Should a map be rejected because of leaks?

[bobadoo2]

I'm wondering what peoples thoughts are on this subject.

Recently my map Orcs vs Goblins and Humans was rejected because Cweener found out my map has leaks.

I have played my map 100 times and it always runs fine for me. In order to fix the leaks it would take me hours.

If the game was rejected because of leaks, because leaks make the game run poorly (for crappy computers only I bet), then shouldn't every World War III map be rejected since they all run laggy even on a good computer?

 

[Zenonoth]

I for one, think it's unfair to judge, reject maps by leaks..it's none of the map's tester/player's business to check the triggers so far as he can play a non-laggy game, however some of the maps lag, some of these lags occur to all players in general and others may occur to people who have crappy computers.

 

[D a w n]

I think it is correct, because it is your job to get rid of leaks. And leaks are just nasty :/

 

[greasontim]

depends on how often the leaks happen in my opinion
cause if its every less than 30 seconds than yes should be rejected
every 5 minutes or so than no it shouldn't be rejected

 

[bobadoo2]

But wouldn't it make more sense to just play the level and see what it plays like instead of opening my level and basing everything on what the triggers look like?

Considering the level always works fine for me, and considering how many leaks there are, I don't think that leaks really disrupt game play enough for my level to be rejected.

Has anybody ever seen leaks actually be the downfall of a level? As in game play, not "o I don't like the way his triggers look so I'm going to reject his map".



Maybe the real question here is: is this an example of good modding or bad modding?

I was really excited to join this website and upload this level I worked so hard on. Then I spent all that time writing a description and uploading screenshots only to have it rejected and disappear, and not even based on gameplay... I can't help but think that the moderator is a good example of someone abusing his power. The next thing you know this topic will be rejected, then my account.

 

[Juliano]

If your map got rejected and the leaks don't do visible gameplay lag, I think you should protect your map, so they cant see if you leaked something and will review only by the gameplay, not by your triggers usage.

However if your map has something like a spell that creates multiple leaks and causes lag in mid-later game then you should fix it.

 

[bobadoo2]

Ya but you wouldn't think you would have to protect your map from the moderators. Lesson learned I guess.

 

[Cweener]

Protecting your map is the worst thing you can do to it, tbh.

If you protect it, then as a map mod, I go in and deprotect it(for many different reasons) and then look at the triggers anyways.
So there's no sense to it, except to limit people from learning from your map.

Anyways,

depends on how often the leaks happen in my opinion
cause if its every less than 30 seconds than yes should be rejected
every 5 minutes or so than no it shouldn't be rejected

That's exactly how I do it actually.
Your map has many triggers that leak.
One in specific that is set to run every thirty seconds and causes around 30+ leaks.
So yeah. Bad.

Anyways, it's not even permanently rejected, so I don't see the big deal.
As soon as you upload a new version it resets to pending.
Hence the "(until updated)" part after the "Rejected" part.

 

[Fingolfin]

I'd say you just stop whining and fix the leaks, and you will find that the map gets approved. It's not that much work and you get to learn how to do things properly.

 

[Catch_ya]

Yes. No one wants to play a fun game and then get a fatal error because the map maker is too lazy to fix the leaks. In my opinion you could reject every single map that have leaks which can be fixed. Like location leaks and such.

 

[Aeroblyctos]

I think if the leaks makes small lag the map should have a notification about the lag and the rating should drop. If the lag is distracting the map should be automatically rejected and told the creator to fix the lag.

For my part I on purpose leave leaks in case of cinematics. They are only run once in a game and those leak fixes just makes the trigger too long which I personally hate. My cinematics makes about 1 to 50 leaks which is a really small amount.

Leaks should be cleaned if a trigger is used more than once or the trigger otherwise gives high amount of leaks.

 

[-Kobas-]

Triggers in map are same thing as animations in models, if you made them bad map won't work (model animate) well...

After all it's not really so hard to clean leaks, even if you can't clear all in GUI but you can easily clean 90% of them using jass functions...
If I remember right numbers are:

0.3 kb for location/point
0.6 kb for group + 0.04 kb for each unit in the group
11.5 kb for special effect

 

[greasontim]

moving leaks really isn't that hard there are tools to help you check for leaks than you just custom script to get rid of them

 

[ironman47]

Don't feel singled out there babadoo I had the same thing happen to me about a week ago and it took me all day to fix the leaks on my map. I thought it sucked really bad too because like you I never experienced any lag on my map and the map had gotted around 1000 DL's in about 5 weeks it was doing pretty good. So I fixed the leaks and learned a about what leaks and what needs to be fixed. I had used a lot of creep spawns that used several different regions and ended up having to change those region spawns into points within the region. Once you have a unit spawn at some point its really easy to remove the location leak (which seems to be the most common leak) in GUI with this custom script:

• Custom script: call RemoveLocation(udg_TempLoc)

Temp_Loc would be your point variable used when you spawn your units.


One things for sure you'll only go through this once. And you'll be a better map maker for it

 

[Fingolfin]

When the mods reject your maps because of the leaks, they don't mean that the leaks make it suck. They mean that if you are serious about your map, you are going to fix those details anyway to get it approved.

 

[bobadoo2]

I guess I could spend an entire day of my life fixing all the triggers but considering it has always run fine for me I just don't feel it's necessary.

It sounds like most of the people on here have experience with leaks messing up a level, either that or you all just take too much pride in your trigger making.

I have been making levels ever since warcraft 3 came out (I bought warcraft 1 the first week it came out) and I have never seen any of my leaks cause any problems. My level 2fast2furious was full of leaks and it became so popular there was even a clan built around that level. I never did pass their test and so I never was in the clan. Yup the guy who made the level got rejected from being in the clan lol.

I also made a drug wars level that became super popular and it was full of leaks. One day at a party I brought up drug wars and some kid at the party said he used to play it on battle.net all the time.

So to conclude I have never seen leaks cause any problems in any of the levels I have made in the past.

Does anyone have any examples of a level with leaks that causes the game to run poorly?

 

[Fingolfin]

If your computer has a lot of RAM memory, you will not experience much problems unless you play for a longer time (depending on the frequency of the leaks). But if other players have less RAM, it will get filled very quickly and cause the game to lag or even crash. I think this is a really silly thing to bitch about, as i just said, if you are serious about your maps, you won't mind spending an extra 15 minutes improving those things.

 

[-Kobas-]

Well one is certain map status won't be set to approved until you clean all important leaks (special effects, user groups, spawn triggers, loops and so on).

You can ignore them if you want, but don't bother map moderators here why they rejected map!

Nothing more to say!

 

[Dr Super Good]

A map should only get rejected due to leaks if the leaks seriously affect gameplay. An example would be the orignal parasite 2, where the leaks were so bad the map could become unplayable very easilly (damage station, a few bombs and then SD after damaging cruisers).

A map where if you played it for 20 hours you may notice performance stutters is not an excuse as no map is ever designed to be played that long.

As long as the leaks do not stop the map being played without performance hickups, then that is no reason for it not to be approved. I do agree however that a map which does leak should be rated lower (even far lower) than a map which does not leak as it shows a level of professionilisim and pollish on the map. The same I would apply to software.

Remember that many GUI actions are leak prone (only fixible by using custom functions) and that the WC3 campaigns all leaked. The leaks were no problem in the campaigns due to how short the missions were. Using the logic here, it would be that the WC3 campaigns would get rejected due to leaks.

In order to fix the leaks it would take me hours.

That is a shit excuse...
You should have already spent atleast 40 hours on the map (more like 100+) so a few more should not mean anything. Further more, if you bothered to design your triggers properly at the start, you could have had them not leak with minimal extra effort. The time you have to spend fixing the leaks is the same time that software developers in real life have to spend if they mess up their design.

 

[Zenonoth]

Well, according to me only, it's too unfair to prevent a map's approval just because a leaky trigger or two, 3/4 of the people here are not master map creators so I think the only thing that should decide whether a map should be Rejected or Approved is how the gameplay, terrain would be like, as I've just checked the http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/faq/maprules/#faq_mapismine and I found nothing concerning leaky triggers, if there are triggers that are placed pointlessly or triggers that could be done in one step and the author designed them to be like in 9 steps or something...should the map experience lag..then I'd have the right to object, but so far as I can play normally without any difficulties I see that there's no need to comment after all.

To be brief, I think it's the map's testers ( Us ) business only to judge the map by how we played it, some people judge maps and rate it 1/5 just because they don't have colored sentences in their description, either ways...that's my opinion..nothing more nothing less.

 

[suave]

It's entirely up to the moderator of course..

But here's my two cents: Just upload the map, and maybe provide a warning that says this map leaks (or may play with performance issues). Let players decide to DL it and see if it affects them.

I agree that fixing leaks can be spectrum of priority.. some leaks are bad, some aren't the end of the world. Taking time to fix these can be costly - especially if it's really not worth the time.

The thing that bothers me is "rejecting" maps from others because of a few leaks seems very prohibitive of promoting map makers for taking time to make maps. It's hard work, and some of the most exciting parts is posting the map for feedback. If there are bugs and leaks, that's FINE. That's a part of any real software product, and it's up to the playerbase to either put up with it or give feedback.. and it's up to the map maker to fix it if it matters enough.

Given that a map maker has had enough initiative to make the map in the first place.. if it gets any play from users, I'm sure that's motivation enough to get up and start fixing the map up even more. But cutting it down from the roots and not letting it be posted from the start is overly prohibitive.

 

[frostloh]

I cant differentiate a leak from a pile of roadkill. As long as the map works fine, doesnt lag and is fun, i'll give it a 4-5/5. I only get pissed when the map lags half the players out, causes fatal error more than 3 times for me or something equally overboard.

 

[PurplePoot]

I don't see why a reviewer should even be looking at a map's code. If it's (relatively) bugless and not laggy on an ok machine (not top of the line but not ancient either) I don't see the issue.

That said, don't write leaky code.

 

[suave]

I don't see why a reviewer should even be looking at a map's code. If it's (relatively) bugless and not laggy on an ok machine (not top of the line but not ancient either) I don't see the issue.

That said, don't write leaky code.

I wish everyone on this site were as smart as PurplePoot. (No sarcasm)

 

[-Kobas-]

Dunno about others but I can see 50% that map can actually show me only by looking at triggers, if I open map interface, constants as well as other editors I will know 95% about map without even playing it...

(I removed terrain from calculations)

 

[bobadoo2]

UPDATE:

So I fixed all of the problems with the map and added in the description that all of the triggers were fixed. It was on the site for a while, but today I found out it's recently been delisted.

I found the map in google's search engine and reuploaded a newer version of it and guess what... it's still not listed.

Does anyone here honestly think the admins will rereview my map and get it unrejected? I sure don't think so. There is still 100s of pending maps and so what are the chances the mods will ever get around to looking at my rejected map again.

Any suggestions?

Is there a cool moderator on here I could contact who might actually unreject it?

 

[Cweener]

Link me your map.


and no. We're all jerks.

 

[bobadoo2]

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/maps-564/orcs-vs-goblins-humans3-3-a-186151/

 

[Cweener]

2.5(3)/5 and approved.

For future reference though, making a thread about how much we don't know about our jobs and posting stuff like "Is there a cool moderator on here I could contact who might actually unreject it?", really tempts us to just reject your map, if we even decide to check it.

 

[Dr Super Good]

In that case you are not very professional moderators. You are there to enfoce the rules and not to enforce your temptations.

I do agree however that such posts could be considered insultive though as he implies that some moderators are not "cool" but that is punishable separatly.

 

[GhostThruster]

In that case you are not very professional moderators. You are there to enfoce the rules and not to enforce your temptations.

and no. We're all jerks.

....

 

[Cweener]

I realize, which is why I didn't let it affect my moderation.

Just saying though. Very tempting. :|

 

[TheKurt009]

your discussions taught me to make a better map.
my map got rejected also, but that doesn't mean i hated the mod.
it was also my fault on that one.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Map making has to be viewed as a sort of product. When you go to a shop you generally buy products that have a good cost to quality ratio.

The cost for maps comes with the time you need to spend to play it. Generally however you will always be playing a map as you allocated time to play maps so cost can be completly ignored (so maps are free).

This leaves only the quality to rate. This ultimatly could be measured in units per time representing how fun the map is to play. Logically this is highly opinionated and even truely crap maps can obtain high scores from specific individuals. Additionally this measurement will degrade over time as one can have too much of a good thing but like wise it can then go on to recover when not being played.

When making a map, you are not only marketing your product against recent products, but against all products that are playable (thousands). It is only logical that you will need to follow certain guide lines of quality to even remotly stand a chance against other maps.

The moderators can be viewed as a sort of filter. They remove maps from the site which are totally worthless to play (near 0 rating) to stop members and visitors from wasting time playing them. They also will give some form of feedback about major faults to allow for improvements to the map so it will nolonger be a waste of time.

So before submitting a custom map, stop to think a minute. Is your map actually comparable to the average map being played? If not then you should probably stop at that point and go back to the design, implimentation and testing phases again until it does pass that brief test.

It can be tempting to submit something you made because you are proud of it. There is nothing wrong with that but if that happened in real life you would get shops selling shit made at primary schools by average 3-5 year olds. In real life you never see such things mixed with all the high quality Ipads and Xbox 360s so you should also not see such things mixed in with Warcraft III maps.