STAR Team

STAR Team is a team founded in May 2014 by the player cf37. Its primary goal is to focus on tracks that are less commonly hunted in order to bring attention to them. In particular, the team explicitly does not hunt Nadeo tracks.

The team was formed mainly to go against FWO, a team which focuses on hunting popular tracks, and in particular getting flashy shortcuts on them. cf37 did not support this, as he felt only playing popular tracks went against the spirit of TrackMania. The two teams have been in an active rivalry since STAR Team's founding, with the rivalry becoming more heated after FWO was taken over by the Council.

History
Following the shock in the leaderboards caused by the creation of FWO by Nino, some players began to feel that the team's activity was dangerous, as they feared the team would cause a monopoly on all the most popular tracks, and especially the official tracks. One fear, which was held specifically by cf37, was that FWO would soak up all the attention that TrackMania Nations Forever was getting, leaving little to spare for other aspects of the community, such as the Trial community - indeed, cf37 had many friends who were active trial players. He envisioned a team which would not focus on a small, exclusive set of maps from years ago, but instead on all types of track, new and old, and made by unknown mappers.

In May of 2014, therefore, cf37 would announce the creation of STAR Team, a team designed to be the opposite of FWO. Whereas FWO recruited members by allowing those who performed new shortcuts on their specified set of tracks, which cf37 saw as unfair due to the inevitably restrictive nature of using a finite resource to recruit members to an active team, STAR Team would recruit members by hosting competitions on tracks every month, with the players who performed above a certain threshold being accepted into the team. cf37 believed that this was both a more sustainable method of recruiting, as the supply of tracks on TrackMania Exchange is effectively endless, and more fair, as the skill level required is much more equal than for performing a shortcut.

STAR Team slowly began to grow via this mechanism. However, it struggled to gain truly exceptional players, as the majority had either already joined FWO, would go on to join it, or would remain free agents. One notable exception to this was the player Snowdome, who refused to join FWO due to his personal disagreements with one of the team's senior members, Lager; as such, he joined STAR Team. He remains the most successful player in the team's history, and can frequently be spotted on official STAR Team hunting servers.

Nino era
STAR Team and FWO have been enemies since the former's founding. In the early stages, although cf37 would often go into arguments with Nino, the majority of members saw the rivalry as friendly, and some members of STAR Team collaborated with members of FWO on certain community projects. Relations would slowly fall however, with them reaching a low point in 2016. During this time, members of the two teams could often be seen arguing on TrackMania Forum, with the discussions often getting locked. One particular thread, titled "Is FWO worse than Hitler?", gained mild notoriety outside the TrackMania community for its toxicity, and notable moments would be often quoted by members of both teams in later parts of the Nino era.

After 2016, however, Nino and cf37 started working to improve relations, as the two leaders both recognised that the silly arguments were taking time away from playing TrackMania. As such, STAR Team created a policy intended to reduce the amount of time members spent arguing with FWO. This policy was largely successful, and by 2019 the two teams were mostly amicable towards each other, although they still largely refused to collaborate.

Council era
After FWO was taken over by the Council, relations between the two teams quickly worsened. The Council cared little for improving relations between the two teams, as it was focused purely on taking over the Nadeo leaderboards. In particular, the Council sent out an order prohibiting any sort of collaboration with anyone from STAR Team; as an immediate result, any positive relations were effectively cut. The actions of FWO under the Council quickly made relations reach an all-time low - although there were no arguments, people in both teams were acutely aware that the Council and cf37 deeply disagreed about each other.

In part due to the failure of FWO to collect each Nadeo record in 2020 (falling just one short before slowly beginning to lose records), the Council sent out an order in June which asked FWO members to prevent FWO from being held back via any method possible. STAR Team was distinctly aware that although this order did not explicitly affect STAR Team, as they did not participate in the hunting of Nadeo tracks, it would be likely that they would be a target of an attack by FWO. As such, cf37 made a recommendation that the team begin preparing for an attack. After some months of tension, the fears realised themselves in November, when a team of around half a dozen FWO members stormed into the STAR Team headquarters. However, due to the preparation, STAR Team was able to hold the attack back, and it was ultimately a loss for FWO. There has not been another attack since, but relations have not improved.