Vote maps off

[Karsten75]

Craigslist does this with posts - not always well, but overall it does work.

I propose that if a map gets 10 straight 1-star votes and only one better vote (to allow for the owner voting on his own map) and the map has no scores posted at that time, the map be deleted from the map inventory. That way the impossible maps can be voted off by the community.

[SPIFFEN]

Hmm this might delete good maps , if the map gets bad votes .
So if your unlucky there might be 15 newbees that wote an map out of the game ,
before someone even manage to play it an post an score .

Maybe it should be an report button on the map ,
so those in charge can see if the map should be deleted or not .

[Karsten75]

SPIFFEN, have you looked at voting and score recording patterns before you wrote that? Very few maps even get 10 votes. Even fewer get it without any score being posted. If the map author posts a score, then his map is safe.

Making the community take charge to weed out maps that cannot be won over time is a good thing IMHO.

[Katra]

How about a sticky 'Report unwinnable maps' thread on the forum?

[Sqaz]

Can't Virgil or one of the mods delete the unwinnable maps from the custom map page, that would be a lot easier than some kind of voting system.

[Karsten75]

How about a sticky 'Report unwinnable maps' thread on the forum?

Because not every report will be true or correct. The actual map scores is a true reflection on whether a map can be beaten or not. By the time the map has gotten 10 1-star ratings and not one score has been recorded, then it is pretty clear that the map is not winnable.

Go look at the maps out there. Hardly any map has gotten 10 votes. So it will mean a lot of players will have to play the map and vote 1-star for not winnable.

That beats a lot of chit-chat on the forum - "Map xyz is unwinnable!" "No, I just beat it.", and whatever else discussion goes along with that.

I remember a long time back (3 months ha-ha) I thought Gump could not be beat and posted that here on the forums. In fact that is why I came to the forums the first time.

Can't Virgil or one of the mods delete the unwinnable maps from the custom map page, that would be a lot easier than some kind of voting system.

But they first have to find and identify the maps. That is why voting or some way to identify those maps are necessary, I think.

ATM only Virgil can manually delete maps. If we ask that of him a lot it wastes his time that he could be spending on creating the expansion pack and CW2. I'd rather he does that.

[Sqaz]

Because not every report will be true or correct. The actual map scores is a true reflection on whether a map can be beaten or not. By the time the map has gotten 10 1-star ratings and not one score has been recorded, then it is pretty clear that the map is not winnable.

Go look at the maps out there. Hardly any map has gotten 10 votes. So it will mean a lot of players will have to play the map and vote 1-star for not winnable.

That beats a lot of chit-chat on the forum - "Map xyz is unwinnable!" "No, I just beat it.", and whatever else discussion goes along with that.

I remember a long time back (3 months ha-ha) I thought Gump could not be beat and posted that here on the forums. In fact that is why I came to the forums the first time.

With most maps the problem isn't the difficulty but mostly the wrong use of crazonium wall, unreachable totems, survival pods that are directly destroyed, actually things that should already have been detected before the maps are uploaded.

Another possibility would be to force every author to first get a score on his own map, this would also make sure every map is tested.

[Karsten75]

Because not every report will be true or correct. The actual map scores is a true reflection on whether a map can be beaten or not. By the time the map has gotten 10 1-star ratings and not one score has been recorded, then it is pretty clear that the map is not winnable.

Go look at the maps out there. Hardly any map has gotten 10 votes. So it will mean a lot of players will have to play the map and vote 1-star for not winnable.

That beats a lot of chit-chat on the forum - "Map xyz is unwinnable!" "No, I just beat it.", and whatever else discussion goes along with that.

I remember a long time back (3 months ha-ha) I thought Gump could not be beat and posted that here on the forums. In fact that is why I came to the forums the first time.

With most maps the problem isn't the difficulty but mostly the wrong use of crazonium wall, unreachable totems, survival pods that are directly destroyed, actually things that should already have been detected before the maps are uploaded.

Another possibility would be to force every author to first get a score on his own map, this would also make sure every map is tested.

I was merely using difficulty as an example of why a map is not winnable. Mostly I filter out maps where you cannot reach all the totems, etc.  The map that probably frustrates most people now is this map. I thought that there was perhaps a trick in winning it that I could just not spot, so I didn't reject it, but let it through. Also, if it is a survival pod that is destroyed, then I let it through, since there is a possibility that I might have missed a special technique to save the pod.

These types of things really should not be a single person's judgment, but is better decided by the community that includes a number of players that are far better skilled than me. That is why I am proposing a voting system.  Obvious errors I can filter out, but "tricks" I may just not be able to figure out. Here is a good example of a map I simply cannot win, although a number of people have beaten it handsomely.

OTOH, I also initially leaned towards the requirement that a map author posts a score for their map (here, for instance). I believe I also asked in another thread which I cannot find now and that was the reason Virgil added that clause to the upload page.  But I have since changed my mind for two reasons.

First is that sometimes idiots make a map they think is unbeatable  and they post it, only for the community to pwn the map in  a few minutes - that is too much fun to just cut them off.

Second  is that some good map builders are perhaps not the best map players and they build good fun maps  that the elite players here enjoy as a challenge.

[C10B]

Unfortunately the whole "share your map" thing is becoming more useless by the day.

1) Firstly they should ban all school kids. Honestly, the quality of most levels submitted are awful.
2) They should only allow 1 upload per person per week to prevent spamming of maps by people like SPIFFEN. Although point 1 should clear that up already.
3) Multiple versions of the same maps but with slight tweaks should be barred. It's annoying.
4) And most importantly, a map should remain invisible from the general public until the author has successfully submitted a score. This would remove most of GORGON's maps from cluttering up the screen and wasting everyone's time.

Other harsher methods might include...

a) Charging for a developer kit. This will help weed out the idiots.
b) When submitting a score, a comment should be mandatory.

Virgil can help...

x) The CW team should look through the submitted maps and try to find a nice collection of maps to put on a new page called "the best of the submissions".

Until any of this happens, the upload page will get worse and worse.

[Sqaz]

The only thing that will help is to force everyone to post a score on there maps (as the banning things are way to subjective).

Second  is that some good map builders are perhaps not the best map players and they build good fun maps  that the elite players here enjoy as a challenge.

And to make a good map you must really have played it. That's the only way of knowing whether your map is good, unbeatable or to easy.

[Xylnalya]

To be honest, I never submitted a single score for one of my own maps, yet, I'd claim to be at least an average mapmaker with decent output. Some people may say "who's that?" or "yeah, she's right" - with a large community it's pretty hard to determine whether that guy should be allowed to upload maps or not.
It's Virgil's choice, but a general "you must upload a score" wouldn't get the kiddys away, it'd just take a week for someone to code a script which wins the map for you by altering game values. One FTP server later you'll just have banned all the honest ones or those that can't stand playing their own map after testing it a quadrillion times (which would include me).

As far as the current voting system goes: You can vote once per IP. It's nice to have those shiny stars under your map, sure, but this isn't a very good system. I just press a button and WHOOP new IP, new vote. Every schoolkid knows such things nowadays.
The best way to determine whether a map's good or not would, in my opinion, be a test by the admins. Currently, only Karsten and Virgil himself can publicate maps - It'd be a simply too large amount of maps for them to play through. In order to go through with this solution we (or rather he, Virgil) would need a dozen moderators; And I think there's a pretty good reason he has for not doing so, or we'd have that by now.

Regards,
Xyl

[Sqaz]

Well, the purpose of the required scores would be to make everyone test there own maps, and I can't believe you didn't test your Fenris maps a lot of times, so maybe an auto-score-uploading thing on the launch custom map option, so you wouldn't have to play the map you're going to upload more than one time, would help.

Or you can just hope the message on the uploading page that says "All maps must be tested before submitting them" will stop people from uploading crappy bad made maps, but unfortunatly that will never happen.

Or maybe the easiest option would be to just ignore the bad maps and place a comment that the map is impossible/bad/extremely trivial so nobody except the poster will waste time on the map.

EDIT: And about those kiddys, I don't think anyone would waste their time on building a score altering program just to post some crappy maps that the community will hate.
This also counts for the remaking of an IP, as nobody(or I atleast don't) watches the score of a map, but watches the comments and scores.

[Xylnalya]

I do test them - but not once I'm done with it. We can't post a score out of our editorial test runs, so they all remain scoreless ^^

A post and/or comment should be out of question - there are enough people trolling or simply whining after their first game, but this has all been said in the posts up there~

*edit*
It just requires a troll with flash coding 'sk7llzZz' to do that, or a little frustrated mapmaker that had his map deleted due to one or two unpleasent trolled comments. Haxing a flashgame is pretty easy - If you know some hexadecimal you could just use a general program to change the values.
That a mapmaker wants his/her map to have 5 stars is pretty easy to understand - and if the mapmaker gets bored he'll just change his IP, especially if there's a system deleting maps with 10 bad votes. Kids are like that, trust me XD

[SPIFFEN]

If players comments the map ,
it should be easy to see if you want to play that map .

So if players comments that it's an bad map ,
everyone will know it is an bad map .

So if everyone does comments the map they have played ,
it would be easyier to get an idea of how good that map is .

[Sqaz]

A post and/or comment should be out of question - there are enough people trolling or simply whining after their first game, but this has all been said in the posts up there~

That's why there are names below the comments  :).
I'd trust a comment of Siccles more than ten comments of some people I've never heard of.

And if hacking is so easy why isn't there anyone with a 10000 on every story map (but since I know nothing about coding that'll probably has a very good reason)

So maybe Virgil or Karsten could post a comment or such if they weren't able to complete a map (but think there might still be a solution) , or say it if a map can never be lost (eg. only 1 intensity emitters that are 1 lvl lower than Odin City).