Another official screenshot

Since the open beta has started now, I was wondering if my personal track times will be reset when the open beta ends. Does anyone know anything about this?

95% that they won't.

Forgive me, please, but what makes Stadium enjoyable that I just can't understand, aside from maybe clean looks and cute noises? Canyon has been well on its way to feel believable with enjoyable drifting and overall great driving feeling...not real, but almost believable in a playful way. Stadium feels like your glued to the track, you can either accelerate or brake by not accelerating, while braking barely brakes and drifting feels like your working against the magnets between tires and track, kinda like a curious toy-car that would've already annoyed me when I was a child.
I can't shake the feeling that I'm somehow missing something?
Any tips or tricks that explain an appeal?

Again, forgive me, I don't mean to be a partypooper here. I just want to figure this out.

You need to get used to the physics, that's all I guess.
Otherwise, just tastes, eh.

could've made a post of the same length asking what is enjoyable about canyon.

I could've given you a brief answer to that one, though: FUN RIDE!

I've just made a little track with Stadium that can easily be driven and it feels really cute. I get part of it, it really is just a very different game. It's little rubber-speedy-toy-racing with adorable bounciness like it's all in a kind of trampoline fun-house. Kinda cool in a way. But the track has to really suite the car. Most maps I saw thus far were painful to wrestle through, more abrupt stopping and turning and weird choppy crawling from one impossibility to the next. Of course, might just be consistently bad luck on my part...even on the servers.

Canyon is slippery, lose and definitely fast enough. Stadium goes faster, but doesn't feel that way...until you try the same Stadium map in Canyon, hehe. Very strange how slow the canyon car goes in comparison.

Physics? Where? Hihihi...sorry, but those, of course, are fantasy physics. I have no idea what they were hoping to accomplish, but it's certainly a very liberal take on physics. I just now drove around on my head, which was kind of entertaining. The car flipped over and rocked around enough, I guess, so that the collision "proximity" (as opposed to detection) was convinced the tires had traction again and thus I could drive... on my head... upside down. LOL. Beta, maybe?!

Enough, enough, I know. Thanks for responding, for sure.

Well, most tracks you'll find on tmx and servers are purely and simply hard for a beginner. Once you can play it properly you get the full enjoyment of it. (For example, it's extremly rare that you actually have to stop fueling to slow down)

About the upside down thing, no, it's not the beta, it's always been part of stadium ^^

The upside down thing is called turtling, and it's a "feature" used for RPG driving (adventure tracks). I'm impressed you discovered it already. It took me 3 years before I finally learned about it, and then only after someone showed it to me.

Also, you'll learn that when people talk about "physics" in relation to TM, what they really mean is the unique gameplay that each environment has. Every car behaves different and has its own "tricks". The unique gameplay to the car is what people refer to as the car physics.

Stadium has been hugely popular since it's first release in 2006 in TM Nations ESWC with well over half a million tracks released on TMX for the Stadium environment. It's also been THE TrackMania played in eSports. It's a game that is played for real cash prizes. And you need only watch some of the pros drive it to understand why it's so popular (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3). The skill ceiling is much higher than Canyon, and much more satisfying to drive close to the line.

If it doesn't feel right at first... my only advice is to approach it with an open mind and don't try to compare it to the easy drifting on Canyon. It's an entirely different environment with completely different gameplay. Give it time and you'll pick it up.

By the way, I say all this even though Canyon is still my favorite environment.

eyebo says:
The upside down thing is called turtling, and it's a "feature" used for RPG driving (adventure tracks). I'm impressed you discovered it already. It took me 3 years before I finally learned about it, and then only after someone showed it to me.

LOL, woops?! Well, I made myself a little map and went over a border to drop down to the floor for some exploring. I hit one of those little ramp-borders that turned me and tumbled onto the blue mat or whatever that stuff is. Still rocking about I guess I went on my first accidental turtling. I have no idea, if I can repeat it to begin with, haha.. anyway. THANKS for the explanation!

Turtling