I played Trackmania on and off a bit today. The ‘problem’ I’m running into now though, is that my rank is high enough that I don’t really belong on the highly-populated main servers, and the suggested servers with people closer to my rank are much less populated. I like to get lost in the crowd, I guess…

And tonight was more TrackMania, of course. I managed to find a server with a decent mix of mid-level difficulty tracks, though there were only 29 people on it instead of the 150+ I’ve seen on others. There still aren’t very many servers running with the full set of United environments, though. About the only interesting part is that I finally managed to crack the 10,000 rank mark, ending the night at something like 9982.

I also finished off a bunch of the solo mode tracks, including the new ‘white’ level ones. I was unable to get gold medals in any of the desert tracks though; the handling on that car is just really odd, and it’s hard to take tight turns without going on two wheels and slowing down a bit.

It was another Trackmania night, and tonight I started off on a highly-populated custom server, but gave up on it after a while. The big problem with a lot of the user-made maps is that you need to practice on them a bit since people love to throw all sorts of twists and crazy stunt jumps and blind corners and such at you, so you need a while to learn the track. You only get around five minutes per track when you’re playing online though, which often isn’t enough.

So, I switched over to one of the official Nadeo servers, running the ‘blue’ B-series tracks. I did a lot better there, but I did start to bore of them as I wrapped up for the day, so tomorrow I’ll probably have to see if there’s a C-series server.

I think the highest I placed all evening was 4th, but my overall world rank is still a little below 10,000 (out of 150,000 or so globally). And at one point, I had a few more spectators following my car than expected…

As expected, more Trackmania servers popped up tonight, so I spent most of the evening racing around on them. They’ve apparently bumped up the server capacity a lot, as the first server I was on often had 130-140 people on it, and I’ve heard reports of others with 200+. Though there’s no collisions between players, races can still become confusing with that many people around and blocking your view. Fortunately there’s an option to shut off other players’ cars entirely, so you just see the chat and final scores at the end of the round.

With that many players around, many of whom were fairly experienced, I didn’t come anywhere close to winning, but I was usually in the upper quartile. I think the highest I ever placed was 7th.

The popular servers were just the Stadium environment though, since that’s the only one available to users of the free client. I’ll probably get sick of that before too long and then I’ll have to seek out United servers with the other settings. Hopefully there’ll be a decent number of them…

Traffic seems a bit heavy today…

…resulting in a bit of road rage.

The ‘Forever’ patch for Trackmania United was released today, at a surprising size of 900 megs. It does change a fair bit though, with a new menu interface, revamped graphics in a few of the environments, new tracks, and some new track builder pieces. And perhaps best of all, it removes the CD check and Starforce, so I don’t need to keep the disc around for whenever I get the whim to play.

I did a bunch of the new tracks, but they were mainly easier ones, meant as tutorials for new players. Looking ahead to the tougher tracks though, the unlocking requirements get pretty steep, requiring things like getting all golds on all previous tracks. I’m not sure I’ll ever reach that point…

Not many servers are up yet, but it was just released, so it’ll take time for people to get it and start up more servers. Hopefully…