Map Making Contest Voting

On April 16 2008 14:50 ShaLLoW[baY] wrote:
Must..not...sex...Walrus...risk...tusk...injury....ARARGAHRGAHRAHRGAGHAR *jumps you*

On April 17 2008 04:05 iCCup.Raelcun wrote:
To be honest I didnt really go crazy over any of those maps, basically voted for the 3 that I found the least imbalanced or that didnt have obviously abusable gameplay elements

To be honest I didnt really go crazy over any of those maps, basically voted for the 3 that I found the least imbalanced or that didnt have obviously abusable gameplay elements

Agreed. Balanced gameplay was the only thing driving my decision, since many of the maps tried to be innovative but fail to allow standard play.

On April 17 2008 04:32 PsycHOTemplar wrote:


*Sigh* *shakes head*

Don't make me link to your masterpieces Raelcun

On April 17 2008 05:14 Chill wrote:
Hey man, I'm all for innovation, but when my choke is a screen wide, chances are I won't be able to defend it!

Things like this made me completely discredit a map. By the time I got down to the "playable" maps, the decision was easy.

On April 17 2008 13:15 ShaLLoW[baY] wrote:
Anyone up to playing a for-fun game on each of these maps tomorrow afternoon, so that I can back my votes up?

On April 17 2008 12:29 Lemonwalrus wrote:
Hey! Stop negative-ing up my thread!

On April 17 2008 13:11 PsycHOTemplar wrote:
I hope no one knows how null terrain works, just so they won't understand the picture of my map.

thats the main reason I dont really like your map, that plus the stacked minerals, the wall of dts across the bridge doesn't help either. Seems like it promotes going to the blocked off section of expansions turtling to tech, theres absolutely no incentive to go ground units early and trying to harass especially since ground units cant enter the null terrain. All the rest of the maps I can see being used in a tournament format even if they are a little imba but no offense this is still too unplayable in my opinion

On April 17 2008 04:21 Chill wrote:


Agreed. Balanced gameplay was the only thing driving my decision, since many of the maps tried to be innovative but fail to allow standard play.

TvZ: 6-13 (31.6%)
ZvP: 4-5 (44.4%)
PvT: 6-6 (50%)

On April 20 2008 03:45 -orb- wrote:
Wow backdooru looks amazing. Not only is that double-gas expo with double-assimilator-glitch with dark swarm awesome, but I'm really loving the 5 critters at each natural expansion (yeah you guys that just viewed the image probably didn't see them).

Hopefully they won't walk off too fast, and they'll be a fantastic deterrant to all these macro-whore fast expanders these days.

On April 20 2008 12:56 Haemonculus wrote:


Except not quite. It's a fun map. And I enjoyed crushing you on it, ^.^;; But it has a few errors.

The critters have 1hp each. So if they had full health, they could very well deter fast expos. However, my marine just went on safari and killed them all off easily.

Also, the sort of "shared natural" if you will, is misplaced. It's impossible to fit a command center between the mineral clusters on each side.

Overall though, hawt map. I do feel it favors terran a bit, as each mineral-wall gives T a slight advantage. But with a little tweaking, I think it'll be awesome.

PshycHOTemplar gets the prize for most innovative map. But as many people have pointed out before, innovation without limit, and more importantly without balance, doesn't make a great map. The null terrain makes units behave very strangely, and frankly I just don't want to put up with it. On the other hand the neutral dt's were an AWESOME idea. I confess that I couldn't get anyone to play this map with me (My BW disc broke, so I'm stuck playing regular SC at the moment), so I played against the computer just to get an idea of how the terrain would work.

On April 21 2008 09:02 PsycHOTemplar wrote:
Well, you know, people will always complain about about innovations in map making. When Peaks and Blitz X were first introduced, everyone whined about unit pathing, and now Peaks is among many people's favourite map. The fact is it only takes 2 or 3 games on a map to get used to a new feature like this, and null terrain is no different. In my games with SuperiorWolf, he was able to get the hang of null terrain after about 2 games.

If you want to keep StarCraft fresh and exciting, you need to embrace innovations, or else StarCraft will just become WarCraft III in terms of maps. You know there was a time when people refused to play on any map with a backwards ramp just because they thought they were 'ugly'? Now just about every pro map has them.

Believe me, I've been around the map making scene for a long time. Since the time when people only used (for melee mapping) the StarCraft Campaign Editor that comes with SC. Every time someone innovates, there's a flurry of blacklash, a few early adaptors, and then a year later it's in the proscene and everyone accepts it. That's just how it works.

Also, as someone who's been making maps for awhile, do you have anything to say about Druadan?

You say you've been making maps for a long time. I'd be interested to know how you begin to formulate a new map.

On April 22 2008 10:13 PsycHOTemplar wrote:
That was before SCM's Mirror Tool existed, which made map making much more time consuming. Sometimes if you have a really good concept in mind, you have to think further ahead than just the main/nat set up, but it's generally good to start there. My last few maps I haven't used MSPaint to plan them out, and it actually shows pretty negatively. So you probably really want to actually do that still (even though mirror tool makes everything so quick).

On April 21 2008 06:30 Triskaidecapod wrote:
Round gave me the most fun with cannons I've had in a very long time =p. The map was fun to play, but it simply begs you to cheese. That easily accessible cliff overlooking the opponent's main... It's also not symmetrical.

On April 23 2008 04:19 VIB wrote:
How exactly is it not symmetrical? It of course doesn't have all pixels identical for each spawn point. But important measures such as base sizes, distance between bases, distance between expos, exact size of each choke point. Those not only are the same for each spawn but they're actually MORE symmetrical between spawns than a 4 player map. Ex.: crossed positions in a 4 player map have larger distance between mains than neighbor spawns. Which leads to little gamble in starting builds before you can scout spawns.

That is the main reason why I made a 3 player map in the first place. I wanted to avoid that early game gambling. I want MORE symmetry between bases than a 4 player map can offer.

About the map begging you to cheese.. yes it does. But since anyone playing it would, theoretically, be expecting it -- then you would be prepared. I wanted it to be a cheese intense map. I made it that way because I thought it would be fun. And you agreed it was fun =D So how can it be bad? Not like you'd get tired of it since it's, supposedly, only one of the maps from a large map pool. So having one cheeseful map out of many others could be fun.

And it IS fun.. isn't it? ^^

I should probably have named it "(3)Cheese" instead to make it more clear =P