Topic
Map Reviews and Testing
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Edited by Khalanil on 2/5/12 5:17 PM (PST)
Chat channel: Map Reviews
Mapmakers: looking for help testing your map? Players: looking for some new maps to try? You've come to the right place. Here's how it works:
2. Write up a review of the map (see "Map Reviews" below). 3. Post your review in this thread. At the end of the post, nominate a map that you think should be tested and reviewed (see "Map Nominations" below). Map Reviews
If you'd like to test a map with other players, join the "Map Reviews" chat channel, or look for players in the "Looking for Custom Games" channel. Map Nominations
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Edited by Khalanil on 2/22/12 5:52 PM (PST)
Maps to Review
Maps Already Reviewed
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Edited by Khalanil on 2/5/12 5:17 PM (PST)
To kick off the thread, I'll be reviewing a map that I picked from a thread on the first page of the Custom Maps forum:
Ent Hero Defense Overall, it's a very simple map which combines heroes and tower defense. It incorporates a few interesting elements that seem promising, if they are developed a bit more (e.g. combination of inventory items into more powerful items). While the map needs more work to reach its full potential, it's a good start at developing a fun Tower Defense map. Things I liked
2. Vote to skip button 3. Individual difficulty settings for each player Things that could use improvement
2. The use of dropped powerups to grant experience to heroes seemed to favor players who run around grabbing the powerups while the other players actually do the killing. 3. Heroes can attack friendly heroes 4. There seemed to some mixed messages regarding the theme. Are we protecting prisoners, or are they civilians? Are the structures huts, or are they pineapples? Settling on a theme would be good for the overall map feel. 5. The game glitched during wave 15, so we all had to quit out. The map thought there were still enemies left, even though they had all been killed. Suggestions
2. Add more diversity to make the map more interesting (i.e. additional towers, more diverse enemies, etc.) 3. Add the ability for a player to see when they've pressed the "Vote to skip" button. Currently, nothing happens except for the number incrementing. It would be nice for players to see at a glance whether they've already voted to skip or not. Nomination To start off the nominations, I'm putting forward my map "Mad Scientist Wars". It's a Tug which can be played with only 1 player, although multiple players make for a more competitive game. |
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You know Khalanil people might actually take this seriously if you did the following:
Stay away from maps on the first 2-3 pages. People are !@#$%ing because they are sick and tired of those maps. All you did by picking a 1st page map is show you are in league with the rot that is Blizzard. And your nomination is also very un-inspired. How about you find a map past say... page 30? I was shown one (I don't remember which) that was close to the bottom and which, under the old maps search system from bnet 1.0, would have made it so nexus wars was never seen or heard from again. However I understand people have false starts. Let me give you a suggestion: Start with a map somewhere past page 20 and review it. Then send the reviews to Sixen and have him build a rating system on sc2mapster so people can go and look to see what maps are recommended for their quality and fun factor. |
Your interest in this thread is greatly appreciated, and I will be more than happy to elaborate on the thoughts and motivations behind it!
A very direct and effective summation of the third criterion under Map Nominations in the first post! As this is a critical point, I will soon update the first post to reflect this importance!
I apologize for the need to contradict your statement, but my membership in the League of Blizzard Rot was never official! In addition, my intention was never to pick a "1st page map" and as this map was completely novel to me, I didn't think to check! For the record, as of right now, the Ent Hero Defense map is located on page 5 with 69 hours played! While I wouldn't classify this as a "1st page map", I do appreciate your feedback that this map is popular enough to avoid for future testing! Since you ask, and in the name of transparency, I will describe my methods for picking this map!
My reasoning behind my nomination was very intentional (also, see my thoughts below on "popularity list diving")! In order to provide a reason for people to review maps, there must be a reward for the time spent reviewing! This reward is that other people will actually test and review the previous reviewer's map! One crude analogy would be that this thread is a Ponzi scheme! There is less incentive for players to review maps if they are unable to nominate maps which actually hold any meaning for them!
My intentions for this thread is not to go "popularity list diving" but to provide a way for mapmakers to find players to help them play their own maps, while also providing an incentive for them to also contribute to the community!
As an aside, my own experience with "popularity list diving" has been largely a waste of my time. I've been designing a new map and decided to check if there are any good ones already developed with a similar theme. I spent an hour yesterday looking through search results, resulting in an hour of my time spent on playing horrendous maps. My preference is to play maps whose makers actually care enough to seek assistance on this forum. At least these maps have someone who cares about their quality and will have some chance of being updated.
I apologize, but I'm not following your logic in this situation. A major purpose of this thread is for map-makers to receive feedback on their maps, which would be hindered by funneling all reviews through a third-person party. As well, many maps are in the initial testing stages, and rating their quality at such an early point in time would be largely meaningless. As stated before, your interest in this thread is greatly appreciated! Your participation would likewise be very welcome, especially for a map-maker of your caliber! |
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How to get this point across to you...
Your goal is incorrect. Here is what you should be aiming for: To get buried but high quality maps at least some exposure. 56 hours may be an ok number, but you picked a map from page 1. Let me furthermore say this: Don't punish good map makers (which include many people much much better than I am) because you are too lazy to go digging. So here is a suggestion: Review the map and suggest the next one, but if the next one is crap, then he gets to pick is own. If you want this idea to come to anything at all you need to change your goal. And the idea of having a review list on sc2mapster is a more solid version of this idea. So people can go look up which maps are worth playing. You are doing the actual digging for them. I'd be willing to help with this idea, but you have to do the following: Redo your first review with a different map. Then change your suggestion do a different map. Both following the rules I suggested. And yes that actually means you can ignore my own map, WW2 Diplo. It made it all the way to page 3 and is therefore disqualified - people already know about it. |
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Edited by FockeWulf on 1/27/12 10:56 AM (PST)
Here I'll do one:
Map: Fatty Fight Maker: Kenoli Current Page: 20 Current Hour Count: 4 Description: The map is a remake of Pudge Wars from WC3. The idea being that a team of 3v3 try to use the "hook" ability to grab the "Fatty's" from the other side over to your side and kill them. Mechanics: The game has VERY solid mechanics. The heroes are built well, all the abilites seem to work. On top of it the new hook ability will bounce of walls like the old one did. A new addition is walls that you can hide behind. You get money by killing enemy heroes. It also has the ability to toss people to the otherside as well. Things to work on: There is no content on the load screen. Also the hero kill stats are not very visible on the top left. Suggest using a dialog box background to make them stand out better. Overall Quality (1-10): 9.5 Do I like this genre of maps?: No Overall Fun Factor (1-20): 7 Other Comments: This game is ideal for a party of 6 friends to have a good time with eachother. Very loud shouts of stuff like "oh !@#$" are to be expected when playing with your friends. Next Suggested Map: "Wintermaul: The Remake" Alternate Suggested Map (Optional): "Dawn of Empires II" Did I make sure it wasn't crap?: Yes There, that ought to be more of what you should be doing. |
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Might as well suggest my map "Warlords and Merchants".
Note the most popular alternative terrain version is "WandM on Exotic Garden" to allow up to 8 melee and max 15 players including merchants for private games. You pretty much need 2 Warlord players and 1 Merchant at strict minimum to make it a reasonable review. |
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I'll join the channel.
I know first hand how near impossible it can be to get people to play test a near finished map and how frustrating that can be. Also if I ever get around to finishing one particular map I have in mind it would be a good way to get some last minute balance suggestions on it. (It already won a competition that gave me an $80 game on steam as a prize despite being unfinished... but good luck getting anyone to play it) |
Your goal is incorrect. As turtles states, just because our goals are different, it doesn't mean that the desire to provide another way for maps to find testers is "incorrect". I'll discuss this later. 56 hours may be an ok number, but you picked a map from page 1. Let's stop for a second and make an important distinction; the phrase "page 1" can have multiple meanings in this context.
Now that we have made that distinction, the caliber of the map I picked is not important for this thread, beyond the fact that I picked it from a random thread on this forum in order to create an example review (which would hopefully be seen by the map's makers).
While a less important point, I'd also like to make the distinction between laziness and the realization that this particular method is currently a waste of my personal time. If others do not feel that "popularity list diving" (or searching for random maps of a particular genre) is not a waste of their time, I would be more than happy to utilize the fruits of their efforts in a more direct manner.
I will continue this thread according to the goal I stated originally. Although it is different from the one you've stated, I believe it will still make a positive contribution to mapmakers who have maps in their starting stages. The goal that you've brought up (To get buried but high quality maps at least some exposure), is definitely an important one. Actually, one of my hopes for this thread was to gauge whether there were enough interested reviewers to restart my previous thread from about a year ago (Peer Reviews: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2140505669 ). You've stated that you are interested, and if you are willing to help, I would be happy to start it back up immediately. Map: Fatty Fight Nice review. That map would probably be a good one to kick off the Peer Reviews again. |
Might as well suggest my map "Warlords and Merchants". Review the current map in the list, and post the review, then I will replace that map with yours. |
Oh well I did what I could. Did you actually read what I posted? I said that I agree with your goal and stated that if you actually want to help, as you stated, then I'd happy to have you help out. |
Actually, I just loaded up your map for the first time and took a look. It appears to have taken an impressive amount of work, but I saw design issues from the second it loaded. Is your map still in the beta stage? Just from my brief look, it seemed that some testing would do it a lot of good. |
That wasn't really meant as a diss. It seemed to be a lot better than the other conquest-style maps I've played. Maps really take a lot of work to work the kinks out. Unfortunately, my experience leads me to believe that most players who find issues that hinder gameplay will just stop playing the map, rather than posting somewhere that the mapmaker will see. |
Well besides the fact I've kinda stopped work on the map... The map has already gone through extensive testing. The reasons work was discontinued are: 1. Latency issue. To put it simply, WW2 Diplo taxes both SC2 and Battle.net for more than it can handle. Altough it is managable, the game still breaks down under full load. To fix this 3 things need to happen. A. Blizzard needs to pull their heads from out of their asses and make triggers multi-threadable like a lot of modding groups have been asking. Yes there is a "Create thread" but triggers will only execute on a single thread reguardless, all the "Create thread" means is "don't wait to finish". B. The dependency bug which has been posted more than enough on a different thread needs to be fixed. Blizzard models are horrid for their graphics engine. The ones we have been putting in there are much better for latency, however cramming the 50+ models its going to take to cover all bases requires multiple dependencies on top of the regular ones and since adding custom dependencies is a crash fest right now there is no reason for me to even try. It might be worth while again if Blizzard fixes it. And it looks like it will be fixed in say... 3 years? Just taking a reasonable guess here. I'd say there is an even chance I'll finish my mechanical engineering degree before they fix it. I'd be happy to be wrong though but I'm probably close to dead on. C. Due to Blizzard mental retardation, AI's also cause memory leaks. And since I have to have 7 of them in there, the game length is rather heavily affected. It is no understatement to say StarCraft 2 is a peace of !@#$. Both Battlenet wise and mechanics wise. I just want my %^-*!@#ed money's worth. I'm not getting what I payed for. And btw... "Burn" is so last decade. |
I guess it's a good thing I held off on a thorough play testing...
Just curious, what are your most performance-taxing triggers doing? I've switched over to doing pretty much everything possible using data instead of triggers (AI, etc.) since multiple triggers firing at once leads to lag and dropped triggers. Also, I'm still willing to take you up on your offer, if you're really willing to help.
Where at, if you don't mind my asking? |
Maybe you still ought to do it. Join channel: Diplomacy. Get to know how pissed off whats left of the community is... Also perhaps you should check out the naval aspects of it... Also the combined arms mechanics (vs single unit counter which is pretty much everything on bnet). Just curious, what are your most performance-taxing triggers doing? I've switched over to doing pretty much everything possible using data instead of triggers (AI, etc.) since multiple triggers firing at once leads to lag and dropped triggers. The graphical load on computers causes them to slow down which makes it so people are out of sync. So not all computers are at the same point in the triggers. So everyone else gets slowed down. Even a finite bit of that causes the system to start breaking. I can play with it a bit more (ie replace the AI) now that I know more about it but there is still only so much I can do. If triggers were multithreadable I could stick each AI on its own thread, income on its own thread, then all the dialogs on their own thread, thus greatly reducing the issue.
unlv |
