A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
I apologize in advance, I did not read the previous posts - but I LOVE the maps ! For sure a step in the right direction, and testmap 1 seems like python with a gold, and 2rocks in place of a ramp in the corners ... :D obviously they are looking into map making in Korea, or at least I hope so if they have a team dedicated to making maps at blizzard.
I seem to have been playing testmap4 over and over - and it seems like a great macro map that is not insanely huge.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
Man you are going into extreme. Noone asks all that, but isn't that stupid that map has million rocks or backdoor rocks? Do you know how much harder is for zerg to defend slow tanks push on shakuras backdoor? Do you know how hard is for zerg to defend tank/thor drop on LT? Even my grandma could make a thor drop on LT cliff and zerg will have a lot of problems.
Thing is that maps shouldnt have those "very easy for one race to pull off and very hard for another race to defend" things.
On February 05 2011 18:34 ChThoniC wrote: Playing some on the PTR right now.
Played one each on maps 3 and 4. Maybe it's just the fact that I didn't play BW a lot or anything, but playing an actual game on the maps is helping me understand them more than just looking at the pictures.
Maps 3 and 4 are jokes. I'll update as I play more.
It has nothing to do with BW. It's hard to analyze a map without playing on it.
If they opened up the middle of test map 2 slightly, and replaced LT with TM1, and Jungle Basin with TM2, I don't think even Team Liquid would complain that it was a bad change.
I think if Test Map 3 had the main's ramp moved closer to the natural, it'd be pretty decent. Maybe not great, but it'd make swapping out Delta Quadrant for TM3 a good deal.
So the general consensus of TL seems to be
1. Blizzard sucks and is evil. 2. Test Map 1 is an improvement. 3. Test Map 2 is a maybe (I love it, but the site as a whole is more meh). We'd probably all like it if more open areas were added. 4. Test Map 3 is kind of bad, but in small and possible to fix ways. 5. Test Maps 4 and 5 are just fucked.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
Don't need all that. However, just removing the stupid backdoor/expansion blocking rocks would go a long way. I can't think of a map that wouldn't be better without rocks. There's a few occassions where it's all right, like opening the way to a protected third, or shortening some passages. IMO they should never be used to block an expansion.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
The thing is, each and every of this cute stuff screws up balance, if only slightly. Say the game is perfectly balance for small ramps. Then how can a big ramp, like on scrap station, be balanced....too? This doesn't even make sense logicly. If force fields are designed and balanced for small ramps, then big ramps must - inevitably - make toss worse off. Same holds true for rocks. If the game is balanced for mains that can only be entered through small ramps, then rocks create problems. Also, if the game is balanced for expos that don't have rocks, then rocks that are covered in rocks create problems. For example terran can expand at their usual timing and just destroy the rocks later, while toss and zerg have to destroy the rocks before the expo; delta quadrant is perfect for this, a safe early expo is impossible for everyone except for terran. They just start the CC inside and float it once the rocks are down.
No offense, but there are MILLIONS of overly cute RTS-games out there with lots and lots of crazy stuff that is nice to play at first but gets ridiculous once players have figured out the abusive possibilities. I would like SC2 to be a RTS that has as number one priority perfect balance. And if this means that maps have to be "boring" to create balanced match-ups then it's absolutely fine with me.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
After reading this thread, I watched an episode of My Little Ponies
It's stunning how applicable a song about making dresses for ponies is to this serious thread about this serious manly game, but it really fits. Poor Blizzard-kun!
And just like that, a hundred Team Liquid posters knees jerked so hard they hit themselves in the face.
I doubt anyone here can actually tell how the balance of these maps is going to turn out. It could go any way. My only problem is how this is going to clash with GOM's release of their new maps.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
After reading this thread, I watched an episode of My Little Ponies
It's stunning how applicable a song about making dresses for ponies is to this serious thread about this serious manly game, but it really fits. Poor Blizzard-kun!
Yeah! Brohoof!
But the comparison isn't fair. Blizzard has dozens of examples of great maps from BW, but they insist on narrow passageways and cutesy bullshit with rocks.
For comparison, if Rarity had an entire book of approved patterns for dresses that would satisfy each pony, but decided she hated those patterns and threw destructible rocks all over everything, then Rarity would be Blizzard.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
After reading this thread, I watched an episode of My Little Ponies
It's stunning how applicable a song about making dresses for ponies is to this serious thread about this serious manly game, but it really fits. Poor Blizzard-kun!
Yeah! Brohoof!
But the comparison isn't fair. Blizzard has dozens of examples of great maps from BW, but they insist on narrow passageways and cutesy bullshit with rocks.
For comparison, if Rarity had an entire book of approved patterns for dresses that would satisfy each pony, but decided she hated those patterns and threw destructible rocks all over everything, then Rarity would be Blizzard.
Rarity is an artiste who wanted to make the dresses she thought were best. Blizzard is a game company who wanted to make the game they thought would work best. Then Rairity went overboard trying to bend over backwards throwing out her ideas for what the customers said, and she did go on to make the GSL dresses that made all the ponies satisfied...until they went out in them and realized that all the things they wanted didn't gel and the dress as a whole looks ridiculous.
Next week is the Global Starcraft Team Fashion Show, and Hoity Toity (who in this analogy is Idra? I guess?) is coming to see. Maybe it'll go well, or maybe we'll learn a lot of things we thought we liked don't work as well as we thought they would've. Then Blizzard will lock themselves in their rooms trying to figure out what game companies wallow in and what to pack for an exile.
Then Day[9] will hide David Kim's cat in a tree, and the analogy really starts to fall apart at this point.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
This. And how those things are said with such utter certainty, even though every poster is asking for a different permutation of the above, and the majority of critics have yet to even play any of the maps... the amount of bitching of some posters honestly makes me question why they even PLAY the game, when clearly they don't enjoy it.
Having played the new maps... are they perfect? No. Are they a step in the right direction? Absolutely yes. Even when the execution isn't that great (positional differences between some of the bases...), the feel they are going for - larger maps, longer rush distances, more natural naturals - is totally evident.
On February 05 2011 20:41 Mulletarian wrote: So let me get this right;
A map is only good if the main is protected by a tiny choke, has no backdoor, has an easily protectable natural and 'a natural third'... And the third should be easy to protect as well. And not be covered in rocks. It should also be of a certain size and never have too many open areas or too many chokes. Cliffs are bad. Not too warm, and not too cold either. They should basically all be the same and give us repetetive gameplay.
I got a feeling Blizzard disagrees. I sure hope they do.
After reading this thread, I watched an episode of My Little Ponies
It's stunning how applicable a song about making dresses for ponies is to this serious thread about this serious manly game, but it really fits. Poor Blizzard-kun!
Yeah! Brohoof!
But the comparison isn't fair. Blizzard has dozens of examples of great maps from BW, but they insist on narrow passageways and cutesy bullshit with rocks.
For comparison, if Rarity had an entire book of approved patterns for dresses that would satisfy each pony, but decided she hated those patterns and threw destructible rocks all over everything, then Rarity would be Blizzard.
Rarity is an artiste who wanted to make the dresses she thought were best. Blizzard is a game company who wanted to make the game they thought would work best. Then Rairity went overboard trying to bend over backwards throwing out her ideas for what the customers said, and she did go on to make the GSL dresses that made all the ponies satisfied...until they went out in them and realized that all the things they wanted didn't gel and the dress as a whole looks ridiculous.
Next week is the Global Starcraft Team Fashion Show, and Hoity Toity (who in this analogy is Idra? I guess?) is coming to see. Maybe it'll go well, or maybe we'll learn a lot of things we thought we liked don't work as well as we thought they would've. Then Blizzard will lock themselves in their rooms trying to figure out what game companies wallow in and what to pack for an exile.
Then Day[9] will hide David Kim's cat in a tree, and the analogy really starts to fall apart at this point.
I really don't get you and what your saying but I have to assume its this....that Blizzard's weird maps are liked by casuals and therefore must and should be in the ladder?
and custom maps which are not really "Casual Friendly" are to be ignored and never to be placed on the ladder.
At least GSL maps would be played on the GSL,what about the other map makers who work hard to put up balanced maps which even casuals may like(maybe if they were actually given a chance)?
Someone who works hard to make balanced and fun maps should be rewarded.Blizzard use use thier PTR to test out custom maps,thats to only way they would get played otherwise and if there is a positive result they should be put on the ladder.
Yes i have played on these maps and only LT 2.0 was worth playing on but even that only on cross positions,with a few minor changes with the natural layout testmap 3 could be fixed,testmap 4 should be square with the mains on the corners and then make all 4 sides the same.
For everyone here complaining and having actually played the maps, I urge you to make a post on the sticky thread about maps on the US ptr forum. Even if it doesn't do much, it still is probably the best thing you can do to influence Blizzard, more so than posting here. If you care even a bit (and have a NA account) I think it's the least you can do.
Strange that Crota actually forgot to mention the small hallway between the 9 and 6 position and the 12 and 3 position... This is basically what make this map completely broken to me, instead of just inconfortable in close ground position (such as the 6 and 3 position).