What happen to Tournaments? + more | Forums

[onesimpleclik]

What happen to Tournaments?

I don't know how many people really care about the Tournaments, but I sure do. In all honesty, apart from the User made tracks which I still love playing, & which is still is going strong, it's probably the only thing keeping Trials Fusion alive. Every other aspect of the game seems to have taken a dive.

Not long ago, there were new community tournaments being put up, from OTHG & other teams/community groups, and Acorn prizes to get everyone involved, but now that seems to have died off. The Tournaments section has taken a step back. I've lost track of how many times I have played 'Forever Lost', 'Amazing Ride', Perfect Execution, etc, you get my point. Feels like Ground Hog Day.

The TrialsGames twitter is relatively quiet when it comes to alluding of any new content the game might be receiving. I would love to see some more Track DLC for the game, but I'd be stoked to at least see some new body kits, rims, rider outfits, or i don't know.. bikes?? Trials Fusion feels abandoned.

Sorry, just a bit of a rant.

[En0-]

Hello Onesimpleclik,

Thanks for the feedback.

So, let's start with the bad news:
- There is no DLC or extra customization planned for Trials Fusion. The game was released 30 months ago and our teams moved on new projects.
- The tournaments have not been updated for a while because some people started to not receive anymore their acorns after tournaments. We're not able to investigate why and it was starting to be too much a hassle to give individually the acorns after each week end tournament. We're not able to fix it because we can't reproduce it and we have no development team on the project anymore. So, we don't plan to add anymore tournaments for acorns.

What we can do:
- We can bring back some UGC tournaments. If a player gets in touch with us and proposes a setup for the tournament, we would probably make it happen.

About the future:
- We expect to talk very soon about what we are doing. We don't have any game to be released very soon but we want to talk about what we are doing.

If you have further feedback or question, feel free.

Thanks a lot,

Eno

[xzamplez]

While it's cool that you enjoy tournaments, I don't think they do anything to keep the game alive. Since day 1 there's been no competitive incentive to play them. The concept was interesting, the execution was poor.

Just go back to the old tournaments for the next installation, or give it the proper treatment (not the same ten tournaments for two years).

[En0-]

Hi,

I agree that for a long time, the feature was incomplete. However, when we have been able to realize what we wanted to do (weekly + UGC + acorns), it worked well (and that's why people are asking for it). But I agree that when the feature is not complete (which has been most of the time), it's not worth much. That will be a learning for the future.

Thanks,

[xzamplez]

Hi,

I agree that for a long time, the feature was incomplete. However, when we have been able to realize what we wanted to do (weekly + UGC + acorns), it worked well (and that's why people are asking for it). But I agree that when the feature is not complete (which has been most of the time), it's not worth much. That will be a learning for the future.

Thanks,

Implementing UGC content was an improvement, I'll agree. However, it was still very lacking, competitively speaking.

Proper treatment would be for the tournaments to have seasons, and for the season rewards to be worthwhile. And for the rewards to be based on position, NOT top%. Each season would have a leaderboard, like current multiplayer in Fusion. And no reused tournaments, to keep it fresh.


But, there's no reason why this tournament system replaced the old. I'd much rather have the old tournaments, but I don't see why there wasn't both.

[En0-]

Hi,

Interesting proposition.

I see 2 issues with the proposition: it's a very hardcore design that has one of his component partially relying on playtime (more you do tournaments, more you climb the season leaderboard) which is something we try to avoid to prioritize the skill over the playtime. The "no reused tournament" may be challenging (how many tournaments would be needed every month? how to generate them and ensure they are interesting? There are solutions though).

I was not on the project when the decision to replace the old tournaments by the new ones have been made. My guess is that there is a priority on non-static content (which makes sense in my mind, when the execution follows).

Thanks,

[onesimpleclik]

Eno,

Thanks for addressing my questions. I do very much wish to see the Trials series continue to improve. I've been a long time fan, have been playing the games since way back on Miniclip haha.

I don't have any more feedback to give on Trials Fusion, but I do have a suggestion for any future games in the Trials series.

So far, the ranking on the leaderboards in regards to individual tracks, is based on the time taken to complete the track & the faults. Might I suggest another stat that could possibly go along with those two? Attempts. They wouldn't effect the overall ranking of a players run on the leaderboard, but it would be interesting to see how many Attempts the player took to achieve that run. Maybe just an extra column?

Eg, Player A took 5 Attempts, completed in X time, with X faults.

[En0-]

Hi,

That's an interesting idea even if I would actually be worried how it would be use by players to troll each others.
I know it has also been a discussion in the team (it was more about the time than the attempts, but the idea was similar). We didn't reach any conclusion however.

I would be interested to hear what other players think about it.

Cheers,

[mrjorts]

Interesting discussion My take on the Fusion tournaments is that I agree that the feature felt incomplete at launch and - at least for me - by the time it got really fleshed out I wasn't really playing all the actively any more. I'll also just put it out there, as long as we're giving feedback, that I never really liked the selection of acorn-specific outfits. I've always preferred having a broader selection of everyday clothing choices rather than a small selection of outlandish costumes when it comes to character customization.

I also agree with xzamplez that I miss static tournaments with global leaderboard points, since that's always going to be what motivates people to take them seriously and get really impressive runs.

I don't like the idea of the Attempts column on the leaderboard because to me the intent seems to be to suggest that it's somehow better to play the game less. It just gives people an excuse to dismiss the top runs. "Of course they're only number 1 because they played the track a million times." It incentivizes people to stop playing with a small number of attempts, which is counterproductive to getting people interested in playing the game seriously and getting into the competitive aspect.

One context where I do like putting an emphasis on low attempts is in Trials Frontier's showdowns, which is really the only thing I liked about Frontier. If you take out the golden ticket pay to win stuff, it becomes a really interesting multiplayer mode that is 1) asynchronous, so you don't have to rely on people always being online waiting in matchmaking and 2) really tense due to the back and forth escalation the mode encourages. I think something like that could work really well in a core Trials game.

Looking forward to hearing more about what you guys at RL are up to in the future

[En0-]

Thanks for the feedback mrjorts!

I agree with the attempts column issue... it can go wrong.