🛈 Announcement
Greetings! Trackmania forums are now archived and accessible in read-only mode, please go to the new platform to discuss the game.
  1. #21
    Fowst2010's Avatar Banned
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Posts
    238
    Ghosts do give a significant gameplay advantage, as I tried to explain earlier.
    The advantage is a live comparison to the world record. You don't only see their line compared to you in real time, but also splits.

    WR ghosts can be considered blueprints for the perfect run. Regional ghosts don't help a lot, because to get ghosts that use a cut, you have to do the cut on your own first. Also, they are too many, you can only enable 7 ghosts or 0 or drive against your PB. Even if I get to the german ghosts rather than regional ones, their lines are far from perfect and in most cases useless.
    Not sure what's so hard about this to accept, have you tried to get a top 200 ish time on an unknown map without a WR ghost? It's possible but it takes way longer than with a ghost.

  2. #22
    If you really need ghosts so much to drive these runs, there are always still the streamer keys available of some high level players that will have a good run on most, if not all tracks that you can race against with starter access. However I agree with the fact that it is not pay to win.

    Ghosts can help you learn how to drive something, for sure, this is the general line to take, and you can compare your exit speeds to see if you took a corner correctly. However there is much more to a map and just following a ghost isn't going to give you indepth information about how to drive a track. I rarely race against WR ghosts and more against my PB, because my pb already does the appropriate lines, it is just a matter of better execution of tricks that will allow me to push further to a faster time. Thus comparing with myself is the best way to improve. Which as far as I know is totally possible with starter access.

    I think there is also an important lesson here about learning a map VS learning the game. If you just practice 1 map, only follow wr ghost and just try mimic what he does. You might get a good time on that map. Then, you go to the next map, and have to do it all over again. Instead, if you take the time to learn the lines yourself, compare to yourself, see what gives you better times, you actually learn the mechanics of the game, which you can then more easily apply on future maps.

    My point being that limiting yourself to learning off ghosts is hurting your ability to learn new maps fast. (a skill that is important in TM, especially in for example COTD). Ghosts can certainly be a nice tool, but they should not be relied upon solely, and certainly do not give as much of an advantage as you seem to think, a replay of top100 vs top1 are both equally valuable. And your own ghost is even more valuable.
     2 people found this helpful

  3. #23
    Fowst2010's Avatar Banned
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Posts
    238
    Like you said, improving on your own matters a lot, but you need to be a really good player already to be able to benefit from the WR ghost.
    The people who have WRs probably also played against the WR more than once.
    In fact the WR ghost is only valuable, if you're going almost as fast. So for 90% of players it might be useless, because the ghost is gone after the first one or two corners.
    But I'm usually less than a second behind WR, less then 0.5 on shorter 30s tracks. The WR ghost has the last few details I'm missing. It's very unsatisfying to play against your PB at this point, because you feel like it's maxed, and whenever you're .1 or .2 ahead your ghost comes zooming around the next corner.
    In spring campaign, they would have helped me a lot to find the proper cut lines. I was 2-3 seconds behind on some maps due to shortcuts. I spent hours on spring 14 bonking into a tree and rewatching the WR cut on youtube without success. Got an uberbug in the tree instead.

    If I paid back then, I would have most likely been able to get one of those cuts and maybe a top100 world time. It's a little p2w but not as bad as other games.

    I guess if I come back to TM, I'll play older TM games instead like serres suggested, I prefer landing bug over not having WR ghosts.
    For now, I'm hunting weekly records in steep.

  4. #24
    That is actually the opposite of what I said. The WR replay holds the general info on what lines to take for example. But it wont teach you the small tricks. Not any more than seeing the WR on youtube does.I honestly only activate world record ghosts to watch them in free cam, not to race against them. So I can see how they approach the turns and what line they take through it from a more topdown perspective. Again however, this information can also be gathered from youtube or your own testing of driving against your own ghost. simply drive 2 runs and take 2 different approaches and see what happens, it is really not that hard.

    If you need these last few 10ths or 100ths of a second, racing wr ghost wont help you more than your own ghost, since your ghost already takes these lines. It just comes down to execution and maybe a small trick somewhere that youve missed. These tricks can be seen on youtube and when racing against (and if youre lucky on youtube you also get to see the input of the run)

    Also speaking from experience, those cuts on Spring are not as free as you might think, as someone who was almost top100 on map4 without cut, I spent almost a month grinding that map for the cut. having watched erizel do it with inputs, and still did not manage to make it work well enough once. It is more luck than wisdom on these, and I very very much doubt racing wr ghost there would have helped you out.

  5. #25
    Fowst2010's Avatar Banned
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Posts
    238
    Right, I'm trying to state the opposite actually. Club is p2w.
    And I disagree with you, I think you should be racing WR ghosts not your own, and you'd improve faster.
    You can't really judge the benefits of WR ghosts if you never use them properly.
    Not watching them on YT or from above, just race with the ghost active and reset if you lose too much speed. You mentioned exit speed before. WR ghost will often reveal that there's a lot of room for improvement in exit speeds. 10 kp/h difference is hard to tell without looking at the speedometer.

    And well spring 4 to me was the hardest cut of spring campaign, and I gave up on it. I agree that one was very luck based, at least from what I could tell. But maybe the WR ghost is just much faster, and I couldn't make the jump at my speed anyway. Those are all things that the WR ghost would reveal without any loss of time.

  6. #26
    I am not saying I never used WR ghosts.I did, and I didn't get anything out of it, which is what I am trying to explain. of course a WR ghost will show you a line you can follow which your PB did not, but the goal isnt to go from top10k to top1. Improvements are incremental and the best way to learn the map and the game is by not doing everything at once. As I said I think the WR ghost can be useful to get the initial line to follow. Then you can set a PB where you drive the right line. From that point forward it is more useful to race against your own ghost because you will be able to see if what you do is better or worse than what you did last time.

    Using this, you can improve sections overtime and develop an actual feel for the game instead of simply copy-pasting a WR ghost. It teaches you more, and will get you the same final result.
    And again, there are tricks that WR wont teach you. You can't see their inputs but you do know your own, imagine you do a waterbounce and you use 50% steering on the bounces, then you try again with 30% and go faster than your pb, you have now learned a mechanic and are able to apply it.
    Now imagine you race behind wr, and on the water he suddenly goes faster, you wont know what steering angle he used to go faster, so you dont know what he did. It doesnt teach anything and it doesnt help you go faster.

    I can totally agree that WR ghosts can help, but they certainly are not pay to win, as all information you can get out of them can be gained in other ways without more effort or time.It is more a convencience to have it ingame compared to on youtube.

  7. #27
    Fowst2010's Avatar Banned
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Posts
    238
    Originally Posted by SparklingW Go to original post
    Using this, you can improve sections overtime and develop an actual feel for the game instead of simply copy-pasting a WR ghost. It teaches you more, and will get you the same final result.
    And again, there are tricks that WR wont teach you. You can't see their inputs but you do know your own, imagine you do a waterbounce and you use 50% steering on the bounces, then you try again with 30% and go faster than your pb, you have now learned a mechanic and are able to apply it.
    Now imagine you race behind wr, and on the water he suddenly goes faster, you wont know what steering angle he used to go faster, so you dont know what he did. It doesnt teach anything and it doesnt help you go faster.
    Absolutely disagree, it's the opposite, the PB doesn't teach you anything, because you already know what you did in your last run.
    You need to play vs WR ghost to get those last hundreths. I can tell if he's full steering or smooth steering trust me...

  8. #28
    What I am trying to tell you is that all youre doing is copying. It is just like school, copy down the answer from an answer sheet and you will pass that test, but it won't teach you anything. Next class you know nothing again because you didn't actually learn. Trackmania isn't about 1 track. If you compare to yourself and experiment with different strategies you will teach yourself what works and what doesnt in different scenarios which you can use and apply throughout the game. And practicing these different strategies and lines is also a better way to work towards a top time. As you will develop a better feel for the car than you would if you just try to copy what someone does ahead of you.

    And i never said you dont know if they smoothsteer or not, but I doubt you can tell the difference while driving behind a ghost if he is doing 30% or 50%. Which you would know of yourself. And if you play on pad, you would even need to know how much 50% is on your stick, which relates back to what I said about developping a feel for the car.

  9. #29
    Fowst2010's Avatar Banned
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Posts
    238
    The issue is remembering it, while also remembering 1000s of items, skills and maps in other games.