Map Battles - Suggestions

[cdxx]

how bout a military power / world war III / nuclear aftermathish theme?
considering there's probably 100's of ICBM's pointed at N.Korea now it may not be to far off from reality.

that or with all these celebrity deaths, why not do a dismal death theme. that can be pretty broad but that's good right? leave it up to ones interpretation.

[nub]

Pillars of Creation? Probably the most incredible discovery in space ever made. The picture below is REAL, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995:


Original image is HUGE!

Anything that resembles them, symbolically and/or physically, would make a good map battle if you ask me. Here's some scientific info regarding the Pillars of Creation:

Linkzorz

[Sacul15]

That's pretty cool. I think a more general "Creation" theme would be easier.

Would it be possible to have two map battles going at one time? So when one is about half-way done, start a new one. That way the competitions would work better in terms of people's time schedules, as well as allow people to have a greater number of options for entering battles. Sometimes I have the time to enter a competition, but I'm not very inspired by the theme, or vice-versa.

[nub]

Yeah but generalizing the theme waters down the challenge itself. I think that the battles are becoming drier over time due to the fact that we're simply mapping a theme. This current battle is proving more interesting than the previous battles since the theme isn't "torture", but a more specific idea that deals with torture (and that idea being the ministry of love). Nevertheless, I think we should take into account more things than just a theme.


The problem with two map battles is that it's way harder to manage two at a time, and 904 is the only one handling the battles currently. Unless they hire another staff member to help manage it, I think that we'll be sticking to one battle at a time.

[904]

@Sacul15: I felt this way in the past as well. But I don't want to start a map battle and then when we're two weeks in it, start another, only to find out that people like the second one better and drop out of the first one. And have that process continue on and on. (which could happen..)

As you might have noticed, I'm trying to get a schedule going, last few battles started at the first of the month, taking about 3 weeks, with a week for voting. I've been pondering on how to incorporate the art battles into the schedule, while maintaining a good rythm.
I thought of 2 options:

• an art battle alongside a map battle: with the art battle starting somewhere around the 10th of the month, taking a week, add a few days for voting and be finished a few days before the map battle is taken to a vote. Drawback is that the art battle takes away the attention from the map battle
• art battle right after a map battle: do an art battle while the map battle is put to a vote, so that there's always some battle to take part in.

I haven't made up my mind yet, but the last one seems like a good compromise. Any thoughts?

[MaK]

I agree that the current map battle themes have been kind of overused at this point, with a couple being an exception. Themes like this "Ministry of Love" are good because it's horror, but are also too easy and much like other usual battles with grungy, dirty environments. The thing about this current battle is that most of the submissions are going to be small scale, one room scenes. There's also guaranteed to be blood in every one. Don't get me wrong I like this stuff, but I've seen it before, and I can't imagine this pushing the limits of anything or being a challenge for anybody to create a scene for.

And with that being, I do have to say 904 is doing a good job keeping the flow of map battles going right after another, and listening to our suggestions.

[Zipfinator]

Maybe we should go to more general themes that can sprout away from the grungy stuff that everyone does like new age space station or something. Anyone who makes a grungy new space station would be disqualified!

[vcool]

MaK - any theme can be boiled down to something simple and generic. I can see the majority of entries for the current map battle will be just old grungy run-down rooms with a seat in the middle, but that is why you have to think outside the box.

I am certainly not making a room. Not at all.

[904]

The most time consuming and difficult aspect of these battles is thinking of a theme and trying to establish wether it would appeal to a majority of entrants. And you guys just show how difficult it can be. At one hand nub says that generalizing waters it down and Zipfinator says that if you keep it generic, it can go in more directions. And if you go back in this thread, you see the same discussion over again (that's not a bad thing though, it gives me good insight into what people want). But it's very difficult to find that spot somewhere in the middle.

F.i. the port battle: I took some old suggestions, such as wet, underwater, pool. And started thinking about how I could make that a bit more specific, but with enough freedom to expand on it. I first landed on 'wetlands', but that is very limiting and not unfamiliar in the HL2 universe, so as far as I'm concerned that was a no go. At that point I was already thinking about going an entirely different direction. Then someone suggested docks, which in turn made me think of port, which fit in to my original thought of water, while being broad enough to become a nice cosy little town, or an immense port like Rotterdam. And it even allowed expansion into air & space.

The difficulty is, that I can't really tell if the theme will be received well, until I post it

[Major Banter]

Rather than debating the point, here are some nice vague ones

and anyway, you've used one of mine before, so sit up and listen

Agony
Fear
Wretched
Curiousity
Hope
Grace (or fallen from)
Frontier
Intelligence
Future
Exclamation!
Past
Hobby
Interest

[joe_rogers_11155]

why dont everybody try to make the coolest map of XEN evar using hammer? Valve hasn't made any Xen textures and that's the ONE place everybody has been waiting to see them create (whether you would say so or not), so what if we all just put these abstract ideas on hold...and create the most boss-est Xen map evAr?

[stoopdapoop]

why dont everybody try to make the coolest map of XEN evar using hammer? Valve hasn't made any Xen textures and that's the ONE place everybody has been waiting to see them create (whether you would say so or not), so what if we all just put these abstract ideas on hold...and create the most boss-est Xen map evAr?

I'll participate in this, I need to make at least parts of Xen anyway Might as well start early

[nub]

Just a possible idea to sync art, model, and map battles fluently:

Take your time and decide on a good theme, then hold all 3 challenges (art, map, and model) at the same time using the same theme.


I don't know if that's a good idea or not, but I think it might be an efficient way of keeping on track with all the challenges and keeping them on the same schedule.

A problem in doing this is deciding on a theme that will work for all challenges. Any theme regarding map battles will most likely work fine with art challenges, but time-span is a whole different ball game (And this goes for model challenges as well). The problem with syncing art and model challenges with map battles is the generally short time-span. I think that the only way you could make a 20+ day time span for art and model challenges is to come up with a hard-ass theme to portray, and make limits for the model challenge (such as a poly limit).


But anyway, I just thought I would toss that idea out there.

[Sacul15]

That could be fun, if only for one battle(s). Problem is, a model battle theme such as "furniture" would never make a good map battle for instance, so the possibilities would be greatly limited. For that reason, I don't think it would be a good idea to make that a trend, but it could work out well if it were a sort of special battle.

[nub]

How about 2 or 3 different themes that are related? That's complicated as well, but that solves the incompatibility issue.