Boosters blacklisted!

[windows3.1]

the problem is that it seems that they do not respect nadeo 's rules for servers.
they have high ranked server wich you can't connect...nadeo don't have the time to control how the rules for the ladders of servers are respected so Dtc can continue to create that kind of servers.

I see. Now that's a problem. I can understand the activity of boosting itself (they just want to look uber pro with high lp numbers, despite what they say), but breaking the system in order to do so is a very bad thing.

[Smigles]

Haha people still care about ladder points ?

Didnt we establish a few years ago that the ladder system mostly rewards time spent, not skill ? Why do you think that none of the good drivers competed seriously in it in TMU and TMN ?

[bel1be]

Hello,

Firstly, they are not cheaters, or nadeo already banned them. That's not the case... They just found a tech to win more LP than normal players...

Funny comment this , are you really sure about this
than you invented the first game without cheaters

[jonthekiller]

Hello,

Firstly, they are not cheaters, or nadeo already banned them. That's not the case... They just found a tech to win more LP than normal players...

Funny comment this , are you really sure about this
than you invented the first game without cheaters

They aren't cheaters, he says true.

[Trackmaniack]

Hello,

Firstly, they are not cheaters, or nadeo already banned them. That's not the case... They just found a tech to win more LP than normal players...

Funny comment this , are you really sure about this
than you invented the first game without cheaters

They aren't cheaters, he says true.

Really, Jon? I would beg to differ with that erroneous statement...

[firstdriver]

I still can't get the list of boosters ... the link just gives me a 404 result

[GregN8]

Haha people still care about ladder points ?

Didnt we establish a few years ago that the ladder system mostly rewards time spent, not skill ? Why do you think that none of the good drivers competed seriously in it in TMU and TMN ?

So true it makes me sad.
Thankfully tm has much more to offer.

[killer606]

I still can't get the list of boosters ... the link just gives me a 404 result

I need it too...

[dogmatix]

Its really, really sad to see that those boosters are still there and not yet banned by Nadeo... Makes me wonder if there is any support left thats working on making TM2 better or if they just exploited the great community as betatesters and now dont care anymore what happens to the game... I mean, just take one look at the Top MP Ranks and you know who are the cheaters...

I mean I really dont care about the LPs, but many new players do and when they see 10 players named rip Dawid (making fun of the real Dawid who is a very good driver and currently named "GTFO COPIES") in the top 12 I can easily see those ppl lose interest when they realize that Nadeo doesn't give a shit if there are cheaters in the game.

I'm sorry for the wall of text that follows and the whiny rant quality of it, but this has been bugging me for a while and this comment about how "new players care about LPs and the fact that 10 players tagged "RIP Dawid" turn us off couldn't be further from the truth as far as I'm concerned. So, while I can't claim to speak for everyone, here's the perspective of an actual NEW [to Canyon, anyway] player about things like Ladder Points and some other elements of the game that have led me to stop playing Canyon altogether, give up on TM2 until I see some new options available beyond the extremely limited world available in TM2/Canyon, and crawl back to TMUF, which, by the by, is, sadly, no longer the game I originally fell in love with thanks NOT to the "boosters" but to the extremely tiny group of players that Nadeo seems to be targeting to make happy these days.

In my case, I came late to the TMU party (United was already on the street, so I didn't play Nations or any previous incarnation.). Once I got into it, however, I absolutely loved it--save for 1 niggling little point--I absolutely despise everything about Stadium, Snow, and Bay driving. I'm not partiuclarly good at them and, no matter how much time I put in there, my improvement wasn't progressing to the point where it was worth spending more time on those. I didn't feel a need to get to worked up about it though because there were quite a number of servers out there dedicated to my favorite types of tracks--Rally and Coast. I spent all my time driving coast tracks because I think they're an utter blast and very challenging without being solely dependent on the hyperactive fast-twitch muscle crowd that tends to dominate the stadium tracks (as well as the first-person shooter world I came from, having played competitive Quake and Castle Wolfenstein for a quite a while.

I found coast tracks to be extremely challenging and I loved playing them. Then, things like a new wife and an even newer baby popped into my life and I got away from the game for a while. When I could finally carve out the time to play again, I was confused when this new "LP" score kept popping up. Much to my horror, I discovered that those damned Ladder Points were being used as the "toll gate" to get into servers. Ok, well, I'm not a great driver--and even when I have great--top 5 out of 25--runs, I hardly EVER seem to score any Ladder Points--e.g., people ranked well above me but finishing below me will score 130 LP after a race, and I get...nothing. I'm sure there's some arcane formula that explains how that works--but I've never been able to find it, so I have no idea what goes into earning those points.

But here's the kicker--since the introduction of Ladder Points, ALL (or at least the most frequently populated or with the most challenging track mix) the Coast-only servers seem to set a minimum of 40 or 60 THOUSAND LP to join. Now, I was a FAR better Coast driver than any other type and I sure as hell enjoyed it a lot more than all that "LOLZ" crap that seems to dominate most populated servers. But now, I'm locked out of playing on any of those servers and locked out of playing ANY multiplayer in the sort of tracks I like because I can't possibly accumulate that many LP on the Stadium servers that now dominate the world. I give up on multiplayer altogether because at least I can buy dozens of highly challenging coast tracks for the single player side. But, it's still a bummer, because I met some really cool folks on the Coast servers since that style seemed to attract a different sort of TM fan than many of the other environments. Oh well.

So, dejected, I move to Canyon...which I find a nice upgrade but an environment far closer to Stadium or Bay than to my beloved Coast. But, hey, I'll give it a shot...and that's when I discovered the completely idiotic 5 minute time limit break for running "official times." I appreciate that some of you are competitive--and skilled--enough that you don't want people spamming the standings. Now here's what it looks like to me: Hey, spectacular! Apparently not content with creating a caste system that ensured that a casual player like me is going to ALWAYS be stuck in the "noob ghetto" thanks to being unable to spend 40 hours/week devoted to JUST this game to rack up those completely meaningless LP, Nadeo decided to add a giant annoyance and impediment to the single-player game simply for the purpose of...what I don't know.

(I follwed the discussions here for a while until I saw too many people saying that 5-minute limit makes things "so much more realistic." I'm sorry but, that's complete bullshit. If "realism" matters, I wonder why you're playing an *arcade racer* instead of one of the hardcore racing sims. But, if realism is critical, then you should be posting "official" times the exact same way that pro racers do: exactly one time per annual racing season. If you wreck your car in qualifying, you MIGHT get to run in the "official" race. If you wreck or otherwise DNF in an official race, you're DONE on that track for this season. As a result, the whole 5-minute thing completely killed my desire to play ANY Canyon. I thought I read that it was changed in some later update, but the fact that it was in there to begin with told me that Nadeo is designing this game toward an altogether different target audience than me. I'll wait until the TM2 version of "United" comes out down the road and see if they've come back around to make the TM2 world interesting for the the more casual player.)

I've played a LOT of competitive team-based shooter games in leagues and I've seen what the impact of hacks can be. I've also seen how effective a well written--and also completely legal in competitive play--script can be. So far, unless someone has a better explanation for how these "boosters" are actually *cheating*, I don't see what the problem is. I can't understand how you'd think that "locked" servers are a violation of Nadeo's policies when they created the Ladder Point system for, as far as I can tell, absolutely NO other reason than to allow server admins to create a minimum threshold for excluding people from joining their servers. Surely doesn't seem to serve ANY other purpose in TMUF to the casual player like me. (The whining about coppers and planets is equally ridiculous; I'm a wretched driver, but I always had enough in my account to buy tracks, car models, and other little add-ons.

If I could figure out a way to boost my LPs into the 50k range without actually hacking (or putting in thousands upon thousands of hours that I just don't have these days), I'd do it in a HEARTBEAT solely so I can get back to racing the Coast tracks that I loved and was fairly competitive in (won author medals on most of the "black" coast tracks I downloaded and regularly held my own against some very good drivers online). There appears to be more than 2,000,000 TM players out there, and I think folks significantly overestimate how many of those 2M even NOTICE, let alone, give a damn who Dawid is or how his ego might be bruised by "haters and imitators." Those of you sitting high enough on the leaderboards to actually CARE about what the TM version of World of Warcraft's "gold farmers" (also annoying but not illegal) are doing are already FAR removed from the bulk of the players out there.