It has been exciting to see your response to updates like the inclusion of Nürburgring Nordschleife, the Aston Martin Valkyrie, GT3 cars like the 2019 McLaren #03 720S GT3 and changes to the Car Progression system. We will continue to do updates each month that track against our plan for the game, but we also balance that with shifts in priorities that come up from the community.
A case in point is the Car Progression system. We heard loud and clear that many players preferred the ability to upgrade cars how they wanted when they wanted, and we unlocked all parts at level 1 and enabled exchange of credits to car points to facilitate your builds in the garage.
This was a change that we had not planned for but recognized was a huge priority based on your feedback. Feedback that continues to be invaluable.
A few weeks ago, we published our Suggestions and Troubleshooting Hubs update. To date, we’ve seen over 470,000 votes counted across the series. From car voting, which has led to the inclusion of 50 new racing models released in Motorsport, to Features voting around topics like FOV positioning and Car Progression, to Troubleshooting which has allowed us to deploy hotfixes to resolve your issues as quickly as possible. We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone in the community for sharing your passion with us and knowing that while we don’t reply to everything, we are reading all of it!
So, what’s coming in the next few months? In addition to adding more tracks and specific features like Spectate Mode, Endurance Races, Car Proximity Radar, Forza GT car division changes, and Logitech TrueForce support to name just a few, we’re improving the overall experience of Multiplayer with some significant changes:
Safety Rating & Matchmaking
Motorsport thrives on competition, and we’re making changes in our latest update to improve your experience by more accurately assessing a driver’s safety rating and updating our matchmaking algorithm to match players who are closer together in safety rating. These changes will help ensure that if you are a clean racer you will match with drivers who are going to give you the cleanest racing experience.
First, beginning with this week’s update we have introduced tweaks to how Safety Rating is calculated by increasing the number of previous races that we use to determine your Safety Rating from 10 to 20. This will put a greater emphasis on your longer-term racing trends. A safe racer with one bad race out of 20 will see little impact on their Safety Rating. A player with a low SR with one clean race out of 20 will see little impact on their rating. This also means that it will take longer for players to raise their SR.
In addition to the shift to longer-term racing trends, there will be increased weighting placed on collisions to determine your SR. Players with many FRR penalties will see their SR drop faster than before.
After the first race in Update 8 some players' Ratings may shift due to the change from 10 to 20 races in the SR calculation.
For Matchmaking, we updated the search algorithm to search for a narrower range of safety ratings compared to your own. For example, players with an ‘S’ safety rating should no longer match players with ‘E’ and ‘D’ safety ratings.
To put it simply, we’re making these changes to match fast, safe drivers with other fast, safe drivers and improve the multiplayer experience for those who want to compete fairly.
We are aware that introducing these changes into the current Forza Race Regulations (FRR) environment may create concern, and we are looking at a number of changes to Forza Race Regulations in the near term to mitigate those concerns, but we are introducing the safety rating & matchmaking changes in isolation to measure them effectively and avoid unnecessary spikes in false positives before introducing new variables to FRR.
We’re also aware of the clever exploits that players are using to combat intentional ramming, and working on a solution of our own that we hope to implement in the coming months.
Forza Race Regulations
Near term for FRR, we are implementing changes to how the system handles fault assignments across several situations. Our next two priorities are rear-ended players incorrectly being assigned penalties and penalizing players who repeatedly cause low velocity side swipe offenses.
Next priorities include looking at things like players being penalized for low relative velocity impacts that should be forgiven, seemingly small track cuts that result in penalties that are too large, nearly identical off-track incidents resulting in different penalty times, and players being penalized for unavoidable contact.
As we said above, it is important to the stability of the game that we introduce and test these changes incrementally to limit the number of false positives we see in each update while still making progress on improving the model.
AI
Recently we made small adjustments to the Drivatar AI to correct race start behaviors and provide a smoother experience into turn 1.
The latest update will reduce unnecessary braking by AI overall. This includes cases while the AI attempts to pass, 2 cars wide in corners, at the apex of corners, and on straights.
Future updates will tweak additional areas to support better AI behaviors related to slowing down after being passed by the player, when the player is alongside AI cars, and passing improvements in multi-class and endurance races. That’s right, we’ll also be bringing multi-class and endurance races to Motorsport soon!
We’re grateful for all the feedback we’ve seen and received and will continue to read and track your suggestions and critiques on our forums. Keep sharing your feedback and issues so we can do our best to prioritize. Thanks again, as always, and we’ll see you on the track.
Andy Beaudoin, Forza Motorsport Game Director
Chris Esaki, Forza Motorsport Creative Director
Trevor Laupmanis, Forza Motorsport Executive Producer
