Review after 11 years Trackmania
Posted: 01 Jul 2017, 17:26
Dear Nadeo,
Im an active trackmaniac but i was never very active in any related community . After MP4 Update i feel a big need to write down my thoughts because i fear maniaplanet is going to the wrong direction
What is the worst?
1) MP4 Update seems to reduce number of active players instead of increasing it... This is an absolute killer in the long run in my opinion even if the community sticks quite long to the game there have to be more new players being infected by trackmania. How you reach this i dont know but i would give Stadium for free to make people join maniaplanet and try to really unite the community on maniaplanet. Btw: channels are an ok idea for me but the nochat was absolutely annoying in demo mode.
2) The community was so much split over the years and you always failed hard when you tried to unite it again. TM Turbo would have been a killer if it wouldnt have been such a fail on computer
3) I played lagoon in demo mode 3 weeks after release. After 30min of playing i was ladder 300 and after 1 hour (2 weeks later) Im rank 50. This lets me guess not even 50 players have played it more than 1 hour. This has to be a joke! By the way: even if it was meant to be nice - giving lagoon for free for the ones that were able to install this beta (i tried and failed because i didnt want to invest one hour for root cause). It was something that nearly made me not buy it at all.
About my story:
I downloaded TM Nations in 2006 and i was absolutely addicted to the game. At the beginning it was the variety of the tracks built by the community and later my interests changed. The good thing for me on trackmania is that i always found something interesting.
One important points at this time: I did not pay a single dollar for this and i was really grateful. I bought TM United not because i wanted to play that game but since i liked TM Nations so much. However by the time i also started to like the old environments i got with TM United. The Forever Update was something of the best i ever got for free and it increased the reputation of Nadeo even more in my eyes. And in my opinion it was great to give nations forever also for free. Maybe it was a fault to keep the old TM Nations alive because it split a small part of the community away for the first time.
Looking back to 2008 and 2009 it was the best time for trackmania in my opinion. It was also due to the fact that the tools for dedicated server have been improved much by the community: FAST, Xaseco and never forget Dedimania were great inventions. Also blockmix was a great addition to the game.
The fails began in my opinion with the communication of TM2 plans: Canyon started great but i didnt participate. I stayed in Forever because i wanted to buy a full TM2 with several environments. 6 years later its still not really possible and i fear lagoon was the last environment while TM2 is slowly dieing, maybe even faster than TM Forever dies which is now becoming also just old (btw: [FreeZone] does not bring anything also if you ask me but maybe check if you sold more games after FreeZone). Still i bought TM Turbo and now i also bought the rest of TM2 environments just because i was profiting a lot with demo mode since 2013. For now i will not invest more money unless i really get something for it.
I dont know if Maniaplanet was just too ambitious or you dont have enough developers or the wrong focus. The amount of content is at least going down every year. Most content i used in the last 5 years came out of the community. Cool Tracks, cool mods and cool tools.
My personal table (the amount is zzzzzz is quite high since start of Maniaplanet):
2006 - TM Nations
2007 - TM United
2008 - TM Forever
2009 - StarTrack Update
2010 - zzzzz
2011 - TM2 Canyon
2012 - zzzzz
2013 - Stadium (hum not very creative) and Valley
2014 - zzzzz
2015 - zzzzz
2016 - TM Turbo (would be nice to play together with consoles but no)
2017 - MP4 and Lagoon
I see a lot of tries on Nadeo side to give something to the community and make it more alive again. However with the current strategy i feel like every action makes it worse instead of helping. In my opinion it was lucky that TM Turbo was not successful on PC and online servers are already close to empty. Only that prevented us from another split of the community.
If i would be you guys I would seriously start thinking about where Maniaplanet shall go and how you reach this (and how you earn money with it). And never forget: you need also people to play because otherwise its useless.
To close this: i probably would have left TM2 because of MP4 Update already if Chase Mode wouldnt exist because for me personally there is not much more interesting in TM2 (and im one who is not interested at all in Shootmania).
A larger player base will help to hold motivated community members. Many dont want to create cool things for just 3 people and go to another game.
Im an active trackmaniac but i was never very active in any related community . After MP4 Update i feel a big need to write down my thoughts because i fear maniaplanet is going to the wrong direction
What is the worst?
1) MP4 Update seems to reduce number of active players instead of increasing it... This is an absolute killer in the long run in my opinion even if the community sticks quite long to the game there have to be more new players being infected by trackmania. How you reach this i dont know but i would give Stadium for free to make people join maniaplanet and try to really unite the community on maniaplanet. Btw: channels are an ok idea for me but the nochat was absolutely annoying in demo mode.
2) The community was so much split over the years and you always failed hard when you tried to unite it again. TM Turbo would have been a killer if it wouldnt have been such a fail on computer
3) I played lagoon in demo mode 3 weeks after release. After 30min of playing i was ladder 300 and after 1 hour (2 weeks later) Im rank 50. This lets me guess not even 50 players have played it more than 1 hour. This has to be a joke! By the way: even if it was meant to be nice - giving lagoon for free for the ones that were able to install this beta (i tried and failed because i didnt want to invest one hour for root cause). It was something that nearly made me not buy it at all.
About my story:
I downloaded TM Nations in 2006 and i was absolutely addicted to the game. At the beginning it was the variety of the tracks built by the community and later my interests changed. The good thing for me on trackmania is that i always found something interesting.
One important points at this time: I did not pay a single dollar for this and i was really grateful. I bought TM United not because i wanted to play that game but since i liked TM Nations so much. However by the time i also started to like the old environments i got with TM United. The Forever Update was something of the best i ever got for free and it increased the reputation of Nadeo even more in my eyes. And in my opinion it was great to give nations forever also for free. Maybe it was a fault to keep the old TM Nations alive because it split a small part of the community away for the first time.
Looking back to 2008 and 2009 it was the best time for trackmania in my opinion. It was also due to the fact that the tools for dedicated server have been improved much by the community: FAST, Xaseco and never forget Dedimania were great inventions. Also blockmix was a great addition to the game.
The fails began in my opinion with the communication of TM2 plans: Canyon started great but i didnt participate. I stayed in Forever because i wanted to buy a full TM2 with several environments. 6 years later its still not really possible and i fear lagoon was the last environment while TM2 is slowly dieing, maybe even faster than TM Forever dies which is now becoming also just old (btw: [FreeZone] does not bring anything also if you ask me but maybe check if you sold more games after FreeZone). Still i bought TM Turbo and now i also bought the rest of TM2 environments just because i was profiting a lot with demo mode since 2013. For now i will not invest more money unless i really get something for it.
I dont know if Maniaplanet was just too ambitious or you dont have enough developers or the wrong focus. The amount of content is at least going down every year. Most content i used in the last 5 years came out of the community. Cool Tracks, cool mods and cool tools.
My personal table (the amount is zzzzzz is quite high since start of Maniaplanet):
2006 - TM Nations
2007 - TM United
2008 - TM Forever
2009 - StarTrack Update
2010 - zzzzz
2011 - TM2 Canyon
2012 - zzzzz
2013 - Stadium (hum not very creative) and Valley
2014 - zzzzz
2015 - zzzzz
2016 - TM Turbo (would be nice to play together with consoles but no)
2017 - MP4 and Lagoon
I see a lot of tries on Nadeo side to give something to the community and make it more alive again. However with the current strategy i feel like every action makes it worse instead of helping. In my opinion it was lucky that TM Turbo was not successful on PC and online servers are already close to empty. Only that prevented us from another split of the community.
If i would be you guys I would seriously start thinking about where Maniaplanet shall go and how you reach this (and how you earn money with it). And never forget: you need also people to play because otherwise its useless.
To close this: i probably would have left TM2 because of MP4 Update already if Chase Mode wouldnt exist because for me personally there is not much more interesting in TM2 (and im one who is not interested at all in Shootmania).
A larger player base will help to hold motivated community members. Many dont want to create cool things for just 3 people and go to another game.