The Elective.
TL;DR: Just my showerthoughts. Feel free to skip reading
In brief I feel the community has offered a lot of backlash for decisions Nadeo has made recently, without (in my opinion) nuance. I will try to lay out some of the issues, what restrictions Nadeo has, and based on this give my take on what would meaningfully improve the user experience.
Background: Going further back there has been a wide gap between Trackmania for the casuals and Trackmania for the "Pro's". The "steps" if you can call them that usually goes
Training campaign -> weekly shorts / campaign 10 -> campaign - 11-25 -> COTD -> competition maps
Unlike many other games, Trackmania lacks a "ladder", yes you can play "ranked" but that does not teach you how to play tougher maps. Because the steps above are very coarse, it leads to people saying for instance COTD maps are both too easy (snoozefest) and too hard at the same time.
To bridge the gap, and make esports feel more as a part of the game Nadeo brought in the 5 esports map as a replacement for black maps. This means the ladder above now looks like this
Training campaign -> weekly shorts / campaign 10 -> campaign - 11-20 -> esport
Which, of course caused an outcry the steep ladder become a sharp 200m straight up jump for many.
In addion COTD is not supposed to be for PRO players, but the maps are too hard for very new beginners. Leading to most COTD maps to look, feel and play the same. In order not to "offend" any groups. Anything "new" or "unorthodox" is culled by the star system / map review system.
Constraints:
- Nadeo has basically 0 developers working on this game
- There is only one person picking COTD maps and Weekly shorts map and being a community manager. This includes overseeing the campaign and pro maps (if i understand it correctly) as well as managing the social media stuff.
We can dislike the constraints all we want, but this is the lay of the land. Spelling out what this means is that Phoebe is under a lot pressure, and has limited time to spend on COTD / Weekly short selections etc etc etc.
Proposal:
In the trackmania discord we elect 4-5 community members on a year / half year basis. These will suggest and make long term plans for both COTD and Weekly shorts, themed weeks, special days, asking mappers to map, etc etc etc. Ensuring Troll COTD actually exists, maybe even putting an "easier" map on mondays and a "harder" map on friday.
Perhaps most important of all, suggest maps outside map review for COTD / Weekly shorts as long as they generally fit the mold, and has been played by less than X players. Now that mold, has to be flexible and broader than what it is today.
Nadeo or specifically Phoebe has the final say vote / veto on any map, period. But Nadeo would ideally just oversee this, and approve instead of having to select, playtest, review etc hundred of maps. Benefits:
- Maybe this would give Nadeo enough time and resources to go up to 35 maps in a campagin. Ideally 25 normal maps (including the "standard" black maps) 5 ALT car maps and 5 pro maps. One could hope that these 5 pro maps were E (easy) versions we had earlier, but yeah hard to say. Then the pro pro maps have no cam changes and are the harder version.
- More variety in both COTD and weekly shorts ideally
However, this hinges on Nadeo actually trusting the community enough here. A trust, I dont think exists unfortunately. But if Nadeo could swallow some camels, and actually trust the community I think it would benefit them both greatly.