jitspoe: If you made it optional for the admins to place the "good" maps on their servers, but made the rewards substantial enough, it wouldn't upset admins quite as much. It just seems like that's what makes people so against change, it's forced on them too suddenly and they retaliate. If done gradually, such changes would have a greater chance of being accepted and admins wouldn't feel forced into it. It's important they feel they still have control, which they would. Later on you could require a certain number of these maps on servers.
Perfectly stated...
Picasso: it's understandable for you to dislike this, as it would detract players from your servers. This is why I suggested it be used on a reward-based system, admins would then have to decide if they would like to please pub players whilst still getting their reward. Now, what you're worried about is that you will lose a large player base on your servers. If all of the servers have the same selection of maps, they will still be able to make decisions to try and get better maps than other servers and therefore gain more popularity. It won't be like this map review board would say something like "Picasso, you have to put this, this, and this map on your rotation, or we will do it(..)", instead there would be a list of maps of which you could make your decision.
The "Reward" is having the servers FULL to begin with. A reward for having maps that are approved by a small minority, or committee as you put it, won't make me feel as good as having full servers.
I just gave you an example with "The Great Maplist Vote 2006" how maplists that are voted upon by a minority of the DP player base don't seem to be appealing to the majority of the current DP community. I've also explained that changing over to such a list has basically made $1,200+ a year servers useless as they have been nowhere near as populated as they were prior to the change.
We're trying to keep crappy maps out of pub, that's never going to happen if something like this isn't created. And look at it this way, Graffiti's population will most likely increase because everyone else will have to choose from those maps as well, you guys can always overcome other servers by allowing special settings and such.
Again, each individual has maps they might think are "crappy" and it's impossible to please everyone. It doesn't seem fair to shrink the variety of maps that have been created over the years by so many creative mappers down to a smaller list created by a small "Seal of Approval" committee of a few old players.
Again, I refer you to the example with the afore mentioned maplist vote. Only a small percentage of the community took part in the vote just like your proposed committee. The rest either didn't care or had no knowledge of the vote.
I made the change and GRaFFiTi's population decreased substantially.
Now, you say that only a tiny percentage of people like decent maps. What if newbies haven't been exposed to enough good maps to truly decide they hate all maps of this category? And yes, the game is dominated by newbies, but most of them like the old rotations better because those were the first of which they were exposed. I know I love crates and a bunch of other cruddy maps. Why? They were the first I ever played, they were the first that got me addicted to the game.
You mis quoted me... I never said "only a tiny percentage of people like decent maps" I said "As demonstrated by those who voted in the "Great Maplist Vote of 2006", users of this forum and those who voted are only a tiny percentage of the DP user base." Huge difference...
Again, the reason NOT to limit the variety is that there are many many more differing opinions of what a good or bad map is than the opinion of a few on a tiny committee. The likes and dislikes change all the time therefore it is up to the server owner to make changes according to what the population of their servers desires. There's also already an in-game voting system in place that we can utilize if we so choose.
Better yet, more newbies need to take an active role in saying what they like in maps (not just what maps they like) and why, then a compromise could be made and some of these elements could be integrated into newer maps. Or perhaps admins would be allowed a certain number of "other" maps outside the list, the possibilities are endless.
No game can improve or progress if it's designer doesn't receive input from it's users but you can't really touch the entire community base and come up with a list of maps that meets EVERYONE's approval based on the results of only the few who might give input as demonstrated with the "Great Maplist Vote" already mentioned.
Again you're denying a huge variety of maps that might seem like awesome maps to someone else. The more you take away from the game, the more boring it becomes.
I have no problem with a committee evaluating a map and putting a "Great Seal Of Approval" stamp on it. Those maps can still act as guidelines or models for future maps and server owners can choose to add them to their maplists. Variety and choice are what make a game as far as I'm concerned and when you start taking the choices away and forcing limits or taking away something that someone else worked very hard on, it's very discouraging.
Why deny newer users the fun of seeing all the 100's of different map creations. Each map is some individual's work of art whether a few of you disagree or not.
These changes would need to be very gradual, oh, and Pimp's map rating system could come into full use with this too, as it hasn't been used as much as it could be.
Nothing wrong with a rating system but some of the above mentioned changes would be very destructive to the game.
