POST Trails Rising Feedback
Since the development of the game has ended and the dev teams is probably (or hopefully) already working on the next Trials game, I'd like to give some valuable feedback from the perspective of a mid-core competitive player. The game I play most are Trials, Trackmania and Rocket League. I like to compete with others, play a single game for hundreds or even thousands of hours over several years, but don't belong to those Top players who could win an eSport tournament in a game.
I bought the game twice. On my playstation account I have hunted platinum on all tracks (Got a Top 600 rank, having played the game about 500 hours), on PC I haven't progressed that far yet. I also played a lot of Trials Fusion and Trials Frontier before.
The Tutorial
With the "University of Trials" you probably made by far the best Tutorial a game has ever had. It gives you the right challenges at the right time, it has a brief explanation of what is expected and you get a tutorial driver on a separate line who repeats what you are supposed to do. That's exactly what you need in a tutorial. The only thing that could have been better is unlocking a few Ninja-level lessons once you unlock the Ninja tracks. A new Trials should have that kind of tutorial again.
Player and bike customization
For a game that already allowed players to be creative in the track editor, this feature has been a great addition for creative people. With huge amount of stickers, it was pretty easy to create a cool design and I invested a couple of hours in the first month to create the one design I wanted to have for my player and then I never changed it. PLacing the stickers was a bit fiddly, since moving a sticker left and right also seemed to turn them a bit. I would have preferred to get a flat sheet to design something on and then use that design and stamp it on the clothes and bikes in the size I needed.
At some point, I would have liked to put my design on different clothes, but there was no way to group and save a combination of stickers to use it on other clothes. So I didn't bother redoing it.
I bought some of those bike customizations, but I never got to use them so I just stopped buying them at all. Same with the loot boxes. Since I didn't need any new items after some time, they became completely use- and meaningless to me. I could use points to get the stickers I want and still have over 100k coins, so the loot box mechanism just didn't have a purpose for me. There must be at least 100 unopened loot boxes in my inventory.
Track and campaign design
I absolutely loved the design of every single track you created. Visually as well as regarding the driving line. They were very well made and the platinum medals were perfectly calculated. I think missing platinum medal by just 0.1 seconds or less has become one of the memes of this game I enjoyed a lot. The checkpoint numbers you introduced were a great idea that helped a lot with talking about certain sections of a track. I also liked having so many tracks to play. With over 200 tracks in total, that's Trackmania Turbo categories.
I think grouping tracks into leagues and having a "stadium" as a final for each league is a great concept for Trials games. However, getting gold medal on each track, and maybe even just silver on the easier tracks should be enough to progress.
Also I think that organizing tracks in a simple list that shows Name, current rank in the leaderboards, medal progress bar and best time already be the way to show them to a player. When moving the cursor over a track, there can be some additional information (Top 10 + own position, Preview image, rating, ...) on the side.
Track selection
At first, I thought the world map was a cool idea. But it became a mess very quickly. I guess you are already aware of the problems with selecting or even finding a track on this map so I won't elaborate on that any further. Especially since you could just select a stadium and see all tracks for 1 league there. My biggest problem with this map is how those contracts are given priority. On a track where I have no open contract, moving my cursor over it looks like this:

You get this nice Track progress bar that helps you see at a glance how close you are to the next medal. I liked just looking at this bar to scan for a track where I could improve my time easily. However, if there was a contract on that track, the bar was gone.

There is no option to hide all contracts.
If you decide to keep contracts as a concept, make sure that they reward the player with something meaningful and that they don't interfere with players who don't care about them at all. I think the best way would be to have them under a separate menu. Just as you would organise a league with tracks, you could organize a sponsor with currently available contracts.
Contracts
I see the idea behind contracts. They give extra replayability for casual players and some even give extra challenges for the better players. But the way they are presented was very suboptimal. Especially since thy block medal information. Imagine being on being in the process of getting gold on all tracks, just a few are missing. If you don't care for contracts at all, the map starts screaming "CONTRACTS!" at you after some time:

Apart from being annoying, there was no real reason to actually play the contracts. The rewards were mainly player customization items that you could not put stickers on (Why?) or stickers.
Multiplayer
I didn't enjoy multiplayer at all in Trials Rising. Getting up to Diamond division was not a challenge at all because there had always been bronze, silver and unranked players that were easy to beat. Often that had lead to me getting the points I needed to rank up to Diamond, and the other players often not even being able to finish the tracks.
I loved the Trials Frontier multiplayer mode a lot. It gives you an opponent and you have a limited amount of time to get the best times on 3 tracks. That's a mode that works for this kind of game (Trackmanias mode "Time attack" works similarly).
When I watched a tournament organized by the community, they used the time attack mode. Two players would play a single track for 10 or 15 minutes at the same time. Player with the best time would win that track. The players had to play those maps in solo mode though and stream their progress via twitch, so that the tournament organizer could load up both streams an restream them to the audience. I think this should be at least available as a supported competitive game mode.
There is another multiplayer mode I suggested ~1 year ago: T.R.I.A.L.S
Track central
I wrote down some suggestions about seeing Track Central as some kind of Social Media earlier. Today, instead of the "Random track challenge", I'd suggest a "Track of the day" feature to give players an option to hunt a new track every day and compete for the best time. You did that partially with featuring 3 custom tracks on the world map, which is a neat feature. But I missed a meaning to that feature for a player. My key question for that would be: "Why would a player come back to Trials Rising every day, to play those featured tracks?" Currently there is no reason for it. A separate leaderboard for a daily track or maybe 7-10 weekly tracks that would close after that day or week, but would still be documented somewhere, would be a cool incentive to come back to the game regularly.
Track editor
An amazing and incredibly powerful tool for track creators. I used 2 weeks of my yearly vacation to learn this beast and build my first ever track. That was a cool experience, yet I couldn't bring myself to finish the second track I started. One specific thing I missed was objects snapping to each other.
Long term perspective
I personally got a bit tired of buying new video games on a regular basis. I'd highly prefer to buy a single game or at least only a small number of games and support that game or those games over several years and see the game(s) being improved and developed continuously. When you advertized Trials Rising with a "Season Pass" I was expecting to see a second and maybe even a third Season Pass in 2020.
When I decide to play Trials, I don't want to have to choose between Fusion, Rising, and maybe 3-4 more Trials games that may come out over the next 10 years. I'd prefer to have one Trials game that has all tracks the community has ever created.
I'd also love to see actual seasons in a single Trials game as well as some emphasis on competitive gaming.
That's it
I hope, y'all found this kind of feedback valuable for your next game. Maybe there are 1-2 ideas that will find their way into the next Trials game. I'll probably buy the next game anyways, but as a fan of this franchise I'd love to see Trials growing again.
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