A journey through mapmaking

On August 24 2013 20:31 Ragoo wrote:
Now that we have established a reason why people would want to make maps, let me clarify why they would stop.
Now first disregard all the things that could be different, that could make mapmaking feel shit and hopeless and who is to blame. Disregarding the fact that Bnet was and still is shit, disregard the fact the fact that foreign tournaments barely did care about well thought out map rotation/map pools, disregard the fact that this community as a whole is rly conservative when it comes to maps (and TLMC vote results are skewed heavily to favor the least innovative maps), the fact that Blizzard never tried to reach out and use the –free- resources we were providing, the fact that other companies (*cough* Valve) are doing a much better job at rewarding and working with content creators, the fact that mapmakers have many serious issues with how the game is designed (see r/starcraft Protoss design thread from some days ago and read Lalush posts to get a good idea; also lack of highground advantage), the fact that his game may or may not be dying or the fact that Blizzard randomly without asking changes the maps they add to ladder.

I may or may not write a longer post about the things that went wrong from our point of view (altho I may have done some of that already here).

At its core the simple reason why people stopped being motivated to make maps is that the maps never get used.

If on average 10 high level mapmakers make a map every 2 months, every map takes at least 40 (but easily a lot more) hours to do and they do this for 3 years. Well you do the math, and this is only including maps that I would consider high quality (for their respective time ofc). Plus you have to look at all of the hours of practice, discussion and watching/playing Starcraft to even get to the level to be able to produce high quality melee maps.

When at the end of the day I can count on one hand the maps by the foreign community that were used in important tournaments you can see why the amount of work put in is not in a healthy relation to what anyone gets out of it.

Compare to the Korean mapmaking scene which is tiny in comparison and thus has less depth and arguably also had less individual quality. Yet they always had the support of GSL and now Kespa that really cared to make the best possible map pools and have a healthy map rotation, and also cared for maps to be diverse.