holding out hope
Trackmania is one of my favorite games ever. I like to sometimes play Cup of the Day, and there are a couple community events that I attend most weeks - a backward driving event & an ice map event.
One of my favorite things to do in Trackmania has been to build my own maps. A lot of them are fun little stupid things I threw together. Some are reasonably high quality maps that I'm hoping for others to play. I've sent a few maps to streamers as challenges before. And I've made a few Trial maps - extremely difficult maps that shouldn't be fun for anybody, but they're really fun bc Trackmania is full of masochists.
Well once in awhile, I make a really high quality map, that I want to try and get into Cup of the Day. One map is picked for each day, then at noon, 8pm, and 4am (u.s. central) there is a tournament where people play. There's a 15 minute qualifier to determine your division (each division has 64 players), and then people compete within their division, with some players getting knocked out each round for having the slowest times.
2,000 or so people play COTD almost every day. A lot of streamers play it regularly. And I have, for a very long time, wanted to get a map into COTD.
WELL. Historically, COTD has allowed a very limited set of maps. They're almost all created by the community, but there are a few basic styles that are generally accepted. It is rare that we would get anything remotely interesting or unique for COTD. After playing for a year or so, I started getting ridiculously bored with it because every single map started to feel like something I had already played 100 times before.
Well Nadeo added a Sunday Funday recently where we get more unique & interesting maps once per week. This has been amazing and has reignited my love for the game (i just lost The Game (if you know, you know)). Since returning to more regular play, I've also learned of the two previously mentioned community events which I'm now playing most weeks.
And since I've been playing again, I've been mapping again.
So I started this map called Bear's Valley. The entire map is one block wide (a single piece of track is 1 block X 1 block in size), which is ... unique. There have been quite a few "straight line" maps before, and I'm probably not the first person to make a one-block-wide map. The initial idea was inspired by a straight line map.
I've probably worked on it for 60 hours. I've crafted extremely beautiful & thoughtful scenery (you're in a valley, surrounded by mountainous walls). And I've put a great deal of effort into crafting a really nice track, that's really fun to drive.
But it is unique. I only make unique tracks. It is also somewhat difficult.
Now, we do get difficult maps in COTD sometimes. We get maps that are way harder than this one actually. And we do get unique maps sometimes. And I don't remotely understand how.
The one-block-wide feature isn't really what makes it unique though. It's more that ... well there are jumps and flips. It is what we call an "RPG" map. We get RPG maps from time to time & they are almost always my favorite maps. Because they're almost always unique & interesting & difficult & require you to actually learn something.
To get your map into COTD, it has to go through Map Review. You upload your map. Other players play it for up to 3 minutes at a time, then rate it 1 to 5 stars.
For maps to get COTD they generally have to have more than 4 stars, and they have to have a lot of votes (50+, i've heard). If they get high enough ratings & enough votes, then Nadeo staff review them and may select your track for COTD. If they don't, they select some tags to inform you as to why they rejected your map. But there's no descriptive communication.
I've submitted maps to Weekly Shorts before (5 new tracks each week), hit these goals, and literally never had a single map reviewed by Nadeo. It pisses me off, and it is discouraging.
But then back to Bear's Valley.
It is a really nice map. I submitted it to Map Review yesterday. I spent about an hour and a half sharing the map over & over as new players joined the Map Review server. All of MAYBE 12 people were on Map Review in that entire time. I think i got 5 votes. One 5 star. Two 3 stars. One 2 star. And one 1 star.
Watching people play the map ... well there is definitely a learning curve. 3 minutes isn't really enough time to learn it. And I feel like a lot of bad impressions come from not learning the map.
One person gave me actual feedback (which I'm extremely grateful for) and ... i don't know. It made me sad. Some of the feedback was to block off some of the scenery I built because it looks like it might be where you drive. And yeah, I get that - on your first 2 or 3 runs maybe. But then you LEARN THE MAP. This is a reality with a lot of COTD maps where the route takes a couple passes to literally know where you need to go.
Another piece of feedback was about how you gear up & gear down throughout the track - basically that you're not going roughly the same speed throughout the entire track. I don't even know what to say about that.
Look. I'm not mad at the person who gave me feedback. I do genuinely appreciate their feedback.
What I'm mad about is that Map Review is brutal, and the process for getting Nadeo to review a map is horrible. Not only do you have to spend tens of hours building your map, but then you have to spend many hours sitting in map review submitting your map over & over & over again until enough people have played it.
And then it only takes a handful of people giving it one or two stars to kill your chances of ever making it through.
And I feel like those downvotes almost exclusively come from taste. From the idea that COTD needs to be this very specific set of very standard style of maps.
As a reader, you're probably inclined to believe that my maps genuinely just aren't very good & people are downvoting them because they're bad maps.
Maybe. But I don't think that's it. I really do think it's a matter of taste.
And I didn't start this post to be pissed off, but as I talk through it I get pissed off.
I was trying to say ...
just that its really upsetting. I work so hard on my maps. They definitely are unique & nonstandard. But I put so much effort into making them fun to drive, into making them forgiving if you're not as skilled of a player as me, into making them beautiful.
And then I see someone comment on a YouTube video saying that they're upset people called their COTD map "low effort". This particular commenter said they spent 3-4 hours building their map. I've spent 50+. And a lot of the maps that make it into COTD do appear to be 50+ hour maps.
Some maps I play and there are just ... fundamental quality of life problems. Yet somehow they make it through map review & nadeo approves them. Or maps have that almost no scenery at all, maps that are little more than just track pieces & green/red arrows.
Then sometimes we get a map that is actually unique. And I don't understand how these maps ever make it through the map review process.
I'm discouraged. I'm sad. I'm irritated. I think their system for reviewing and approving maps genuinely sucks.
But the whole point of this post was actually to say that I'm trying to hold out hope. That I'm going to hold out hope.
I've made some changes to my map. I was receptive to the feedback. I added a "safe" route in one of the spots the feedback-giver had complained about (they complained that the section forces you to brake and lose all your momentum ... but they just hadn't figured out how to drive it yet, and it required no braking.) I added light-up borders on roads so it's a bit more obvious that you just need to drive forward. I added a wall in one section so that ... again people go forward ...
After making my updates, I sent it to map review and ... guess what? Nobody was there. So I'll have to try again later. It will take another hour or two of sitting in map review to see how people play it, to get a sense of what people struggle with.
My biggest frustration is that a lot of people seem to equate "map requires learning" with "map is bad". My second biggest frustration is that people seem to equate "map is non-standard" with "map is bad."
But anyway. I'll keep throwing it into map review. I'll see how people play it. I'll ask for and listen to feedback. I'll make changes. I will not compromise the vision of the map. I will not fundamentally change the map. But I will accommodate what I can, within reason.
And I'm going to hold out hope. I'm going to get discouraged when people are giving it bad ratings ... but then I'm going to hold out hope and keep trying. I don't want to be so easily defeated.