Online Matchmaking:-Instead of putting us in a lobby using whatever criteria are currently used (which don't work, at all, and we all end up randomly joining and backing out and rejoining until we find one we like), show us the current lobbies including who is in them, what track they are running, and what lap they are on, and let us decide. And if there's a full lobby that we want to join, then let us add ourselves to a waiting list so that we get the next space as it becomes available. If there are no lobbies or none with enough space for the number of people in the pre-lobby then players would be allowed to start a new one.
Player Ratings:-Instead of just using TrueSkill to rate drivers, add an element of temperament to the system. This could be done simply by counting up and adding or subtracting points for contact and leaving the track boundaries, so for example a player would score 10 points for every lap that had no contact and no off-roading (clean laps, but ignoring drafting), and 5 points for overtaking or being overtaken with no contact occurring, and 2 points for drafting with no contact occurring, and so on, while at the other end they'd lose 5 points every time they were involved in contact or leaving the track. It wouldn't be fair all of the time, but on average a good racer would end up with a far higher score than a wrecker. Lobbies would then require a certain score both in terms of skill and temperament before you could enter them (see below)
In-game UI-Move the "X Quit" message to the left hand side of the screen so that it sits properly with the "X is pitting" messages. Or just delete it - no one really cares who has quit anyway.
-Allow us to increase the brightness or opacity of the racing line to make it easier and more natural to turn it off.
-Show how many pitstops a player has taken in the Distance To/ From list. It's no good me knowing that X is only 400ft behind me if I don't know whether he's already taken his mandatory stops.
In-game camera.-In cockpit mode allow us to move our head (or chair) around and tweak the FoV. Different players want to see different amounts of dashboard, and the optimal FoV depends on the size of your screen and your distance from it. A one-size-fits-all solution is not good, and some of the cockpit cameras in FM6 are absurd.
-Make a floating mirror an option so that those cars without mirrors aren't dangerous to drive. When you draw a tiny wing mirror in-game it's useless, but when you're really driving that car you don't
perceive the mirror to be tiny because that's not how our eyes and brains work; you just see what's in it. There's no way to handle this elegantly on a flat screen so just add the option of a cheaty mirror instead.
-Make chase-cam an assist so that hardcore means hardcore.
Online Lobbies:-Instead of 9 class lobbies plus however many (6?) specialist ones with all skill levels and all car types mixed in together, base lobbies on the players' skill and temperament score. So for example the first few could be "open" hoppers with no restrictions, set to DEF/ ABC/ SRP in the same format as the current ABCS so that players can still build, tune and race cars against each other, and then the rest would be division-based hoppers of various kinds, some permanent and some rotating weekly or monthly. As players progress and their rating increases they'd gain access to more of the lobbies. Lose the rag and smash a few people out and you get demoted again. A sort of mixture of hoppers and leagues, if you like.
Lobby Control:-Vote To Kick needs to work better than it does.
-Assigning temporary "host" status to whomever has been the lobby longest might also help the player base to police itself. That person would get to kick players without a vote, and possibly have some say in track selection (maybe they could void an unpopular Random choice and force a re-vote?), but they'd only be host so long as they remained active in that lobby. And the other players could still kick them using the now-functional Vote To Kick option :)
Ghosting:In addition to ghosting cars that are stationary and cars that are driving the wrong way, the game should
- ghost players who fall 90% of the track length behind. Even better would be if players a lap apart were ghosted relative to each other, while remaining fully corporeal to other traffic close by.
- ghost players (or simply make them invisible to everyone else) who have just entered a lobby for the first time, or just DNFed in a race. Only cars that finished the previous race get to have bodies. Think of it as a sort of qualifying-lite. You run one "qualification" race ghosted to prove that you are on-pace and then you get to race for realsies and your best lap counts as qualification for the next race, same as everyone else's.
Grid ordering:-Fastest Lap from previous race works really well, but people who join a new lobby should start at the back, not be shuffled randomly throughout the pack. Having a new-joiner who isn't very fast dumped on pole is the number 1 cause of 1st-corner wrecks, more so even than people who "forget" to brake.
-Laps dirtied by drafting should not be discounted for the purposes of staring grids. Excluding them from the leaderboards is fine, but you shouldn't be punishing people for close racing.
Basic Motorsportyness:-Design the Career mode around the promotion of driving skills, rather than the acquisition of lots of content.
Meaningful starts. It would be so much more interesting if there was a skill to starting well beyond just holding down the throttle until the counter gets to 0.
-Races should finish at the end of the lap the leader crosses the line. This is the case in all motorsport everywhere. Lapped cars should not have to carry on the full distance, especially the track is now full of AI-controlled cars that have already finished, aimlessly and erratically meandering around the track. Everyone should see the bloke waving the chequered flag!
-Get rid of all the tire walls littered around to prevent cutting and instigate a penalty system. I'd personally favour just making the player coast for long enough to negate any advantage gained but without actually slowing them down as such, but if the Rating system listed above was in use then cutting would automatically damage your score so you'd already have a disincentive.
Spectate Mode:-Is rubbish. You can't even tell what position players are in, let alone any of the other useful bits of info that you'd expect to find in such a mode - lap number, distance to and from, split times, etc - and which would make eSports so much more entertaining. It needs to look as much like TV coverage as possible.
-Automatically stream it to the lobby so that anyone waiting can watch the race in action without having to load the game themselves. Again, this would be massively eSports-friendly.
Rivals:-Allow us to set a time per division, rather than just one per class.
-Add a "Delete" option to the leaderboards that allows us to expunge our own time and set a new (possibly slower) one.
Teams:-Add (or re-add?) support. Just allowing them to share
open tunes and paints and some team-based element to events, leagues, and leaderboards would do it. You can see from the fact that so many players pay actual money to change their gamertags that's there's a demand for it. There's a whole load of community good-will sitting there waiting for you, all you have to do is embrace it. And it's basically free!
Loading screens:-Players spend a huge amount of time staring at these (my record is 10 minutes in one go) but they are so DULL. I can think of about a million ways to make them more interesting, but just listing the relevant lap records and track info (names of corners and so on) would be a nice addition.
-While I'm at it, would it not be possible for the game to start loading the track into memory as soon the vote is complete? That way by the time the count-down hits 0 everyone's machine has already been loading for 55 seconds.
Track Voting-Treat tracks and conditions separately. A track with 3 variants and day/ night/ wet versions of each should not show up 9 times as often as a track with just 1. We shouldn't have to race Le Mans 9 times just to race Bathurst once.
-No track should appear as a choice if any variant of that track has been raced within the previous 10 races in that hopper.
Two versions of the same track should never show up at the same time.
-The Random choice should never, ever throw up a track that is a different variant of one of those just rejected.
Edited by user Tuesday, July 26, 2016 12:04:11 PM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified