I may come back and write something more detailed later. There has been a lot of discussion since my last post. But I want to address two things that are sort of related.
You don't need to discuss me as a council member in order to illustrate your problems with the council idea in an emblematic way. I don't really want to be on the council; don't denounce the council idea because you have a problem with me (and/or I have a problem with you).
This is not a takeover of the map scene. It's a map advocacy group. It doesn't care about anything except getting maps into ladder and tournaments. (This is how I see it at least... is this not the view everyone shares?) As such, it is purely merit based. Merit in maps is contentious. Thus to have any legitimacy it would have to be as democratic as possible. This is not and should not be a business. That is a wacky idea. We do this for fun. Even if we got paid we'd be doing it for fun, not because we get paid. The route to get the ear of tournaments or whoever will be through having the attention and support of the larger SC2 community, not somehow persuading them that they'll make more money if they pay attention to us. (That doesn't even make sense... why do we want to make money for someone else?)
I will address some other issues in another post, issues that have come up that are important concerns that the people voicing them haven't even put quite clearly yet. Incidentally this is my problem with the naysaying thus far. It hasn't had a clear goal, it just sounds like doubt for its own sake. If you want to express reservations and concerns, I implore you to take ownership of them and frame them in terms that have easily identifiable facts, claims, and hypothesized outcomes with tl;dr style summary. Otherwise to even address them we are mired in an amorphous blanket of problems detached from the proposal which has its own uncrystalized form. It's like attacking milk with a wicker basket in order to get grated cheese.
On October 22 2012 00:32 EatThePath wrote: This is not a takeover of the map scene. It's a map advocacy group. It doesn't care about anything except getting maps into ladder and tournaments. (This is how I see it at least... is this not the view everyone shares?) As such, it is purely merit based. Merit in maps is contentious. Thus to have any legitimacy it would have to be as democratic as possible. This is not and should not be a business. That is a wacky idea. We do this for fun. Even if we got paid we'd be doing it for fun, not because we get paid. The route to get the ear of tournaments or whoever will be through having the attention and support of the larger SC2 community, not somehow persuading them that they'll make more money if they pay attention to us. (That doesn't even make sense... why do we want to make money for someone else?)
I think the point has not been emphasized enough that this will not and should not, in any way, interfere with the efforts that the mapmaking teams can put forth, and that the goal is simply advocacy and support, in a way that does not shut out anyone. This point is the very basis of the idea of a union, and people seem to still miss out on it. Instead, they get caught up on the idea of certain council members, or even the name "Union", things that haven't even been properly discussed yet and are just working thoughts. In other words, try to stay focused, guys. :/
Let me start by saying that I support the idea and you got my sword, bow and axe, etc.
But there have been some very valid concerns raised and some of the reactions of those were overly defensive. I do also share most these concerns. The core of the problem is that we are lacking certain personalities within our community. Forming a union won't neccesarily bring them into existence.
Also, keep in mind that it's easy to agree that the current state of map pools sucks ass, but it'll be near impossible to agree on the maps that should be replacing them :D
Ok so: the problem is that the mappool is mostly static in spite of a myriad of interesting and well-made maps being produced by the community. And the "council" idea proposes to alleviate or solve this problem by increasing communication between those who choose maps for mappools and the people who made the maps. The authors themselves don't need or necessarily want "attention", but must be involved since the maps can't advertise themselves. Those who choose the maps may choose community maps if they have evidence that incorporating such maps into their mappools will benefit their tournament.
So the council's purpose is to be a liaison to mappool-choosers and the rest of the community. Thus it's not the authors necessarily who the council will represent, it's the community. The council needs to be able to show that the community wants new maps first, and then communicate that want to the mappool-choosers.
Currently the extent to which the mapping community shows off their maps is to make a post in a relatively unseen subforum on teamliquid, and occasionally buy some attention putting maps in an open tournament with a monetary prize. The former only shows maps off to people who are already interested in the maps. The latter does get attention to the maps, but not useful or meaningful attention. I'm sure no one who enters the tourney because it has a monetary prize is actually going to play on the maps outside of the tournament (not even to practice, probably), nor will they encourage friends to do so either. These tournaments have no coverage anyway, so the people who might be swayed into being interested in these maps by seeing great games played on them don't actually see them.
So the council is useless if it can't prove to anyone that a meaningful portion of the community (as in, not the melee-mappers within the custom maps subforum) actually want to see those maps. It's easy to point out people complaining about the current pool, the hard part is pointing out specific maps that the complainers want to replace the "bad" maps with. If it can start to make people think about tangible, existing maps when complaining about bad maps, then it's useful. At that point it has something meaningful to communicate to those who choose mappools, and thus it is plausible for new maps to replace old ones in tournaments.
The only thing I'm aware of that is capable of inspiring people to be excited over specific maps is of course teamliquid itself. Not a minor subforum, but the site itself as a whole. Things like the TLMC prove that the higher-ups of TL are concerned with the mappool; that they desire to change the static mappool, and replace those maps with the best maps from the community. Thus if the council can truly represent the most interesting maps of highest quality, it may be possible to receive divine intervention in the form of TL to help get meanginful amounts of people interested in actual maps as being replacements for the hated-maps in the pool. They don't need to run the TLMC repeatedly to find those maps if the council is finding and promoting the maps adequately instead. What they can do instead is maybe run a TLOpen on a mappool made up at least partially of those maps. So the mappool could include the best maps of the current pool and replace the worst maps of the pool with the "best" maps the council can find. Thus the tournament would be presenting the mappool that people arguably want to see in the premier tournaments. If TL is unwilling to do this, perhaps Playhem Daily could be inspired to do so instead. Certainly they've had no qualms about sticking maps not found in ladder in their pool for years now. If they aren't willing to do so on a whim, I don't know how you'd go about convincing them it's in their best interest to do so (with your handpicked maps).
Only once tangible evidence showing community acceptance and desire of having community-made maps in their mappools can be shown will it be useful for the council to communicate with the tournament officials. Communicating with them is easy, you just find an email address, send shit to it, and pray they read it. Making them give a shit about what they read and want to do something about it is the hard part.
If this is possible, it will benefit the entire community. Thus I support at least giving the council a try. To whatever degree you think I can be useful in these endeavors, you have my axe.
edit: lol wtf lefix, you stole my line and some of my ideas while I was writing them
I see two phases for the recommendation effort. The first is to gain visibility in the community and get people interested in new maps. With the new custom melee map UI matching arcade, we have a good opportunity and a much better system for actually getting maps played and getting feedback on them. So the first part is point to some maps and say "hey everyone, play these". If you can actually go on b.net and click join game "TPW Breaking Point" expecting a game, that is already miles ahead of what we have now and will bring in orders of magnitude more games and awareness. Testing and feedback will build legitimacy for the public perception of a specific map.
At that point the second phase of the recommendation can begin, which has the full weight of wide support. This is when you approach tournament organizers or whoever with a serious advisement/request, always on behalf of the mapmaker only with their consent.
Bye for now, look forward to more tonight or tomorrow.
On October 22 2012 01:37 Nightmarjoo wrote: Ok so: the problem is that the mappool is mostly static in spite of a myriad of interesting and well-made maps being produced by the community. And the "council" idea proposes to alleviate or solve this problem by increasing communication between those who choose maps for mappools and the people who made the maps. The authors themselves don't need or necessarily want "attention", but must be involved since the maps can't advertise themselves. Those who choose the maps may choose community maps if they have evidence that incorporating such maps into their mappools will benefit their tournament.
So the council's purpose is to be a liaison to mappool-choosers and the rest of the community. Thus it's not the authors necessarily who the council will represent, it's the community. The council needs to be able to show that the community wants new maps first, and then communicate that want to the mappool-choosers.
Currently the extent to which the mapping community shows off their maps is to make a post in a relatively unseen subforum on teamliquid, and occasionally buy some attention putting maps in an open tournament with a monetary prize. The former only shows maps off to people who are already interested in the maps. The latter does get attention to the maps, but not useful or meaningful attention. I'm sure no one who enters the tourney because it has a monetary prize is actually going to play on the maps outside of the tournament (not even to practice, probably), nor will they encourage friends to do so either. These tournaments have no coverage anyway, so the people who might be swayed into being interested in these maps by seeing great games played on them don't actually see them.
So the council is useless if it can't prove to anyone that a meaningful portion of the community (as in, not the melee-mappers within the custom maps subforum) actually want to see those maps. It's easy to point out people complaining about the current pool, the hard part is pointing out specific maps that the complainers want to replace the "bad" maps with. If it can start to make people think about tangible, existing maps when complaining about bad maps, then it's useful. At that point it has something meaningful to communicate to those who choose mappools, and thus it is plausible for new maps to replace old ones in tournaments.
The only thing I'm aware of that is capable of inspiring people to be excited over specific maps is of course teamliquid itself. Not a minor subforum, but the site itself as a whole. Things like the TLMC prove that the higher-ups of TL are concerned with the mappool; that they desire to change the static mappool, and replace those maps with the best maps from the community. Thus if the council can truly represent the most interesting maps of highest quality, it may be possible to receive divine intervention in the form of TL to help get meanginful amounts of people interested in actual maps as being replacements for the hated-maps in the pool. They don't need to run the TLMC repeatedly to find those maps if the council is finding and promoting the maps adequately instead. What they can do instead is maybe run a TLOpen on a mappool made up at least partially of those maps. So the mappool could include the best maps of the current pool and replace the worst maps of the pool with the "best" maps the council can find. Thus the tournament would be presenting the mappool that people arguably want to see in the premier tournaments. If TL is unwilling to do this, perhaps Playhem Daily could be inspired to do so instead. Certainly they've had no qualms about sticking maps not found in ladder in their pool for years now. If they aren't willing to do so on a whim, I don't know how you'd go about convincing them it's in their best interest to do so (with your handpicked maps).
Only once tangible evidence showing community acceptance and desire of having community-made maps in their mappools can be shown will it be useful for the council to communicate with the tournament officials. Communicating with them is easy, you just find an email address, send shit to it, and pray they read it. Making them give a shit about what they read and want to do something about it is the hard part.
If this is possible, it will benefit the entire community. Thus I support at least giving the council a try. To whatever degree you think I can be useful in these endeavors, you have my axe.
edit: lol wtf lefix, you stole my line and some of my ideas while I was writing them
I entirely agree. Getting larger forces involved, such as TL or Playhem, would greatly help the cause and would probably be necessary for success. A TLopen on these maps would be quite epic, but just a TL highlight for each monthly recap would probably do wonders.
Updated the OP with some fancy quotes. If I'm missing one, let me know!
While most of the feedback is positive, and skeptical at worst, nothing is going to get done if we can't come to a conclusion on a few key questions.
On October 21 2012 16:52 Timetwister22 wrote:
Some topics worth discussing: -Should the union promote maps for teams? Or should teams promote their own maps? -How many should be on the council? How do we pick them? -Website, writer, graphic designer: Are they available? -Should we just turn motm into the monthly highlight? Or do we keep it separate? -What other current community ran events could be merged under the union?
I'm mostly hanging out on the SC2Mapster forums, but I think the mapmaking scene could use a bit of a shakeup.
I published an arcade map on the EU server called Mapmakers chatroom. Thats a very straightforward way to go I think every server should have a mapmakers chatroom where interested players/creators can hang out.
I think there should be a joint effort to produce a set of really cool stuff for all the players that return for HOTS. High quality UMS maps as well as melee maps. To do this, you need to ramp up pressure on quality testing. I think there are many ideas that are good, both for UMS maps and for melee maps, but they only get ~60% of the way. We need to help each other to push projects up to that >90%.
On October 22 2012 07:57 Timetwister22 wrote: While most of the feedback is positive, and skeptical at worst, nothing is going to get done if we can't come to a conclusion on a few key questions.
Some topics worth discussing: -Should the union promote maps for teams? Or should teams promote their own maps? -How many should be on the council? How do we pick them? -Website, writer, graphic designer: Are they available? -Should we just turn motm into the monthly highlight? Or do we keep it separate? -What other current community ran events could be merged under the union?
1. All maps should be treated equally; we should promote the best maps out of the entire pool and disregard teams. To pick maps, we should hold tournaments or contests decided by votes from the council.
2. The council should be split into two parts: - Council, which should consist of basically every established mapmaker that wants a spot. There are many ways to pick this, but generally it should be easy to get a spot if you've made a few good maps or are active in the community. The Council will vote on things such as tournaments and anything else we need to put to a vote. - Inner Council, which should consist of community leaders who can communicate with tournament organizers and represent the community. These should probably be elected by vote of the Council, and maybe have to be re-elected every so often, to keep it from becoming the fabled 'old boys club' of yore. Inner Council should bring matters before the general Council for a vote (e.g. should we do x or y?) and so forth.
3. No comment
4. Keep them separate. Or, if you combine them, generate two winners lists (1. Council votes & 2. motm organizer picks)
On October 21 2012 16:52 Timetwister22 wrote: Some topics worth discussing: -Should the union promote maps for teams? Or should teams promote their own maps? -How many should be on the council? How do we pick them? -Website, writer, graphic designer: Are they available? -Should we just turn motm into the monthly highlight? Or do we keep it separate? -What other current community ran events could be merged under the union?
1) Both. It's been the point so far that our mapmaking unity is only an existence of support - not replacement - so let's keep it consistent.
2) I'd be comfortable with 5 to 7. 3 would be too few for something like this, where differing viewpoints on subjects such as 'best maps of the month' are important. After things have been established, and we get a feel for how things are running, if we see that we need more, less, or different members, then we can certainly make such a change. The initial selection can be done possibly through the skype chat,and it can go from there(it would probably be most similar to selection of judges for MotM).
3) Hard to say, we've seen a few members that are capable with each area, but as we're still developing the idea it's hard to say if we can get them to dedicate their skills to the cause.
4) Separate. If this is for promotion and nothing else, then it should maintain itself as a separate entity. Certainly the unity can promote the hell out of MotM with each monthly recap, but I don't think they should be one and the same.
5) As few as possible imo. Keeping with the theme of consistency made in points 1 and 4, the unity should serve only the core function of promotion - if we see that services can be performed better by merging then we will do so. Nothing is set in stone, that is an important point to keep in mind. All of this discussion is centered on that point, any of these things can change down the line if needed.
You should have a dedicated place to show of maps, that make them look... delicious and more appealing to players/business people. Both TeamLiquid and SC2Mapster looks... uncool.
On October 22 2012 08:45 monkalizer wrote: You should have a dedicated place to show of maps, that make them look... delicious and more appealing to players/business people. Both TeamLiquid and SC2Mapster looks... uncool.
SC2Maoster seems to be far more focussed on UMS mapping and generally hacking in the editor and TL far more about melee mapping in practice though.
-Should the union promote maps for teams? Or should teams promote their own maps? all maps should be represented. no exceptions
-How many should be on the council? How do we pick them? Whatever we do, keep in mind that "Complexity kills" (and i don't mean the pro team). The organisation should have very simply structures, and be easy to maintain. Not do too many things at once, etc.
-Website, writer, graphic designer: Are they available? Cloud be put on sc2melee.net once it's done. But it's more important to post quality threads on tl and reddit. There will be 100x more viewers than any website we may set up for ourselves.
-Should we just turn motm into the monthly highlight? Or do we keep it separate? I feel like MotM is kind of dead atm, although I am sure someone is going to revive it again eventually, if only for another short time.
-What other current community ran events could be merged under the union? None, really. I feel that running events might be too much of a commitment. The union could highlight any mapmaking related news, council anyone who has questions about community maps, inform the community and it's leaders about new up and coming maps, etc. But it shouldn't attempt to run it's own events, imho. Keep these things seperated.
On October 22 2012 00:32 EatThePath wrote: I may come back and write something more detailed later. There has been a lot of discussion since my last post. But I want to address two things that are sort of related.
You don't need to discuss me as a council member in order to illustrate your problems with the council idea in an emblematic way. I don't really want to be on the council; don't denounce the council idea because you have a problem with me (and/or I have a problem with you).
Indeed, however, you were nominated which sort of illustrates, at least to me, the fundamental communication problem with this scene:
1: The overwhelming conception in the mapmaking scene seems to be that MLG, Blizzard etc don't make certain map pool and map changes due to stupidity or ignorance. As the tweet Timetwister linked showed. Sundance is well aware that there is a group of people who are displeased with his map pool. As the tweet also illustrated, he doesn't per se agree but is willing to listen. MLG and Blizzard are not stupid you know, they have built pretty large organizations, they know what they are doing, the reasoning behind their map pools and lack of neutral depots is not stupidity and ignorance, rather, it guards an ulterior purpose.
2: The overwhelming conception in the mapmaking scene seems to be that the vast majority of fans actually care about this perceived problem with map pools. I highly doubt that, majority of viewers has no understanding or a lot of thought put into it. A very large portion of viewers doesn't even play the game but just enjoys to watch casually. It's like complaining about the grass quality of a football field. The majority of viewers just don't think about it and don't care.
MLG is well aware that a lot of people exist that think there are problems with his map pool, indeed, Diamond tweets this to him (aggressively) every other week. It is simply his opinion to respectfully disagree from a chiefly commercial perspective.
This council may be able to advice him on what is a 'good map pool' for your definition of 'good map', but are you confident to say you can advice him on a map pool which brings him the most revenue? That is what he cares about, he has investors to answer to.
I mean, take MLG versus Proleague, most people would argue it's a 'bad tournament', it was practically rigged to give an unfair advantage to NA players, it's a complete farce and a spit on the spirit of fair competition. Does Sundance care? Maybe he does somewhere but he likes viewer numbers more than fair competition. It ensures 3 things: 4 NA players in pool play, and 8 KeSPA players in pool play, and a KeSPA vs non KeSPA players in the finals, exactly what he believes will benefit his viewing numbers.
Likewise, I have a feeling that tournaments are hesitant to try new maps because viewers don't quite like new maps as much as mapmakers do.
On October 22 2012 08:28 monkalizer wrote: I think there should be a joint effort to produce a set of really cool stuff for all the players that return for HOTS. High quality UMS maps as well as melee maps. To do this, you need to ramp up pressure on quality testing. I think there are many ideas that are good, both for UMS maps and for melee maps, but they only get ~60% of the way. We need to help each other to push projects up to that >90%.
I think the council being discussed here should only be concerned with melee maps. Because melee and UMS maps have very different problems. There already are excellent community made melee maps, the just don't get noticed by to many people. However IMO there aren't any good UMS maps. I can't see how a union could get UMS mappers to put more work in there projects.
On October 22 2012 08:34 Rkynick wrote: The council should be split into two parts: - Council, which should consist of basically every established mapmaker that wants a spot. There are many ways to pick this, but generally it should be easy to get a spot if you've made a few good maps or are active in the community. The Council will vote on things such as tournaments and anything else we need to put to a vote. - Inner Council, which should consist of community leaders who can communicate with tournament organizers and represent the community. These should probably be elected by vote of the Council, and maybe have to be re-elected every so often, to keep it from becoming the fabled 'old boys club' of yore. Inner Council should bring matters before the general Council for a vote (e.g. should we do x or y?) and so forth.
I like the concept of having a big pool of people creating ideas and giving feedback and having a smallerpool of established figures in the scene deciding things. However your Idea involves alot of bureaucracy (joining the outer council, deciding who is eligible, keeping lists, etc.). Is it really necessary to have such an entry level barrier or would it be possible to just have the community as a whole as this "outer council", basically anyone who wants to can participate.
EPT
I think every server should have a mapmakers chatroom where interested players/creators can hang out. 
