Lol, see the problem with me playing this with anybody is that I know all the solutions, so while I could be useful, I'd have to incessantly give hints until you all figure out what to do and give ME instructions.

There are exceptions to this, though. A couple levels are genuinely frustrating even if you know exactly what you're doing.

Somehow, I think I could deal with you knowing all the solutions >_>

I know how you feel, most people are incapable of cooperating. And yes this should have won the contest, sadly the judge's didn't put much time or thought into the this game.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 5 2010, 11:36 pm by Liberty-Prime.

Well, I'm not sure the judges are rightly even coming to the level of judges. What I've observed in these mapping contests is that the judges play the game and make a judgment, but no questions are ever asked, no confirmations made, nothing.

How can you judge a map without making inquiries of how things work? You have to ask questions! In most of the contest threads, you see all the players commenting on one another's maps, pointing things out, and raising inquiries. There seems to be better judgment going on there than with the judges themselves.

Me, Azrael.Wrath, and Ashwin7 (some guy we found) just started tackling this.

I really like this map due to its mystique and simplicity. The reference to God made it better than the Puzzling, I think.

I'm not sure what you mean about the reference to God.

My friends and i got mind-raped ;[

In honor of the new map that I will be releasing (of a completely different sort) for the Week #6 contest, I have decided to release the solutions for L37.

1.


2.


3.


4.


5.


6.


7.


8.


9.


Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 27 2010, 5:44 pm by FoxWolf1.

The judgements were made from a player's perspective, not a map maker's perspective. You can't expect every battlenet player to know how to make maps, and you can't expect every gamer to develop video games. Since the judgements were made from a player's perspective, no questions should have to be asked. If questions have to be asked then there is a lack in the design of the game.

Now, this isn't my debate, and I am loath to give it new life, but I think it's worth pointing out that a single-shot judging isn't anything like a universal representation of a "player's perspective". If anything, the closest parallel is to the sort of person who joins once, plays for a short time, and then leaves, never to play again, without ever investing any time or being part of the game's "community". But that is only one type of player, and thankfully, it is far from the only type.

In fact, as both a player and a map-maker, I bear no particular good-will to that sort of person; a game that is designed to be very "catchy" at the expense of long-term replay value might spread quickly and widely, but at best, it will be a fad, and could be expected to die out rapidly among significant players (I don't consider the lower strata of battle.net life to have any significance, since they are neither any good to play with, nor inherently attractive enough to make popularity with them of any interest). On the other hand, a game that focuses more on the experience of repeat players might spread more slowly, but will last a lot longer, and thus has far more ultimate potential. If you look at a lot of the really popular maps with developed communities, you can actually see a strong bias towards long-term potential over new-player experience, where new players generally spend the whole game getting the crud kicked out of them, being shouted at, or even being banned, because the game is designed to run at the level of the experienced players instead of catering to the new player.

Since the map judge can't practically know what it is like to be part of a contest map's elite, or even invest the time as a regular, his perspective is necessarily skewed-- and that's where information might come in handy. Direct information can help fill in the gaps that a contest judge's perspective creates, allowing for a more representative understanding.

In my honest opinion, puzzles 2, 3, and 9 are absolutely brilliant.

We didn't one shot the game. I played over and over, and we actually had like 7-8 different people trying to get through the map, and none of us were able to make it through the second level. These were people that are intelligent, so it wasn't just any random idiots. Since none of us could beat the second level, and there was no sort of negative feedback mechanism to keep the player's interest, I blamed bad design.

Close, but actually most popular maps have a main game mechanic that is easy to learn and hard to master. Those that have mastered the mechanic can out-perform the noobs, but the noobs can still play and improve.

This is where something along the lines of some sort of negative feedback mechanism would come in handy. Contest judges do/did their job for free and in their spare time, and as such their time is very limited. It isn't fair to anyone to create a map that could potentially never (as in too hard to solve) finish, and expect them to master it. If you had foreseen this sort of predicament you could have designed your game to allow for the best possible gameplay, as the whole situation spawned from a lack of design -not on the puzzles themselves (I thought the puzzles were brilliant), but the lack of a negative feedback mechanism. Since you made the choice to not implement such a mechanism, the judges were unable to complete the map in a reasonable amount of time. I understand that you wanted your map to be contemplated for long periods of time, played over and over again by a small groups of people, but you have to remember that you submit your map for a contest. Your map wasn't one that was made to win the contest.

Huh... I saw this just now, grabbed it to go play it. Seemed like fun... ... then it said not enough players...
I'll pass x.x

That is an interesting idea...but how would a better feedback mechanism, either negative or positive, be implemented in this case? For one, in order to have sufficient variability and general cleverness, the puzzles basically have to be pre-designed: you might be able to program a computer to come up with logic puzzles by some formula, but lateral thinking puzzles are a whole different story. I also wouldn't want it to do things like give you increasing levels of help as you get stuck-- after all, that would basically lead to the map guiding players through to victory, and a game where everyone is a winner is a game where winning is the same as losing. Plus-- and this is a somewhat different issue-- one of my main concerns was establishing and maintaining the sort of atmosphere that I desired, that being one of inscrutability. I think that a puzzle map should feel, well, puzzling-- they should be about getting those who are found lost, not getting those who are lost found. There actually is one negative feedback mechanism designed to bring that about: higher-skill players sometimes solve #1 very quickly, and their success there in turn misleads them about what to expect from puzzle #2.

For the record, some of my testers were able to get up to level 4 with a few plays. Mind you, every puzzle is designed for a somewhat different thinking style: people who are good at things like #2 might have trouble with #4, while people who are good at #4 might be less suited to solving things like #2.


I think you underestimate the barriers to entry for many maps with mature communities. For some maps, the norm is for everyone else on the team to leave the moment that it becomes clear one of their allies is below the expected skill level, because a new player is nowhere near adequate, and is therefore a massive liability-- I think that's very different from an easy to learn game where a new player can jump right in and perform at at least a tolerable level. I agree that easy to learn, hard to master is a nice ideal-- but in practice, from what I observe, concerns of depth and replay value ultimately wind up leading to sacrifices on the "easy to learn" factor in many successful cases.


Well no, it wasn't-- that's not how I think contest maps should be made. I think contest maps should be made to be the best that they can be, and it is up to the contest judges, not the participant, to find accurate ways of assessing them given whatever limitations they might have on their personal time. Sometimes that might mean asking questions about the map's design, or even cracking it (if you can ) to look at the triggers. Designing the map around the testing format is like car makers tuning their products to perform better on EPA tests without actually having greater efficiency-- it indicates that there is an element of bullshit to the tests, not that the car makers are actually improving (since I just stipulated that part of the example was that they aren't). Designing a good system of testing means designing one that is as unbiased as possible, which is one where being "made to win the contest" is painstakingly eliminated as a factor in the results.

You could have allowed players who keep failing at a particular level to have more time to think about the level. Your goal in using soul to end the game was to deter players from guessing randomly and getting something right. This is noble in intent, although in practice it was a harsh punishment that deterred players from continuing to play. You also could have given players that keep losing subtle hints, as I said before, some people are just simply going to never solve certain puzzles.

That's true for games like Heroes of Newerth, but I don't really agree so with Brood War UMS maps, especially since there is no ladder.

The ideal situation would be one where the testers have near unlimited resources to complete the map. Since nobody is ever going to have this sort of capability without being paid to do so, the time judges have is going to be limited. This was a contest, and the maps submit to the contest should have been created to adhere to the original judging criteria.
Your map would cut off the players' focus by making them restart the entire map during the middle of gameplay. This made it near impossible for people to play with battlenet players, since most battlenet players will give up after 2-3 tries and losing. The map is obviously too hard for some people's taste (like the 7-8 people that were trying to help the judges by finishing), which resulted in an inability to finish the map. The map was fun until we got to the second level, where we were harshly punished by having to rehost and find new players to play with us.

P.S. We tried to crack the map in order to finish it, although it ended up with a corrupted mapfile with every unprotector we had.

It might depend on what sort of maps you play. I've found it to be very true with maps like Temple Siege, for instance.


There are definitely certain compromises in the map that resulted from attempts to solve certain design challenges. These were:
-The guessing problem: How do I keep people from making progress by trial and error without making the solutions massively complex?
-Involvement and tension: How do I make attempts at solutions emotionally important, such that the process of solving a puzzle is not something done casually, but with the player on the edge of his seat?

The idea behind a system of punishment is to solve both of these at once, by giving wrong answers a "weight" that they would not otherwise have. Compared to some of my previous maps, it is a very moderate punishment system-- my biggest map from when I was more heavily active, about 5-6 years ago, was designed with very heavy threats of sudden punishment and general panic-inducing factors, combined with a very high rate of actions in a competitive game, in order to induce an adrenaline rush. I still think that in theory, it should work...but it was so harsh, and sacrificed so much in order to be as extreme as it could, that to this day it has not seen a complete match. Compared to that map, the punishment in L37 is very tame, and likewise, the "unfriendliness" caused by those systems is much less...but even though the extent is less, the same sorts of drawbacks are still present. I'm really not sure what can be done to avoid them, and I'll admit-- this is probably a flaw with me, personally, as a game designer, and it does seem to impact my maps negatively.

But that is a separate issue from the judging issue, I think. I think that the dialogue model that Gidoza suggested could help overcome some of the drawbacks of the contest format, and it also would help with improving the maps (and the map-makers).

There's an important difference that should be made here between having to design a map in accordance with particular criteria to be encouraged (like adherence to the theme, fun factor, replayability, etc.)-- which I fully agree with-- and being made to design a map in accordance with the limitations of the judges-- which is problematic. It would be one thing if the theme for a particular week were "make the best map for a 30 minute, first-time game experience", but that wasn't the theme here: and while that might be interesting as a one-time thing, it shouldn't be appended to all the contests.


It's strange, but for some reason, the protection of the map wound up being a lot stronger than expected. It might have something to do with corruption that occurred during the map's production (for instance, text trigedit stopped being able to edit the map properly after about puzzle #3). That said, in my tests, I could get it open enough to see the triggers, though the process corrupted the terrain.

I didn't know that, as I don't play temple siege

The first problem: You make the players start the map over without making them rehost the map. This allows the players to keep a sense of progression. This sense of progression lies in that the players solved the previous puzzles already, and even though they are cast to the first puzzle, they can quickly get to where they were before. This will also inhibit players from guessing what to do, since once they do guess they immediately are put into the next level; it would be very hard to remember exactly what you did in this scenario. All of this lessens the harsh punishment of rehosting while helping to keep the player's interest by giving them a sense of accomplishment.

You could also add in a negative feedback mechanism such as more allotted time or hints. You could add on a specific amount of time on a certain level for each time the players fail at that level, and give a time cap. This way the players would have more time before their soul runs out on the levels they are having the hardest time on, thus lowering the severity of the punishment of restarting the map.

As to solve the second problem, I believe the punishment of restarting the map without rehosting is sufficient enough to keep the players on their toes the entire time. The time allot cap would also serve the purpose of making sure that the players don't get too much time to work on a certain level.

Instead of time allotted to the players, you could also have given a hint to the players after x amount of failures.

Yes there is a difference there. Although, we didn't play your map for 30 minutes. I played your map for many hours. You had some design issues that led to your map being unplayable. You received such a low score to due a single category of your map leading to the rest of the map being un-judgable. Since we couldn't crack the map, and couldn't spend weeks on end solving the puzzles, our only option was to do what we did.

That could work...I think if I were to be making a map of that sort again, I would seriously consider a "soft restart" mechanism instead of a "hard restart". Some of my decision to go for a "hard restart" was simply down to having a limited amount of time to work: it's much faster to use Blizzard's restarting system than to make my own, especially considering how much information the map keeps track of simply by not preserving certain triggers.


There's always the dialogue option...if you really wanted to know what the later levels were like, I could have even showed them to you using my testing copy with level-skipping features (actually, the level-skipping triggers are all present in the release version as well...I just deleted the control units).

I'll admit this much: I didn't expect #2 to be as much of a slaughter as it was. In fact, my initial classification system rated it at about a 5-6 (with #1 being a 3, and the meanest levels, like 5 and 6, in the 8-9 range). Each puzzle in the map is based on a different thinking style, though, and I may have overestimated the readiness with which people would be able to engage in the sort of thinking required for #2, that is, realizing that the directions could be a code instead of a hint.

In my map Recursion RPG, which now has a thread in this forum, uses a similar system. I originally derived it from The Legend of Zelda. The main form of progression in most, if not all, Zelda games is in the items that the player has. This allows for players who are bad at the game to run into a deadly situation, grab an item, die, and yet still make progression in the game. This also allows very skilled players to run through the game at a very fast pace. In Recursion RPG the form of progression lies in the knowledge the player has of the game as well as the items (Zelda also had progression be in the form of knowledge, but knowledge is more significant in my map due to it being so short), where if the player ends up having time reset, they still have a sense of progression throughout the game in the form of their obtained items.

I thought about asking you to give me an uprotected version, but, it isn't at all fair to judge a map that wasn't the submit map. It also isn't at all fair to communicate with the map makers about their map (within reason) before judgments are made, in order to keep bias to a minimum.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 1 2010, 10:06 am by CecilSunkure. Reason: Typo