@biass said in Moses’ tips for team map design:
@moses_the_red said in Moses’ tips for team map design:
Or perhaps I'm attacking the problem from the wrong angle. Map makers have no decent means to showcase team maps to the team map community, and thus there's no incentive to make new innovative team maps.
Physically cannot believe you actually managed to hit a nail on the head.
Consider the following:
As everyone has been trying to tell you, The popularity of Astro is not because it is "good" but because of outside factors. Those factors of course being inertia, Promotion, comfort zones, etc.
Flip this around now:
if you make a teamgame map that is "inherently good" it still might not get played, due to those same outside factors.
I always preferred making 1v1 maps because ranked ladder was my "thing". But for getting a decent run as a mapper, you were rewarded for making your maps better by having them appear more often, a higher score, and having them actually recognised by "FAF" as a system.
Not wanting to make teamgame maps (Or at times, more ladder maps) because there was not enough incentive to do so is something i've always believed was a problem.
TMM sort of solves this by applying the same incentives as ladder to teamgames. But it's now my job to work on providing you incentives as well. You can read about all of that in that election proposal document I posted recently.
If you have some insight on what might incentive you as a "teamgame mapper" to actually bother making your maps better I would love to hear it, but leave your hero complex at the door, thanks.
Yeah, I think the issue now is the artificial influence of frankly you and FTX on map promotion.
I'm looking through the "M&M Team Top Picks", and while those maps are absolutely gorgeous, well made and obviously done by people with great talent, I don't think I'd host any of them, or join a game on any of those maps.
And the reason is that I can look at a map and tell whether its the kind of map I want to play, and the maps I want to play are team maps that work well in a pickup game setting where you spend significant time in the lobby sim.
And it would be silly and spiteful for me to pretend that there isn't a more to it than that, you're a minor factor in the stagnation of the team map scene, but I tend to think your part of the problem. We have a toxic community culture that disparages maps people enjoy playing - where we refuse simple things like an objective scoring system because an astro variant might make the cut and god forbid we make some Astro players happy by introducing them to a variant of that map they might enjoy.
And all this is just making the game shittier than it has to be.
I think more should be done to try to push good team maps into the spotlight, but the first step is for the people responsible for handling that to stop intentionally pushing away maps that don't look like they were originally intended for ladder.
I hope you consider implementing an objective measure of map quality for use in promoting maps to people, because if your goal is to get people to play ladder maps in pickup games you're just going to fail and leave the custom team game scene with an even harder time innovating.