Just out of curiosity: GT7 races are scheduled rather than on demand, yes?
I'm wondering if FM8 needs to do the same thing, like iRacing also does, in order to fill lobbies. But that runs counter to the Forza ethos of "pick up and play when you want".
I haven't played multiplayer in GT7, but I think it works the same as GTS, which is as follows:
Daily races have 3 types - A, B and C, e.g. the current 3 types of race are described here:
It's a very racy-looking week in the Gran Turismo 7 Daily Races this week, with all three events featuring track machines -- and from the very highest echelons too. Daily Races are the main ranked multiplayer events in GT7. Your Driver Rating (DR) and Sportsmanship Rating (SR) are determined by y
www.gtplanet.net
For one week, each of the daily race formats remains the same, with the same track, type of car, and ruleset. They run to a schedule, and you set a qualifying time outside of that schedule. Your qualifying time has no impact on the lobby you are put in, that is determined solely by your skill and safety ratings. Within that lobby, grid positions are determined by qualifying time, so very good players often choose to start from the back in top split (the name for the lobby that contains the players with the highest skill ratings in that time slot).
FM also has a schedule like this, but the track is not fixed, and you qualify separately each race. There's also a lot more than 3 options, so that's naturally going to dilute the number of players in each race (I'm not saying this is better or worse compared to fewer, but more populated, options).
FIA races are called something else now, I think, but as far as I'm aware, the format is the same as the GTS FIA races. These are much "bigger" races, and my screenshot was from one of those. They run to a schedule, but my recollection is that there were only 3 time slots for each race. They work like FM's races in that you are first matched into a ratings-based lobby, then you do a qualifying session before the race. These races formed part of a season-long contest, where you got points from each race towards your season's points score and placing. A huge appeal of these races used to be that you could obtain "star player" status from these seasons, but I believe that is now gone and only attendees at LAN events have star player status. Because of the small number of time slots for each race, these races were always fully populated at my rating, and the spread of skill was tight. My recollection is that it was common to have approx 2k rating difference between the highest and lowest rated players in a lobby, on a scale of 0-75k, so I think there were tens of concurrent lobbies taking place for each FIA race. When I played, people took these races really seriously, public practice lobbies with the same settings as the next FIA race would run and be well populated for days before the race. People would spend a lot of time trying out different car and strategy options beforehand. The top players would limit access to their practice lobbies to only the highest driver rating, and when I was high enough rated to get into their lobbies, it was fun to see how long I could hold onto their slipstream for. I don't know if they're as popular now that most people have no chance of getting star player status from them.
So FM's races are mostly like GT's daily races in terms of a continuous frequent schedule that changes once a week, but the track rotates rather than being fixed, and there are more options. They have qualifying each race like GT's FIA (or whatever they're called now) races rather than GT's daily races. Another difference is that rating doesn't feel very special in FM, it's pretty easy for me to be close to the max rating, whereas in GTS it felt like a huge achievement when I first got A+ driver rating, and in GT everyone can see your driver rating whereas FM doesn't let you see other people's rating. On the other hand, keeping rating hidden may be intended to avoid discouraging participation through rank anxiety, and I think this is a valid choice.
I don't think FM's multiplayer format is particularly bad now. It's hard to argue that fewer options would be better, or that a fixed track is better than a rotating track. Qualifying each race is also fine IMO. I've also found the penalty system to work reasonably well in its current form, and the driving in my races has been reasonably clean. My feeling is that none of these differences are the reason why there are so few players in many FM lobbies, and the most likely explanation is that players were driven away by the state of the game in the past, and haven't returned. It's possible the game can start to grow from here, as there's no doubt the recently communicated plans for improvement will make the game better from most people's point of view.
Thanks, playing all those boring races didn't fit in my schedule this month.
If you do just the 10 mid-engine multiplayer races, each race counts as both mid-engine and open, so you will get both FOMO cars from those 10 races. I didn't know this before I did 10 open races before starting the mid-engine races, but a friend has confirmed to me that it works like this. I don't know if it's intentional or not. So you could just do one multiplayer mid-engine race every few days and unlock both cars.
But I will add, one has a whole screen full of FFB settings and the other just 2. I know which I prefer.
