TL Map Contest 6 - Results! Text by Plexa Graphics by shiroiusagi



At long last, we're ready to announce the winners of TLMC6. This was a contest which sought innovative maps that would challenge players to reevaluate how they play the game. We feel that all the finalists delivered on this, but which ideas did the community find the best? Now that the public and progamers have had their say we can reveal the final ranking of the finalists.



Prizes

Blizzard have one-upped themselves from last season and for the first time ever we're able to offer a cash prize for the top three entries. In addition to this, all finalists will receive Beta access (if they do not already have access) in addition to a Community Commander portrait. The prize breakdown is as follows:





$1,000.00



FIRST PLACE



$500.00



SECOND PLACE



$250.00



THIRD PLACE



Provided by Blizzard.



Honorable Mentions



While not placing in the top three, the other finalists are all worthy of mentioning for how they try to push the metagame. From Dash and Terminal's wild natural/third design, to Moonlight Madness's insane back door, to the metagame breaking Noah's Ark or the sheer insanity of Mutiny. These maps would make for interesting games, and we hope that we get to see one or two of them used in the future.



Dash and Terminal | SeinGalton Moonlight Madness | SidianTheBard

Mutiny | Timetwister22 Noah's Ark | Superouman







Winners

THIRD PLACE Ecosphere | Enekh [Team Yeoul]

Ecosphere was narrowly the most preferred map by the progamers who voted, while the public didn't see the map so favorably. Nevertheless, after taking both into consideration Ecosphere was the clear third place for this contest. Ecosphere is a cross-only four player map which utilizes exposed back doors to add variety to the early game and create an accessibly fourth base come late game. During the midgame players can collapse the rocks in the center to create terrain for their advantage - for instance closing off the rocks near the gold base to better defend the position. Players have a lot of new options on this map, and we're interested to see how those will play out. Enekh will walk away with $250 as third prize.



SECOND PLACE Bridgehead | Semmo

With it's striking BW aesthetic and unique layout, Bridgehead found appeal with both the public and progamers alike. The map was second on the public vote and third on progamer vote giving it a clear preference over third place. Bridgehead is going to force players to think carefully about how they plan to play this map. The wide main ramp and large backdoor into the natural means defending both main and natural is more difficult than your typical map. As players continue to expand on the map they make themselves increasing vulnerable to attack. We think that this will mean the map will feature constant action from the early game through to the late game. Semmo earns $500 for second place.



FIRST PLACE Terraform | -NegativeZero-

The clear winner of this contest was Terraform. It placed first in the public vote and second in the progamer vote. I could go on to talk about this map in detail, but we were able to get an interview with -NegativeZero- after we tallied up the votes. -NegativeZero- secures first place and $1000.



+ Show Spoiler [Full Results] + Rank Public Pro 1. Terraform Ecosphere 2. Bridgehead Terraform 3. Noah's Ark Bridgehead 4. Ecosphere Dash and Terminal 5. Dash and Terminal Moonlight Madness 5= Mutiny 5= Noah's Ark 6. Moonlight Madness 7. Mutiny



Interview

Hi -Negative-Zero-! Congratulations on Terraform winning TLMC6. For those who are not familiar with you, could you tell us a bit about yourself?



I started making maps for Brood War around 4 years ago - BW was popular at my high school, and a group of friends played LAN games in the library almost every day. I started off making really stupid maps for us to play as a joke, stuff like a map where there was 1 cluster of mineral nodes in the middle and 8 players all spawned in a circle around it (you might actually recognize the SC2 version I made).



Eventually I found broodwarmaps.net and started making 1v1 maps, while at the same time I started playing SC2. This led to a lot of my BW maps being ports of SC2 maps, but eventually I focused on refining one particular 1v1 map called Overwatch which was used in a couple amateur BW tournaments and is actually still in the ICCup map pool right now.





Overwatch

However by then I played almost exclusively SC2 and was (and had always been) a complete and utter scrub at BW so naturally my mapmaking interest also slowly shifted to SC2 - at first I held out because of some BW-master-race idiocy and the fact that using the SC2 editor looked insanely hard, but I gradually adjusted. My first SC2 map was made in 2012, it was reasonably bad but I think I had at least some sort of idea of what I was doing.



I made maps pretty infrequently for the next couple years, most notably that joke map Chaotic Arena, and Synapse which somehow managed to make the TLMC 3 finalists and annoyed a few people in the process.





Synapse

It was almost a year until my next map, Coriolis, which was a pretty idiotic idea of a low econ 4p map for TLMC 4 but people actually seemed to like this one. At this point I started mapping a little more frequently, you can see all the maps linked in my TL profile. My favorite map of mine is probably Apotheosis, it's actually a heavy revision of my BW map Overwatch. And 2 TLMCs later, here I am, I guess.





Apotheosis

Can you give us some insight as to how Terraform came about?





Amazon (left) and Apollo's Corridor (right)

Admittedly a lot of my map ideas aren't 100% original - Terraform in particular was inspired directly by 2 maps: Amazon by EastWindy and the BW map Apollo's Corridor by sTY_leZerG-eX. I vaguely remembered the spiral design from Amazon and wanted to make a map with a similar design just because it looked good, but at the same time I figured I could use the idea of one long winding path to make the layout interesting by adding only narrow, easy to exploit chokes between concentric elements of the spiral, making players be very careful about army movement. This was the original version:





Original version of Terraform

I liked the overall idea but not the specific base layout because it seemed to force players to expand toward each other so I decided to revise the base layout. At the same time I came across Apollo's Corridor on broodwarmaps.net and liked the idea of the mineral wall bases and the high ground ridges so I incorporated both at the same time. Also, the very narrow and spread out chokes were toned down a little for the sake of balance. Several revisions later, and I got what you see in the final version.



Speaking of mineral walls, four of the bases on the map double as a mineral wall. How do you think this feature will play out?



Intuitively the answer is "probably pretty badly for Zergs" but I'm a scrub so I'm not going to try to judge balance, especially since map balance has a history of sometimes being notoriously hard to predict (see: Crossfire). In terms of concept, though, both of them serve as alternative 3rd bases that you'd only see in specific situations due to their vulnerability to harassment. Only Terrans doing some sort of 3 base push would really take the forward 3rd, even though it's the closest, and the gold base is gold so who knows what crazy stuff will happen there, although it also serves as a somewhat standard option for the 4th base if the normal 3rd gets taken. Also, on the off chance that those bases get mined out, then suddenly the map is a lot more open and army maneuvering becomes a lot easier.



The other notable feature of the map is the spiral layout of the map. How do you expect players to utilize this layout?



It will give players something nice to stare at on the minimap, making them forget to split their marines or inject their next round of larvae, giving the win to the less easily distracted player.



Honestly it's not as big of a deal as it seems, it splits the map into 3 main pathways but the same effect could probably have been achieved with some ugly blobs of terrain in the right places. The more important parts are the chokes and bases that are positioned along the spiral.



What about those chokes?



Basically what I mentioned in the question about mineral walls, they just make players think a little more about where they move their army - also since they kind of restrict pathing you have to commit more firmly to an attack.



Internally, Terraform was referred to "The Spiral Map" or "TSM". Can we just call it that from now on?



Yes, if only because I want people googling League of Legends stuff to stumble across my map instead.



Anything else you'd like to say?



Let's see:

- Noah's Ark should have won

- Future LotV mapmakers, please use narrow chokes more often, now that Zerg has units that can take advantage of them - they make for interesting positional play. Superouman had the right idea back in 2011.

- IeZaeL's Emerald Plaza has been robbed of a deserving 1st place finish about 5 times by now

- Timetwister and NewSunshine have been robbed of pretty much any finishes ever

- Freakling, you are awesome

- Double harvesting econ mod is a good idea, blizz pls.

- Tanks need a buff, blizz pls.

- Thanks for the votes!



Congratulations once again!



Thanks!

See you next season!

Congratulations to all the finalists for their stellar work and to -NegativeZero-, Semmo and Enekh for walking away with the cash prizes. I'd like to take a moment to say thank you to The_Templar and Teoita who spent countless hours mulling over every little detail of this contest. Without their hard work this contest would not have happened. It's easy to take your contributions for granted, so I'm hugely appreciative of your time and effort. Additional thanks go to Psione and TL Strategy for helping make this contest happen. And of course, Blizzard for the incredible $1750 prize pool. We hope to see you all again next season!



+ Show Spoiler [Full Results] + Rank Public Pro 1. Terraform Ecosphere 2. Bridgehead Terraform 3. Noah's Ark Bridgehead 4. Ecosphere Dash and Terminal 5. Dash and Terminal Moonlight Madness 5= Mutiny 5= Noah's Ark 6. Moonlight Madness 7. Mutiny

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