A Love Letter to Trackmania
I play a lot of TrackMania & build a lot of maps.
I love Cup of the Day, the daily competition of ~2,200-3,500 players. We hunt a map for 15 minutes & qualify with the fastest time we set. Divisions are created with 64 players in each. Div 1 is the 64 players who drove the 64 fastest times.
During qualis, I'm competing against 2,000+ other players to get into the best division I can. Though, this part really feels like a competition against myself. I'm usually div 15 - 25, so I feel extra good about getting, like, 18 or better. That means I played well today.
Once qualis are over, we warmup, have a no-knockout round (Where I always drive backward for fun, and a few other players do too). The next round will knock out the 4 players with the slowest times. Each round knocks out 4 players until top 16, then 2 players until top 8, then 1 gets knocked each time.
I love this format. Because even if I'm slow today (relative to the 2,000+ other players), I get to compete against 63 other players who drove about the same time I did.
In slower divisions (~15+), it's a competition of consistency & avoiding bonks. Knockouts most rounds are determined by who fucked up really bad, not by who drove the slowest clean run. Top 8 is still heavy with bonks (probably because players are more pressured to drive fast), but there are some rounds where everybody drives a clean run (no crashes & no major mistakes causing big slowdowns), and it's genuinely a competition of speed.
Those rounds feel incredible. They're fun to watch. There's high tension. Anything could happen.
Once you (or someone else) crashes, it's just not as exciting.
Most days during qualis and in cup, I play "bonkless", which I mean as: I intentionally drive slower lines, I release the gas more, use a slower technique for drifting, and make other speed sacrifices in order to reduce my chances of crashing.
Some days, like today, I'm feeling good about a map or I'm just in a risky kind of mood, so I drive as fast as I can, every single round. I take risks constantly.
I'm disappointed if I get knocked out before top 16. One, because I want myself to play well and make good decisions (risk the appropriate amount). Two, because I love cup and I want to play. It's a really important part of my day that takes me from a half-human to being able to function and focus on unfun things. And it puts me in a good mood.
When the tournament isn't going, you can join a COTD server and hang out with other players and just hunt. Just drive again and again, trying to get the best time you want to go for. And you can chat with other chatters. It's lovely & people are usually so wholesome in TM.
I used to do that for one or two sessions almost every day after cup. A session runs for 30 minutes (iirc), and there's a "winner" at the end of each session - whomever drove the fastest time.
I don't care about the session winner. I'm not competing for it, and I couldn't if I wanted to. These hangout servers are mixed skill levels, which is awesome. I play with div 1 players who have thousands of hours, div 32 players who started last week (some div 32 players do have hundreds of hours though, and I occasionally get div32 on a bad day or map that's not my style), and a lot of skill levels in between.
It's cool as hell. But it also means that I have zero chance of beating the div1-div8 players in a session. And anyway, I'm not sure it would feel like much of an achievement. The vibe in the hangout is not of competing against eachother. Instead, we hunt medals and personal bests.
The Map's Author must validate their map by completing it. They can try again and again to get the fastest time their hands will allow. If a player beats this Author Time, they get an Author Medal on the map. It's quite an achievement on most Cup of the Day maps, which have Author Times that are extremely hunted by very fast racers.
I've only earned one Author Time in 10 months of near-daily cup participation, and occasional hunting. I've captured 3-5 other ATs that were pretty slow & easy to get.
But, there are Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals. These are set automatically by the game, based on the Author Time, but the map Author can set Gold, Silver, and Bronze to be whatever they want, as long as Gold is slower than AT, Silver slower than Gold, etc.
It is often a strong achievement to get the Gold medal, at least for me, and this is usually my target if I'm hunting COTD. Once I've got the medal, I might keep hunting, just knowing I've got more in me. Other players might aim for Silver or Bronze based on their skill level & what the best of their abilities is.
Then there are 25 campaign maps each season, which also have AT, Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals.
There is also a campaign leader-board where the most dedicated and fastest players compete for the #1 spot by getting world record on as many maps as they can. Of course I'm not participating in this.
But I do like to check out the campaign maps. A lot of them are kind of boring. There's a bunch of different styles, and they tend to have a certain feel to them. They're good, but they're ... corporate, in a way. They feel like they're built for the masses, not for 5 people to nerd out on & obsess over.
While campaign is part of the mainstream TM culture, and I do want to be part of that, I'm not that motivated to play it. I played the first 20 maps last season (Summer 2024), but didn't unlock the last 5 maps, because 2 of the gold times were super hard. You need 20 gold medals to unlock the last 5 maps. I just get bored, and I have no community to compete with across the whole campaign or even on individual maps. I'm just ... somewhere in the pack, several thousand places away from first.
I play a lot of Map Review. Map Review is a server where players hang out and play each other's maps. You're supposed to submit potential Cup of the Day maps to Map Review, where they get a rating of 1-5 stars, and Nadeo (the company that makes Trackmania) will review and select some to be Cup of the Day maps.
People (self included) submit a lot of different maps to Map Review. You can get feedback on a map you haven't finished yet, or something you're testing out. You can just share a map that you built because you wanna play it with other people or show it off (I think this is about half the submissions).
People submit long maps, short maps, troll maps and lol maps, kacky maps and good maps, maps without scenery, and maps with too much. It's awesome. It's so fun. And I like to hang out & just play. Each map comes through, we play it for 3 minutes, chat, vote 1-5 stars, and move on to the next map.
But sometimes I play a map that I absolutely love, I save it to my Favorites, and I hunt it later. (I also save lots of maps I don't hunt later)
Usually, I save maps that I know I can get World Record on if I really put my heart into it, or that I suspect I can cut. I rarely save maps that are unfinished, since my records won't carry over to new iterations of the map. Finding a cut is extremely fun though. It's often brain-rot (ex: respawning over-and-over again to retry a trick 7 seconds into a 10 second map, with a success rate of 5% or much, much less), but there's something really satisfying and rewarding about it.
I really enjoy building maps, too. It's a creative outlet for me, and I love driving my maps. I just build what feels good to me, so from my perspective, they're typically some of the best maps. Most people don't like them lol.
And objectively, they're often bad maps - little to no scenery (though I almost always add bears!), respawns are bad, no safe lines, sometimes extremely difficult, no signs to tell you where to go, etc. But none of that really matters if it feels good to me to learn and drive the route.
I will hunt my own maps extensively to set a good AT sometimes. Partially because it is fun to compete against myself & perform at my highest level, partially because I want it to be a competition between me and other players who are trying to beat AT, and maybe sometimes because I want to see what my map looks like when driven by a top level player.
Other times, I just wanted to try out an idea, or I don't love the map, or I just don't feel like hunting it. I still share those in Map Review & upload them to Trackmania Exchange (amazing 3rd party site for TM community, forums, map sharing) and to my ReedyBear club in-game (built-in support for map sharing but it sucks), but I'm just not invested enough in them to hunt, and it's not a ton of fun for me to hunt them.
Building maps, a huge motivation is the potential of other people playing them. I love to see that somebody has played my map, and that they probably spent some time hunting it (either bc it's really hard or because their time is really good).
Maps are art, and art is for sharing.
I love when other people engage with my art, and especially when they enjoy it. Even when people don't like my map, I enjoy seeing what it's like for them - watching them drive it. Sometimes it's hilarious how awful the track is and the awful things it makes their car do. Other times, it's a learning experience - A trick is way harder than I intended, or something isn't as obvious as I thought.
Other times, it's people just driving it, somewhat successfully, and having a good time. Those are my favorite, but it's honestly all good except for rage quitting.
Sometimes I upload YouTube videos about a Trackmania achievement of mine, or about a map I made & am proud of, or just something in-game I'm excited about.
Of course, it would be cool if they blew up and I could get paid for playing my favorite game, but that's not what it's for. I genuinely don't want to be a professional YouTuber. I share things I love. I want people to see them because I'm excited about them. I share videos about my maps, in part, because I want people to play my maps.
I create things I love, and I share them so other people can enjoy them too.
I compete against myself, to do the best that I reasonably can. (I do recognize my limit in-game, and I don't go for AT or WR when it's not achievable for me. Maybe in a year or two, when my skill is higher.)
I haven't mentioned it, but I learn. It's so exciting to hunt a COTD map when it has some weird or new or interesting mechanic. Or some maps will really help train a skill I'm bad at, like brake-tap-drifts or backward speed-slides.
I also love chilling with other TM players. I love this game so much, and I can't really share that love with people who don't play TM. Granted, I do share some stories with my besties, but they can't get excited the way I do, because they don't play TM. They can enjoy the story, but not the experience.
The chats are good too. Most people in TM are just wholesome and kind. And when there is a a jerk, they're usually ignored, or the conflict gets resolved pretty reasonably. I think a lot of us are old lol. I'm in my 30s & I've had some chats about all the old tech we (racers in our 30s) have nostalgia for.
And it's also hella fun to compete within my division in COTD. It's both exciting because I'm pushing myself, I'm practicing focus, I'm trying to be consistent, I'm trying to make good decisions, AND I'm competing against peers in my skill range who are doing the same thing.
I also share maps to Trackmania Exchange's Monthly Track Competition. That's a guaranteed 5-10 eyeballs on my map, and there's a restrictive theme that can be fun to build for.
Do I need a conclusion? I set out to tie my Trackmania gameplay into questions about Competition, Purpose, and Community. But it's more of a Love Letter to Trackmania.
If I want to pull from this original intent, I'd say that my motivations change day-to-day, but having a community of peers is incredibly important for me. I wouldn't care much for cup without the built-in community features (the chatting). This brings a depth and fullness that Rocket League lacks.
I love the competition. I play Rocket League almost purely for competition, because there's no meaningful chatting or building of rapport in RL. I wouldn't build many TM maps if I didn't expect someone else to play them. I like to push myself to my limits & see the best I have to offer. I like to hang out. And I like to just play and have fun. I also like to have achievable goals (medal times) to pursue, both as a means to push myself, and as a stopping point to say this is enough.
I also think about how ... if I'm able to play so much Trackmania, why am I not able to do so many other things that require focus & attention? That's a combination of factors that I might want to explore more, to compare & contrast. A lot of it is mental illness (likely anxiety disorder), but maybe I could use this TM knowledge to help me navigate and accommodate that illness.
P.S. It also makes me happy to see my bear counter go up on bear blog. I don't need a million eyeballs, but it's nice to know I was seen, even better to know I was enjoyed.
P.P.S There's no pressure to be a chatter when hanging out in TM. If I wanna chat, I chat. If not, I don't. There's usually people talking either way, and it's very easy-going. I'm not sure if irl community spaces have this feature. Certainly not as much.