Proposed amendment to Map Maker's Medallion distribution regulations

Should the Map Maker's Medallion be given to FIRST place winners of minicontests?

  • Yes (Please explain in thread why)

    Votes: 20 95.2%
  • No (Please explain in thread why)

    Votes: 1 4.8%

  • Total voters
    21

Fruity Snacks

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The Map Makers Medallion has been out now for well over 1.5 years. When I was first in correspondence with Valve about it, I had suggested to the rest of the staff at the time that the medal would be handed out to the Top 3 finishers of major mapping contests, and the first place winners of the "serious" minor contests; those "serious" minor contests being detailing contests and 72hr contests or any other ones deemed as such. Amongst the staff at the time, it was a hot topic and I wanted to expedite the process of getting the medal in-game, so I threw out the mini-contest bit, since no joint-decision could be made. Over a year and a half later, I'd like to bring forth this amendment to the rules of the medal, in the form of the public vote. I am not staff, nor do I have the ability to make this decision (technically), but I'm pretty sure if the community showed their views on this, things would happen.

So, what does the community think about this? I have attached a poll, but I'd like to hear some discussions about this. What do you (the community) think about giving it to the FIRST place winners of the mini-contests?

For more info on the Map Makers Medallion, you can check out this link.
 
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Idolon

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Feb 7, 2008
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On one hand, the medallions were intended for people who made significant contributions, and minor contests might not really be considered significant to the entire community, even if they earned that first place.

On the other hand, "were." TF2 has changed a lot in 1 1/2 years, and the medals are getting pretty damn rare. Last ones handed out, if I'm correct, were at the end of the MVM contest - almost half a year ago. Contests are few and far in between, and I wouldn't mind seeing more medallions getting handed out. It might also help for community outreach; I would guess that most players don't even know about the medallion.

I'm giving this one a yea.
 

Ælement

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Dec 21, 2010
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I'll say yes

While i appreciate my own medallion for it's rarity, i think anyone who has shown superior capability in mapping should be able to get their hands on it. Which means that winners of serious mini contests should also be rewarded.

Winning a major contest is a large undertaking, and while patience and persistence are two key values in a successful mapper, i feel like winning a minor contest also shows some qualities that should be recognized (that is, as long as there has actually been competition for the title.)

Could always just reward the one winner in minor contests, and keep rewarding the top 3's in the larger and more demanding major contests.
 

Egan

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Feb 14, 2010
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I agree with Harribo that "I think the major contests take a lot more effort often including just as much detailing as some of these minor contest entries have and would be unfair to major contest winners to put those on the same par." but I do think it has the potential to encourage participation enough in the minor contests to a point where it would be just as difficult to achieve a win with the many entries the minor contest would have.

I think it would be a good reward only if the minor contest exceeded 2x or more participants than what the major contest would garner. Like the MVM major contest had 7 entries, so if a minor contest could get around 15 (or more) participants (not just entries), then I would be open to having the medallion as the reward.
 

Fruity Snacks

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I think it would be a good reward only if the minor contest exceeded 2x or more participants than what the major contest would garner. Like the MVM major contest had 7 entries, so if a minor contest could get around 15 (or more) participants (not just entries), then I would be open to having the medallion as the reward.

This is an excellent point that I was going to bring up later on, but setting a base-participation limit would most-likely be necessary.
 

A Boojum Snark

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almost half a year ago. Contests are few and far in between
I really don't see six months as a long time in mapping. Valve guys might slam out a map in 3 months or less by way of more experience and rapid in-house feedback and constant playtesting, but that still isn't that quick. The rest of us would easily spend half a year on a map and usually more.

I think it would be a good reward only if the minor contest exceeded 2x or more participants than what the major contest would garner. Like the MVM major contest had 7 entries, so if a minor contest could get around 15 (or more) participants (not just entries), then I would be open to having the medallion as the reward.
This is one of the first things I thought about. IF it was going to happen, there would definitely need to be a minimum participation threshold for medals.


I haven't cast a vote in the poll yet, I'll mull it over, but I am leaning towards saying no.
I know I've been out of the "scene" for awhile now, but it feels like the minor contests are just too minor most of the time, at least in comparison to what it takes to make a full map. Minor contests have almost none of the playtesting and gameplay refinement, which is an enormous factor/burden in creating something normal.
There would probably also need to be a case-by-case consideration for whether or not a minor contest qualifies, even if it has a lot of participants. We tend to have some unusual/silly contests for which awarding a medal might seem insulting.

Speaking as someone who has a medal for artpass participation/resource pack, when the medal was finally implemented and I learned it was to be given out for major contest winners as well I really didn't feel like the artpass participation was a worthy reason for the award. I liked some of the clever things I did in it but it wasn't really up to snuff, I take much more pride in my pack (thanks again, Frozen).
Also having won two minor detailing contests... I don't think either of them would have been worthy of it either.

That all said, I'm not sure how much this would affect things either way. Doubling the handouts of an unknown and rare item would still leave it unknown and rare. Minor contests are easier to participate in so having a cosmetic award for it might help expand the community to other people and places, but I'm pretty blind as to how the outside community is these days.
Mapping is also still the hard job for people who really want to do it. The workshop and relative ease of getting models into the game has exploded the content creation community on that side from almost non-existent to far surpassing what the mappers ever had. More awards might be too little too late to have any meaningful effect in that regard.

Which would leave us back at "us"... would it just end up being more ways to congratulate each other? Not that that is a bad thing, per se, but things definitely seem to continue getting smaller around here.
...I've ran on a lot longer than I meant so I'll stop here.
 

Sel

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Feb 18, 2009
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Just glancing over the list of people who have one, there are plenty who I know for a fact aren't very good mappers, and a few I've never even heard of, so let's not try and act like this is some sacred special item. Give it away for any remotely good reason.
 

Idolon

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I really don't see six months as a long time in mapping. Valve guys might slam out a map in 3 months or less by way of more experience and rapid in-house feedback and constant playtesting, but that still isn't that quick. The rest of us would easily spend half a year on a map and usually more.
Very true! However, I meant more in comparison to the rest of the TF2 community - the last 6 months have seen two workshop content bundles as well as the Electric Boogaloo update (for those curious, ~130 items and 2 maps).

There's no point in trying to match the speed of the item workshop community, but I think it'd be great if we did more community outreach than we do now. Getting more people involved with the mapping community, even if it just means letting them know we exist, could lead to bigger and better things (hopefully a map workshop).
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Just glancing over the list of people who have one, there are plenty who I know for a fact aren't very good mappers, and a few I've never even heard of, so let's not try and act like this is some sacred special item. Give it away for any remotely good reason.

Yeah pretty much this. I'd like to see it get used as a sort of mappers' equivalent to the wiki cap or the community items, where they can be handed out to anyone the mapping community decides deserves one. Like, some of the better custom maps out there that never got put in the game and weren't made for a contest, those people should probably have one. And I guess anyone whose map made it into the game, even the ones we don't like.
 

Idolon

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Yeah pretty much this. I'd like to see it get used as a sort of mappers' equivalent to the wiki cap or the community items, where they can be handed out to anyone the mapping community decides deserves one. Like, some of the better custom maps out there that never got put in the game and weren't made for a contest, those people should probably have one. And I guess anyone whose map made it into the game, even the ones we don't like.

Maybe for people who have maps in the showcase?
 

Freyja

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Jul 31, 2009
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Maybe for people who have maps in the showcase?

I like this idea because there are so many really good, high quality maps that should deserve it, but weren't made for a contest. I get that they're supposed to be a prize for contests, but well, being handed out to every artpass participant kind of ruined that, in that way.
 

EArkham

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Aug 14, 2009
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Some good thoughts in the thread in general, especially from BoojamSnark, but I have to agree with Idolon and Aly that the showcase makes an excellent yardstick for measuring mapping quality. Ideally we want the medallion given out in recognition of a job well done, and we have far too few major contests these days.
 
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UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
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Sep 8, 2008
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Well, im a bit mixed on this aswel.

The showcase has a low number of maps and for that reason could be a worthy indication indeed. I however dont know how many with such medal are in there. And i still think that some map creators of some weird modes are going to be left out although they made something of high quality.

Still, the minor contests arent a bad idea. They still take some effort into being good, and its hard since you dont realy know who is going to win due to having alot of high quality contenders. If you win this its already an achievement to show that you are capable of doing all the required detailing on a large map. The #1 to me still deserves it.

Maybe it would be good to mention its origin on the medal as in a way of: "I created [mapname]" or "I won mapping art contest #". This way people can still see the way they earned it.
 

henke37

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Agreed, a small note about why would be great.
 

Harribo

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How do you people think we'd be able to do that exactly? If we wanted to have the medals say something different for what the people did to get it as a stock feature i.e. without renaming them each different description using name/description tags each item would need a unique id in TF2, which isn't going to happen. We could get the medal to be renameable which to be honest I don't know why it wasn't from the start but is probably the same reason it wasn't paintable from the start, because it was lazily implemented by Valve.

I also think this whole vote is stupid as the there are going to be more people in the community that do have the medal that don't and why would they not want more opportunities to do so, even if they thought it was a bad idea why would they deny themselves another opportunity to get one?

I think Egan's point on making sure any Official minor contests have to meet a legitimacy requirement for the contest to be eligible is a good idea. I don't believe it will bring in new people to the community, just putting ourselves out there for the rest of the community to see on a much more regular basis would do a much better job of that. Boojum makes my point much better that I raised in staff discussion of this that Egan quoted, Being 1st in a Minor Contest doesn't seem half as much work compared to the top 3 of any Major Contest, so why do we think rewarding them as such as good idea?

Sel's point of a fair few people having the medal that he's never heard of is all to do them being handed out for the artpass entries (which I would suspect Sel knows) which was the original reason this medal was created and so even though those people may not highlight our current intentions for this medal which is congratulating members of the community who have done outstanding work with their own maps and for the community, the medals given out to honour the medals original intention I feel particularly distracts from that.

I'll probably post more later
 

Fruity Snacks

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"Tons of people suggest using the Showcase as a way to hand out the medal"

I think this is a great idea. The amount of high-quality maps coming out of here is lower than when the medal was put in place and I think it'd be a great incentive for people to push for higher-quality maps. That being said, the showcase has sort of fallen into a state where if you finish a map and it looks okay, you can usually get it moved into the map. I'd like to see more involvement with the community, voting on which maps can get into the showcase and so on. Maybe a re-pass of all the maps there and re-judgement might not be a bad idea (just a suggestion).

"Lots of people suggesting the ability to change the description of their medal"
I'll poke around and see if this is possible. I'll report back when/if I find out.

"But Artpass people have it too, wouldn't we just be handing out more?!"
Yes, that is true, and it is still one of the least-owned items in the game. Last count was about 83. See this link for reason as to why Artpass people got it.

As I stated once before, one of the reasons I continued to pursue with the medal, and when the form of guidelines that was being put together the second time (as in, post-post-artpass), I tried to keep in mind that this was going to be visible on players, so naturally people were going to be like "whats that" and then boom, people mention TF2Maps.net Artpass, and you get some publicity for the site. Everyone likes attention too, so when people are like "Oh! What did you get that for? Thats so cool!" you get some attention and people like attention

Minor contests have some requirement
Sounds good to me (I agreed with this earlier)... The only issue is way down the road when this communities activity continues to die off to lower levels. Do we adjust numbers to keep handing out medals, or just drop it? Something to consider. Don't want to temporarily fix something then come back again a few years later when no one is here to argue about it.

I forgot half the stuff I was going to mention in this thread because I got interrupted half-way through writing it, but here's what I have for now.
 

A Boojum Snark

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If it was going to be a special recognition medal, as opposed to explicitly a prize, I suppose I could say yes to giving it out for notable minor contests. However giving it out for non-contest completed work (e.g. showcase suggestion) would still be a more meaningful thing than the minors.

On the showcase consideration, how happy is everyone with things that show up there? Is there anything people believe shouldn't be there, or should be but isn't? Glancing over the showcase now, I recognize the names of all but a few as being "active" members. Are there newer or less active authors overlooked somewhere in the workshop that really should be in the showcase? Opening it up to less concrete definitions (winners) brings the possibility of drama and necessary precautions and guidelines should be made. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that an audit of procedures should be done before the medal is opened up, so as to reduce potential problems if any are found to exist.

Further, if they are to be awarded for all high-quality work, they would almost become default/implied/pointless as major contest awards, as it would be likely that all three winners would be moved to the showcase as well as 4th 5th and more if there is a lot of quality entries.

Is the wiki cap handled well? How much of that decision is arbitrary versus numbers versus quality? I know it is an entirely different kind of criteria they need to use over there, but it wouldn't hurt to look at how another group handles a special recognition item.

So yeah, I guess I'd say yes to awarding it for more than major contests. What and how, I would leave up to others to determine since I don't feel involved enough to have a sturdy opinion.