Volume 57 -- August 10, 2007

Welcome to one of the last few Fridays of summer. Since the status of our next patch seems to be on everyone's mind in the community at the moment, I'll jump right into current events. The good news is, as of late last night, we have officially submitted our latest auto-update to Xbox 360 certification for approval. This is, of course, the much anticipated patch that will bring equilibrium back to Forza Motorsport 2 in a number of ways. The most important fixes involve the AWD glitch and the performance index calculations of the Lotus Elan, both of which have been pretty detrimental to the usefulness of our scoreboards.

FM.net moderator mrnelson gets the cover spot this week with his ultra-realistic photo of a customized FWD shootout on Tsukuba.

There are other changes too. The one that will be most useful to me is something most of you won't ever see or experience -- the ability to maintain a list of Gamertags on a backend server that will permanently ban cheaters, hackers, and other miscreants, from Forza 2's online community. You may have heard this before but I'll reiterate once again: If you're going to grief others out of a good time, then we don't want you hanging around. The good news is that our reports tel us Auction House abuse is down -- way down from what it was just a month ago.

Niscozi submitted this wonderful shot of a Skyline GTR riding off into the sunset.

So yeah, all of the community policing you guys have done via FM.net have really paid off. The fact of the matter is, user-generated content is very new territory for the games industry and while we at Turn 10 are proud to be pushing that envelope, we also recognize that there will be some growing pains involved as we better understand how to deal with the inevitable downsides to UGC (the acronym itself is such the buzz word these days).

Our race livery featured car of the week belongs to Devarous' Mopar-skinned Viper.

When will the patch go live? Although it's fairly out of our hands at this point, if we get through cert with no major red flags, you can expect the next auto-update to hit in the next week and a half. At the very latest, the patch will have to land before the Nissan Sentra SE-R tournament kicks-off later in August. We look forward to a better, more glitch free day in the Forza 2 community. I will have full release notes on the patch when it gets closer to release.

Dedmonwakin's Nightcrawler Mustang is our featured fantasy livery car of the week! Very nice theme and layout with the stained glass windows, and Kurt's face is incredibly detailed.

Other stuff in the works is our first DLC car pack you'll be able to grab off Xbox Live Marketplace. For licensing reasons, I can't talk about which cars will make the final cut, but we're getting close to having all of those agreements signed. Also, I have no idea what pricing is going to look like but I expect it'll be fair. At any rate, car pack #1 is in good shape and should be going into its polishing phase all of next week. Then we submit for certification and around and around we go (i.e., more content coming afterwards). Those of you who want everything now... please... be patient. :)

We admit... we have a soft spot for the curves of a sexy car. Forum member LFG's minimal but effective photo really gives new meaning to the phrase "car porn."

Onto tournaments. We're still working with our server folks and looking into what we can do about the pesky split-server issue that basically has the tournament advancing the wrong lobby into the next round. This is an issue that the server team has been working on improving for PGR4 so hopefully we'll piggyback on their success. On top of that, one of FM.net's moderators (ncasolo) is helping me compile wishes for weekly custom tournaments in this thread. The idea is to mix things up and have one unique custom tourney each week catored specifically for the hardcore community. So if that sort of competition is something that fires you up, I urge you to head into the thread to post your thoughts.

Forum member redesign had us asking the question, "how the heck do you get so good?" This Mel Gibson/Braveheart paintjob is stunning in its subtle detail.

Next week, a bunch of us are heading over to Gamefest 2007 to check out keynote presentations and/or giving speeches ourselves on various game development topics. I've been told by my buddies in the press that they'll also be flying out for this event so it should be interesting to see if Gamefest goes the way of GDC and becomes bigger and more celebrated. There's also a Formula Drift competition in Sonoma CA this weekend and FM.net moderator and drift junkie Sidefx will be attending the event for full blog coverage. And as usual, be sure to check out the winners of our weekly photo-mode and fantasy / real-life replica livery contests. You guys continue to astound us with your dedication and designs. Keep it up!

Keiisuke shows off his 20" rims and made the rest of us take notice of the G35's unique profile and grill. Very clean shot!

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