Redoing at the Gameday Rules?

[Seba]

Wasn't it 20 minutes/map before? If so, I don't know why it was changed to 30; 20 per normal map, 15 per arena/orphaned stage is fine.

Officer-only uploads outside of gamedays were established to provide a larger incentive for buying veep, and I don't think that should change, at least not now. Yesterday drp mentioned in chat that the servers went up in price 50%, and IIRC he had to pay out of his own pocket for TF2M stuff more than once. Pay for veep, get the ability to upload your own maps; otherwise, wait till gameday or ask an officer (who isn't Rexy, ofc).

I seem to remember that there was a rule a while back stating that an author couldn't get his map(s) tested more than once a week in gamedays, no matter if it was the same map or a couple of different ones. I think if this was changed to, say, four days, it'd be fine.

 

[grazr]

CTF/KoTH are 20, Arena is 15, the rest is 30. I'm not sure why you'd wanna change this, it's fairly standard for "normal" servers to run 30 minutes/6 complete round games.

 

[LeSwordfish]

Plus, dropping map times simply means people will resubmit maps. Rather than trying to get into one every so often, theyll try for several after another. The advantage still remains with the people who idle in chat and refresh the events page. Plus, when you DO get into a test, you get 1/3 less time.

 

[Seba]

30 minutes usually seems like a very long time when we're playing a map and its issues become obvious within the first five minutes. If it stays as 30, I wouldn't mind though - it's only some of the maps that get me complaining about the timelimit.

 

[Godslayer57]

I feel that 30 minutes for any map is slightly too long. Think about this. 25 minutes is a more reasoable time as it is short and more importantly in a 3hour test it allows another map to be added. As if all maps are 'other' the total time and mapcount would be limited 6 30 minute maps can take up an entire gameday, another reason is that by taking 5 minutes of each total map time there is less chance of people leaving during gameday due to bordom. 25*6 is 150 minutes or 2 hours and 30 minutes which would still allow 30 minutes for more maps etc.

 

[honeymustard]

Pubs are playing to have fun, so 30 min is fine, but we're trying to find problems with the map, and usually by the 20th minute and onwards, the problems have been found and are just being repeated over and over, which causes people to get mad and some to leave.

 

[grazr]

If a map has issues that causes the server to leak players just skip the map. It's better for the other maps this way and it's fair so long as you report it to the author so he can redeem those issues.

 

[VelvetFistIronGlove]

Honeymustard, I think you misunderstand the purpose of playtesting. We're not "testing to find problems", at least not the problems that will be evident in a single 20 minute session. The problems you'll find that way are the obvious, uninteresting problems: misaligned textures, a vis mistake or two, maybe a spawn room lacking a func_respawnroom. These are very useful things to find, but they're not what's vital about playtesting.

What is important is the "flow" of the map. Timing of cap points, positioning and amount of healthpacks. Distances between important areas. Ease of defence/assault. Whether people habitually go the wrong way at a junction even after they've learned the layout. These aren't generally things you can tell from a single playtest, let alone the first 10-15 minutes with players who haven't seen the map before. It's too small a sample size.

This is also what makes demo recordings immensely valuable. By observing players over multiple sessions you can get a much better answer to many of these questions. I'm not suggesting that we extend the 30-minute session: that would just lead to player fatigue. But I am saying we need to have more testing of any map (here and elsewhere).

Impromptus are the best answer so far within the tf2maps community. The only real drawback is that you rarely get players for it just from chat, without a Steam announcement. For a short period after VIP was brought in, all VIPs were made admins of the tf2maps Steam group so they could put up announcements for impromptus. Not surprisingly, some idiot abused this and started spamming other announcements, and so we lost the ability.

I don't have the time regularly to run gamedays, but I'd certainly run impromptus more often if I could announce it and thus get players in. I'd even do this if I didn't have a map of my own to test but just felt like playing some, since the TF2Maps community is one I usually enjoy playing TF2 with.

 

[Okrag]

The map tests are closer to 25 minutes anyway because if a round ends within the last five minutes of the map it switches.

 

[honeymustard]

No shit, but those problems still are apparent within 20 minutes, in my experience, at least (from watching STV demos of my maps).