User created maps

OK you miss something.

Atm MM is only using a very small list of maps. Not even all the featured ones.
Normal room, can use every map, also those which dont have a password.
The difference between featured and non featured is for the !map command.
The command only uses featured maps.
And there is a reason for that. I think there are like over a thousand maps, probably more. Like 100 of them are good, 100 are ok/good for troll games/fun partys, 800 are just stupid, useless and boring.

So when you would now use the !map command with all these maps featured there would only be a chance of 1/5 to play on a decend map, and only 1/10 to play on a good map. Thats why those aren't featured.
But they can still be played, when you use the command !map MapName, like that every map can have its poll.


Lets come to player made maps. Actually a good part of the featured maps are player made.
People like TheMooseIsLoose often create maps. To attract attention they ask people to test them, or ask the communitys opinion. Like that the devs certainly notice them too, and the good ones become featured. (Most playermade maps that are seriously made become featured.)


So there is no nerf to user created content, just a nerf to troll maps.
If you check what the non featured maps look like, you will agree that the systeme is pretty good.


Edit: Also there are many old versions of maps. All those are excluded from the !map command because a bether version exists.

Unfeatured maps: http://zero-k.info/Maps?mapSupportLevel=0&size=Any&sea=Any&hills=Any&elongated=Any&assymetrical=Any&special=0&isTeams=Any&is1v1=Any&ffa=Any&chicken=Any&isDownloadable=1&needsTagging=false&search=

Here is the reasoning for the current situation.

• Our map hosting syncs with Springfiles, which has a very large number of maps from over a decade of uploads.
• Most of the maps accessible through the unfiltered !map command are terrible or old.
• Most of the common words you may put into to !map command to find a map lead to such maps.
• Therefore it is fairly likely for an unfiltered !map command to commonly select terrible or old versions of maps.
• Downloading maps is bad for the server as it is a fairly expensive use of bandwidth.
• Downloading maps is bad for users as they need to wait for everyone in the battleroom to download it.
• Steam allows us to give everyone a large, fixed, set of maps.
• Therefore we put the featured maps on Steam and made the default !map command unable to select a non-Steam map.

PanchoVilla you are incorrect about the current situation. Any map can be played on an unpassworded room. To do so first set a password, select the map then use the !password command to remove the password. This ensures that you know what you are getting yourself into when you use !map.

quote: This seems a big nerf to user created content. Whats the idea behind this? we have a voting system in place, so if a map is bad, it can be voted out?

Not a solution as many people don't look or think about what map they are voting for.

There's some behavior that might seem weird, especially to new players :
Say, I want to start a new game on an unsupported map.
I click Singleplayer & Coop => Skirmish => Advanced.
Then I click Change Map => Download maps.
While I'm browsing the list of maps [EDIT:] on the website, a spectator comes into the game, then leaves
(but I don't know it because the chat doesn't show the logs of people joining and leaving - btw, how to enable it?)
I finally select Easter Bunny v2 Horse [cannot autolink maps?], an unsupported map, but when I click "Play on this map" and Alt+Tab back to the game, I see that Nightwatch tells me that he cannot find this map !
(If the spectator didn't show up, I wouldn't have had this issue.)

P.S.: Link to maps on Springfiles, for the curious :
https://springfiles.com/spring/spring-maps

I'm not supposing anything, I've tested it. Try it yourself if you don't believe me.

it would be good to have a command to vote in an unfeatured map

something alongside !map

like !ufmap

that would allow voting in any map from the database, and players know straight away from the different map command that this map could be of dubious quality so can downvote if wanted...

and it means we dont have to go through the process of setting a passworded server, then voting map in, then unpasswording it, then passwording again when we want to change, and so on.

the chicken community really suffers from this as they love to slaughter chickens on stupid maps

quote: But they can still be played, when you use the command !map MapName, like that every map can have its poll.

This is false -- I just tested in a custom room with some SpeedBall maps I've played with before. Springie only finds the maps if I'm hosting a passworded room. When did this change? This behavior is terrible and should be reverted.

I'm fine with having a smaller, curated map pool for matchmaker games, and I'm fine that unsupported maps don't show up in the random !map command -- but custom rooms should be able to pull from the entire map pool, especially when a specific map is desired.

quote: GBrankPanchoVilla you are incorrect about the current situation. Any map can be played on an unpassworded room. To do so first set a password, select the map then use the !password command to remove the password. This ensures that you know what you are getting yourself into when you use !map.

I just tested this as well. False. Its completely broken >:/

[16:33] maackey: !password
[16:33] Nightwatch battle password removed
[16:33] maackey: !map SpeedBall_X20-V1.1
[16:33] Nightwatch Cannot find such map.
[16:33] maackey: !password
[16:33] Nightwatch battle password removed
[16:33] maackey: !password blue
[16:33] Nightwatch battle room password changed
[16:33] maackey: !map SpeedBall
[16:33] Nightwatch changing map to SpeedBall_X20-V1.1
[16:33] Nightwatch This map is not officially supported!
[16:33] FeXoR: Want to play alone?
[16:33] maackey: !password
[16:33] Nightwatch battle password removed
[16:33] maackey: !map SpeedBall X20
[16:33] Nightwatch Cannot find such map.

Yeah, its not impossible to do it, but you can only host non-featured maps through a janky, unintuitive, tedious, undocumented process, which IMO is unacceptable. I get flustered when there are obvious issues but people say things are fine/working.

I shouldn't have to set a password, select the map, and then unset a password every time I want a "fun" or otherwise non-featured map. That is just bad UX.

At the very least there should be a checkbox in the lobby settings that says "Allow unsupported maps" instead of connecting it to the passworded state of the lobby... wtf that still bewilders me.

We could loosen the restriction on map selections, now that the server seems to have handled the release. The main remaining issue is that there are common maps with old broken maps as substrings. We could limit to supported a have people post on their maps.

Why would you want to completely -
(well, besides running Spring in command mode or some even harder hoops to jump)
- close off most of the maps to the players?

Honestly, the biggest issue
(the behavior that is seemingly inconsistent because of lack of feedback)
could probably be solved just by changing the Nightwatch answer in that case from "map not found"
to "if you want to play on unsupported maps, password your game, download and change the map, then un-password it again"...

(I however don't know how hard it would be to make Nightwatch to understand the difference...)

For the substring issue we could search featured or supported maps first and only search the rest when a match isn't found (so an exact name of an unsupported map would work).