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When we first started the rankings project, we wrote the following:
"2014 was big year for competitive TrackMania. It saw the shift from Nations Forever to TrackMania²: Stadium for almost all major tech competitions, the continued success of well-established players, and the return of old faces to the scene. All this, as well as breakout performances from some of the newer members of the scene, led to many close and exciting matches over the last twelve months.
People often wonder how the best players stack up against each other. “Who is the best player of all time?” is a question that has been asked countless times, and we can only speculate as to how legends of the past would fare against the current generation of pro players. What we can do, however, is compare those who are currently playing the game with their opponents, and in doing so, hope to form a list of the best players of 2014."
After over a month of hard work, we have finally finished releasing articles on who we believe to be the best players in terms of their 2014 performances and achievements. We hope that you have enjoyed reading the articles, and that they gave you a bit of insight into the pro scene and the various competitions that are avaliable to enter and compete in.
The Team
Leo "Leo" Falcomer-Dawson, Project Manager, Writer, Rankings
Ilkka "wormi" Pääkkönen, Writer, mA Contact, Graphics
Peter "znik" Skarstein, Rankings, Graphics
Andy "Sabre" Wilson, Rankings, History Expert
Kevin "Safran" Luu, Rankings
Florent "Some0ne" Gaudiller, Player Research, Writer
Mathieu "cR4p0" Debien, Player Research
For their help and effort, we want to thank:
Thomas "Sky" Rabel, mA Contact, Graphics
Ayrton "Tona" Lemaire, Video Production
Special thanks to Kalle "frostBeule" Videkull for his input on the player ranking and providing us with a lot of great source material in the form of match reports and VODs. Thanks to Tim "Spam" Lunenburg, whose match videos helped us write accurately about the events of 2014, and Gabriel "Gaby" Guibert for some of the pictures we used in our publications.
Statistics
On Monday, sixth of April, the articles had been viewed over 28,000 times, with the average view count for a single article over 1,400. The most viewed article was the first one, which features twentieth player "Sandder" and introduces the project; it has so far racked up 3,500 views.
Readers left 47 comments on the articles over the span of their release, letting their thoughts be known and congratulating the players for their success. The article with most discussion to date is the "Kronos" article with 16 comments.
Outside the top four, the player our four ranking experts were most unified in ranking was "Koenz", who placed twelth. Meanwhile, the player who the ranking team struggled most to place was "YoYo".
The total word count for the articles is 28,516, the longest individual article being "Spam" at 2,216 words.
The most embarrassing typo was when "Leo" wrote his own last name wrong. Approximately, writing one article took between four and five hours.
What now?
The project was both a learning experience and a test of our time management skills, and there is no doubt that things will run a lot smoother internally if we decide to build another ranking at the end of 2015.
We would be grateful to hear your feedback on the project. We have already received some in the form of comments on individual articles, but feel free to write down your opinions and ideas on how to improve down in comments section. Were the articles well written? Were the pictures and videos picked correctly? Were there too many articles, or too few? Do the articles need more numeric data? What new we could add? How was the formatting? Whatever comes to mind, be sure to write it down!
Top 20 Players of 2014 complete list
5th: Andy "Sabre" Wilson
Video
Last but not least, we present you a video with all 20 players, made by "Tona"!
Thank you!
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To the feedback: in my opinion team matches should weigh a bit more than they did in this ranking, after all there's only few big solo tournaments/LAN events throughout the year, and sadly not everyone can attend them for various reasons - in compare to the team matches that are being played basically every week.
Also, would be great if you linked as much VOD's as you can while mentioning the tournament/match etc, for example:
Instead of this, you could add the link to the match VOD on YT:
Of course, articles will be fine even without it, but it could save a lot of time searching for those who aren't as familiar with the scene and haven't seen this match/tournament before.
As for feedback, if there would be more clear method to go by when basing these rankings, then I don't really think it would be that much of a struggle to see where the players should be ranked at. I mean it's all about how good the player did, and the results are pretty well documented and should be quite easily comparable as long as you strictly follow the same method.
How that method should look like is another question. I've already stated that I think it should be a combination of individual achievements, how well you drove in team-matches (not what achievements you got), and that how well a player did during the whole year is prioritized, and not have one event (such as ESWC) influence the ranking too much.
I also really think it was a miss not having KarjeN in the list. If you can include PokeR on the basis of him doing really good in team-tournaments, then as I see it KarjeN should be treated similarly. Consistently it looked a bit bad not to. He (together with Carl Jr.) was a key-reason why Team Dignitas were so successful in the team-tournaments throughout the year. Maybe he wasn't as active as before, but I still think he was more than active enough to be included, and more active than others who got on the list, such as Sand or Tamarillo.
Other than the rankings, I think it should have been called "Top 20 Tech Players of 2014" to avoid confusion, but otherwise the presentation and writing was excellent as a whole.
As a comment, i have nothing more to say than people already wrote. In my opinion, ESWC ranking impacted a lil bit too much but i guess it was also your choice. Every ranking must have its rules, yours gives much importance to ESWC, why not.
Also, as Railag said, it would be more attractive and efficient to get some video links or interactive stuff linked to the text which is sometimes hard to digest because of its density. Break would be welcomed :D
I hope similar projects are incoming!