MotM Created 11 years ago2013-09-29 16:24:15 UTC by Striker

Map of the Month has been dead for a year now.

What gives?

You shouldn't have recorded in a 4:3 format in the first place, the review is not bad at all( with the exception of clearly repeated scenes...).

Prior to Archie and me temporarily departing to focus on The Core, we noticed that the reception for the reviews was, to put it bluntly, crap.

There were a number of months where only 2 people had voted on two separate maps causing us to throw a dart and one month where only a single person voted.

The videos are very time consuming to write, record, edit and upload, and we eventually came to the conclusion that if the community wasn't bothered, neither were we.

Hey, that map scored pretty well. I thought it was because it was good

Dimbark's review: That map doesn't look as awesome as you say. The architecture looks very plain.

[edit] that must be the reason why I haven't mapped in ages. I probably have the highest standards ever and I never even meet my own expectations.

It IS good, but it came out years ago before MOTM was a thing. We reviewed it in July 2012 because there was only one vote for that particular month and it was for some aim map or something.

[edit] that must be the reason why I haven't mapped in ages. I probably have the highest standards ever and I never even meet my own expectations.

Ignore the fancy talk in your head. I'm currently making a HL1 map that, if I thought like that, I wouldn't release in ages( really crap r_speeds). Being idealistic is on of the traits we have to get rid of man.

Urby, I just don't think so. MotM isn't promoted enough. Plus, your video reviews are practically invisible: the method of access is crap andshould address this problem.

I would say don't bother. I doubt I'll pick it up again while The Core is still in development, unless somebody else wanted to there isn't really any need to change the MOTM area on the homepage.

((CBFs/apathy quotient) * laziness factor) / no = 17% probability for MOTM Success at twhl ='(

Map of the Month has been dead for a year now.

What gives?

If anyone is willing to do the "map of the month" reviews, I'm sure the community would be grateful. It might be a bit time consuming but it may also be a good excuse to further and better understand the concepts of level design.

The videos are very time consuming to write, record, edit and upload, and we eventually came to the conclusion that if the community wasn't bothered, neither were we.

The community did enjoy the "map of the month"s as far as I can tell. And the mappers were usually grateful. The videos were sometimes very inspiring.

I think nobody really tended to vote for it, like September 2012, because the vote was harder to find because you had to go through a ton of pages on TWHL.

TWHL has a built in question-asker on the side-bar. Why not ask MOTM there?

I put myself forward to do MOTMs if I had the time. Turned out I didn't.

What about a monthly MOTM bash where we all PLAY the winner?

I'll do them, if you guys wouldn't mind. Scotch said he'd help me for the first couple, and I personally think I could do them. But it's the community's decision, just know my name is down.

Maybe a pm or login reminder that it's time to vote for a new map would boost participation? (OR DEATH THREATS) =)

Yeah, I kept forgetting that it was time to vote.
But I loved the reviews.

For me it really started feeling like a thankless task. Myself and a few others were trying really hard to zap some life back into the community with MotMs, retro tournaments and prizes, etc.

At the end of the day it just seemed like too much effort for little to no gain. It wasn't attracting new members and existing members didn't seem to care, as dwindling vote figures all too clearly showed.

If it was to work, I think a general motm discussion thread would be necessary. It'd provide a way to discuss candidates and reviews and arrange tests and games in a less closed setting than each review's own comment stream.

I also think it might work best if, once the winner was revealed with its one or two 'official' reviews, users were encouraged to write their own reviews. This'd provide the most useful gains for winners. How this could be achieved, I don't know. Perhaps some sort of submission system like the one for tutorials, which has the 5 criteria we judges motms on and automatically calculates the percentage score based on the user's inputs. It's a stage above basic comments and the 5 star system

I'll throw my hat back in for a while at least if a restart is planned. Just bought myself a new camera and a couple of new lights so it'd be a good platform to test those. Although we do have to come to terms with the fact that even if it does start up again, no video review will ever be as good as the one for de_twhl2011

Will Archie if/when you get sick of it, I'll happily try my hand at it. =)

New point of view for a review? Sounds good. Without the MotM winner in the shot? Even better.

No need to wait, LaVolpe, the motm publishing tools support multiple reviews. It's just a matter of either penguinboy giving you motm admin rights or myself or one of the other team members publishing a review on your behalf.

Having the motm winner in shot gets you bonus points.

I'm not shy of speaking either, just that lately I find it hard to record more than 20FPS with the tools available. I admit that my reviews wouldn't be first class like Archie does them.

Even if it isnt map of the month, reviews on maps sound pretty interesting.

If my voice weren't so ugly over the microphone, i might have done it sooner.

I'm not sure how much more visible MOTM can be, seeing that it's on the front page, but if anybody has any suggestions I'll see what I can do

If people want to start up MOTM again I can definitely make some sort of annoying reminder to try and get more votes

If people are interested in doing MOTM reviews remember that text reviews are okay too, they don't have to be videos. I don't really have the time to organise or write reviews myself, though

I don't think the MotM itself needs to be more visible, but I do think there's still an element of the reviews not being obvious enough up at the top right.

Perhaps links with the reviewer's avatar under a nice big "Reviews:" heading below the main MotM score page. This presumably wouldn't be too difficult to add since the review submission page already asks for the reviewer's user ID.

I'll do them, if you guys wouldn't mind. Scotch said he'd help me for the first couple, and I personally think I could do them. But it's the community's decision, just know my name is down.

Contact Penguinboy or Archie through PM. Learn about which MOTMs are waiting reviews. Review one of them and post it in your journal, here or use MOTM publishing tools with permission. If everyone finds it satisfactory, go ahead and try the rest as well.

At the end of the day it just seemed like too much effort for little to no gain. It wasn't attracting new members and existing members didn't seem to care, as dwindling vote figures all too clearly showed.

The reviews were not a failure. There were less votes and maps each month because people were just tempted to try better game engines. Since the Source SDK was very problematic compared to others. And Goldsource was simply dying (naturally).

Nobody can deny the fact that the members are not mapping as much as before. Perhaps, we should set a minimum limit for MOTM votes. If it gets less than 5 votes, it can't be selected as MOTM. In order to eliminate MOTMs with "joke" votes or 1 vote.

God damn it guys. Just reading this thread makes me want to do a review...

Do one, then!

And give temporary bans to anyone who trys on anything like the McPoker shit again.

I always wondered if that was intentionally made by another member under a fake account to troll the MotM staff. Of course, they'd never admit it so asking is useless...

Well for a mapping website, the first thing i see when i login is a news post
Gotta scroll ALLLLLLL the way down to the bottom and then you see 6 maps.
tiny little thumbnails
When you click on the tumbnails, you get bigger thumbnails - and no other screenshots.

MOTM is dead because it seems the forums attract more attention than regular maps do.

Back to Map of the month, if you want to make it a big thing, give it a big link.
Its a little tiny addition under the maps tab which attracts little to no attention.

I'm just speaking truth because i cant think of the last time i downloaded and tested a map (other than making Castle Disposed)

This is a mapping community and the maps arent really embellished. So I think the focus of the entire website is a bit skewed away from that.

I have to agree. The general design of the site hinders navigation, discovery and many great features are hidden away behind bad navigation, sometimes several links deep.

I'm definitely aware of the issues with some of the site navigation, especially the lack of exposure for new maps. The current version of TWHL4 has the recent maps at the top of the page, along with a feature slideshow for top maps, MOTM winners, competition results, etc. It looks something like this (disclaimer: unstyled, old data, etc etc). The new vault already supports extra screenshots and those screenshots have a similar slideshow thing on the map detail screen.

All this talk of improving the site (and lack of Sledge motivation) has prompted me to start working on TWHL4 again, so I'm more than welcome to suggestions!

Navigation and presentation are definitely in need of a deep psychological analysis.

I hope you make it a perfectly functional site without requiring JavaScript. I hate designers that do that. JS is supposed to be an improvement over what's already functional. But, I know you're smart enough to know this.