TheM wrote:
I don't want to sound like I'm siding with ESWC here, but comparing fB's Weekly Race with ESWC is a pretty weird comparision. fB's Weekly Race, though having lots of active participants, in my eyes cannot be compared to a "high ranked" eSports tournament like the ESWC or (in TM terms) ESL CPS, ET's STC/NC, etc.
The people that regularly finish towards the top of the results of the weekly race are actually in my view just as good as those that have managed to win ESWC. If you watch the races you'll see that it's guys like Omnipotz, Shorty, Racehans, Sand, Marius89, etc. who are fighting for the wins up front. Yeah, maybe they might not win at ESWC, but these guys are no slouches either, and the Weekly Race is a different kind of challenge, one that plays to their strengths and that they deserve to be rewarded by, perhaps not in monetary terms like ESWC (should) have given out, but by receiving the accolade of being the winner after racing for an hour on a map they'd never seen before against over 100 other drivers. If you don't think the Weekly Race has any impact on the Esports community, then I would use the example of Racehans, who won almost a dozen Weekly races in the space of just a few months, and was able to use it as a springboard to trial membership with Team Acer.
I think it's unfair to write off events like the Weekly race as "unimportant" when compared to ESWC, simply because these "bigger" events have been around longer. I also get the feeling (And perhaps I'm just a bit misinformed here) that ESWC's Trackmania events are kind of elitist compared to the Weekly Race; for example, I live in the UK, and while France may be only a small ocean away, Trackmania isn't well known on the northern side of the channel tunnel at all, and therefore even if I was talented enough (And I'm saying this hypothetically because in reality I'm nowhere near that level) there would be absolutely no way I would be allowed or able to compete in something like ESWC as there's no qualifiers or support for Trackmania here, unlike in the rest of Europe. And unless you've competed successfully in it before you're not going to get any special invites to circumvent this. However, if I want to compete in the Weekly Race, I can just rock up on the server without even needing to sign up.
This probably won't be a popular opinion, but I think that the old "1 v 1 on a relatively short point A to Point B map" format, whilst enjoyable, doesn't suit players like myself who are more endurance/laps drivers. It's not a bad format by any means, but for me personally it's too luck based; (And keep in mind I only say this as someone who competed in ESL CPS for the first time a few months ago) if you make a mistake across a short sprint, then that's it: game over basically for that round and you often can't recover. Also you get so many rounds one after the other that from my point of view it can sometimes become a bit redundant; especially if it's really one-sided I can occasionally find myself thinking: "Why do I have to do this same race 20-40 times, when we already know what the result will be?" (But like I said, maybe that's just me
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Finally, it's interesting to note that increasingly we are seeing tournaments popping up like DDE's 24 hour road or in particular TMT's multilap tournament which I think shows an increased demand for endurance events in the community; it is not just about the 1v1 tech tournaments anymore; it is also about the RPG nightcups, the NASCAR knockout cups, and the F1-style events, to name just a few, and that's how it should be; it's not a straightforward ladder where all roads lead to ESWC, it's a tree from which many branches sprout. (Indeed, many of these branches haven't even heard of each other, so I guess it's sort of like a family tree in that sense...
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Anyway, sorry for my lengthy ramblings, that's just my 2 cents on the whole thing.
