THEMA: Trackmania frei Version wird drastisch beschnitten!

A little late for so drastic changes I think.
Why don´t wait for TM2, do it there same way and keep TM as it is.
Community will loose many players, servers will remain empty.
And I talk about the real free servers, hosted by clans and players.

Nadeo says now "freezone" are nadeo servers - the most uninteresting servers in browser!

For the servers Nadeo has nothing to pay for.
The player servers get now misused of Nadeo to make some money?

I think Nadeo has missed to make their own servers interesting in a way, that players are hot to play there and even wanna pay some money for it. But no - Nadeo uses the servers not of Nadeo to make their deal!

The community put sooooooo many work in TM, think of all the plugins, xaseco, fast, remote programms, boards, cups, tracks, servers...and got no money for that. Imagine a world of TM without all those things made of players!

This decision is a slap in the face for all faithful players playing this game for years!

I own TMU since very long time, so I´m not angry about buying this game, but I am sure we will loose many players on our ~10 public servers payed by us!

And btw: The coppers we already paid for the server acc´s!

Cheers, the very, very disapointed Big Al :cry:

Would be nice if Nadeo would give us some further information instead of giving us just hard facts of changes.
I think there is some money for the developement of TM2 needed. But in my opinion they shall first develope it by the money they have and then earn the money for that. If they don´t have money to develope TM2 - just leave it! I wouldn´t cry! I am happy with TM.
I think they wanna squeeze now TM-players for develope TM2.

And no one can tell me that the servers and the support is so heavy expensive, that they can´t afford it anymore. Btw, i don´t see the use of the nadeo servers anyway, there are enough servers from players, much better than the nadeo servers, and with better tools. So Nadeo, if Your servers are too expensive - just stop them!

Nadeo stopped to develope (really important and useful) tools for TM. Players did, and players did them on players servers! Not Nadeo!

Nadeo needs money for other things, not for TM, I´m 100% sure!

I am really scared of TM2, maybe we have to pay monthly there! I paid my price for TM, in many ways, now Nadeo slaps my face!

Thats ridiculous jamie! There just has to run some databases and some simple services. Nobody can tell me the essentials are so expensive! And Nadeo don´t even has a world record system like Dedimania.

I really wan´t to know how much Nadeo has earned with TM, and then wanna know for what that money was spent...

And btw the stopping of the adverts, I ever wondered why they took the right to show them to a TMU player, he already has paid for the game! But that is no longer important now...

Why not first work and think and then doing changes???

This whole discussion gets really more and more ridiculous.

Even the ideas of "monthly paying", I would be the first deinstalling TMU, even if it just were 0,19cent/month!

I paid my price for a game and a system like it was! Not for the changes now have be done or further will come!

In my opinion there were years of bad money management, no ideas, no developement in the situation. Now we have to pay for! Nice, nice...

We run a root server with ~ 10+ TM servers (and for sure some other services). That rootserver costs 100+ euro/month. Now Nadeo forces us that normal players just can´t join on a normal way on our servers. That sucks so much!

I just check: 41 players instead of 100+ normal at such a time like now.

Ingame-Werbung
Microsoft schließt angeblich Massive Inc.

Bis zu 400 Millionen US-Dollar hat Microsoft 2006 für Massive Inc. ausgegeben, einen Spezialisten für Werbung in Spielen. Jetzt steht die Tochter angeblich vor dem Aus. Ein weiterer Rückschlag für ein einst hoffnungsvolles Geschäftsmodell.
Der Softwarekonzern Microsoft will laut einem Bericht des Fachmagazins Adweek seine auf Werbung in Computerspielen spezialisierte Tochter Massive Inc. bis zum Ende des Monats Oktober 2010 schließen. Laut unternehmensnahen Quellen sucht J.J. Richards, der Chef von Massive Inc., derzeit einen neuen Job. Ein Großteil seiner Mitarbeiter soll neue Stellen innerhalb von Microsoft bekommen. Ein Sprecher von Microsoft Deutschland konnte die Meldung gegenüber Golem.de nicht bestätigen, Anrufe in der Europazentrale von Massive Inc. blieben unbeantwortet.

Microsoft hatte das bis dahin unabhängige Unternehmen Massive Inc. im Jahr 2006 für eine Summe von angeblich 200 bis 400 Millionen US-Dollar gekauft. Trotz erfolgreicher Werbeabschlüsse in Titeln wie Madden NFL und Guitar Hero blieb das Geschäft stets unter den hohen Erwartungen. Anfang 2010 hat Electronic Arts, einer der wichtigsten Partner von Massive Inc., sein Kooperationsabkommen gekündigt. Ein anderes Problem des Ingame-Advertising-Spezialisten war, dass Microsoft die Vermarktung von Werbung in Spielen auf der Xbox 360 meist direkt abwickelt.

Florent wrote:
Marty, I would like to add that we named the game 'Forever' and I our first desire was to have an audience big enough to support the studio by sole advertising revenues. It was achievable if we multiplied our audience with Forever, compared to ESWC and we did it! However, the crisis arrived and a company that has been bought 200M€ by Microsoft is now closing it's external services. It can't be more clear that the revenues have declined and the hopes in the sector reduced. So, to keep the 'Forever' concept alive, we are looking to increase the revenues from the primary source: the conversion of accounts to the paying one from the wide audience, and not the core community. For the later, we implemented the 'favorite servers' solution as well as the direct access solution (enabling to join any server) It is not a perfect solution, mainly for host like you that want audience on their servers. But what I intented to explain here, is that those moves are to keep Forever and that this game should survive the release of TM2. And from my point of view, I would like players to have both shortcuts on their desktop. There is value in both games from my point of view and the gameplays are all differents.

Big_Al, if you look in the first post, there is a link that explains it
www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2 ... y-year-end
we have been informed, a month ago, that they will stop their activity

we are working with another agency, but things are not so simple

in game advertising has suffered a lot and you can read this here
www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/q ... g-business
but we were not exactly in that case since we have generated more than 10 times their audience. (quote from them: "players have spent over 8.9 million hours", while it was 100 millions hours for us at that time)

the fun fact, is that we probably inspired them to do this (same agency IGA and this recent interview can witness it)
www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2 ... iew?page=2

we have been innovative, we have reached our audience target to make the game sustainable "Forever" but somehow, the world is changing a little... a least the in game advertising one ^_^

Big_Al, We have spend 7 figures numbers to make Nations. The future of it's model and the fact that we can get some revenues is strategic, even if only running the server would not cost so much.
Advertising was at the core of the "Forever" concept, in a way, that our target was to multiply the revenues of the previous version, ESWC, by multiplying the audience. We succeeded, but other things created other obstacles.
Maybe it will bring us more knowledge, to know how to make the future of our games. If there is a free entering model, maybe we can think better of a Nations 2, or not (it is purely for the example) There are way too much parameter that are proper to the studio to really get all that lead to this, but at the end, we are providing space for the community to organize itself. Microsoft adapt, we adapt, the community adapt and the players adapt (buy or use favorites, for example)

lille: sure. It is part of the negative effect of the solution and like I said earlier, the idea to integrate players wanting to participage to improve the solution is also behind this. It will take time to improve this and we were aware of it, off course.

- We are still working on rules for the freezone servers and may ultimately bring back the oppoturnity for players to host in freezone, under some rules enabling the game to run longer on itself (since we lost the Massive advertising revenues) but I can't tell exactly when it will be ready
- Until then, we also work on a way for hosts to put their servers in front of the FreeZone ones. In fact, we have encountered some players making fake accounts or some critics that the most populated servers should not necesserly be the first. We will try to use coppers to make hosts with commited players to have an easier access to the top of the list. It is a test, like we intend to do more in the month to come.
- There will certainly be a compromise, but we will try to find the rules that enable the best experience for all type of players, including hosts, while enabling the game to balance the recent lost of revenues. And I think it is better than simply letting it down. So far, thanks to favorite servers and direct access, we are quite confident that most players that really want to play the game, that they can. It seems that the main challenge is in making the host enjoying the situation.
- For the hosts, I would invite them to look at the manialive recent release forum.maniaplanet.com/viewforum.php?f=46. It will take a little time before it gets better, but it may be a necessity for future freezone servers. It is also a tool, dedicated to hosts, that we are working since months on it, and I hope that it is, at least, a little signal that we care and that it is the best answer to somebody that would say that we are going to remove dedicated from maniaplanet: it is way the contrary!
- The number of players in Nations Forever is a record in the month of December. It is a record old of 30 months.

El Fuego, we are working on the rules and will update on this question later. Today, you need to use hide_server 1, to make it work.
you can create yourselves a nations account if you want to test it.

for all of this, I would like you to have a little patience. If you played the game for so many years, welcoming free players by so many, I think it still has to do with Nadeo making it possible, and we are talking of a scale of time quite smaller than that.

thanks
Florent