The only constant in the world is change

[Sentura]

what you said above is the reason one has demographics for games. you tailor a game to a specific age, gender, etc. to make sure they like it. sorry this is a bit off topic, but none the less i think it somewhat relevant to the discussion..

[Taylor]

I completely agree you should try not to be too precious of your creation. But I don’t think you should always listen to what a player thinks, often you will get more benefit investigating why the player thinks that.

The average player is not going to have the grasp of level design the author does, their opinion will be narrow-minded or based on little experience. This sounds demeaning but I don’t mean it to, if you’re there studying layouts, reading into design philosophy and slaving over Hammer/Radiant/Whatever for days on end, you will have a much stronger knowledge of your levels workings and intentions. Aspects such as game-flow and balancing are very delicate, and need careful adjustments.

And clearly if you take everything on board you won't simply please everyone because the players interests will naturally conflict and you will make bad design decisions. I think player feedback is one of the most important tools out there, for a variety of reasons past the obvious ones, but be careful with this “the player is always right” attitude.

[sarge mat]

Learning to accept critism is the easy part, learning when to say no, and be confident enough to just refuse to do something because you know it is right, is far harder.

Knowing when you truly are right, and when you are not, that is step 2.

I agree but when starting out I think the most important thing of all to remember is to keep going, It can be very demoralising when you have worked on something that you think is great and then have people says it’s not so great. But critism is by far the quickest way to improve yourself. My most recent map and the first one I posted here has a lot of issues but it was far better IMO to find that out now rather than a lot later down the line. It gives you the opportunity to take a step back to see where you have gone wrong and in this case not to waste much more time on it.

[BaRRaKID]

About people saying that a map is "too big", i think it's important to determine if the problem is with the physical size of the map, or the "psychological" size of the map.

If the problem is with not having enough time to get to a given point in the map to complete a certain task (ie: In a CS map not having enough time to get to a bomb site after the bomb is planted), then the problem is with the physical size of the map, but i think that most of the times when players say that a map is too big, what they are really saying is that its boring, or not entertaining enough. If the paths of the map are dull, or too claustrophobic, or too repetitive, the player might get tired of them faster than the time it takes for him to reach the end, and that could give him that feeling that the map is too big, but if you challenge the player throughout the path, and give him something to do (or just watch) while he is crossing it, then the players will probably not get that feeling at all.

I think this is also one of the reasons why players never like puzzles that make them go back to the beginning, they already saw that part of the map, they don't want to see it again unless you give them a great reward for doing it. If you think about it, when you do this, for the player the map will feel to be twice has big has what it is in reality , because he had to go from point A to B and back to A (and sometimes back to B again).