Member
Trials Developer
Hi,
I can't explain how the decision was made because I don't know (I was not involved).
This kind of discussion about "we had lot of great ideas"/"this design was obviously bad"/"it's obviously a step backward" is close to a phylosophical question. For anyone having game dev experience, we know that great ideas are not enough (the reality is much more complicated) and bold statement as "obviously bad"/"step backward" are really easy to do afterwards. They are also discussable: "5 star-system versus yes/no system" is nothing obvious. :-) Changing things is something hard: human nature is against it and people resists a lot to change (do you remember Microsoft Office Ribbon? People hated that... still it was an improvement, but as it was different than what people were used to, people hated). So, instead of blaming people who made those decisions, I would praise them actually. They had the courage to try something new with the honest intention to improve things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
My own opinion is Trials is a great game (especially for 20$ (or 40$ with extra content but features are the same)) with some problems and that it will become an excellent game in a near future.
Also, we really think Track Central needs improvements (we had another meeting today to make some decisions and kick off another batch of improvements to develop). So, we aknowledged the issues and are assuming the fact it's not at the level of quality it should be. (and you know, lot of us play Trials Fusion a lot, so we're also impacted and frustrated by those problems and we want to see them fixed)
With this post, I try 2 things:
- First is to not close the discussion. I really believe that this close proximity between the dev team and the community is something rare in the industry and that's key to help us to make the game excellent. I honestly believe you're one of the best community in the industry, you really have lot of great initiatives and make amazing stuff (tracks of course, but streaming, videos, fan art, content curation, community organizations etc...).
- Then I try to give you some insights and idea about what is game development. This awareness may help everyone to stay constructive and post without any hate and without supposing someone did something bad by purpose.
Each of you, for each of your post, has an impact on the mood of the forum. So, you're also responsible.
If you put hate in your post, you will feed the bad ambiance, and other players will feel free to do the same and this forum will be a place where nobody feels comfortable and nobody wants to share anything good.
But if you stay constructive, friendly and steer toward the positive side, then more and more people will do the same and you will enjoy more positive sharing and more great moments.
(Please forgive me if I don't answer every post but I also have a job to do that you're expecting and I'd like to go home at some point ;-))
Thank you,
Member
Thanks again for your responses En0-, and your right that criticisms should be made in a constructive and civil manner.
I don't think that the state of Track Central is a philosophical matter, it simply doesn't function as it should. which means either the test department wasn't doing its job properly or the bugs were reported but resolved as wont fix in order to get the game out. Either way it has affected the opinion of the game in the eyes of the fans, which has caused this outpouring of negativity. If you can look at your bug database and not find any of the issues that have been reported by these forum members then ok, but if those bugs are in there then the game was released in a state that would require patching after release, which is a bit sneaky.
I do agree that Fusion is good value, perhaps with the backing of Ubisoft and going on four platforms it should have been a full price title? would that have allowed for a bit more testing and bug fixing before launch? you have a dedicated fan base that would probably have paid more for a New Trials game, I would have. Expectations after Evolution were so high that to be fair it would have been difficult to top, but you did have a lot of suggestions on how to, and not many have been implemented.
Its good to know that there is continued support, and that there will be for a while, I imagine that Fusion will one day become the game we all think that I could have been.
Ive only recently got Fusion and so im just coming across some of the issues that have already been discussed and argued and moaned about, so apologies if all this sounds like a repeat. I do like the game, and the features like the challenges are cool. Also some of the level design is terrific, with all the extra hidden easter egg stuff (penguin Tennis!, the maze bit).
Senior Member
i don't think the like or dislike is that much different from the 5* rating both are actually pretty bad, but they don't have an easy solution and more ratings don't really help because who will be bothered
the like dislike makes voting easier, its easy to say if you like a track or not(bit harder though if its average), a disliked track will be all bad and the ones with lots of votes will have alot of people liking it, doesn't mean you will but title and thumbnail will tell alot too
once tc gets a better sorting it will be easier to find the good tracks you like, does it matter if stair tracks get alot of likes if you can find the tracks you like?and people can find your tracks if they like what you make
now what if on top of the like/dislike you could give some feedback from a prebuild list for the people
-driveline has inconsistent obstacles
-background lacks theme
-wrong difficulty
-...
-other(this allows maybe a mini review maybe?)
probably also a good idea to add positive feedback like
-great/decent diveline
-nice/stunning deco
these could also be used as search terms
maybe you can also view a detailed stat pages where you could see these reviews and how many people gave a certain feedback
Senior Member
This. Since there is sooo much place on the screen not even used why not put this in as an extra option. Like, you go into track details, and can vote on certain stuff that doesn't affect rating in any way. Most people won't bother doing it, but the people who do it would probably be those who want to give genuine feedback to the builder. I don't know if it would really work, but this should at least be tested in one way or the other. Or since we have so many notifications already, why not add an option to send a small message to a builder that pops up in his notifications somewhere with feedback about a track? I don't get why nothing like this was at least tried since everyone wants to see good tracks in TC. But with no way to give feedback to people most tracks will always be bad...Originally Posted by sparkierjonesz Go to original post
Member
I really wish they add the feedback option somewhere down the life of this game. It would be invaluable to know why people liked your track and why other people disliked the track. This way builders know where to improve instead of repeating the same mistakes over and over. And it's near impossible to improve on something if you don't know it's lacking.
I quite like the new rating system though. In evolution it seemed most tracks fell between 3-5 stars regardless of the availability of 5 stars. This inflation meant very poor drive_down_a_straight_line tracks had 3 stars, and everything in between that and very good had 4 stars. Hence the reason 4 stars was very common and misleading. Currently, there seems to be a very healthy distribution between 0-100% in the ratings because raters are forced to choose between the extremes like/dislike, thus preventing them from gravitating in the middle. The smooth distribution creates itself because for every track, the number of people who would choose like (regardless of whether they think like is too big of a compliment for the track) will proportionately increase with the track's quality. Whereas in evo all these people would choose 3 stars and mess the distribution.
That said the like/dislike system works best with multiple (waay more than evo) feeds. You already have the smooth distribution, the only thing left is to augment the tracks into many different categories so as to find the best content in all these categories. For instance, Project Spark is a game that is 100% driven by User Generated Content (Cross-Platform between XB1 and PC I might add!) and it uses a similar like/dislike rating system. It's currently in beta but it's quite easy to find content because it has feeds, lots and lots of them. Here is the list of feeds it has:
-Newest
-Followed Creators
-My Favorites
-New and Rising
-Top Rated: Last 7 days
-Top Rated: All Time
-Most Downloaded: Last 7 days
-Most Downloaded: All Time
-Starter Kits
-Surprise Me
-Team Dakota Selections
-MarketPlace Showcases
All these feeds are presented in a scrolling interface which makes much better use of screen real-estate than Fusion currently does. My point being, adding lots and lots of feeds will bring more good content into the light. The feed page needs to scroll down to accomodate more feeds. Of course, give us more options to create our own feed and we could recreate most of these feeds ourselves, but that won't cater to the more casual gamers, who also tend to be the majority of track raters.
TL;DR More feeds, and then more feeds, and finally more feedback options
Senior Member
@En0: Maybe I vented too much stuff out. Though, I did state my opinion and what should be adressed.
I play Project Spark sometimes too, and I'm amazed that the rating system works pretty well too. Everything there is always at least a little unique to others, and the feeds have good stuff in it even when some levels are not fully polished. I guess Trials is just too easy to create a bailout level because of the presets. I think RedLynx should make the trials editor start at a blank and flat terrain with NO objects, and a real terrain modifier, not stacked terrain.Originally Posted by damassacre Go to original post
Back OT, there really needs to be more feeds, like damassacre mentioned, 48h feeds of any difficulty & type, and newest feeds of any difficulty & type, also the tracks per feed should never be limited, should allow us to scroll neverending (also damassacre mentioned). Then, sparkierjonesz suggestion could really be useful, having main critics of the parts of the tracks, which really can push the creators to improve, and have better overall quality.
