume of tickets. I get that and I am sure other people, like me, stopped sending tickets because repeat tickets don't help. But here we are 4 months later and the issue is still unresolved and no one can give any kind of update saying hey we are working on it, can't replicate it or what ever the issue may be. It is simply unresolved.

You do a great job Nitro.

Must be hard and i have massive respect for you.

Hate\Love, always going to be the same.....................................

Top marks to you.

Being someone who works in a kindof similar field, it makes sense. We work from the ticketing system. We are responsible for the cases in our bin, and that's what we focus on, and that's what we book our time against. Also, the number of cases, and the number of common issues experienced by multiple customers indicate to the engineers at the dev level which issues are most common, and most impacting, even if we don't escalate them to the dev level. Decisions are made which issues to prioritize, based on the number of customers reporting them.

We have a forum like this one, but we don't have time to read forums looking for things to do. And we can't book time against a forum post. We don't have a Discord, but we're not a video game. But if we did, we wouldn't have time to read Discord all day either. We've got cases to work on.

I'd imagine Turn 10 and Playground are similar. Even if they do send you a generic reply and close your ticket, they're probably still tracking the numbers, and using them to decide what issues get priority.

I can understand this move from one side, but that sub forum was very useful for users helping users solve problems.

I have worked in the IT field for well over 30 years; everything from net admin to tech to customer support.

In my world, it sure would cut down on tickets if solutions to issues can be posted in a forum, rather than having to respond to the same problem numerous times. Also, It is quicker for the end user to read a solution that has been posted as opposed to waiting for a reply from Tech Help.

Just my observation....

I work same for my company.

Good to see someone understands.

Fluent in customer service jargon i see. These 'tickets' are just a way to pretend issues don't exist and have the forums look positive towards the franchise after the mods have done some spring cleaning

Edited by user Saturday, September 7, 2019 6:23:08 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

If things were actually getting fixed I would believe this. I also worked in customer support/ service for 15 years. I had to deal with people face to face, unlike these guys who don't have to see any of these people that are having problems. When a company like nvidia puts out new drivers and there are game effecting issues reported, they are right on it and get it fixed. They last driver update fixed graphic issues it was causing in fm7 from the previous update a couple of weeks before. That is how it is done. I never heard them saying send in a ticket and we'll get to it when they can. A lot of these issues are getting ignored because we are getting near the end of the life cycle of the game. Why bother, people are going to move on soon anyway. I haven't seen any evidence these people are trying to fix anything, and by them locking community support, it shows even more how they really don't care.

How many ticketed bugs will creep into the next game do you reckon?

I don't know. I would guess there would be some old ones and some brand new ones also. I heard fh3 was like that when it came out, but they seemed to get it fixed. I get there are a lot of things that can go wrong, but 11 months into it I would think things would work better. I have pretty much given up that it is going to get fixed, my game is getting new things wrong but I just have no confidence in PG to do anything. When it stops running it stops.

See, I don't buy the claim "we're directing you to support to effectively track issues". Because people, like myself, would previously use both. Shutting the community support down means a) Answers that can be easilly solved by the community will now take up more of support's time. b) You're trying to hide how many issues the game has. People will no longer be able to see "ok, other people are having the same problem" etc.

It's a very, VERY bad change for transparency.

Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door suspension upgrades restored.

Sometimes, tickets work like a charm. :)

Regarding the deletion of the Community Support forum: usually, user support is strongest when there's no official support. In this game, there is official support, so, in theory, user support is not that important, but tech support gets tons of tickets every day and they are overworked as a result.

Besides, from experience when looking up Windows issues (unrelated to the game), Microsoft's (and any company's) official support will usually offer the most basic help possible, since they don't know how familiar you are with the product, so the official support is often not helpful.

Personally, ever since the announcement of the official Forza Discord server, I've been under the impression that Microsoft ultimately wants to phase out this forum. It runs badly and currently it doesn't seem to be as tightly moderated as the Discord server. Discord itself is also much easier to get into and doesn't have that approval requirement on new accounts, so you can start posting from the get-go. Trolls aren't a problem since, like I said, the server is more tightly moderated.

The world is getting faster by the day and in the future walls of text such as this one will disappear. I'm not sure how I feel about it taking into account how easily misinterpreted short comments can be, but this movement isn't Microsoft's fault as everyone is doing it and, more importantly, seems to wish for it..

Edited by user Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:31:54 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I hope these forums would remain. The change you mention, it's cutting costs when companies move on platforms hosted and supported by third parties. I'm not so sure either that faster necessarily equals better in every context. I can see lot's of potential risks in enhancing the product and even increased internal bureaucracy despite outside looking sleek.

@NitroGlitter While I can understand the logic behind the ease of tracking tickets vs support forums, the ticket system as it is now is not really an improvement, and in many ways is much worse due to the extremely long response times. Not to mention how bad for transparency these ticket systems are, with huge amounts of information duplication since players can't see how other players have solved their problems.

What I would like to see is the support forum be something like a big FAQ, with guidelines to know when it's better to submit a ticket vs discussing the issue on the forum. This will require good moderation, but if done right would be a huge improvement over what we have now. For common issues with known solutions, players can view the support forums and avoid clogging up the ticket queue, but can still request a support ticket for more complicated issues.

Also, on the topic of Discord. Discord is a bad joke for tech support. It's fine for casual conversations (including discussions with the devs), but with how fast it moves and how difficult it is to find past content it's a very poor platform for support or public announcements, and actually suffers from many of the same problems as the tickets (information needing to be repeated all the time since due to limited visibility to the overall playerbase).

Just a reminder that this thread isn't relating to support. For any issues, bugs or support questions, please see our support site.

In regards to the above post (@gamer1000k) about Discord - It isn't a place for tech support. That is also the reason for our support site.
Discord is a place for discussion and players to find others to convoy up with. This is mainly for the reason you've pointed out such as that information can sometimes get lost with how quick the chat can move.
The support site and submitting a ticket allowed the support team to control the speed but allowing them to check & track every bug mentioned.

This thread is about communication from your company about everything. The point is the lack of communication about the lack of support. Quit trying to cover that up. You have directed people to community support and to discord for support. I was just on discord yesterday watching nitro talk support with people who are still having trouble with teredo. I posted something that worked for me to get it to run right and you guys locked the support forms so now no one can see it because the think it is locked. Gamer1000k did not bring up a bug and you direct him to the support site. That is horrible communication. He was telling you your communication is bad when it comes to support and offered ways to better it. A good company is always looking for ways to better things. You guys try to make it worse.

Can you talk to us without using a script? All the genuine feedback and non-support related queries, and it's the same "go to our support page, this isn't the place for that" response. We are not here for support, we're here for answers.

Funneling all support queries into the ticketing system where they can be ignored for months/years, and then suddenly closed with merely a scripted message, with no accountability, is not exactly what I would call "transparent" or "support". I guess it's better for the image of the company when people cannot discuss such issues in a public forum, let alone hold the company to account when such issues remain broken for months/years on end.

Something about Series 14 livestream #ForzaMonthly and anniversary

It felt bit less... competitive than some past streams, which IMO was improvement. I don't usually watch these though.

It was great to see Wheelspin duplicate issue was solved, it works wonders, spun 300 or so today and I still got time to play the game the way I want to and not to spend my time in garage management. Have experienced really great custom routes made by players over months and it was good to see about route creator improvements, I wish it will get more even more features in the future. Blueprint Finder improvements were good news too and what I have toyed with it, I was able to find custom routes that never showed up earlier in when I searched for longer races.

#ForzaMonthly had fun and also interesting content. Trivia segment was fun, not surprised that team Designers were good at it. Mechbergh made great host, though one of the most memorable things was "Veyon Super Short". I suppose that's one way to make anniversary program memorable. Perhaps not intended, but hey, it worked. :-P

Most interesting thing was racing competition on custom routes. If it were been a team match team Designer & Liaison would have won it, less rewinds and overall better positions and was it only win out of four races? Team Directors wasn't hopeless either. Gift thing made nice numbers for anniversary stream I guess there is that to show and while folks in chat spamming "Gift" told about something too, but that's not to say that it wasn't good to see people involved with Horizon actually play it and not be totally helpless with their own product.

Length of routes came up few times, not in context of stream time budget. I came to think that couple of routes, one featured in Community Championship and one before that on Developers Championship by Pickerchu, there were one and two laps versions if my memory serves me right. However, quite lengthy routes but Dev version is based on stats visible in Creative Hub, one of the most popular ever. So there is data, but no way of knowing if anyone is gathering that data but there's need for short races, they are must when there's just not much time, but there are also need for events like the Marathon, or the Titan, they are certain way very different kind of experiences and with custom routes there's always factor of discovery, not only about routes, or creators imagination and ability to give an idea actual form, but unexpected also enables to discover about our virtual vehicles.

Hopefully Retrokrystal will see my suggestion and take it to the developers. Suggestion for improving classified and free for all adventure: in order to make the race more competitive, it could add 1 point for the player who makes the best lap in the race. Thus, the last placed has chances to at least compete for another point for the championship. This would only be for road and street racing.

Edited by user Sunday, October 20, 2019 5:16:11 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Re: Series 15: October 21 livestreams

Developers mentioned how they had difficulties finding a bug because they don't use retail equipment and bug in question only appeared on retail build / platform.

This is IMO kind of important transparency towards customers. There has been speculation if relying exclusively on dev kits could be one reason for numerous bugs which have happened after content updates. While bugs are unfortunate and rarely improve the experience, no matter why or how they happen, at least some speculations could be but put to rest now.

Edited by user Monday, October 21, 2019 12:35:33 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Any developer who doesn't test on retail equipment isn't even beginning to do their job properly.

Possibly I missed it but reading about Community support, as its label indicates clearly, was support from COMMUNITY.

Considering game is accessible from PCs (with wheels different Windows OS versions ... ) and different versions of Xbox, game being international and huge number of features, doing testing correctly is, by far, too expensive. It's easier/cheaper to put all the pressure on developers shoulders using Graal automated testing than to organise a pilote phase. Outcome is team focusing on things they did develop ( playlist, route creator ) or with expected low bug impact ( design/liveries ,cars ), honestly, would do the same in such conditions.

Being about transparency and communication,

Will to pay or not for additional feature is something you don't want to be discussed on the forum ?
Concept of a feature pack is something you don't want to be discussed on the forum ?