I think the largest problem with helping new mappers is that when they throw up screenshots of a map it's barely got any more than a days work and consists of a few walls, corridors and generic structures. The trouble with this is that it's hard to criticise this beyond a patronising "try harder". What i mean by this is, if i went to my lecturer and asked for help and had minimal work, is all i would get is "do more work and come back in a week". Because there's hardly anything to guide me on. He doesn't know where i want to go with my work or even where i could go with what i have; because the possibilities are endless. He doesn't want a whole lot, but anything more would give him idea's on possible resolutions.
the fact that the better mappers get the most feedback is undeniable, and yes it is kinda irritating, but it does kinda make sense, most people here give feedback solely on visuals (primarily due to checking gameplay with a playtest is difficult), and the better mappers tend to provide better visuals to comment on, and some people go and search for little visual errors as well. Actually...to a large margin this is not the communities fault, when a server admin is looking for new maps they look at the screenshots because...well...its just more practical to do then test every map. So the maps with better visuals will get more server time, which means they will be playtested more and so they will get more comments. From experience its difficult to playtest a rather new map.
I think you're right that the better mappers get more feedback, but not for the reasons you're thinking of.
- The better mappers are the ones who get their arse in gear and actually manage to get testing - we offer a full server usually every other week for playtesting which can have any map submitted to it no matter what the quality. I notice a lot of the not so good mappers don't ever submit their map for gameday.
- The better mappers are more able to make something exciting, which in turn gets people excited and then they're more willing to play the map. (you can't blame anyone for this)
- Providing feedback for the better mappers is easier since you don't have to explain as many basic concepts, and people are lazy.
In response to these statements I'd like to throw out what I feel is an exception, since it seems that everyone has been saying similar things.
I had the WIP thread for zig up since the 27th of December (that was the during the beta 2 I believe), and with the exception of Immortal-D, I didn't have any feedback whatsoever, until the first gameday it was in. Even then, I had only a handful of replies for it, from other people who were in my same position (and I'm specifically referring to Ravidge, and Lepock, since they were the only people ON the server that gameday when we played my map. Everyone else who could have given really good and expert feedback left after half-acre, frontier and cashworks had already been played). After that, my WIP thread turned into a discussion on FPSB and how much they suck (which they do), and then about lightmap scales because some few were crashing on my map. But overall, I didn't really get any feedback--and my situation matched a lot of those reasons the three of you mentioned in my quoted sections above.
So I'd have to argue here that those who already have attention here at TF2maps.net are the ones who get attention. I had nearly 70 percent of the work done at that time, and great screenshots for people to see and plenty of reasons to download and give feedback. I must admit that I didn't have my WIP posted as early as the other submissions, but it was still plenty of time to give feedback, especially because the majority of changes vital to the success of the map happened between beta 3 and 6. That's when I really could have used the most help.
Here's my WIP thread if anyone would like to go over what's been said. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone, I just tend to agree with a lot of the reasons why this thread exists.
http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=4689
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