About Lagoon changes...

[riolu]

So, the long-awaited update has finally been released yesterday and without really having any hopes of seeing the big speedboost issue on Lagoon rollercoasters removed, I saw this:

Of particular note, it includes a fix to the Lagoon speed boost issues on the magnetic roads, that makes previous records obsolete: You can now drive a bit faster and improve your times...

A FIX to the speedboost issues? Hell yeah, good job Nadeo!

Since I am unable to play myself right now, I was simply asking a few people for some feedback about the changes and watched a few streams on Twitch to see if something really changed...
And it didn't.

All you did is increase overall speed gain on rollercoasters and funnily enough it didn't make a single change to the speedboost issues. Not a single change.

Negative aspects about increased rollercoaster speed:

• - Invalid times on 100% of Lagoon tracks with rollercoaster blocks. Especially regarding the solo campaign, where some times have already been pretty close to the limit, this is a slap into the face for every WR holder or active campaign player. It's only been a week since the release, so it's not that big of an issue in my eyes (in comparison to the Canyon desaster ). Yet, an avoidable issue.
  - Broken & unplayable campaign maps. Tracks which have already suffered from consistency issues (B07 hello) have now rendered unplayable because you are simply too fast in almost every attempt. Same applies to many other rollercoaster tracks as well where you actually have to brake now in order not to fly off. The already not-so-good solo campaign now turns out to be even less fun.
  - The mixture between higher speed and the yet existing speedboosts creates a giant gameplay mess. The speedboosts now appear to be even more overpowered than they used to be due to the higher speed.

Positive aspects about increased rollercoaster speed:

• - ???

What really boils my spaghetti is the fact that you're stating that you "fixed" the speedboost issue, but there was no fix at all. Instead, it just got worse and added extra problems. I simply cannot comprehend how you're able to take these decisions without being aware of what you actually change and what possible consequences are. It appears that there has been almost zero testing involved to this case, hence the outcome of this update. Instead of involving some expert players in order to investigate this issue, you have been working all alone and here you have the foreseeable outcome. I'm sorry to sound rude, but this is just irresponsible and doesn't really put a good light on you as developers.
The Lagoon community including me are still ready to help anytime in order to sort out this issue, but you need to broaden your horizon and actually test the things you're changing before you're deploying it to the public. Now there's just another mess to take care about which has clearly been avoidable. I am aware that you guys are working hard and we all appreciate it but that does not justify deploying supposedly "fixed" gameplay updates but instead just make it worse.
I hope that you're still continuing to investigate on this issue, now that I wrote this post which hopefully opens up your eyes.

Thanks for reading and feel free to give any input on this.

[CatWithScarf]

I agree with you in 100%.
My friend that recently started playing TM2 Lagoon said that he cant make a clean run on - A15 , B07 (as riolu mentioned) and B15 (for now i don't know if he will play more campaign now) cause flying off the rollercoaster blocks.
You should really test updates before publishing, or atleast give community members to try new fixes etc.
Almost every rollercoaster recrods were maxed and after an update was realesed - every 'maxed' time before update was just destroyed by speedboosting thingy.

I hope that it will be fixed for real soon.

Cheers

[Thrawn46]

I agree, especially B07 is broken and I fly off every single run because of too much speed :/

So yes, a real fix to actually remove the speedbugs would be much appreciated

[Topspin]

It appears that there has been almost zero testing involved to this case, hence the outcome of this update. Instead of involving some expert players in order to investigate this issue, you have been working all alone and here you have the foreseeable outcome.

I think, nearly all developers are very bad players of their own game; you can see it practically everywhere in any software company.
This is quite normal, since developers have not the time to build up a solid skill for their own gameplay, because they have their hands full with coding their game.
As a result, which is quite unfortunate, they are rather blind for some problems which players, who play the game every day with great passion, are confronted all the time.

Because of this, I highly agree with involving experienced players into the process of gameplay, especially for fixing the issue of speedboosts, which is in my opinion the most annoying and game breaking bug of all the 4 existing environments of Trackmania 2 at the moment.
And yes, the speedboost are still there, just as the earth still orbits the sun!

This has nothing to do with a lack of knowledge of developers; this would only be a smart joint venture of specialized people, which most probably will create a win-win situation, for both the developers, who want to sell a game as good as possible, and the players, who want to enjoy their game without any upsetting major gameplay bugs.