Forza Horizon 5 is headed into it’s Series 20 update this week, appearing to take some leaves out of Motorsport’s playbook more than previous: A new oval circuit being added to the game’s map, various high performance cars such as the highly-requested Lamborghini Huracan STO and much-anticipated Porsche Mission R, the next batch of content is looking even better than the last.
A key ingredient from the Forza Motorsport side however – and feeling like half a game without it – is Ranked or anything of that competitive nature.
Forza Horizon ranked play and community action
In it’s mission to create the most accessible and casual-friendly Forza entry yet, Forza Horizon 5 made the controverisal decision to strip the game of a competitive ladder.
While leaderboards and Rivals modes still remain, live PvP racing was restricted to Road or Dirt racing, not being able to even choose what class you wanted to race in until a later patch added Custom Adventure.
Players were quick to notice and to request it’s return in droves, citing the game’s lack of meaningful progression and endgame as a means to return the much-loved mode, but given the franchise’s casual stance the chances were – and still are – slim to none.
Naturally, as the Forza community tends to do, they assessed the situation and the tools at their disposal, before taking things into their own hands.
Forza International Drivers’ Association
Horizon’s community efforts have seen successes and failures.
For every breakout success like Team Wars, there has been, for example, the ill-fated 1 Hour of Racing – a huge part of the success within the Horizon community has been it’s willingness to coordinate together and cooperate to structure what was previously a wild west of racing communities.
Of this effort, spawned a team at the centre of it all – with their name drawing comparisons already to the real life motorsport equivalent, the FIDA (Forza International Drivers’ Association) is a group that comprises of the game’s top league runners and community members, overseeing everything from professional-grade leagues to groups like the Forza Creator’s Guild, a central hub for the community’s best trackmakers and builders.
While they have mostly been confined to helping with large-scale events such as Team Wars’ Prospera24 endurance race, their latest endeavour intends to reinvent how community leagues operate thanks to a bot-driven ELO system.
Project FIDA Core & ELO System
Any competitive communities in other games will be very familiar with the ELO system and how it works.
Using a combination of factors such as the rating of your opponents and the level of ‘volatility’ set by the organisers (often referred to as the K-factor), ELO serves as a great way to rank the skills of players within a competition and the missing piece of the Horizon competitive puzzle. If you are a high-skilled driver, your rating will be high as a result, say 1000 points. If you lost to a 500-point driver, the 500-point driver would rocket up the standings
For the full reveal with the team behind it:
The project is slated to finally go live in the summer, with Project FIDA Core bringing a centralised ELO system for all competitive communities who opt-in to use it, among many other features such as rank cards, license and awards tracking, alternate account detection and more.
That’s the great thing about it being a community system; If you don’t want to use it, go your own way. If you only want to use parts of it, choose how you implement it to your own league.
Racing Haven / Ferrari
YoYoGavri, the sole developer of the Discord bot responsible for the system has stated that the current stage is backdating the system to the start of FIDA competition, actually landing at the previous title with FH4 Team Wars and working forward, in order to calibrate ahead of release.
When this finally lands in the hands of organisers and the community alike, we can expect the scene to evolve in a BIG way, one I can’t wait for.
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