That’s exaxtly why I don’t use the leader board cars…because as soon as someone uses one, everyone does and it completely kills the fun factor of this game.
I think you’re missing the point. In the world of road or track day cars no two are the same. The job of the performance index is only to loosely group cars to keep the classes and grids broadly similar but no two cars of the same PI are equally matched in all characteristics. Some may return a lap time to within thousandths of each other but they aren’t equally matched throughout the entire lap.
Every class has cars that are slower, more difficult to drive or extremely difficult to set up and some cars are only suited to certain tracks, but this is an accurate reflection of cars IRL. They exist in this game to give players the chance to drive them and to offer diversity and a greater challenge.
It would be crass if every car performed like every other car at any given PI.
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That might be arguable if the game offered other forms of balanced racing, but as the PI brackets the only form of balance of performance in the game, it needs to work better. Easily the majority of the cars in the game are totally useless in MP because, purely by luck, they happen not to be competitive at one of the completely arbitrary PI thresholds.
Personally, I’d rather have 100 cars split into competitive and well-balanced divisions than 1000 dumped in the idiotic PI classes we have just now.
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I’m not missing that point. What I’m saying is that given how well I can tune/drive, I shouldn’t be 4 seconds behind when I’m in 3rd place and the cars are all 900.
I’m confident in my own personal ability in this game. Some of the cars are overpowered.
You are missing the point. Driving a P1 at Rd Atlanta you were always going to be off the pace. As has been explained it reaches the top of the R Class PI on account of its power and top end - this is not effective for Rd Atlanta. While Turn 10 could balance the PI, the most important factor is just how different each track is. The only way T10 could balance the PI and account for the differences in tracks would be to give every car at 900 PI the exact same capabilities in handling / speed / accel etc.
Now if you were driving the P1 at Le Mans or Daytona you probably would have beaten the M8B as power is much more of a factor at these tracks - other LB cars like the Radical etc. will fall away. I do realise that the M8B is somewhat OP, but still - different horses for different courses. Don’t run the same car all night and expect to be equally competitive from race to race
Again, if this were true you might have a point, but it isn’t even remotely true. The P1 isn’t competitive anywhere in R class. I don’t think it’s faster than the M8B on any track, except maybe the ovals (which shouldn’t be in any game mode where the cars aren’t evenly matched in the first place). It might just about keep up with it around the power tracks, but they will both be multiple seconds per lap behind the real power cars like the Ultima at that stage. Most of the cars that can reach R900 and many of the cars that can ONLY run in R class are not competitive anywhere, with any tune, under any circumstances. That’s the problem. Some of the “best” cars in the game are like this. The One:1 for example falls at the bottom of P class, so it’s literally useless.
Have you tried running both cars at Road Atlanta to see what the differences really are between the cars?
IMO the PI system isn’t perfect but I wouldn’t claim it’s completely broken based off of public lobby race results. Driver skill and assists can easily mask the true differences between cars built/tuned to the same PI level.
If based on the differences the P1 isn’t competitive against the M8B at Road Atlanta, are there tracks where the P1 is competitve?
There is league and spec racing is the best options.
Every game has this problem. It’s very difficult to keep one setup from dominating and still keeping the character of the car.
There’s not much of the character of the car left once it’s been upgraded to reach a PI limit. Especially if it’s been upgraded so that it jumps up 2 or more classes from stock. At that stage you’re basically driving a bag of upgrades that just happens to look like the original car.
Your right. Either make cars unique and imbalance perforce wise, or have them basically fell the same. It’s real hard to do both. Is there room for improvement, of course. But it’s not near as easy as everybody thinks. I prefer building cars up into something different over having a spec races. There still some differences between cars even with all the same parts, that gives some options.
I’ve reached the point where I’m only really interested in racing in balanced series. I’ll be doing as many leagues as time permits (such as TORA, not the non-existent-if-you’re-in-Pinnacle Forza leagues), and if I play public MP it’ll be in Cycled Production or maybe Modern GT. I can’t bring myself to go back into the ridiculous class hoppers any more, not because of the behaviour, but just because of the format.
As “race anything against anything” is a central theme of Forza, I seem to have reached the point where I dislike most of the game for what it is, rather than for the ways it’s broken, so I should probably just stop and go play something with some actual motorsport in it instead.
I take a different view. I’ve always liked FM because of its blank canvass approach. It provides massive scope to allow players to create whatever they want in terms of cars rather than spoon feeding them a car of fixed specification. If you think about the number of cars in game and the millions of permutations available that’s quite an undertaking.
However, I do think it’s gone too far and because of the number of players who only ever attempt to drive LB builds and tunes most of this “freedom” is wasted.
Just getting rid of engine, drivetrain and aspiration swaps would still leave ample scope to build and tune (especially if the upgrades were expanded) and would massively narrow the performance gaps at any given PI level. I’m all for diversity but not at the expense of a realistic starting grid.
The point that’s being missed isn’t that different cars are good on different tracks, the point is that Forza isn’t about close racing (or anything else related to motorsport) in the first place. Forza is a car game. It’s core philosophy is to stick hundreds of cars in a sandbox and let us play with them and tinker with them. That there is occasionally good, close racing is basically an accident. Those of us who play it for that reason probably just need to accept that the game isn’t intended to cater to us.
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I’d just like to say that road Atlanta really suits power cars.
I also think I could get the p1 round sub 1.17
But zee is right there is only 2 cars that can challenge the m8b on any track. The ultima and the radical. The m8b is ridiculous op and completly ruins r class. I really like r class publics I love power cars like the ultima saleen hennesy venom and the noble just to name a few. But rarely get the opportunity to use any of them other than the ultima. Last night was a perfect example it was being dominated by 1 fool in a m8b. I tried to use the 458 s at nurb gp it’s good for 1.53 he finished ahead on a 52. The m8b can do sub 1 50. So I saw red pulled our the r382 and smashed him for the next 10 races finished 2000 ft ahead of him and prob 4000ft ahead of the pack. Did I enjoy that not really I just wanted him to change his car
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I need to clarify that I understand the points being made about “some cars lap faster than others”. Okay…that’s obvious.
As I stated earlier, the problem I have with the PI system is that it makes some cars completely non-competitive in any class. The P1 being a good example. You can’t get the handling and braking above 7.0 I don’t think, and if you do, you will have moved it to the very bottom of P class. At the top of R class, it’s also not competitive because everyone else has handling of at least 7.2 so everyone just flies around the corners like they aren’t there. On tracks where speed and acceleration are favored, cars like the Ultima completely dominate the entire field. At that point, the only way to win is to fight fire with fire and play with a car that I don’t feel like driving.
The difference between 6.9 and 7.2 handling is grossly over-exaggerated.
Certain OP cars aside, the main failing of the game (multiplayer hoppers, at least) seems to be the over-reliance on PI as a balancer…
PI, alone, shouldn’t be considered a reasonable balancer, because there are so many cars in the game, and so many different ways that they can achieve whatever PI level. Rather than relying solely on PI, the game should take advantage of all of the different modifier/specification fields that have been factored in, before—mostly for the career, especially in previous titles, but also in other events, from time to time.
PI number, engine displacement, weight, number of doors, drivetrain configuration, engine placement, year of manufacture, manufacturer, region, production/race/pre-tuned/specialty… After that, PI limitation for a race shouldn’t necessarily be the top of each class; like we see sometimes in private events, and in the career play, maybe the closest racing doesn’t happen at 700, but instead happens at 650, for loose example.
Now, it could be argued that suddenly taking advantage of these fields would split up the playerbase and result in it taking longer to get a reasonably large field together to race, but it would be an attempt at ensuring close, competitive racing. The questions are, could it be done at this point, and would it be worth it—the pros with the cons…?
If there was another metric that could be used to keep lobbies balanced Turn 10 would never have needed to invent PI in the first place. That’s what PI is for, that’s its purpose. It just isn’t quite good enough to achieve what it’s meant to.
In a game where the core philosophy is to have as many cars as possible from varied territories, eras, and series, and allow them to be upgraded and tuned in an infinite number of ways, it’s really the only feasible way to achieve any form of balance at all. Anything else T10 could do to improve the quality of the racing, such as selecting and balancing cars in more coherent divisions instead of individually, would run up against that core philosophy. They could make the racing better, but not without running the risk of changing what Forza is.