Improve At TM

What is a good time on a map?

Of course if you grind a TOTD (Track of the Day) for countless hours you might achieve top 1k, top 100 or even top 1. But there's another map tomorrow, and another one the next day, and 1000+ in the past 3 years that may be just as fun. On the other hand, playing every map for 5min and just settling for gold is less satisfying than clocking in a nice time, and certainly does not help you improve as much. So, when to push? And when to stop? This plugin aims to answer this tricky question.

How does it work?

By analyzing your performance on the latest tracks you played, the plugin suggests you a personalized Goal Time on any TOTD, past or future. This goal time is computed using your PBs on similar tracks, and aims to be achievable while also ensuring a constant improvement rate.

Example of use:

• You love LOL maps and penalty grass, and almost exclusively play these kind of tracks. You encounter a nice tech TOTD and start driving it. The plugin does not recognize very similar maps in the latest ones you played, so it suggests you an easy goal time (close to gold). Once you start playing more tech tracks, the plugin should will start recognizing them and offer you more challenging times.
• Your brother's name is Carl and he plays tech tracks very well. Upon encountering the same TOTD, the plugin will give him a much harder goal time, perhaps even somewhere in the top 10. However, on a "Kacky of the day" his goal time should will be much worse than yours, as you master these tracks better.

Limitations:

• Currently only works on TOTDs (future updates will surely include more maps COPIUM)
• The goal time is never worse than gold (and might therefore not be so useful for beginners)
• This is WORK IN PROGRESS and comes with NO WARRANTY of anything (pls be nice)

How does it really work ?

The plugin starts by analyzing your autosave replay files to get the latest 30 TOTDs you played (and where you achieved silver). For those tracks it stores your PBs, as well as the top 100 TOTD leaderboards in a database. When you start playing another TOTD, the plugin compares the top 100 with the 30 leaderboards in the database, and decides which maps are similar to this one based on how their top 100 correlate (the idea being that two similar tracks will have similar leaderboards). The goal time is then computed using a weighted average of your PBs on these tracks (or rather, on how far they are from top 1), and pushing the resulting time towards top 1 by a fixed improvement factor.

Notes:

• In case the computed goal time is worse than gold, or when no maps correlate well with the current one, gold time is returned.
• The goal time depends on the top 100 TOTD leaderboards, which close 24h after the track is released. Therefore, it will keep changing at each track reload for 24h, and only be fixed afterwards.
• The training database is refreshed every 10 days, so any improvement on your part will only show up after this time.
• The previous goal times will not automatically recompute with your new database, unless you specifically want them to (see debug section below).

Troubleshooting / Known issues:

Please be aware that this is work in progress, and bugs are very common sometimes to be expected. Here's a (non exhaustive) list of known issues:

• Sharp increase in goal time difficulty after 10 days: This is probably because of the first training database refresh. While you may not have improved that much yet, goal times might already have given you motivation to push some tracks further than what you would have done otherwise.
• Discrepancies between goal times of tracks of the same type: The main reasons for this are 1) maps with cuts (their leaderboards may look much different than what they should, since cut maps could attract different players than regular maps), 2) maps which play differently at high level (a good example is Kwasy_tm's Desert Line on 25th of August, which demands only precision at intermediate level but requires some level of SD mastering for top 100. Setting a good time here will boost your goal times on FS maps, even if you're not an FS player) and more generally 3) maps whose top 100 is "weird" for some reason (holiday breaks with fewer players, other competitions in parallel, ...)
• "My goal time is always too hard or too easy, but just never right": Evaluating one's level with precision is hard, especially for us humans. It is common to think we're better than what we actually are, and so a goal time that is too easy might seem ridiculous. On the other hand, if it looks too hard it can only be the machine's fault, certainly not our misconception of our abilities. The easy fix for that is just to play the map and have fun! Perhaps the goal time will be more adapted in the future.

If you're still reading this, it means you're interested, and I'm glad! Please don't hesitate to reach out to me on Discord if you find bugs and/or improvement ideas. I might not respond very quickly as I work full time, but it's certainly nice to have (positive!!! only positive) feedback. To report inconsistencies in goal times, you may want to add a copy of your log (available in debug mode) as well as your "training data" file (in Openplanet's plugin storage).

Debug mode:

The plugin also comes with a debug mode, which allows you to manually recompute goal times (normally done on map load), refresh training data (normally done every 10 days) and refresh the TOTD list (normally done every day). It also provides logs on what the plugin is actually doing (useful for bug reporting).