You've got it right. For me, it's not a problem of population though. While the openness was forced at the beginning, it made a huge difference in how quickly the content improved overall. As soon as it became possible to hide content, the quality of content stagnated. I don't think I've really copied anything from other people in this game, despite seeing some truly awesome things that would've worked well for maps I was working on. So it's not that I need someone to give me ideas. It's just that creativity seems to breed more creativity.
I love showing off my work but I'm trying to be better about doing it whne it's at a more complete state so I don't make promises I can't keep. The system should have retained the file's original author from the get go. It's such a critical feature that goes a long way and it baffles me that it was an afterthought to the dev team. I think that would have been more important than having hidden files because then nobody could steal a map anyway. Prefabs is a different story, but there's nothing stopping people from throwing your prefab on their map and exploding it anyway. As @a Chunk said, the positives outweigh the negatives and I miss the more open source community that we had last year. Population definitely plays into that. I don't really know when the population dropped off because I didn't Forge for a while, but it seems completely dead right now for core Forging.
I know a lot of people are going to not agree with this.... BUT, I feel like less is more for forge... Halo 5 just has too many pieces/ colours/ textures / variants to the point that the art of piece usage and block creativity is thrown out the door. The larger piece count is just utilised for aesthetics reasons in most cases.... LESS IS MORE.
The simplest looking things you use or look at every day are often disturbingly complex. I think its great, if you use textures that do not match you get a really ugly map, as more complex pieces get introduced you have to adapt to get better. Despite your best efforts, maps made a year ago would often still look bad, now we know better and the new combos are amazing, sure it took more skill to make a forerunner structure out of primitives, but now we can make dev quality maps with the new pieces, which imo is better. I think it really shows how creative people can be and encourages it, why make another covenant or forerunner map when you can morph those objects into your own unique, high quality theme. The most creative people will probably use the new high quality pieces and make something truly great.
I agree 99% only because I am a hardcore minimalist. I love when certain forgers use complex pieces and methods in order to create a simple looking aesthetic.
It's not clear if you mean too many to use or too many in use. You can never have too many to use. You will always have too many in use.
Sangheli has become the new Forerunner. It's an easy art style to do and most maps with the theme are going to look very similar. Unlike Forerunner however, Sangheli needs to be in a desert or tropical environment or it'll look weird because we have not been canonically exposed to that architecture in different environments. Not that there is anything wrong with using Sangheli pieces on their own, but the Sangheli theme itself seems incredibly limited, and for that I think it will quickly become the least impressive art style. And it's a shame too, because it wasn't long ago that pulling it off in Forge was arguably the most difficult thing to do. As the first person to do it convincingly, I'm disappointed to see it oversaturated all of a sudden. Oh well. In the end, all that matters is whether or not the map is good, right? Ironically, I think Forerunner is more impressive now because the new pieces are very high fidelity and the alien fauna and emissive blocks really adds to it. I think we're going to see a resurgence, and I'm honestly glad.
Probably the most skillfull one since the Halo CE Pistol Most balanced within it's own sandbox though? No, definitely not, it's very under powered compared to the rest of the sandbox
If you're referring to the Anniversary maps than yes, I agree. But than again, those look almost identical to the H3 forerunner theme which as most of us agree looks the best.
I like Reach Forerunner the most. It had the shiny look without being overly detailed. But I still like Halo 4's Forerunner too. I don't know how 343 went from this to this WTF