Maniaplanet Forum

Ok, so I realise I might be in a minority here, but I LOVE hotseat mode in Trackmania 1 and 2. For many years my friends and I have rounded off an evenings entertainment with a hot-seat tournement on Trackmania. When Trackmania 2 Lagoon came out I bought it the same day and immediately organised an evenings gaming... only to be bitterly disappointed that hotseat mode is utterly broken not just in Lagoon but all Trackmania 2 titles!

How is Hotseat broken... Let's start with setting it up. First of all we see this:-

hotseat-wtf-1 by videogameperfection, on Flickr

Ok so that's new.. "SCRIPT PARAMETERS"... and load and save.. I just want to play hotseat... Oh well I guess I click on the Plus button on the square and add a track... well apparently not...

hotseat-wtf-2 by videogameperfection, on Flickr

What the heck is this? No matter where I browse I can't add any tracks, all it ever says is this "no appropriate media"...

At this point if one clicks around randomly you might stumble across this:-

hotseat-wtf-3 by videogameperfection, on Flickr

This is what we get if we click "Load". though we can only see track set A B and C... what about the rest? What is Lagoon even doing here? This is Canyon!

hotseat-wtf-4jpg by videogameperfection, on Flickr

All right so we can't add any downloaded tracks and only tracks from set A B and C... that sucks... at least we can play though.... but that's not where the weird problems stop... now when we start a hot seat game I have to manually type all the players names in.. why is this? Before my buddies could create profiles and choose their icons.. (in Trackmania 1 they can choose cars too, but that never worked in Trackmania 2.. oh well). Still, this is a minor issue I suppose compared to the mess illustrated above... it's not the only weird thing going on either...

hotseat-wtf-5jpg by videogameperfection, on Flickr

What is this? Why does it say "Laps" when I cross the first checkpoint? What is that jerry can icon indicating? What have you done to our beloved hot seat mode??????



I'm so disappointed that the devs went and ruined hotseat mode... please please could you fix it? It can't be that much work to fix and it'd really make a long time fan and customer very happy.

Thank you for your time! I do still love Trackmania but this is really frustrating.

If you would have taken the time to search the forum a minimum, instead of wasting it for trying,
getting angry, and posting many screenshots, you would have noticed that the local play modes are not available since start of Maniaplanet 4, and that there is still some work to be done before they come possibly back. Unfortunately there is yet no indication.
Besides this there is a local play title which features the missing modes (only available if you have all Trackmania2 titles).

Wow, somewhat rude reply from someone supposedly representing the forum in an official capacity.

I did search the forum for "hotseat mode" and related searches, it threw up some results in a different language, sorry but I only speak English. There's nothing in the Steam release notes either to say "oh sorry these modes are broken". I don't regularly post here, I'm not a hardcore player.. sorry if I managed to miss that news.

While I'm disappointed I don't think I was impolite with my answer whatsoever. For them to release a Maniaplanet with such a regression is indeed very frustrating. I am a paying customer, I don't expect an update to break my favourite game mode.

Besides this there is a local play title which features the missing modes (only available if you have all Trackmania2 titles).

Would you be kind enough to point me in the direction of this? I do have all of the Trackmania 2 titles.

Sorry, I did not mean to be rude, but you have to admit you were angry with your post, and you could have avoided some of it by first searching - or asking here

Ah, sorry, with the extra title, I mixed up with the Splitscreen, which you can find here viewtopic.php?f=538&t=37493
It does not feature Hotseat mode unfortunately.

The only real workaround at the moment would be to use the final frozen version of Maniaplanet #3, where you can still play the local modes.
Link here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41242
Also beware that the online mutiplayer will be degrading there, the more servers will be updated to the newer version of the game engine.

Hope this helps!

P.S. I'm not official, Nadeo members have an orange nickname here. I'm here only during my leisure time.
Moderators have either red (global) or blue (country specific or community development based tool suforums)

Wow that's great I had no idea it was possible to go back to Maniaplanet 3! Thanks so much! I will give that a try tomorrow.

Can I have Maniaplanet 3 and 4 installed at the same time? I do occasionally play Trackmania online, and I've no problem just switching to MP3 for hotseat nights.

You can have both games installed at the same time, but not in the same folder.
Especially important is that you would have to make sure they don't share the same folders, namely the user data (in documents folder, but also the "Program Data" folder). You can modify the folders in the Launcher applicaton.

Besides this I would recommend you to use a local account only for Maniaplanet 3.

Just to be safe, do a backup of your existing files.

Understood, thank you.

I don't think it is very unreasonable to be angry with this though - something that used to work just fine is now pretty broken and/or super confusing. This post is still valuable feedback for Nadeo devs.

I agree with the original poster. This has been a regression of content and is inexcusable when you have paid for advertised content. Not too dissimilar to ordering a life time supply of tea and later being only served hot water.

I sincerely hope they reinstate this game mode as it was the only reason I bought all of the Track Mania titles and gatherings with friends have become less enjoyable without it. Fingers crossed they do the honourable thing and bring it back. I shouldn't be expected to retrograde my installation just to use game features.

And well done BuckoA51 for keeping your cool in the world of forum posting. A rare sight, I doth my hat in your direction.

So after a hectic month with work, I thought... hey maybe they fixed this! So I fired up Mania Planet... when I did this it downloaded a ton of updates and I got all excited but, nope.. hotseat mode is still broken.

I wonder why this game can't update like all my other Steam games too, automatically...