on the surface, forza horizon 5 is known as one of the best modern racing games while still maintaining an active playerbase but recently, the franchise has been on a decline, and if you look deep, you realize it’s only about to get worse from corrupt staff that support cheating groups, to shady communities and rigged money tournaments after wasting over 2 years in this game and its community, i have discovered a few things about it you can pause the video at certain points and read more details about some topics if you want we start in november of 2021, when forza horizon 5 was about to be released everything was looking good from the outside, but when the game was released, it was an unfinished mess, which isn’t a surprise considering the current state of modern gaming looking back at the trailers, it became clear that many of the features were non-functioning, and were carelessly put together to show off in the trailer forza horizon 4 didn’t have a good launch either, but they somewhat cared about that game with many updates and bug fixes something that horizon 5 still lacks over a year after launch most of the features were carried over from horizon 4, and even the “new” ones aren’t truly new they brag about the engine sounds in horizon 5, but the system already existed in the previous game, where they just didn't have as many car sounds the eventlab is one of the main features that keeps horizon 5 alive, which allows you to create custom maps the tools for map creation are primitive and very limited, but they get the job done. the problem is… we already had this in horizon 4 it was there, but it wasn’t complete horizon series is infamous for beta testing new features in their old games and expanding them in later titles if they had positive feedback, and eventlab was one of these features but there is no need for a new game both games use the same engine so why release a buggy mess when you already have a great game that you can improve upon? money of course as it is with many modern games that are just an improved version of the previous titles, which is not always a bad thing, but forza horizon 5 isn’t really an improvement it’s like five steps forward and four steps backward thankfully, the upcoming forza motorsport, built from the ground up they just lie to our face and keep showcasing the same old recycled content! is this a new trend in gaming? and to be fair, it’s much better than overpromising now we know that the next forza motorsport is going to be a budget gran turismo but for xbox, and considering the limited target audience, i highly doubt it’s gonna succeed but anyways, these were all the things you probably have heard of already if you went a little deeper in forza news now it’s time to go deeper and discuss things that you would only know if you have been following the forza community very closely. forza games are developed by playground games and turn 10, which i will simply refer to as the “devs” keep in mind that actual developers have little freedom when it comes to developing the game i know some of them and we actually share a lot of common ground for these topics so the term “devs” will mostly refer to the corrupt ones and the people who run and manage these games there will be some serious stuff, but some of it is also cringe-worthy drama, so be warned we start with bans once every few months, there is a constantly recurring controversy in forza related to bans, and it is for good reason forza is notorious for their strict guidelines and false bans while turning a blind eye against actual cheaters you might think they would learn, but things have actually gotten worse overtime just take a look at this game’s leaderboards and you’ll understand but even if you avoid all of this and do literally nothing wrong, you are still at risk of being falsely banned and it happens more often than you might think so what can you do about it? you can submit a ticket, but it is highly likely that you will be greeted with a copypasted response ban appeals are usually handled by this guy, who we refer to as b.m. it is clear that he doesn’t even read most of the tickets, so what’s the difference? they could just use a bot to do the same thing for free clearly someone is really good at doing their job, which becomes even more apparent when we look at a recorded livestream where we can see how b.m. deals with a cheater someone joined the streamer’s lobby and started cheating in an online race b.m. banned him, but not before flexing his dev tools and mentioning how much in-game credits he has and he brought this up twice i don’t know why having unlimited credits matters when the guy was blatantly cheating… but ok b.m. then said some censored words, and we moved on lucz joined the chat he had been recently hit with a permanent ban for supposedly modifying his xp and credits more on him in another video, but in short, lucz had managed to achieve max credits and a high level by playing this game for over 12 hours a day, on a console but he was still not unbanned despite having everything to prove his innocence so now, surely he had a chance when he stumbled upon the sole person responsible for bans? of course not right off the bat, b.m. had a bad attitude towards him he then pretended to check his account and told him that his ban was justified! he then told him to submit a ticket, which of course, he was going to lazily respond with copypasta at this point, it is becoming a trend for devs to lie to your face and cover everything up like nothing happened, which is exactly what they also did in the following topic ptg is one of the veteran forza teams and the biggest part of forza’s “community leader program” which is supposed to consist of the role models of the forza community there are over 20 of them, but 5 of them are the most important ptg members are really close to turn 10, and some turn 10 employees are also a part of ptg for now, i'll be discussing their cheating scandal, which you can check out in full detail in one of my other videos but in short, they hosted a challenge, one of their own members cheated in the challenge, and despite this, i won but they didn’t give anyone the prize until after the whole thing and the server moderators tried to cover the whole thing up like it never happened fortunately, i recorded everything and the whole thing ended up looking really bad for ptg, and this wasn’t even their only controversy that they tried to cover up i never covered what happened afterwards. did ptg members leave? did the team disband? did the devs finally cut ties with them? well, this is forza, so here’s what happened: they moved on, and the devs only strengthened their relationships with them a simple acknowledgement and path correction by ptg would have been acceptable BUT NO! they have to keep their 100% clean image that never existed in the first place i’m surprised forza has gotten to where it is today with these people running it! ptg is only one of the five main groups in the community leaders program we’ll get to the other four later, but for now, it’s time to discuss the devs’ and ptg’s biggest enemy, which is… the modding scene the modding scene is really small in forza games, and that’s because the devs absolutely hate mods the most controversial mod for the game has so far been the forza-painter tool the livery tool in forza is highly outdated in 10 years, it has barely seen any changes and improvements fed up by this lack of care, the community came up with the forza-painter tool this tool basically converts images into in-game liveries but technically, it doesn’t it just uses the primitive shapes the game offers and puts them together in a way that looks like the image the tool simply automates the livery creation and cuts down hours of work into just a few minutes, which sounds really good and harmless for both the game and the players, right? yes! this tool was received exceptionally well by the community, but of course, the devs weren’t happy they started banning people for using this tool, which resulted in backlash from the community at this point, they don’t want to officially ban the use of this tool, but they also won’t allow it in livery competitions which means they still oppose this tool but why? this tool brings nothing but good things for the game. why not allow it? their excuse is that it makes it easier for players to import offensive images well, people have always been doing that long before the forza painter tool even existed but they already have a highly active and strict moderation team, with a bot supposedly in development to further assist them, so what’s the problem here? to this date, no one really knows the reasoning behind the dumb decision to ban the use of this tool but the modding tools aren’t limited to the forza-painter tool this game has very little modding potential, but that doesn’t stop people the most popular tool is called forza all-in-one, which contains many things, but it is mainly used for acquiring exclusive cars without having to grind through the limited-time and boring seasonal events but wait a minute, that would hurt player retention which means less money from daddy microsoft and that’s why an “anti-cheat” was developed specifically targeting this tool and it banned people with no mercy even if you wanted to mess around with this mod in single player, your account would get flagged and banned the next time you go online yes, this is a game where you get banned for cheating... in single player! and the community doesn’t make it better either i get called out by one of the creators for this! like are you serious? this should be common sense! and it’s not just this one person either i know game modifications are against forza’s terms of service, but so are they in most other games it’s just that even the company that sues modders doesn’t care about the use of single player mods no one cares, except of course, the forza devs and a good portion of the playerbase this also explains why b.m. was so keen on someone having unlimited credits despite them literally cheating in an online race so yeah, welcome to forza feel free to cheat, ruin leaderboards and destroy online races there won’t be any punishment for you cuz devs and half the playerbase doesn’t care but TASing or modding a car early is a serious problem?! well, just add that to the long list of questionable priorities in forza, and it doesn’t stop there the second community leader group, called forza horizon 5 uk, appears to condone the use of exploits to achieve impossible amounts of accolades, while their head admin hypocritically labels users of the forza-painter tool as cheaters this leaked dm from him also reveals that some of the devs are not too fond of me, and i don’t really get why there are some bigger creators who regularly showcase forza money glitches, shady modded account websites, and accessing new cars before their official release, and somehow i’m the real threat among all of them? i have been banned from fh5 five times, which is the world record for a single account to this date, two of those bans are completely unexplained despite me reaching out to people who were able to directly contact the devs but enough of that, onto the next topic as you already saw, it’s hard to get away with any rule breaking in the forza series however, it’s not uncommon for games to whitelist a few players in their ban system, and this exclusion often ends up being abused in forza like how someone manages to get away despite modding the game and accessing cars before their release, using an exploit to steal liveries and claim them as his own to farm downloads, getting banned on his alt account and ban dodging. any one of these offenses is enough to get any player banned from forza, but this person manages to get away with it and openly brag about it just because he is friends with 2 of the largest forza creators so far we have discussed 2 out of the 5 community leaders 2 of the 3 remaining groups are related to the competitive scene of forza horizon those being called team wars and horizon racing academy there was also 1 hour of racing, which basically died after the owner came back from the dead and removed those who were actually keeping the group alive but all of them are related and work closely together team wars hosts custom community races that are supposed to be serious although things usually go out of hand and it is generally a toxic place with a lot of drama surrounding it i'll only get into the most important one, which is when they tried to manipulate a $500 tournament imagine if the referee in a football game was also a football player in the same tournament and bracket yep, that’s exactly what happened here the race control managed to basically turn the results around and the losing team made it through the bracket not to mention the actual winning team had one of their best players banned from the race for unjust reasons these decisions were clearly biased, and even if they weren’t, a competing player in a tournament should not be allowed to make such big decisions in the same tournament this tournament got canceled eventually and most of the information is gone, hmmm, did they pull a ptg? doesn’t matter the race control message is still up and i have downloaded all of the race vods there is 1 community leader group left, which is also related to competitive stuff, but this time for the other forza title motorsport, despite being the game that was supposed to bring the most out of competitive forza, failed horribly at it the official scene was called forza racing championship, and it never really took off despite having tournaments with prize pools of up to a quarter million dollars seriously, it feels like no one knows about this and even i had a hard time finding information about it the viewership numbers are in the hundreds, some vods are missing and it wasn’t exactly popular in the competition either so we can safely assume that the marketing budget was basically zero big sponsors have already moved on to other games with better foundation for such tournaments, with the pandemic being the final straw for forza rc tora is the last community group with the goal of organizing motorsport tournaments, and given the current state of everything, it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere the new forza motorsport has to bring something new to the table for its competitive scene to even stand a chance hell, even horizon has a larger official esports scene but they are only organized in china, with smaller, but still respectable prize pools despite being much smaller in scale, these tournaments still manage to perform much better than motorsport tournaments the viewership numbers aren’t everything, but they tell us a lot the devs attitude towards the competitive scene has always been well, their game engine is horrible when it comes to running the game on different hardware to begin with, resulting in huge discrepancies in pace which basically ruins the competitive aspect more on that in another video they removed ranked racing from horizon and every time you bring it up in their forums, they just tell you to go play motorsport they still fail to realize that horizon is obviously a much more appealing game forza motorsport attracts simcade and maybe some full sim fans, the ones that are probably playing gran turismo right now, but horizon, anyone can enjoy it in a better world, these games would merge to create the ultimate “car game” experience but considering everything we talked about, it is highly likely that things will only get worse in conclusion, forza games are genuinely great with lots of potential, but sadly, forza motorsport is getting destroyed by the competition while horizon is dying by the lack of it some of the people running these games are shady at best they brag about their community, but they only support unhealthy community role models while not giving a ? about the rest however, not all hope is lost i know there are some developers who still care about the game and are planning to add some of the highly requested features to the game please don’t go after anyone mentioned in the video i also don’t expect this video to change anything these were most of the important forza-related information that not many people know about the only goal of this video is to highlight this information and make a few more people aware the description of this video will be updated if more details are required i will also try to respond to every criticism and question in the comments while this video is relevant
