Exotic Places CS:GO Mapping Contest 2019

Quote from csWaldo

20 hours ago, csWaldo said:

That's not entirely true. A lot of these assets (including Yanzl's) are free for non commercial use only. I doubt anyone will be upset if you're just submitting your level to be part of the contest, but if there's any chance of you winning money in this contest with someone elses assets, you would probably want to talk to the asset creator beforehand, unless the assets are specifically licensed for commercial use.

Custom assets aren't just set dressing that some artist will make for you in return for prize shares, usually. Environment art is just as much part of a map as is level design. People have different strengths and both aspects require a lot of work hours so most experienced people here will gather in small teams and split up the work to get the project done in time. If environment art isnt your strong side then ideally you should look for a partner to share your project with who can deal with that side of things. Though a single person can still manage on their own. The best example of that would Biome, the winner of the last contest.

Yeah that makes sense. I appreciate the post and clarity brought. Thanks

Quote from csWaldo

On 11/3/2019 at 6:21 PM, csWaldo said:

That's not entirely true. A lot of these assets (including Yanzl's) are free for non commercial use only. I doubt anyone will be upset if you're just submitting your level to be part of the contest, but if there's any chance of you winning money in this contest with someone elses assets, you would probably want to talk to the asset creator beforehand, unless the assets are specifically licensed for commercial use.

Custom assets aren't just set dressing that some artist will make for you in return for prize shares, usually. Environment art is just as much part of a map as is level design. People have different strengths and both aspects require a lot of work hours so most experienced people here will gather in small teams and split up the work to get the project done in time. If environment art isnt your strong side then ideally you should look for a partner to share your project with who can deal with that side of things. Though a single person can still manage on their own. The best example of that would Biome, the winner of the last contest.

Hi, I asked yanzl, it should be fine as long as you give credit.

Is this the right place to have a discussion about rule 4? I think we need to talk about it as a community, now that de_zenith has exemplified how problematic it is.

I can understand wanting a simple set of rules that you can follow religiously, so admins don't have to decide subjectively on a case-by-case basis. That being said, you cannot always write a rule that covers all cases of right or wrong correctly. In this case, I think that rule 4 is exceptionally far from covering what most people would think of as ok.

Taking de_zenith as an example (although I want to clarify that this is about the rule/the enforcement of it, not specifically about de_zenith), it seems that the map was basically finished before the contest started. I don't think there's any arguing that it has a huge advantage over other contest entries, since so much more time and work has been put into it.

I don't particularly want to argue about whether de_zenith should be removed from this contest, but I do think that we need to have a talk about what to do about cases like this in the future. It's clear that it isn't fair to have a map that's been developed for several years compete against one that's been developed for a couple of months - and we need to find a way to either change rule 4, or the way it's enforced, so it doesn't happen in future contests.

Quote from birjolaxew

1 hour ago, birjolaxew said: Is this the right place to have a discussion about rule 4? I think we need to talk about it as a community, now that de_zenith has exemplified how problematic it is.

I understand your concerns. But I don't think that there is an actual alternative for "rule 4".

The contest is NOT about who can create the best map in ~8 months. Mapcore is holding this contest to encourage people to create/finish maps and so that some maps get a little more attention.

If you really expect that everybody starts from zero when the contest starts, you can just forget it. Because nobody (except some hackers and intelligence agencies :P) can control what's going on the hard disks of people. People can easily keep finished maps secret until a contest starts. The only way to avoid this would be to have a very limited theme (something like "snowy castle" and NOT something open like "exotic places"). But this would have the consequence that very few people would participate in the contest. Because nowadays most people need something like 2 years or more to create a new map.

So just accept it, or we won't have any contests ever again.

Quote from Radix

34 minutes ago, Radix said: So just accept it, or we won't have any contests ever again

Ok dad

Quote from Radix

1 hour ago, Radix said: If you really expect that everybody starts from zero when the contest starts, you can just forget it. Because nobody (except some hackers and intelligence agencies :P) can control what's going on the hard disks of people.

I don't necessarily think that you need to catch every attempt at cheating. I do think that there needs to be a commonly agreed upon idea of what is allowed to enter the competition. In this case the rules obviously do not match what most people expect that to be.

As you can see from de_zenith, the devs have been very open about how long the map has in development for. As far as I can see, there's no attempt at cheating - it's simply a case of them thinking that entering the map is fine (because the rules says so), while most other people think that it is not (because it has a huge advantage). This disagreement needs to be cleared up - it all depends on what the official reaction to the fact that people can cheat is; you can choose to stand strong on what you consider ok, at the cost of illegitimately gaining an advantage still being possible, or you can choose to redefine the competition so that what was previously an illegitimately gained advantage is now within the rules despite it still being morally questionable. In this case it seems that you've gone with the latter.

I personally think that most people can be trusted to not cheat, because most people don't like doing things they see as wrong or immoral. Combined with the fact that it's a pretty big effort to conceal a map in the hopes of it being valid for an upcoming contest, and I'd wager that - if it is made clear that doing this is considered not acceptable - cheating of this kind would be close to a non-issue. That does not apply if the "cheaters" feel that it is ok because the rules state that it is. I very much doubt that the de_zenith developers would've tried to hide how long the map has been in development for even if that made the map ineligible.

I do not agree with the idea of redefining what is ok just because it is difficult to catch people. This seems a bit like if the speedrun community decided to allow segmented runs on all leaderboards, just because splicing can (and has) happened.

There's a similar discussion on every contest, just don't worry about it, maybe focus on actually making a level instead.

Quote from FMPONE

2 minutes ago, FMPONE said: It is not "difficult" to catch people who are working on stuff they haven't released. It is impossible.

Thus, we're not attempting to do it. redefining it to be ok.

Redefining it to be an alright thing to do is not the only valid response to it being impossible to catch (which it isn't necessarily, as seen with de_zenith).

Honestly I don't think time is an advantage here. A CSGO maps are a finite project (overdesign is 100% a thing in both layout and art) and strong ideas and layouts are most important here.

It's not fair on the zenith guys to spotlight on 1 map like this. They obviously worked hard to get where they are with the map.

This argument would hold more weight if a single person complaining about zenith was actually impacted by it. The rules encourages older projects to be picked up and finished, which is a good thing imo and 8 months is enough for anyone to make a contest winning map. If you can't, then you should probably use this opportunity to practice rather than to tear down other peoples work.

Quote from csWaldo

2 hours ago, csWaldo said: 8 months is enough for anyone to make a contest winning map.

Apparently it's not. That's why we have a discussion and why >90% of the map entries will not be finished in time ever. ?

Quote from Radix

6 hours ago, Radix said: People can easily keep finished maps secret until a contest starts.

This is very true, but the contest theme definitely helped reduce the chances of this. It was a good idea to combat it.

Quote from JimWood

22 hours ago, JimWood said: the contest theme definitely helped reduce the chances of this

I dunno if "exotic" really did this, but apparently the purpose of the comp is to be a spotlight for maps and encourage their completion (which is fair enough). The only major advantage indefinite time has over 8 months is that you can juggle a lot of fundamental layouts around, but I found that with a solid set of broad goals, maps are easier to shape up to be what you want.

Quote from Interfearance

On 11/12/2019 at 2:36 PM, Interfearance said:

I dunno if "exotic" really did this, but apparently the purpose of the comp is to be a spotlight for maps and encourage their completion (which is fair enough). The only major advantage indefinite time has over 8 months is that you can juggle a lot of fundamental layouts around, but I found that with a solid set of broad goals, maps are easier to shape up to be what you want.

The encouraging their completion part is the best, watching a thread like Submerged is beautiful. (I think) gamebanana is you submit it and people will generally post some reviews after, which has less of a community aspect to it.

This then also makes me feel guilty that my thread has so many views that it doesn't really deserve.

So how about that deadline, getting pretty close. You guys and gals sweating yet?

We should be fine personally, but my god it's flown by

Quote from Radu

13 hours ago, Radu said: So how about that deadline, getting pretty close. You guys and gals sweating yet?

Was just giving you a head start, tomorrow I'll start work on something.