Some reflections about the solo mode

[7Alvin]

Yeah for the last issue, it's probably why E maps don't worth enough. So maybe we need multipliers only, or officials for everyone once the maps are unlocked or having all maps directly for more competitions.

[wiidesire-2]

I don't 'hunt' the maniaplanet solomode really, it's more a minimized programm meanwhile the other things which I do on my pc

And I thought I would be the only one

[EntropicLqd]

While I can understand Nadeo’s argument that a 5 minute wait between each official time run is to reduce server load I can’t help but feel that it would be a self-correcting problem.
Consider the scenario where your replay is submitted whenever you set a new record (as long as you’ve beaten gold – just to keep things slightly sane).

When the game was first released the traffic to the servers would be large for the first few weeks. Maybe some people would see some timeouts or submission errors because the servers were overloaded. Since submitting a new time is only the next race away it wouldn’t be a big deal (maybe annoying, but not as annoying as having to wait 5 minutes after an upload failure) and they could just retry – maybe they’d be even faster the second time.
After a few weeks most people would be approaching their limits in terms of driving an even better time and the traffic to the server would fall off dramatically.

So I suggest that always submitting an official time whenever you beat your personal best is a self-correcting problem in terms of server traffic. And if the server software that handles the replay uploads is written properly horizontal scalability would be trivial anyway.

The current scenario where you have to wait 5 minutes between official times succeeds in reducing traffic to the servers. Probably quite spectacularly, but also acts as a massive disincentive to even bother to try to set official times; especially on the harder “03” tracks which get very unforgiving. It also fails in that the game appears to always submit the replay to the server even when you haven’t set a new faster time.

I’m now at the point where setting a new official time on any of the tracks is probably going to take a few hours. And I almost never have that kind of time to dedicate to TM. And judging by the activity in the TM group I run for my friends with TM, they don’t have that kind of time either. So there’s no competition between us and no incentive to bother setting an official time because no-one else in the group is because it now takes too much time.

Whenever it was that I got TM-2 (ages ago) the 5 minute delay wasn’t too much of a burden. But now the thought of having to wait 5 minutes (and fail), and then another 5 minutes (and fail), and then another 5 minutes (and fail), and then....(etc) is enough to put me off playing the game altogether. And since the game itself is behaving in such a way that makes me reluctant to play it; I’m also not going to be playing on-line either.

It would probably be enough to have an option within a group that meant you could see everyones fastest practice times to get everyone playing again. It's much less fun trying to beat some random entity in Europe that it is a friend.

Just for the record, I really wouldn’t want a return to the “coppers for official mode” scenario. That just penalised people who didn’t have loads of coppers.

[Edster]

Just for the record, I really wouldn’t want a return to the “coppers for official mode” scenario. That just penalised people who didn’t have loads of coppers.

My problem is that I keep spending my Planets on buddies (I have about 200 I think) and that sets me back 150 each. I'm also not gaining as much planets because the servers I play on are sparsely populated. (Aside from the Lol map-type servers on Stadium, which I'm just not as into as longer maps in the game) So I don't want to have to spend currency on official times. Funnily enough, on the shorter maps waiting for official mode for 5 minutes can be really tiresome, but on C-D-E tracks I tend to find that I'm ready to try again after 2/3 runs at most, which is much more ideal.