What Afreeca is doing right now seems just desperate and chaotic, for whatever reason.
The reason is it's fun and fans are eager to see the novelty.
Goodness, people are acting like Sparkle is a permanent, FS level addition to the scene. It'll probably be gone after this season, well before play on it gets boring.
We now have an absurd situation where Afreeca and the Korean map making scene are still years behind the curve when it comes to even observing their own stated basic quality standards for map execution
you are wrong, last season we had two great maps that addressed current meta issues. Gold Rush was made by the same guy who made Circuit Breaker, Destination, Matchpoint, Blue Storm and many more. Rose.of.Dream's new maps were also used in ASL not long ago. The decision to go for a wonky maps season was a conscious one and I agree that it was done for novelty's sake. ps: turns out Crossing Fields' (the other new map last season) creator is responsible for Sparkle.
What Afreeca is doing right now seems just desperate and chaotic, for whatever reason.
The reason is it's fun and fans are eager to see the novelty.
Goodness, people are acting like Sparkle is a permanent, FS level addition to the scene. It'll probably be gone after this season, well before play on it gets boring.
Novelty just for novelty's sake and fun from watching the chaos unfold? Never a good idea. If for some reason Sparkle (or some other of these maps) became a reappearing standard over multiple seasons, that would at least be testament to its virtues as a map and that something went terribly right with Afreeca's map policies. But how long do you think an audience will keep interested in this kind of development if ultimately the competitive aspect suffers from it? Virtually no one wants the era of grinding FS/CB ad nauseam to continue forever, in fact most people don't want to see games on these maps any more, so don't pretend this is what people take exception to. There are just better, more organic ways to incentivise change and evolve meta and map pool. We now have an absurd situation where Afreeca and the Korean map making scene are still years behind the curve when it comes to even observing their own stated basic quality standards for map execution, but want to revolutionize the game with maps that look overall poorly thought out and hastily thrown together.
but most of foreigner maps are a copy paste of FS CB,look at Jukado maps,they are always some FS variation,and nothing wrong with that,at some point i thought FS was the perfection of maps and proly like chess will be the only map relevant,then mech switch did happen,so a map likes dantes peak is a better option.the new maps are chaos yes,i dont even think they are looking at balance anymore.Flash is gonna win ASL 5,atleast lets make it different.
Jukado's maps are not representative for foreign maps in general. Jungleterrain, CrystalDrag and myself have been making very different maps.
What Afreeca is doing right now seems just desperate and chaotic, for whatever reason.
The reason is it's fun and fans are eager to see the novelty.
Goodness, people are acting like Sparkle is a permanent, FS level addition to the scene. It'll probably be gone after this season, well before play on it gets boring.
We now have an absurd situation where Afreeca and the Korean map making scene are still years behind the curve when it comes to even observing their own stated basic quality standards for map execution
you are wrong, last season we had two great maps that addressed current meta issues. Gold Rush was made by the same guy who made Circuit Breaker, Destination, Matchpoint, Blue Storm and many more. Rose.of.Dream's new maps were also used in ASL not long ago. The decision to go for a wonky maps season was a conscious one and I agree that it was done for novelty's sake. ps: turns out Crossing Fields' (the other new map last season) creator is responsible for Sparkle.
What does this prove? Both of last season's maps had a ton of serious, but easy to find and fix, bugs when they came out. Guess who helped the map makers fixing those issues (not all of them, mind, you, because that's just not possible with minimal deadlines, inefficient communication channels, huge knowledge gaps and a language barrier in between)?
Then this season again we get a bunch of maps that pretty much all have more or less severe terrain elevation bugs and can't even get worker pathing bug-free and mining rates balanced despite Afreeca explicitely demanding this beforehand for submitted maps.
That being said, Waldstein (maker of Crossing Fields and Sparkle) is definitely doing a good job now (I taught him about some issues). and Earthattack has always been one of my favourite Kespa mappers, but his maps are usually a mess by current (or any) standards and he clearly still fails to even realize the capabilities of the new ScmDraft. Don't get me started about Rose.of.Dream or Ragnarok[Valkyrie]. Their contributions in the recent years where all of such low quality that it only proves how helpless Korean tourney hosts (be it Sonic, Afreeca or whoever) have been with their mapping policies.
Are you saying the guys who made the best ever BW maps are rubbish? Because that's what I read. The lack of testing is due to BW being not so popular anymore and the maps not being used on ladder.
On March 15 2018 23:18 juvenal wrote: Are you saying the guys who made the best ever BW maps are rubbish? Because that's what I read. The lack of testing is due to BW being not so popular anymore and the maps not being used on ladder.
I am not talking about player level balance testing but knowledge of game mechanics and in-editor debugging. I am not saying the guys are rubbish, just that many things they have done in the past during the Kespa days were very sloppy at best, and that they haven't improved their skills since then, which means, due to the lack of player testing, map quality has deteriorated even further. The complete decay of the Korean melee mapping scene after SC2 came out certainly did not help. I don't doubt the conceptual quality of balance of some of their maps, neither that they introduced some great new map mechanics over the years, but as far as quality of execution goes, their bar for even "good enough" has been and still is very low in many respects.
I empathize. It's like "nobody was fired for buying IBM". In the end this looks like a sales process to me, and in sales, the best product doesn't always win. Relationships matter, who you know matters, and having the perception as the "safe" option matters. =\
I have a quick question on Stork. Usually, we are not seeing him doing the stream on Afreeca a lot. I'm just curious if Stork is doing a full-time job while playing Starcraft at the same time? Do any people from Korea know about this?
On March 16 2018 08:09 HansenZ wrote: I have a quick question on Stork. Usually, we are not seeing him doing the stream on Afreeca a lot. I'm just curious if Stork is doing a full-time job while playing Starcraft at the same time? Do any people from Korea know about this?
He is streaming full time. He certainly should be able to maintain a good quality of life based on the income from it. He streams almost daily, usually for 3-6 hours.
On March 16 2018 08:09 HansenZ wrote: I have a quick question on Stork. Usually, we are not seeing him doing the stream on Afreeca a lot. I'm just curious if Stork is doing a full-time job while playing Starcraft at the same time? Do any people from Korea know about this?
He is streaming full time. He certainly should be able to maintain a good quality of life based on the income from it. He streams almost daily, usually for 3-6 hours.
Got it, thanks for the info. Glad to see him doing well.
On March 16 2018 08:09 HansenZ wrote: I have a quick question on Stork. Usually, we are not seeing him doing the stream on Afreeca a lot. I'm just curious if Stork is doing a full-time job while playing Starcraft at the same time? Do any people from Korea know about this?
He is streaming full time. He certainly should be able to maintain a good quality of life based on the income from it. He streams almost daily, usually for 3-6 hours.
Got it, thanks for the info. Glad to see him doing well.
Yeah, sure, no problem. Perhaps you are just in an effective opposite timezone which is why you don't see him a lot. However, you can always catch up on his YT channel. It's proof to how much he plays nowadays but more so a source of a lot of great games: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCns4Qg50SKaylIG1cErmvng
Freakling, I believe I speak for a lot of BW viewers when I say that I don't know what specific quality control issues you are talking about. I'm curious to learn more. How big of a mining imbalance are you talking about? What are the other issues? As a viewer I pay attention to overall map balance, murky as that sometimes is, and "the big idea" on any given map, such as the mineral-only inside the main on Andromeda or the outer ring of expansions on Outsider. "The big idea" of a map is what creates interesting games and shifts the meta. Are there quality control issues I don't know about that are impacting the progamers or the quality/balance of the games?
Edit: Just to be clear, I have a lot of respect for good craftsmanship and adherence to best practices, and I know that's what you're calling for. I don't have the map-building experience to grasp what they are in this case, though.
On March 17 2018 04:56 Djabanete wrote: Freakling, I believe I speak for a lot of BW viewers when I say that I don't know what specific quality control issues you are talking about. I'm curious to learn more. How big of a mining imbalance are you talking about? What are the other issues? As a viewer I pay attention to overall map balance, murky as that sometimes is, and "the big idea" on any given map, such as the mineral-only inside the main on Andromeda or the outer ring of expansions on Outsider. "The big idea" of a map is what creates interesting games and shifts the meta. Are there quality control issues I don't know about that are impacting the progamers or the quality/balance of the games?
Edit: Just to be clear, I have a lot of respect for good craftsmanship and adherence to best practices, and I know that's what you're calling for. I don't have the map-building experience to grasp what they are in this case, though.
I just want to take some time to explain the situation with melee maps/melee map making in BW. This is my personal take on it.
I would divide the map making community (if it can be called that) into Korean and Foreign. I don't know all the details about the Korean community, but personally I would split them into 3 categories: The Bigwigs (Str18, Earthattack, Rose.of.Dream., Valkyrie[Ragnarok], etc.), Mapmaking team members, and then everyone else. The foreign community, I would categorize as those that frequent map making sites and with a lot of experience (freakling, crystal, me), then most other map makers (I'm really not trying to toot my own horn here).
The biggest difference between these categories is just accessible information. Those that hang around sites have much more knowledge on map making because we discuss, identify problems, problem solve and share what we find with each other. On top of that we criticize mistakes, etc. Then you have those that are just dabbling in map making, and it's difficult or almost impossible to pick up all the information that was gained over years and years of testing, trial and error.
With Koreans, the bigwigs are those Kespa mapmakers and OGN mapmaking team that reliably produced maps for leagues over the years, maintaining a decent standard for mapmaking for the most part, except "quality" started to fall behind as time went on, and they still have not really addressed these problems as of now. There are also a lot of great Korean map makers that belong to the other group, map making teams. LatiAs is one of them (AGAIN map team). Unsurprisingly, a lot of the maps that have been candidates for ASL have been from these types of mapmakers (with some other teams like FAMAT, not sure if Mapdori had their own team, etc.) I'm not 100% why the Korean community organized into map teams, but my guess is that they tried to get their maps into professional leagues by getting together like that, and they flocked around particular sites to share information. The 2 biggest sites that I was fond of was Mapdori and Intothemap, both which died off around the time of SC2. I frequented them regularly. The maps there were amazing and very experimental. Unfortunately the two sites don't exist anymore (that I know of) and their map databases were wiped. Years later, we have LatiAs coming to bwmn saying that korean scene is mostly dead, so he rather share his work there, or on his personal Naver blog (Which you guys should DEFINITELY check out!) What does this mean? The loss of easily accessible information for Korean Mapmakers. This means it is easy to fall behind in "new discoveries", especially since SCMdraft received huge changes in the past year. And if new discoveries are made, how will they share them? Let me tell you that the language barrier doesn't help.
Now, here are a few things that should be checked, quality-wise for maps to be presentable, especially in professional leagues where tens of thousands of dollars are on the line (like the ASL). These are things that are easily corrected in the editor, with minimal to no in-game testing:
-Mining rates/General pathfinding: Pathfinding regions are now visible in SCMdraft and this allows map makers to get rid of nasty pathing bugs much more easily. Vespene geysers can be tricky too because each race has different collision boxes (where the miner and the building interact). Each position has different rates, and even same positions can have different mining behaviors because of the surrounding terrain which creates different pathfinding regions. This is a natural progression from the gas issue that was found around 2006 (notice that Kespa maps implemented this change around mid 2006). I'm talking about the gas at the starting location always being on top or to the left.
-Height/Elevation: It was impossible to check minitiles' elevation height before around 2014? CHKdraft from Staredit.net allowed us to see these tiles and I started using this when I first came back in 2016. For the first time, you could make ramps with proper elevation, vision and hit%chance properties. Maps in professional leagues should definitely be using this feature. It affects battles, skirmishes. vision gathering, and positional symmetry all around the map. But still, many do not. This feature was added to SCMdraft in 2017, which is THE editor to use.
-Vorteces: I actually had never encountered this in my personal experience while playing BW, but this is the reason one of 12 oclock ramps on FS have the ability to infinitely stack your units if too many pass through at the same time and something messes with them too. The units' collision box will try to pass through the node (which is on unwalkable terrain), and the unit cannot leave the unwalkable terrain, because simply, it is unwalkable. It can't move. This happened to Bisu in one of his streamed games where he had a full control group of his army stuck, and GG'd right after noticing what had happened (he lost the fight obviously). Now you see why this is potentially game-breaking. I don't have any recollection of this happening in a promatch, but STILL it should be dealt with in the editor. This happened to my map Uzi Sara for the Ginyuda Team Battle (it was fun seeing Flash lose on my map!), and I emailed 910 after realizing it, telling him he ran the risk of the stack bug happening Live during the competition (it was on one of the main base ramps, so the chance was higher than if it was at an expansion or w/e). Ultralisks are more prone to these than any other unit because of their wide collision boxes. It doesn't have to be just at ramps, it can happen anywhere.
-Cliff Asymmetry: BW uses isometric tiles, showing the 2D map from a perspective in which the cliff wall that is facing away from the player is not shown but obviously this is not the case the other way around. This one is pretty small most of the time, but it can have a more significant effect depending on how much walkable/buildable terrain is used at the top and bottom edges of the map. This is also exacerbated by the fact that the bottom row of tiles in a map are blocked by the HUD and cannot be used by units. I had a map in the ICCup mappool which had a problem at one of the expansions where the bottom base could not build a second hatchery simcity, but its counterpart could. This is a positional imbalance, and can be easily fixed (I just copy/pasted and moved everything accordingly and blended in the rougher parts).
-Tank range: Not a big one, but tank range can be problematic because you have to design the map in a way in which Terran can't just abuse everything with siege tanks from absurd areas. SCMdraft now has a unit-range indicator, so we don't have to test this in-game before (I've done this before, it takes so long to test).
Unit holes: What the koreans call "seongi Islands" or something like that. Basically areas of the map that a player can drop units, which can give players a significant advantage. This one is easy to fix, you just need to use unit-passable overlay and block those holes with unwalkable terrain. Some tilesets are harder than others to plug in the holes. An example of this is dropping a siege tank behind a zergs base in a place they can't reach and the tank killing their base. Or a ghost fitting into a nook and being able to nuked your base from somewhere unreachable (unless you use siege tanks). As far as I know I think I saw something like this happen in a progame in the mid-2000s... Was it iloveOov? I'm not sure.
Anyways these are some of the big and easy ones that should be dealt with, especially in maps used in leagues.
EDIT: some words, and also I wanted to share LatiAs' naver blog with some of his other maps, as well as some of his teams': LatiAs Naverblog Go check it out!
Another big issue are tile flag related bugs, especially haphazard use of cover providing tiles, which unfortunately has always been rampant in the Korean scene (especially on Intothemap.com). I don't know how something like this can go unnoticed for years, but I guess no one really ever investigated terrain mechanics or played those maps (but they made pretty pictures, I guess).
On March 18 2018 03:34 Alpha-NP- wrote: Does anyone have any VODs of PvT on Sparkle? I'm looking forward to Snow vs Mong and Sea vs Pusan in ASL5 ro24.
here is one, although it is the worst of the three games between Flash and Stork that night!
EPT
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/HtMr4BR.jpg)
