Should judges be able to change the weapon sets on maps submitted to the 1v1 contest, during the contest?
I think it would be fair if they changed it to their liking for the tournament that starts after the contest, but the contest itself should include weapon placement in the judging process.. just my opinion, others may disagree.
Yes. If they believe design is the most important why not? But if you're that confident your weapons belongs to said map, make it worth judging points. And then what? Great designs will fail because of a bad choice of weapons. And I believe that's even worse. A bad gun can break any 1v1 map.
On the one hand, the 1v1 player count causes ordinarily acceptable weapons to become extraordinarily powerful because you no longer have the ability to contest it with additional players. Therefore, seemingly innocuous decisions made by forgers could end up playing poorly on an otherwise good design. On the other hand, the 1v1 player count also lends itself to unorthodox weaponsets, and the judges could mistake or perceive a deliberate creative decision for an imbalance, and thereby tarnish the author's vision for the design. I would prefer not to go down the slippery slope of amending contest entries within the context of the contest for the sake of maintaining an even playing field. There are 6 weeks to build, test, and receive feedback on your map - and the 1v1 playercount makes it easy as can be - so what you submit is what should be judged. Nevertheless, if the judges are allowed to make changes, then the author should be able to opt out of having their vision changed based on how the judges would like their maps to be played. I personally would not want anyone to experience my design other than how I intended it, and if they found issues with it, it's my responsibility to make changes, not theirs. Furthermore, it doesn't interest me whether my map is "better" with its weapon set altered or not. I submitted it the way I wanted it to be played, and I don't want to see it advanced if it is changed. The tournament is a different story.
I think between each judging phase, contestants should be inform about problems on there map and with the weapon set or whatever. I also think the judges should be allowed to change it if they want or possibly they could do a test without weapons, but ultimately it should be up to the author and the contestant doesn't have to stick with the weapons that the judges decide they like.
I vote no. Especially not without it being held against them. But, that goes even more for spawning. Spawning is a huge part of making a good 1v1 map for this game, so it doesn't feel right not to punish people who have taken the time to polish one of the most important aspects of 1v1 gameplay.
Just run it by the author as a suggestion. If it's something minor like replacing a speed boost with a damage boost I don't think it hurts to run it by the author and make sure it fits their vision- BUT, this is something that should be noted and done AFTER the contest. Authors have more than enough time to play around with different weapon palettes beforehand, whatever the submission is should be considered as what the author deems perfect for the map's layout (that they would TURN DOWN any suggestions to tweak the weapons). If they would be down for a tweak... well, should've thought of that before the deadline If it comes down to the final two and it's incredibly hard to pick a winner, I think it's cool to play around some more to see to it that each design is playing at its full potential.
First of all, the scenario in which the judges would decide to remove weapons would be extremely rare. This isn't some contest breaking issue and this is being made into a much larger issue than it needs to be. Very few forgers who are competent enough to make a good design are going to make poor weapon placement decisions, and those who just slap **** down probably aren't that familiar with Halo 5's bullshit. I know that when I had only made one or two maps that I was putting down a ton of **** on my maps because that's how it SHOULD be. Maps should be able to have a pickup every 2 inches and that's how Halo has been for a long time. I don't think it's fair to hold that tendency against people because a lot of us are still forging for Halo and haven't adjusted to spacey shooter 5. Still, I can understand the perspective of "judge exactly what gets submitted", but you also have to acknowledge that a lot of people probably aren't involved in the community or playing a lot of Halo 5 (because you the **** plays Halo 5), and so they aren't up to date on how shitty the sandbox in this game is. A perfect example of this would be Longshots map. It's definitely a good design, but he placed a grenade launcher, brute plasma rifle, multiple battle rifles, and a damage boost. His map is pretty small, and the gameplay (as I experienced it) boiled down to running around with the BPR and switching because it's so ****ing overpowered that the maps layout no longer meant anything. So, in this hypothetical situation, would you rather the judges say "well it played like **** because of the BPR so let's move on" or would you rather them say "we can tell just by looking that this is a good design, so let's spend the 5 seconds it took to place these weapons to remove them and actually experience the map before we disqualify it" Again, I can understand going full black and white, but I just feel like Halo 5 is so ****ing broken in so many ways that at some point we need to look past technicalities and judge the core designs of maps. I just want the best and most creative design to win, and it would be really shitty for a map like Longshots to get the **** because of something that really isn't a skill in this game. In other games (namely arena shooters) with more diversified pickups and interesting counterplay between pickups, putting weapons and powerups down and designing around them is definitely a skill, although still not a huge one. Halo 5 is a completely different story because every weapon is bullet mag ridden cancer and It's literally impossible to design a map that makes something like the sniper a fair weapon while also designing around spartan abilities. The only skillgap for weapon placement that exists in Halo 5 is "are you stupid enough to place a railgun???" In any case, some of you are really, really blowing this out of proportion. I feel a palpable contrarian aura in the air and it makes me glad that I'm not a judge anymore. Y'all are annoying.
If all 4 judges agree that a map I submit plays poorly because of the weapon set or placement, I have no problem with them testing it with changes to the weapons or weapon placements. In general I'm surprised at how many people are opposed to this. Essentially what it boils down to is that if the map is left in its submitted state, it will probably be eliminated from the contest. There would be no real downside that I can think of to allowing changes to be made, assuming your goal is to place highly in the contest. You would still have control over the version of the map that's in your fileshare (and linked in your map post). But you'd also stand a better chance in the contest. I'd be on board with giving people the choice to opt out of having alterations of any sort made to their map, for those that feel strongly about it.
Reminds me of a teacher that would help the curve after exams. She would removed the two most missed questions to help the lower graded tests. The top scores didn't change but the bottoms were brought up a little. Though if I bumped up a grade, I'd feel like I was given an advantage the others didn't get. I was tested on what I studied and answered with what I knew.
This analogy is a little bit off base, but I see what you're getting at. A much closer representation would be the teacher not disqualifying a perfect score because the student used a pen. It's trivial, and hell, he probably didn't even know it wasn't allowed.
Is the grace period still happening? Spawning and weapons (power, timers, ammo) are included in allowable adjustments. Let people make those adjustments during that time and what they end up with after that is what is judged. If elements are fine tuned after the grace period then there is no need for a grace period, just extend the deadline. I don't like seeing dead horses getting beat all the time around here but I'm trying to help.
The best way to solve this issue. Is to do a multi stage contest that allows users to alter their maps. So, this would allow maps that seem to have potential but have something stupid going on with it to be fixed because after each cutoff the authors would have a chance to improve said map. Then you won't have people making any sort of deal about it. It also would spread out people being pissy over a larger period of time so you don't have a ****ing **** storm at the end of a contest. Hindsight 20/20 Also, there is a contest going on?