You Too Could Be Banned From Forza Horizon 5 For 8,000 Years For Doing This
Turn 10 Studios' Forza Motorsport is a series of simulation racing games that focuses on track racing events, around a variety of real and fictional tracks. The popular game franchise showcases realistic performance and handling characteristics of many real-life production, modified, and racing cars, and is published by Xbox Game Studios.
That's not to be confused with Playground Games' Forza (pronounced "fort-za") Horizon, which is a series of simulation racing games that focuses on street and off-road racing events in a variety of fictional locales, also showcasing realistic performance and handling characteristics of many real-life production, modified, and racing cars, and published by Xbox Game Studios.
If you're confused, we'll break it down for you: Motorsport is track racing, and Horizon is not track racing. Forza Horizon is much newer than its more staid Motorsport sibling, but it's already on its fifth incarnation and has proven to be a big hit for Xbox Game Studios. The games offer glorious visuals (including ray-tracing support in the latest title), a soundtrack full of licensed hit songs, and competitive online play over Xbox Live.
As a part of the online features, players can create and share custom liveries for their cars. These are essentially just cosmetic skins that players can edit and create. Obviously, as with any online platform for user-created content sharing, there are many guidelines in place for what can and can't be put on the side of a car, and after four iterations—plus six more in the Motorsport series—Forza has quite a list of disallowed decorations.
Included in that list are items that feature threats or glorification of physical harm, as is usually the case for any online platform. There's also a prohibition on depicting "certain notorious individuals, organizations, or events." That's probably the basis under which a player was recently banned from Forza Horizon 5 for the pictured vehicle livery, which includes the likeness of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un alongside the hashtag "#SendNukes," among other parodies of questionable taste.
So it goes that the user who created that livery has been banned for 8,000 years (yes, that's eight thousand years). Rather than simply saying "you have been permanently banned from this service," Microsoft elected to set the user's ban duration to a period nearly as long as the known existence of human civilization. The livery has been removed from Forza Horizon 5's online library, although users may still see it on the vehicles of players who already downloaded it.
According to Reddit poster /u/AllThingsRacing, who claims that the creator of the livery was his friend, the banned player never received any prior warning, nor was he banned prior to this. He also claims that the comically-offensive KFC livery was the creator's very first controversial creation. If those statements are true, then Turn 10 (who does the content enforcement for both Forza series) seems quite heavy-handed here indeed. The tales are believable, though, because other players have also complained about first-offense bans, often for much less egregious offenses.
A number of players have expressed surprise at having their accounts briefly suspended for creating questionable liveries, like one for a van that says "Free Candy" on the side. Well, the enforcement guidelines clearly ban that specific type of livery, along with numerous other things you may not expect. Given that, we might recommend all Forza players (that want to remain Forza players) to go ahead and take a look at Turn 10's "Enforcement Guidelines."
