POLYTRACK, MEASURED
PolyTrack ghosts and leaderboards, explained
PolyTrack has no live opponents. It has ghosts: laps recorded by other players, raced beside you, and a replay viewer to study them with. The listing describes the leaderboard; the client also ships a playback screen the listing never mentions, and most of this page is that screen.
The ghost on track
IN-GAME
While you drive, the record lap is raced beside you as a translucent car. The three HUD columns become meaningful the moment a record exists:
记录— the record lap to beat, e.g.00:27.167当前— your live lap差异— the gap, green when you are ahead (-00:00.584), red when behind (+00:00.031)
On a fresh track both side columns read — until the record has been fetched.
The replay viewer
IN-GAME
观看 (watch) opens a playback screen the store page never describes. It shows:
- the recorded car, labelled with the player’s name in quotes — ours read
"Anonymous"on a signed-out session - that run’s timer and speed while it plays
⏮/ play / pause and a scrub bar whose yellow ticks sit exactly on the checkpoints- a camera pad in the lower-left: four directions, so you can watch a line from above or behind
图表(chart), which opens a speed-over-time graph labelled with the same name and their top speed — ours readAnonymous 227.56 km/h, plotted 0–327 km/h against the run’s seconds
What the listing says
- the track picker shows the best lap times recorded by verified players
- you can pick an opponent off the leaderboard and race their ghost
- your own best lap is also available as a ghost to race against
- a bad run is cheap: restart is one key and the countdown is short
OFFICIAL ONLY
The four points above are the store listing’s wording about the ghost system, dated 2026-11-02.
Open questions
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
| How many ghosts can be on track at once? | NEEDS CHECK |
| What separates a “verified” time from an ordinary one? | NEEDS CHECK |
| Can you choose which player’s ghost to load? | NEEDS CHECK |
| Do custom tracks record ghosts and times the same way? | NEEDS CHECK |
| Does a leaderboard reset with an update? | NEEDS CHECK |
Why a ghost, and not a player
Time trial games have raced ghosts since the first TrackMania: the ghost is the cheapest way to make a single-player run feel social. It costs no server time, it never waits, and it does not fall off the track in front of you. What it does do is put somebody else’s line on your screen, which is the whole point — you learn a corner by following a car that already took it well.
PolyTrack’s listing leans on that directly, naming TrackMania as the inspiration. The practical consequence is that “multiplayer” here means “somebody recorded this earlier”: nothing about the run is live, and a ghost that stops mid-corner is a disconnect in a recording, not a player quitting.