ATTENTION: This blog post contains info for Player-based competitions. For an addendum on how to handle Team-based competitions, read this post.

As the title already reveals, I'll need your help in archiving all things Trackmania Competitions. For the new central information and news hub trackmania.news I'm in need of your input as (former) competition manager, hoster or even as someone, who just happens to be able to give me the data I need.

What the Data is For

In the future it will be possible to search for competitions on TMNews. These competitions can be regular or singular. Inside the competition page you can browse for each event belonging to the competition, that has happened in the past or that will happen in the future. Each of these events - if completed - contains its results and other infos, such as VODs.

The general structure of how competition data is stored (left) with an example (right)

If you'd enter all of the competition's previous events results (e.g. MX KO, Smurfscup, TTC) on the page, it might take months to finish. If you are able to send me the data you can acquire in one evening from your previous competitions, I can save you a lot of time.

What Data do I need?

I need structured data in form of tables. An excel file or - even better - a delimited text file will be of great help.

Let's take the True Talent Cup TM2 example, which is a regular event.

The Events Table

First, I need an events table, which contains the following data:

EventID         <int>       A number that is used to assign the results to the event (results table)
EventName       <string>        The name of the event (e.g. "True Talent Cup #22")
Date            <datetime>  The date and time of this event (e.g. 2020-11-13T20:00+02:00 - in ISO 8601 format!
PrizeCurrency   <string>        Optional - If a prize was given away, enter a name for its currency (e.g. "€" or "Planets")

If you need a good resource on ISO 8601, click here.

The table in the end could look something like this:

EventID EventName               Date                    PrizeCurrency
1           True Talent Cup #1      2018-05-22T18:00Z   Planets
2           True Talent Cup #2      2018-05-29T18:00Z   Planets
...

The Results Table

Now that we know which events have happened, we only need the results of those. All TTC results can be put into one table using these columns:

EventID         <int>       A number that is used to assign the results to the event (event table)
Position            <int>       A number that represents the player's position in this event
PlayerLogin     <string>        The ingame login of the player - used to connect the results to one player's profile
Prize           <decimal(2)>    Optional - If a prize was given away, enter it's value (e.g. "2000" for 2000 planets)

The table in the end could look something like this:

EventID Position    PlayerLogin Prize
1       1       karjen      1000
1       2       carljr      900
...
1       98       ozontm     0
2       1       carljr      1000

How can I send the data?

Feel free to send it to me either via e-mail (dennisozon at gmail) or via Discord (Ozon#0359).

Thanks for reading. I hope everything is explained. If you have any questions still leave a comment or make me aware of them on Discord or Twitter. Let's work together to make Trackmania more accessible to everyone!