Osl112 says:
I disagree. That will favour the bigger names a lot more, as people expect that they will get a quality track from them.

That's the point, is it? If you know that every uploader spends HIS OWN "MONEY", you can be SURE that the author has put his best skills into the track (otherwise = automatical loss of money).

Yes, maybe a "MAKE IT PUBLIC" option on tracks should cost 50 planets.. or better 100. This way people could still upload and use them on servers but only the real well built ones would appear publicly on the site.

If I remember there already was suching pay to upload system on TrackMania CarPark before. If you were given an award for a skin, you could upload two others, or something like this.

That would make tracks remain longer in the lastest uploaded list.

You could also improve the idea by offering the player the possibility to choose how much planets he wants to give. If someone has done a masterpiece track, he could give (for exemple) 1000 planets to place it on the homepage for a longer time. This way any author could have a real chance to get noticed. At least for his first tracks.

And 50 planets is really not enough. You start with 5k and get 100 more for each 1000 ladder points you get. This way you can upload 50 crap maps without doing nothing, and much more by the next...

Virus says:
If I remember there already was suching pay to upload system on TrackMania CarPark before. If you were given an award for a skin, you could upload two others, or something like this.

That would make tracks remain longer in the lastest uploaded list.

You could also improve the idea by offering the player the possibility to choose how much planets he wants to give. If someone has done a masterpiece track, he could give (for exemple) 1000 planets to place it on the homepage for a longer time. This way any author could have a real chance to get noticed. At least for his first tracks.

And 50 planets is really not enough. You start with 5k and get 100 more for each 1000 ladder points you get. This way you can upload 50 crap maps without doing nothing, and much more by the next...

Maybe even simple filters where you must at least write a valid description of at least 250 characters and have a screenshot will help.

Parsing 250 chars strings to check whether an author comment is "valid" is everything but simple...

Call me a dreamer, but I still think that in the end, quality will prevail.

I look at it the same way I see the music business..... I mean, millions of people will buy the next Lady Gaga tune, even if it's complete rubbish the same way they will download and award some "famous" trackbuilders next track, even if it sucks epicly.
But: There is still enough room for good and honest bands to do their thing and build a fanbase. But it takes time. If you LOVE building tracks, you put details and ideas in your tracks, and then your tracks will show your love for trackbuilding and this will be rewarded. But as I said, it may take time. It happened with my Coast track "Pyraminx" - it was overlooked for years ! but as time went by, it slowly made its way to a classic, because it is a really unique track, I loved the initial idea and I spend weeks building it.

There is, of course, what I would call "the mainstream market" in TMX: you can supply the kids with tons of "island like" full speed tracks - this will raise your chances of awards significantly, as these kinds of tracks seem to be very popular (boring as hell to myself, but that is just my taste - but then again: there are some kids out there who really LOVE building these kinds of tracks, and no surprise, these again are the best ones of that genre.

And my last point: I guess we all witnessed the big buddy awarding thing on TMX, where a certain handfull of "trackbuilders" spent their whole day awarding everything of their buddies that had more than a Checkpoint in it and flooding the "recently awarded" list with very very bad tracks. But hey, we all knew their names after a few weeks and we automatically AVOIDED their tracks, didnt we?

A suggestion would be to make the function "add to your favourite authors" more visible and better accessible like it used to be.
Make it easier to focus on your favourite authors than on the first page where you risk losing your appetite for good tracks by repeating the mistake of downloading only the "best of the week".
Maybe it would be possible to customize your own starting page.... so that it automatically shows the latest tracks of your favourite authors instead of the recently awarded and best of the week.... the same way you customize your last fm page for example, because if you're not a Lady Gaga fan, why bother looking at it every day, instead:you want to know what your favourite bands are doing.

Greetings and happy trackbuilding
DrZuckerbrot aka TheMightyBoosh

and most people will just add same mainstream authors to their favorites list, and they'll earn even more awards...

I agree that the Favorites would be a very good idea, but with that idea we would need PPO in order to discover new authors more easily.