I stipulate I have yet to play online.
The above is only about online. Specifically their PR (poor) and their reduction off online features/options.
Btw, I am enjoying the game a lot--great game. SP is the best I have seen in a sim. I have little niggles (e.g. Time Trial is *exactly* what I was looking for the other night when I was talking with Robert about having a single car for every course as to limit the number of variables and have a more focused leaderboard--alast, Time Trials *is just that* but it is burried in the poor menu structure and not clearly defined from Quick Play, Hot Laps, etc). It doesn't look like you can snag your friend's ghosts easily though
Btw, I haven't seen you on live to hit you up for a FM3 game
Actually, I haven't seen anyone but Robert one when I have been on. And that is the problem with the new online structure. It is probably easiest to give scenarios.
In FM2 you could join a lobby (just search/browse) or seed your own. Seeding was nice because you could setup your favorite tracks and cars, customize AI, lock slots for friends, etc. If people liked your lobby features they could join. Usually you would seed with a couple friends on your list so you would start off with a room of guys who all WANT to play by the rules on the tracks. This routinely resulted in some pretty great races (some of my best online experiences with Live to be quite honest).
In FM3 there are no Open Lobbies--Only Private. So you to populate a Private Lobby either need to (a) get enough friends to populate a prive lobby (b) convince racers in hoppers to dump them and join a private match or (c) as Turn10 says go to their forums and post a request, "Please join my private match, here is my GT, add me as your friend. Needless to say--ick. Now the Hoppers (MatchMaking) has some problems. The first is selection. e.g. Until the other day there was no F, E, D, C, B, or A class in circuit racing (!) I wanted to get some miles in my C Class Career Car (Ford Focus R6). No Go.
You are essentially locked into what Turn10 makes "good" online races. This is a problem because they frequently screw up. e.g. Allowing extremely fast non-stock cars in oval "stock car" races. Those races are screwed up because inevitably 5 seconds before the race someone switches out to a Bugatti or whatnot. The Hoppers don't allow you to do really basic things; e.g. what if you want to all race Audi R8s to put everyone on an even playing field? What if your groups wants to mix it up and alternate an Oval Race, an Road Race, a Drag Race, and a Drift? Nope, cannot do it in a hopper. You need to leave your group and individually go to each Hopper in MatchMaking. Everyone have a hankering for Sedona Club in C class Cars? If it isn't in the rotation it isn't in the rotation. You have no control or input (unlike FM2) to transition from one race to another, as a group. All those killer online variables that is 4 pages deep (like 130 variables) Turn10 invested in? Not even relevant in MatchMaking. I don't even believe Tag, Cat & Mouse, Multiclass racing, etc are *even in MatchMaking Hoppers right now.* Until 2 days ago the only modes were essentially straight races with collision on but no damage.
So lets say to avoid a ton of collisions you want to do delayed starts (e.g. 1 second delays). This could avoid first turn collisions and could make for some interesting racing. Nope, you cannot enable this option (right there in the AWESOME MP features) because it is unaccessible unless Turn10 makes a lobby with it.
FM2 never had this problem. There were always a lot of lobbies and if you wanted to do something new (or just wanted to do your favorite course and cars) you could start your own. If people liked it it would get populated, if not you could populate with AI. (Yep, haven't seen AI in MatchMaking yet either; lame having 3 people in a room when you could add a couple AI until real people populated).
The biggest problem with only having match making (I don't know people who want to remove it as it is accessible, only that most want Public Lobbies back, too) is that without seeding and poor "kicking" tools the racing is a crapshoot. Most turn into wrecks in the first corner with really blatant "destruction derby" racing. Of course there is no damage which is good and bad--the bad is it doesn't teach these guys that if you play like that your race is over. Of course it seems the Hoppers have a REALLY high turnover (if you want to do something else you have no attachment to the room, you just up and leave the lobby, so why not trash a couple cars first and then head over to a different mode?) Ghosts are kind of borked (not transparent) and while that could be a temporary solution to encourage racing, that is really no different from hot lapping or time trials. e.g. I don't really want to give up moments like this: I took a corner wide and Robert got in my inside, rubbed perfectly flush with my car and pushed me to the outside corner of the road where I lost all my speed and lost lap position. Totally clean and fair and really setup my attempts to reclaim position. But unlike FM2, where it seems quite common to seed a solid group that stuck together in lobbies, this is my typical experience: I make a really nice, clean, pass and the very next corner CRUNCH! T-Bone, well done with Live chatter: "That is what you get for passing me son!"
Running your own lobby you can handle this a lot of ways (ghosts, no damage, damage, staggard starts, etc) that adjust to the group. No one size fits all. But Turn10 pretty much is taking one approach--and it just encourages the griefers. Not every race is ruined, but it is no fun getting spun out 2x at the beginning of the race and being 10 seconds behind on the first lap. With matchmaking you will never make up that time.
And of course you have the guys who have figured out the hacks and tricks and exploit online which in MM it has been a lot harder to police or change game settings (you cannot) to prevent this.
All this to say is a lot of FM2 players who played online are finding FM3, although it is in many MANY ways better than FM3, took a step back by stripping out Open Lobbies and replacing them with MM. MM works fine in Halo or CoD. Get TK'd? Respawn in 10 seconds--your game isn't ruined. In a 10 minute race getting blasted out of the first two corners by griefers ruines your 10 minute race. But more importantly you just cannot race how you want when you want. A good policy by any game company is to let gamers play the game how they want to play, when they want to. MM is better than a LOT of online systems (and better than none) but those who enjoyed FM2 see a lot of limitations in the system.
Of course Turn10 never said they were removing it (and the press stinks at relaying these things), and since Turn10 said all the online features of FM2 were coming over it really struck a lot of people who primarily play online as misrepresented. Turn10 has already said *open lobbies are not coming back* and have been quite rude about the topic. MM is the future as it allows them to leverage DLC and it is more accessible to new players. And Turn10 is really ticked that online gamers are giving them bad reviews for what they feel is a "broken online component" and an unwillingness to turn private lobbies into public lobbies.
And that was why I posted. It is quite interesting when you get a petition for a removed feature, thousands of posts about 1 single feature, dozens and dozens of scathing reviews, and even your own forum polls show 80% of people are mad about the change -- and the company line is, "
We do not care what you think, we won't change it." I got a laugh out of the "this hurts our feelings" line from Turn10
Anyhow, with this and CoD4 MW2 PC issues, I think 2009 is shaping up to be the year of, "How important is developer-consumer relations to product sales and satisfaction?" How much is MW2's PC issues going to impact PC sales? Will Turn10's MM ensure better DLC sales (i.e. create Hoppers that are DLC only ala Halo 3), enough to justify turning off some holdovers from FM2? Is the negative press even visible? Does it affect word of mouth? Or is PR, marketing, and press build up more relevant than the chatter boxes on the community sites?
True, MW2 and FM3 are different issues. MW2 is (in my eyes) trying to make versions similar across the board whereas FM3 is more of an example of not developing features the consumer wants because they believe they want more accessible (even if lowering replayablility) gameplay and the ability to monetize MM.
I think with the direction Live has gone and seeing Bungie pull customer browsers 11th hour and refusing to answer questions, Turn10 very deliberate in their refusal to discuss this pre-launch (and crappy media feedback--the media cannot review online games worth a darn), and recent Skate 3 interviews indicating MS has really presented a case for the benefits of MM as a means to monetize and solidify a cohesive online experience that hits the mass market. A paid service, without dedicated servers, dedicated to the mass market looks to really be a barrier for more traditional online gamers. The face of this market is shifting and changing quite quickly, and will continue to do so with companies like EA saying SP is dead.
It will be curious to see how important fan frustration is and how the balance between supply-and-demand works out. In this case there is a clear demand, and the developer has no interest in meeting it. A peculiar situation to say the least.
