I've been thinking more about community features recently and how things have gone on with
Forza Motorsport 6. Now that we're almost 4 months into the game's life cycle one can make a reasonable assumption that things are as they are and won't change for quite a while.
[h]The Good:[/h]
I like that
Johniwanna and Mechberg do live streams every week and that we get to race against them. John's fun to watch and Brian's a good competitor in a Hopper.
I like that the community was able to get involved in some web content for ForzaMotorsport.net, namely
the "All Cars" project. That was a good example of the community having an opportunity to "give something back" to the game.
Although I don't bother with them myself, I appreciate that there have been some
Holiday Bash painting events.
It's nice to get some free cars with custom liveries each month. I don't use many of them but sometimes there'll be a neat paint for a car that I'll end up using a lot, like the
Halo 5 GT350R that I've been using in this week's League races.
I like that I can download a tune that somebody has used directly from the in-game Leaderboards, and that if I wanted I can grab paints and tunes I see in the Hoppers as well.
I like the League system, it's updated weekly and the racing has been good most nights.
[h]The Not-So-Good:[/h]
Finding Liveries within the game is very cumbersome. Ever since
Forza Motorsport 5 we have had to rely on a "one car" system which is quite limiting. Dan Greenawalt spoke pre-release about how
Forza Motorsport 6 will "help turn painters into heroes". It's hard to do that when I can't find all of a painter's content in one simple place. Turn 10 already had the solution in place in Forza Motorsport 4 with the
Storefront, I honestly don't know why they went away form that and figured that the current solution was an improvement. With the current system, if your design is not a contest winner, it may as well not exist since it gets so few downloads.
Tuners have it even tougher in
Forza Motorsport 6, as the "Get Tunes" section only shows results in order of date created (newest first). There is no "Sort by Rating" option like you get with Liveries. You cannot specify a certain drivetrain in your search results ether, so if you're looking for a good RWD or AWD tune on a car that's naturally FWD, you'll have a hard time finding one. There are no official tuning contests either (although given that that involves test driving it's understandable) so unless your tune is the kind that's capable of setting Top 20 leaderboard times it's going to be forgotten within a day.
Painters get a Weekly contest just like Photographers do, but unlike Photographers the winning designs aren't officially showcased anywhere or shared on Social media and Forza Hub. Winning Photographs have a potential audience of over a million people due to the fact that they're shared on the official Facebook/Twitter pages and Forza Hub. Painters don't get that, and since may of them are aspiring graphic designers that's a large chunk of exposure that they're not getting. For all we know "the next
Andy Blackmore" could be a Forza player but real life racing teams aren't seeing that player's potential. We all know that auto manufacturers pay attention to Forza; having winning designs featured could have benefits that extend beyond the game for some people.
Winning livery designs aren't documented anywhere officially, which when combined with the current way of "finding" liveries, makes it very hard to actually find any contest winners unless you're active on the forums and know where to look. As such it makes it hard for the average player to discover a new painter that they might like to follow.
League information isn't shared officially in any capacity. There's nothing on
the official website, no weekly blog post detailing what cars and tracks feature in the next event. It seems that the community is expected to pick up the slack and do the legwork to get information out there.
"Community Monthly" Rivals events haven't been updated in a long time.
There are no Drag Racing leaderboards or Rivals events. There are Drag Leaderboards, but
they appear to be hidden away unless you "break your game" to find them.
Kicking troublesome players out of a Hopper has become a lot more difficult, which in turn means that most Multiplayer races start off with big crashes.
There are no Clubs or clublike features. I didn't use them much but there are people out there who liked it.
There is no way to Gift user-created content to other players. I sort of understand the reason for this but it's still something I miss from
Forza Motorsport 4.
There is often no acknowledgement of popular issues on the forums. If a bunch of people are talking about something for a while, a simple "thanks for the feedback, we'll look into it" would suffice. That way players know their feedback is being heard and they may provide more in the future. Most players don't complain because they hate the game, but rather the opposite, and they're trying in their own way to make it even better.
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Sorry if that went a bit negative towards the end, just wanted to get some thoughts out there and start a discussion.
