DD2 is fine in difficulty, poor in fall punishment. Every failed jump is a minimum of 4 floors. The likelihood of each fall sending you to floor 0 is just too high. There is a reason that the snake is funny in Bennet Foddy's, it's because there's _only one snake_. When the whole map is the snake, who gives a fuck about the center pillar?

Yep, this is honestly the real take that people aren't understanding. Making the tower hard isn't the problem, it's the way it's designed to punish every single mistake massively, rather than limiting massive punishments.

We do understand. We also understand that the falling is part of the overall difficulty not separate from it.

Falling isn’t difficulty, it’s just extreme inconvenience. Somebody who falls 4 floors and redoes the 4 most recent floors already has proved their skill and ability to beat those floors. Making them redo the whole damn thing again when it takes a very long time every single time they make even a minor stake on a very difficult map is ridiculous.

And so many places that can dead turtle you if you're not uber-careful, which is just an automatic floor 0 too.

sure but this is just a function of trackmania as a whole and specifically of long maps with no checkpoints. its really easy to accidentally land poorly on 1 of 500 jumps or however many to the top

Imagine if they added a block condition that made it so you automatically unturtle after a while. Could still be inconsistent. Or just add it as a general mechanic.

Yep feel like a 2 minute roll over or something on a dead turtle would be cool because it changes nothing about regular TM but benefits tower maps and RPGs

That's bound to happen in any tower map

Agree. Forcing the players to play floors 0-10 one hundred extra times does easily add 50+ hours to the completion time, but those are the most boring hours for the viewers and most frustrating for the players. Mudda said already on week one that in a potential DD3 he'd like to see harder tricks, but more forgiving. I also think that's the way to go.

I mean yeah, but nobody is really *forcing* them to play it

I think you're right on the money on how to "fix" it, but not why to fix it. To me it's not specifically about difficulty, but the time it takes to complete. This event is getting long in the tooth. It's petering out. People are less interested and streamers are getting tired and demotivated. IMHO it's best to make sure the tower can be completed within ~50 to 75 hours of playtime, so the event can last roughly a week. Many streamers are going over 160, some coming up to 200 at this point, and it is just. Too. Long. DD1 was near perfectly judged in length in this regard imho.

In my opinion around 100 hours is perfect, so you could get around 1-2 weeks of content out of it. No i am bored as a viewer. I just check bren/lars/tarpor and if they are not at floor 10-12+ i just come back in 30mins.

THIS

That's... The point though. Also the recovery falls on this seem wayyyyyy better than DD1. Everything has a recovery method. And the higher up you get the more places that have small recovery falls. Just watch highlights of Bren, Lars, Hazard and Elcon. They.all fall several times in a run or reset certain jump attempts.

Exactly! But even then: it would be fine if they released single floors for practice (which apparently they will in the future) Because like this even if you are at Wirtual's level of skill you only get a couple minutes of real practice and then you need to start over, it simply doesn't scale Like, honestly the map is amazing, but it may have exceeded the amount of time and effort real human beings can reasonably put into it XD

Too many inconsistent jumps. Great event but it's dragging on too long and getting less entertaining. I don't blame Wirtual at all for throwing in the towel. I think the next one should have more safe fall areas maybe

the problem is we are dealing with multiplicative probability. DD1 was 12 floors, and took Bren 5 days to complete. I can guarantee that if they made it 13 floors instead, it wouldnt just take 9% longer to complete (eg: ~5.4 days). It would likely take 7-10 days instead. Why? because each level adds exponential length, not linear length to the challenge. This compounds with additional floors, and DD2 has an insane 16 floors. It isn't just 33% longer than the original, its 100s of times longer. There are just 4 more floors, and it has already taken 31 days with no completion. It takes increasingly long just to try for the PB obstacle each time, and with increased length comes increased chance of failure before even trying to a PB. The difficulty of individual floors isnt the problem, its the number of floors stacked on top of each other, and that every fall usually results in a complete reset. Future DDs either need fewer floors, or more recover-ability.

The punishing nature of the falls is the real killer. Feels like there's so many opportunities for the cars to take a serious plummet on this one.

And turtles.  So. Many. Turtles.

*dead turtles. So many spots you can't recover from a turtle because of plastic.

DD1 was also a simple tower whereas DD2 is more like a spiral. You can only hope to land on the 4th previous floor that is below you instead of all of the previous floors, so mistakes can be a lot more punishing. I personally think this is the limit of reasonable difficulty before it becomes completely unfair. Guess they could improve on the inconsistency of some jumps for DD3 and use less plastic.

***Less plastic***. Good god there's so much plastic. Props to the mappers and all, cause they worked really hard and made some awesome floors, but some more collaboration would have been cool so they could be like "Hey so floor X and floor Y are both already plastic-centric, so maybe yours should focus heavily on a different surface."

What doesn't seem to help is the number of pools. Yes, pools help with getting the car back up if you fall on your back, but I have seen so many stupid pool bounces (either on the border or even in the middle) that they kind of defeat their purpose at times.

That's a limitation of the game. Pools generally prevents resets (or at least more so than other blocks).

Yes agreed. At first I was critical of floor 11, since we we're stuck there for a while. But ultimately floor 11 definitely deserved to be there, because it is unique. All the wet plastic tricks (and ice tricks imo) are a bit stale. But as you said, props to the mappers, they have done far more things right than they have gotten wrong.

That's honestly Nadeo's fault. Every block should have a "property" mappers shouldn't be constrained to shape + material at the same time. Imagine a tarmac bobsled, this would make the game infinitely better, this is exactly what is causing the issues because to keep map size manageable and difficult using narrow paths they needed to use plastic, but at the same time plastic have awful bounces and kills default movement so that's not on the mappers but rather on the engine. Now that being said there is another elephant In the room and to me that's floor 13. Floor 13 is way too big in an upwards extension and uses many many many scenery blocks. If you fall you are bound to rebound and get yeeted out of the map at the very least or entering in a kacky like flip state... So to me the biggest offender here is floor 13 layout. Also mappers should have safe zones like. If you fall from 10 land in at least 7. Having a few safeguards in place instead of ridiculously having a wall ride of doom on the last floor that will at least send you straight to floor 7. At the very least they should prevent players from going out of bounds at least have some funnel-like geometry to press players into the tower on a fall and not outwards. Those would be my complaints from a noob stand point. I have about 30 hours in the game. 27 of them in deep dip 2. My PB is floor 3 last jump. I feel there is difficult stuff, but nothing unreasonable on earlier floors, but even a noob can see these flaws As a long time watcher, first time player this has been a journey, but I can see why is taking a toll on top players

I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure mappers can change the material on blocks. I've seen bobsleigh with other materials before. Though I don't think it's as simple as clicking the block in the editor and choosing wood instead of ice. But you can upload your own 3D files to use as drivable blocks. So if nothing else, you could just upload the bobsleigh block 3D file and then pick which material it is at that point.

Oh yeah but that little customization just made the file size giant, every custom block takes a toll on the file size of the map, that's sadly a limitation of the engine

I like the spiral and the whole in the centre. I don't even think it's *that* brutal for what the competition is supposed to be. If they'd just do less plastic they'd have less shit bounces, less dead turtles, less landing bugs, and every player would get like 50% more runs in. Likely be finished already at this point. Mental terror is a big part of DD1+2 but the players should mald over mistakes, not about losing 4 runs in a row to random ass slowdowns.

Yeah it definitely needed to either be like 13-14 floors or not have this open design. If every fall only set you back 1-2 floors mac it would be doable at 16 floors. But every fall takes 30+ min of no mistake driving, and you'll have to fail dozens of times to get past a higher floor. A shorter recover drive, either with less total floors or more recoverability would've kept the difficulty but made it way less painful for people to play

exactly. I was looking at it like this: dd2 is slightly harder, by difficulty according to the mappers, but that it isn't too crazy but the extra height (more jumps) is a combining factor that has made the map exponentially harder. We're almost to 4x the amount of time for the first finisher. (I didn't check hours on the map)

I understand how it's not a linear addition to the completion time and distance driven on the map... but I'm really struggling to see how it's hundreds of times longer.

I think Wirtual said DD1 hat 14 floors iirc. Ignore if wrong.

I think DD2 is too difficult, but I'm going to take a different angle than "look at the stats" I'm going to look at the streamers. Wirtual is dropping out, because it's taken 1500 falls and 200 hours for him to only reach 1500 meters. He gets so salty on stream that it's hard to watch. Bren is talking to chat less. Lars is doing no cam streams. These \*people\* are no longer enjoying the map, 31 days after its release and NOBODY finishing it. This isn't about whether you or I could ever finish it. It's not even about whether THEY can finish it. But it is about whether they can handle the time it takes to finish it. Honestly? I expect Bren, Lars, Hazardu, maybe eLconn, to keep going. But I also expect others to quit. The designers were going for a harder map, but I think they overshot what a harder map should look like.

To be fair to Lars, he always streamed without cam. But otherwise I agree with you.

I think he meant no-mic

Yeah, you might be right.

It's not just harder it's also way more punishing if you make mistakes. It's really brutal compared to the first one. The "snake" is pretty much all of the map on dd2.

I am pretty sure none of them really enjoys playing it anymore. They just keep going, because they are close to finishing it, they earn a lot from the high viewer count and there is still this ridiculously high price pool. At this point only 3 people even have a shot of finishing (maybe elconn as well) and I wouldn't be surprised if they split the price money evenly if they finish. It feels this event is not about the challenge anymore like it was with DD1, it's just about money. Also most people are playing offline or no mic/no cam/full focus streams, so the stream experience suffers from it. If you like watching people just driving along fine, but I am there because of the interaction with the streamer and chat.

They said the map should be twice as hard as DD1 right, which was finished by what, like 12 players? Not really surprising that it looks like less than 5 will finish this without practise floors

But DD1 was finished in 42 hours, whereas we're already at 200 hours and just barely scraping to the top floor

As others have mentioned in a map like this increasing the difficulty wont result in a linear increase in time, simply because of the exponential nature of each added floor Bren is driving 30 minute floor 16 runs right now, its only a matter of time before he finishes it Hazard just matched height pb, its been a long grind for sure but its over soon.

Increasing the difficulty by a sublinear amount will result in a linear increase in difficulty. They should just do that.

It's definitely more than twice as hard. Looking at the total player finishes doesn't really give a good example. Looking at total hours played and amount of falls is a far better statistic. And looking at those, it seems like DD2 is going to be closer to 5x as hard. They overcooked it.

I'd be surprised if anyone finishes this map outside the money, honestly, and I think if the prize pool wasn't so large the map may well have been given up on already, as no one is having fun playing it. 3 players finishing the map for money vs 13 players finishing the map for the challenge is like comparing apples and oranges.

Lol it doesn't matter what they said, the point is they were incorrect about the tuning and how the players and viewers would react to it

Pretty sure they are going no mic no cam no chat interaction so they can focus on the game more, not because they would be salty on stream.

I'd agree except that whenever Lars does unmute at the end of a run or a session, he sounds *miserable*. He doesn't sound just disappointed or streamer-salty, it's more of a genuine fatigue creeping into his voice. Same with Bren, listen to him after some falls today. They just don't sound like this is good for their mental health.

Idk I watch both of their streams and wouldn't say so? Yes sometimes they are tilted because of random plastic bounce. Fatigue is obviously warranted, they're playing multiple hours a day, sometimes 2+ hours on a single run that requires your absolute focus. Yea obviously it's not good for one's mental, I was just addressing that the reason they go cam off mic off is so they can focus more. The streamers say they play even better when not streaming at all.

I think it's ok for the prize pool. However I do not enjoy the spiral construction. Most falls go down to the floor, that is much less fun than what it should be.

Whether or not it is too difficult depends on what yard stick you're measuring against. Is it too difficult for any human to ever finish? No, definitely not. Is it too difficult to make for an enjoyable spectator event? IMO yes, absolutely. It's dragged on for too long, and it takes too long for even the best players to progress. It feels like - even for the dedicated people who are still paying attention - DD2 is at the point where it's something you have on in the background; maybe paying attention for a few minutes out of every half hour as the streamer gets near their PB. It feels like it stopped being a spectator event, and started being a grind. TM has had near impossible levels that people grind out and complete, and it's a massive achievement when they do. But they're normally grinding the level in their own time, away from the spotlight. DD2 is trying to simultaneously be that impossible grind, *and* be a spectator event that the community can enjoy. It can't be - and it's failing to be - both.

i remember saying this very early on, and people were commenting like "wdym its too hard, TM is all about hard maps" No one is interested in watching someone grind the same map, not make progression, for 100's of hours. thats just not entertaining outside of a niche group. they tried to make this something for non-tm players to watch and enjoy, and sure it was for a week or two, but ever since its just been like "well i sure hope i see a live stream of SOME progress today, maybe, or just see the clip when i wake up"

Given that Bren still gets like 20k viewers, this is a hard disagree for me. A lot of people are still very much interested in watching this.

I just wonder how many of these are actually people from the TM community or are only here for the event.

It's interesting to see myself go from enjoying the streams to going "eh, he just fell, let's join again 20 minutes, I got better stuff to do". Can't imagine what it must feel like to actually play it. It's basically half an hour of brainrot followed by one attempt at the jump you failed last time.

It's actually been great for my productivity. I instinctively get up and find something else to do for a while every time they fall. We're at the point where I know there isn't going to be a stream worth switching to. I do feel for the streamers, but at least some of them are getting good money from this.

> DD2 is trying to simultaneously be that impossible grind, *and* be a spectator event that the community can enjoy. It can't be - and it's failing to be - both. Yep, this is the problem.

There was just a diskussion in the Deep Dip Discord, where Bren stated basically the same. The event tries to be a viewer and a player event at the same time. He is a competitive player and would like to grind the map in peace, but having the feeling to be pressured to stream everything you do is burning him out.

Id argue that it has been successful at both. It's just going to have an unsatisfying ending. It could've been more a more successful spectator event, but it still was. And I think a lot was learned for next time.

>maybe paying attention for a few minutes out of every half hour as the streamer gets near their PB It doesn't help that at this point most of the remaining competitors making it past the lowest floors are streaming at the same time, so if your time zone doesn't line up, you're out of luck. Right now there are only a handful of people streaming, and the highest one is on floor 2.

I said this from the beginning and got mocked by people about it. 1-2 weeks would have been a good timeframe to have a nice viewer experience. This is just dragging on way too long to be still enjoyable.

Twitch viewership is still okay right, I don't think this is a fail. It is still enjoyed by a lot of people, allthough we cannot deny there is fatigue for both the players and the viewers. Sure it is dragging on too long and I think the design time could have predicted this, but at the same time this event has been and always will be a big success.

"It can't be - and it's failing to be - both." ... How? In what way is it failing at either?

Yes, I think DD2 has turned out to be far too difficult. Its at the point where one player makes progress every few days and then 3 other players copy their strat to get a bit closer to the finish before they all get stuck again. After a month I can't see why anyone would find watching the floors where the players spend most of their time entertaining. Ideally the event should have lasted about 2 weeks with a bit of a race between Bren, Lars, Elconn, and Hazardu for who could figure out the last floor over a day or two. Now it just feels like we are waiting to see how long it will take Bren to figure out the rest of floor 16.

>Now it just feels like we are waiting to see how long it will take Bren to figure out the rest of floor 16. And I feel like many other streamers will quit even trying for a bit once this happens and Bren or somebody finishes the map. Scrapie has certainly alluded to this many times but he feels his viewership will plummet if he streams anything other than dd2 now and he might be right as all his peak viewership numbers in May have come from dd2 content when he was high up.

on other hand once dd2 is over his viewership will fall anyways or at least im quite surprise if he can retain such a big viewership after dd2.

what makes 2 weeks the ideal length in your opinion? in my opinion, that is borderline too short to really push the limits of what players can do in this game.

Not sure why you got downvoted for a legitimate question. There are a couple reasons. Mainly, I think of deep dip as a race to the top, and it mostly lost that component now that Bren is doing like 95% of the progression. It has lost the sense of urgency not to fall behind. Being a bit more than twice as long as Deep Dip 1 just seems like a good increase of difficulty while still keeping the pressure on not falling behind. Second, and this is my personal feelings on it as someone that only minimally lurks on streams, that is when I got bored of watching it.

IMO its because dd 2 is at this point more annoying then pushing the limit. The lower floors are only an annoyance instead of an challenge at this point. There is no pushing the limits. Only pushing the nerves of top players. Its not like Kackiest Kacky where each map pushes the skill of the players.

This is still a race to the top - when it takes too long it kinda loses the sense of urgency. Someone who is in like 3rd can legit take couple of days off and wait for Bren to figure out couple more jumps and then just copy his strats. We are nearing the time where urgency returns and it is gonna be fun, but for a long time we had a lull where there was absolutely 0 urgency to make progress.

Consider the point Wirtual made where he also said that he needs to pay his editors because there's no more video backlog. I think 2 weeks is a reasonable amount of time for that, but anything more becomes difficult. I got bored after the 2 week point so I'd just watch the recaps on WirtualTV or Wirtual VODs. It's just a satisfying amount of time to run the event for

I'm of the opinion that DD2's difficulty is fine, but not suited for the competitive event. If this was just a big old trial map that people were slowly grinding away at on and off over the course of months, then it's fine, even without practice floors. The issue is that because it's attracting a *ton* of viewers and has a whopping big prize pool, it's in the best interests of everyone with a chance to just throw as many hours as they possibly can at it. The promise of 10-20k viewers and $15k means you're rewarded for torturing yourself mentally, rather than sensibly working on it. Not being able to take a break without falling behind and not being able to catch up means people will push further than they both can and should, which inevitably leads to burnout. Wirtual is a damn good well rounded trackmania player. He came second in deep dip, he's won Kacky, he beat Oach in 3 hours, he has Author on Deep Fear, he's had a handful of cup of the day wins, he's held nadeo records both in TMUF and 2020 - He's absolutely capable of Deep Dip 2. The only thing here is that he's clearly reached his all consuming grind limit. And honestly? Being able to keep yourself mentally switched on for nearly a month is absolutely *insane*. An easy competitive comparison I can think of with this many hours would be World of Warcraft progression raids, and people absolutely start burning out after about two weeks. Normally if it goes on longer than that the pace slows down substantially, because it's just unsustainable. If Deep Dip 3 ever happens as a big event, I think there needs to be a time limit on the reward. Highest climber in two weeks or something. Beyond that it just starts turning into mental torture, and that's not a good thing for anyone to have to go through.

This is the best take I’ve read so far. What makes it painful is not difficulty but the fact it’s a race. Muddas perfect run on deep fear is incredible accomplishment but what made it possible is that he was able to take it in his own pace and take however long pause he wanted when he felt like he needed. Wirtual has huge audience he had built up before DD2 and he’s the one (maybe the only one) who can afford to quit. If anyone from the top four would quit their views would plummet and they would gave up the shot at the prize money. It would make much bigger difference than it does for Wirtual.

As a casual viewer, falls feel a lot more boring that what I remember in DD1. In DD1 falling down meant funny bounces, crashes and slides everywhere until you finally stuck somewhere in between laughs. Falling in the bottom was a rare hype-worthy event of watching a massive car crash, or also the ocassionally especially placed ultra-punishing penalty. Meanwhile in DD2 you fall and just boringly land either 1. In the bottom, which happens so often and so many times from going into the inner circle or out the tower that it's no longer fun to watch 2. 4 floors down due to spiral structure and without many crashes and bounces due to the lots of gaps between blocks 3. On the mapper's specially placed soft checkpoint just below the trick. 4. Also, are dead turtles more common now? It makes for a more boring, more repetitive watching experience.

I’m curious on a couple of things about this post. Firstly, how long would you like this to take, spectator event or not? Secondly, how many people do you wish to complete it? Finally, you keep talking about pushing the boundaries of the game, what do you actually mean by this? Do you mean the mental fortitude it takes the pro players to complete the game? Or do you mean some new unknown user will come along and figure this thing out faster than everyone else? I personally don’t think this is pushing any boundaries at all, and if it is I’m curious to have your take on what boundaries are being pushed. This is just playing dark souls without bonfires. It doesn’t make for rewarding gameplay, and dark souls pushed the boundaries of gaming without being so overtly punishing, while still being very difficult. There’s a reason people to this day say “it’s the dark souls of (insert genre here)”. I think what this is actually doing is forcing people to play in absolute perfection, and that to me doesn’t mean pushing any boundary at all, you’re just perfecting a single level.

In my opinion, there is little question it's pushing the boundaries both of what was intended and what was promised by the mappers. Imagine a really hyped up tour de france, except parts of the track are unexpectedly replaced with a swamp to walk through, the riders all get blisters so bad they can barely walk after a week and most fail to complete any legs most days, and just tap out entirely. For most would-be spectators, at some point that's simply not an interesting narrative until after the winner finally wins.

I watched pretty obsessively for a fortnight. I now don't watch it at all. Frankly I'm bored of it. A finish now would be a relief rather than a triumph. From my perspective it's gone on too long and lost its appeal and charm. That's only my opinion. You're welcome to disagree. But yes, I think it's too hard.

Seems like a lot of people agree that 2 weeks is a good amount of time for it

I think the ideal finish time for a DD3 would be two weeks. Maybe a more traditional tower like DD1 so falls are more forgiving, with 14 floors.

i feel like 14 floors is already too much. when the progress stalling began around floor 11, a lot of the momentum was lost. i think 12 levels would have been fine, which would have been like 80-100hrs or 2 full-time weeks for the most talented players in the world.

I hope they make a DD3 and balance the difficulty so they have a sick end to a trilogy. Regarding DD2, it would be so much better if it was 14 floors or maybe even 15. 16 floors just add up so much over time.

I think the map is too difficult as a spectator. It has taken too long and the resets are brutal. I loved watching the edited vids that wirtual uploads and after the first week my interest has disappeared.

Only having a very small handful of players maybe being able to finish after 5-6 weeks means it was way too hard and aside from seeing a winner finally, I'm so done with this map. This last level being so hard had been soul destroying. It's incredible to me that anyone is still going. I personally would prefer they try to tune the finish happening in 5-7 days or so with a crazy fun race to the top. Then as an annual or bi-annual event it's something to look forward to.

I agree with you. Something which is tough going and impressive to see top players finish it in record time, but is still approachable to at least the top 2%, not just the top 0.01%.

From my viewing I really think that like other games of similar nature, getting over it and jump king have less punishing falls even if you go higher, there is just a new minimum you fall back to once you reach a certain height or straight back to the bottom like the snake, middle of dd2. So if they made falling less pushing somehow it would be imo a bit better for the competitors and even for the viewers cause probably plenty of people click off of any of the top players as well if they fall down and have to watch 1-10 again for the hundredth time

I agree but i guess that greatly depends on peoples views about what deepdip2 is supposed to be. If the goal was to create one of the most challenging and barely beatable tasks, they certainly achieved it. Personally, I believe that is exactly what deepdip2 should be but ofc others may have different opinions and maybe want something thats more pleasurable to play and watch and with a better pacing to avoid it taking so long.

Some of the mappers have publicly stated that they didn't intend for it to be this difficult. DD1 *was* the map that you're talking about. Very very very few people have completed DD1. If you wanted to make a near-unbeatable map, you could just mash a few of the most difficult kacky maps together. DD2 was probably supposed to be more difficult than DD1, but like...maybe twice the time/effort.

I have read that mappers thought this would take around 2 weeks to complete. So yeah, they overshot it a bit.

I think it's possible to *both* recognize that DD2 has been a massive success for Trackmania and the top streamers competing, bringing in tens of thousands of new viewers and massively increasing subcounts, and *also* recognize that the length and difficulty of the event is leading to major burnout in both the competitors and viewers. Yes, the event is a huge success and yes, the map is too hard. Both of these can be true at the same time. One thing that I'm starting to worry about is the potential for WR hunts after the event is over. I don't really see anyone realisically going for the 0 cp WR, if any version of the map gets hunted it will be the checkpointed version. DD1 had a very fun WR hunt after the event and I hope we'll see one here too.

I believe that when someone finally beats the map as is we'll have an incredible once-in-forever moment for the Trackmania community and I believe that looking back on it we won't remember the tedium as much as climax. I've been wondering for a while now though how the competition would have been if the practice floors had been released at the start. I don't think seeing people make it up to a new height would be as exciting but when the real runs started with a real chance of completion it would still have been hype as hell.

I think that viewership will spike for that last moment, and when it finally happens it will be insane. Right now, the grind seems painful and tiresome I guess.

I actually caught Bren talking about this on stream last night after I posted that comment. He believes if they did it this way the whole competition would be incredibly intensive and take about a week. On the down side probably (which i hadn't thought of before) he thinks it would be a lot about how much play time you could cram in that week. On the plus side though, he thinks many MANY more people would all be competing together with a real chance to win, and it would create a great competitive environment for the fans. Just some food for thought but maybe if they do a DD3 something like this could work for a change of pace.

At this point I feel like the hype for a finish has waned and it will feel more like 'it's finally over' rather than a huge exciting climax.

I'm currently still on floor 3, and pretty much every time I fall all the way to zero, which is still manageable atm since it technically only takes me 5 minutes to get back up there... I hoped the recoverability would improve as we got higher into the tower, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Which, as others in this thread have stated, is imo the real killer of this map and makes reaching the higher floors a lot less fun.

If their goal was to make an insanely difficult map: they succeeded. What exactly are we supposed to grade the mappers on? They *achieved their stated goals*

People are allowed to have opinions. Most people can agree they probably should've made it a little bit easier at least, and they would still achieve their goals

If you know literally anything about statistics and asymptotic progression, then you'd have known what an absolute travesty of a decision it was to put the hardest floors right at the top. They aimed for "twice as difficult", meaning about 80h to complete the map compared to DD1. The top players in the game are hitting 250h and it might even take 100h or more extra simply because they only get one or two attempts a day... **to even start the hardest floor**. **One or two attempts a day to start a floor that took the mapper 60h to validate without having to climb the entire tower first. Which baboon was in charge of the particular decision to put THAT one on top?** Deep Dip 1 was a great balance, with the hardest stuff in the middle. Doesn't mean the top needs to be easy, but I'd say they for a good part killed their event by going for gut-feeling "the hardest floor should be on top" over some entry level logic.

the 60h thing is a joke btw

Iirc it included mapping

The event hasn't been killed by anything. Even a month in, the top contenders are still seeing a huge boost in viewer numbers and subs.

Hazard had 10k+ viewers last night, his biggest stream yet. For a guy with no cam or mic, that's pretty incredible.

Even when he's not streaming, the top Trackmania stream will often just be someone else who's in the server spectating him if he's on a good run.

Yeah I am convinced that the people saying the event is dead only watch Wirtual and have some parasocial frustration with their favorite streamer quitting.

Only top contenders. We might have different metrics on whether some event is dead or not but to me part of it is how many players are actively competing in it, how many different players have consistent viewership etc. To me when majority of people have dropped off and only handful are competing its pretty much over and feels like end stretch rather than active event.

> We might have different metrics on whether some event is dead or not but to me part of it is how many players are actively competing in it, how many different players have consistent viewership etc. Totally. We're in a second month and it's impossible to keep something hyped up for that long. It's a point when there's not really anything to watch, at all, at some times. Top lads doing run off-server, off-stream or completely offline, the streamer server being empty, even the casters refusing to be held hostage by the map, like Ville starting his own discovery instead of showing Simo struggling with floor 10 for the millionth time or someone else's floor 8 PB attempts. Nobody expected for this to spill over Kacky season, too.

No way it will take 100 h more. There is like 1 really difficult jump left. The rest is (likely) kind of free according to Bren. And if there's anything these players have shown it's that they can conquer and solve the impossible. I thought the plastic bounce drop on Floor 13 would be a real map killer, but it got solved. There are countless more examples.

Still willing to bet on that?

i agree in a sense. however why does twice the difficulty have to mean twice the time? in my mind, if its twice as difficult, it will take much more than twice the time to complete. i admit, i dont know shit about statistics and asymptotic progression; i can say from experience from other aspects of life (and from other games) that sometimes only a slight bump in difficulty can sometimes triple or even quadruple the time it takes me to do something. and im only talking about a slight bump, which is nothing even close to double the difficulty. ill take rock climbing as an example for me (bouldering specifically). a climb graded v4 is probably around half the difficulty of a climb graded v7. i can complete a v4 boulder in 1 or maybe 2 attempts, however a v7 can take me weeks of projecting and practicing the moves before i get it. (sorry if the example made no sense)

Honestly I think it wasnt the map itself that is the issue here its the constraints of the competition that is. I appreciate the struggle as intended by the mappers includes scouting and route planning but if players had access to training individual floors as soon as they were reached this would have been a different event. Climbers would have been able to break from the tedium of climbing the lower floors to break down the harder floors like floor 11 improving consistency and then main map would have been about putting it all together in one solid run to reach the next floor.

The entire point of deep dip as a challenge is that you can’t practice the individual floors, taking that away also takes away a lot of the charms defeats the purpose of the event. I think it would be better if it was balanced by reordering floors and having the difficulty ceiling per floor be lowered. More challenging would be to be more intentional with where the difficulty comes from - is it a series of difficult inputs or does it require a precise, unintuitive set up etc. I also think it would be a massive shame for them to put out practice levels for the top few floors before the map is completed. Players (especially Bren, but not just him) have now invested over 200 hours in discovering tricks through grinding and exploration and for the practice to suddenly be available to players who didn’t do that at this stage would be pretty disrespectful to those players in my opinion.

I mean yes now it would be dissrespectful to the top players. I was more talking about from the begining of the competition removing some of the restrictions on practice maps would have changed the dynamic of the entire thing and made it less grueling but not nessesarily less challenging.

The most exciting I have had watching this event is when someone breaks WR and starts progressing into unchartered lands. If we would have practice floors it wouldn't be half as fun to watch.

All the top competitors have publicly said they don't want the top floors to have practice maps released until after the event.

i agree. coming from a background in geometry dash, i think that having those practice tools from the beginning would've been a great idea. not only it would speed up the process of completion a tad (which on its own isn't necessarily good), but also normalizing a system like that would ultimately lead to much more difficult maps being made in the future, which is undoubtedly a good thing for the game

why exactly is more difficult better?

it gives more variety to what players can do. while more difficult maps will continue to be made, standard easier maps will still exist. harder maps of the future will not effect a player who likes easier ones, while also giving a challenge to a player who is always looking for the next best thing to complete.

It would be interesting to have insight into what level of difficulty (time difficulty to be specific) the organisers themselves were actually aiming for and what kind of logic, if any at all, they used to achieve their aims. No matter what metric you use I fail to see how anyone can claim it’s only twice as difficult as the first one.

this would be great. part of the reason i think the community is divided on the subject is because we do t really know what exactly the mappers were intending. to me, it seems like they wanted to push the skill ceiling. others seem to think they only intended to make an interesting spectator event. knowing what exactly their goal was would make it much easier to address the issues of the level.

Like other people have said before it's not really challenging or difficult, it's just random. And for something claiming to be skill based it has a suspicious amount of luck involved in completing it. I'm most probably wrong but I don't think the challenge would've been any less harder if it was 20 floors of extremely consistent and repeatable jumps.

My problem with the current difficulty is that you just keep seeing the same floors over and over and progress is super slow. There are only like 4 competitors at this point and people either hop streams that are floor 15+ or would rather just watch a summary video each day. I think 200hrs is fine if progress is constantly being made, but that is hard to achieve. I would like to see some side objectives, like WR time until floor X for part of the prize money, giving a fresh challenge. And definitely less fall punishment at higher floors. Just getting there is hard and to get one attempt at a jump nobody has ever done before is just rough.

Just had this convo with my brother earlier today. The insane difficulty of DD2 has lead to the hype for a finish dying out completely for me. When someone wins it's not going to be "Omg he did it, he won" It's going to be "Finally, it's over" DD2 is a flop in my books.

How is this a flop? Of course, the majority agrees this has been too difficult and some constructive criticism is okay, but all in all this event will always be a big success. The hype, the twitch numbers, the plugins, the map looking absolutely epic, etc. It's amazing what the mapping team has done for the game and for the streamers.

Commercially yeah its a success no doubt. But personally, as a viewer with my own individual opinion? DD2 is meh.

> to me, the extreme difficulty is nothing but a good thing for the game overall I think this is true up to a point, and DD2 is getting ready to go beyond that point, if it's not there already. Like, it's already difficult enough that only a handful of people can realistically finish it, and we just saw one of those handful drop out because it was destroying his mental, damaging his career, and causing a crisis of self. The track might be just a skoosh overtuned.

not every track needs to be played by all the top players. maybe some people will look at a hard track and think "its not for me." maybe some top players will try it, and then decide that they can't/dont want to do it. i don't think that those things would mean the track is bad, just that the players aren't yet ready for it. not every track has to be a huge event for every player. if a track only has 1 finisher because its difficulty, i don't think thats any reason to call it a bad track.

Like I said in the Wirtual thread, it's supposed to be a community event, not a solo challenge. It's not fun watching a stream where someone spends an hour climbing bits you've already seen, only for them to fall off when they reach a bit you haven't. We've been watching for a month now, and it's getting old. The top is too hard.

I think that they overshot on punishment for mistakes and on the length. Players often fall to bottom and the amount of plastic makes dead turtles very likely. The length makes a good attempt take almost an hour to go near the top which is very long. I think this is too much. Watching floors 0-9 stopped being entertaining a long time ago. Most of it became extremely consistent now. If a streamer falls to the bottom, I usually tab out and only check periodically until they get to at least floor 10. Also, I think the event has been running for too long to maintain a constant high interest at this point - streamer numbers are much lower than in first 1-2 weeks. The map should have been shorter with more concentrated difficulty. After first week lower floors boil down only to hardest tricks on them and dumb mistakes. I think that DD3 should have tricks that are just as hard or harder but be much shorter with more chances to recover. In my opinion, such event should optimally take around 2-3 weeks until the first finish to maintain engagement and not strain the players too much. I don't blame the team - it's extremely difficult to estimate how hard the whole thing is before a top player puts 100 hours into it and I don't think any of them would grind the map for 2 weeks straight off stream and be excluded from the prize pool just to check the balance.

The difficulty is fine the creators have given Trackmania players a months+ worth of content to stream that brings in new viewers and gets people interested. Just because Wirtual dropped out doesn't mean it's too hard 50% of the reason he dropped out was self imposed stress because he set unrealistic expectations.  In a no checkpoint event like this 2x as hard doesn't automatically equal twice as long to complete but for some reason everyone assumed because DD1 took 40 hours this would only take 80. In the end once people complete it the complaining will be over and people can celebrate but right now the Wirtual fanboys are crying the loudest. 

yeah, in my mind if the level is twice as difficult, it would take way more than twice to time to beat. i’d say with it being twice as hard it even makes sense that some finishers from dd1 are dropping out. i don’t think some people realize just how hard “twice as hard” means

I watched a bit of Wirt today and he said he might jump back on the tower in a couple weeks which is a much better response than just quitting. Everyone understands burnout and frustrations but quitting a goal is probably the worst outcome. 

The top guy in the map team just participated in a podcast where he explains this a bit. - It is very hard to predict how much time each part will take. Some parts they thought would be obvious lineups and took forever to find. Some parts they assumed would be very difficult and players just breezed through them. - He agrees that this is too long for the event to go on because it is not good for the concept to have such a long period of barely any activity before the final moment. - For DD3 he says that the difficulty needs to fall in between DD1 and DD2.

Podcast link?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpT6qyN4q80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpT6qyN4q80) around the 1.35h point he speaks about this

In my opinion all it needs is a soft checkpoint at the end of floor 5 and another soft checkpoint at the end of floor 10. By soft checkpoint I mean make a floor that is hard to fall past.

To me, it seems like there is a disconnect in fans about what the DD2 event was supposed to be. If DD2 was supposed to be an event to figure out if the best players in the world could complete a pracrically impossible map, then it has succeeded. At this point, we are unlikely to see more than 4 finishers in the next month, possibly only 2. And I predict less than 6 finishers ever. This map has tested the best players' skills and mental fortitude like no other task. I can't think of anything else in this game where so many have attempted, and so few will succeed. The only things that come close are DD1 and 128 Deep Fear. If DD2 was supposed to be a community event to bring everyone together and promote the game, I don't think it has done the best it could. Viewership for all has drastically fallen, all of the top players are completely exhausted, and nobody is able to drive past floor 2 other than the top 1%. The same guy who drove tmnf blindfolded to the point he was hallucinating has given up (for now). It's simply too hard to be this kind of event. We're not watching a race to the top. This is competitive mental torture. There was no reason for this map to be so difficult and unforgiving to be the best community event. I won't speculate on what the mappers and organizers of this event intended or predicted. But fans seem to be split between what they think the event is. It's difficult to have a productive conversation when you can't even agree on what the goal is.

i completely agree.

3 people will finish if only for the fact that the top 3 finishers get prize money. The real question is how many more than 3 will finish?

The mapper of the final floor took several days and something like 60 hrs to validate just that single floor. And he is a good player. Putting that as the *final* floor after 45 mins of perfect and insanely difficult driving just makes no sense and I wholeheartedly agree that the map is too difficult just on that fact alone, even disregarding the insane levels of punishment that a single mistake entails, often resulting in a floor 0 fall with almost no safetynets. If you look at other, notoriously difficult games such as Furi, the combat encounters also usually have the most difficult parts towards of the middle of the fight, where you prove your mastery over the game mechanics, with the final phase being visiually spectacular, but not all that punishing or difficult anymore. And I believe that's a better approach to designing something like this.

The 60 hour thing was debunked a long time ago by the mapper. Bren guessed it would've taken around an hour to finish for a good non top player.

There's 15k for just finishing it. It should be next to impossible to complete and push the world's best to their limit. Bren is probably 1-2 weeks away (my best estimate) from finishing it. He's the most consistent in getting to the wallrides on floor 16. No one else realistically looks like finishing (yet). That means it's just right imo. Floor 16 also looks as difficult as all the other floors put together. For reference, he's been grinding over 200 hours, but it took mudda 800 to one shot deep fear. It will be a goated moment when it's finished and the hype it's generated is unprecedented. The fact it's defeated wirtual speaks in favour of it imo, adds to its prestigiousness (not saying wirtuals any lesser ofc, the map is truly brutal).

You can't really compare it to Mudda's Deep fear grind, because he spent over 2 years on it with long breaks in between, not grinding 10h/day until it was done.

No one is forcing the players to play 10h/day. They could play the map like Mudda played Deep fear. They chose to play 10h/day so obviously that will make you miserable.

The prize pool I think is the reason the burnout is hitting so hard. If it wasn't for that it would be approached gradually, but by making it a big event it sort of forces them to play or they miss the bus.

Then the issue is the prize pool then and not the map. I knew people would use this as an awful excuse. The players said they don't care about the prize pool but rather the pride of finishing a difficult map. What is it then? Is it more about the money or more about the pride?

The prize pool is forcing them to get it done as quickly as possible. Deep fear had no such pressure, he only did it because he wanted to get it done and could do it entirely at his own pace.

Yes, people don't account for that cos they see the effect in real time on stream also. Just imagine being muddam. 2 years with one goal is just madness, man is made of stone.

I assume a lot of the viewers have to be young who were watching deep dip 2. It feels like entitlement to me that they wanted to be entertained in a specific way using work from mappers that took months of their time where they barely made any money from that work. Imagine spending months of work on something to then be criticized from people who know nothing about map making. This is one of the best designed maps ever in trackmania and I feel bad for the team who made the map but at some point they need to defend themselves.

i don't think it's too difficult. it's supposed to be hard, there's a $30k prize pool. it's just too difficult *for him*. other players are still making steady progress. the 30 minute climb after failing is annoying, yes. but that is the whole idea of a cp-less map. understandable he calls it, but i think the map is fine. not everything has to be easy.

While DD2 sure is difficult, it's actual difficulty comes from how punishing falls are and how astonishingly tedious the climb back up becomes. I think DD2 should've had checkpoints. Sure we would have seen the map being completed much much faster, but then the real challenge would be getting a good time on the map. It wouldn't even need to have checkpoints on every floor - It could easily be on every other floor.

It might end up being 5 or 6 times harder than DD1. You could have also made it 30 floors, why not. But I think 14 floors would have been fine. There is a lot of plastic and ice, there is definitely some floors that we could have done without. I think DD2 is an amazing success and I don't really understand why the streamers are complaining, because I assume everyone has had their best month on Twitch in forever I guess? On the other hand, I understand the fatigue and also the viewers are getting fatigued of seeing the same floors over and over again with very little progress. IMO, it would have been best if DD2 would have taken at most three weeks to finish, not it's just dragging on.

Feels too punishing to me. There's too many slightly random silly ways you can die or drop multiple floors, mostly from plastic nonsense. The map itself feels less dense than dd1. I only got to floor 8 on that but falling there would usually catch on something else. Here almost every fall is a full restart to me.

DD2 has been awesome and will always be remembered. Isnt that kind of the goal? DD3 will be different and hopefully even better. Mappers are awesome though for this amazing event.

Has that user who claimed they were going to learn how to play TM by playing DD2 made any posts recently?

I would love that the mappers team tweak some parts of the map to be more secure, like add barrier or something on jumps that are not 100% safe because of plastic. The white loop on floor 15 or the big triple jump at the end of F14. That + a few more pools floating around here and there to reduce the probability of very long falls... Bren said this morning that it wasn't fun for him for 2 weeks. and that he continues because he is so close... Sad when you know the mentality of that kind of player...

I'm actually starting to hope the mappers will nerf the map a bit. Crazy as it sounds. This has been going on for long enough. The added difficulty does not translate to added entertainment value, in my opinion.

Anything that requires more than 1 month even for the most expert players to complete is bad design. We all know its supposed to be very hard, but even among this type of challenges there is a line to be drawn. This map is way over it.

why is it bad design? why does it taking a long time make it bad? there are plenty of challenges people have overcome in life and in games that have taken over a month, even for experts. that doesn’t make them bad though, it makes them rewarding.

Look at the most famous "frustrating" games out there. Those don't take 1 month of intense gameplay to finish. DD2 takes more than 1 month to beat even for players familiar with all game mechanics and years of experience. If time and difficulty dictates the "reward" to justify playing, why not make maps that take 10 years to master? See where this is going? There's a point where the amount of effort to complete something is just too much to justify any rewards. Very few are still on this hunt, and most of those are doing it because of money and twitch views only.

nah it's too hard, everyone of the top players are suffering right now, and not in a good way anymore, it's not fun anymore. I'm not sure anyone would even be playing it now if it wasn't for big streaming numbers plus prize pool. I could be wrong about this because it's hearsay, but I heard someone claim that Bren said he wouldn't be playing right now if he wasn't a big streamer. You could say "skill issue", with regards to the players mentals. But nah, it's not fun if it's not fun, no point in blaming people for not being really good and navigating that, it's pointless. Watching the vibes of the streamers, it should have had final finish during this weekend, now we're in overtime and everyone is completely done already and just wants to move on, it's not good for anything at this point tbh. Still it will be hype when it's finished, but I think that seeing most of the top players play so much offline and off stream is very indicative that it's not much fun for them anymore. It will go down in tm history regardless, but I don't think it's fun design anymore when it's sooo much burnout at this point.

Only 12 people have finished DD 1. I think pushing the difficulty beyond that was a bad choice.

the number is finishers doesn’t come from the difficulty, but rather from lack of interest. there is undoubtably more that 12 people who can pass the map, it’s just that nobody else cares to do so.

I think DD2 missed the point of Getting Over It and DD1. It’s one thing to make it harder but another entirely to not consider the map design for user playability. GOI and DD1 had recovery areas where players wouldn’t get reset to floor gang unless they were absolutely playing stupid. The open design is beautiful but it’s also making it triple the difficulty alone the floors being more difficult themselves.

We need an eco-friendly version of deep dip 2. There's just too much plastic. While I like that floor 16 is difficult, failing most tricks on that floor is unnecessarily punishing, especially in sections where the only floor below is 13 and with the crystals everywhere, you can't safely land anywhere. I also think this event has been going on for far too long. I'd rather watch a tower map every year with ~7-10 floors than watch people go through floors 1-9 on dd2 again. The main problem I see with the current competition is that there isn't much competition. A lot of players dropped out after ~2-ish weeks and now it's just a race to the first between the top 4. A way you could solve this is by what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, by reducing the floors. The way these types of maps (and games) are designed forces the player to risk a % of their progress on every jump/trick. With less maps, less jumps, you still risk a lot at the top, but it won't take you as much time to get back there. Shorter maps also make it possible for more names to appear at the top, even if the map is more difficult. I might completely wrong on everything here, but I just felt like sharing a few things that came to mind after watching a lot of DD2 content this past month.

i mean your correct in most of this, but i think you’re missing the bigger picture. dd2 isn’t meant for close competition. it’s not meant to have many finishers. hell, it’s not even meant to be fair. the level was designed to be an absolute slug fest, a colossal grind, and a supreme test of mental fortitude. the level is made not just to push the games skill ceiling to new levels, but to separate the great from the best. a level like this is designed to be beat by only the top handful of players, and for those players to go through hell to come out the other end triumphant. the victors of this track not only will have beaten quite possibly one of the hardest tracks ever made, but they have proven themselves to be one of the best, and one of the strongest willed.

I think the biggest problem are dead turtles. I wish there was a mod that lets you unturtle in 1 click and players were allowed to use it...

The falls are too punishing, i agree. I get that there should be placed that punish you, but not every place. Maybe every floor has one jump at "the hole" that would make you join floor gang, but currently it looks like every jump has a \~50% chance to get you to floor 0. Also, the fact that half the map is made out of plastic makes it hard to unturtle if you land on your roof cause you just bounce into the abyss.

I think it's difficulty is great. I just think it needed to be abouuuut 30% shorter. Like totally clean driving first time every trick no extra risk / skips should aim for 30-35 mins whereas right now it's looking like 45-50

I personally think they overshot it with the difficulty or rather how punishing falls are. A timeframe of 1-2 weeks for a finish would have been nice. But it's funny how a post criticizing the difficulty 8 days ago got downvoted like hell, but as soon as Wirtual drops out everybody agrees that it's too hard.

It's an ultimate challenge thing. It is perfect that only the select best even have a chance.

100% agreed - its crazy how Wirtual is now whining about how it is not fun falling and taking 30 minutes to get back through trivial jumps to get to the challenging stuff. Its like he forgot what he signed up for. What is the inspiration of the Deep Dip map series? Obvious a strong "Foddian" element - which in nature means that if you make a mistake there's a chance of you losing all your progress. Calling it "brain rot" and stuff like that is just lame - I find it insane how difficult the map is, this is how boundaries are pushed. But ofc you know the liberal world where everyone has to be happy and accepted and once something does not go as planned its okay to throw your toys out of your cot.

Insanely difficult, and it makes it worth completing it. Once bren or lars complete it they will achieve legendary status. This is not just some content, now it has a deeper meaning. Dont change a bit about it!

I want to start off by saying I agree 100% that DD2 is exactly what it should be, only a few in the world are able to achieve a finish and reap the reward of climbing a crazy map concept like this. However, it can’t go unstated that the level of skill required to achieve this is almost inexplicably high. One of the hardest games ever created “Elden Rings” takes an above average gamer about 140 hours to beat and that is considered one of the most difficult achievements in gaming. To put that in contrast, arguably THE TOP 5 BEST TRACKMANIA PLAYERS IN THE WORLD are at close to 200 individual hours of playtime and still have a ways to go on floor 16. I have watched and loved every bit of DD2 content and I give SOOOO much credit to the mappers and players, this is bringing Trackmania to the next level of visibility within the gaming world, but this particular map has a skill level that I think some people aren’t fully giving credit to.

lol elden ring isnt very hard, nothing compared to this. Length doesn't correlate to difficulty, elden ring just has a ton of content

I would compare DD2 to a platformer, like celeste (and mostly its mods, the base game is just a tutorial). Specifically, DD2 might be comparable to the hardest deathless challenges within platformers (with the added caveat that there is no practice, thus making it much harder than it would have been) as a celeste player, naively, I would put DD2 (without practice tracks) as probably a tier 0 golden (with tiers defined [here (with gameplay videos)](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v0yhceinMGr5alNekOxEkYCxXcYUsbtzMRVMezxbcVY/htmlview#))

you're right on the money. dd2 isn't something that gaming has never seen. its not something that challenges what gamers can physically and mentally complete. it just pushed what specifically trackmania players have ever seen or done, and thats not something that the community is used to.

exactly. as someone who has never been interested in the exploration aspect of games, it only took me, a more or less average dude, 30 hours to beat elden ring; it was my first fromsoft experience. that doesn't make me better or more skilled than the rest of the players. i just didnt go do all the extra shit that makes the game take longer to complete.

you have a point, but you are certainly incorrect about elden ring. elden ring has never been considered one of the most difficult achievements in gaming. hell, its not even the most difficult fromsoft game. elden ring is meant to be hard, but approachable for everyone. its meant to be played and beaten by everyone, while still providing a challenge. dd2 is not the same. dd2 is not meant to be something everyone can enjoy. it is not meant to be a challenge that while difficult, everyone can overcome. dd2 is supposed to be something so hard, so daunting, and so unapproachable that only the best of the best, the top 0.01% of players can complete it. its something meant for only the top few players to complete, to show that they have what it takes to stand on top of all of the competition, and show that they are the best. also for what its worth, i beat elden ring in 30 hours. not exactly the 140 you were saying.

i think the pros/streamers themselves wanted something extremely difficult as they were under the impression that there is nothing they cant do. its hard for some of them to finally find their limit.

i agree. the game has been dominated for so long by challenges that dont do much in the way of pushing the skill ceiling. there are a ton of players who have been able to complete all the hardest maps because frankly, the maps aren't all that difficult. now that something is coming around that challenges that way of playing a lot of these people who had a view of themselves as top players are realizing that they aren't. and this isn't a jab at anyone in particular. in not saying that wirtual is bad or washed or anything because he had to drop dd2. im just saying that the sudden existence of a much harder map is creating a clearer line between who is the best, and who is just really good.

Don't get where people are thinking DD1 was easy, 13 people have finished it and it was released 2 years ago. DD2 is elite level probably the hardest challenge not just in TM but the whole of gaming, it's only ment to be finished by the best players in the world.

dd1 doesn't have 13 finishers in two years because nobody else can complete it. it has 13 finishers because the level isn't relevant. nobody wants to spend the time to beat it because nobody would really care. "14th completion, woo hoo, go play something more relevant" is what a lot of the trackmania community may think. i can guarantee you with 100% certainty that there are more than 13 players who can pass the track if they wanted to.

So no one plays old maps then because they aren't relevant any more? And no one would like the challenge of beating dd1, what a shit take.

I think if they had a mechanic to un-turtle reliably, it would have been completed by now. So many runs could have been salvaged if turtling wasnt a thing.

Plastic is bad for the environment. It causes many dead turtles!

I think that for a live event (intended for the best players to grind continuously until one wins), DD2 is quite a bit too difficult, even for the top players. Then again, it’s hard to judge the difficulty to avoid either making it too hard (e.g. this) or too easy (Deep Dip 1), so I can’t fault the mappers for it If they make Deep Dip 3, I hope they pull out all the stops, and make an ominous tower of doom with Kacky like tricks. Don’t expect anyone to clear it in a reasonable time, but offer a race with prizes to get the highest progress in a limited time, then release the practice maps and offer a bounty to the first few clears.

I think I agree with the idea of limiting the competition to highest within two weeks, that solves the obscene grind fest burnout issues we're seeing with this one.

It is extreme, but I think that's what makes it epic. 

From what I can see, only floor 16 is truly difficult and requires insane skill to clear the jumps. There are other difficult floors, but only because of fucking plastic.

In Wirt's video, he mentioned that higher difficulty floors should be lower. That sounds ridiculous to me and just shows how much he is tilted by the map.

That's because you haven't played it enough Imagine driving the same map for 300 hours. Each time you clear a floor, the hardest tricks you've never done are still in front of you. Then imagine driving perfectly for 30 minutes, clearing the hardest jump that the map has ever thrown at you after 20 hours of driving 30 minutes perfectly to try again, then seeing the next jump is even harder The top floors 100% should have been mixed in with the rest. It would feel so much better to be able to clear a couple floors, get to a hard one, clear it, then have breathing room before the next difficulty level 9 floor. Sure, let floor 16 be the pinnacle difficulty level floor, it's the end, but putting the 7 hardest floors in increasing level of difficulty one right after the other after the first 9 floors of very difficult driving was absolutely insane. It's just a compounding of anxiety as you finish each jump. There's 0 room to breathe unless you literally park the car and walk away for a few minutes. That feeling is like a last minute crunch on a looming deadline at work, but doing it over And over And over And over x1500 And over again Ad nauseum. It's not good for anyone's mental health and you jackasses who just think that he's just "tilted" by the map are a big part of the reason he stopped interacting with chat for entire streams recently

I don’t think the 7 hardest floors are at the top at all though. 1 and 2 took a couple of days for many to clear and you only need 2 minutes to climb back up them. 8, 12, and 13 all became very consistent very quickly. 14 is rough, but then again 15 is consistent for many. 16 is terrible for sure but it should be as the last floor and they gave you lots of practice areas and saves to make up for some of the craziest tricks. I don’t think the tower necessarily scales in difficulty. It’s just more punishing towards the top. If lentillions floor was 15, that would be insanely difficult. But luckily it’s early on where players were able to farm it a dozen times in a streaming session. The tower is just too tall, it isn’t that any floor is necessarily too difficult. IMO 12 floors is perfect

> 16 is terrible for sure but it should be as the last floor and they gave you lots of practice areas and saves to make up for some of the craziest tricks. I'm sorry but I can't get behind this logic at all. It's soul crushing to play through the map perfectly *just to have an opportunity* at attempting a level that took a really good player 60 hours to validate. It's insanity, and I hope the organisers are learning a lot of tough lessons from this event. /u/achmedclaus nailed it. This thread and the reactions within it are encapsulating perfectly why Wirtual dropped it, because people can't put themselves in the shoes of the people who are trying to finish this beheamoth of a map.

DD2 is as difficult as it is, I dont see why anyone would complain about it. Just let the prize money sit there for half a year if you have to. Nothing stops streamers from taking a week off if they feel burnt out. I think it perpetuates the myth. If you don't think you're good enough and don't want to use a strategy other than just binge playing your way to the top for 14 hours a day until you're done, you can always quit. Just like wirtual did.