Map of the Month Organization - Page 19

On March 11 2011 04:20 EunByuL wrote:
I DISAGREE.

Guess nobody likes my maps, can I get scores plz?

Hello, my name is dezi and i'm a guest judge this month. I got this "job" due to winning MotM#1 but wasn't able to judge during february (semester exams).

My first task was to score all maps. This means playtesting them and scoring them in the individual categories (Balance, Originality, Fun, Aesthetics). Scorewise you're only allowed to give full points (1-10) in the individual categories and all judges do this for each map. To score all maps the MotM team uses a google spreadsheet which allows too easily sort the maps afterwards by average score.

But reaching a high score doesn't mean your map automatically reaches the Top 5 of a months Mappool. This only allows the judge panel to determine maps that could be part of the Top 5 (so we can sort out maps that aren't quite as good).

Yesterday late at night (at least it was late at night in Europe) we had a skype conference trying to find out 5 maps. So we opened up all the maps that claimed a top spot and discussed the positive and negative aspects of the individual maps. So maps that reached a relativly high score dropped out due to flaws or they just weren't pleasing enough.

But lets see our Top 5:
Leviathan: easy pick - doesn't need an explanation
The Edge: while the aesthetics are a little bit dull the layout is very original and we all had much fun playing the map
Sanctuarium: out of all the 4 player maps this was the one that gained the most points (prodiG sees similarities with Jurassic Park )
Those were our first and easy picks and now it started to get hard. We discussed 3 hours if i recall correct and had maps like Memorial, Frozen Sanctum, Fault Lines, ... on our list. Out this kinda big bunch of 2 player maps we decided to pick Aldaris Betrayel due to its outstanding design. For our last spot we initially had Memorial and Fault Lines in mind and we couldn't decide which one to use. After a little bit of debating we dedicede to make a vote in the chat. Everyone writes down which map to choose and we send our vote once iGrok counted from 3 to 1. Memorial won 4:2.

It's kinda sad that we have to drop a map like Fault Lines but after our first few picks all the other maps were really close.

The more you know:
During the whole judging time we all hang in a secret skype channel which allowed us to discuss the maps and i can say all of the judges are really nice guys. They know their "job" and especially their editor
So it was kinda fun and entertaining to judge will all these guys and you even can learn some things to improve your own map making. So whoever gonna win this month can feel really honored to judge along side them.

Surprise:
This month also brought up a special map: Bitter Jungle or Blood Bath 2.0 if you want to call it so. It's for sure a fun map and we had a long discussion whether to or whether to not put this map in the top 5. We want to get this extraordinary map recognized so we came up with the idea to use this in a kinda special way.

For your information, here are the averages this month (last month's in green):
Balance/Originality/Fun /Aesthetics/Total
5.91 / 6.54 / 5.71 / 5.68 / 23.84
6.26 / 6.41 / 5.73 / 5.94 / 24.34

On March 13 2011 07:53 Meltage wrote:
23 in channel atm ^^