tmrank methodology

tmrank takes Trackmania tournament placements and turns them into player ratings over time. The goal is not to find one perfect truth, but to build a readable ranking system that matches competitive intuition better than a simple count of wins or podiums.

Curation and weighting are part of the project, not hidden implementation details. Which events are included, how different formats are grouped, and which tournaments count as majors are all local choices that shape the final output.

What counts in the default ranking

The default profile is mainly an esports ranking. It starts from Liquipedia Tier 1 and Tier 2 Trackmania tournaments, then applies local curation on top.

Some events are excluded from the default profile because they are different enough to deserve their own lens, including seasonal campaigns, Kacky events, and Formula-style events. Those kinds of tournaments can still appear in separate side profiles that only track that category.

GOAT ranking

The GOAT ranking is not driven by one tournament or one hot streak. It combines four different ideas about greatness, then blends them into one index with configured weights.

Prime rating: a player’s best sustained high point, not just one spike month.
Elite area: how much top-level strength they accumulated over time.
Median conservative: their typical level across active months.
Title points: credit for results in the curated major-events list.

Majors are hand-curated, not pulled automatically from Liquipedia. In the default esports profile, that list currently includes things like World Cups, TMGL, ZrT Cups, XPEvo, Red Bull Faster, and other notable tournaments selected in the project config.

These components are normalized so they can be compared on the same scale, then combined with configured weights. In the default esports profile, prime rating, elite area, and title points carry the biggest share of the final GOAT index. The site displays that index on a 0-100 scale, with the top benchmark near 100.

The idea is simple: GOAT should reward more than one kind of greatness.

Current ranking

The current ranking is meant to answer one question: who looks strongest right now? Better placements against stronger fields help more, while weaker finishes hurt. The model uses a conservative rating, which is basically a safer estimate of strength that discounts uncertainty.

Long inactivity raises that uncertainty, so old strength counts less with time until a player competes again. In simple terms: inactive players are not erased, but the system becomes less confident that their old level still reflects the present.

That means current ranking is not a “best ever” list. It is a present-tense view of active strength.

What this ranking is not

tmrank is not official, not fully objective, and not exhaustive. It does not pretend every tournament is equally important, and it does not assume sparse eras and modern eras are perfectly comparable.

The main subjective choices are event inclusion, event weighting, and majors definition. Those are all visible project choices rather than hidden claims of objectivity.

Different profiles can disagree on purpose. That is a feature, not a bug: Trackmania has formats that reward very different skills.

Why profiles exist

Esports, campaigns, Kacky, ZrT cups, and World Cups do not test the same thing. Side-by-side profiles let the project compare different ranking philosophies without forcing them into one shared list.

The default profile stays focused on the esports scene, while side profiles are specialized views that only include events from their own category. A profile can override event curation, rating settings, majors, or aliases without changing the default esports profile.

Technical notes