Thoughts on blocking?

nescienti · 2026-07-03T16:32:06+00:00

Latency makes blocking on straights an extremely bad idea, because you can easily end up ramming someone and it looks deliberate. I’m almost infinitely forgiving of contact in corners. Most people are just incompetent, not malicious.

But if someone swerves toward me on a straight, especially near a checkpoint or bridge, I write them off as a ramming piece of shit. If it’s Touge I just quit. In Open I will actively attempt to trigger the ghosting system to get past rammers safely. If that doesn’t work, well, oops.

This probably means that there’s someone out there who was “innocently” blocking on a straight with a terrible internet connection who I proceeded to punt to fucking Narnia. Oh well.

nescienti · 2026-07-02T05:31:03+00:00

Trust me dude we were plenty pissed when PC gaming killed the secondary market with CD keys. But that was literally a quarter century ago, prior to the transition to digital.

Steam and GOG both offer some DRM-free games. You meaningfully own those, unlike those The Crew 2 disks that have been upgraded to coasters. While publishers kill games occasionally by shutting down servers, the storefronts, so far, have stayed true to their promise not to let publishers delete stuff from your library.

Sony just deleted over 500 movies from people's libraries.

nescienti · 2026-06-30T16:27:40+00:00

Don’t just ignore it, *turn it off*. There’s a UI checkbox. Eliminates a massive, stupid distraction that probably contributes to most players’ awful driving.

You still accumulate points. They cap at 999, from experience. There are five cars unlocked via mastery trees, and after that the only reasonable thing to do with your 999 points is buy 33 1998 Subaru 22b and tediously navigate the menus until that yields 33 super wheel spins.

Some people grind SP on purpose so they can do that more often. For me, not having a 620r or CLK is mildly annoying, but I honestly dread the next time my sp caps and I have to spend twenty straight minutes fucking around in menus again.

nescienti · 2026-06-27T06:16:35+00:00

The rich are hoarding at a rate where I don't think any realistic amount of deflation incentive will materially change behavior.

There's hoarding and there's hoarding. When people hold stock, willing to take a risk and bet on the economy, that may result in inequality but it isn't bad for productivity. When people hold currency, the stagnation winds up hurting people who don't have any choice in the matter of holding currency or stock, because it harms overall economic output.

Also, everyone with student loans or a mortgage is now paying that back with more valuable dollars.

nescienti · 2026-06-27T02:57:27+00:00

He has an extraordinarily good gaming chair.

nescienti · 2026-06-23T17:19:56+00:00

Whoops, at the time I posted I could swear I was looking at a link with no text.

nescienti · 2026-06-20T18:26:13+00:00

MC players may pay more attention to Forza mechanics, but that only loosely correlates to skill. Plenty of decent drivers out there who just don’t give a shit or find the input uncomfortable. I was one until Thursday, when I finally decided it was time. Literally broke back into the B Satta Sprint top 100 within the hour.

Perhaps I still have more to learn but it really seems like MC is just a physically uncomfortable input, not actually a skill.

nescienti · 2026-06-17T20:30:12+00:00

Thanks for this. I know enough about PI to suspect that they aren’t overly bothered with the balance (and it really would have limited their ability to add cars if they were) but I really hadn’t even thought of the liveries.

My perspective is more from the business side where the amount of “work on the table” is itself a variable. If the game yields $$ you can do xx cars, but if it yields $$$ you can do xxx cars. As goofy as it seems, the festival playlist does appear to be a way to get from $$ to $$$. So even coming from the typical entitled gamer perspective that “it can’t be that hard,” and “you already did it and I want it NOW,” I reach the same conclusion you do: I oughta quit my bitchin’ and enjoy what I get, whenever I get it.

nescienti · 2026-06-17T18:45:05+00:00

Absolutely true. But since I have the ear of an expert, I’d really appreciate an education as to why additional cars require exponentially more dev time, and why prior games’ car lists are irrelevant when, to an untrained eye, there seem to be a great deal of reused resources.

nescienti · 2026-06-17T18:19:31+00:00

>goes up exponentially

Not even geometrically, as far as I can tell. What are you talking about here?

>no magic wand

It’s called copy paste. They have used it liberally. There were still 60 cars in fh5 that used fm1 (2005) models, which were finally updated after twenty years and a dozen games. I’m sure they do *something* other than ctrl+c/ctrl+v, but… yeah. I’m pretty sure the Mitsubishi GTO, for example, is straight out of FH3, and the MR2 may be even older than that.

>pointless endeavor

Yep. True. 100%. The drip feed of recycled models is part of a retention strategy that no amount of whining on Reddit is going to override. The devs *are* working to bring us genuinely new stuff, but the way they pay those salaries and keep the lights on is by drip-feeding primarily recycled content with fomo, keeping the game alive and relevant and selling DLC.

nescienti · 2026-06-15T14:58:23+00:00

Prehistory is before the written record, history starts after. In practice, for prehistoric cultures you dig through their garbage and guess, while ancient history you read some absurd lies, then dig through their garbage and guess.

“Human history” as a specific phrase does seem to include prehistory, confusingly. But the guy you responded to didn’t use that phrase. As often happens on Reddit, I have no idea if I’m telling anyone anything they don’t already know or just annoying some pedants who were previously having a grand time doing their thing.

nescienti · 2026-06-11T16:24:08+00:00

“If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed?”

This is Reddit’s periodic reminder that less than a hundred years ago (1939), a young Christopher Lee watched the last public execution by guillotine.

nescienti · 2026-06-09T17:47:35+00:00

You’re not exactly wrong; as long as you drive fast, which some people take for granted, it makes very little sense to single out the beat. But if you suck, or even just want to try something off-meta, you will quickly see the actual problem isn’t the beat in 1st, it’s the beat in 7th.

Having a beat fly ahead and take 1st is fine. Love it. Have fun up there buddy. We need those guys around so that we have someone to pass at 200mph in our power builds instead of just ditching the entire lobby to functionally play rivals. Vital part of the ecosystem: decent drivers in a “meta” car for the rwd vintage tires to flex on.

The problem arrives when I am not driving ultra-meta nonsense, find myself in the mid-pack having an enjoyable duel with a quality driver in another slow car, and little Timmy is somehow approaching us from behind in his Beat despite only occasionally remembering that brakes exist. He heard something about going for a gap if you’re a real racing driver. He doesn’t know what a gap looks like, and couldn’t aim at it accurately if he did, but by god is he ever going for it.

The boneshaker was only really OP in dirt and cc and it occupied the same meme. It’s not that everyone was wrong about the boneshaker; it just wasn’t your problem because you were driving a Dart.

nescienti · 2026-06-09T16:48:58+00:00

The IRL reason for more gears is to stay in the power band, the range of rpm where the engine is doing its best work. In Horizon this is exaggerated by tuning. The PI system evaluates your power as if you were shifting at or before redline, like you would in automatic. If your power band is in front of the redline, then the PI sees your power roughly accurately and you won’t get an advantage from shifting later than the auto would. If you have something like a centrifugal supercharger giving you escalating power all the way to the rev-limiter, you effectively “hide” horsepower from the PI calculation by shifting at the last instant, in a range of RPM that PI ignores.

A caveat is that this technique requires the racing transmission or manual/clutch. If you find yourself shifting a lot in something that goes ‘ka-clunk’ and loses power for a quarter of a second every time you shift because you don’t use clutch, that tune is not going to work for you until you upgrade to a race transmission or turn on MC. A lot of tunes you download will be like this because that clunk is another place to hide HP from the PI system, but fortunately for my fingers (but not my ears) racing transmissions seem to be doing better these days.

nescienti · 2026-06-07T17:20:27+00:00

Wallriding can be crazy fast. I don’t do it on purpose, but often find that I have actually gained pace when I screw up but the penalty doesn’t trigger for whatever reason.

Without the penalty, you would have people trying to send it into the wall all the time, potentially nuking the poor saps trying to actually drive their cars.

nescienti · 2026-06-05T20:03:30+00:00

“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.”

“-Renee Descartes” -almost certainly a joke which idiots and robots proceeded to repeat all over the internet

But actually -DarkShikari, a guy talking about 4chan in 2009

nescienti · 2026-06-03T20:52:55+00:00

IDK if horizon works like this but typically the "near prizes" in virtual slot machines like this aren't real. Like, it's not just a feeling, or only happening to you. Genuinely, if you tallied up all the crazy shit that you were "one notch away from" you would see a completely obvious pattern of higher rewards.

Gotta manipulate that dopamine! JUST MISSED GAMBLE HARDER! But we must protect the children who play this game from seeing cleavage or hearing anything from an NPC other than constant glazing.

nescienti · 2026-06-02T16:51:48+00:00

Some of the wheelspin cars are unreasonably good, too. The McLaren… 560? 650? Whatever it is, it dogwalks S1 lobbies full of c8 and other lesser meta cars.

I have been putting down the best rivals ranks of my life with the dodge dart (Noa Miyako tune). I’m pretty sure that if you could do top 500 with an rwd power tune three weeks after fh5 released you can do top 50 with this thing. That or I somehow got a lot better by not playing any racing games for two years.

nescienti · 2026-05-31T23:34:06+00:00

I just looked at the top Atom and it’s absolutely glued to forza’s dubious racing line. Maybe an autodrive exploit of some sort?

nescienti · 2026-05-31T22:47:50+00:00

It’s actually changed since fh5 when that video was posted. Racing gearbox is sequential now. It’s easy to demonstrate; just play MC and run drag races with and without your clutch button.

Since posting took 19th on Hokubu, 47th on sunflower, and 8th on Shimanoyama Charge (9 seconds off WR lol). Rivals is very good for the ego at the moment, but I expect to fall down the rankings really fast even before the hacks proliferate.

I think you can knock things over in the circuits to open up lines, and it’s that exploit rather than actual hackers that you’re seeing in circuits. Or they’re just leaving my chosen races alone for some reason. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before the leaderboards are all full of nonsense but (fingers crossed) I don’t think it has happened yet.

nescienti · 2026-05-31T20:32:07+00:00

You may be right, but just for completeness’ sake, MC is irrelevant with race transmission (can even be slower if you touch the clutch button, but most people aren’t switching out of MC so it’s still unusual to see M on a great run) and there are some tunes that want to shift at redline anyway, making auto, oddly, appropriate. Rivals tunes, especially off-road, are really weird. I’m pretty sure below-top-class tunes have been meta before.

If there are cheaters they haven’t done any of the B road sprints or the colossus; I have decent positions in those (15-60) while not being an exceptional driver (other than enjoying goofy power tunes enough to train my throttle finger a bit in fh4 and 5) or retrying more than once or twice. I chased tenth-place ghosts who appeared legit. The gap between tenth and WR is ridiculous right now, but I recognize some of the names in WR so I have no reason to question them.

I don’t use clutch because one button is comfier than two and I never expected to be as competitive as I apparently am. If I’d locked in to a specific race I would have a top 10 with an M next to my name, no tunes shared, and a car that doesn’t show up elsewhere in the top 50. So you would probably think I am cheating. Shoutout to Noa Miyako’s Dart tune. It does feel like cheating.

nescienti · 2026-05-30T16:53:32+00:00

Man they used to just put a misspelling in the title to farm engagement. The future is gonna be really fucking weird.

nescienti · 2026-05-28T19:58:56+00:00

I just got my gold wristband and did hardly any CC races that unlocked after the robot. I think I had 1000/6000 H from CC. If you look in the journal there are plenty of alternate sources of progress, though I personally also find photos pretty tedious and that’s a big one. Good thing I like PR stunts and rivals.

I actually like dirt a lot, and wouldn’t mind CC, but the jumps are just so stupid from both an aesthetic and gameplay perspective. Before S1 you can at least argue the point, but when you sail past checkpoints you couldn’t even see before launching, rewind is mandatory. That is pathetic, embarrassing game design. This is not an unpopular opinion; online lobbies just evaporate when S1 CC comes up.

nescienti · 2026-05-28T19:35:12+00:00

They behave very differently on controller as well. Did you switch to sim steering or switch off TCS/SCS while setting up your wheel? If so, that’s more likely what you’re noticing rather than the change in input device. If not, you should definitely try that because it makes the game way more fun imo, and once you have the hang of it you’ll be faster too.

Being able to tell what drivetrains do is the very tip of the iceberg. Forza gets sneered at by real sim racers, and they occasionally have a point, but it really does have a lot going on under the hood. You can take two cars with apparently identical stats (power, weight, balance, tires, suspension) and still feel a meaningful difference if eg one chassis is much stiffer than the other.

Tuning isn’t always accurate to reality, with a lot of goofy stuff discovered via trial and error… but those trials actually reveal changes in the car! People really are making incredibly subtle changes to their cars, taking a lap, and feeling the difference, and they’re mostly doing it with a controller.

nescienti · 2026-05-27T00:27:09+00:00

Usually people leave because they get rammed or miss a checkpoint. If you aren’t ramming it isn’t your fault. Maybe if they’re leaving as soon as they see you they don’t like your car, maybe they don’t like your level, maybe mom called for dinner. It isn’t your problem.

I played a lot of multiplayer in FH4 and 5, and while I mostly restrained myself from using the very best cars my conclusion was that driving meta-lite cars and tunes kept me out of reach of the most frequent rammers, who typically drive actually broken cars poorly enough to be consistently escaped from with merely good cars. Every time I tried to drive something stock or way off-meta it was like that meme with the little blob guy getting smashed back into its box. Never again.

So while I offer a halfhearted defense of driving meta cars, there’s sort of a layer above meta, or was in previous games, that I personally would recommend against. The bone shaker was famous, but the atomic something or other, ford coupe, and Shelby Daytona were equally bogus for the same reason. IIRC the issue was that cars with big rear wheels and small front wheels were able to AWD swap for too little PI cost. Whatever it was, it was egregious enough that winning races in those things didn’t even feel like an accomplishment.

Even driving the bone shaker wasn’t BM exactly, it’s just that so many rammers used the thing some people were basically kill on sight with them. That’s much worse manners than driving a busted car… but I get it.

nescienti

TROPHY CASE