StarTrack Aftermath

PapyChampy became the ultimate winner of the StarContest today, with +0.01 gain against Dakkon, and Mr.A finishing third. As the competition is now over, it is somewhat hard to access the list of tracks submitted, so if you want to play some (or all) of the submitted tracks, try this link (provided by Mr.A). Pappy’s track is now showcased on TMX, so hop in and try it if you haven’t yet!

The StarContest brought many awesome tracks which I hope will make it to the final campaign, but it also raised many questions or created some commotion; on multiple occasions, the judges’ decisions or remarks about tracks caused the TMX users to stare in disbelief, some concerns appeared about the (lack of) difficulty in tracks supposed to be hard.

Nonetheless, the resulting campaign should be enjoyable, especially if Nadeo does indeed shift some tracks to easier or harder “layers” (such as shifting a C track to B or D category) in order to balance each group.

For the TMUblog, the competition provided plenty of writing opportunities, so now I’ll have to find something else to write about. *Sigh*

Startrack reporter 19 – Who’s gonna win?

In about 7 hours, the winner of round 6 will be announced. Two days ago, PappyChampy’s track had about twice as many awards as Dakkon or Mr.A, who were roughly at the same number of awards, but since then, Dakkon started gaining heavily, and is now just few awards behind. Mr.A is last as far as awards are considered, but he still got enough awards to get a green card in the Awards part of judging. Still, the number of awards is not a major judging factor, so there can be a lot of surprise when the results are finally made public.

The clock is ticking…

Startrack reporter 18 – The Final is here!

Finally, after 5 weeks, we’ve come to the final of StarContest. The three builders who made it through all the elimination rounds into the final are Mr.A, Dakkon and PappyChampy.

These three finalists will now build their Stadium E track, due on monday 17th, and from those 3, the supreme winner will be chosen.

Please, also give a warm welcome into the Loosers Lounge 😉 to Phil83, Raxor and Dengel, who were eliminated just before the finish straight. Good work anyways, guys!

StarTrack reporter 17 – Who’s gonna be the finalist?

By now, the 6 semifinalists have uploaded more or less final versions of their tracks, some of them after starting over several times.

Let’s talk briefly about the three “duels” that will happen after tonight’s closure of submissions…

Duel #1: Coast

The combatants are Mr.A and raxor. Both of them have built rather technical coastal tracks, with many twists and turns. Both tracks feature coastal ride, with raxor’s track having one nasty coastal turn without protective fence, so let’s go for some swim! 🙂 Both of the tracks also contain at least one tricky off-road part, raxor once again being the more evil one, as his off-road section is preceeded with a yellow booster. Mr.A, on the other hand, decided to put an unforgiving stunt just before finish — I think many people will learn to hate treehuggers after crashing into those nasty plants in the middle of that stunt.

Duel #2: Island

Dakkon and Dengel are the two duelists here. Dengel has built a technical track with some “pixel-perfect” jumps, while Dakkon has gone insane with high speed adrenaline jumping experience. Unfortunately, dengel is reworking his track heavily as I’m writing this, so there’s not much I can speak about here now. Dakkon’s track is definitely cool once you memorize the route by heart, but surprisingly, all CP-respawning works, so while my wife wasn’t able to make it through, I’d say it’s easier than the original Island-E from the United Race campaign.

Duel #3: Bay

Fasten your seatbelts, guys, this is gonna be tough… the “miracle kid” Phil83, who was unknown before this compo and now is one of the favourites of the contest, vs. PappyChampy (btw, I really hate the nick, as the middle 2 syllables of it are a rude word in my language 😦 ).

Both guys managed to find out original (“innovative”) things to do with the Bay tiles. Pappy has a cool 90-degree banked jump through a CP, while Phil sends you through a gap between bridge-support pillars, to name just one from each track. Both tracks vary very well between tech and speed sections, and checkpoints are distributed reasonably well so that CP-respawn does not put you 30 seconds back. In Pappy’s track, one CP respawn requires you to take an alternate route — I’m curious whether Nadeo will object against this or not. What is even more interesting is that both tracks employ Water-bounce, but while Phil’s track has the water bounce as mandatory, Pappy allows you to ride around it (might be interesting to test if it’s not faster to go around…)

All in all, the five tracks (excluding Dengel’s one, which is under reconstruction right now) are top quality and Nadeo will definitely make many enemies when they decide which of the track gets butchered.

Stay tuned!

Startrack Reporter 17 – Semifinal 6

Today, Nadeo announced the 6 participants of the StarContest that made it to round 5. Three of them built the best Extreme tracks for each of the three “Original” environments, while other 3 were the best 3 losers. Today, StarContest lost hawk_ger, Ricardo Rix and smok3y, to whom we send our heartfelt pity 🙂

Now, the 6 semifinalists are building the Sunrise environments’ Extreme tracks: 2 of them build Bay, two build a Coast track and two try their best for Island.

Keep checking TMX’s StarContest section for uploaded and updated Round 5 tracks, so that you can provide the very needed and appreciated feedback to Mr.A, Rax, Phil83, Dakkon, Dengel and PappyChampy!

Startrack reporter 16 – Round 4 underway

As of now, 7 out of 9 contenders in Round 4 have already uploaded some version of their TMO extreme tracks. With about 36 hours remaining, two builders (HawkGer and smok3y) have not yet uploaded anything, so they will get much less feedback; this has proven to be dangerous (Check StadiumD track from Round 3, which with just a little feedback might have turned out very well).

Meawhile, several builders are asking Nadeo to increase the copper limit for the upcoming Round 5, especially for Bay, which has probably the most expensive tiles; there are worries that 3000 coppers is too little for a fully decorated, 60 to 90 seconds extreme track. No official answer has yet been given.

Startrack reporter 15 – Judging of round 3

Right now, you have an excellent chance to influence the future!

Hop over to TMX and download all the 20 tracks submitted to round 3. Try them the way you like playing new tracks, check the intro and replay, and provide feedback (as thorough as you can) for each of them on TMX. Don’t just put awards where you like it, but also say what you don’t like in the Comments section where appropriate.

Nadeo DO read these comments and awards and will take it into account.

I’m sorry I didn’t post yesterday, life is turbulent right now 🙂

Startrack reporter 14 – Questions, questions…

While the Magnificent 20 are currently building and/or finetuning their Round 3 tracks, a lot of discussion is happening over at TMX (the greatest Trackmania tracks exchange server ever).

Question 1: Round 3 allocation weirdness

A question that gets repeated over and over is “Why are we building unneeded tracks?”

As Kiwininja (and many others) has stated recently, there are already enough high quality tracks for some Environment-Difficulty combinations (Desert C is a good example), but still, another track in that combination is just being created, while for other combinations (e.g. Desert B), not nearly enough tracks are already “greenlighted” or “yellowlighted”, but still only 1 more track for that combination is in production.

What this implies is that

1. A builder who was allocated an Envi-Diff combination that is already “crowded” with good tracks has a very difficult position, since in order for that new track to make it into the campaign, it would have to best at least some of those tracks that are already considered “good enough”.
2. On the other hand, if there are only 2 or 3 good tracks in the Envi-Diff combination, Nadeo will ultimately have to include (into the campaign) some tracks that at the first glance seemed “not good enough”; the builder who got this combination in Round 3 needs only to make a mediocre / average track and still has a good chance to make it through.

This is what some participants (either former or current) think about the current (Round 3) situation.

The thread where this question came up is waiting for an answer from the officials, so stay tuned…

Question 2: “E” as in “Extreme”?

Those of you who made it through the United campaign all the way up to Extreme (Black) tracks probably have the understanding that Extreme tracks are either very long (Coast E = 6+ minutes on an 8-lap circuit), or they contain difficult stunts with lots of airtime (Stadium E, Island E). While the first “E” track in the TM Nations Forever campaign is only 48 seconds long Stadium wallride madness, its difficulty is still insane, especially with the near-end wall-to-wall hole jump.

What some builders are already getting worried about is how are they supposed to build an Extreme track if the Nadeo requirements of “track finishable from every checkpoint” and 60-90 seconds length are in place. Already we’ve seen in the previous rounds that the difficulty of StarTracks is significantly lower (on average) from the original United/Nations campaign. Therefore, round 4 and 5 building of Extreme tracks will be a challenge between “make it extreme” and “don’t overdo it”.

What might help tremendously would be Nadeo pointing to a particular track in each environment (such as “Coast D 3” or “Stadium C 5”) and stating “This is the difficulty we’d like to aim for with the Extreme tracks.”

Stay tuned… And feel free to provide your own opinion in the comments section!

Startrack reporter 13

The following builders made it through to round 3. They now have 1 track to build each.

• smok3y
• DaKKon
• Dengel
• HawkGer
• MrA
• ~KiWiNiNjA~
• PapyChampy
• pjw
• Rax
• Snakey3000
• JumperJack
• TimeBreaker
• Ricardo Rix
• Nitryx
• Qbert
• The Idler
• Ichirou
• Phil’sTracks
• ratracer
• 57060v2

They are ordered by the number of awards on TMX, with smok3y having over 2.300 awards, and 57060v2 having less than 30. What a spread!

Please remember – from this round onward, Nadeo will take into account the feedback of the community on their tracks, so if you have the chance, try as many of the tracks as you can and provide feedback about how it played. It’s not like “Every award is a positive point and every comment without award is a negative point”, it’s more like “Do the critics criticise the driving itself, or some minor things such as replay camera?”

Startrack reporter 12 – Anxiousness before Round 2 results

We’re just minutes away from the moment when Mr.A reveals the results of Round 2 and the 20 lucky contenders who make it to round 3. In round 3, these 20 will still be building tracks with B, C and D difficulty – no “Extreme” tracks are to be created yet.

There will be 1 track per Environment/Difficulty combination, with the exception of “Bay D”, which is not available now.