Watchers in the Wild

[Moderator]

[TD]

Moderator: StoPCampinGn00b version (none stated) Watchers in the Wild by normalice REVIEW Watchers in the Wild is an almost 100% symmetric 1v1 map with above average visuals (terrain, doodads, weather, etc) created by a seasoned melee map maker, normalice. There is no huge advantage for a particular race, but night elf in particular may be at a noticeable disadvantage to being as successful than the other races in the map. Players will be satisfied with a easy-to-get-to tavern and multiple shops, as well as reasonable item drops. Read more below for a more detailed explanation on how the performance of the map is.​ FEEDBACK Gameplay: First off, the creep camps seem to drop reasonable items. The creep camp variety was thought out. One in particular can be obstructive to the map's gameplay by chance. The top right sea giant camp is a lot closer to the pathway than it's 'symmetric' counter-part in the southwest. Adding on to the much higher probability a player may attract those creeps, they have ensnare. Which means a forced fight. The neutral building are symmetric and have equal opportunity for both sides to reach one in time. Good job having a tavern and shop, but having a shop with sleeping and non-sleeping creeps guarding it can cause annoyances for some players. The problem with that is, the non-sleeping camp will wake up, so it defeats the purpose of having a creep that sleeps. What's the problem with always awake camps guarding shops? It's that it takes away a popular strategy, shopping at night. The layout is symmetric, besides the out of place creep camp. It offers a fair share open space and chokepoints, but the starting points may be unfavorable to players with a build order as they are not enclosed but rather split halfway from the upper entrance and the lower entrance. (Build order's purpose are usually to prevent things killing workers off, like blademasters). Other than that, not much of a problem here. The bases have a higher amount of resources, but that's the style of the map. There may seem to be less trees, but there are actually plenty of densely packed canopy trees for enough lumber. Where is my mention of night elves being somewhat underpowered in this map? Well, it's because uproot creeping is toned down a little due to the distance from the camps and the shallow water where you can't build. That is a very minor problem, but adding goblin laboratories adds on to that pain of being NE. Reveals and sappers are efficient counters to a night elf army, especially 1st tier. Other races seem to be balanced, orcs have a nice fountain to heal up to high HP levels after a fight, undead have critters and enough resources for tier 3, humans have a nice green camp expansion to get early. Overall, above average job when executing melee gameplay in your map, but you could definitely improve. ​ Visuals: The terrain is pretty good in the map. Tile placement looks a lot better than the overhead screenshot, it's not randomly mixed nor it's plain. Height leveling was similar to blizzard maps, as well as cliff usage. The doodads looked good, your environmental doodads looked great. Sometimes doodads seemed placed in the middle of pathways, but it's pretty decorative, the only thing I see that looks wrong are the temple like areas where the storm reavers and revenants reside. The platform is sticking out. The whole thing looks like it's sticking out of the boundaries. It could definitely use more decorations.​ Miscellaneous: None.​ RATING This map is rated with a three star moderator rating. It's a higher three, but I cannot give a recommended (4) this due mostly to a lot of minor melee component issues. Overall map can be useful for melee map creators and players alike. ​ FAQ [COLOR=white Map Making Related [COLOR=white [COLOR=white ] How can I get my map approved? Learn here. Where can I get world editor assistance and find tutorials? Here. Forum Related[/COLOR]]How do I navigate the Hive Workshop? Learn here. What does reputation mean at the bottom of my profile? Learn here. Where can I discuss a problem only with the staff and/or higher administrators? Here. [/COLOR]

[/TD] [/TD][/tr]

 

[Rex.]

Hi normalice, can you change the description colour? It is too gray. Make it into yellow or any light colour! It helps people like me to read your description easily and even possibly more downloads and approve! Good luck!

 

[normalice]

I brightened it a bit. Need more or is that enough?

 

[Rex.]

Yeah that's better.

 

[Vinz]

The overall look is good, well structured.

 

[Rex.]

Oh yeah, pls add the changelog. No changelog= Rejection

 

[Rex.]

And also credits.

 

[normalice]

Oh yeah, pls add the changelog. No changelog= Rejection

there's an "Updates" section. There simply haven't been any updates yet.

also, there is no one to credit, as no custom items were used..

 

[Vinz]

Agreed, Changelog and Credits are optional and are rarely seen for melee maps, unless a change actually happened or custom decorations were used respectively.

Also, please don't double post. Use the

button.

 

[StoPCampinGn00b]

Review finished!

[TD]

Moderator: StoPCampinGn00b version (none stated) Watchers in the Wild by normalice REVIEW Watchers in the Wild is an almost 100% symmetric 1v1 map with above average visuals (terrain, doodads, weather, etc) created by a seasoned melee map maker, normalice. There is no huge advantage for a particular race, but night elf in particular may be at a noticeable disadvantage to being as successful than the other races in the map. Players will be satisfied with a easy-to-get-to tavern and multiple shops, as well as reasonable item drops. Read more below for a more detailed explanation on how the performance of the map is.​ FEEDBACK Gameplay: First off, the creep camps seem to drop reasonable items. The creep camp variety was thought out. One in particular can be obstructive to the map's gameplay by chance. The top right sea giant camp is a lot closer to the pathway than it's 'symmetric' counter-part in the southwest. Adding on to the much higher probability a player may attract those creeps, they have ensnare. Which means a forced fight. The neutral building are symmetric and have equal opportunity for both sides to reach one in time. Good job having a tavern and shop, but having a shop with sleeping and non-sleeping creeps guarding it can cause annoyances for some players. The problem with that is, the non-sleeping camp will wake up, so it defeats the purpose of having a creep that sleeps. What's the problem with always awake camps guarding shops? It's that it takes away a popular strategy, shopping at night. The layout is symmetric, besides the out of place creep camp. It offers a fair share open space and chokepoints, but the starting points may be unfavorable to players with a build order as they are not enclosed but rather split halfway from the upper entrance and the lower entrance. (Build order's purpose are usually to prevent things killing workers off, like blademasters). Other than that, not much of a problem here. The bases have a higher amount of resources, but that's the style of the map. There may seem to be less trees, but there are actually plenty of densely packed canopy trees for enough lumber. Where is my mention of night elves being somewhat underpowered in this map? Well, it's because uproot creeping is toned down a little due to the distance from the camps and the shallow water where you can't build. That is a very minor problem, but adding goblin laboratories adds on to that pain of being NE. Reveals and sappers are efficient counters to a night elf army, especially 1st tier. Other races seem to be balanced, orcs have a nice fountain to heal up to high HP levels after a fight, undead have critters and enough resources for tier 3, humans have a nice green camp expansion to get early. Overall, above average job when executing melee gameplay in your map, but you could definitely improve. ​ Visuals: The terrain is pretty good in the map. Tile placement looks a lot better than the overhead screenshot, it's not randomly mixed nor it's plain. Height leveling was similar to blizzard maps, as well as cliff usage. The doodads looked good, your environmental doodads looked great. Sometimes doodads seemed placed in the middle of pathways, but it's pretty decorative, the only thing I see that looks wrong are the temple like areas where the storm reavers and revenants reside. The platform is sticking out. The whole thing looks like it's sticking out of the boundaries. It could definitely use more decorations.​ Miscellaneous: None.​ RATING This map is rated with a three star moderator rating. It's a higher three, but I cannot give a recommended (4) this due mostly to a lot of minor melee component issues. Overall map can be useful for melee map creators and players alike. ​ FAQ Map Making Related Forum Related How can I get my map approved? Learn here. Where can I get world editor assistance and find tutorials? Here. How do I navigate the Hive Workshop? Learn here. What does reputation mean at the bottom of my profile? Learn here. Where can I discuss a problem only with the staff and/or higher administrators? Here.

[/TD] [/TD][/tr]

 

[normalice]

huh. the yellow camp in the corner wasn't a problem during testing, but i didn't really test it "extensively" so it's probably worthwhile to back them up a bit. Any idea when the map contest ends so I can update like a normal map?

also, the sleeping creeps thing - I just double checked it, and it seems all the shop creeps do, in fact, sleep? Did you mean the observatory, perhaps? I didn't want anyone to be able to sneak out a shredder, because those are a pretty big deal. I usually put non-sleeping creeps and/or creeps with ensnare at an observatory specifically for this purpose, but the terrain that ended up around the observatory didn't seem to favor any creeps with ensnare, so two non-sleeping creeps is what I went with. But even that doesn't really matter, as purchasing a shredder wakes everything up anyway - sleeping creeps at an observatory only gives one a 'head start'.

as for AoW creeping, I figured since the natural expansions were 'easy' green camps, that would be the most attractive spot for AoW creeping, making the on-ramp an ideal location for building it. As such, the surrounding camps are also mostly green as well. I've never really understood people who AoW creep, myself, so I didn't really give much thought as to whether or not that was sufficient...

 

[Ken-E]

Contest Review

Summary


The overall presentation doesn’t seem to be interesting, with a title like ‘Watchers in the Wild’ you’d expect something that would be set on the Ashenvale, while it does feel irrelevant. The execution of the map is rather decent. Blizzard cliffs are well utilized at the beginning, water puddles creates a natural feel for the map, the terrain isn’t flat though some part may feel it was warped too much with terrain tweaking. The size of the map is really good, enough paths and space and it’s incredibly maneuverable.
However, the tileset combination is extremely modest and it’s kind of monotonous along with the rest of the randomly placed doodads that are messy than natural. Trees have spaces in between them small units can hide in between spaces. Also, boundary should not be merely be trees as it would looked ugly when they’re cut down, this is easily remedy by overlapping Blizzard cliffs or adding water space between boundary and shore trees.
But the biggest things that this map overlooks are the creep and neutral buildings locations, to begin with, the Fountain of Power is really out of place, it doesn’t pop up on the map as a neutral building would replace it with Health/Mana one, another one is that 2 Taverns on a 1v1 melee map feels like it wastes potential space for neutral buildings, I would place it on the middle replacing the fountain. Creep camps aren’t well thought out, Red Creep camps should have more substantial return other than item and bounty, usually, guard Dragon Roosts or Marketplaces. There are nearby Red camps on the starting building and what makes it worse is that Green camp guard Gold Mines? It doesn’t seem right. Finally ‘Items’, while it has a decent item drop set, it could’ve been more random though.
Overall, it’s a decent map I suppose, there are execution errors and many part of the map are unpolished.



Map originality – 22/30

Terrain/Layout- 15/25

Creep camp and neutral buildings – 6/20

Item drops – 8/15

Map presentation – 7/10

Total of 58/100

 

[normalice]

Trees have spaces in between them small units can hide in between spaces.

Where? Are there any such spaces at the starting zones? I looked at the pathing of the map, for this specific thing, and couldn't find anything.

As for the rest of the map, some tree spacings were intentional, the rest I didn't think mattered.. But if there are some that you think are potentially troublesome, I'll be happy to take a look (just need to know where!)

the Fountain of Power is really out of place, it doesn’t pop up on the map as a neutral building would replace it with Health/Mana one

Yeah, I really wish blizzard would patch it so the fountain of power shows up on a mini-map, but w/e. The only problem is that a fountain of mana benefits the Orc the most and a fountain of health benefits night elves the most. In any event, the only way to really balance it is to either not have a fountain or to have both.

2 Taverns on a 1v1 melee map feels like it wastes potential space for neutral buildings, I would place it on the middle replacing the fountain.

I'll take that into consideration, especially with the previous note

Creep camps aren’t well thought out, Red Creep camps should have more substantial return other than item and bounty, usually, guard Dragon Roosts or Marketplaces. There are nearby Red camps on the starting building and what makes it worse is that Green camp guard Gold Mines? It doesn’t seem right. Finally ‘Items’, while it has a decent item drop set, it could’ve been more random though.

Actually, I put quite a bit of thought into the creep camps

The green camps at the expansions are due to the fact that the expansions are in close proximity to each other. I wanted people to be able to quickly take it and set up a defense, without advantage given to races that can take yellow camps without an army (i.e. night elf AoW creeping or humans with defend footies against ranged creeps).

For team or FFA maps, it makes sense to have marketplaces or dragon roosts, but for a 1v1 map, those things are too pivotal. And it makes little sense for red camps to guard anything else. On the other hand, red camps in a 1v1 map are rarely ever attacked at all. To that end, I put them out of the way (in the far corners), making them optional but the payoff is they drop the best items one could reasonably expect in a 1v1 map (level 4/5 permanent - aura items, in other words).

Then, yellow camps are in the near corners - that is, on the shortest path to the natural expansions. The yellow camps that guard nothing have better drops than the yellow camps that guard the observatories.

And all green camps are closer to the middle (except the ones that guard the shops, of course), for ease of creeping. They don't drop much to speak of, but that's not really the point of green creeps.

The item tables, in general, are what one might call 'standard'. Boring, sure, but there's a reason it is standard. If the drops are too good it becomes mandatory to kill the creeps instead of fight your opponent. If the drops are bad then there's no point in killing them at all. And if you introduce a broad random element that can drop either 'too good' or 'bad' items, then you cause chance to factor into the game above tolerable levels..

I'll probably remove the fountain of power, though, and put a tavern there instead. I'll have to think about what to do with the location of the current taverns..