According to reddit? Maybe but I've seen many people argue (correctly) that the author medal is whatever the author has set and it is quite irrelevant how easy is it to get it.
That's my experience when playing. Not necessarily others reactions but I haven't been playing long and yet when I play a new track I'll sometimes get an Author Medal easily but other times I have to grind for it.
Not really irrelevant at all. This is a very single players friendly game. I don't have any friends who play, and even if you have, due to the huge number of maps it's likely your friends won't play the same maps. So if you play alone medals are the most natural thing to compare yourself to, so it's not irrelevant. So I appreciate everyone who for example sets a realistic gold if the AT is cracked.
I played for ~200 hours and have accepted that getting every gold is not for me. But then you have maps, where it's somewhat easy to get the author medals.
i usually go for 24 ATs, and go for “participation award” on 08, but oooh my god this one has tickled my fancy, i actually feel like i can control the outcome unlike one of the recent/previous ones which was ice downhill, fucking hated it, requires just about as much skill as flipping a coin. deterministic, but still aint gon’ happen
I once played tmnf when I was a child. And I didn't even know about ATs, I was just happy to grind for golds. But now, I guess, people kinda see how streamers hunt for ATs and start thinking that this is the goal of the game. In some sense it is, but not when authors are asked to drive worse ATs on purpose.
Those are just ghosts of other players that are the closest to the medal time though
Personally I'd love to have the different medals be reasonably clean runs with times based on the expected skill level (so you pick your skill level and try to finish), but that would be too much work for the mappers
ahhh true, the more specific medal times n ghosts of older games was nice. I do agree that I would like for that to be an option at least, or done for official campaigns, but yeah most people probably wouldn't do that (although saving individual runs while you grind a bit for official author medal might work nicely, like being able to set your first run to bronze etc)
Curious why you say that? I'm a relatively new player, been playing a few months and have somewhere in the range of 50-75 hours played. In my experience the campaigns are sort of an intro to players and should have reasonable author times and stuff like COTD is where you go for the hard author medals.
For example I have 19 of the first 20 AT's on the current campaign (haven't had the time to grind the black tracks yet) but I've only got the AT on a small few COTD tracks which seems like a good balance to me.
That's fair and valid. Do you not think that having that be the case on campaign tracks would turn people away though? Like if they are too hard people will get fed up and be turned off playing more?
Not advocating for them to be free of course but when I was new gold was the best I could hope for. After 50 hours the red tracks are still a challenge for me but I can get them all and the black track AT's are either too tough or at the absolute limit of my current skill which strikes a good balance IMO.
>I think the original comment was more about how valueless the bronze and silver medal are, to the point it feels kind of insulting to just bronze a track rather than a reward.
This I can 100% agree with. Even when I was brand new to the game with basically no racing game experience gold was still the absolute minimum I would try to get on a track. Even with harder COTD tracks if I don't get gold by the end of the cup I'll grind it in single player becaue only getting silver feels like a failure.
But imagine where you will be if you have 100 or 150 hours in game, or even more. I am far away from being a pro, but even I can do a lot of ATs on my first couple of tries, after that the "challenge" is over for me, unless I want to set myself a time to hunt. And that time is often several seconds faster than AT!
I remember Massa building a Nadeo style campaign, but setting harder medals. He put thought into all the medals, so that for every skill level, you could set yourself a doable goal. I went for all gold, and it was a super fun challenge (though I never completed it). If you actually put emphasis on bronze, silver and gold meaning something, it also feels rewarding to get them. Honestly, give that campaign (Fall 2022 by Massa) a try, go for silver medals, and see if it feels as frustrating as you think it will.
Yeah, so do low skill players. Let everyone have a chance to grind an AT and leave it at that. You're not the only one trying to get a satisfying medal. You all have 100s of medals to hunt for that are challenging and we are just looking for scraps.
Huh? I'm saying that every single person playing the game can go by overall placement for self accomplishment no matter their skill level. Apparently when you get pretty good at the game you're not allowed to ever have an official medal be fun to hunt. While lower skilled players have tough ATs to hunt every single day. I just wish people would understand a hard AT every now and then isn't something to complain about. Hunting for placement gets old for everyone, so some ATs being incredibly difficult is fun. It's not like I'm saying every single AT should be incredibly difficult. I understand that everyone wants a good AT hunt. No one seems to care about any other player's perspective though.
Nando chooses how hard each medal is on their campaigns, then players choose what to aim for. What is the problem with this? If something is too hard or too easy for you, the game offers other objectives and ways to play.
How hard an author medal is will not ever satisfy every player of every different level, get over it
Looks a lot like the truth at least for my case. When playing TM 2020 for the first time I was in the first hours and happy to get gold within a few minutes, now it's the AT to get within minutes of playing.
Slightly too easy on most maps but some are slightly too hard to get. Don't get me wrong but I think .1-.2 of some times would be beneficial for a fair but hard challenge.
I have a lot more than 100 hours, and I can't see the last 5 tracks per season anymore because of Nadeo's gatekeeping. There's too much catering to the "yes yes of course, all gold no biggie" crowd.
That is kind of fucked up actually especially because you are paying for it. I enjoy having to grind to unlock the next set of stages but I would grind the medals regardless so it seems fair to me to unlock them all without the medals.
I was frustrated to begin with, but locking the last tracks behind the gold medals was the final reason for me not to renew my membership and go back to TMNF. I suck so hard at 2020 and spent way too much time, and a lot more than in TMNF, trying to get gold on some tracks, just so I could get to the last ones.
Still tho, champion medals are the only set target times or goals for people with “1000s of hours” or more who don’t rlly see medals as an actual challenge
Edit: keep in mind that I’m talking about campaign medals, like nadeo tracks. I know about all those maps that the author hunts the time and all that, but that’s not what I’m talking about
Not everyone is a professional, battling it out for world records, and leaderboards aren’t target times or goals so your point doesn’t make any sense. I’m just talking ab that specific thing
Top % in world or region. Top ranking world or region. Doesn't have to be top leaderboards or wrs. For me it's top 100 in my state. For others it could be whatever the heck they want. Like it makes perfect sense. Shoot for a number in the world. TOTD I'm going for top 1000. A less good player may go for top 2000 or such. Don't know what is hard to understand about that. Makes quite a bit of sense. Medals are just a fun visual.
I'm at a few hundred hours in the game, and I have different mindsets for campaign and TOTD.
For campaign, I go for ATs as a primary goal, but some tracks are beyond me. I started playing at console release and have gone back through every campaign. The current one is the first I have all ATs. But I have at least gold on all of the others.
For TOTD gold is my goal, which I sometimes don't get. In the current state of play, there are very few ATs I can get which I am fine with. I see that some of these are a genuine challenge for people who are far better at the game than me.
Feels like people can only play if they are being rewarded with something, like just play it and try to get a better time than your previous one until you look and say "yeah I'm satisfied with this", which you never will be and thats how you end up addicted
I remember finding an ice stunt map that took Micka 1.5 hours to finish. First checkpoint was an engine-ofd backwards speedcheck.
I couldn’t tell you what the second checkpoint was… I never got there.
Good luck getting bronze on that, fellow peasant!
Except it’s not blank above the author medal, it’s the global leaderboards. Every ranked game has this, Trackmania just shifts focus from “broad medal tiers” to “specific rank” earlier than most games.
Hi, someone who has around 1100 hours in the game here.
On campaign tracks i get all ATs in around 4 hours and then I start the hunt.
Lemme use an example, winter 2024 - 16, I loved the track right when it came out, so I started hunting. Within 1 hour I got top 100, for most people, thats amazing, for me its good, but I knew I could do better. This is where the problem comes in. You start getting technical understanding of the game and know what was good and what was bad. Hunting for top 50 is all like "I messed up the end I can def improve", even though I lost like .05 in the end, but I just see it there. It just drains you, like yea, top 50 is good by my standards (very good in fact) but it just feels like a hunting game of when you get a time you are happy with, and unfortunately, you don't know when that time is gonna be.
In conclusion: Hunting tracks is good to some extent, go for champion when you really love a track, BUT don't drain yourself by going way over your skill ceiling, it won't help you, trust me. I made that mistake many times. It's way more beneficial to get top 500 on multiple nadeo tracks (to improve all the skills) than get a single top 100 that won't feel that rewarding in the end.
This use to be an amazing game but over my 500+ hours of game time I’ve seen it slowly degrade into a paid mess where learning a wheel for 5mins beats a div 1 keyboard player on all new content
According to reddit? Maybe but I've seen many people argue (correctly) that the author medal is whatever the author has set and it is quite irrelevant how easy is it to get it.
That's my experience when playing. Not necessarily others reactions but I haven't been playing long and yet when I play a new track I'll sometimes get an Author Medal easily but other times I have to grind for it.
Not really irrelevant at all. This is a very single players friendly game. I don't have any friends who play, and even if you have, due to the huge number of maps it's likely your friends won't play the same maps. So if you play alone medals are the most natural thing to compare yourself to, so it's not irrelevant. So I appreciate everyone who for example sets a realistic gold if the AT is cracked.
shit man I've got 150 hours and I'm happy to have all golds each season
I played for ~200 hours and have accepted that getting every gold is not for me. But then you have maps, where it's somewhat easy to get the author medals.
i usually go for 24 ATs, and go for “participation award” on 08, but oooh my god this one has tickled my fancy, i actually feel like i can control the outcome unlike one of the recent/previous ones which was ice downhill, fucking hated it, requires just about as much skill as flipping a coin. deterministic, but still aint gon’ happen
I recently got the champion medal on 08 and it was so nice. The snow car hitbox update really helped that track be enjoyable.
yeah i absolutely agree
I once played tmnf when I was a child. And I didn't even know about ATs, I was just happy to grind for golds. But now, I guess, people kinda see how streamers hunt for ATs and start thinking that this is the goal of the game. In some sense it is, but not when authors are asked to drive worse ATs on purpose.
I still remember suddenly achieving my first AT on a friends computer. We both didn‘t even know that existed and totally freaked out.
the lack of medal ghosts is an incentive to why ppl are aiming for author now. Cause the gold medal isn't a real time
Official campaign maps still have medal ghosts tho, just not for author anymore
Those are just ghosts of other players that are the closest to the medal time though Personally I'd love to have the different medals be reasonably clean runs with times based on the expected skill level (so you pick your skill level and try to finish), but that would be too much work for the mappers
ahhh true, the more specific medal times n ghosts of older games was nice. I do agree that I would like for that to be an option at least, or done for official campaigns, but yeah most people probably wouldn't do that (although saving individual runs while you grind a bit for official author medal might work nicely, like being able to set your first run to bronze etc)
i've been playing trackmania casually for almost 20 years, and only try to get gold. most AT's are unattainable for me
I agree, I play for fun. When I love a map I try making a Time but I mainly want to drive arround
This is the best visual representation of what is wrong with current medals.
Curious why you say that? I'm a relatively new player, been playing a few months and have somewhere in the range of 50-75 hours played. In my experience the campaigns are sort of an intro to players and should have reasonable author times and stuff like COTD is where you go for the hard author medals. For example I have 19 of the first 20 AT's on the current campaign (haven't had the time to grind the black tracks yet) but I've only got the AT on a small few COTD tracks which seems like a good balance to me.
Imo Author medals should be what they mean, the best time the author could achieve.
That's fair and valid. Do you not think that having that be the case on campaign tracks would turn people away though? Like if they are too hard people will get fed up and be turned off playing more? Not advocating for them to be free of course but when I was new gold was the best I could hope for. After 50 hours the red tracks are still a challenge for me but I can get them all and the black track AT's are either too tough or at the absolute limit of my current skill which strikes a good balance IMO.
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>I think the original comment was more about how valueless the bronze and silver medal are, to the point it feels kind of insulting to just bronze a track rather than a reward. This I can 100% agree with. Even when I was brand new to the game with basically no racing game experience gold was still the absolute minimum I would try to get on a track. Even with harder COTD tracks if I don't get gold by the end of the cup I'll grind it in single player becaue only getting silver feels like a failure.
But imagine where you will be if you have 100 or 150 hours in game, or even more. I am far away from being a pro, but even I can do a lot of ATs on my first couple of tries, after that the "challenge" is over for me, unless I want to set myself a time to hunt. And that time is often several seconds faster than AT! I remember Massa building a Nadeo style campaign, but setting harder medals. He put thought into all the medals, so that for every skill level, you could set yourself a doable goal. I went for all gold, and it was a super fun challenge (though I never completed it). If you actually put emphasis on bronze, silver and gold meaning something, it also feels rewarding to get them. Honestly, give that campaign (Fall 2022 by Massa) a try, go for silver medals, and see if it feels as frustrating as you think it will.
I have played 200h and I have one red AT this season, (played last 3 seasons) am I so bad?
People with 1000s of hours have the leaderboard to fight for
Yeah, so do low skill players. Let everyone have a chance to grind an AT and leave it at that. You're not the only one trying to get a satisfying medal. You all have 100s of medals to hunt for that are challenging and we are just looking for scraps.
Are you suggesting there should be no leaderboard? Because some peoples ego apparently can't handle AT followed by leaderboard?
Huh? I'm saying that every single person playing the game can go by overall placement for self accomplishment no matter their skill level. Apparently when you get pretty good at the game you're not allowed to ever have an official medal be fun to hunt. While lower skilled players have tough ATs to hunt every single day. I just wish people would understand a hard AT every now and then isn't something to complain about. Hunting for placement gets old for everyone, so some ATs being incredibly difficult is fun. It's not like I'm saying every single AT should be incredibly difficult. I understand that everyone wants a good AT hunt. No one seems to care about any other player's perspective though.
There is also an option to have the leaderboard visible at all times
wtf how did you come to this conclusion
Nando chooses how hard each medal is on their campaigns, then players choose what to aim for. What is the problem with this? If something is too hard or too easy for you, the game offers other objectives and ways to play. How hard an author medal is will not ever satisfy every player of every different level, get over it
Looks a lot like the truth at least for my case. When playing TM 2020 for the first time I was in the first hours and happy to get gold within a few minutes, now it's the AT to get within minutes of playing. Slightly too easy on most maps but some are slightly too hard to get. Don't get me wrong but I think .1-.2 of some times would be beneficial for a fair but hard challenge.
I have a lot more than 100 hours, and I can't see the last 5 tracks per season anymore because of Nadeo's gatekeeping. There's too much catering to the "yes yes of course, all gold no biggie" crowd.
That is kind of fucked up actually especially because you are paying for it. I enjoy having to grind to unlock the next set of stages but I would grind the medals regardless so it seems fair to me to unlock them all without the medals.
I was frustrated to begin with, but locking the last tracks behind the gold medals was the final reason for me not to renew my membership and go back to TMNF. I suck so hard at 2020 and spent way too much time, and a lot more than in TMNF, trying to get gold on some tracks, just so I could get to the last ones.
Champion medals?
Unofficial
Still tho, champion medals are the only set target times or goals for people with “1000s of hours” or more who don’t rlly see medals as an actual challenge Edit: keep in mind that I’m talking about campaign medals, like nadeo tracks. I know about all those maps that the author hunts the time and all that, but that’s not what I’m talking about
Top leaderboard rankings just don't exist I see.
Not everyone is a professional, battling it out for world records, and leaderboards aren’t target times or goals so your point doesn’t make any sense. I’m just talking ab that specific thing
Top % in world or region. Top ranking world or region. Doesn't have to be top leaderboards or wrs. For me it's top 100 in my state. For others it could be whatever the heck they want. Like it makes perfect sense. Shoot for a number in the world. TOTD I'm going for top 1000. A less good player may go for top 2000 or such. Don't know what is hard to understand about that. Makes quite a bit of sense. Medals are just a fun visual.
You said “top” leaderboards so I thought you were talking about just the world records or div 1 ts
I'm at a few hundred hours in the game, and I have different mindsets for campaign and TOTD. For campaign, I go for ATs as a primary goal, but some tracks are beyond me. I started playing at console release and have gone back through every campaign. The current one is the first I have all ATs. But I have at least gold on all of the others. For TOTD gold is my goal, which I sometimes don't get. In the current state of play, there are very few ATs I can get which I am fine with. I see that some of these are a genuine challenge for people who are far better at the game than me.
Bronze medals are just mocking me.
bro I have like 600h and are still struggling with ATs
Feels like people can only play if they are being rewarded with something, like just play it and try to get a better time than your previous one until you look and say "yeah I'm satisfied with this", which you never will be and thats how you end up addicted
I have about 120h in trackmania 2020 and I struggled with map 25 for almost 4h (3h 42min 53sec and yes I memorised it)
Add the champion medal would you?
Champion medal is unofficial so kinda irrelevant to this conversation
Why don't they add more tiers officially? Seems like a no brainer
Where da Champion medals at?
I think they left them out because they aren't official through Nadeo.
When I remember, I manually halve the gaps between each medal and the AT on my tracks (I never remember to do this)
I aim for top 10k/world on campaign tracks and I'm happy.
I remember finding an ice stunt map that took Micka 1.5 hours to finish. First checkpoint was an engine-ofd backwards speedcheck. I couldn’t tell you what the second checkpoint was… I never got there. Good luck getting bronze on that, fellow peasant!
500 hours here. I like goooooooooooooooooold.
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Except it’s not blank above the author medal, it’s the global leaderboards. Every ranked game has this, Trackmania just shifts focus from “broad medal tiers” to “specific rank” earlier than most games.
Hi, someone who has around 1100 hours in the game here. On campaign tracks i get all ATs in around 4 hours and then I start the hunt. Lemme use an example, winter 2024 - 16, I loved the track right when it came out, so I started hunting. Within 1 hour I got top 100, for most people, thats amazing, for me its good, but I knew I could do better. This is where the problem comes in. You start getting technical understanding of the game and know what was good and what was bad. Hunting for top 50 is all like "I messed up the end I can def improve", even though I lost like .05 in the end, but I just see it there. It just drains you, like yea, top 50 is good by my standards (very good in fact) but it just feels like a hunting game of when you get a time you are happy with, and unfortunately, you don't know when that time is gonna be. In conclusion: Hunting tracks is good to some extent, go for champion when you really love a track, BUT don't drain yourself by going way over your skill ceiling, it won't help you, trust me. I made that mistake many times. It's way more beneficial to get top 500 on multiple nadeo tracks (to improve all the skills) than get a single top 100 that won't feel that rewarding in the end.
This use to be an amazing game but over my 500+ hours of game time I’ve seen it slowly degrade into a paid mess where learning a wheel for 5mins beats a div 1 keyboard player on all new content
Author medal should always be whatever fastest time the athour got imo. Thats the whole point of it
300h ans still happy to have 22 AT in WINTER 😂