"ho i don't find the way, i rage so your map is out" MAN IT'S RPG ! xD

gg admins

Voyager006 says:
Disqualifying tracks because the authors' idea of a road trip is different than yours sounds quite harsh to me. People can have different interpretations of a theme, which result in different approaches to the challenge.

I totally agree with Voyager. Unlike explicit themes (Quantum Hourglass or Flatland for example), it is difficult to guess your expectations since everyone has its own definition of a road trip.

I myself did not submit a track this time, but if I had to make a road trip track then I would imagine a huge (very huge), futuristic and heterogeneous city with skyscrapers and things like that. Because for me it sounds like a road trip.

Anyway, acting the way you act is not going to encourage track builders to take part in next contests.

lul

ps: mx mtc sucks, check out this

This MTC is weird.
But i only played one of them and it's great.

Seriously, how hard is it to understand that a road trip involves some kind of displacement from the original toponym? A drive through a city can never be a road trip, no matter how large. Would you consider a "road trip" a 100km commute to work? Because that's what some people in LA have to do every day.

I thought that my approach to road trip was actually very lenient: A trip through roads. This does involve some VERY little details:
1.- You can't do it inside a village, town or city, because you're not going anywhere.
2.- There has to be a number of things to visit in one way or the other.

That's about it. Skyslide breaks detail 1, poupipomme and the other dude break detail 2. Rex barely complies with both, so it's in (there are some very interesting structures to sightsee and the displacements are very large). Snake complies with both, so it's in.

If it's that hard to understand a theme, and it's been in 3 out of 3 MTCs and always from the same people, then maybe we should make dumb themes like "jump" or "make a short track" or "put a start and a finish block somewhere".

Cancel, i guess?

Osaka, I share your point of view.

I just want to defend the guys who made a map in Stadium. If you remember, at the start of the contest I've said that it will be hard to make a map on Stadium for this theme. And if I said that it's because, in my point of view, you can't feel the road trip in stadium. Whatever you will make, you'll be in the same place all the time : the Stadium. So it's hard to say, the maps are great, there is a lot of work but they correspond not with this theme.

I don't know what you'll do for this contest, but I think you'll take the best decision.

Ok, time for me to chime in.

skyslide says:
One is generic RPG (with horrible wayfinding too) and as such not eligible (it takes place in a single village in its entirety, is there anybody who knows what a road trip is?)

horrible wayfinding, ok your opinion...

no roadtrip?
well the name says enought lol:
a normal fishing day, you start next to your fishing poles, then you take a roadtrip through the castle and the village in front, then you go back to start, roadtrip is over ... yey ... you also get the message at the end
"maybe a fish takes biten, lets go gome and check the fishing poles"

maybe a little story is missing..

I haven’t gotten a chance to look at your map, so correct me if I’m wrong here on these two points:
1. For this MTC, “Road Trip” seems to be less than a “let’s go to the local food store” and more of “Let’s do a long drive to a vacantion spot far away”. We are talking not just what the thing you’re doing is (driving on road), but for how long (and far) you’re doing it.
2. Even if we do call your map’s drive path a “road trip”, you said that you go through “the castle and village in front,” and then you would go back to the start. If I recall the rules...

FT»Osaka says:

Theme of the Month: Road Trip!
There are no start-finish block restrictions. However, if you start and finish in the same general area, you absolutely have to make it clear that you've moved along the way.

That part I put in bold seems to be a big reason why your map did not count. You didn’t leave the general area from how you have described your own map.

Micmo says:
"ho i don't find the way, i rage so your map is out" MAN IT'S RPG ! xD

gg admins

No, it’s not RPG. This MTC theme does not describe a traditional RPG track. Actually, it seems the official rules seem to practically ban a traditional RPG track. Part of the rules state:

FT»Osaka says:
Since the tracks are going to be very long we are expecting that you keep difficulty reasonable. Think that nobody is forced to spend a ton of time on your tracks

Whereas the Trackmania RPG blog, which seems to be a pretty reputable place for traditional RPG maps, they state this as to the definition of such a map:

Trackmania RPG Blog says:
Basically, an RPG track is a track which is often very long, very adventurous and very often has a mod. Many RPG tracks are also story tracks, or even mission tracks. RPG tracks consists of inside passages, tricks like pipe balancing, wallride balancing, difficult jumps and mazes.

(link)

Those tricks listed near the end are hard and can take a while to get through. Doesn’t really fit the rules that state that your map shouldn’t be that difficult. Mazes hurt more so because they are a massive time sink into learning the map. If I’m looking for a long, yet fun map, a maze will pretty much drag the rest of the map down, nearly invalidating any other design success with the map.

fredair.esu says:
lul

ps: mx mtc sucks, check out this

So basically because an MTC theme was more challenging creatively speaking and didn’t get a lot of submissions, we should abandon the MX MTC entirely and go to TMNFX’s version? To me that sounds a bit backhanded. I’ll stop here on that quote - I’m not going to perpetuate it much longer, nor am I going to backseat moderate.

FT»Osaka says:
Seriously, how hard is it to understand that a road trip involves some kind of displacement from the original toponym? A drive through a city can never be a road trip, no matter how large. Would you consider a "road trip" a 100km commute to work? Because that's what some people in LA have to do every day.

I thought that my approach to road trip was actually very lenient: A trip through roads. This does involve some VERY little details:
1.- You can't do it inside a village, town or city, because you're not going anywhere.
2.- There has to be a number of things to visit in one way or the other.

That's about it. Skyslide breaks detail 1, poupipomme and the other dude break detail 2. Rex barely complies with both, so it's in (there are some very interesting structures to sightsee and the displacements are very large). Snake complies with both, so it's in.

If it's that hard to understand a theme, and it's been in 3 out of 3 MTCs and always from the same people, then maybe we should make dumb themes like "jump" or "make a short track" or "put a start and a finish block somewhere".

Continuing with the message osaka puts here, I’ll add on that more complicated/creatively challenging MTC themes have been done. In fact, they’ve been done recently! Check out this submission thread: MTC March 2016 submission thread

Lastly, I close with this:

This MTC was harder than most. I’ll give you that. But, part of the reason why the MTC works is because it is a challenge. If a game developer made it incredibly easy to play it’s game at all stages of skill - you wouldn’t play long. You’d simply stop playing because there would no longer be a feedback loop of “Ok, I can do better” to keep it going. So with the MTC, if it were “build a map” as the full rules text every time, it would have stopped years ago. But with the restrictions imposed by the theme, you have a challenge, because it’s not what you usually do, which in turn raises the skill ceiling. That creates the “I can do better” feedback loop. Without it, there’s no point to an MTC.

This is more intense than some ESL discussions in the Facebook fullspeed group

I think I'll leave my opinions here as well:
First of all, I don't think the heated discussion which is going on right now will probably not help us in any way.

Secondly, some things @Osaka:
I honestly do not understand what you expected from this MTC: Many people did not have nearly enough time to build a 4:10+ monster track (Poivrot and me for example wanted to do a duo, built 40s in 1 week (which is a lot for my standards at least) and stopped because we noticed we would not nearly have enough time to finish the track) and the theme was waaaay too vague to really guide the building process in a way that would make it clear for everyone what was expected (another example: Poivrot and me thought, that the best would have been for us to base the track around a style progression (fs->tech->dirt) and have some scenery changes but I'm sure that you would have discarded this idea as well). Furthermore I find cancelling this MTC out of frustration or whatever to be an extremely harsh move as there were people who spent hours trying to build what was their idea of what the theme was about.

But as you probably won't change your opinion for this MTC anyways, I'll leave some thoughts about potential future MTCs here:
- A MTC should imo be a contest with clear restrictions on what is allowed, required and forbidden and should not be based around a concept which can be interpreted differently depending on the builder.
- I would also personally expect the MTC to be doable in a reasonable timespan, as endurance-themes take way too much time to build (for me; I for example can not to much more than 45s in a reasonable timespan, this may or may not be different for other people).
- A theme should give all environments approximately the right chances and should ideally allow for as many styles as possible, too (tech, fs and dirt being the most important ones imo).

An ideal MTC for me would fit to the three things I listed above. And I share fredair's opinion: The TMX MTC usually does well-defined or extremely loosly-defined MTCs which either impose clear restrictions or leave everything up to the builder to decide and the judges to judge, how well the theme was implemented. I personally dislike the loosly-defined MTC concepts of TMX but I find the restricted themes of the TMX MTC to be perfect for some challenging building fun.
So I would request the next MTCs to be like that: A well-defined theme which is doable for everyone. Just some examples of what could be done (not regarding the past MTCs): Restricting the building area in some way (size, shape, area, ...); Requiring something that the car should do (in sections) (flip, freewheel, drive backwards, PF/R/L/B, ...); Imposing requirements on the track route (symmetry, start/finish/cp placement, surfaces, reuses (multilap, crossings, ...); route direction (only down, only left turns, ...); limited block choice; required elements with restrictions on count, length, ... (jumps, drops, [wall rides], transitions, ...); connecting pre-placed Blocks.
With so many possibilities, there must be a lot of good possible themes, don't you think?