Forza Motorsport players are using the world’s simplest exploit to give troll players a taste of their own medicine.
Griefing and trolling has been a major problem in the Forza Motorsport community since the game’s launch. Forza Motorsport is a racing simulator. The people who play it want to race seriously and competitively within real-world motorsport rules. But, as anyone who has spent any time online at all can tell you, the internet abhors anyone trying to take something seriously.
Because of its prominent place on Game Pass (and proximity to the more arcadey Forza Horizon series), Motorsport has attracted its fair share of trolls and griefers. These players have been dubbed ‘torpedoes’ by the community for their propensity to send their cars into a turn at full speed, hoping to ram others off the track. They’re like red shells in Mario Kart, except they’re driving hypercars worth millions. Let’s take a look at an example.
There hasn’t really been anything players can do about this, and it ruins entire races. Reporting trolls to developer Turn 10 and Xbox via the in-game reporting tools does not seem to have slowed them down a jot. Harder racing sims like iRacing have a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of torpedo play. Try it on, and you will be banned immediately. In Forza Motorsport, the banhammer has not been falling fast enough to deal with players like this (if it ever falls at all).
That means that Motorsport players have had to take matters into their own hands. A very simple exploit has been gaining traction in the community, and it’s proving useful when you see a torpedo approaching in your mirrors. See you if you can spot it here.
Did you see what they did? If you watch closely at 0:06, you’ll notice a slight hitch in the footage. That’s our player quickly pausing and unpausing the game. Doing so causes their car to ghost for a second. Because their car is ghosted, the would-be torpedo simply passes through them without doing any damage. The troll bins their car into the barrier, taking no one else with them. Infuriated, embarrassed, and knowing they’ll never catch up, the troll immediately rage-quits the race.
There are some corners of the community that are (quite rightly) concerned about the ways this exploit could be used for evil. I’ll give you another example from the game’s official subreddit. I’m not saying that this player used the exploit the wrong way because they didn’t, but their clip is an effective tool for demonstrating how the exploit could be used to cheat.
This player sees that a Turn One pileup is coming and uses the pause-unpause trick to skate through undamaged, gaining several places as a reward. It’s not that this player survives the Turn One prang that the Forza Motorsport sim racing community is concerned about. It’s the places they gained that worry them. Again, putting my Sim Racing Steward’s hat on, I don’t think any untoward actions were taken here. This player simply read the tea leaves correctly and benefited. But you can see how someone looking to gain an advantage might try to leverage this trick to move through the pack unfairly.
If Turn 10 can’t do anything to curb the trolls, then this exploit is the only weapon players have against them. Unfortunately, it could also become a double-edged sword. If you, like the Forza Motorsport community, want to take your sim racing seriously, then this is an exploit that should only be used as a last resort.
And if you don’t want to use the exploit at all (and fair play if you don’t), you can still give the trolls an old-fashioned taste of their own medicine, like the player below.
Image: Xbox, Kotaku Australia
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