Trackmania Feedback (boring maps)
I sent the following feedback to Ubisoft (which hopefully makes its way to Nadeo).
Troll Cup today (Oct 1, 2025) was not a troll cup. It was a ridiculously normal cup, and it was quite boring. 2 or 3 players in my division said they were bored and quit. Several others complained of being bored. It should have been a regular cup. Last month's (Sept 1, 2025) was a better map but also belongs in regular cup, not troll cup. It was interesting tech (rally ice reactor) but honestly not a troll at all, and several other players shared the same sentiment in match chat last month.
And to be honest, cup of the day, in general, is so bland and boring. 90% of the time it feels like the same track I've already played over and over and over again. The tech, mixed, fullspeed, and other main track types that ya'll pick just aren't interesting. (though I do love the ice tracks pretty much every time)
Last year I played cup almost every day. This year, I've found myself losing interest in Trackmania because of how boring it has become playing, essentially, the same old track over and over.
And there's better tracks that come through map review. I used to submit tracks to map review myself and I'd play a lot of other people's good and interesting tracks, but the only ones that make it through are the boring ones. And on that note, I think the bar for map review is set way too high. I've never had a map reviewed by nadeo. I had two Shorts maps with about 50 reviews and a 4.0 average, and another with 36 reviews and a 4.0 average. I heard from other players that you needed even higher than 4.0. Some people had like 100+ ratings on their map with no nadeo review.
And I have two track of the day maps I submitted with about 3.5 avg rating, one with 27 reviews and the other 19 reviews. And I hear from people that you need like a 4.2 or 4.3 or better to even get a nadeo review. A rejection with feedback would be a bummer, but not even getting nadeo review is really frustrating.
I don't know if you all realize how brutal map review is, especially if you submit anything that's not entirely ordinary. It's demoralizing and discouraging, especially that Nadeo seems to have such a high bar to even review maps. And the sheer amount of time it takes to build a map (Pipe Safety took me 100+ hours, flippant took me about 40-50 hours, most my good maps take 20+ hours) has little bearing on how people will rate it. The actual quality of a map also has little bearing because many people just vote based on their personal tastes or a strict idea of what they think cup of the day should be.
And then once you've built your map, you need to spend literally hours submitting it to map review to get enough votes on it to matter. The only time you get enough votes to be worth submitting is when there's like a 20 minute queue time. And you need to submit probably 5 to 10 times. Otherwise you might get 2 or 3 votes at a time. Its been a couple months since I was last in map review, but the only time it is well populated since Shorts began is right before cup of the day, so the window for actually getting votes on the map is very slim.
And speaking of, Shorts tend to be fairly boring too, despite many super interesting tracks being submitted to map review. Some interesting maps make it through, but not very many.
It's also frustrating seeing the same (boring) mapper picked over-and-over again while my maps don't get reviewed and others' more interesting maps almost never get picked.
Anyway, I've been thinking these things for awhile. I mostly stopped playing cup of the day the last few months because of how standard (and boring) the tracks usually are, but I look forward to Troll Cup every month, but then today's was such a disappointment that I finally decided to send some feedback. Also, I think it's fine that there is a selection of standard (what i would call boring) maps. It just is so disappointing that there are so few non-standard (i.e. interesting) maps included.
Thank you for reading,
Reed (reedybear in game)