Ruining the game before it's even released

[EnaiSiaion]

People go to TMX and they dont even have to go searching for tracks, all they have to do is visit the front page and find the ten best of the week and plop them onto their server. The top 10 itself is a popularity contest that the staff of the site have not bothered to even attempt to fix and the same 40 or so guys can give each other boosts to the top of the showcase while thousands of tracks are relatively invisible to the visitors.

True.
There was a thread about how the award system should be changed, and everyone posted stupid ideas like super-awards and mandatory replays before posting an award, but nobody even considered to get rid of the award system! But don't worry, the latest idea is a semi-random "try these" window that picks 10 tracks uploaded during the week, so as to reward trackspammers (with a 0.5% chance to get lucky instead of a 0.1% chance).

This is because the people running the show are already established so they get free downloads, and naturally they were all invited into beta 1 so they got a nice head start on making their tracks. A Ganjarider track got 20 awards during the first day while anyone else's track got 10 downloads. This is bullshit and it is almost pointless to make tracks for MX if you want more than a handful of downloads and zero comments.

It doesn't help that the best online tracks are simple, with no precision driving required to just finish and with no clever buggy transitions - exactly the opposite of the tracks that are (a/re)warded at TMX.

I agree, I dont like that trackmakers are trending towards the same kind of tracks that have been successful in TMF, but they are comfortable with that style which is why it pervades.

Supported by TMX. Remember the themes of just about every recent MTC: "use all surfaces", "use every block", "3 times reuse", ... guess what kind of tracks this promotes? Yes of course the same old transitional reuse REPETITIVE TRASH template maps!

[TGYoshi]

Soooo how is this related to the topic?
You're currently whining about TMX/MX instead of TM2.. And MX is something made by the community, not by Nadeo or something.

[Balmung]

Right, and who ruins the game? The Community, not Nadeo. When there is a Community Problem, than the Community must do something and with Sites like MX they have the possibilities in the own hands.

Some days ago someone ask why there so many tracks on MX that have so many awards and his own track not one. I say him exactly that above. If players could cheat, then they will cheat and nothing other is this when they push here maps with awards up. But that is a Community Problem, not a Game Problem. When you can rate something, than they will cheat for a good rating and no system can do anything against that.

[spookymunky]

Hmm.. this is a much deeper topic than I first thought after reading all the posts.. Basically from what I can see your main issue is with the server mods grabbing the top rated tracks and the rating system being biased. There is no perfect solution to this, to seperate the good from the useless out of a constant influx you need some form of voting, no one person could sit down and look at it all. The problem is 90% of people only take the time to vote if they love / hate the actual whatever in question, or they like / dislike the person who made it / outside influence, other people like / dislike something so they should too, or in the case of trackmania they dont like that particular style of track hehe... That is ignoring fake reviews / paid reviews etc etc..

The problem with trackmania is double fold since everyone has a different view of what the tracks should be like. For example you seem slightly derisive in particular towards full speed tracks and short tracks.. neither are exactly what I like, but in the case of lol tracks, I appretiate how with the decent tracks it is purely about geting one situation perfect like say hmm, earlier was playing one where whole 3 corners to the track but you had to use right amount of breaks, right amount of 2 wheels (whee, I love the new cars) to get round as fast as you can, over and over till you remember it , same goes for the fullspeed ones, have to get round corners by hitting apex at exactly the right point knowing that it should be possible instead of letting up off the gas / tapping the break etc.. It makes you a better driver in the trackmania world, and thats one of the biggest pulls of it, gets down into your core self improvement joy centre of the brain.. same area that releases sweet endorphins / dopamine for an accomplishment (usually sex / food / water etc, its easily tricked hehe)

Sorry, got sidetracked. Basically there is no real solution. One thing that kinda pops into my mind, although itd take some work, why not have community betatest servers that run every map that comes out, one for each genre/style I guess, completely random order, minimum of 3+ non consecutive (but within a 10 race timeframe) top 50% of winning races to vote, if that makes sense.. probably not, I am drunk .. basically if theres 20 players and you come in top ten 3 times within 10 games.. etc etc, for example 6th, 6th, 6th you can vote .. 9th,11th,15th,blahblah9th, 8th.. you can also vote. Throw in a webpage that only displays the top 5 but mainly the track of the day from each genre that have passed the test or soemthing. Add in some sort of evil equation depending on how long you played and how close your votes were to the average of everyone elses votes (should curb down on the love / hate impulse and also stop people getting friends to vote for theyr stuff) .. emm so best voter for genre every day gets a percentage of the websites profits from google adsense or whatever after the hosting and admin rights deducted, even if its just $1-10 per winner you would be surprised how many people will take part

hell, there are so many players.. a drunk idea like that could become a self sufficient reality in a matter of weeks.. thats how you destroy a site that you think is corrupt, wrong, detramentive etc, you dont sit and whine about it, destroy em , hell, could even make it into a daily tournament.. final of each day could be the person that wins on all 5 or 6 of the winning tracks and the winner gets 40% of the daily winnings.. I would take part even though I know its just a way of getting people to work for FA throw in some popularity and its not unfeasable to win $50 or something a day after a few weeks i guess.. really depends on people that are nice and "part of the community" not just keeping all the money

Not the best Idea, but an idea.. hopefully that is the kind of thing this topic was created for and maybe some others will add theyr own ideas ?.. we are the community, no point in crying that we suck, do something about it

*edit.. off subject. hehe* wtf nadeo / ubisoft, I almost forgot, this is my first post.. why oh why do people with a maniaplanet account have to register again to talk on the maniaplanet forums... it kinda takes the mystique of a I dunno planet idea created to bring all gamers together in one happy world.. just a thought

[krone6]

I like the above idea... Sounds possible.

I think this is why nadeo's doing a planet side server hosting. If i get it right then not enough planets for your server and it doesn't get put in the list, cuts down on spam etc. A system like that would only show servers that are either new, are kept up with, or active, which are pretty much all the same.

[metoxys]

To the topic: (for some reason I'm writing on a Nintendo 3DS so my typing speed is rather slow)
I do agree with everyone saying bad things about the server and the extremely overrated ganja/mra/eyebo tracks and stuff. It is ridiculously hard to get more known as a mapper if you upload a track which you spent a lot of effort working on and a track that is fun to drive on and it stays on the front page for ~3 minutes because of the 2.6*10^19 tracks that are uploaded every minute. Tracks that SOMEHOW manage to get 1 award to be displayed in the "Recently Awarded" thingy have a 0.5‰ chance to obtain more than one to practically stay longer in the list. Now, the tracks that stay long enough in the list eventually enter the BotW where they get 5 awards per second and, I guess, ridiculous numbers of downloads.

Now, because I am rather constructive Imma give suggestions against that:

• Limiting the number of tracks one can upload in a certain period of time
  Simple and effective, completely preventing trackspam and giving builders more time to improve their maps. A disadvantage of this that just came into my mind is an "upload day" because this might cause groups of people to upload 1 track in the same interval lool
• Display 10 random tracks function (hopefully 1 track per author and hopefully excluding BotW)
  Already suggested and I loved the suggestion
• Having to register in order to see BotW
  An idea that came to my mind while slowly writing this post. But I guess it won't be that effective with 700 active users Google Analytics (?; my Google Chrome says that they are on MX) displays while I am browsing the site it won't be as effective.

stopping here because my hand hurts like mad

[metoxys]

What I forgot,
what do some of you have against fullspeed? Canyon is made for fullspeed! It is fun and not particularly hard enough to be frustrating!

[zixxiz]

I dont see why there would be a need for track "spam" as the people that "spam" are generally uploading a whole collection that has been finished. That and I have not seen or heard of ill effects of track spam.

Fullspeed is boring and unexciting in its stadium and island incarnations, and in the case of some Canyon tracks (look no further than a certain track sitting atop MX). That said I have so far seen good fullspeed tracks out of Canyon that make use of a wide variety of blocks and routes, but I wouldnt go far as to say Canyon is made for fullspeed though it does support it well.

[Filipe1020]

i have a thing to say for you, trackmania 2 is still on BETA, soo you can expect things to be changed like Hylis said

Just make some great suggestions and bug reports soo things can be changed.

[EnaiSiaion]

Agreed on overrated tracks. I'm not familiar with MrA's tracks, but Ganjarider's old TMN tracks were unique because they had this thing called FLOW! back when everyone was derping around with random hairpins and lol-worthy jump tracks. However the old loop/wall FS doesn't work in canyon so his recent attempts are just flatout platform tracks with a few turns and lots of boring straights.

But they have the name Ganjarider on them so they automatically get 500 awards.

What's needed is PPO: a system where everyone can participate and earn karma by driving other tracks, then add their tracks to the jukebox. This worked perfectly: put in some effort and your tracks will be played. Alas, for some reason MX is a total rewrite instead of an upgrade of TMX so it's low priority and probably won't happen.