Maniaplanet Forum

Egophagus I love you for this post. This is what im trying to communicate for about a year now

Dear Ecophagus,

I understand you are mostly talking about ShootMania, right?

Well guess what, there is another game on the ManiaPlanet engine, which is called TrackMania.

And no offense, but WE WERE HERE FIRST (we were here more than 10 years ago, actually).

Did you know that the Beta 3 update broke down TrackMania's Platform mode? Would you like to know how? It is now impossible to Validate new maps for this mode. So, as much as I would like, I cannot finish my newest map, so I cannot publish it and no-one can play it.
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Furthermore, Nadeo have created a "carmixing" station (= you can use a car from one environment on a map from a different environment), and they have united all three existing environments in this station, so it should now theoretically be possible to run servers with all the environments (finally! we've been asking for it for 2 years!), but this new station has no official maps (they might have copied the existing White-Green-Blue-Red-Black maps from existing stations there...), plus of course this car-mixing is not available for the Platform mode.
So, how should someone who is Platform-oriented understand the recent update? For me, the game is now very much broken.
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Not to mention the dozens if not hundreds of bugs that we've patiently submitted to Nadeo over the years and we don't see them fixed.
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Joader wrote:Egophagus I love you for this post. This is what im trying to communicate for about a year now

... just as we are trying to convince Nadeo to fix our game. Nothing groundbreaking, just fixing the silly bugs that are in the game. Things like "The timer of the map intro starts counting before the map is fully loaded, and the intro gets cut off once the timer assumes we are at the end, even though we are not."

You have to understand one thing: WE ARE THE CUSTOMERS. We paid for it. We were promised a fully functional product, but instead, at least as far as ManiaPlanet is considered, we are still in beta.

Did you know it is not possible to get rid of Stations? I would very much like to remove the entirety of ShootMania, but alas, it still is there.

Did you know that if there is some update for Shootmania, which I don't play, I still have to download that patch and install it?

The whole ManiaLink thing is very confusing; it is much easier to go to Mania-Exchange and get things there, then to try to navigate through ManiaLink (I especially like how you move the mouse cursor to the top to perhaps edit the link address, but the volume/resolution/settings panel pops up instead and things get very messy).

New features are added without documentation. I would very much like to add Medal ghosts to my maps, but no, Nadeo have decided that these will only be available for complete Map Packs, so I would first have to create a map pack (campaign), then there is some undocumented system for recording the ghosts, which keeps telling me "Too slow" or "Too fast", and I still don't know what to do after that.

Sorry, I'm ranting again. It's just so easy to slip into ranting-mode when it comes to ManiaPlanet.

Alcator wrote:Dear Ecophagus,

I understand you are mostly talking about ShootMania, right?

Well guess what, there is another game on the ManiaPlanet engine, which is called TrackMania.

And no offense, but WE WERE HERE FIRST (we were here more than 10 years ago, actually).

Hi Alcator,

I haven't played any other Mania Game, that's right. But I think we are in this together now, like it or not. I understand you: Without the existence of Shootmania your game would be in a much better state now, even if Nadeo has seperate teams for both titles. They just do too much at once. Good god, would I be pissed to play a game which is almost a decade old and still has so many crucial bugs and missing features. A sad outcome for a so-called "community game". Somewhere on this forum a guy said someting like: "I don't know many studios making multiplayer games that are bugfree as Shootmania, look at Battlefield 4!" I had a good laugh. I'd like to see the amount of lines of code compared to each other. Then people go like: "Yes, but Nadeo is a small studio!!" I tell you what: If you are a small studio, don't agree to develop 3 games at once. It is really that simple. And if you think a community portal would be great, so you can gather players around the world on a single portal which has all your cool games, please, for the love of god: make it modular! Make sure you can connect and disconnect single games easily without interefering the other games.
Mania Planet is a bugged, awkward, ugly nightmare of user experience. It lacks tons of comfort features online games had 15 years ago. Nadeo should be proud that players play their games despite of Mania Planet . It really speaks for their games. As the inherent design flaws of this online community platform speak for Nadeo's way to work.

If I had only more time, I'd do the following:
1.) Set up a free bugtracker like "Mantis"
2.) Invite other players to help (English required)
3.) Report all the known bugs in there as it should be: Complete bug description, steps to reproduce, expected result, bug class (minor, major, critical etc.), error frequency (once, sometimes, always etc.), attached examples (screenshots, logfiles)
4.) Report missing features (not missing content but missing functionality of already existing stuff)
5.) Prioritize everything by votes from the players
6.) Serve it on a silver plate to Nadeo

I expect around 300-400 tickets for Shootmania alone. As I said, unfortunately I don't have the time, working 45h per week. And frankly, I don't believe Shootmania can recover from the player loss anymore. But yeah, this would have been the required thing to do. In this regard we all have failed. Instead, community experts like Soprah praying for patience and optimism (nothing personal man, I'm sure you're a good guy).