Valve Acceptance vs. Community Acceptance

[Seba]

Charging for maps is a terribad solution. As WolfKit said, servers would use the previous versions of maps and it would just be a dick move towards the server owners; it would be even more expensive to run servers and it would turn into Valve forcing others to support the authors instead of supporting them themselves.

 

[henke37]

I didn't say that it was a good idea. In fact, I think that it is a terrible idea. But there isn't much else to do. The map stamps obviously isn't doing a lot and the lump sums start to feel empty after a while.

 

[xzzy]

What it needs is an MvM style matchmaking. You buy a ticket to get into some kind of ranked competitive mode to play on new custom maps. A portion of ticket sales go to the map makers, and winning the games gives access to hats (because everyone loves paying money for hats, they'll never realize they're paying money for maps).

Or even dividing a portion of key sales out to map makers could work.

 

[tyler]

What it needs is an MvM style matchmaking. You buy a ticket to get into some kind of ranked competitive mode to play on new custom maps. A portion of ticket sales go to the map makers, and winning the games gives access to hats (because everyone loves paying money for hats, they'll never realize they're paying money for maps).

Or even dividing a portion of key sales out to map makers could work.

email valve about ranked matches on custom maps for $$$ please, thanks in advance

 

[Sergis]

lets make models work for us


pay 5$, get double the droprate on Zinkenite for a week

pay 10$, get triple the hatchance on Antiquity

etc etc etc

 

[WolfKit]

With an mvm map, you could probably get a portion of ticket sales.

 

[nightwatch]

With an mvm map, you could probably get a portion of ticket sales.

I can see Valve being really happy about an arrangement like that. If a portion was a nickel.

 

[WolfKit]

I can see Valve being really happy about an arrangement like that. If a portion was a nickel.

Probably still more than stamp sales.

 

[Randdalf]

To add to this, I emailed Valve twice about Chasm and never got any response, guess they didn't like it. I think it is slightly odd that they have gone virtually completely silent on community maps. The last one to be released was koth_king, but that was developed with Valve and not in public. So the last grassroots release was Gullywash which is more than a year ago now. I haven't had the time to work on maps because of university work and so I kind of only come here intermittently now, but it does feel as though there has been a kind of downturn in custom mapping fortunes ever since MvM was released.

I do think Valve are still interested in community maps, they even provided an example map in the SDK for MvM when it came out, but I don't think there have been any custom MvM maps of note. Obviously though there's the new contest, so that should change in future. Special Delivery was pretty much a disaster of a game mode, nobody's really touched that since it came out.

I am really flabbergasted as to why they haven't opened a map workshop yet, it would really help reinvigorate the mapping community, especially if Valve provided some kind of financial incentives in-line with what item creaters make. Though other people have said here that they are working on that, stamps haven't really worked as planned, so it's kind of a sticky situation. They could certainly do a paid-by-played scheme for MvM maps, given the tour of duty system, but for other game modes? I don't think it really works out.

I think your best hope of getting a map in the game at this point is to make a MvM map, since it seems to be where Valve is focusing their attention at the moment. I don't personally think that MvM is as shit hot as it's made out to be, you don't form communities on 6-player MvM servers, that's for certain, but it's the newest thing in TF2 right now.

Added new checkout dialogs and taunt-activated effect to raise awareness for Community Map Stamps

Anyone know what this is? Was in the most recent update. Seems like they added some strange parts for each map as well.

 

[Crash]

They added filters for strange weapons so the weapons only track on the custom map you bought the filter for. I wonder if they are going to get much use. I bet all the proceeds for these will go to mappers though.

Either way, it sounds like they are trying to get people to be loyal to their favorite community maps, which is a good sign!

 

[Fish 2.0]

To add to this, I emailed Valve twice about Chasm and never got any response, guess they didn't like it. I think it is slightly odd that they have gone virtually completely silent on community maps.

They could at least reply "no"

 

[WarmHandSanitizer]

you know what would be cool? A stat that tracked the number of global kills on each map.
i.e. "Hale's own koth_lakeside: 27,980,633,022 kills"

 

[tyler]

Maybe some kind of strange filter?

 

[Crash]

Nah they'd never add that.

 

[Harribo]

a customisable strange filter would be nice where it lets you input the full map filename into the filter and use it on that map version only could also be a great way for them to help find out what custom map are 'trending' so they can have a look at them and see if they might want to add it to the game officially.

 

[GPuzzle]

cp_orange will dominate.

 

[Harribo]

cp_orange will dominate.

I think you underestimate how many people play achievement_idle as a legit map. That's all kinda besides the point though, there not going to blindly add maps in as a direct result of it.

 

[GPuzzle]

I think you underestimate how many people play achievement_idle as a legit map. That's all kinda besides the point though, there not going to blindly add maps in as a direct result of it.

Oh crap, I forgot about achievement_idle!

 

[Micnax]

...who the heck MADE achievement_idle anyway? I'm genuinely interested.

 

[GPuzzle]

I think it was advertised on the (fake) Mechanical Engineer Update. But it was a joke map, the name of the mapper wasn't there, and there was a download link.