The Trackmania community has had its fair share of controversies and debates in the past 18 months regarding competitive integrity, outright cheating scandals and gaining unfair advantages through third-party software.
From slowing the game down via tools like Cheat Engine, modifying the game’s physics through the in-game feature to create your own game mode, using third-party tools like DXTweak or the software that ships with your preferred input method, all the way to creating increasingly “useful” visual helper tools that guide you through driving a track the most optimal way, the crucial point is that the community still hasn’t reached a consensus on what the definition of Competitive Integrity should be in Trackmania.
The bigger problem though is that seemingly the developers at Nadeo also don’t have a precise enough answer.
Before we get to discussing what Competitive Integrity in Trackmania is, let’s take a look at what developers of other competitive games have to say about the topic:
Riot Games defines Competitive Integrity for their esports title VALORANT as follows:
Competitive integrity means that we want aspiring pros to have a fair shot at reaching the highest levels of play through merit-based competition. We will work tirelessly to ensure matches are won and lost based on a person’s skill and teamwork rather than external factors.
Source: VALORANT blog
To quote another developer, they define Competitive Integrity like this:
Players understandably want for their skill […] to be the primary factor for whether they won or lost.
Source: Greg Street on ask.fm
Competitive Integrity widely is regarded as your skill being the deciding factor on whether you should win or lose when competing against another player.
External factors should be reduced as much as possible to create an (almost) equal playing field for everyone.
For whatever reason, there seems to be a rather vocal faction of players in Trackmania that have seemingly forgotten that competition should not be about amassing the most advantages possible and skirting the boundaries of what is allowed by tournament organizers.
This mindset can be traced back all the way to Trackmania United Forever competitions where a tool called “DXTweak” was starting to get used by some competitive players to adjust their steering angles on certain environments like Rally to avoid the car from sliding out as much.
There were outspoken players like “Zooz” that argued it to be cheating but those complaints ultimately fell on deaf ears as more and more players started using DXTweak to keep up with the competitive advantages.
With the introduction of Openplanet, a community-made modding platform for Trackmania that allows players to extend their game with quality-of-life features, e.g. integrations for community websites like Trackmania Exchange or Item Exchange, Speedrun Timers, Custom Loadscreens, etc, we unfortunately also saw more and more blatant attempts to throw competitive integrity right out the window.
Some players recently started coding plugins that make game mechanics like Speed Slides way more trivial by exposing game internals that you aren’t normally made aware of by just playing the game and guide you along the way to ensure you’re achieving the optimal steering angle for Speedslides. Due to no safe guards inside the plugin itself (which would be trivial to bypass for anyone that knows how to code due to a plugin’s source code always being accessible), this can be used and abused in record hunting and even live competitions, if not expressly banned by tournament organizers or the developers.
Thankfully, the Openplanet developer, Miss, was nice enough to co-operate with tournament organizers to come up with a solution that lets them either ban Openplanet outright from servers or at least make sure that no unsigned plugins are running on a player’s Openplanet install.
The latest case in the saga of “Let’s see what I can get away with today” is Trackmania’s most prominent YouTuber and Twitch streamer, long-time campaign shortcut hunter and person who coined the iconic phrase “… and then Hefest got this run”, Wirtual.
His recently released Track of the Day, Midori ft Majijej, came with a challenge on Twitter, stating that he would pay out a total of $1000 combined to the first 5 players that managed to beat his author time of 44.455 seconds.
After several professional players got to hunting the track, they quickly noticed they weren’t getting close to the author time, neither with the game’s built-in Action Key feature, which lets you limit your steering angle to 20/40/60/80% at will, nor with holding the analog stick of a controller at a certain angle.
After being called out by one of the professional players, Wirtual admitted on Twitter that the author time on the track was driven with the help of the software “Wootility” that comes as part of the software package of his peripheral of choice, an analog keyboard named Wooting two HE.
As demonstrated in this tweet, Wootility allows the owners of such keyboards to map keys on the keyboard to arbitrary analog inputs, similar to DXTweak, with the ability to even save those mapped analog inputs to the device’s firmware eliminating the need to have the Wootility software installed on your computer. As a cherry on top, Wirtual has apparently used this publicly since late last year and nobody seemed to have cared about it until now.
In my opinion, the usage of such a peripheral and the ability to create presets of custom steering angles sets a dangerous precedent which could elevate the already existing advantages of some peripherals over others (e.g. keyboard being preferred by most players of the Ice surface, while most Fullspeed players prefer controller) to the next level.
Can we still speak of Competitive Integrity in Trackmania when the only skill involved is to study the map, find out the best steering angles for each corner and then transforming the gameplay into playing the piano by pressing your 100 preset keys in the right order? I think the answer is clear.
However, at the time of writing, the developers of the game, Ubisoft Nadeo, have not released a concise statement of whether the usage of DXTweak or similar features built into the drivers of peripherals is allowed or not.
The only statement that exists is one specifically targeting DXTweak in response to complaints about records in the Trackmania 2 campaigns, which indicates that they view at least DXTweak as cheating, however since the statement only was written on a relatively specific Discord server, not many of the community likely have come across it.
I want to add one final note addressed to the developers:
Nadeo, please clarify your stance on what is and isn’t allowed. Your existing Code of Conduct is open to many different interpretations and does not specify whether software that is part of the driver suite of a peripheral does count as “third-party software” or not. Similarly, please expressly state whether creating your own custom Action Key settings are allowed or disallowed, no matter which way they are ultimately achieved.
Thank you for reading this post. I tried my best to address the main concerns of the topic and focus on the points that in my opinion are the most crucial in this debate. Also to the Trackmania Community, please try and stay focused on the real issues, don’t get lost in pointless debates about things like what makes something a macro and what doesn’t.
If you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or Discord.
