Maybe I am somehow strange, but I have taken part in some contests and I have never came to people organizing the contest after it started and said 'hey, could you change rules/conditions/anything so I can do better/contest is better?'.
Perhaps because such contests were well prepared, thought out and also didn't require the use of a seemingly
arbitrary constant picked by a third party.
Some track designs aren't used because they wont work well and you can simulate this potential to fail or succeed in your head. That's how you come to your eventual decision on paper and create your final appropriate design in Hammer. You base a track off of potential balance and performance.
This contest was supposed to be about
increased creactivity, creating maps that could
vary despite a focal constant; and the track provided limits creativity in almost every aspect of significant potential variance. The track should have been designed to offer a large amount of freedom but instead it does the opposite and the reason we are given is "it's supposed to be a challange" despite the fact that such a point is counter intuitive to the primary concept of the contest.
These were my legitimate concerns about the layout:
Variation limit 1:
This long length of track forces the requirement of a solid structure imposed at this location. Anything other than the use of some solid geometry will either be a significant sniper/demo-jumping issue or performance hit. It's within the mappers own interest to do this, we will see a lot of it.
Variation limit 2:
The proximity of start and end force a resolution of effective spawns to default to these locations. Anything else compromises the significance of the start or final locations which should be the most significant and epic portions of the map. Alternatives are possible but generally inferior. You will not see a blu spawn on the right and probably not on the left because it makes the low ground redundant; but the lack of options might force this possibility anyway.
Variation limit 3:
The particularly linear portion of track here exposes a lot of the length of the map, anyone concerned with performance, regardless of gameplay, will be forced to make amends at either or both of these locations.
Variation limit 4:
I re-iterate the issue above. Anyone concerned over LoS will be forced to make ammends at this corner; particularly if they havn't created solid geomtry from the first image.
Also i have DoDS.
P.S. This post wasn't intended to continue the debate on changing the track, i was merely explaining my reasoning for disliking this particular track design as people seemed to think i was just hatin' for the sake of personal preference.
