Main problem of TM2: How to get newbies into the game?

[Ace.]

Hello guys.
Lately I am playing more and more on public servers, mostly mini and short tech. On these servers you can face the, imo, main problem of the game which has to be solved for a better future of the game. Lets be serious, 99% of the actual community has been playing this game for years. We have one of the friendliest communities out there in online games but I feel that it is more decreasing than increasing as newbies don't get into it. Because they don't get into the game at all!
If you are new to the game you join the server you like the most, play an hour a day and go offline again. There is no point for them to find more into the stuff which is going on as there is no help or no guideline which gives easy information. Back in the days we had a looooot of funteams which were spread over all skill levels. Lets be honest, most of us started in a team pretty much as a noob. We all learned from those teams and we all had our days of being a beginner. But those teams seems to be not existing anymore as everything goes competetive and only good, fast and well known players change between the teams. Are there even funteams and funwars existing anymore?

I don't want to blame that development but to get new people into the scene we need to do anything as the role of funteams and teams with beginners seems to be vanished. We have so many awesome projects going on, beautiful tournaments, dedicated people organizing stuff, streamers, community pages, but no central place where beginners can discover that all. How about a page which is linked to the startpage when starting Maniaplanet which shows every basic information: different styles/gamemodes, titlepacks, how to drift (binding brake key to another key, a trick which is soooo important and almost no one knows it of the newbies), community-pages and their function explained like TMX/Maniacalendar/Dedimania/Carpark etc., Facebook-pages of dedicated players or streamers, already existing guides (like Zniks competetive-guide), tournaments or cups shortly explained (and where to find information about it) and so on. Only an organized, well structured page where they can find information they want to get. Maybe even with video (I remember the drift-videos by slidestar. So basic but still informative). All these information is already existing. But we are missing a central place where you can easily find it without any clue about it.

tl;dr: Sorry for the long text. I just felt like writing this down. I love this game and the community but somehow I feel that we are doing not enough to get new ones into our game. The competetive scene fully lost the contact to the new players which are still there in big numbers! Many want to discover this game in more detail but they just don't know how.

[TMarc]

Actually there are the campaign maps, which are easy enough in the beginning.
There is just no live tutorial about how to drive.
But you also have to see that whatever information you give on any page, it is either already to much or to complicated, or still insufficient and impossible to make a noob a expert driver in short time.

You learn driving only by practise

[tcq]

Totally agree with the post mad by Ace.
For example, what is the most common questions inside of TM?

1. How do i change my name?
2. Can you see my car?

ManiaPlanet is all about customisation, but the beginner doesn't have any clue how to start anywhere. A wiki doesn't help. I needs to be embedded in the game and the user needs to have tutorials that show him what to click where to achieve what he wants. I'm not talking about complicated stuff like creating a mod or a title pack. But this small things which are not explained and not intuitive to beginners are what freaks out new players if they discover the game.

[TMarc]

absolutely right, tcq
But then, such things (also the actual handling) must be much easier. No additional LOC etc. should be required.
(this was already discussed in more detail in another topic on this forum btw.).

[darmaya]

Give one free PC-envi to TMT new customers (TMT>>>TM)
Introduce those newbies to the delices of TM, train, grows
Then open the up-bridge (TM>>>TMT)

[Palteza]

but no central place where beginners can discover that all. How about a page which is linked to the startpage when starting Maniaplanet which shows every basic information: different styles/gamemodes, titlepacks, how to drift ...

Mali (and a couple of persons with her) has prepared a big update of mania-actu (which should be renamed for the occasion). I saw it, the website could be right now a new bright portal for everyone in the community (with a whole section for the beginners explaining everything you're pointing out), everything is ready.
It's now in mania-actu staff hands (John and Sky mainly). It could have been even released before the GA easily if the motivation was a bit there, but it was obviously not the case . Let's hope it will come soon to welcome the new players coming from TmT...

And yeah ofc the new players are not welcome in good conditions. The launch of Maniaplanet in itself is a big pain, imagine a new player arriving on this platform with all these widgets stuff . Maniaplanet is now only talking to the already existing community (many possibilities, but hard to master), but the simplicty (which has always been the main force of the whole serie) is now lacking to welcome new players and grow something new.

Everything you say about competitive scene, fun team, fun wars, and so on is so true. Everyone who has the capacity to have a global view on this community would say that (speaking for tech mainly. it seems Speed scene is growing again, and dirt scene dying). Something has changed and the community is not refreshed with new blood, or hardly. Just take a look at the variety of competition organized. Either you have really strong organization knowledges/you're famous in the game/you propose cashprizes, or your competition will die almost instantly if you don't push it so hard. Because we are an old community only waiting for super serious organizations. But hopefully this old community still exists, it carried Trackmania² Stadium untill now ...
But yeah, new blood is definitely missing.

[disposableaccount]

trackmania has a strong focus on hard difficulty racing, speedrunning and creating content, it's the kind of game that appeal to a limited hardcore crowd, it's unique format (time attack only, no ai, no collision) puts people off long before they think of joining any team

also i never see anyone talk about trackmania 2 in forums, it's always the electronic arts, codemasters, other games with a long running series like burnout and sonic or any racing sim the industry shits out, i'd find games like blur and nitronic rush/distance before knowing tm2 exists even thought TMNF was pretty popular

and yeah, the trackmania community is fragmented like shards of glass and the populated servers are all casuals

[Alcator]

trackmania has a strong focus on hard difficulty racing, speedrunning and creating content, it's the kind of game that appeal to a limited hardcore crowd, it's unique format (time attack only, no ai, no collision) puts people off long before they think of joining any team

No, Trackmania does not have a strong focus on hard difficulty racing.

Ever since I became active on tm-exchange, I kept criticizing that we are over-valuing / over-praising tracks that are just too damn hard.

Think about this: Every single official Nadeo track is fully respawnable. From every checkpoint, you can reach the finish. But on mania-exchange, you will find many tracks picked as "Best of the week" or winners of the Monthly Track Competition which are just full-speed madness and only few, if any at all, checkpoints in those are respawnable. Which means that until you pixel-perfectly memorize the only correct path, your learning consists of constant restarts.

Sure, you may say: "That's what we like!"

But then don't be surprised if this does not appeal to ANYONE below the age of 20 - because the new generation of gamers grew up on games that feature checkpoints / auto-save! I might have hit puberty when Doom was the hottest game in town, and if forgot to manually save my progress and an imp killed me 3 meters from the finish, I had to do the whole level from scratch. But today, gamers expect the game to auto-save before every major encounter, and respawn them at that save-point if they mess it up. And guess what: Trackmania has this behavior EMBEDDED into its core! It's us, the arrogant old-school map makers, who are not capable or not willing to learn how to design respawnable maps!

We should all start making beginner and intermediate difficulty maps. Those are sorely needed. There's already half a million hard maps, but where is an easy track by GanjaRider for these newbies to find and play?

[gugaruz]

...

nice post, i fully support your text!
i wanna mention that all oldschool gamers started playing on easy maps also...
like in my lifetime, i played easy nadeo maps on servers as i started playing tmnf after a while i discovered fullspeed, tech and finally rpgs

nowadays it's so that guys trying rpg out without any knowledge of the game of trackmania (i speak on own experience).
and ppl that are noobs and playing "complicated" maps first, they will get dissapointed very fast and will probably switch to another game

[disposableaccount]

it's hard compared to other racing games with it's gold medal requirement and flying of the track and restarting