Seems fine to have author medals this hard, I love having the 'can you beat the dev' type of challenge. As long as it's actually nadeo setting the author times I don't see a problem.
Yeah same. I feel like people started thinking about author medals like they are gold, yknow starndard medals. But in my eyes its always been just "can you set a better time then the author of this map"
Yeah I love unlocking hidden achievements for beating the devs, like the base jump and ragdoll ones in the Just Cause series. I'm not a TM player since it would rapidly consume both my life and my sanity, but IMHO "beat the devs" type challenges should be just that, not some artificially lowered bar that leaves you wondering how well they actually did.
I’m fine with the challenge but at least be consistent about it. Next time Nadeo drops an ice map it better have a cooked AT so players like me can actually be challenged in the campaign instead of ice ATs being piss free like usual
I see AT as the best time possible that has been done by the devs. IMO it should be as hard as the devs are able to make it. If it was just a speed target, then why not just name it "Platinium medal" or something like that ? No, it's the AUTHOR's best time ever. If it's unbeatable, then that means you are not as good as the map's creator, which is totally fine to me.
I mostly agree, but throw on the caveot that each "color" of map should limit the amount of grinding. White, they should only be able to grind for 30 minutes, then 1hr for green, etc. Or something like that.
I think author metals should be good enough to establish you mastered the map but not good enough to be unbeatable. Some maps are more difficult to master so some author times should be more difficult to get.
Eh, 22 is technically more difficult than 25. The issue is just that Wirt and many other pros don't have any experience with the car. If no one had any experience with fullspeed that would have taken days, not hours. Whether or not they should make alt car AT'S challenging. IDK, I don't think it's bad to have them at the same level as the other maps in the same color.
idk, maybe just get good? There's no prestige in an AT that's easy. If the prestige doesn't seem worth the grind, don't do it. That just makes the people that can do it even more impressive. In the end, AT's are only there to give an extra challenge. It doesn't make sense to ask them to be easy. You don't lose anything by not getting them.
@@uku5840 I mean that's kinda the thing tho isn't it, the difficulty of mastering a map depends on ones own skill sets. Wirtual points out that some tech maps might actually be more difficult ATs but because he has more experience on them, they weren't as difficult for him. Yeah a lack of experience would make mastering a map seem more difficult, that just means you need to get more experience on that type of map to get author times on those types of maps
The campaigns are specifically broken up into maps of different difficulty. You want someone who's semi-new to be able to get gold on the easiest tracks, but it would be ridiculous for them to be able to get gold on the hardest tracks. I don't see why the AT's should be any different.
On the author medal talk, I dont really play trackmania so much, but I know that there is a champion medal plugin, that is made after a week of times, maybe making that official would be a good way to keep author medals readily attainable but add in another kayer of challenge to the campaigns
As someone who just started playing, I'd say gold medals are for understanding the track and driving it cleanly, and should all be achievable (with ease if you're a pro, with some level of grinding if you're new), and author medals are for optimizing the racing line to shave off seconds and eventually using advanced tricks (wiggles, quantum slides etc.). Personally, I'd feel satisfied if I managed to get all the author medals of the first 15 tracks (this is the second campaign I'm playing and I'm working on the five middle tracks), and I don't think every author medal should be achievable.
I completely agree that campaigns should have consistent difficulty in author medals as it is made for the general public of the game. Any other track, however, it does not matter how difficult it is. It only matters that the author of the track set the target time. That is the entire point of the author medal and it should only be out of your reach if the player who made the track is much better than you. The author medal should not be consistent because the author is not consistent.
I think an author medal should be representative of good execution on the author's vision for the track, so it should ideally be set on a run that has no [major] mistakes and includes every line, technique, and "trick" that the author imagined while building the track. Every speedslide, every ice 360, every bugslide envisioned by the creator of the track should be necessary to match and beat the author time. This necessarily means that a highly skilled author with good intuition and a highly technical vision should be handing out much harder author times, and it's okay if a low-skill player builds fun maps with easy author times that any competent player can get in just a few tries if not on the first attempt.
To your question about author times on the official campaign, I would say that author medals should increase in difficulty as you progress in the campaign. If all author times are easy, what's the point for skilled players, but if all author times are difficult, it's discouraging to new players. Make their difficulty progress so newer players can still achieve some times and have something to gauge their progress as a player on.
Yes but this is a champion medal turned into an author medal, I get that it should be difficult but only top 100 players can get this, it'll take the average player who has 200+hours in the game atleast 20 hours on the map to get it
My wife hates when I slide out…especially when she recommends I go full speed. But I have been following Wirtual’s advice and I have been finishing in record times. Thank you!
As a united competitive player from back in the day I find it absolutely both outrageous and hysterical to attempt to play this fucking car on keyboard, I applaud this man and his patience. I also want to see him play island and bay LMFAO
If the author medals get progressively harder you kinda get a sense for your skill in the game. If they can keep authors consistent over different campaigns for each color that might be a different kind of progression where you see yourself getting a few more with each campaign.
I believe author times should be consistent across all maps. They should pose a challenge, but the challenge should come from the maps themselves becoming more and more difficult and not from the author times getting harder and harder on top of maps getting harder. I would either prefer if they'd all be really hard and I'd have to choose my battles or all achievable. For example if I play a massa campaign, I expect to get silver medals and maybe I'll push for gold on some that I found nice, that's perfectly fine, the author medals are all consistently crazy strong. On the other hand, if I play a Maji campaign, I will try to get all author times and it would piss me off if Maji asked like Chroma to set a specific author time on an FS map and all of the other ones are achievable. I myself also don't play with the plugin because for some reason there seemed to be some kind of memory leak that would crash my game over and over after an hour if I had the plugin installed and so I play without knowing author times. Whenever I see that I get author times on the first 10-ish maps after a small grind, I tell myself "alright, I'll go for all author times". The problem with that is that I get baited into setting an impossible goal for myself and then when I spend out of nowhere 15h+ on a map without getting author time I close the game and I don't open it again until the next season. I tell myself every improvement "oh alright now this is probably author" and I can tell you that after telling myself that dozens of times in a row (especially because of how easy author times were in other maps), I just get discouraged. If the campaign is made by a single author, I expect that author to set times that match their skill level, which should necessarily be consistent. As such I believe a "Nadeo" author time shoud mean something (even if in this case it's not a person, but it's still a single entity). I have especially little patience with the new cars that I think just make the game experience worst in every way, it's like they're forcing me to play another shitty racing game that handles like garbage and I have no clue who those updates are for. That was my rant, thank you for listening to my ted talk!
I believe author time should get harder thru the campaign (not crazy hard). This gives better players a challenge so they don't beat the campaign in 45 mins. This gives new players a challenge on beating the map without crashing and then go for the author time. This helps new players find their max and make them learn new tricks beside just driving a clean run and beating the author time.
tl;dr Difficulty of Author Medals should be from the map itself rather than hunting to get a difficult time. Easier medals early on can give an inaccurate idea of the later medals. Less people have experience with cars other than Stadium.
Imo i think its good if its an increasing difficulty. The medals should be playing clean in all maps in a good time efficient way, because harder maps are harder, the clean efficient lines are harder, thus making the final time harder. And as you can see wirtual slammed it with a .200 lead over it. If you are behind by 2 seconds in this final map its maybe 20 turns. You are losing .1 of a second in each turn.
Yeah, I have pretty much the same opinions as you. I kinda hate the new cars as well, particularly the desert car, it's so unwieldy and the tilting makes me tilt. Like, it's already pretty difficult to master the stadium car and now they want us to master 3 other, worse in every way, car? It makes me mad. I also hate Camera 3 perspective in the new cars, like is it too hard to ask for me to be able to see more than half of my screen when in camera 3? I want to see where I'm going, not the hideous car they made.
In the first place, an Author Time is not about setting a certain level of difficulty but about competing with the mapper and how well he could drive his own creation. Also I dont think the ATs of red/black maps should be very doable for new players, since the Author you are competing against is not a new player either. Plus, the ATs are hidden without plugins anyways. I think the difficulty of the black maps is totally fair as they are meant for you to show the mastery of certain mechanics and styles you've learned against the Author.
I think it's really good for the author medals to have a big difference in difficulty from map 1 to map 25. They're a nice stretch goal for intermediate players, and having a steep curve includes more skill levels into the challenge.
i can say, the first time I played trackmania I had no indication that there was any author time past gold. I was absolutely not good enough at first to stumble upon the existence of author times until i started watching trackmania content.
I watched wirtual play for over a year before I ever played. I play on ps5 so I watched content before it was possible for me to play. I got author times my first day on the game, because I had visually learned so much already. It’s a good tool
Agree with what wirtual said, author medals should all be the same level of difficulty, if they are all insanely difficult that's fine, having them all varied is a bit weird. Too easy is also really boring.
I don't think it's weird to have the maps that are marked as harder have harder author medals. All the medals are far easier on the easier tracks. It would be bad game design to make all the medals the same difficulty on the maps specifically made to be easier or harder. I don't see why ATs are any different.
@@jonathanmacdonald9609 The "harder" maps are more complex, doubling down on that by making the medals harder to achieve too isn't right imo. But everyone is entitled to their own opinon.
I think the key thing about author times. Is that every track in the same “difficulty barrier” is somewhat similar in difficulty to obtain. They don’t all need to be obtainable, it just needs to be understandable from the interface why it isn’t just because they suck.
I feel like it's pretty good actually that they made author hard, because its understated that they also made gold hard for an average player so that they have achievable but difficult goal still. They're giving more of a range of achievable goals and the only problem would be people who have historically hunted author medals feeling like they can't and being upset over that.
First campaign i played 15 was my goal, i think that's a good point for it to start requiring more advance mechanics, it gives players incentive to seek out videos and get more involved in the community
14:28 Of course the run that gets the at is the one where he says something memable This will be my go to for giving maximum effort from now on. "boys, put your hole into it!"
No matter where you set the bar there's gonna be some crazy trackmania player out there uber-bugging it off into the sky. The author time should be as simple as it's namesake, just whatever the fastest time the creators of the map could manage.
The hardest tm author medal is actually Coast-C5 in trackmania turbo: build to race for the nintendo DS, which is 6 tenths faster than the WR because of a bug
To the "Author Medals" I think a consistent difficulty for the Author medals in the official campaign in not bad, because with the latter maps the difficulty of the maps already is getting harder. But her is then the point of what difficulty is good for it... And i personally have the feeling that they put this time such hard maps, becouse more and more people where complaing that the ATs where to easy I think a plugin like "The Nadeo Medals" could be possible, where they can set the time of the Nadeo Medal to the best driving time from Nadeo
Would love more detailes when you try to help us with the maps, almost like school teacher style where you might review your runs in 0,5 speed so you can play and pause them and give a little bit more details and pin point the moves your pulling off and why a bit better, i have a bit of hard time of keeping up with all of it when all the moves and tricks gets talked about so quickly😅 Great video as always though! Congrats on all the author medals, ill get them all one season aswell, probably not this one though😂
I only know trackmania from youtube. Never played it and probably never will but I enjoy watching and developed an interest in the game. For the longest time I didn't even know there are other cars in the game. For me TM was stadion car and that's it. If it would have been this wonky desert car when I first saw the game I doubt I would have stuck around for more.
I like how hard this author time is. Author time is arbitrary. They don't have to make it achievable for everyone. You spend 2 hours max author timing every map. They could make every author time take you 30mins. If you are not good enough to get this author time it just makes it more of an achievement for the people that do have it.
7:37 I'm new to trackmania and i have been able to get the author medals in the first five tracks of this campaign and the last (the only two i've played) but that's it. I like that i am not able to obtain all of the author medals because i think they would be meaningless for 99% of the playerbase if a player of my skill level could obtain all of them. I also like having a goal to work towards, i'm not a zoomer who has adhd and needs that instant gratification dopamine hit
On trials, a dirt bike 2d racing based puzzle/physics game, gold medal times seems to be a good achievement for all players while platinum was/isn't seen until beating the gold medal time and is a more expert players goal. In later games they added diamond medals, which is a close to perfect run time goal which is very difficult even for veteran players. I personally think author time should be similar to the platinum times in the trials game series. edit: also Wirtual play Trials Fusion!!!
There is no such thing as a "too-hard" author medal (that isn't hacked in, anyways), but I do think it's acceptable for there to be official ATs that a complete newbie can't get. Multiple, even. Obviously not the entire campaign unless you say upfront that this is meant for the experts/hardcores, but the black label tracks could all have ATs that would be near-impossible for a complete newbie to get and I wouldn't have a problem. Besides, from the outside looking in it seems like 1-10 are supposed to be the newbie medals (with 1-5 being the easiest of the campaign), 11-15 are tougher but still doable for newbies, 16-20 are on the edge of possibility, and then 21-25 require either years of prior experience (someone like Wirt) or at least 20+ hours learning the game to even approach much less obtain them. And the 25th is the hardest of them all. That's just my opinion, but I'd be fine with that.
I really like this campaign, I don't mind other cars and I like when maps are unique like for example engine off tech, and I really like how author times with each map are getting harder, because it appeals for me that black maps are real challenge (especially 25th map), so for me nadeo made good job
I think the black track Author Medals should be hard, only the better players unlock the Black Tracks, so they should then be challenged to best themselves. The other colours should be achievable, but scaling in difficulty per colour you go up. And the AT should be set by Nadeo, to keep it between the devs and players, which strengthens the bond between player and dev
As a brand new player that started halfway through the spring campaign, I don’t mind the new campaign. I do think author medals should be slightly more difficult as I’ve already gotten a few. My singular wish for the game, is that they provide some training or tutorial to give a foundation to begin from. Just diving in and playing random modes and maps feels wierd without any guidance.
Their “tutorial” is severely lacking in the actual mechanics needed to do well on the game. I still don’t full understand speed slides on any surface, I don’t know how to initiate a Neo slide or really understand what that is, and I don’t get wiggles at all for controller. Someone help me please Jesus
@@GrimaceTheCat1 If only the tutorial would have ghosts for the medals at least, that way you could at least attempt to "monkey see monkey do" but without any clue it's kinda useless, if I hadn't watched some TM before I would have been quite lost on some of them
@@GrimaceTheCat1 you can find tutorial for speed slides in the community section (Dont remeber what it called) type fullspeed beginner should find it. there is a map that shows a graph of optimal sd at all speed, essentially on road above 400 speed the skid mark should overlap about 40 - 50ish percant and the faster you go the wide the overlap has to be for optimal speed. dirt and grass you need wide overlap. i don't know how to neo slide myself but at low speed you can't drift normally but by doing some quick input (don't really remeber 100% what they are like i said i never managed to do it myself) it possible to drift at low speed and that what neo slides are in the comunity section you can also find straight map to practice wiggles on different surface
, I like that the author medals aren't easy to get. they _should_ be hard to achieve, and it forces you to learn and improve fast if you really want to grind at it. in the first campaign I played, spring of 2023, I got 3 author medals during the season, and one of them was on 01, in which I got a completely lucky 28.5. I would say I'm overall a much better player than I was back then, but I can't replicate that again. That's not how an author medal should work. It should take unquestionable skill and technique in order to accomplish. In this campaign, I don't have a single author medal yet, and I'm fine with that. Getting gold medals is already an accomplishment for these tracks.
7:37 New player here: achieving seemingly impossible stuff is the best in gaming, so Author Times should be hard. (i didnt get any in red and black in the last and for me first campaign)
As a mid tm player, i like this nadeo move. I saw the ATs are much more difficult, so I decided I was up for the challenge to beat them all (although I haven't gotten to map 25 yet)
I like having a challenge in the author medals in the campaigns, I just want the level of difficulty to be the same each season. For example, I want every white track map in every campaign to be the same level of difficulty for the author time, same for green blue, etc. I judge my skill based on if I can get more author medals on harder tracks as time goes on. So I don't want them to all of a sudden make the red and black map author medals really easy, but I'd rather them be a challenge until I am just really good at the game
I first played the game only a couple of months ago, so I still remember fairly freshly when I got my first author times. It was on the first level of the campaign at the time (I believe this was the campaign pre-desert car). This was my first time ever launching the game, and I got gold surprisingly quickly, so I looked up the AT, saw it was achievable, and went for it. Then, after 20 minutes or less of grinding and practice, I got it. And I felt... confused? Sure, I was happy to get AT and felt it was a good show of skill, but I felt like I shouldn't have been able to pick up the game for the first time and get an AT on the first map I played in less than a total of 30 minutes (I didn't notice the tutorial maps until a decent bit later). I then got the ATs for the second and third maps in similar times. It felt like the victory was a bit hollow and it kind of made me value the glorious ATs less. This all being said, I didn't play much more of the game, so I can't say how this may've felt for me trying later maps. I did play some later maps, but randomly in ranked (and no, I didn't drag my team down by not knowing the maps. I held my own in low Bronze). And maybe I was performing well because I have a general gaming background and have played a notable but not large amount of arcade racing games.
The white and green tracks are extremely easy to get AT on, it’s the later tracks where they get difficult. It seems like they make the first 10 tracks super easy to try to get new players sucked in.
One thing I will say about author medals is that I feel like they should implement them differently. I like the champion medal idea we have currently, so why not make it official? Like I’m all for hard ATs by good players who they get to run maps, but why not make it like… bronze, silver, gold, champion (which would be more similar to ATs of prior campaigns) and Author medal which should be a MASSIVE achievement to get. That way you give the better players more official content to stream as they go for the author medals but you’re not taking away the more achievable fourth medal from the player base who isn’t as hardcore. And I do play- last season was my first and I did get all ATs which felt good but like… I JUST started playing. Should I really deserve every official medal?
I think Author's should be grindable for new players. I love difficulty of TMNF authors - above green seems everything impossible but in a week or two you just get it. So if a completely new player can let's say in 100 hours build a skill to complete all 25 authors before they release a new campaign then that's a good campaign.
as a new player that grinded out all tmnf authors, i loved the difficulty there as well. started by knocking out gold times on all tracks, then went back and grinded out the author on each and not only did this feel incredibly rewarding, i think it also led to a great skill progression, kinda like it was serving as one long tutorial for getting new players to the starting point of the climb to game mastery personally i don't mind if there's a bit of a difficulty curve in author medals in a campaign (especially since i feel like tmnf author medals had a bit of a weird difficulty curve, where some early maps were unpleasant to grind) but having insane jumps in difficulty in an official campaign is kinda ridiculous if expert players want to goals to grind for, i totally get it, 'easier' author medals can't serve that purpose, but isn't the leaderboard already perfectly suited for setting goals to grind for? grind for top 5%, top 1%, top 500, top 100, etc and before someone asks why newer players can't do this as well, it doesn't really work as a goal-setter for newer players though, not nearly as well as official author times do. at those early stages, top 25%, top 5000, etc are all pretty nebulous since they wouldn't have developed the inner metric to gauge those results by tldr: author medals on official campaigns work great as both as benchmarks and rewarding goals for newer players, more experienced players should have game sense and experience to define their own goals with the leaderboard system
@@chriss4855 More of a problem with top X is that anyone just can't do that. Only Top 100 players are Top 100 and the later you come the harder it is. Author time is constant so anyone can come and beat it anytime
Hiding AT’s is the best thing for a brand new player since they don’t feel like they miss out by not getting it. That said, as an experienced player, if you told me Scrapie hunted a map for 40 minutes to set the AT, I would say it’s probably too hard for a campaign track.
I have no issue with Author Medals being arbitrarily hard. As the name implies, the mapper should do their best to set a time. If the devs are more skilled than most of the player base, most of the player base shouldn't be able to get ATs. I think some related issues are, that gold medals have lost their value and the difficulty curve is too steep from white to black. Firstly, make ATs be hard to get all the way from white maps to black maps. Maybe not too hard, give the mapper a limit/orientation like 30 minutes or 30 runs to set a time and thats it. Secondly, make early gold medals a bit harder and later gold medals maybe a slight bit easier. The raised difficulty should come from a longer, more complex map, not simply from a tighter time. At my skill level I can barely collect all golds after many days of trying through the season. And while a few days of campaign once a season is good fun I usually complete white to blue without much issue and get stuck on the later maps. I'd much prefer to spend more time perfecting earlier maps. Have gold be an achievement on every map. This way author times wouldn't "need" to be achievable. Or as others have suggested, introducing platinum medals would also allow ATs to be harder.
Im new to trackmainia. I like getting some author medals I spent like 30min grinding for, but understand that other players want it harder, so I vote for some author medals hard to get
It feels like author medal took the purpose of gold medal, being a tough but beatable time, when it should be just the best time a nadeo employee can actually set
ok, "should be this"... based on what? your opinions? historical precedent? if it's the latter, then that's total cap, recently i completed a several month grind where it took ~45 hours starting as a complete beginner to get all at in all tmnf maps, without using any newer tech or any shortcuts if a jobber like me could accomplish this in sub 1 hour per track on average then there's no shot the author times used to be "the best the author could do" haven't played much tm 2020 cuz of the stupid season pass price, but from what i've seen this standard for at medals remains relatively similar to how it was in tmnf meaning that your argument for "it should be this" is just based on your subjective opinions, right?
@@chriss4855Not sure what’s confusing to you, it’s literally in the name “author time”. It should be the best time the author can set on their map. Edit - Also yes TMNF author times are very easy, the new game is much more difficult on the later maps. The issue is that they intentionally are slow on the earlier maps, and whether all of the times should have similar difficulty.
My (very rough!) targets would be: 1 hour playtime = every bronze, some silvers 10-20 hours = every silver, some golds 200-400 hours = every gold, some ATs 4000-8000 hours = every AT
Author medal by itself should be an achievement and not just an endorphin feeder, all black maps should feel like that, rather than a malder. Not many people understand that
7:30 I'm not good at the game (I'm ok) and I have never thought I should be striving for author medals. I should be striving for Golds, players newer than me should be striving for silver or even bronze, and players who have thousands of hours in the game should have something to strive for. I think Nadeo has finally seen it that way.
I think developer times should never be "designed," it should be the actual best the developer could do in the time they had. Growing to the point where you can go faster than the person who made the freaking game is what makes beating a dev time so satisfying, and it takes away from that if they go easy on you.
I like the hard authors because it gives me a reason to keep playing the campaign. I’m not good enough to have a reason to hunt the campaign maps past author. Plus the campaigns are good controlled environment type maps
As someone who is either completely average or bad at trackmania, I’d like for authors to be more obtainable and it would probably make me want to play more because to me a lot of author medals feel unobtainable/not worth the time investment for a casual player, but I also understand that it could diminish some players joy when achieving the medal
I think author medals should be difficult even on white maps, to give better players more of a reason to grind the early maps of a campaign. Gold should be the target for new players.
I think Nadeo should just make golds harder. Make gold barely achievable for new players and make author time incredibly difficult for experience players. Then the bronze and silver metals can get a bit more love too
is there any tricks or tips for the new car (idk if it is actually new but new to me ) for controller? i feel like it is so overly sensitive that i cant get a grip on it
IMO AT's should take a good amount of time for average player to complete. Something along the lines of 30 mins for the first 5 maps and then add 30 mins every 5 five maps. So white maps take 30min per maps Green 1h, blue 1.5h, red 2h and black 2.5h. That would make the all AT's campaing take a good 37.5h to complete for a average player.
do i think that all authro times should be achievable for new players? YES! but not in a means of it being easy, but by means of them not requiring hidden tech like speed slides to obtain I remember the first trackmania game i played on Xbos a decade ago, i got my first green medal, i didnt even know they existed. and it was such a hype moment. it got me excited & made me start grinding maps for the rest of the night i hung out at that friends house!!! Im also fairly experienced with racing games, so like, for racing gamers that are new. yes.... for an average average joe. probably not. theyre should be a skill goal to strive for!
