As programmer and rrowland said, there were A WAY BETTER maps submitted.
I haven't played Bomberling Arena, but just by the replay I could see that the map was highly better.
Everyore was complaining that the map couldn't be on youtube before the contest deadline. That nice map that won the contest was being polished since BETA!
Ps.: "Hi... I won the custom map contest and I want to know how many were there..."
Everyone has different tastes. Bomberling Arena is fun, but I enjoyed the photon cannon game just as much. They are different types of games and I found both entertaining.
At any rate, don't feel bad if you didn't win. If your map is actually 'better', it will bring more enjoyment to more people and if that happens, then you are the real winner anyway.
I have no objection to your point that the fun factor is more important than skill requirement to make the map. In fact this is one of the thing I frequently emphasize. Read my post again. I didn't say others should win because their maps require more skill to make. I said there are "better maps", which already includes the "fun" factor.
The problem is, while I won't question your feeling of finding Photon Command fun, it is hard to believe majority of people would feel that map is fun as well. Give me evidence if you think otherwise.
If you still insist Photon Command is a map that deserves the prize, please explain why Blizzard didn't openly anounce it, other than the reason I suggested above.
My apologies. There was a similar thread to this one to which I had just posted a response before seeing yours. I didn't say everything I said in that thread in this one. In the other thread I clarified that I don't think that Photon Command necessarily deserved to win, I just didn't agree with everyone in the thread saying it was a bad map. With all the maps submitted it wouldn't surprise me at all that there were maps 'more worthy' of winning the contest. I just disliked all the hate the map was getting because it was 'too easy to make', but I see that that wasn't your intention so my bad for misunderstanding.
I would like to see some of the entries all of you submitted though as I don't really have anything to compare the winning maps with at this time and am interested to see what else was submitted. I'm sure you guys have some great maps =D
EDIT:
By the way, I don't think Photon Command is all that fun, but rather that it was a reasonably entertaining diversion from the numerous reiterations of mass autospawning unit maps (Nexus Wars, Desert Strike) and TDs that flood the first pages. Back when I played WC3 it was only for the custom maps so I know that much more impressive content can be made, I just have yet to see any. Considering what I've seen in SC2, Photon Command is good. If this map were released now in WC3 however, I wouldn't have played it simply because there are so many better maps.
Well, let's review what Blizzard said on their contest page. Some snippets of interest:
"In our first-ever StarCraft II Custom Map Contest, we're challenging you to craft the most fun, creative, and polished custom map that the galaxy’s ever seen."
"Keep in mind that we’re looking for originality, innovation, and fun"
"We’ll be choosing three winners to represent the best of what the mapmaking community has to offer"
So in summery, the judges are looking for maps that are:
The criteria is highly subjective, but I'd say that the selected winners only really met one or two of these (i.e. fun and polished). I didn't think they were particularly original, nor the best maps I've seen produced, but that's just my opinion. But that's what the judges picked, so what more can you do? :P
- Stupid technical reasons that leave most out. (lag, advertising logo etc..)
lol, possible indeed.
My own submitted map actually had such technical problem which I only found out a few days ago. I feared that early uploading of the map would disqualify me, so I didn't even uploading it to the server till a few days ago. (It is a single player map so I tested it using the editor test function all along.) When I uploaded it a few days ago, it stopped at 0%. After some research, it turned out my custom player color set on player property page didn't match that in game variant setting caused the problem, which was fixed in a few click. Not sure if the judge got my map and tried to upload it, then thought this stupid map couldn't even be uploaded to the server and immediately threw it away! lol
What a shame that my map was indeed quite origin, at least among the maps we have currently. (Imagine that it is a mix of the playstation games Monster Hunter and Dynasty Warriors, which I don't think many people had attempted so far.)
If they really threw away good maps because of those pathetic reasons, they are really stupid. If they found a good map has advertisement, tell the author to get rid of it and it is already fixed; If a very good map has a few bugs, ask the author to fix them. Too bad they instead chose to simply pick some apparently advertisement-free bug-free craps and pretends the map contest didn't exist.
Someone published Photon Command to US (currently #1 after the featured maps). I checked out most of the purchasable upgrades and played up to the 10th wave before I quit. Very nice presentation I must say, and that's all I will say.
That completed the custom map contest joke. Good job Blizz!
So this was my entry, and it didn't win. Why didn't it win? Because it followed blizzards rules, "new, fun, innovative, blah blah blah". What blizzard really wanted was "Simple and Accessible"
I am now cleaning up and fixing the original version of my map with advanced things that I had found after the contest, because unlike "RAD" which was deserving if it followed the rules I started the map 4 days after the contest started, and spent 10-15 hours per day learning and testing things in the editor to get what I wanted out of it. I didn't have a template, terrain, or even an idea to build upon. I created an engine, terrain, idea, polished and balanced it in less than 26 days. If I had done this for fun, I wouldn't be complaining.
Now me personally, I feel ripped off. I worked my ass off for this contest to just be basically told, "yours wasn't good enough". We decided that instead of the maps that took time and dedication, we picked simple and easy.
However, if the maps that had won had followed the rules and been worth a 5,000$ prize and trip to blizzcon, I wouldn't be complaining.
It's completely off-putting and downright depressing to know that blizzard could careless about their mappers. A mention of some of our maps at blizzcon would have been nice, I mean they did claim all rights to our maps anyways.
I had been working on a second version of the map with really clean, well everything. However because banks can still be hacked I will be postponing it until that is fixed. So I am going to implement a lot of new functions into the original, and release it as Photon Arena Round-Up.
Hi, I posted a thread on starcraft2.com to convey the 'wtf' reaction of many in this forum. Please post in it and explain your disapproval of Blizzard's choices of custom game winners in hopes that in future contests Blizzard will pick deserving maps.
Hey, noticed this thread and I thought I'd just throw in my 2 cents to this topic. Also I was lucky enough to run into one of the custom map contest judges at Blizzcon and had a chat with him.
500 entries are a lot to go through, but they managed to cut quite a few of them early on. One of the important things were what they were going to use the maps for. Basically the winning maps were set up on 16-20 pc's where people at Blizzcon could get in line and play them for about 15 mins before moving on. It was important that the player could sit down and immediately understand what was going on and get into the game, having a meaningful experience in the limited amount of time they could play. As such, a lot of the maps which required a lot of explanation/choices and/or wasn't easy to understand right off the bat were removed, as well as maps taking a long time to play.
Then there were a lot of maps which bugged out instantly when launching them, which could be because of poor design or that a patch broke them. There were maps which used WASD or other designs which lagged too much and didn't work well in multiplayer/battle.net, and they were also removed. After narrowing it down further they had to playtest the maps a lot making sure it didn't contain inappropriate content or totally crash/bug if you did specific things.
In the end I wouldn't disagree with anyone saying there were better maps out there, whether it's because they were more fun, or because they had more work put into them. But as Blizzard stated in the contest, the winning maps would be playable at Blizzcon, and as such they had to find entries which would suit the "Drive-By playing" they had planned. Did they pick the best maps for this? That's a matter of personal opinion I guess, but saying that maps like Photon Command and Zergling Round-Up were horrible and didn't deserve to win is very unfair in my opinion, when in fact they seemed like good choices for Blizzard's purpose. I saw with my own eyes many people sitting down and having fun playing all of the community maps.
Now, aside from mentioning that the winning maps would be played at Blizzcon, could Blizzard have been more specific of what they were looking for? Probably. But this is the first time Blizzard is doing something like this, and it's a learning experience for them as well as for us.
As for MAD winning, I can't really argue for or against it since it's my entry, but I will say a couple of things just so we can have more facts on the table. It was released during the SC2 Beta under the name RAD, and anyone who had access to the Beta could play it. Did this count as released or not to Blizzard? I don't know, but to put things in perspective; everyone with access to the Beta could also play Starcraft 2, and Starcraft 2 wasn't a released game. Maybe only the maps released in retail counted as released.
So when SC2 went retail I wanted to release RAD, but someone else had occupied the name, and as such it was delayed. That's why I changed the name to MAD, but I didn't get around to releasing it. Later on a lot of people (people here at mapster and friends, etc) recommended I send my map into the contest, so I did. Should it have been disqualified? It was never out in retail, so I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I don't want to defend MAD winning, but I hope people want the facts on the table before jumping to conclusions.
In the end I hope people can enjoy both the contest winners as well as all the entries as they are released on battle.net without thinking of who should've won and not. They're all great maps, and if there are things we don't like we should be helping each other making them better, not trashing them and end up discouraging people from making maps.
Thank you for that post, Acemore. It describes exactly what I was going to post (regarding the playability at BlizzCon and the judging).
I made Zergling Round-Up. I totally understand the critique (since I admit my entry isn't exactly a pinnacle of map creation), but after hearing about the judging process from Blizz I can see where they're coming from. There is a totally unnecessary amount of resentment in this thread. =/
I'm going to post and publish the map soon, but before that I would like to improve and polish it. It's an obvious homage to the original Zergling Round-Up, but I can assure you that it's no clone and uses different mechanics. I received a lot of feedback at BlizzCon and acknowledged that it gets boring after a few rounds, and I will try and do something about it, so I hope you can bear with me on that.
Congratulation to the contest winners. There must be reasons why they are chosen. Some of them may be hard to understand from our perspective, but we must give the benefit of the doubt to Blizzard. After all, they are the one who invested ten years into this game.
Walk away with what we have learned, and make better maps.
Remember guys we have nothing against the mappers who made the winning maps, just complaining about blizzard choices.
And now we have the final comic part...
"Hey guys, I'm Mr. Blizzard and I gave you a cool keyboard / mouse movements but wait, if you used that features your map is disqualified because the game lags thanks to me"
just... LOL
Using single player map test??? Was that too hard?
P.S.
Arent't MAD and Photon Command using mouse click laggy controls? :D
Maybe that was harder to detect!
Remember guys we have nothing against the mappers who made the winning maps, just complaining about blizzard choices.
And now we have the final comic part...
"Hey guys, I'm Mr. Blizzard and I gave you a cool keyboard / mouse movements but wait, if you used that features your map is disqualified because the game lags thanks to me"
just... LOL
Using single player map test??? Was that too hard?
P.S.
Arent't MAD and Photon Command using mouse click laggy controls? :D
Maybe that was harder to detect!
MAD and Photon Command didn't lag any more than a normal game on battle.net. They use a simple click which isn't as laggy as a loop checking for WASD keys or mouselook. In general, games using WASD movement have to be very responsive in order not to feel sluggish, and use client-side recognition instead of an authorative server like Blizzard is doing.
Blizzard didn't give us tools specifically for WASD movement, they gave us the tools to do almost anything. Map makers are simply creative in finding ways to use these tools, and one of those ways was to use triggers/data to detect keyboard input and order unit movement in a loop, a clever way of using WASD movement. Unfortunately it lags, but there are plenty of things you can do in the editor which will lag and be unresponsive, not just WASD movement.
And of course Blizzard wanted maps which were responsive and playable. Saying that Blizzard gave us the tools which causes a map to be disqualified is stretching it... very far. They wanted quick maps which could be played on battle.net and were easy to get into, simple as that. I think their map choices for this was great, but they could've been a bit more clear on this though.
The good news is Blizzard plans to implement a much better system for WASD movement (and possibly mouselook), but it will never feel as good or responsive on battle.net due to the authorative server as it will in single player.
Ace actually, if well made, a loop WASD movement lags exact as much a mouse click button.
The important thing is to make the trigger start when the button is pressed first. They just lag the same but movement lag is more evident then shooting lag.
Nah, those games still lag like crazy, but it did a good job giving the player the illusion of lagless input.
Photon Command fire a missile from the cannon to the mouse clicked target, in which you are going to click like crazy, and the bit extra time it took to launch the missile is simply added to the travel time, no lag noticed.
MAD use traditional right click movement and occasionally target clicking, which even if it tooks some delay to fire, does not annoy you as much as you expect your unit to move 0.01 inch right away as you pressed the WASD button.
Still, all the reasons given so far (bug free, lagless control, drive-by gameplay) haven't convinced or remove the notion that judging process was done poorly or not given enough attention.
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Everyone has different tastes. Bomberling Arena is fun, but I enjoyed the photon cannon game just as much. They are different types of games and I found both entertaining.
At any rate, don't feel bad if you didn't win. If your map is actually 'better', it will bring more enjoyment to more people and if that happens, then you are the real winner anyway.
Can we get a brief synopsis on this atrocious third entry?
My apologies. There was a similar thread to this one to which I had just posted a response before seeing yours. I didn't say everything I said in that thread in this one. In the other thread I clarified that I don't think that Photon Command necessarily deserved to win, I just didn't agree with everyone in the thread saying it was a bad map. With all the maps submitted it wouldn't surprise me at all that there were maps 'more worthy' of winning the contest. I just disliked all the hate the map was getting because it was 'too easy to make', but I see that that wasn't your intention so my bad for misunderstanding.
I would like to see some of the entries all of you submitted though as I don't really have anything to compare the winning maps with at this time and am interested to see what else was submitted. I'm sure you guys have some great maps =D
EDIT:
By the way, I don't think Photon Command is all that fun, but rather that it was a reasonably entertaining diversion from the numerous reiterations of mass autospawning unit maps (Nexus Wars, Desert Strike) and TDs that flood the first pages. Back when I played WC3 it was only for the custom maps so I know that much more impressive content can be made, I just have yet to see any. Considering what I've seen in SC2, Photon Command is good. If this map were released now in WC3 however, I wouldn't have played it simply because there are so many better maps.
Well, let's review what Blizzard said on their contest page. Some snippets of interest:
"In our first-ever StarCraft II Custom Map Contest, we're challenging you to craft the most fun, creative, and polished custom map that the galaxy’s ever seen."
"Keep in mind that we’re looking for originality, innovation, and fun"
"We’ll be choosing three winners to represent the best of what the mapmaking community has to offer"
So in summery, the judges are looking for maps that are:
Source link: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/community/contests/sc2maps/
The criteria is highly subjective, but I'd say that the selected winners only really met one or two of these (i.e. fun and polished). I didn't think they were particularly original, nor the best maps I've seen produced, but that's just my opinion. But that's what the judges picked, so what more can you do? :P
lol, possible indeed.
My own submitted map actually had such technical problem which I only found out a few days ago. I feared that early uploading of the map would disqualify me, so I didn't even uploading it to the server till a few days ago. (It is a single player map so I tested it using the editor test function all along.) When I uploaded it a few days ago, it stopped at 0%. After some research, it turned out my custom player color set on player property page didn't match that in game variant setting caused the problem, which was fixed in a few click. Not sure if the judge got my map and tried to upload it, then thought this stupid map couldn't even be uploaded to the server and immediately threw it away! lol
What a shame that my map was indeed quite origin, at least among the maps we have currently. (Imagine that it is a mix of the playstation games Monster Hunter and Dynasty Warriors, which I don't think many people had attempted so far.)
If they really threw away good maps because of those pathetic reasons, they are really stupid. If they found a good map has advertisement, tell the author to get rid of it and it is already fixed; If a very good map has a few bugs, ask the author to fix them. Too bad they instead chose to simply pick some apparently advertisement-free bug-free craps and pretends the map contest didn't exist.
Someone published Photon Command to US (currently #1 after the featured maps). I checked out most of the purchasable upgrades and played up to the 10th wave before I quit. Very nice presentation I must say, and that's all I will say.
lol
So the third map is Zergling Round-Up.
That completed the custom map contest joke. Good job Blizz!
So this was my entry, and it didn't win. Why didn't it win? Because it followed blizzards rules, "new, fun, innovative, blah blah blah". What blizzard really wanted was "Simple and Accessible"
I am now cleaning up and fixing the original version of my map with advanced things that I had found after the contest, because unlike "RAD" which was deserving if it followed the rules I started the map 4 days after the contest started, and spent 10-15 hours per day learning and testing things in the editor to get what I wanted out of it. I didn't have a template, terrain, or even an idea to build upon. I created an engine, terrain, idea, polished and balanced it in less than 26 days. If I had done this for fun, I wouldn't be complaining.
Now me personally, I feel ripped off. I worked my ass off for this contest to just be basically told, "yours wasn't good enough". We decided that instead of the maps that took time and dedication, we picked simple and easy.
However, if the maps that had won had followed the rules and been worth a 5,000$ prize and trip to blizzcon, I wouldn't be complaining.
It's completely off-putting and downright depressing to know that blizzard could careless about their mappers. A mention of some of our maps at blizzcon would have been nice, I mean they did claim all rights to our maps anyways.
I had been working on a second version of the map with really clean, well everything. However because banks can still be hacked I will be postponing it until that is fixed. So I am going to implement a lot of new functions into the original, and release it as Photon Arena Round-Up.
anyone have any data about Zergling Round-Up? I know the 2 other map. (photon command is totally crap)
Its fun for the first 3 games. After that its pretty bad.
Hi, I posted a thread on starcraft2.com to convey the 'wtf' reaction of many in this forum. Please post in it and explain your disapproval of Blizzard's choices of custom game winners in hopes that in future contests Blizzard will pick deserving maps.
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/932784469
Hey, noticed this thread and I thought I'd just throw in my 2 cents to this topic. Also I was lucky enough to run into one of the custom map contest judges at Blizzcon and had a chat with him.
500 entries are a lot to go through, but they managed to cut quite a few of them early on. One of the important things were what they were going to use the maps for. Basically the winning maps were set up on 16-20 pc's where people at Blizzcon could get in line and play them for about 15 mins before moving on. It was important that the player could sit down and immediately understand what was going on and get into the game, having a meaningful experience in the limited amount of time they could play. As such, a lot of the maps which required a lot of explanation/choices and/or wasn't easy to understand right off the bat were removed, as well as maps taking a long time to play.
Then there were a lot of maps which bugged out instantly when launching them, which could be because of poor design or that a patch broke them. There were maps which used WASD or other designs which lagged too much and didn't work well in multiplayer/battle.net, and they were also removed. After narrowing it down further they had to playtest the maps a lot making sure it didn't contain inappropriate content or totally crash/bug if you did specific things.
In the end I wouldn't disagree with anyone saying there were better maps out there, whether it's because they were more fun, or because they had more work put into them. But as Blizzard stated in the contest, the winning maps would be playable at Blizzcon, and as such they had to find entries which would suit the "Drive-By playing" they had planned. Did they pick the best maps for this? That's a matter of personal opinion I guess, but saying that maps like Photon Command and Zergling Round-Up were horrible and didn't deserve to win is very unfair in my opinion, when in fact they seemed like good choices for Blizzard's purpose. I saw with my own eyes many people sitting down and having fun playing all of the community maps.
Now, aside from mentioning that the winning maps would be played at Blizzcon, could Blizzard have been more specific of what they were looking for? Probably. But this is the first time Blizzard is doing something like this, and it's a learning experience for them as well as for us.
As for MAD winning, I can't really argue for or against it since it's my entry, but I will say a couple of things just so we can have more facts on the table. It was released during the SC2 Beta under the name RAD, and anyone who had access to the Beta could play it. Did this count as released or not to Blizzard? I don't know, but to put things in perspective; everyone with access to the Beta could also play Starcraft 2, and Starcraft 2 wasn't a released game. Maybe only the maps released in retail counted as released.
So when SC2 went retail I wanted to release RAD, but someone else had occupied the name, and as such it was delayed. That's why I changed the name to MAD, but I didn't get around to releasing it. Later on a lot of people (people here at mapster and friends, etc) recommended I send my map into the contest, so I did. Should it have been disqualified? It was never out in retail, so I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I don't want to defend MAD winning, but I hope people want the facts on the table before jumping to conclusions.
In the end I hope people can enjoy both the contest winners as well as all the entries as they are released on battle.net without thinking of who should've won and not. They're all great maps, and if there are things we don't like we should be helping each other making them better, not trashing them and end up discouraging people from making maps.
@Acemore: Go
^ win
100% my opinion
Thank you for that post, Acemore. It describes exactly what I was going to post (regarding the playability at BlizzCon and the judging). I made Zergling Round-Up. I totally understand the critique (since I admit my entry isn't exactly a pinnacle of map creation), but after hearing about the judging process from Blizz I can see where they're coming from. There is a totally unnecessary amount of resentment in this thread. =/
I'm going to post and publish the map soon, but before that I would like to improve and polish it. It's an obvious homage to the original Zergling Round-Up, but I can assure you that it's no clone and uses different mechanics. I received a lot of feedback at BlizzCon and acknowledged that it gets boring after a few rounds, and I will try and do something about it, so I hope you can bear with me on that.
@Acemore: Go
This.
Congratulation to the contest winners. There must be reasons why they are chosen. Some of them may be hard to understand from our perspective, but we must give the benefit of the doubt to Blizzard. After all, they are the one who invested ten years into this game.
Walk away with what we have learned, and make better maps.
Remember guys we have nothing against the mappers who made the winning maps, just complaining about blizzard choices.
And now we have the final comic part...
"Hey guys, I'm Mr. Blizzard and I gave you a cool keyboard / mouse movements but wait, if you used that features your map is disqualified because the game lags thanks to me"
just... LOL
Using single player map test??? Was that too hard?
P.S.
Arent't MAD and Photon Command using mouse click laggy controls? :D
Maybe that was harder to detect!
MAD and Photon Command didn't lag any more than a normal game on battle.net. They use a simple click which isn't as laggy as a loop checking for WASD keys or mouselook. In general, games using WASD movement have to be very responsive in order not to feel sluggish, and use client-side recognition instead of an authorative server like Blizzard is doing.
Blizzard didn't give us tools specifically for WASD movement, they gave us the tools to do almost anything. Map makers are simply creative in finding ways to use these tools, and one of those ways was to use triggers/data to detect keyboard input and order unit movement in a loop, a clever way of using WASD movement. Unfortunately it lags, but there are plenty of things you can do in the editor which will lag and be unresponsive, not just WASD movement.
And of course Blizzard wanted maps which were responsive and playable. Saying that Blizzard gave us the tools which causes a map to be disqualified is stretching it... very far. They wanted quick maps which could be played on battle.net and were easy to get into, simple as that. I think their map choices for this was great, but they could've been a bit more clear on this though.
The good news is Blizzard plans to implement a much better system for WASD movement (and possibly mouselook), but it will never feel as good or responsive on battle.net due to the authorative server as it will in single player.
RAD = MAD should be disqualified, wtf blizzard ...oh wait...team liquid guild?
Ace actually, if well made, a loop WASD movement lags exact as much a mouse click button.
The important thing is to make the trigger start when the button is pressed first. They just lag the same but movement lag is more evident then shooting lag.
@Acemore: Go
Nah, those games still lag like crazy, but it did a good job giving the player the illusion of lagless input.
Photon Command fire a missile from the cannon to the mouse clicked target, in which you are going to click like crazy, and the bit extra time it took to launch the missile is simply added to the travel time, no lag noticed.
MAD use traditional right click movement and occasionally target clicking, which even if it tooks some delay to fire, does not annoy you as much as you expect your unit to move 0.01 inch right away as you pressed the WASD button.
Still, all the reasons given so far (bug free, lagless control, drive-by gameplay) haven't convinced or remove the notion that judging process was done poorly or not given enough attention.