ok so the website was public for like a couple of days or so, obviously what's following is just a very first and partial impression.

as it is right now, it's hard for me to find a point of this website. i mean, tmx was born in order to share/test/rate custom tracks, right? that was perfect for tm just because all i had to do was download a track, play it in solo and come back here with a comment or award. smooth as milk.
most of the times a tm track was famous online because it was famous on tmx. here with sm this isn't working anymore.

now, being sm a online-only game, the main purpose of the website is gone missing: testing tracks has become much harder. i mean, i can't even choose which map to try!
for example, what if i would try nimrod's latest map or id's brainstorming? i can't. all i have to do is looking for a server with those maps and hope they will be played soon. to me, that's just weird and it totally spoils the fun.

this could eventually lead to underestimate the whole rating system (love the new one btw!), making it more and more futile. it's quite annoying to play random tracks on a server, come back here and search if the track actually is uploaded here. it'd a waste of time and this is not how i'd like to play the game.

second point: if the tracks played online are chosen by server admins i bet there will be maps played on every server and others that no one will EVER play. not everyone has the chances to run his own server in order to put online his maps.
sure there will be someone who'll start a server with recently uploaded maps (if i remember correctly eyebo did something similar in tm) but i fear that won't be enough.

thus said, i do think smx will need deep changes in order to keep its importance in the world of sm.
now i'm not a coder or else, but i'm quite sure stronger links with the server are highly needed.

like, a real-time and constantly updating list of maps that are played online could help. also an in-game tool that allow me to rate tracks without even exit the game would be nice.
sure that won't resolve the fact that i'm not allowed to play the maps i want. we can use some kind of playpal system there:
like, playing online/rating maps/writing comments could increase my karma and i could spend that same karma in order to play one particular track (not mine) on a playpal server.

example:
jimmy the lizard = 56 karma
mra fanboy = 41 karma
robocop = 39 karma
stinky turd = 1 karma

they're all playing on playpal. track chosen by jimmy will be the first played, then the one chosen by mra fanboy and so on.







tl;dr: i can't play the maps i want to play and this sucks balls.

yeah, I also saw that problem once. I think the site is at least important to make your map available to the public, to give it the chance to get on a server. I think it's quite clear, that the site is useless for testing maps solo, since you have no clue how playable they are if you walk around alone (well, except maybe on TimeAttack tracks).

I'd really supprt the idea of ingame-map-rating, there would be a ManiaExchange-server-plugin or something needed, but I guess thi would be quite possible. (I never made a server by myself, so I have no clue, was just a guess^^)

I don't know what will come later in the game (since it's just early beta yet), but probably Nadeo will add some bots to play in solo mode against. At least I have no clue how they would make the solo campaign without. If this would be added to the game, the site will be as useful as it was for TrackMania, but atm, I agree you.

there won't be bots nor solo mode.

Space says:
there won't be bots nor solo mode.

well in that case, you can delete most of my last block of text

There is going to be a definite difference from TM, lets see how it pans out. I hope we can do something in the mold of PPO and perhaps, maybe, we allow other people to run our controller this time. As I do agree that 'getting your map played' is going to be harder than in TM (if that we wasnt hard enough).

But if the community were to produce servers based moreon the newest maps, then maybe that would fix a lot things.

Suggestion: At a map page, there could be a direct join link to a server which has recently played the map.

Maybe there could be PlayPal Online servers for each game-mode unless you are capable of running multiple game modes in a single server? not sure if its possible though and even then, multiple PPOs may be quite a burden.

And a non-SMX suggestion is that i hope Time Attack maps are capable of being played offline, but that is really for Nadeo to decide upon.

Nimrod says:
I'd really supprt the idea of ingame-map-rating, there would be a ManiaExchange-server-plugin or something needed, but I guess thi would be quite possible. (I never made a server by myself, so I have no clue, was just a guess^^)

I'm working on a Manialink that allows players to rate maps in game. Servers will have to provide links to the Manialink to rate maps in game.

Snake55wildcat says:
multiple PPOs may be quite a burden.

The dedicated server should be capable of switching between modes. I haven't had time to thoroughly test the dedicated server yet, so I don't know what its really capable of.

I'm sure there's a very good reason behind the no bots decision Nadeo made. Though it would have been an excellent feature to have. NPC AI's work when they've been pre-programmed to work for certain modes (Battle, Melee, Time Attack - any of the built in modes). But when players start creating custom modes (Jailbreak, Dominion etc), the AI needs to learn how to play that mode. I'm sure ManiaScript doesn't have AI training capabilities.

I really would like to see bots in SM though.... It would make this game a lot more fun then it already is! Then we could practice a map get good at it then when we go on a server and play that map we're at least familiar with it.. But it's Nadeos choice, I guess