fin said:
But the people making these maps, the community, would be even more incentivised if they seen some fruits of their, and your labour. This could help the quality of community maps. At the start there will probably be some stinkers. But if it gets people playing Halo more, that the goal right?
Yes and no. There are people who make content specifically because they want/expect some kind of reward for it. That reward could be recon, internet-fame, a handjob from Urk, some form of personal recognition.
The reality of it though is that even that doesn't make someone a good designer. Just a busier one. How many people do you think believe they can get recon if their screenshots are put on Bungie Favorites, and how many of those people do you think message me on a daily basis with their screenshots, and how many of
that group of people actually take quality screenshots? You've met the internet, so I'm sure you can do the math.
Ultimately, this is a situation I blame myself on. I'd have loved to have spent more time with Foundry, for example, producing some different maps and giving people some frame of reference. Sure, people might've scoffed because I didn't merge two boxes, or because "omg he used rockets in Foundry map is for nubs lawl," but the people that have potential to make quality maps would have a frame some frames of reference for how to place spawns, respawn zones, and how to use these in conjunction with objectives and item placement to direct movement through a map. I have a plan to rectify this, but it will be some time before that plan is exacted upon the world. Until then, I have Atlas, which allows me to provide some direct feedback, make clear my expectations, and at the same time, provide the community a place that is clique-agnostic to post their maps without having to worry about being told my someone that their map is inferior because it doesn't use the right assortment of tricks. For now, I hope that the combination of Atlas' guidelines and my own feedback (which I leave in threads on the forum) helps give people an idea as to the standard I hold map submissions up to.
I dunno what I'm trying to say, I just want new maps. Broken record, I know, I'm thinking about deleting this post...but what the hey?
I hear you. At least you know they're coming, right?
Domino Theory said:
Hey, I have a crazy proposal. How about you select a few groups (preferrably groups that have already been on Bungie Favorites such as ourselves) and have said groups compile a bunch of Objective maps and give them to the organizer (if referring to our group, then that'd be me) and then have said organizer submit those maps to you?
To me, that'd be a lot easier than creating one group and have the random people in that group submit theirs maps. So it would be you telling the other groups "Hey W, X, Y, and Z, I want you guys to tell your group members to submit their Objective maps to you, then you'll submit them to me."
It'd really be a shame to let this temporary CTF playlist idea go.
It's been brought up, but ultimately it's not easier for me because, frankly, I don't feel there's a group I can trust with such a task. A similar experiment was done with Halo 2. Make a playlist dedicated to community-made gametypes, and give it to a different group after a given period to populate how they'd like to do it. The result was mostly a goat rodeo, and I believe the playlist died after the second or third group to have a stake in it. The players didn't like the list, the groups had trouble adding value to the list or making it particularly different. We had three or four groups that we didn't even get to because their gametypes were all virtually the same, yet those same gametypes already existed in similar form in Matchmaking in hoppers that were not doing well.
On top of considering community specific issues, I also have to keep in mind that, hey, Team Objective, which is almost 40% CTF gametypes, is not doing well. As Eazy pointed out, taking a couple objective gametypes out of the lineup might not necessarily make the playlist MORE popular. The risk involved in making longer-than-a-weekend objective hopper while an established hopper is struggling is pretty apparent, imo. I'd rather prioritize ensuring that the full time playlists are solid before adding extra timed playlists that may end up being redundant. Like, imagine if right before RBTB retired had I added a RBTB double EXP playlist that occurred every weekend? It would have done more harm than good to the full time playlist which was on its last legs to begin with.
TO is an interesting quandry. It's hard to identify what exactly the problem is, outside of the fact that most people just want to play slayer. Ask different people, get different answers. Ask Luke, for example, and he'll complain that certain gametypes (that are not, and have never been in the hopper to begin with) need to be removed. Further, those same gametypes are in the social version of that hopper, which is doing just fine.
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