My first team for the Trial was pretty quick but as is common in this game, had zero racecraft. One in a little Corsa divebombed me after the turn-in point for a checkpoint and bounced off my door and missed the checkpoint, then I was being dumb and looking at the positional tracker to see how far he was gonna drop down and misjudged a 90 degree corner and missed the checkpoint myself, which cost us the race barely. Then we won the second race, then pushed to the front of the third until we got the bridge... Guy in front of me clipped the edge of the bridge and came to a dead stop for some reason, I tried to check up but the guy behind me didn't have time to react and ran into the back of me and pushed all 3 of us down into the river and ruined that one.
Took 2 more tries because people kept basically not braking for 90 degree corners and piling in and pushing a bunch of us off the track and behind the AI. Naturally the guys that didn't get rammed off didn't try to hold up the AI either.
Making exclusives available for non Gold members is great. I'm really glad they did that. I was always in favor of it. But the requirements for getting 100% should have stayed the way it was before.
You said that before the Playlist was boring. How is that different now? The Playlist is really boring now. At least for me.
May point is that the community is trying to kill all the fun for those that like a little bit of challenge or grind. If someone hate the Playlist he just need to ignore it. Yeah, it is really that simple. People complained that it forces you to play online. In reality it was enough to complete just a single Arcade event. Or the absurd complain about the Trial being too hard. It's supposed to be an ultimate challenge. It's main point is to be hard.
Challenge and grind are different and should not be lumped together in my opinion. Also fun is subjective.
Part of the reason why the playlist was boring was because it was too easy, and too much. The championships are all locked to "Highly Skilled" or whatever AI, and usually by the halfway point of the first lap or the 25% point of the race I was ahead of the AI and wouldn't see them again, making them essentially boring hotlapping in some random class/division of car I'm forced into. Letting us customize the challenge a bit would make it better, like letting us earn more festival points for racing AI at a higher difficulty. Been a while so maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I believe in FH4 you could turn up the difficulty for the weekly things, dunno why they would take that away.
In my opinion, part of the problem with the "challenge" in this game though is that the AI behaves really cheaty and inconsistent in certain classes/car divisions/event types, and just a look around here you will see people making observations about it too. Speaking of the Trial specifically, the biggest part of the challenge is getting teammates that actually have upgraded cars and/or that won't just ram into you and try to use you as brakes... Which in my opinion isn't a fun or engaging "challenge" at all.
Saying "you can just ignore it" doesn't work either, as you can't ignore it if you want the exclusive time limited cars. Accolades and achievements are different as they have no function, but things don't really count as "optional" if you have to do them to earn exclusive in-game content.
If you like racing, why don't you just race? If you like trying to get over 1000ft on a Danger Sign in a van, go for it. If you think it's fun to run over 10 bicycles in Guanajuato then what's stopping you from trying to do that without the playlist telling you do it? No one has taken anything away from you, they just aren't telling you to go do it anymore. If you want a challenge you will get a much bigger challenge from trying to do interesting builds and racing against Unbeatable AI than you will curbstomping the "Highly Skilled" AI in whatever the weekly championships are.
Personally, I like that I can finish the boring nonsense faster and go do stuff that is actually fun. This week was the first time since at least before Christmas that I turned on the game, won the new car and had time/enthusiasm left over to go do something I actually wanted to do. Normally, after getting rammed in the Trial, then driving around some garbage EventLab thing with stupid checkpoint placement, taking 10 pictures trying to get it to acknowledge the requirements, making trips to the garage to change/build cars for each individual PR stunt, and racing my rare classic roadster on a rally course or some silly nonsense, I just wanted to turn the game off when I got the weekly prize car.
Not too sure why they get rid of PR stunts though, don’t really remember anyone complain about those.
I didn't think they were fun, but they were relatively easy/fast points so I didn't mind them. In my opinion, the limitation to specific cars and specific classes made them annoying more annoying than in FH4, as now I'd often have to go rebuild a car I already had built for something else, and that takes longer than doing the actual PR stunt which is kinda lame.
I only skimmed the "Let's Go" or whatever the stream thing was, but I think they said they want this series to be more focused on racing with that World Cup or whatever it's called, so PR stunts will return later.
