Is the Grinding fixed?

[...]

I know nothing about this game other than mostly negative reviews, most mentioning grinding. I checked last patch notes and they fixed more bugs than my 3-month uncleaned kitchen has, so who knows how many are left, but as you can tell, I don't care about bugs, is the grinding fixed, thanks.

[ТΕИƎꞱ]

nah still a bit of grinding if you are trying to unlock all the tracks even with the addition of the dlc tracks you will need to grind contracts ridiculous i know!

[Tyrian Mollusk]

Sadly, still lots of bugs left, especially since they added more and didn't entirely fix the ones they said they were in the patch.

Grinding is ... improved. I'm not going to say it's good, because I can't re-grind and report, but if you are good at Trials already you now have the option to ace the training levels to unlock tiers of tracks instead of only doing it by XP grinding. The grinding is also a bit better in general now because of small things like how stadiums are now less likely to break their part in the progression and approaching the grind knowing more than early buyers did.

Buy the Helium and Donkey bikes ASAP. Pay attention to the XP awards on contracts. Always have a contract on the track you are running (the RedLynx sponsor basically acts as breadcrumb contracts to lead you through the game, if you know to follow them), since just running a track doesn't have any real rewards (don't play for medals until you have the game unlocked or you just drag it out). DLC means more tracks and more contracts on those tracks, so not quicker leveling but more variety in the leveling and more "just do the track" contracts for XP that doesn't feel quite as bad-grindy.

Those bugs can definitely bite, though.

[...]

Thanks for the answers and tips! I will consider it now.

[Fazo]

wait what? after the patch they said you can just A+ the tutorials and it will instantly unlock all tracks from that specific difficulty. if that's the case there should be no grind whatsoever.

[Tyrian Mollusk]

Getting an A+ is a grind, too, depending on where your skills are at, and most of us don't actually know how it interacts with the rest of the game. Eg, does it unlock the contracts you need to use on those tracks to get your level up for whatever tier you aren't going to be able to A+ readily, or do those follow the original progression and having more tracks actually means slower total progress?).

Oh, one thing I forgot before: doing ranked multiplayer awards a ton of XP, so that is a way the grind has been significantly lessened if you are ok with playing that side of the game.

[Scruffy McGuffy]

People exaggerated the grind in the first place, then trashed the game in reviews as a result. Or maybe because it has lootboxes, which are cosmetics only and cannot be purchased with real money so whatever.

The gap between playing the tracks you've unlocked so far, and unlocking the last set of Extreme tracks, was only a few hours of play time. That's easily filled by doing Contracts in SP, of which there are 425 to choose from, or play some MP which rewards easy XP at a fast rate. Once those tracks are unlocked, no grind forever. It's a one-time bump only. It shouldn't have been there, true, but people made a mountain out of a molehill.

Maybe it's been patched by now to unlock everything by beating the University events. If so, you're set if you're good enough to beat those. If not, do a few Contracts or play MP for a short while.

I see I'm at almost 100 hours played now, and I just finished a session playing some UGC which was every bit as good as the official tracks are. That grind people complain about was over 80 hours ago and long forgotten.

[Tyrian Mollusk]

Originally posted by Scruffy McGuffy:

The gap between playing the tracks you've unlocked so far, and unlocking the last set of Extreme tracks, was only a few hours of play time.

The gap was there every round of unlocks and took half the levels you need every tier. That was a lot of worthless contract running, and that assumes your game worked and unlocked contracts correctly, which most people's didn't. Then you add in that the grinding is doing stupid crap on boring tracks, never getting to actually do what you want, many didn't know they were intended to get the extra bikes (since the game never tells you anything about how you get contracts), and it's a massive departure from how the rest of the series unlocked, and anyone reasonable can see why people were upset about wasting hours upon hours that they shouldn't have had to waste not getting to do what they want with a broken, flagrantly unfinished mess of a product.

RedLynx earned those negative reviews, and they're still earning them since the game hasn't even approached release quality.

[Scruffy McGuffy]

Originally posted by Tyrian Mollusk:

Originally posted by Scruffy McGuffy:

The gap between playing the tracks you've unlocked so far, and unlocking the last set of Extreme tracks, was only a few hours of play time.

The gap was there every round of unlocks and took half the levels you need every tier. That was a lot of worthless contract running, and that assumes your game worked and unlocked contracts correctly, which most people's didn't. Then you add in that the grinding is doing stupid crap on boring tracks, never getting to actually do what you want, many didn't know they were intended to get the extra bikes (since the game never tells you anything about how you get contracts), and it's a massive departure from how the rest of the series unlocked, and anyone reasonable can see why people were upset about wasting hours upon hours that they shouldn't have had to waste not getting to do what they want with a broken, flagrantly unfinished mess of a product.

We agree they've made some poor design choices, and it was dumb to require any grind at all to unlock the later tracks when the previous games method of unlocking on medal count worked well for everyone.

Where we have to agree to disagree is 1) how bad the grind is, and 2) how serious that is relative to the positives of this game, which are often overlooked. For 1), I was going to be doing the Contracts anyway, as I did in Fusion, so it was only a minor inconvenience to do them sooner than later. Or you can do MP as you said, and XP is very generous. For 2), I see people on Steam with many dozens of hours played leaving negative reviews, which imo is rather silly no matter what the game is. Rising doesn't get enough credit for its high quality tracks, nor for having almost double the amount of content that Fusion had. Those are two enormous positives imo, and the negatives in comparison are small.

[Tyrian Mollusk]

For (1), you generally ignore how much the grind varied by player. There are and were a lot of bugs that make it a lot worse, plus the game lack critical information. With so many players getting broken stadium races (blocking a critical contract series) and no reason to expect that decent progression requires purchasing extra bikes and activating out-of-game rewards, experience varies pretty absurdly.

For (2), the balance is much more in the game's favor now. Earlier, any new player was pretty guaranteed to have a horrible experience that probably doesn't even lead into a good experience in any reasonable time (a well earned negative review), and everyone else was a crap shoot on whether things worked out badly (a substantial percentage of well earned negative reviews) or just decidedly mediocre.

If I could review the game on Steam, I'd have left a negative review early because the game deserved avoiding and then probably changed it to a grudging thumb up because the odds of getting a moderately functional experience are a lot better now.

Dozens of hours of bad experience is pretty solid grounds to a negative review, I'd say. It is at the very least a massive caveat one should consider in making a purchase. Especially for someone new to the series who, unlike you, won't just easily pass the various nonsensical and arbitrary tasks required to be allowed to see parts of the game where it begins to get interesting.

In Fusion, those tasks were optional and there entirely to enrich the experience if you wanted them. In Rising they gate seeing whether the game is enjoyable. It's difficult to overstate what a terrible idea that was and how badly if affects the general player experience, even if you personally found it of relatively little consequence and lack the empathy to understand why others might feel differently.

Originally posted by Scruffy McGuffy:

Rising doesn't get enough credit for its high quality tracks, nor for having almost double the amount of content that Fusion had. Those are two enormous positives imo, and the negatives in comparison are small.

That isn't the question here, but personally, while I do credit Rising having better tracks this time around, RL's tracks are for me an almost insignificant part of the game and largely irrelevant. I bought the game entirely for the work of the builder community, and Track Central is a disgusting piece of garbage that outright insults the most substantial part of the game, not to mention the many builders burned and disheartened by the unforgivable editor failings, like arbitrarily deleting files. Being forced onto RL's tracks and jumping their idiotic, ill-conceived hoops because nothing else allows any kind of reward or progress just rubs salt into that wound.

Just like the grind early on, their poor design and poor work prevent me getting to spend time playing the game I want to play, so a token improvement to the built-in tracks hardly constitutes a significant positive (let alone two positives) and certainly doesn't outweigh the ridiculous and unacceptable negatives. I'm only even still running RL's tracks because of how they ruined TC (significantly and noticeably dampening its early content I was looking forward to) and because they deliberately designed the game's reward systems to force us onto their tracks (ie, still more grinding).

[Kaiser Panda]

Just for the record, I just saw a post from a Reddit user who made some discoveries regarding the grind in Trials Rising.

If it can help anyone...

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrialsGames/comments/e5l6sc/the_truth_about_the_progress_grinding_spoiler/