I hope the ForgeHub staff and video team don’t take this the wrong way, but in my completely honest and blunt opinion, you guys are absolutely botching your map features. To me it seems like you are more concerned with getting features out there as soon as possible, likely in an attempt to maximize page and video views. Overall, your approach to map features is killing the prestige of the title of “ForgeHub Feature”, which you could have legitimized in Halo 5. Sure, you might be getting decent page/video views now, but if you continue down this road your audience will become less and less impressed when they see the word "Feature" on this site and on your channel, and will begin to gradually tune out. You featured Goldleaf soon after it was released, which is in itself is problematic. It’s the equivalent of calling an album or a movie a “classic” the same day it is released. Furthermore, it turned out to have a bit of controversy surrounding the aesthetics of the map, as it seems like some of the key aesthetic elements were uncredited and possibly plagarized. In the video feature, you guys falsely advertised the map as playing like a CE map when it obviously does not in any way, shape, or form. Note: I am not saying that it is a bad map because it doesn’t play like a CE map, I am just saying it is falsely advertised as such. You guys featured Simulation, which is an absolute joke of a map and you know it is. Especially you Warholic because you’ve admitted that much to me. Your most recent feature of Deadline (a Terminal remake) is blowing up in your face or is going to blow up in your face because there is now an infinitely better remake which just came out a day later. Had you waited to feature it and taken time to digest the remake, you might have potentially avoided this conundrum entirely. I hope none of the creators of the maps I've mentioned take offense to what I've said in this post, but I understand if you do. For the most part, my gripes are with the timing and carelessness of the feature process and NOT with you or or your maps.
I agree with the general point of the article, but judging from the videos, Station 7 is in not infinitely better that deadline. Deadline is gorgeous, Statino 7 is Hideous.
I didn't even notice Deadline was featured until I read this. I do agree that featuring maps (of any quality) this fast takes away from the awe & desire to get featured. Back in my hay day it was epic to get a feature. I was so stoked for every last one of my features & strived to be good enough but now a days there are way more forgers that are at that higher level then back then. I in no way want to sound arrogant but back then there wasn't a lot of people at that level because it took a lot more patience & effort to get a layout or structure regardless of how good you were at the initial map design. It was hard to shape your structures the way you wanted when you had to geo-merge one piece for an hour & then some people just give up. Now you can place any shape in any angle you want in seconds so planning & redesigning on the spot as well as boosting creativity is easier than ever. So maybe that's the difference? There's way more high caliber content coming out than there was back then in comparison.
Hideous? That's a little extreme. Station 7 is faithful to the original as deadline is not. For that reason station 7 > deadline
I'm an extreme guy Yeah idk how inaccurate Deadline is. More faithful remakes aren't necessarily better anyways. Anyways I'm in agreement with the original poster, I don't think I've seen more than 2-3 maps so far that I think deserve a feature, and those haven't been featured. But everyone's gonna have their own opinions on which maps are the best. Like everybody loves that Pit remake. I think its beautiful, but needs scaled up to play right in H5.
In general, i wish more focus was towards original maps. I laughed the other day when I saw someone post a remake and the forger said something in the description like "This map was designed for 2v2". I withheld my comment which was something like "dude you didnt design this map... you recreated an existing design"
I see nothing wrong with this thread, it's good constructive criticism. On one side, I see where the staff is coming from. Finally after years the forging community is back on track and starting to grow again. Pumping out features gives new forgers something to strive for. The more content released the more likely to get the community involved. This helps the growth and health of the forging community. On the other side, I get where the original poster is coming from. I've been around since 08, and like zombievillain said, features were like winning an Oscar. Back in the day a map feature was the best of the best. It was the map you downloaded to see how someone made a structure and was played 100 times by everyone in the community. Either way, as long as the community stays in the shape it's in, I'm happy. I understand the argument from both sides. Thanks to the original poster for bringing up the issue.
Does terminal really need to be scaled up? The opinion that maps need to be scaled up for this game is ridiculous just like it was in past games. You are not sprinting, thrusting, ground pounding etc. non-stop. I didn't really say much about this H2A because it was dead but how quickly features are being put up is a bit extreme. Aesthetic maps are a bit different because they don't have have any gameplay value and remakes should go to the more faithful map because if it is not faithful to the original, what is special about the remake?
Thanks for sharing your constructive and honest thoughts with us aPK, I fully realize that we are featuring content at a faster rate than normal and that is intentional. Forge is hot off the press and everyone is in a state of excitement to see what the forge community has been creating. I've personally featured a few maps that I thought held up to the standards we originally set, including Sandtrap and most recently, Deadline. While these maps have been featured, I realize that they both have room for improvement. I'm actively communicating with the creators of these maps on a daily basis to come up with recommendations and suggestions on how to improve the gameplay experience on their maps. I agree with most of your concerns and observations and will try to improve our selection process for featuring content in the future. I truly wish this to be a golden age of forge and nothing less. The timing of these features were important to me because I knew that viewer retention would be greater if the content was first seen on ForgeHub. While Deadline may not suite the expectations of a ForgeHub feauture at this time, I viewed its overall potential and can say that improvements are being made to fulfill those requirements as we speak. In regards to Simulation, the map was only featured on our channel. I wouldn't characterize the map as a "joke" but I do fundamentally disagree with its implementation to play Breakout as I would rather preserve the integrity of the original map and the uniqueness of this new mode. Simulation attempts to retroactively fit an old map into a new mode and the experience feels both contrived and derivative to me. I'm somewhat of a purist and would rather see Breakout as a truly unique game mode with custom tailored maps designed around that game mode. There are a lot of factors I have to consider when making content decisions. Our map features were very exclusive during MCC and that was mostly due to our standards being different than those representing our channel. Our video team is off to a great start, I value their partnership and would like to find ways to connect their work to our presence here. Perhaps featuring Goldleaf was not the best way to synchronize our efforts. I know it didn't hold up to my personal values for an exclusive map feature, which is why I didn't write anything in the article and just let the video speak for itself. Perhaps some of you could help recommend a better way to connect the content we produce on our channel to our website here.
All things aside, this part is very problematic. A film, album, game, tv series, etc. is never awarded and celebrated for what it could be. It is always for what it is, as is. If you saw outstanding potential in the map then you should have waited for the potential to materialize, because the perception of potential is extremely subjective (more so than judging a final product) and is not always materialized completely or in the way you visualized it. On a side note, I 100% agreed with the Sandtrap feature by WyvernZu.
Additionally, it seems like you are confirming that page and video views are the focus. I understand why, but I do not agree with that line of thinking at all. Forge communities are a very critical and creative space, just like other "art forms". Politicizing the features only means that the title will lose any and all weight or importance it could have had with that community, and nearly every feature will likely be met with skepticism or just flat out lack of interest.
As long as the standards for the map features improve over the next month or two, I don't think its a problem. I agree that its more important to have content on the youtube channel than that the maps be up to Aprils standard. These maps sort of are the best of the best, there just aren't that many maps to choose from right now.
This line of thinking I think is understandable, but it is clearly not the line of thinking coming from the Warholic FH team.
The features could always stay an exclusive thing compared to other maps. Maybe there should be a tier below "feature" so that forgehub could show off maps without awarding them by saying they're the best of the best. Just an idea.
The 'ForgeHub Favorites' were community nominated maps that we later renamed 'Community Favorites'. In the past users would nominate maps in a thread each month, then they would be asked to vote a second time. We built an algorithm that would automatically choose the top 10 maps of the past 40 days based on user data and ask the community for a single vote. This allowed users to participate more without being encumbered by the process too much. That feature was lost during the last site update but will be rebuilt some time soon. I loved our 'Community Favorite' system as it democratized featured map selections to users, first place winners were permanently placed in ForgeHub's featured map list. We had winners to announce a couple weeks ago but decided we could skip it since my map won first place. I didn't think it was appropriate to write up an article for my own work. All of our efforts are aimed at building back our community bigger and stronger than what it once was.
There are many factors that have contributed to the Features so far in Halo 5. One of the main ones is the growth and integration of the ForgeHub YouTube channel. This has introduced a factor that we hadn't had to deal with previously. While it makes perfect sense for the YouTube team to pump out regular map features, it doesn't necessarily make sense to do that on the Web end of things. Our challenge is in finding the correct balance. I think the suggestion to have another tier below 'Feature' is a good one, as it would enable us to continue regular map features on YouTube without compromising the high standards that have typically been associated with 'ForgeHub Features'. We definitely appreciate the observations, criticisms, and suggestions. It's really nice to see the passion after so many years where indifference has pervaded the forge scene.