Beyond the Public Lobbies: The Organized Leagues of Forza Motorsport
The current iteration of Forza Motorsport has had quite the troubled start. From a launch that gave us a game riddled with bugs, server issues, missing features and overall a simcade that was just not ready to be released as a fully fledged game for the public. But there is one thing you will not see in the game reviews, the youtube video essays and most certainly not from within the game itself. It is a part of Forza Motorsport's existence ever since 2011 and the introduction of Forza Motorsport 4: Organized Community Leagues
These places are where you can find far better racing, feel apart of something beyond just hopping into an online lobby with random players you may never see again. You get to know your competitors, remember their names, have genuine rivalries that aren't just yelling slurs at one another through Xbox messages. In these leagues you will see events, but these are not just ideas cobbled together for the sake of doing so. These communities come together, work out an idea and will come up with a list of cars the game has to offer, build them very specifically and then test them for hours to make sure that the cars will be as evenly matched as they can be.
But it's not just the cars, the builds and the age old struggle of maintaining a good BoP (Balance of Power) with them. You will also have livery regulations, often taking inspiration from real racing organizations that the community watches and admires. The league will have their own logo, a unique brand and identity so they can stand out from the others. They can do multiclass style racing and have specific livery regulations for each class so they can be identified on the track. In places like these you'll see the most talented of the Forza community's designers recreating mandatory logos, number boards stitched to racing liveries of their own design or inspired by real race teams they look up to.
Sometimes you find lone drivers, racing for the fun of it. Maybe some of them take it seriously for better or worse. But in these places you will also see team drivers. Just like you would see in actual racing events, teams will often join these various leagues in search of fun events to do. To test their skills, whether it be tuning, driving or livery creation. Some teams stay small, low key. Others get will get known for having fast drivers and doing more of the higher tier events in the community. Though gone are the days that Forza Motorsport is used for actual e-sports events.
What sort of racing does go on in these leagues? A wide variety, in fact. You can get your oval racing fix with leagues focused on stock car style racing. You can find leagues making events with the various TCR and BTCC cars available. The most popular types of racing however is GT3, as most leagues all seem to have their own take on the GT3 format. But with your particular car types, you can have races that are either short sprints, maybe multiple heats in one event. Some events might be an hour or an hour and a half in length per event. But what this community really enjoys is their endurance races.
For those that have not ventured into the vast leagues out there for Forza Motorsport, a formula was figured out on how to manage endurance races on a scale as long as 24 hours. But how does it work? Without dragging out details I can simplify it to this: the lobbies measure distance, not lap times and overall time. The distance per stint (usually 2 hour stints) is added up as the race goes along, so even if you have say 5 splits in an endurance race (that can mean potentially 100 or more drivers!!) all the different splits are technically racing everybody else. So in theory, the team in say, 2nd split, does have the chance of making podium overall!
Now, in my previous article talking about my general experience in the Forza community (The Russell Forza Experience!) I talked about the very first league I joined. How did I find it exactly? Well, as problematic as social media can be it can be very helpful for signal boosting these leagues to others. I found that small FRX league from a very large and active Forza group on Facebook. These teams will also take to twitter and instagram and make posts about their team and events there as well. If the league itself is big enough, they will make social media accounts under that league to boost promotion even more.
Alas, as positive as I have been so far it is not all the best out there. Leagues and their organizers can do the best that they can to make all their events look and feel as professional as possible. Or at the very least, respectable. But there is no avoiding the possibility of attracting the attention of drivers and/or a team that has questionable, if not terrible racecraft. What am I talking about? Impatient drivers, drivers who feel entitled to the track simply because they are fast and nothing else. Drivers like these are stressful to deal with, they stress others on the track around them and can overall change the mood of a racing event from competitive and fun to a stressful sweatfest in an instant. Now I could go off on a tangent about it here, but that isn't really the point of this particular article. In fact, I'll redirect you to my friend Hoot's great write up of this very topic which you can read right here
As Forza Motorsport 2023 continues to get small changes, quality of life updates and added content, the game itself isn't so much as a game, but a foundation on which so many varied leagues of all skillsets and racing styles can build off of to create what I like to refer as the proper Forza racing experience. To which, I'll leave off here with links to leagues I myself have raced in, helped with and been apart of long enough to confidently recommend to any other Forza Motorsport driver that took the time to read my article. See ya next time!