Let's talk about the awkward "unclear rule" issue

How can they judge your map without an update? Workshop is not featuring things like "Download past updates". Imo.

Without wishing to sound mean, I feel like just a tiny amount of convergent thinking would have avoided your disappointment. Put yourself in the contest organisers shoes for just a split second. How are a bunch of people completely unaffiliated to Steam supposed to instantly download/backup 100 submissions? Hell, consider the fact that they had no idea how many submissions there would actually be and you have something that just can't be planned for.

I guess ultimately in future you just have to assume full responsibility for every stage of your submission and if you're in any doubt whatsoever about the rules, question them before the deadline. Most importantly, always remember that these competitions are organised/run largely by volunteers trying to do something good for the community, so they don't have a big magic "Download all the maps now" button built in to their Steam account.

I have to disagree with you @text_fish

There's nothing difficult in making a backup of all the BSP right after the deadline and share it with other judges on a server/cloud, it just would have taken a little bit of time (1 hour MAX) and then time to upload the BSP somewhere afterwards. The judges would have been able to do of that, i'm sure of it, it just wasn't planned this way.

I would have done the same as MikeGon, this rule does sound like "you can update if you want afterwards but we will judge the version you sent at the time of the deadline anyway" to me, it's misleading.

I don't know about your map and if it should have been top 10 or top 20 but, in any case, that's realy frustrating for you, i understand that. And I also understand that judges must be strict with rules (what has been done with Fiorina is harsh but fair for example). Maybe something can be done here

Quote from leplubodeslapin

50 minutes ago, leplubodeslapin said: There's nothing difficult in making a backup of all the BSP right after the deadline and share it with other judges on a server/cloud,

Hopefully you can work with the organisers to set this system up before the next competition then, because I'm sure it would be appreciated.

Quote from MikeGon

38 minutes ago, MikeGon said: I was trusting the official, detailed, and clear rules post

Hang on, are you saying they're clear or unclear?

Look clearly everything's open to interpretation, especially on the internet where there are language barriers to negotiate for some people. We can agree on that and it's unfortunate that your interpretation was wrong, but I think considering 100 entrants managed to follow the rules without a problem there isn't really much wrong with how they were written. Personally I didn't get even close to making the deadline, but in my mind there was no doubt whatsoever about the meaning of the rules when I read them. It just makes sense to me that they would ask us not to update our workshop files after the deadline, and I don't know why anybody would assume that they have a system in place to download the submissions in one go.

Quote from text_fish

8 minutes ago, text_fish said: Hopefully you can work with the organisers to set this system up before the next competition then, because I'm sure it would be appreciated.

[...]

and I don't know why anybody would assume that they have a system in place to download the submissions in one go.

There's no complex system needed, just copy the BSP and NAV from workshop/id folders to another folder right after the deadline. It just takes time because you have to check for map IDs but that's basically it.

Quote from text_fish

8 minutes ago, text_fish said: but I think considering 100 entrants managed to follow the rules without a problem there isn't really much wrong with how they were written.

You just can't assume stuff like that. If for anything 99% of people are wrong and 1% is right, it doesn't mean that the 99% must be right. It doesn't mean anything, even if it was confusing for only 1 person then that would be enough to discuss about it. But according to Vaya, many people found this rule confusing.

Quote from leplubodeslapin

14 minutes ago, leplubodeslapin said: just copy the BSP and NAV from workshop/id folders to another folder right after the deadline

Correction:

• Wait until the very end of the deadline (to the second, because obviously somebody will complain if they start early or late)
• Open every WIP post that had a recent update to see if they declared themselves finished before the deadline.
• Subscribe to those 100ish submissions and download them all.
• Backup the map files and send them out to the rest of the judges.
• Hope that in the meantime, nobody decided to upload a new version of their map because hey, what's the difference between a minute and an hour?

You're right, that wouldn't have been impossible, but what lunatic would decide to do that when they and all the rest of the judges can just subscribe to the winning maps and launch them for testing straight from csgo's inbuilt UI?

Quote from leplubodeslapin

22 minutes ago, leplubodeslapin said: You just can't assume stuff like that.

That's a fair point. Sadly MikeGon's assumption cost him a lot more than mine did.

I believe 5 or 6 were DQ due to this issue. that's 5% or so

Quote from text_fish

1 hour ago, text_fish said: Correction:

• Wait until the very end of the deadline (to the second, because obviously somebody will complain if they start early or late)
• Open every WIP post that had a recent update to see if they declared themselves finished before the deadline.
• Subscribe to those 100ish submissions and download them all.
• Backup the map files and send them out to the rest of the judges.
• Hope that in the meantime, nobody decided to upload a new version of their map because hey, what's the difference between a minute and an hour?

Or ...

• Subscribe to every map as soon as you get a workshop link on the forum, BEFORE the deadline
• Let Steam download, and eventualy update, maps by itself before the deadline
• Disconnect from steam at the exact moment of the deadline
• Copy/paste BSP files somewhere else and take all the time you need to share it with other judges

I do not mean that it's judges fault not to do that, i just want to point out that it's doable and that for any potential future constest this can be improved.

Quote from Vaya

1 hour ago, Vaya said: I believe 5 or 6 were DQ due to this issue. that's 5% or so

Which might represent a drastic amount of hours of work, not negligible at all.

Personally, it was clear to me that the timestamp "last updated" on my WS submission had to be before the deadline and therefore any further updates would imply disqualification.

I do agree, however, that the rule could have been written a bit more clearly.

Quote from leplubodeslapin

1 minute ago, leplubodeslapin said: Or ...

• Subscribe to every map as soon as you get a workshop link on the forum, BEFORE the deadline
• Let Steam download, and eventualy update, maps by itself before the deadline
• Disconnect from steam at the exact moment of the deadline
• Copy/paste BSP files

I do not mean that it's judges fault not to do that, i just want to point out that it's doable and that for any potential future constest this can be improved.

Which might represent a drastic amount of hours of work, not negligible at all.

yup this is my thinking. 6 people or so didn't understand the rules, so they weren't clear enough.

I just want to say the contest has been amazing sans this one issue.

JD did it just right. He left Biome as submitted for the contest. He then kept working on the new update but didn't touch the contest version he submitted.

The thing wit the workshop it dynamically updates each subscription so the judges version also updates. Its probably unrealistic to think all the judges would copy and paste 100 or so bsp's to a separate folder from the workshop folder.

As far as I know only two maps were disqualified because of it. Both of them had missing models when I looked at them at the deadline, which was a certain exclusion criteria for me when judging, since they made the maps largely unplayable. So I don't think there is that much of an issue in this case as it may seem when reading this thread.

Anyway, in hindsight I agree that the wording was a bit too ambiguous and could've been better,... certainly something to be improved upon in future competitions.

Quote

36 minutes ago, 'RZL said: As far as I know only two maps were disqualified because of it. Both of them had missing models when I looked at them at the deadline, which was a certain exclusion criteria for me when judging, since they made the maps largely unplayable. So I don't think there is that much of an issue in this case as it may seem when reading this thread.

Anyway, in hindsight I agree that the wording was a bit too ambiguous and could've been better,... certainly something to be improved upon in future competitions.

so even if you ignored the deadline thing the map was still unusable? makes sense. Would have been good for a judge to say 'this map has been DQ'd for blah' too in the submission thread IMO. Communication is key to transparency.

Quote from MikeGon

6 hours ago, MikeGon said: Just disconnect steam and that's it (disable auto-updates or whatever). Then you got all the time you want to backup and start evaluating.

I just want to point out that the judges are human who are in different time zones / working different hours than each other. Simply disabling steam wouldn't work considering they may not all log-in / start or close steam at the same time.

There was a period of 10 days after the deadline for the judges to judge the maps and that's probably why it was so long after that the 10 were announced.