It's currently 9 track styles, which seems to cover most of the track styles. But one of the oldest and most important track styles have been entirely forgotten about: Trial.

What's weird about it is that RPG is a track style, and this means that a lot of trial builder use this tag instead of trial, which would've been a lot better, because these track styles are fundamentally very different. This also diffuses the difference between trial and rpg, and many people have started to call trial for rpg, and it makes searching for rpg maps harder.

All discussion is welcome

Regards, eie

Good point.

Agreed.

Trial should be added.

Trial is also much more popular in Canyon than RPG is. So mostly when you see "RPG" and it's a Canyon map... it's very likely to be a Trial map.

really?

I don't know enough about this to be able to say so, all I worry about is if none RPG/Trial players will understand what these are about. For a new player, I'm sure RPG makes no sense at all to pick, but trial sounds like something someone can pick without realising its something else.

trial is rpg without a story
so its something different in my opinion

MrA says:
(...) I don't know enough about this to be able to say so, all I worry about is if none RPG/Trial players will understand what these are about. For a new player, I'm sure RPG makes no sense at all to pick, but trial sounds like something someone can pick without realising its something else.

Current styles

Track styles says:

Race
Fullspeed
Tech
RPG
LOL
Press Forward
Speedtech
Multilap
Offroad

To counter your argument: I don't even know what the difference between Race and Fullspeed is supposed to be, but I know for sure that I, and 90 % (No source, just an estimate) of the people involved with RPG and Trial could tell the difference between the two styles. Even most people have to label their tracks as "Trial" even if they've set the style to "RPG".

Example: (This track)
From the author comments:

Caluadan says:
Heres my first Valley map, just a small Trial map, not too Hard

There is a clear difference, and an attempt to explain it by Occam is found here

Occam says:
Trial tracks and RPG tracks are fundamentally similar in design. The most distinctive feature to differentiate between an RPG and a Trial Track is the look and feel of the track. RPG tracks are usually shaped in an adventurous setting by means of an heavily modded environment, often even feature custom sounds like for example a cracking hallway or a Gregorian chants when entering a hall.

Trial Tracks use plain unmodded blocks and tend to be a bit shorter and in general seem to be a bit easier to digest for slower PC hardware than the modded and rather copper heavy RPGs. RPGs are often outstandingly long, not to say epic and often even story driven. (...)

Another argument is the fact that we have separate servers for RPG and Trial maps, which itself should mean that it's rather compelling that T/MX has ignored this fact for too long.

To me it seems rather obvious that Trial should've been added a long time ago, seeing that it is in fact an older track style than RPG. It saddens me that the label RPG is too often misused, and I think the track styles of T/MX might be blamed, because it is not on the list of track styles.

I see a point in adding Trial as type, yes.
There's a clear difference between Trial and RPG.

eie says:
To counter your argument...

I wasn't making an argument

....

I'm happy enough to see it added anyway.

MrA says:
I wasn't making an argument

Sorry, the lack of any arguments made me start an imaginary debate ^^ I was kinda looking forward to debate some people being against the suggestion, but it doesn't look like anyone has spoken against it. A success, I suppose, with all the support for the suggestion.

Now if someone with power and responsibility could use their power for good and make this suggestion a reality, that'd be great.