After almost 6 years and 2,175 TOTDs posted, the Track of the Day Bot is dead. At least for a while.
Due to Reddits API changes around 3rd party bots and tools, Reddit decided to remove the API access of the TOTD Bot account without any notice. My last information was that existing bots will keep continue to work, seems like that is not the case anymore.
The only option left to get the bot back up running is porting it to their own developer platform, which will take a while if it's even possible at all given how many stones Reddit loves to put in the way.
So please bear with us/me until the bot has been ported.
Also thanks again to all the people that messaged me about the bot not working. :)
For those who don't know, for the last couple months, Spammiej, Ssano, Sahtel, Intax, Samifying and occasionally Bren / Danii and raaarely CarlJr and Pac have started playing together as a group, doing the COTDs/ Weekly competitions and RPG discoveries...
The name came from Spammie suggesting it in a Bonk Cup when they were going against the OKBOIS (without the OKBOIS knowledge) and the name stuck. Going as far as holding their own competition, the PAPI Of The Week, with a Bren base map, and a Bren iteration as the name of the map (like the ICONIC Brenelephant).
This post isn't anything really important, it's just an appreciation post because for me, who was hetting bored of trackmania content, felt this collaborationwas like a breath of fresh air in the community and have started to watch everything spam posts on youtube, and then watch ssano's pov a couple days/weeks later when he releases. I can't count how many times I've laughed out loud watching the new content.
I love the dynamic between the group, and hope they keep this cadence for a long time, since it's already been many months, and they're still as interesting and funny as they were when they started playing together.
Also huuuuge thank you to Auwrah who's pumping new original competitions every now and then. The Lucky Jump (i think was the name) event is what sparked this post and his events are always so fun to watch.
As some of you might know, I made map 4 of Week 96 (Weekly Shorts). Since quite a lot of people are now playing one of my maps, I thought this would be a good opportunity to get some feedback and tips to help me become a better mapper!
So if anyone is willing to share their thoughts, feedback, tips or anything else that could help me improve, I would really appreciate it. Thanks!!!
Hey friends it's your good pal Meow420. As an American player who's been grinding COTN for close to 3 years, I'm very familiar with the format at this point. My long term goal was always to win one, and I did finally get that monkey off my back (yay!).
With that said, I'm still struggling with not fumbling in the very late rounds and finals appearances.
I've made 8 Div 1 finals now. Looking back:
Crashed in my first two finals appearances (Understandable I suppose)
Got outdriven in most of the others
Crashed finals again last night
In fairness to myself, 5 of the 7 final round losses were to the absolute DEMON that is AR_Down.
I always assumed that the nerves would go away after putting myself in that situation enough times. This definitely is the case as I've definitely gotten better about it, I just still find myself making small mistakes that I'd rarely make earlier in the tournament. My hands aren't shaking or anything dramatic, but heart rate definitely rises and I can feel myself driving differently.
For those of you who've won COTNs or consistently perform well in deep runs:
How do you remain calm, cool, and collected.
Any tips, routines, or mental tips for treating it like any other round?
Thanks in advance for any tips.
Edit: On another note, if anyone has the "2" shaped car skin the Shorty used to run a while back, seems appropriate in this case.
On my channel (https://www.twitch.tv/casualgamingwithpaul & https://www.youtube.com/@CasualGamingWithPaul) we run a weekly knockout every Sunday at 17:00 CET (I will start that earlier if we do start getting fuller lobbies). Everyone gets just 10 minutes to learn the track that I built and then the knockout begins. We start the stream at 15:00 CET everyday, so no need to wait until just before the knockout before you come and say hi.
It would be great to see more people join in. You can see all the previous maps in my club (Casual GWP) - there are public campaigns where we store them - CasualOTWeek nnn-xxx if you want to take a look at previous ones (the first couple of tracks aren't the best as I had no idea what i was doing).
This weeks track is called "Spinny Flippy Canyon" and it's usually about 40 seconds a lap, the knockout room will be open to the public for anyone with club access and will be called "Casual OT Week 073".
It’s been 2 months and I miss trackmania more than any of my ex girlfriends. I put 4 hours a day minimum into this game grinding. It is the game that I put the most time and love in. It is my favourite game and for years ive grinded ranked mode. While I my pc gets fixed I pray there’s something slightly like it on mobile. I need something to fix the hole in my soul. I can only watch so much bren and wirtual before I go stir-crazy. I assume there’s no answer but I need something
I’m going back and revisiting the first time I played and I noticed I didn’t get a couple author times and Track 10 is one of them. I’m driving it and I can improve but once I get to the huge ice wall I lose the speed and can’t make the huge jump so I have to release. Best I can do is a low 43.
I've been at this since the beginning of the season and am soooo close to the AT!! How do I improve my run to beat AT? I've tried to follow the WR, but I lose speed every time I get to the 3rd checkpoint jump to skip the penalty snow and can't make that jump. This is my best run so far. Thanks in advance!
Hello guys, im here to make an announcement to players who loves Short/Mini Tech maps.
We built a brand new server with a new Ranked System, which bases performance on individual tracks against other players, bringing a new challenge to the community. Only highly rated tracks from TMExchange will be added, and we are also working with several of the best tech mappers to create new maps weekly, that will be added gradually.
The ranked system is highly complex and functional, and it is constantly being developed and fine-tuned. This server is a place for the community to have fun again among skilled players and to grow together (and we are open for feedback).
Every rank has an own challenge and you can see every info about your rank, your goals to next rank, and a lot of other usefull things to improve and have fun!
If you want a cool place to challenge yourself against others, just search for "911 Mini Tech Ranked", we will be there!
I’m building a TM2020 map-activity program, and I want its features to be based on questions that mappers and players actually care about, not only the ones I’ve personally thought of.
For example, it can already answer questions like:
When is the last time a new time was driven on one of my maps?
Which map in a map-pack had its WR improved most recently?
Which maps still have no finishers?
For each map, what is the newest PB by any Canadian that made it into the top 20?
What is the longest standing WR on maps Wirtual has authored?
If you could ask any question about activity on a map, across your own maps, inside a map pack, or among newly uploaded TMX maps, and get an immediate answer.. what would you ask?
Don’t worry about whether it's even realistic or not. Even a simple “I wish I could see…” answer is exactly what I’m looking for.
P.S. I have some wild ideas for future versions including a (near) real-time monitor for single-maps, and detailed ghost-inputs analysis.
This is the forth (and final) of a series of posts I’ve done looking at AT difficulty. Its mostly for the purposes of sharing the player and medal count data I collected for this project (in case anyone down the line can make use of it), so it isn’t aimed at a general audience.
Anyone who’s used the mWalrus’s Map Rank plugin (which I love, btw!) may have noticed the player counts jump from 99,999 straight to 200,000. This is because above 100k Nadeo only shares a range (ie. 100k-200k), and the upper limit is what plugins use for their calculations.
Because of this I tried come up with better estimates of player counts (and medalist counts, which is handled the same way). Luckily player count decays (ie. drops off) pretty regularly throughout each campaign, so I ended up using a python script that anchors the count with exact values (towards the end of a campaign) and finds the line of best fit through the intervals at the top.
[That’s the basic idea but the implementation ended up being kind of messy. It worked best to split every campaign into 1-10 and 11-25 (and run separately), and a few campaigns with no “anchor points” had use a curve fitted from all campaigns.]
In other words, take these player/medal count estimates with a grain of salt. I can guarantee they’re better than just using the upper limit for every map (and none are outside of Nadeo’s ranges), but they’re in NO way “proven.” The only validation was my eye test (I did try a bunch of different methods to find one that looked right though), so if anything consider this like someone drawing in the decay shape for each campaign by hand.
And, oh yeah, I did this (estimating medal counts) for every campaign track’s Bronze, Silver, Gold, Author, Warrior and Champion Medal. The Player Count rows on the spreadsheet have Nadeo’s high and low player count range (alongside my own estimation), if you're looking for it.
That’s it for the main data dump. It has every campaign (through Summer 2026) track’s Player Count (Nadeo High, Low, and my Estimate) and Medal Counts (the same way) for all 6 of the medals. There’s also Medal%, Medal Time, WR (back-calculated from Warrior Medals), Medal-WR Difference (in seconds) and Medal-WR Difference (in %).
I also found grinding data from 2 players: Nikarmotte (thank you, especially for the feedback!) and Nebula (estimated from their graphs). There’s a separate sheet with their times to get certain medals. When I ran their data against the various methods of difficulty assessment I found out my Percent of Medals Expected metric kinda sucks (to my own surprise not at all lmao).
Correlations between grinding time and various predictors
Typical correlation coefficients between grinding time and these measures. 0=No correlation. 1=Perfect correlation. As you can see PME performs slightly better than AT%, but simple AT count is better than either. Also you’ll see I looked at difference between AT and WR, both in raw seconds, and as a percent of the author time. WR Difference (seconds) gives almost no correlation. WR Difference % does give a modest correlation, but less than any of the above 3 measures.
Once again, thanks to anyone who read these! It was a fun project, if a bit exhausting. The Master spreadsheet, and the grinding stats spreadsheet are already shared, and I’ll probably edit in a link to a folder with other random stuff like the script I used to estimate player counts when I get the chance.
