first of all, forza has always had a meta in which only a tiny handful of cars are even close to each other in competitiveness. this is not a phenomenon new to fm23. like, in the glory days of fm3 and fm4, the only time you’d have a good shot without a meta car was in the multiclass lobbies because grognards tended to shy away from those lobbies and people drove a much larger variety of cars. straight a class lobbies? better hope you were in an audi in fm3 or a subaru in fm4 or you were out of luck.
secondly, i do not know where you are getting the idea that i love the formula mazda. i have literally complained about it right here on these very forums. it is broken. it needs to be patched. it’s also one single broken car in one single class, other classes are as balanced as they have ever been.
third, the formula mazda isn’t even the most broken car forza has ever seen. the lotus elan in fm2 and the dodge dart in the muscle car dlc in fm4 immediately spring to mind. but hey, they got patched because they were broken. know what didn’t get patched? the audi s5 and vw golf in fm3, cars that i’d argue were equally broken as the mazda yet were never touched.
and i have no doubt that you had a larger pool of cars you could compete in in fm6, because the average skill level of the playerbase fell off a cliff from fm4 → fm5. it was blatantly obvious to me when i got an xbox one and a copy of fm6 that the players i was running across were not even in the same ballpark as the players i would run up against in fm4. the same is true in fm23 - i feel like i am better at this game than i have ever been in any other forza game, but even then, i should not be able to hop into a miata and then win by 10+ seconds over the other 5 miata/cosmo/integra drivers in d class lobbies.
edit: actually, know what? i posted this before checking out the a class leaderboards, basing it just off the last time i played, when the formula mazda was indeed absolutely dominant. and, well, a quick look at the leaderboards as they stand now does not at all indicate the formula mazda is even broken. almost every track has a large variety of cars making up the top 10. the impression i had of the formula mazda being overpowered was surely a result of a class running concurrently with spec mazda, incentivizing people to have one, combined with the game still being new and so people having less time to grind out other cars to try other builds with. looks like, as time has gone on and people have unlocked parts for other cars, they’ve found a bunch of cars that are at least as good as the formula mazda.
in fact, i went and did some number crunching. i consider a car to be dominant if it makes up at least 7 of the top 10 spots on a track.
out of 57 total layouts in this game, the formula mazda only dominates 8 of them. and the tracks it does dominate are all low speed tracks with few straights and lots of turns. you know, exactly the kinds of tracks a car that is entirely grip-based would be dominant at. meanwhile, tracks that are more balanced, like, say, spa or indianapolis gp or mid ohio, don’t even have a singularly dominant car at all.
you are complaining incessantly about a problem that does not even exist. in fact, the leaderboards indicate that in general the pi balance, at least for a class, is overall in a pretty good spot.
