I decided to release the beta4 version of my pirates map to public servers:
This map is part of the last resort mapping contest: The main deadline was supposed to be on june 7th. and the winning map would be hosted at the SAGE LAN event held in Enschede, the Netherlands. However a few days ago this announcement was made at the crossfire forums:
All maps have been submitted now. After speaking with a few players, none agreed the maps were ready for competition yet. After SAGE, the ball will start rolling again. Mappers: feel free to upload your map to public servers to get testing done. I will announce another deadline after SAGE!
WTF? Who are these players? Where can I find their feedback telling me - and the other 4 mappers- how to change or improve my map making it suitable for competition play? We already had three deadlines, adding a 4th deadline doesn’t change anything, it will not make our maps suitable for comp play without any proper feedback… After the first beta release of pirates map I receive a large amount of feedback from comp players. I listened to their feedback and made changes to the map - making it suitable for comp with the beta 3 release that was send to them.
If you create a contest and have a deadline, you stick with that deadline: If you change the deadline just because you don’t like the quality of the maps submitted, give proper feedback, so the mappers know what needs to be changed…
Frustrated and disillusioned are some of the words that pop in my mind after reading the new announcement on the crossfire site.
The ‘bright’ side of this story is that we are now allowed to release our maps to the public to get feedback. But that’s just plain stupit and pointless: How on earth could I get any proper feedback from a public server hosting my map with 32 or more players, while the map was designed for 5vs5 players?
-end of rant- here’s the Pirates beta four map: http://www.wolfplayer.nl/temp/pirates_b4.zip