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On June 08 2008 10:00 Vaul wrote: I support the proposal for a single foreigner map added into the pool.
I agree, Korean maps + one foreigner map ( or one oldschool map ) would be great .
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One superhot pro looking foreigner map would be awesome <3
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Id be more interested in seeing some old map making a comeback in TSL2.
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Kennigit
Canada19447 Posts
We did do extensive investigation into a few foreigner maps for the first season. The overwhelming feeling from top level foreigners we spoke to was great concern over balance, practice, games availible etc. We'll definitely approach the issue for the next season and see if things have changed.
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On June 10 2008 04:36 Chill wrote: What benefit does a spectator get?
Lim Yo Hwan was the reason I got interested in Starcraft, particularly as a specator event and ever since the first time i saw him play last summer I have been rather hoplelessly hooked watching practically every game from proleague and the starleagues and the reason was that I could often count on him to do something fantastic that I had never seen before. I will always be a Boxer fan because I get a fantastic amount of excitement during/before his games where I am sitting on edge, waiting and wondering "what is he going to do this time, what new, exciting thing will i see?".
This is why I would like to see a foreigner map in TSL. I'd even go as far as to say (sorry nony) that having a map where the players maybe dont know every single nook and cranny and timing and proxy spot and buildable pixel might not be a bad thing (so long as I cant do something stupid like get the first lings from a 12 pool into a toss main before forge finishes, or can have my nexus shelled from the terran main or something) as it would create more possibility for the unexpected. I liked bluestorm more when i could see something like proxies ( hatches, robos, facs) at 6 and 12 for the first time. I think a little bit of the excitement of the map went away after players started regularly checking that spot and/or I didnt have to wonder about the timing or how the game would play out because i had seen it before.
New maps, and players adapting to them, charging boldly into uncharted waters, is good for the game and keeps this 10 year old game interesting instead of stagnant.
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Sufficient testing could solve balance issues and provide quality control.
Again, I think many of you are greatly overestimating Korean mappers, the fellows that brought us gems like Demon's Forest, DMZ, Katrina, etc. 99% of maps in Starcraft suck, whether made by the foreign scene, the koreans, or by Blizzard.
Blue Storm especially and the other Korean maps have been played to death by koreans, in events like the GOMTV classic that casual SC gamers watch. And the casual gamers generally are not going to be as interested in watching the same games with mechanically worse players.
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Foreign maps would make foreign Starcraft a lot more fun to watch. Watching people copy the same macro builds over and over from the koreans gets old. It would be great to see my favorite players on new maps, where they had to dream up their own builds from scratch.
I'm sure map imbalance won't be an insurmountable obstacle. But there is one imbalance I look forward to seeing in action - one that will almost certainly follow from bringing foreign maps into the mix. It's the imbalance towards creative players with a good eye for the game, over the uncreative player with good execution who can copy build orders.
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Agreed that as mostly a casual starcraft watcher (never really played it just picked up following the pro scene instead, play warcraft 3 still) watching foreign tourneys with all the same maps the koreans play on and half the time (eh probably more then that) just copying builds and placements and such from the koreans is just relatively not as entertaining to watch.
I feel like since it is such a major tournament ($5000 is a lot of money after all) it's worthy of having a few maps people need to practice on for it if they want to advance in order to make the league stand out more so. I know in PGL WC3 added some new maps which made me actually watch it instead of not giving a shit because its the same maps over and over (and while wc3 reuses the same maps 10x more than SC, its the same idea.)
It would be nice to see new maps and watch the foreign scene make their own unique strategies on it and having to do research on the maps themselves if they wish to advance far in the tourney instead of copying koreans.
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I thought the games on Wuthering Heights, and especially Othello were good in TSL. The players only really had a few weeks at most to prepare for them, and had only a few proleague games to watch to get ideas of how to play. I wouldn't call the TSL games on those maps subpar, and if TL decided to put a foreign map or two into the competition and warned the players ahead of time and maybe made it MOTW in iccup or something, it would give players time and some motivation to practice on the maps. As for ensuring the map was of quality, I'm sure TL or iccup could throw some weight around to get players to help test the map, and get a variety of opinions to see if people both liked the map, and thought it was solidly balanced.
I support the idea of placing foreign maps into TSL2, and I think it could be done successfully, to make and test a map in the months before TSL2, give players in the ladder period time and a place to play on the map to learn it, and to then finalize the map based on any issues which came up during the ladder (ladder = mass games, which can bring up issues unseen in even rigourous testing) before the actual tournament started.
It's definitely a gamble though, but I feel that TL could easily just abandon the project towards the end if it doesn't look like it's balanced well enough + interesting enough. The involved mappers and testers may be disapointed, but at no cost to TL or TSL's reputation. At worst, the map could possibly just become a regular iccup map, which any mapper would be satisfied with. It's not like iccup tries to have the most balanced mappool, just a pool of popular maps.
I haven't seen too much on the player's opinions of having to quickly learn Othello and Wuthering Heights, maybe TL can try and do some more interviews to see if the players felt like they had enough time to learn those maps, etc? $5000 is I think a good motivation for people to learn a single map or two, especially given an environment like iccup to practice and experiment on the map(s).
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This idea sounds great on paper, but is terrible in practice.
1. Koreans won't play you. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal to you, but to the top foreigners, it's a HUGE deal. There are probably 500 Koreans as good or better than the top 20 foreigners. These days, basically all the top foreigners have Korean friends. We don't have those resources or that kind of player power at our disposal.
2. It won't help you get ready for Courage if taking SC to the next level is right for you. Courage maps are all recycled from major league competition and tend to be reasonably standard, heavily played maps even before being used in Courage.
3. Even if it's a map that has okay balance, unless it changes the game in a meaningful way, the good players will just look at it briefly, maybe a run a few dry tests vs the computer to check building placements and such, and then go into the games with basically no practice and get similar results. The players who devote a lot of time to learning the maps probably won't be able to get enough meaningful practice on them to make a difference.
Well, good luck, but I won't hold my breath.
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Melbourne5338 Posts
On June 12 2008 06:55 anotak wrote: Sufficient testing could solve balance issues and provide quality control.
Again, I think many of you are greatly overestimating Korean mappers, the fellows that brought us gems like Demon's Forest, DMZ, Katrina, etc. 99% of maps in Starcraft suck, whether made by the foreign scene, the koreans, or by Blizzard.
Blue Storm especially and the other Korean maps have been played to death by koreans, in events like the GOMTV classic that casual SC gamers watch. And the casual gamers generally are not going to be as interested in watching the same games with mechanically worse players.
I do not put korean map makers on a pedestal, however with the exposure of their maps in the professional tournaments in Korea, the maps get a lot more credibility and a certain brand-name type respect which makes the map more marketable and increases the chance of player support for the map.
I personally think your gripe of using overplayed maps is exaggerated and your expectation of new maps to be a tad greedy. Some of the maps chosen at the time were not even released during the discussion of maps. None of the maps used in broadcast are over a year old, and we did not fall into the use of older favorite maps like Python, Tau Cross or Longinus. Some of the maps were and are still active in the Korean progaming scene and thus they get a lot of playing time on TV, however even pop songs have a longer shelf life than the month or so you've taken to get tired of the maps.
I also think that you downplay the difficulty of testing foreign maps. Sufficient testing requires time and manpower more suited to a community than a couple TSL staff more concerned with running a tournament. However, personally I don't see very much community support between the dropouts in Lemonwalrus' TLCAMMC tournament and the lack of replays and tester for maps on broodwarmaps.net. With Korean maps, we have the korean scene and the competitive foreign scene to draw racial statistics and possible imbalances from, with foreign maps at most we have the occasional thread full of theorycraft or casual tournament.
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On June 12 2008 10:39 pachi wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2008 06:55 anotak wrote: Sufficient testing could solve balance issues and provide quality control.
Again, I think many of you are greatly overestimating Korean mappers, the fellows that brought us gems like Demon's Forest, DMZ, Katrina, etc. 99% of maps in Starcraft suck, whether made by the foreign scene, the koreans, or by Blizzard.
Blue Storm especially and the other Korean maps have been played to death by koreans, in events like the GOMTV classic that casual SC gamers watch. And the casual gamers generally are not going to be as interested in watching the same games with mechanically worse players. I do not put korean map makers on a pedestal, however with the exposure of their maps in the professional tournaments in Korea, the maps get a lot more credibility and a certain brand-name type respect which makes the map more marketable and increases the chance of player support for the map. I personally think your gripe of using overplayed maps is exaggerated and your expectation of new maps to be a tad greedy. Some of the maps chosen at the time were not even released during the discussion of maps. None of the maps used in broadcast are over a year old, and we did not fall into the use of older favorite maps like Python, Tau Cross or Longinus. Some of the maps were and are still active in the Korean progaming scene and thus they get a lot of playing time on TV, however even pop songs have a longer shelf life than the month or so you've taken to get tired of the maps. I also think that you downplay the difficulty of testing foreign maps. Sufficient testing requires time and manpower more suited to a community than a couple TSL staff more concerned with running a tournament. However, personally I don't see very much community support between the dropouts in Lemonwalrus' TLCAMMC tournament and the lack of replays and tester for maps on broodwarmaps.net. With Korean maps, we have the korean scene and the competitive foreign scene to draw racial statistics and possible imbalances from, with foreign maps at most we have the occasional thread full of theorycraft or casual tournament.
To add to your argument, sufficient testing really cannot be done by having a few low level players play a few games, but getting guys who are at least B rank to play a lot of games on those maps is difficult. If it's just C or D rank players, the level of understanding is pretty low. Even if they have a grasp of the basics (which many of them don't, not until you starting getting closer to B anyway), the sense of timing and the ability to read and predict opponents is low. It's not that C and D rank players can't figure out how to use the map and do well, it's just that it will take them much longer to piece things together and you need a lot more of them to cover different perspectives because they are each lacking more. And even then, things could get missed entirely.
Didn't TL.netters think that Katrina would be a Terran map? What's the avg rank for a TL.netter... high C? Low B? Well it's definitely Flash's map, but every map is Flash's map right now, so that's pretty meaningless.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
The only way a foreign map will ever take off is it is so fucking cool that it makes you want to dust off your CD case and rip of BW for the first time in 5 years.
Haven't seen anything like that yet =/
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Anyone know how the koreans get people to test the maps? Do they pay them?
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
they typically give them to a proteam to test the alpha map.. not sure if its paid or not (it might be.. although the advertising is pretty good coming up every time the map is played)
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Can we give map to excello, tot, or mym, and say: "have at!" ? lol
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Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
There aren't going to be any major-tournament-worthy foreign maps until the high- and top-level foreign players themselves support the idea.
You guys should be appealing to that player base, not to the TSL staff or anyone else. Your maps aren't going to go anywhere until your target audience wants to play them.
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Calgary25955 Posts
I think the players will play the maps if they are worthy of high-level, competitive play. I haven't seen a map like this in a long time, at least on TL.
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There needs a lot of work to make balanced maps, at least few months creating them and few months testing them!
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I say give the TSL a few seasons, see how things go, and if the top players were to support it, then start testing some foreign maps. I don't see the need to jump into something potentially risky to the tournament's credibility so soon. Even though a lot of testing can be done, it's just not as reliable as the Korean standard (and as the OP noted, even they can turn out poor quality maps sometimes).
But at the very least, I would like to see a better variety of tile sets for maps. IMO, Having every map blue/twilight (or whatever it's called) is a bit annoying from a spectator's point of view. We had: Blue storm, Othello, Wuthering Heights, and just Zodiac as the sole non-twilight map. I think having a space map, a twilight map, a desert map, and a forest map would be a good mix. Good, balanced maps of all tile sets are definitely available, and the variety should make the spectator happy. For example, my current favorite mix of maps to see would be Colosseum, Andromeda, Othello, and one more.
Just my two cents on the maps. Overall I was quite pleased to see new maps from PL instead of older maps.
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