Edit: summed up version: "Qualify the audience's credibility via skills, personality, understanding, taste etc. and apply it to what you can take out of their criticism."
Yea, cc can sometimes nullify a map's magical powers. But if you seek to better yourself, you should learn to handle it.
In taking cc you usually want to qualify the audience and understand where they are coming from. A random hl player "not mapper". An experienced mapper. Someone with tons of skill, etc. Do they understand what they are talking about.
Then understand that they may not understand reasons you chose to do certain things. If they comment on things you think they don't understand why you did. Explain yourself. It's not being deffensive, it's being realistic. This is when criticizers sometimes think your being deffensive. Try not to sound as such.
Understand the audience's personality, taste, style etc. Understanding everything gives you a better picture as to why they say certain things and which things will become relevant.
The whole time you are qualifying them to understand how credible they are and what not. In the end, everyone's opinion matters but you have to come to some understanding.
Like when Dimbark rated my goldsource map, he wasn't even rating the actual part of the map that mattered because he didn't understand it for some reason "didn't read comp. description or something. I had to qualify his cc to understand that it wasn't relevant or credible at all and I had to explain to him why.
One time, someone said my map was complete garbage and shouldn't get the good rating it did based on the screen shots. When I was younger I didn't know how to handle this but if it happened to me now I would understand that his cc wasn't credible at all because it was only based on the screen shot. Others even called him out on his bs.
The bottom line is cc is very beneficial if handled properly and if you want to better your skills. But don't let it offend you. Simply understanding it by qualifying it will eliminate this. And as always, people will have feelings and rating towards your map whether they post it or not. Telling them not to do so simply says you cannot handle it and that people's opinions don't matter to you.
If you really don't want people to rate or comment I think that's fine. But it simply says you are not willing to learn from others because you don't want to. To me it seems like a lack of self motivation. But, perhaps it's something else.
Pardon that rant sandwich. I need to learn to get my message across faster.
Edit: I usally don't rate a map unless I want to give it 5 stars. Rating under such I feel can be unnmotivational to many and don't want to do that. Instead in such cases, I prefer to comment basically why it isn't a 5 star map pointing out goods and bads.
1 star= 1-20, 2 star= 21=40, 3 star= 41-60, 4 star= 61-80, 5 star= 81-100. I think a 10 star rating system with incriments of 10 would be more appropriate. With 5 star rating, people usually think that 5 stars is "perfect" but realistically this could be close to a B.
