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I've dropped a request to join Goon prix (uPlay name being magimix2000). I'm happy calling myself wholly new to this franchise (I suspect the few hours I spent with Trackmania Turbo 2 on PS4 don't count for much). The game's approach to getting new players up to speed with how to play the game reminds me of *old* Trials. "Here's a track illustrating some key concept or technique. You'll know when you've started to get some kind of a handle on what that might actually be when you get a good medal time. Or maybe you won't. I've done all I can..." Edit: But the fact is I found myself *grinding* those training tracks, really wanting to learn what needed to be learned. Improving times until I just can't anymore, for now. Since it seemed to be scratching some of the same itches that stuff like Trials can scratch, decided to take the plunge and go full-on Club access. magimix fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 16:01
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Sikreci posted:Yeah same. I was actually planning to just play the free version to see if I liked the franchise before buying some older ones on the Steam sale but I just ended up falling in love with this one. Is "author medal" the tier up from Gold (like 'platinum' or 'diamond' in Trials)? I've still a few of the training tracks to go through; the ones I've see so far that consistently stump me in terms of 'getting' the technique enough to gold it are ones with icey surfaces. For example, the very first training track that introduces you to ice... On my first run, I (fluked) a silver. Not only have I not golded that one, I've not even managed to re-achieve that original time, let alone improve it! I *clearly* don't grok that surface at the moment.
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Jul 8, 2020 16:18
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How crashy are people finding this game, incidentally. Now I'm branching out of the training tracks, and connecting to servers, I've had 2 CTDs and a 3rd crash so hard I had to physically restart my machine 
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Jul 8, 2020 17:28
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StoryTime posted:No CTDs, but I've had some weird glitches where the game suddenly refuses to load tracks in solo mode. Restarting the game helps sometimes. There was a while where all the checkpoint times claimed that I had both cleared the track in .001 second, and that I was also improving on that time, but that got fixed by a patch pretty quickly. This game definitely seems to be a work in progress. I got in some quality time this evening, and am happy to say this time round the experience was crash/glitch free in every respect. Now I feel like the game is getting a chance to show me its qualities. Helps that I'm starting to figure out what various bits and bobs mean, as well as building some expectations about what the game is supposed to be doing at different points. I'd like to say that it all started coming together, and I raced well, but franky, my bar was finishing a given match inside the top 50% of racers! I did get up to 5th rank once! For a few seconds I continue to not 'get' ice 
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Jul 9, 2020 20:13
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What is a good club to join, or a good term to search for, to find tracks that are suitable for newbs learning the game? I feel like I've had a bit of a bad run recently, jumping into clubs, and onto servers, where the tracks are, from my untrained eye, lovely, inscrutable bollocks. I'm sure the tracks aren't *bad* (though I do dislike tracks that aren't well *readable*, same as in Trials), but there is zero point in bashing my head against the Trackmania version of a Trials ninja track, because for my current skill level, I simply won't be able to learn anything. Trials at least gives you a hundred-plus tracks across multiple skill-tiers for you to cut your teeth on. The handful of training tracks, and the summer events tracks, aren't as effective, in terms of learning the ropes.
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Jul 14, 2020 18:45
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Jehde posted:Of course there's a thread for this, it's a pretty good iteration of Trackmania. I instantly fell in love with the raised track parts, but the daily tracks have turned out to be pretty fun as well. It's always great to hear people having trouble with the ice, the bobsled track parts can be pretty fun in their own way. I'm gradually vibing more with the game. Obviously part of that is just getting used to the mechanics of driving, but that goes without saying. I'd say the greatest "challenge" has been getting used to, as it were, the way you are expected to play. For example, early on I struggled a bit with the notion of jumping into a server to get a measily few minutes to bash my head at a track that I can't figure out how to finish at all. What use is 5 minutes of fruitless mooching about not knowing what do do, or how to beat an obstacle. In trials, I'd just grind a track over and over, for hours sometimes, figuring things out on my own terms. But the expectation in TM is that you'll stay on that server, and you'll rotate back onto the track, and hopefully the next 5 minute try-out sees you get a little bit further, be a little bit faster. I definitely began to enjoy the game more as I made peace with those expectations. I also started to play the game more and more, and the ratio of 'solo' vs 'online' shifted almost entirely to 'online'. Those 5 minutes spent on a track I can't even finish stopped being something that raised my hackles, because I learned to go with the flow. The *other* thing I did was realise that sometimes I need *digital throttle*. The default controller mappings are great, and it is enjoyably playable with analogue throttle and brake, but often, if you aren't using digital throttle, you are just hamstringing yourself. There are a *bunch* of gold and author medals I now have that solely came down to me racing the track with digital throttle instead of analogue.
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Jul 22, 2020 16:52
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Arsonide posted:One goes and one stops. Oh, come oooooooooOOooooon!  Give us the secret sauce for reliably inducing slides, and controlling them reliably!So... Did today's update, like, turn on skill-based match-making or something? I'm finding myself placed in pools of players whereby I'm finishing much higher than I used to. Even starting to see top-5 finishes! I'm having to earn them, so be sure. But they are *there*. Earlier on, my bar was, 'did I finish inside the top 50%?' I'm continuing to vibe ever more with the game. That drive to squeeze out the best possible run, so long as there are seconds left to do it... And really reacting to how other racers are doing, and really, really not wanting to fall down the ranks if at all possible.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:52
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~Coxy posted:Why can you not report the 1 second times at the tops of the leaderboards when the match ends. There is a *bunch* of messed up stuff happening with online play at the moment. Was it one player in particular that you saw with impossibly short times, or was there a fair amount of it? Certainly when I was playing last night I had a healthy dose of: * Finishing matches with a negative time * Normal checkpoints ending the race, seemingly at random * Multi-lap races absolutely unable to go beyond the first lap * Checkpoints giving absurd deltas * Player ghosts doing just about anything other than tracing out what a given player did This was affecting TotD, Arcade, and all the player servers I tried hopping onto. The 'negative time' one was especially annoying, because it meant you couldn't get a trophy for the time you actually managed; it just borked that run entirely. A close second to that being the fact that the checkpoint mess would give you wholly erroneous medals/PBs (hopefully it is something Nadeo can clean up, or is that asking too much? Red Lynx would occasionally do sweeps of leaderboards to fix or remove obviously busted times). I saw some chat that implied that it is an issue with a specific version of the server software.
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Jul 29, 2020 07:26
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~Coxy posted:Oh, I didn't actually know that Trackmania supported laps. (One of the rotations I played was a Mario Kart server so I just assumed that the "normal checkpoint ends the race" was a limitation in the track editor.) That explains some of the weird behaviour I saw last night. I'd put that down to whatever is borked with the servers at the moment. The negative times I saw (and got myself at times) exhibited similar to what you describe - the multiple players having negative times frequently having the *same* negative time. Usually in a range of -1.xxx to -1.5xx or something like that.
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Jul 29, 2020 07:36
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It's funny not funny I was spending some time earlier just doing on-line campaign, and while there were definitely still issues (ghosts wigging out, for example), I was reliably getting runs in, and getting reliable, legit times. Oh, they're on the case perhaps, I thought to myself. Then I hopped onto the TotD server, and HOLY gently caress, what a nightmare. A nightmare! Crazy frame drops (down to 22fps at one point!), and while I managed to get at least a single run in, I then fell foul of the negative-time thing. But not just me. Oh no. *Everyone*. And then the game crashed.  Today's track seems neat, but, well, think I'll stick to 'solo' play for now. Edit: That said, I did see a tweet just now that indicates they have some fixes soon to deploy. Fingers and toes crossed.
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Jul 29, 2020 18:22
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Entropist posted:TM has never been very suited for console since it's all about customization. The TOTDs now also tend to be modded to hell with custom blocks. They did release TM Turbo on console as more of a fixed game that was more about completing the campaign. I feel like there is a middle ground there, in principle. Not that I'm saying it would happen; just musing... Skins? People make wildly creative stuff with vehicle skins in plenty of games (Forza, for example). Custom tracks? Trials on every platform ships with the same editor used to create the campaign tracks, with global, cross-platform track sharing. Custom server software would be a PC only thing, but if the platform holder isn't hosting the servers, then I don't see that'd it'd intrinsically preclude console players *connecting* to it, assuming this was mediated via a publisher-managed gateway. The thing where the publisher is providing the hosted servers, less of an issue. Custom soundtracks would be a big issue for platform holders though, I'd imagine. I played a bunch of TM Turbo on PS4. A fine enough game, but the specific implementation of gating of access to tracks as you progressed struck me as needlessly hardcore, compared to Trials (pre Trials Rising, which does its own dumb, different thing). magimix fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 29, 2020 |
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Jul 29, 2020 19:40
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