Questions & Answers Trackmania Turbo

[Hylis]

It's not beacuse you did not saw it that it does not happen. And it's not because things does not happen that we should not take into account of what would happen if it does. As you may have seen in Trackmania Turbo, there are "report" menu nearly everywhere for the track you are playing on, there is even to have special rules on account to play UGC maps etc. Maps with troubles were not really common over the last decade, but we still had to do it. So, as you can see, there are constraint to dev and we took them into account to try to be as efficient as possible. The solution would probably have been our "name maker" but we did not had time to do it. Hyperlink of maps on TMT Center is a way to share maps that we have work on instead. Always choices and priorities.

PS; for the little story, it was like a sport at one time on Virtualskipper to insult other players through server name. If you take the Elite chat, you can see that if we would like to really protect players in Trackmania Turbo, which target a less informed audience, then it's also part of the equation. Some product or companies are more or less in that direction as well and I think Turbo is more as well than Maniaplanet. With good management of parental control, we also could make good things like hiding track names to kids etc. But again, it was additionnal complication we did not had time to manage, or in fact, decided that more important things were to be done, like Trackmania Turbo Center, as an example.

[w1lla]

I have i minor question: How about webservices?

[magnetik]

I have i minor question: How about webservices?

I think you need to make your question a little more precise ^^

[w1lla]

I have i minor question: How about webservices?

I think you need to make your question a little more precise ^^

Well, in the past we had webservices for trackmania, ManiaPlanet even VSK had one if i can recall right.

Methods we can get like Solo Ranking, Server Rooms, Challenges(Not maps), Player Statistics.

[magnetik]

Humm, I thought I was on the Maniaplanet topic. Can't say much about it sorry.

We plan to improve the webservices in Maniaplanet though.

[w1lla]

in both cases.

[fng_thatoneguy]

Just remember that Nadeo is still a small dev shop and they will have to prioritize all the work ahead.

(Detailed examples omitted ... see the original post)
Prioritization is not good. I give you an example - if police works based on prioritization, then they never find a thief who stole your wallet, because at first they must find all murderers, then rapists, then thugs etc. And because is not possible to catch them all, they never work on low priority stealing.

It's the same here in game. Programmer should fix all bugs - small and big, without prioritization. This is the only guarantee that something will be done. The only lower priority things may be those improvements that require a lot of time and gives really small advantages.

(Question to Nadeo omitted for brevity)

The unfortunate truth is, prioritizing happens in every facet of our lives, whether you are consciously thinking about it or not. It is especially true for a software development team because they are writing software to make the company money. If they don't write the code that will please the most people, they won't make the most money. Again, sad, but true.

If Nadeo had unlimited resources they could accomplish the goal you seek, but since they have limited resources, they are forced to handle the highest priority problems. There are millions of players who have tried TrackMania and ShootMania... not all of them come report bugs, but there are several who do. If every bug ever reported were fixed in the order they were received, players would leave the game quickly because the largest pain points (including ones that may make the game unplayable) are not being fixed due to their order in the queue. So the solution isn't to prioritize in the order it was received, but to handle the ones that affect the most users and keep them from enjoying the game (I get it that all the defects are frustrating - I agree); but again, we're talking about how to do the best work with limited resources.

The real solution for getting your particular issues fixed, is to help raise the priority by getting others to also come complain about it. You see this happen in politics where people will petition (go get others to sign a document agreeing that a particular issue is a high-priority pain point for them) so that Nadeo understands this is a larger problem than one or a handful of players have reported. If you get enough, the priority will be raised and you have a higher likelihood the problem will get fixed. The truth is, Nadeo can't know that the problem is as large and high-priority of a problem unless they know how many players are truly affected by and are upset about it.

Back to your example, murderers take away lives that can't be replaced... wallets contain things that can. If the wallet issue is resolved and the murderer still continues to take lives, well, I think you can see where I'm going. Priority still wins. So find other players that are frustrated with the same glitch and encourage them to come bump your report thread. This will help Nadeo understand the reach of the problem and help them prioritize your issues higher in their queue. My apologies if you don't like the answer, but it's the nature of commercial software development.

Best of luck in your quest for the fixes.

[Hylis]

Good to see that priorities get attention and thanks for the explanation. There are just two little things I would like to adjust here.

First, this is much less a question of money than time. The goal is somehow to make the most advanced games, and it's a matter of speed. Would it be possible to make things faster with more money, we would do it, and anybody would do it, since it would assure you much more success. So, it's a race, and in races being bigger is not always an advantage. The size can become much more useful in the impact of things, but depending on product types, it's different, and for software development, size can even become an issue versus agility if wrongly managed.

Second, it's quite useless to have many people say the same things. It's too unrealiable to bet on number of complains to know what is the size of the problem. Of course, if it's a bug or something that prevents players to use the game accordingly to the system or something we have no other way to be aware, the users testimony are useful (ex: the connection issue of rat in car) but I have seen people try to raise priorities by bringing their mates to wish the same thing. When we read a wish, we evaluate the quality of it, how it integrates in the plan, how it can connect to other things and often look at if it brings something efficient for key players that themselves bring other things to other players. This is why I need to know the players and their role in the various group of players to better define the priority of the wishes. This part is the closest of what is my job on a regular basis.

[fng_thatoneguy]

Fair enough. You bring up good and valid points, and I should have clarified when I mentioned for rat_in_car to bring more people to complain that it be real people experiencing the issue, not just friends helping bump the thread. I guess my petition analogy was not a good one to use after all. My apologies.

Thank you, Hylis, for your clarification on how Nadeo prioritizes. Being a software developer myself, I realize it's never an easy thing and pleasing everyone will never happen because we all have our own vision of what your priorities should be. I also realize that it's impossible for us as outsiders to understand the entire picture of the issues brought to your attention and that you all do see that picture more clearly. Hopefully other players that aren't developers will understand that a little better and understand that not all things we report can always be highest priority.

[rat_in_car]

Everything seems right except that prioritization is important if you have hundred or thousands of bugs reported. But it's not in this case - I saw only few bug reports, maybe 10-15 or something like that, on forum. I don't count those who are related to bad hardware or false bugs / unncecessary requests (if player ask for missing option that is already in game) etc. List of bugs or improements requests is very short imo and prioritization in this case has no sense.