The Story of Trackmania's Most Controversial Map

this is Midori a trackmania full speed map with elements of bobsley that I created set in a floating island scenery at first glance this map looks pretty Innocent but it is home to the biggest controversy in trackmania in 2022 and the story behind why is a pretty interesting one it all started when I got the idea to host a challenge I wanted to build a track perfectly suited to my skill set and try to grind it for a near impossible author time the first five players to beat the author time would get one thousand dollars in prices as well as real life author medals one second like that's pretty cool right that looks amazing I thought this was a fantastic idea but things didn't exactly go as planned the track was released on the 23rd of July and within just 24 hours several Pro players had claimed the time I sat was outright unbeatable and that I had cheated when I told the author time as it turns out they weren't entirely wrong though not on purpose the way I drove the Midori author time was so controversial that I almost got myself banned from trackmania but now that the dust has finally settled it's time to tell the story of how Midori became trackmania's most controversial track foreign track Mania Maps there is no greater honor a Creator can receive than having their track be chosen as track of the day every day the developers sift through thousands of tracks to choose the one track that becomes officially added as that days track of the day in April of 2022 I started building Midori with hopes of making something of such good quality that it could receive the track of today's status this was a good starting point but the surroundings so far were incredibly tame the scenery on a trick media map is really what can make it feel magical and come to life and for this I got the help of trackmania streamer Maji who put in over 40 hours of work into turning what was no more than just a simple sketch into this breathtaking landscape the attention to detail and the overall result is honestly quite stunning and I really recommend checking out her channel to see exactly how she does it with the scenery in place the track was complete and I started grinding for the aforementioned author time challenge when I first started doing speedruns of Midori I thought a time under 45 seconds would be amazing but not long after I managed to get that with the relative ease and I still felt I had a long way left to go to optimize the track soon I found myself stuck at 44.57 all things considered a good time on the tracks but annoyingly in that run I messed up the very last corner and lost a couple of hundredths there I told myself I would go for one final Improvement and leave it at that as I had already played the map now for over 15 hours in total and then this one happened foreign [Music] 44 458 this was beyond anything I could have expected and a worthy challenge to anyone who wanted to get the real-life author medals stylistically Midori is all about snowballing speed if you ever manage to squeeze out a tiny speed Advantage early on it will often translate into greater and greater time gains throughout the track to keep up with my author Time Players couldn't afford to miss a single detail especially early into the run the author run had a great ice wiggle in the start downhill followed by a precise low jump into the bobsled and a really good first bobsleigh turn Bob slay turns are where things start to get interesting when you're driving a bobsley turn you always want to be steering a little bit but the exact amount depends on how fast you're going for a low speed Bob slay turn the ideal steering amount might be as high as 60 percent and for a hyper speed turn it could be as low as 25 percent the essential principle at work is that the faster you are the less you should steer one trackmania 2020 released this absolutely sucked for keyboard players since keyboard players have the choice of not steering at all at zero percent or full steering at a hundred percent but no values in between so in any bobsley turn you were bound to lose time this led some professional keyboard players like Kappa to getting creative and driving competitions with a hybrid input setup where he would use keyboard for the majority of the run and then whenever a bobsley turn appeared he would use a controller that he had lying on his desk to gently steer through the turn and then continue on keyboard afterwards the developers found this silly and they wanted to introduce something to bridge the gap between keyboard and controller so they made something called action Keys action keys are essentially just macros when used they let you lock your steering at different percentages in my opinion they're a great addition to the game as they give keyboard players a Fighting Chance without having to switch input device a theoretically perfect turn could still be one massively favored towards controller players whereas say you have to enter it steering 49.2 percent and exit it with like 42.4 percent but in other situations action Keys could be favored with the consistency that action Keys provide where you just hold one button and get 40 all the time it could be easier than trying to estimate that on an analog stick entering the first bobsley turn on Midori you are driving at 400 speed which happens to line up with when 40 steering is The Sweet Spot following that you have to precisely speed slide on the dirt and the platform before the wall ride before you get to the second bobsleigh turn at this point you are going at 540 speed meaning the bobsley steering needs to be much lower than in the first turn as a keyboard player you have the options of either turning 40 or 20 both of which are not ideal in testing I discovered that the steering angle that seemed to gain the most speed was to ride around 34 percent but how exactly can you achieve that on a keyboard in the summer of 2021 the keyboard company wooting sent me one of their models that they wanted me to try and give feedback on so they can improve their analog keyboards for trackmania players the really powerful thing about this keyboard though is that it allows you to customize a lot of things the user can set which buttons they want to be the analog ones and exactly what analog curve they should have so if you wanted an analog key to produce say 29 steering when fully pressed down their software allows you to do that this is where the heart of the issue lies I was convinced that this was the future for keyboard players in trackmania so ever since I received it I've been using it as my main keyboard I've showed on stream many times how it works and what I'm trying to do with it I've talked about it in several discords with Pro players and I even planned on making a video detailing exactly how it works but unfortunately that one fell to the wayside at the time of setting the Midori author medal I had been using this keyboard for for over a year with no pushback or problems and I really thought nothing more of it I just went about my usual way of gaming so to get the 34 steering in the second and third bobsley turn I just used an analog profile on my keyboard and held the key all the way to get 34 steering this made my car accelerate a lot through the bobsleigh turns and I was able to carry that speed over the great platforms by speed sliding and maintaining the lead as I cross the finish line I got a massive 1200 Improvement I told myself that is that the speed loss from using 40 steering instead of 34 in the last two Bob slay turns is actually quite significant and it seemed like there was no way to beat the other time with action key 2. Alcon who is one of the world's best ice and full speed players and a clear favorite to win the challenge was still 35 hundreds behind the author metal after grinding for an entire day to clear up the confusion I decided to post a tweet where I explained how how I driven my author time this however disappointed a lot of people the perception at the time was that I had just made a map with an author time so ridiculous that the only way to beat it was by going out and buying an analog keyboard for 150 and then setting up your own custom action keys to get enough speed out of the last two bobsley turns many were rightfully upset and argued that this should be considered cheating but up until this point there had been no rules on what is allowed and what isn't with an analog keyboard despite the best effort by people in the community to have a rational discussion things quickly got out of hand many hate tweets started flying back and forth massive Reddit threads were made thousands of Discord messages from Sunrise until sunset two players even went as far as blatantly cheating to get the author time claiming that if virtual can cheat then so can we they did this by modifying the game's physics to permanently give themselves a reactor booster and then driving to the finish with an impressive 6 second faster time and then trying to claim the prize money not gonna lie I hadn't expected that when I set up this challenge unfortunately though both of these players got banned from the game as soon as nadeo returned from their vacation as it turns out modifying your input device and modifying the game's physics aren't one in the same thing the next day Alcon managed to set up his controller as a custom action Key by using a program called DX tweak he could limit the steering range of the analog stick to be 34 and then much like kappa's hybrid setup that is how he played the tracks after many hours of grinding that day elcon eventually got this run thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] 44437 becoming the first player to successfully beat my time and the first player to claim a Midori author model and 400 in prices after talking with my community about it on stream and speaking directly with Carl Jr the five-time world champion of trackmania it was clear there were big concerns about this becoming the meta in the game part of the beauty of trackmania is that you only really need four buttons to compete up down left and right if using custom action Keys was necessary to beat my author time that would kind of defeat the purpose as the difficulty would be made really arbitrary it was no longer about high skill driving but who had the most advanced setup after realizing my mistake I decided to grind Midori again but this time by only using in-game action Keys a 40 60 and 80 steering to set a time on a setup that everyone has access to after playing for a couple of hours I managed to get a 44 573 1100 slower than my custom action key time but still much faster than everyone except Alcon on the map I decided to make this the new unofficial author time on Midori and changed the rewards so that anyone who beat the 44573 would still be eligible to win the prizes over the following days the player yon123 405 would become the second person to beat the author time and the player Mata 2002 would get it as well though both of them had also used a 34 steering setup this still counted for prices as we had yet to receive any ruling from the developers two spots now remained in the pricing as I was looking at the field of contenders I noticed something very interesting the player's shadowcrancer was going for the ultimate Chad move playing the entire track on controller from start to finish for reasons I won't get too much into now this loses a lot of time in the start as to wiggle down the bobsleigh is best done on either keyboard or the d-pad but the interesting part was that in the bobsley turn by moving the control stick with surgical Precision he was gaining time compared to those that just used a 34 action key doing this in the second and third bobsley turn on Midori shadowcrancer was gaining upwards of 4 to 5 speed compared to just holding one steering value and ultimately proving that the real action Keys had been joysticks all along the trackmania community and myself included had gotten so lost in the sauce of which action key was the best the drama and the memes that we overlooked the fundamental principle at work that gradually reducing steering is better for hitting The Sweet Spot steering angle this is how bobsleigh should be done perfectly but next to nobody had actually bothered trying it since just pressing one button and getting a decent result was much easier after seeing it I was very curious to try it myself and I quickly discovered that it is indeed very difficult the only strategy to make this even somewhat consistent was by using a legal plug-in for the game called dashboard which lets you have an input display on screen at all times then you would drive a bobsleigh turn and stare at the input display and try to estimate when the arrow was about 35 filled up after taking a while to get used to it I was getting much faster attempts and all that remained was chaining everything together in one run [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] 44.416 400 is faster than my original author time and temporarily the world record on the map but the final time doesn't really tell the full story exiting the second bobslee turn this run had a speed advantage of 5 over my 34 steering one which meant that if the entry to the next turn was better this run could have been a low 44.3 which would be far Out Of Reach of what you could do with any action key soon after shadowcranser also managed to beat the author time and one day later NADA became the fifth player to beat 4457 rounding out the pricing both of them doing it on a controller the metals came out looking amazing the company winmed did an amazing job designing them as close as possible to the in-game medals and I'm very happy to be able to give these away to these five successful players but this isn't quite where the story ends what was the aftermath of all this were custom action Keys allowed or considered cheating were records I had driven with this keyboard still on the leaderboard or did they have to be removed on the 5th of August we got some answers when nadeo made a statement addressing the issue in the statement they said the following seeing the controversy about these action Keys instead of looking at the ways player try and maximize their advantage it rather pushes us to revisit for instance ice bobsley gameplay ideally to reach a situation where these methods would be too marginal for top performance later it reads Our Hope and ambition is to make different input devices close enough without requiring analog single action keys and to eventually maybe even remove action Keys entirely using a personal custom key to lock your steering automatically at an optimized angle is unfairly advantageous when consistency is valued as a skill and therefore will be considered unwanted and disallowed until further notice we will not sanction players or records for this retroactively as we agree that this has been a very difficult topic without clear rulings before players who may have used this method before this article are not considered to have been cheating but this article does serve as a wording going forward quickly summarized they're disallowing custom action keys from now on but they will not penalize players like myself thankfully who have used them in the past since they did not have any rules about them back then they also alluded to potential physics changes for bobsley and Ice to remove the need for Action keys and improve the long-term health of the game when adeo says they are looking to do big changes like this it's usually assumed that these will be far in the future but only a couple of weeks later it was rumored by people with inside knowledge that an update to ice and bobsley was coming as close as the 1st of October this update would make Bob slay so that it's equally fast on keyboard and controller which sounds like a great idea but this update was also going to permanently change the game because if the rumors were true it would make any tracks featuring either bobsleigh or ice much slower there's a community in trackmania that collects track of the day author medals there's over 700 in total now and to get them all you need to grind a lot of different tracks for a lot of different incredibly hard Metals but out of those 700 Maps Midori would be the first one to become officially impossible after this physics update and they realized they had just a little over a month to get to work if they wanted to get it before the door shut close forever the player monkey grind the track for over 150 hours in total but luckily he would be rewarded for his effort when he got an astonishing 44.336 on the track a run that simply carried nearly perfect speed throughout the nap beating the author Time by 12 hundredths of a second other players were not so fortunate the player's spam indexer put in an equally Herculean effort having spent most of their time in drag Mania playing tight drifting tracks bobsleigh full speed was quite out of their elements both of them accrued upwards of 100 hours grinding Midori getting excruciatingly close many times over but as the first of October rolled around both of them fell just a few hundred short of getting the medal as the new physics update dropped the first thing I did was go back to Midori to see the damages only to quickly realize that there was absolutely no chance of beating the author time anymore a great run on the track now would be about three seconds slower many of the most passionate ice and bobsled players really dislike this new update and have made a petition for nadeo to revert the chambers but knowing the alternative it's hard to say what's better you know if only there was a competitive trackmania game with over a ducky long history of records and leaderboards without any updates during that time that'd be great in the days since the patch Midori has become completely abandoned what started out as a fun and unique challenge has eventually turned into trackmania's version of Chernobyl a land so filled with toxicity that nobody really wants to go there the drama and the Uproar all of this created really makes it one of the most controversial track media maps of all time but perhaps we can turn this into a learning experience starting soon on my live stream I'm going to be building Midori 2 and perhaps things can be done properly this time to create a challenge the way it was meant to be or perhaps I'll have to make another drama video in half a year's time we'll see how this one goes [Music]

Channel: WirtualTV

Views: 2,341,168

Keywords: Wirtual, Trackmania, Shortcut, World Record, Highlight, Best, Pro, Player, Tricks, Tips, Tutorial, How To, Coaching, Cup of the day, midori, midori drama, 34%, Trackmania cheating, midori cheating, trackmania drama

Id: VUvtt0Li98g

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2023