I'm gonna have to hurt somebody if the Snarkpit goes back to that blue and white eyesore layout. Please keep the white text on black at least.

I would really like to see the reviewing aspect of the site brought back in some fashion. I realize the current site supports user reviews of maps, but the amount of grief I received when I did a handful of them was completely not worth it. I had like 50% of the reviews I did questioned by the authors and was bitched at through PMs about stupid s**t like 'My map is not a 1, can you at least bump it up to 2' and 'My killbox is slightly more complex than you are insinuating in the review, I demand you write a thousand words about my worthless map'. I guess some sort of reviewer overview that shows tendencies, rubrics, general guidelines, etc would be good (a cool example would be reviewing the original HLDM maps, which most people know, to give a solid baseline), so that when a person gets a review they can at least see why and how this reviewer reviews as opposed to just having some jackass following Lep's (and radium's) old HL1 reviews that nobody remembers and pissing people off. Reviewing is teaching, and it helps mappers avoid obvious design and construction mistakes. I learned through radium's reviews, as did many older mappers. It was a dark day when it was closed and then deleted.

A related pipe dream I've always had was to have a multiple reviewer website where maps are reviewed by different people with different styles to give a balanced and wider view of a map. You can click on a map and see an overview, pictures, and like four different scores from four reviewers with different tastes and opinions. This probably would never happen because reviews don't even happen now but oh well.

All of this ties into my other issue with the current Snarkpit, and that's the copious amount of worthless s**t garbage maps clogging it up. If it's not 'nice' or 'fair' to delete every killbox and other half-assed non-attempts at mapping then at least we should be able to ridicule them into stopping, or something :/

haha, CJ if anything you were too generous with that review

EDIT: well prefabs perhaps, I love prefabs, but I was more referring to my own mapping style, which is make lots of different sections of maps and then toss them out and release nearly nothing. I would post pictures of interesting bits to get advice for future endeavours or encouragement to continue on it, but there's really no appropriate place for it, since I'll have little intention of ever finishing it. It doesn't belong in my profile or in the maps forum, so it just languishes on my harddrive as a reminder of broken dreams or something.

For example on an old comp I have a bunch of chunks of Natural Selection maps spread across like 8 different files that if put together would probably make a full map (with mismatching themes). That was a couple solid months of mapping that was pretty much never seen by anybody.

Good point Redwood.

My suggestion was based on the fact that 90% of maps don't get feedback (unless you really beg for it in a seperate thread). While on the other hand most of us here are interested in taking a look at screenshots, and we form opinions on them, but putting them in words takes too much effort for most maps. Now if you could just click on a scale, that's something else. And yes, Yak, i agree gameplay is more than half the story. But how will 90% of maps get reviews if most of us don't want to write words, let alone download it and take a look. And reviews is what ppl need to hang around snarkpit and keep working on improving new maps.

Redwood's suggestion of adding gameplay scoring scales could help here.. and maybe if a map gets good visual score, more ppl could get tempted to download it and fill in the gameplay scores.

But i wouldn't dismiss the visual scores. without them there would be almost no feedback at all, unless you beg for it.

Good idea about the single-author-eternal-thread-of-work. But i would make a subtitle about the current project, which the mapper can change to keep ppl easily updated on what is currently being discussed.

I only have a

couple moments to say hey but... I would like to say that as long as the roster remains intact I have few complaints about a revamp.

However, I would like to say once more for clarity... Any revamp that would include "Critiquing" as a bit more of a prioity/payment unit of any new Snarkpit would be a plus IMHO.

As time is sshort for me I cannot even take the time to read any of the previous postings in this thread so if its been mentioned already, forget I said so.

See'yas " SRC="images/smiles/wavey.gif">