Forza 3 Discussion...

Most of the folks are focused on our next DLC car pack slated for release sometime early December (more info on this insane 10-car monstrosity at a later date) as well as our next title-update for Forza Motorsport 3. There is currently a hefty amount of DLC in the works and this will continue for as far as the eye can see.

Multiplayer Hopper Evolution

The first week (and a half) numbers are in for our multiplayer matchmaking hoppers and they pretty much confirm what my gut has been telling me over many hours spent in multiplayer – first of all, people are playing and playing in droves. Over the past week, we’ve had approximately 1.5 million matchmaking games played globally, with a good chunk of the action happening in the Circuit Racing A Class hopper, followed by the catch-all Drift hopper. You can see how all the hoppers breakdown in popularity and usage below. So based on the initial data of the A Class hopper’s overwhelming dominance, we’ve rolled out a couple more hoppers this week: A Class Pro and B Class. Both these hoppers are designed to split out A Class players into smaller groups and into their own hoppers.
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Secondly, we’ve started a thread and poll to gauge the Forzamotorsport.net community on a hopper they’d like to design for themselves. Basically, if you could design a hopper or game type, what would it be? Obviously, there needs to be consensus. Landin has gone through and selected game types that he’s seen the community suggest already and has created a poll to see which idea will be the most popular. The idea is that there will be a hopper section that will be community feedback driven and we can be very dynamic and flexible with it – updating it once a week, etc.

Multiplayer and Matchmaking Design Vision

Up to now, the hopper list has remained fairly small, static and generic. I’m sorry for any frustration this has caused any of you. For the first few weeks, we had to keep the hopper list small in order to better control and verify the results of our tweaks to matchmaking. This smaller hopper list focused our players (you guys) into a smaller number of larger pools and thus allows us to rapidly iterate on matchmaking settings and ensure higher quality search returns. I’d like to thank you for bearing with us while we collected this data and iterated on matchmaking.

Moving forward, we’re going to continue to fine tune the matchmaking criteria, but we’re also going to begin the next phase of our plan… introduce many new hoppers with a variety of rules. Our goal is to have more than enough hoppers to serve our diverse community while maintaining (and even increasing) the quality of our matchmaking results. Most new hoppers will be completely data driven. For example, if the data shows that one hopper is getting more than enough players to maintain quality matchmaking (i.e. Circuit Class A), we will attempt to fracture its numbers into two or three hoppers by introducing variants of the original. Hopefully, these variants will bleed off a significant percentage of the players in the original while also providing much needed variety. This will involve lots of experimentation and iteration. Players will “vote” with their actions. The data will tell us if a variant is popular or should be further evolved.

Advanced matchmaking, hoppers, the Xbox party system, private lobbies and advanced host rules are actually a suite of features that were designed to work together. When matchmaking is fully dialed in and the pool is large, players can find others with similar interests and skills. From here, they can form a party or better yet add new like-minded players to their friendslist or favorites. Then, as a party or group of friends, they can create advanced private lobbies. And finally, from these advanced private lobbies we will find new hopper variants to introduce.

Between our ability to collect usage data, tweak server parameters and add new hoppers; we have an incredibly powerful toolset to continually and rapidly iterate the Forza Motorsport 3 multiplayer experience. Over the coming weeks it will evolve to better serve the needs of our entire community based on how you play. In the coming months, as the number of people in the larger community continues to grow in both size and diversity, so will the number and diversity of the hoppers.

Zune, Pre-Order and VIP Cars Gifted - Some of you have already noticed messages popping up in the bottom right corner of the screen alerting you that a new gift was received. I can confirm that by the end of the night all cars will have been gifted. This includes the three Pre-Order blog cars, the first batch of VIP cars, and the Zune HD Audi Touring Car. Check your message center and receive your gift! If you're having problems shoot us an e-mail at [email protected] and we'll do our best to get things sorted out.

Official Turn 10 Time Trial Competition: Starts Now!

When: Now until Friday November 13th at 12:00PM PST

Where: Time Trials in Forza Motorsport 3.

How: Navigate to the “Leaderboards” menu and scroll down to “Time Trial”. Scroll down to “Sedona Raceway” and select “Press A to Start Race” at the top of the leaderboard. Set your best possible lap time!

Available Prizes:

• Subaru Impreza S204 Unicorn Gift Car
• Sedona Raceway Themed Mines R34 Gift Car
• In-Game Credits

Prize Structure:

Note: Results taken as of 12:00PM PST on November 13th

Top 10: Subaru Impreza S204 Unicorn Car, Sedona Mines R34 and 500,000 credits.

Top 50: Sedona Mines R34 and 200,000 Credits

Random 50: A random selection of 50 players from position 50 to 500 will receive the Sedona Mines R34.

Turn 10 Bonus: Both Landin and I will be setting our best laps on this leaderboard. If you happen to place next to either of our gamertags (“chespace T10” and “TurnTenStudios”) you’ll get yourself a Subaru Impreza S204 Unicorn car!