Volume 35 -- February 23, 2007

By: Che Chou and Bill Giese

The First Pitpass Report of a New Era.

Welcome back to the Turn 10 Weekly Pitpass Report, your window into the development of Forza Motorsport 2 -- the complete racing simulator for the Xbox 360. In case you're new to this little routine we've had going for about 35 weeks now, do check out all of our archived Weekly Pitpass Reports here. But nevermind the past. The future is imminent and Forza Motorsport 2 is very much a part of that momentum right now.

Thanks to a handful of gorgeous screenshots in the past couple weeks, a new website, and an awesome TV show to boot, Forza Motorsport 2 has been climbing the buzz meter on the intarwebs. Checked Gamestats just now and was pretty excited to see the game clock in at #8 overall in popularity (#4 for Xbox 360) just behind Sonic and his buddies. I know these rankings are transient and changes day to day, but it's still cool to see nonetheless. So thanks to all of you for spreading the word wide and far about Forza Motorsport 2. Good stuff is still to come.

Speaking of good stuff, we're joined this week by Turn 10's senior game designer Bill Giese to talk about an exciting new feature we announced this week on the Forza Motorsport Showdown reality TV show -- the Xbox Live Auction House. For as long as I've known Bill here since starting at Turn 10, he's been passionate about community features in games and has pushed hard to implement design ideas that would further the Forza Motorsport 2 community. So it's natural he'd be ultra-stoked to share his babies with y'all here today. In fact, many of you may have already gotten a taste of his enthusiasm on our forums last night.

Anyway, Bill's been pent up on these new features for the better part of a year now and he's ready to tell all. So let's get to it -- introducing: The Forza Motorsport 2 Xbox Live Auction House, as told by senior game designer Bill Giese!

Going Once, Going Twice -- Sold!

By: Bill Giese, Turn 10 Senior Game Designer

The Auction House was one of the first features that we built out for Forza Motorsport 2. We wanted to create a one stop shop for buying and selling cars over Xbox Live. In this Pitpass Report, I will go over some of the Auction House's coolest feature -- although, in practice, it really does take a community like ours to make a feature like this see its full potential.

The idea for an auction functionality came out of Forza Motorsport (on Xbox), where we saw how much people liked creating trade lobbies and wanted to develop an easier way for players to buy/sell cars online. We wanted to provide players with a simple system to search, bid, and sell cars. We also wanted to allow an easier way for players to get cars that are not in their career home region (in Forza Motorsport 2, you'll begin your career by picking a native region -- North America, Europe, or Asia). We wanted to make it so that even if a car is locked to you in the single-player career, you could still go to the Auction House and pick one up for your collection (provided you've got the money and can outbid other players, that is). 

Sorry, can't search by "awesomeness."

From a top level, the Auction House is divided into three different tabs: Search, My Bids, and My Auctions. The Search Tab is the first screen you will see when entering the Auction house. Along the left side you will see a column of possible search parameters that you can change to filter the auction results. These include Price, Region, Car Level, Car Class, Make, Model, Year, Drive Type, Engine Position, Power, Curb Weight, and Design (whether or not a car has a custom paint job).

The right side of the screen will now display the list of results based on your search. The auctions are sorted by featured auction (more below) then by auctions with the least amount of time remaining. The cool thing is that browsing these auctions once the game goes live is like going to a virtual car show -- each one of these cars will likely have been modified, tuned, painted, and otherwise customized in some fashion. No two cars will be alike -- unless the seller was just totally lazy, but even then, you can check out a car's extensive history, just like you would when you buy a used car with Carfax).

A closer look at each of the auctions gives you the full story. When you place a bid on someone's car, your in-game credits will be removed from your career account and put up on our Auction House server. Why do we remove or hold money from your account after you place a bid on an escrow server? Like most things on Xbox Live, it's to provide a secure environment for player transactions, as any sort of exploit or hacking in Auction House could easily destroy our happy little econo-sphere. Besides, holding onto your money until you resolve the auction also helps you keep track of how much money you have, as your available credits are always up to date.

Bill Gates has lots of a ton of available credits.

The My Auctions tab is where you keep track of all the cars you're currently selling in the Auction House. Think of it this way -- if the My Bids tab is where you are spending credits, then the My Auctions is where you will be making credits hand over fist. We give the player some important options when creating auctions. The "Buyout" setting, for instance, lets you set a winner-takes-all one time price for your car (c'mon, everyone's got a price).

Meanwhile, Auction Length determines how long your auction will run on Xbox Live. Obviously, the longer an auction, the more exposure and potential bidders you'll have lined-up; the catch is, however, that the longer you leave your auction up, the more handling fee you pay, which obviously factors into the total profit of your auctioned car. The longest length of time you can set an auction for is 24 hours.

Then there's the "Featured Auction" premium. What this means is that, for a price, your auction will be colored differently than the other auctions and will always appear at the top of the list of search results, regardless of time remaining on the auction. Hey, what can we say, it takes money to make money. We also allow players to lock their livery designs and paintjobs to their cars. This prevents someone from buying a car with a hot paint job only to turn around and copy/paste it to mass produce an army of cars with that same paint job. We believe that your paint designs are your intellectual property and you should have the option of protecting that creation.

So let's say you've just created 700 Mini Cooper S auctions (each one with a locked Barbie paintjob), and now you want to go off and play some single-player career. How do you keep track of your auctions once you leave the Auction House? Well, besides using Forzamotorsport.net's Auction House page as a resource, we've built into the game a handy message center that will notify you of any crucial activity in auctions that you currently are a part of. In the top left corner of the screen (on every screen except in-game racing) you will see a notification that looks like an envelope. Pressing the left bumper button allows you to access your messages which notify you of whether your auction has been sold, outbid, or simply expired. From the message center, you can then jump right to the corresponding Auction House entry.

A couple more points about our Auction House system before I go. First of all, we're going to actively put cars which we codename "unicorns" up for sale in the Auction House. These are cars you can't buy or unlock in single-player career and they're exclusive to the Auction House. To keep these things truly rare, we're not allowing players to resell these unicorn cars back on the Auction House. We're still determining the frequency of these unicorn auctions, but it's definitely something we can play by ear after Forza Motorsport 2 hits retail. And finally, we've implemented auction extensions to prevent players from sniping bids at the last second before an auction expires. So as long as someone bids on an auction, that auction will continue to remain active for a certain amount of time. How devoted to that auction are you anyway? This will let you put your credits where your mouth is.

The whole point of the Forza Motorsport 2 Auction House is to encourage community interplay and really provide a purpose for those who excel in painting and tuning cars. Now, the scoreboards aren't the only place where you can make a name for yourself. The Auction House is also a better way to sell career reward cars, which normally go for a paltry 100 credits each. Get more bang for your buck, son, and march that bad boy into the auction house for a hefty return.

We'll have more on Forza Motorsport 2's Xbox Live Auction House in the weeks to come. Thanks for reading!

// What are your thoughts on Auction House? Post 'em here! //