Well maybe he doesn't care about what other people think, which is fine I guess, but as you said yourself:

matto says:
On the other hand, you can just ignore those comments.

lol id

Ok, so you don't want feedback. That's fine.
Here's the deal.
Simply express it on your track page.
"Please don't tell me what you want to see in my tracks! You only get what you see. Give positive feedback only or else shut up!"

... says:
They're awards. They're not your own little blog where you pretend to give feedback to the user but instead you end up just forcing your own ideals on the trackmaker.

That's the core of the post, I guess.

During the years, it has become a (bad) habit to give people "hints" and "tips" concerning their ways of building or designing a track.

Have you every asked yourself why that became a habit ?
- Because newcomer and amateur builders ask for it ? -- Because they need it ?
- Because veteran builders "appreciate" it ? -- Although they know what they did 10 times better than you do ?
- Because 90% of all tracks look and feel so worn out that you just can't help but telling an author to put more quality into his tracks next time ? -- Which could count as a useless attempt to raise the overall quality on uploaded tracks ?
- Because you've become so used to criticising that you do it all the time ? -- I wish I knew

It just took TMX people 2 WEEKS at the new TM2 game to adapt all the bad ways and habits they showed on TMX earlier and it somehow ruins the experience new MX platform.

I don't know, somehow it all stinks. I loaded about 50 tracks from MX and almost fell asleep from boredom.
There were a HANDFUL of tracks which were really clever thought out and built well (Irondragon's among them).

I feel like people should put WAY MORE EFFORT & TIME into building their tracks and THEN upload them to MX.

This would change peoples' overall perception and attitude towards other peoples' tracks, making it easy again to appreciate and enjoy the tracks you load + review.
For me, it's hard to appreciate even the few good tracks when I feel so overwhelmed by the mass of indifferent and desinterest uploads, sided by masses of indifferent and desinterest viewers.

[quote=tstargermany]

... says:


This would change peoples' overall perception and attitude towards other peoples' tracks, making it easy again to appreciate and enjoy the tracks you load + review.
For me, it's hard to appreciate even the few good tracks when I feel so overwhelmed by the mass of indifferent and desinterest uploads, sided by masses of indifferent and desinterest viewers.

Good words man, really good words.
People don't care about quality, but more about quantity of their tracks.

It's just a fact that most tracks are nothing special anymore.

I started to enjoy trial tracks since some time. They aren't the usual thing every track has. Those usual tracks aren't worthless or so, they are just so normal. Nothing special. Most 'good' tracks seem to have 'smooth' stuff everywhere. Might be cool, but sometimes I get bored of those things myself as well.
Press-forward starts in especially online mode are plainly annoying - my opinion probably.

Since I play trial tracks (and start to build them a bit) I figured out TM can offer a lot more then just time-trial racing on smooth tracks, trying to drift neaaaar the border without actually touching it.
Ever played Platform mode in TMU? I did. Kinda challenging by the way. It's something else then being as fast as possible.
The TMU solo tracks for Platform weren't that awesome in my opinion tho.

Trial platforming (you can include RPG) is something most people have never really tried.
Personally I don't like trial tracks that are insanely long, but they are fun. Besides the normal tracks they give variation on the normal stuff always around.

Maybe this goes a little off-topic, but I guess we don't try to do new stuff anymore. Sucks.

tstargermany says:
I don't know, somehow it all stinks. I loaded about 50 tracks from MX and almost fell asleep from boredom. There were a HANDFUL of tracks which were really clever thought out and built well (Irondragon's among them).

I feel like people should put WAY MORE EFFORT & TIME into building their tracks and THEN upload them to MX.

No. Here is why: say I put a lot of effort into a track - let's say a week. I upload it. It gets 4 downloads; unfortunately they don't award the track because they're drunk or only like platform or hate the daybreak mood or their religion forbids tracks that start in a tunnel (this doesn't mean the track sucks, even my most successful tracks barely have a 25% download to award conversion rate).

Having acquired 0-1 awards, the track vanishes, never to be seen again. All of your effort just went down the drain. Carpet bombing is much more viable - you spread out the risk of watching your track simply disappear. I put a lot more effort into RPG tracks simply because there are few of them compared to the size of the community, so all of them get a fair chance to show their moves.

Somewhat off topic: strategy game Starcraft had a popular mapmaking scene. Warcraft III exceeded expectations and spawned a mapmaking scene that created games like DOTA and a large number of other high quality maps. Then came Starcraft II with its new and revolutionary custom games menu: popularity sort! Instead of displaying just the maps with active lobbies (ie. waiting for players) it would display them all sorted by number of matches recently played on them. This is the equivalent of awards on TMX, down to the gigantic tail end of tracks with 0 awards or maps with 0 matches.

People realised their map would start with 0 matches played - wayyyyyy at the back - and it was very unlikely that enough players would randomly pick their map out of several thousand to get a match started. Their map, representing potentially months of work was 99% likely to languish in oblivion almost regardless of its quality.

The Starcraft II mapmaking scene died.

So get PPO running as soon as possible.
Best way to force people to play your track, while everyone has fun.

@Enai Siaion : Are you aware that you just described the main principle of TMX?

This is EXACLTY how sh*t goes down at TMX for the last years. Maps with awards get more awards, not because they're good, but because they appear at the "last awards" list and people search for "most awards", everything else goes down the drain.

And it's EXACLTY because of the reason I gave .. masses of maps, terribly few good among them. Users aren't stupid, they KNOW they haven't got a chance of finding good maps other than by using for "most awards".

That has been the FUNDAMENTAL FLAW in the tmx system for years and I'm full of it. I can't take it anymore. TM2 BETA is only 2 weeks old and MX has already fallen back into the old destructive schematics !!!

I promote this idea::
- People can upload as many tracks as they like
- A "make it public" option costs 500 or more planets for the UPLOADER. The more, the better. Only these tracks appear publicly on the site.
- This way, an author will make sure his track is good, because otherwise, his "money" is lost.
- This way, browsing users can be sure they will get some good quality, no matter who the author is

This slick move would boost the overall quality of published and loaded tracks by xxxxx%.

Each track here as a point. It's the drivers fault if they don't like it. Even though I don't like rpg style maps or super fast maps I know some others do.

And what comes to tstar's idea, tmx/mania exchange is mostly about sharing the tracks and storing them into the internet, not a showcase room.