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I have no idea what this thread can be classified as but it's going to sound a bit ranty. Oh well.
Here at TL, we have many individuals who work hard and make their own Starcraft 2 1on1 maps. I applaud you. To those who make UMS maps, even more applause because you do truly time-consuming and meticulous work, and your efforts really make it so that more casual players can play the game.
Eh, I just went off topic. Ugh, I feel like this is going to drag on a lot.
Ok, so here at TL, lots of people make maps and post them here. The skill level varies. For a newbie, this is like dipping his toe into the water for the first time, and getting... flamed?....
Bad analogy. Uhh, anyway, it's hard for new users to make a map of quarter-decent quality. The mapping population here on TL is a lot like the 1on1 population, except scaled down a lot. That means that there's a lot of poor mappers who have no idea what they're talking about, some half-decent people who know the basics, and very few top people who understand everything they're talking about.
Thus, comes the main point of this thread.
Far too many people come into a map thread and give comments that have no basis. Linking it to my previous metaphor, it's honestly like the strategy forums. Most of what people say is complete untested BS that comes from absolutely no experience whatsoever. Of course, since those who are the best at mapping actually do browse the map forums, unlike how the top 1on1 players never post in the strategy forums, you do get a lot of good advice too. The problem is, having to sort through all the stupid stuff and finding the cream of the crop.
Now here's the thing. Because SC2 is such a new game, balance isn't completely defined yet. Most things can't be classified as balanced yet. For example, wide open spaces in a map was considered to be Protoss favoured against Terran in Brood War. We don't know if it's true or not yet in SC2. There are however, enough similarities between BW and SC2 for a good mapper in BW to pretty easily become a good mapper in SC2. Just look at Superouman or Morrow for example. They made very good Brood War maps and they're great at making SC2 maps as well.
The reason that they've transitioned well is because a map that played well in Brood War would be almost identical to one that would play well on SC2. The problem is that these similarities aren't easy concepts to grasp. It takes a lot of mapping experience as well as a lot of decently high level playing to understand these concepts. Like how you can explain how to play starcraft to your girlfriend, but it takes a ton of time for her to actually understand how to play even at a decent level.
To summarise the above three paragraphs, most people in the mapping forum dont' know **** about what they're talking about. To be brutally honest, even the iCCup mapmakers aren't excellent mapmakers compared to what Brood War had. We get the maps to a good quality with discussion amoungst ourselves and brainstorming on what we could improve. At this point, the only people whose criticism I'd trust without being shown proof would be Nightmarjoo and Superouman. And maybe Morrow if he ever bothers posting.
This doesn't mean that you should shut out everyone's advice. Just take it with a grain of salt. Test it a bit in game, then, decide for yourself whether to trust it or not. Your skill level is important though. A general rule, the better the mapper plays, the better he maps. Also, please respect the higher level mappers opinions. They're usually right.
One last thing. Don't take criticism personally. The reason we give you criticism is because we want to see you improve. It's not because we're internet jerks who like to bash on people, even if it seems like that sometimes. The only way to improve is to make maps and take the criticsm and apply it to your designs. That's how I improved and that's how I continue improving. Best of luck.
Love from neobowman/EfHiro
P.S. GET RID OF STRAIGHT LINES IN YOUR MAPS. IT LOOKS TERRIBLE.
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I, on the otherhand, really am an internet jerk. I don't map melee; so I will stay out of the rest of this for you pros. Cheers.
P.S. Square maps are not cool maps.
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I absolutely love this post. It's brutally honest and terrific and what every mapmaker needs to hear.
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very good points, i also think people need to actually play the maps out themselves and then comment unless they are just looking at the aesthetics or something.
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Like how you can explain how to play starcraft to your girlfriend, but it takes a ton of time for her to actually understand how to play even at a decent level. So uh.... can you write a guide for this?
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I do not understand why this warrants a thread here, unless your going on to talk about 'how to submit high quality accurate feedback'. No offense, though.
One last thing. Don't take criticism personally. The reason we give you criticism is because we want to see you improve. It's not because we're internet jerks who like to bash on people, even if it seems like that sometimes. The only way to improve is to make maps and take the criticsm and apply it to your designs. That's how I improved and that's how I continue improving. Best of luck.
This is common sense (at least to me).
This doesn't mean that you should shut out everyone's advice. Just take it with a grain of salt. Test it a bit in game, then, decide for yourself whether to trust it or not
^I like this. Everybody should go on forums with this in mind.
At this point, the only people whose criticism I'd trust without being shown proof would be Nightmarjoo and Superouman. And maybe Morrow if he ever bothers posting.
^I trust those who have made good maps in the past. Those guys are definitely high up there, but I'd also trust people that are not as high up there. I doubt Morrow even looks at this section of TL.
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I agree entirely with the nature of this post. Pardon my french, but there's a goddamn #$*%ing shitload of concepts involved in this game and the maps themselves, and almost all of them interact in some way with every single other concept. Even the smallest of things has an important effect on the overall scheme of things. It was actually almost a year ago that I decided to try to understand all of these concepts myself to help me funnel them into excellent maps. I have summed up quite a bit of it recently (much of which can be found here) and pretty much everyone who's seen it seems to agree to a large extent. But if I know anything about gaming it's that Me In 1-3 Years is gonna look back on the Me Now and laugh at how much I did not know. I totally expect StarCraft to have this effect to an even greater degree.
A good analogy I came up with is: I'm in a building. I don't know how big it is, but I know that I'm on the first floor and I have access to a few of the larger rooms; very few people are actually beyond this point at the moment. There's still rooms and closets that I haven't yet opened the door to, but more importantly there is still a second floor... and you know what? There's probably a third and a fourth too; hell, probably even a fifth. When all is said and accounted for, I don't really know shit right now, and what I do know I have to think hard to put into my maps and am more often than not quite relatively unsuccessful in my original intentions, I just sort-of roll with it for the most part. Pretty much every good mapmaker is at this point right now IMO, and if you're not it's just because you're setting the bar too low and you're probably not actually sure what you're after.
edit: Oh yeah, and the next two expansions are just going to compound all of this. The best of the best of the best won't really pop up until 2-4 years after Legacy of the Void.
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I try to avoid commenting on balance for maps. You really can't tell just by looking at a map. You have to play, and you have to play a lot.
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I try to avoid commenting on balance for maps. You really can't tell just by looking at a map. You have to play, and you have to play a lot.
This is basically what it comes down to. However, if nobody commented on maps before extensive testing, then there would essentially be no comments aside from "that looks badass" or "less straight lines please". For this reason I have spent a lot of effort trying to think about how games would play out without actually playing on them. I like to think that after looking at a map for 10-20 minutes (the amount of time I think about a map before even posting on it) then I've essentially seen many dozens of games on it. This number might sound high, and maybe it is, but you have to understand that blizzard has data from many millions of games when they go to balance things. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't have that kind of time (and I have a lot of time). Therefore I have trained myself to understand many key trends and how they interact with each other. It is by no means the best way to do things, but it is pretty efficient when you get really good at it. I've also watched many hundreds of hours of high level games and streams and replays over the past year though, which is really key to doing this. So yeah, there aren't many people who are very good at it (if any), so be wary when you get balance comments in your thread.
In fact I only give a certain kind of balance comments nowadays. I never say "this is a terran map" or "this is a zerg map" anymore. What I say is "this particular feature will tend to ____" or "if it was my map I would make this smaller/bigger/etc". It's really up to the mapmaker to consider if it really flows with their overall idea of the map.
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On December 10 2010 11:34 Barrin wrote:
In fact I only give a certain kind of balance comments nowadays. I never say "this is a terran map" or "this is a zerg map" anymore. What I say is "this particular feature will tend to ____" or "if it was my map I would make this smaller/bigger/etc". It's really up to the mapmaker to consider if it really flows with their overall idea of the map.
Now that's how to give feedback.
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That's pretty much why I prefer to do the visuals for other mappers lately... I'm not so much of a gamer to get good enough to do the actual balance stuff, but I still want to contribute, and I can still do so my way.
I'm still torn if I should comment on the visuals of other people's maps, as any helpful comments would take me a long time and maybe some examples and I don't know if that would be actually appreciated.
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I kind of agree with the OP. I feel as if the game is still really new and that means no one is really qualified to know 100% if a map is viable or not. There are people who have good design skills and those skills definitely can transfer over in the broader sense but, the finer details are still undecided.
When I look at and analyze a map, I try to think, "How would I play this map?" I'll go and see, where would I expand, where would I rally my troops, where would I scout, where would I place spotters, which areas do I need to control? If another player comes along and looks at my map and he plays differently than I do, and he says he would expand here or rally there, that is valuable information to me. I don't think everyone plays or thinks the same way and having other people explain the way they would play the map is helpful.
Also, I found Day[9] Daily #191 very insightful: How to Analyze a Map and Adjust Your Play
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Yeah I will admit day9 is where I get about 40% of my better ideas. There are some seriously sweet hidden gems in the BW dailies too btw... takes a lot of patience to find them though.
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I think that the biggest problem is that I find it hard pressed to get much feedback on my maps at all.
The view counts go up, but comments and criticisms are fairly lacking. Like my thread here about my latest map hasn't received any feedback on my latest version.
I feel that we could all benefit from creating a group of people that are willing to playtest maps at a relatively high level but there's just no such thing right now.
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Yeah LunarC I've looked at that multiple times tbh. Every time I did I felt like what I would do to it would turn it into a completely different map, not something I like to do personally so I just said nothing. What I was thinking about saying (but I didn't because I didn't want to insult you, but now that you mention it here it goes) I think you should start from the bottom. You are trying to do things that are pretty complicated and, to be blunt, rather unorthodox, but I'm not sure you really understand how to do them properly (not that anyone really does but there are certain degrees). Just take it slow really... more open middle, pay a lot of attention to how to take and defend a third and how it relates to the overall balance of the map. Have you read this thread? http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=174059 BTW Don't take this as an insult at all... Even though certain features were pretty unorthodox they were also pretty clever. It's hard to comment on balance in a map like that to be honest.
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On December 10 2010 13:26 Barrin wrote:Yeah LunarC I've looked at that multiple times tbh. Every time I did I felt like what I would do to it would turn it into a completely different map, not something I like to do personally so I just said nothing. What I was thinking about saying (but I didn't because I didn't want to insult you, but now that you mention it here it goes) I think you should start from the bottom. You are trying to do things that are pretty complicated and, to be blunt, rather unorthodox, but I'm not sure you really understand how to do them properly (not that anyone really does but there are certain degrees). Just take it slow really... more open middle, pay a lot of attention to how to take and defend a third and how it relates to the overall balance of the map. Have you read this thread? http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=174059 BTW Don't take this as an insult at all... Even though certain features were pretty unorthodox they were also pretty clever. It's hard to comment on balance in a map like that to be honest.
Yeah, I realize I tried to pack a lot of "stuff" into a single map. I suppose I should try to keep everything standard with just one or two really unorthodox features.
Oh and don't worry about suggesting something like starting over. I'm not very experienced when it comes to mapping so I'm really open to any criticism no matter how harsh it may be.
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On December 10 2010 07:44 neobowman wrote:
Most of what people say is complete untested BS that comes from absolutely no experience whatsoever.
This is very true. I got a lot of flak over my latest map, Tarnosis Isle, having a back door into the main. Well.... I consider it a Side door entrance.
People would take a look at that and say " Shitty Blistering Sands backdoor rocks, your maps gay n'stuff." without even trying it. I think I may have made something good, and I would love to see other mappers catch on to the idea of a side door into a Main base. See what others can do with the thought.
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On December 10 2010 12:47 LunarC wrote:I think that the biggest problem is that I find it hard pressed to get much feedback on my maps at all. The view counts go up, but comments and criticisms are fairly lacking. Like my thread here about my latest map hasn't received any feedback on my latest version. I feel that we could all benefit from creating a group of people that are willing to playtest maps at a relatively high level but there's just no such thing right now.
Dude, i will test out anyones map pretty much whenever im online... Volta.296 (1800 random player) but i agree, a group of people would be so sick.
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Honestly, the reason I don't comment on people's maps myself that much is because there's going to be so much debate from lower level players over what I say that it's just stupid to try and argue. It's not worth the effort if people who don't know how to play try and shove their opinion over yours.
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I agree of this thread.
On December 10 2010 22:22 neobowman wrote:
Honestly, the reason I don't comment on people's maps myself that much is because there's going to be so much debate from lower level players over what I say that it's just stupid to try and argue. It's not worth the effort if people who don't know how to play try and shove their opinion over yours.
& I agree of this post.
It's the same what happened to my first published map which I showed on TL.net.
You pointed me to some flaws that you think the map was having. Some other random dude, who in my opinion, is the shittiest mapper on the forums here and still posts a lot, thinking that putting x500 size doodads in your map makes it a good map, then followed by making a comment about a feature of the map which I explained in the OP to be something I really wanted in this map, and yada yada yada...
Stuff just went from "wow, neobowman replied to my thread." to "wtf, why do I even bother."
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EPT
