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Re: Mappers!
Well hell ya! Me and a buddy are juggling around the concepts of the great maps, trying to find a really good one, but I could do an NG one too.
Here, let me bestow upon you some of my wisdom.
1) A map, to be successful, must be outdoors. Even office and nuke have never shared the kind of popularity that dust and dust2 have achieved. de_dust, de_dust2 and de_aztec are, as near as I can tell, the three most popular defusion maps. Nuke ranks up pretty high there, as well as I couple others. cs_office and cs_italy are two of the most popular hostage rescue maps. See a trend? Every one of those maps except office is an outdoor map.
2) A map, to be successful, must be a defusion map. Note that the most popular maps are defusion maps. In hostage rescue maps it is often not even worth it to rescue the hostages, whereas in a defusion map as terrorist you can spend a few seconds planting the bomb, even in the heat of battle. There are some very successful hostage rescue maps that I love, but defusion is the way to go.
3) A map, to be successful, must have the right scale. A map with bad scale in any way will fail. It will not achieve popularity. In my map de_serenity2 the key problem is the scale--everything was too big. Mainly vertically, but it causes a lot of problems because people hate falling off my catwalks and dying or taking 80 damage. If I'd done more testing to begin with and found the right scale it would have never happened. So: test, test, and test again--the scale, that is.
4) A map, to be successful, must be professional. And by this I don't mean exquisite and elaborate. I mean that even scoutzknivez, a very fun map, has never achieved the level of popularity that the more professional maps have reached. We need to stick to the basics--buy zones, objectives, and good 'ol gameplay. No gimmicks. he_ and fy_ and all those other different types of maps are interesting, but they don't hold a lot of replay value and they don't attract professional gamers.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents for now. I would love to make a map that sorta goes along in that vein. The one "rule" I wouldn't mind breaking would be making a hostage rescue map, whatever, ya know? But the thing about scale is paramount.
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