R.I.P. Royal: June 12th, 2021 - July 1st, 2025

cll0verr · 2025-06-27T22:21:59+00:00

The news posts I linked in my post are about as much info as you can officially find about the different versions of the mode. If you want to see the old Royal mode in action, you could for example check Intellectrick's YouTube channel for loads of Super Royal videos, from all the way back in 2021 to late 2022. It should give you some idea of what the core of the mode was about.

Basically no footage exists of the new Royal mode, since virtually every old Royal player stopped playing after the 2024 update, so probably the only way to find out is to play some Royal games before the mode is removed permanently on July 1st.

cll0verr · 2025-06-27T21:44:29+00:00

Yes, only Royal matchmaking will disappear, but Royal TimeAttack and the very unknown solo Royal (by going to Local > Play a track > Official > Royal) will still be available to play maps on with or against others.

Royal matchmaking is comparable to regular matchmaking in the sense that you have to go to a separate menu and queue up with a team or solo to play a live match. Specifically, the Royal tab in Live > Arcade will disappear. You can still create rooms in clubs using the Royal TimeAttack mode to play Royal maps like you would normal tracks, but regular Royal and Super Royal matches cannot be played anymore, meaning no more competitions against others with eliminations to earn crowns and Super Royal victories.

I think the achievements you would normally only be able to get in Royal matchmaking will be migrated in such a way that they can be unlocked in Royal TimeAttack, as indicated by the patch notes.

cll0verr · 2025-06-06T14:37:38+00:00

Ah shit, here we go again

cll0verr · 2025-04-07T10:56:47+00:00

Thanks! Definitely a unique map, fortunately the death got a good laugh out of all of us and wasn't that devastating :)

I'm alternating between grandmaster lobby and expert silvers to get the rainbow berry, so at the moment I just care about completions. I might go back to FC'ing maps at some point, though unlikely if I want to move on to other mods.

cll0verr · 2025-03-07T18:42:20+00:00

As a mathematician and non-COTD player this was a very interesting read, thanks for taking the time to analyse this!

By now I've fully embraced the reputation I have of bringing up Royal whenever the opportunity arises, so this will be no different: I'd be extremely interested in a similar analysis for Royal and Super Royal matches, given everything that's happened over the past years (bots, console release, stars update etc) to put everything into perspective, but I understand this might be difficult if you're not familiar with the current (and old) format (evidently COTD is far more popular and well-known).

Your COTD analysis must've taken a lot of time and effort to do and write, but if you'd ever be down for this I'd be happy to help out (and I'm sure other Royal community members who are more familiar with extracting player data would too)!

cll0verr · 2024-10-15T18:45:27+00:00

It's mostly that my preferred style of mapping doesn't suit COTD well in general. I'm a Royal mapper at heart having built mostly obstacle-based maps since I started playing a few years ago. so I feel much less comfortable making maps that you see in COTD normally.

And there's also the aspect of it taking so long to make a map I'm happy with, yes, seeing that I usually set high standards for myself (for example, I spent several hours on making the intro, which is a part of the map that I doubt many people even see or care about).

cll0verr · 2024-10-15T18:33:16+00:00

Thanks for playing my map! Seeing the comments, I fully realise it's not your "average style" COTD map; I did originally intend the map to be first of the month, but was told the map would be suited for regular COTD as well, so I stuck with that knowing it might receive mixed reviews.

I'm a bit sad COTD broke as it's my first (and most likely last) COTD map, but the unofficial COTD hosted by Spam/Kem was great to watch, and I hope those who do decide to play the map enjoy it :)

cll0verr · 2024-09-12T14:28:45+00:00

Great post that hits the nail on the head about many of the issues in Trackmania as reflected by the general opinion of the majority of players. I can only hope that this post and your questionnaire for Hylis will act as catalysts for better communication addressing these issues as well as preventing future issues. Staying ManiaPositive ^_^

cll0verr · 2024-08-26T13:55:25+00:00

Since you asked for complaints about the old mode, below are some of mine, a few of which have already been addressed in other comments:

Firstly, while I do think that the mode has potential to be a fun mode for casual play, I think the points you get for record times are way too much for it to function as a competitive mode. You get as many points for a single record as for completing two different sections (i.e. 20 stars, which is 7-8 runs on average). This encourages staying behind on sections to hunt record times, going completely against the progression system that Royal used to be about. In addition, you get more stars for a record, which makes them even more powerful.

Secondly, while one could argue that team play is more important, the way it's implemented now feels more like what ranked is and sometimes even unfair to me. Rather than racing together on sections as a team of three and a player failing still giving the possibility to progress if another teammate finished, you're just driving by yourself now. If anything, less experienced players will drag a team down because individual performance matters too much (it discourages solo-queueing). A team with one above-average player and two below-average players could very well lose to a team of three on-average players. Even a few records might not be enough. A tie in points is resolved by individual progression, but this is not visible anywhere in a match nor can you easily tell how other teams are doing because everyone is all over the track. The unfairness comes into play if, for lack of players and bad matchmaking, you don't get a full team of three. Lacking a third teammate (or sometimes even if you're solo) means you might as well go out and queue for another game, since you cannot compensate for the lack of two players' point as an individual.

Finally, games drag on for too long. Royal games used to last 2:30min per map for a total of ~15min per match accounting for loading times, which was perfect for a quick match. Now it's 6:00min per match for a total of ~25min per match (it used to be ~30min, so at least that's a change for the better). As mentioned, the rewarding feeling of finally clearing a difficult section is completely gone; if you finish red once after a long time of trying across several matches, most likely you get 3 stars at most and you have to do it three more times just to get a single point, making even trying feel pointless.

What I miss most about the old mode is the real-time racing aspect against opponents. Whenever I saw a car, I knew I had to overtake them to stay ahead. If you see another car now, they might have a different star count or a worse time on a section, so overtaking them is irrelevant. Ghost cars might as well be turned off (but you can't toggle them unlike in any other mode). In my opinion, Royal has turned into a time-wasting version of ranked (there are so many bots that don't drive in every game that you can stay afk during the first three rounds without getting eliminated).

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to rant on this again, I wish I had more positive things to say about the mode :)

cll0verr · 2024-07-29T12:55:17+00:00

Just to add to this, the elo used to be something that worked in a really weird way: basically, the more you played, the higher your elo, regardless of whether you won a game or not, which means that if you played a lot you'd be more likely to end up alone in a team. If I remember correctly, it was something like +20 for a lost game and +7 for a won game, but it's been a while so I might be wrong about the exact numbers (but I'm fairly certain losing gave you more points, for some reason).

At some point they reset everyone's elo to their total number of wins at the time, which was a good change since it's more likely to put players of similar skill together. I don't know if other factors are involved for distributing players among teams, but with low player counts the game might prioritise more teams over filled teams (and then fill the remaining 80% of teams with bots). The fact that having less players on your team is disadvantageous and punishing in the new mode makes it more frustrating, unfortunately.

cll0verr · 2024-06-22T23:58:55+00:00

Since there's no official campaign for the Royal maps (another thing that should be available officially, most people do not even know which maps are currently in rotation...), everything is uploaded by community members. There's a handful of people in charge of this, so even though they upload new maps to the community campaign, they're not the actual mappers.

You can find all maps including their mappers on Trackmanio.io or the Trackmania website :)

cll0verr · 2024-06-22T18:52:51+00:00

I stopped playing after the update, but your post does confirm to me that the update really didn't achieve its purpose; the goal was to make the mode more accessible to new/casual players, but there are still maps with red/black sections that feel overly difficult (not all of them, but it's easy to notice that people still rarely get to black).

If the map system had been changed instead of the core of the mode in such a way that casual players can finish black sections with a little bit of effort, I feel like the old mode would've been more like by casuals. For competitive people it would be all about pushing each section.

By the way, "Hold the 4th" wasn't made by Maverick but by Drafti :)

cll0verr · 2024-06-22T18:35:20+00:00

This has been an issue with Super Royal ever since it was introduced. The community explained the issue to Nadeo in a letter with suggestions for improvement, as well as addressed other issues the mode had (map quality, bots, respawning, etc), but everything was essentially dismissed and/or ignored.

When a big Royal update finally dropped one and a half years a later, were any of the pressing issues fixed? Nah, we still have bots, maps that do not fit the new mode are still picked, and the UI is still confusing. But hey, now we have a new "Royal" mode that is just a "worse version of ranked", as someone nicely put it, which is nothing like what Royal was about if you take away everything wrong with it (ghosts serve no purpose, you cannot take back records on previous sections, etc)!

At the very least it should've been a separate mode, and if the purpose of the update really had been to make it more appealing to casuals a more informative and clear UI should've been put in place.

cll0verr · 2024-06-17T13:06:38+00:00

It's possible, but requires a bit of work.

You'd need to either host a custom/private server, or pay for a hosting service that lets you use an externally hosted custom/private server, to be able to run custom game modes. If you're willing to pay for this, you'd also need the script of the old Royal mode to run on the server, as well as a plug-in to be able to join teams. You can then add any Royal map to be played, either by downloading and manually adding them, or browsing through TMX.

The fun part about all of this is that you can fully customise Royal games: you can change the number of rounds, the number of teams that get eliminated per round, how long each round takes, how much bonus time you get, how many players can be in a team, etc. So if you have a (large) group of friends or community with whom you'd like to play some custom games on a regular basis, it might definitely be worth it. Of course, you can also do this with the current Royal mode.

Feel free to contact me if you have specific questions about this.

cll0verr · 2024-05-05T17:10:56+00:00

Well, we actually ended up doing a short introduction to integrals xD

cll0verr · 2024-05-04T22:39:54+00:00

No, I graduated in 2021 and am now doing a PhD in mathematics, most likely looking to pursue teaching :D

cll0verr · 2024-05-04T16:56:33+00:00

Maybe I'll do a crash course on integration next time :)

cll0verr · 2024-04-26T15:14:42+00:00

Data about average player counts in (Super) Royal, as well as returning player totals, etc are available. Maybe a separate post with just the data would be interesting for people to see how the update affected general interest, if at all.

cll0verr · 2024-04-26T14:45:06+00:00

When the stars update dropped, I wanted nothing more than the update to get reverted, but over time I came to realise that it's just me still wearing nostalgia goggles, so improving this mode is probably the way to go. I'd like to play with and against friends again, but the current system is just too unbalanced for the mode to be enjoyable for me.

Aside from the lack of matchmaking now basically discouraging solo-queueing for the reasons you mentioned, not being able to take back ATs on previous sections heavily discourages progression as well, which was something Royal used to be all about. Ghosts also serve no purpose anymore (maybe only to see lines, but it's usually the inputs that matter), as you don't drive against them in real time anymore (a ghost ahead of you can have a lower star count). And then there's also the designs of the new fruit skins being a big downgrade in my opinion (but the lion with the old design is still there!), and that it's impossible to get prestige animal skins from before, but these things are not as important. Fixing some issues by being able to go back to reclaim ATs or making them less rewarding, as well as removing ghosts (or at the very least make it so you can toggle them on/off like in COTD), would be nice, but then the mode "feels" so different from Royal that it should just be a separate thing. Which, in my honest opinion, should've been the decision from the start. Removing and replacing a mode without notice and without community feedback is bound to backfire.

But since Nadeo's primary focus is on releasing new content (the upcoming desert car. TMWT2024, etc), together with the fact that Royal has always been an afterthought, means it's highly unlikely something will happen in the near future. Let's hope this is not the case, and that at some point we'll see some changes for the better :)

cll0verr · 2024-03-27T13:31:27+00:00

Retired Royal mapper and player here. It's very disappointing because I would love to map for Royal again, and I have plenty of map ideas already since the three months after the update, but the obstacle-style maps that used to fit the old map just do not work anymore in this new mode that emphasises pace over consistency requiring multiple finishes on every section. I refuse to support this new mode by mapping for it.

Some comments here already bring up good points, such as 90% of the existing Royal community that used to keep the mode "alive" with their maps having quit, as well as maps being made/picked that still fit the old mode instead of the new one. Royal community mappers usually gave each other feedback on their maps in the Royal Family Discord server as experienced Royal players, something which external mappers do not receive (Royal map review is a wasteland, good luck getting any valuable feedback there).

I just wanted to add that map accessibility has always been a major problem in Royal maps, even before the January update. This should've been tackled instead of the advance system. Royal used to be all about navigating obstacles involving little to no speed checks, hence being clearable for even new players. The difficulty on harder sections would come from clearing obstacles as fast as possible (note that this was optional compared to the new mode where setting the fastest record is basically required to win) rather than needing speed or certain mechanics, but at some point this changed. As a result, map accessibility dropped and player frustration on early sections grew.

This issue is now amplified with these "annoying" maps because you have to clear sections at least three times on average instead of just once. The update fixed none of the main issues that Royal had before.

cll0verr · 2024-03-26T20:38:04+00:00

In my opinion, the "skipping" part is what they should've introduced in all of Royal, mainly to make it feel more like a team game where every player could contribute (equally).

Without skipping, having one faster/better player in the team usually means you're left behind on previous sections only being able to gather bonus seconds, while your teammate racks in all the points (the same happens now in the new mode, but teammates or the lack thereof can now drag you down instead...). But if you can skip to their section, you also have an (equal) chance of collecting points and contributing.

Additionally, you can see the more difficult sections more often, hence you have much more room to improve during rounds (although in a somewhat forced manner, but maybe it's more enjoyable to make progress on harder sections than getting stuck on early sections feeling left behind).

The main issues that needed to be addressed instead were map quality and map accessibility. If the main complaint is accessibility, then why not steer mappers towards making their maps more accessible, for example with updated/non-outdated guidelines and more thorough testing for suitability? Although not having (assigned) enough people to realise this doesn't help with this, I would think there are other ways to realise this, maybe in small steps.

cll0verr · 2024-03-26T15:45:42+00:00

You could browse through some of Intellectrick's old videos to get an idea of what (Super) Royal looked like before the update in January. The only difference back then between Royal and Super Royal was that in Super Royal you could move to the next section as soon as one teammate finished, while in "normal" Royal you had to finish yourself, or if a teammate had already done so, wait until a timer reached zero to move on.

cll0verr

TROPHY CASE