[SUGGESTION] center.mtavc.com Map quality

[Si|ent]

Although the ideas behind center.mtavc.com appeared to be good it is obviously flawed.

It is becoming full of maps that are poor to say the least (not all, there ARE some great ones there, unfortunately they apear to be the minority) many maps are uploaded every day. Some don't even have spawn points!

The RSS feed means some servers are downloading every single map, getting ful of shite ones and that in turn reflects badly on mta itself when a new player enters and sees how awful the gameplay is.

Voting is a great theory but unless the auther gets 3 friends to vote (obviously a lot have) which itself isn't exactly unbiased, then the map go's unvoted. Who would bother to look through the hundreds of maps his server has downloaded and return to the site to search and vote for each that he liked? Equally who would do so after playing it on a server somewhere? Not many that is for sure.

So, what to do about this? I'd like to suggest a little RSS in the other direction. A little popup vote at the end of each map asking the player to vote between 1 and 5 (or asking if they wish to vote first) the player votes, the server tots them up and RSS's them back to the center.

This would be quick, easy, accurate and people may even be able to script the removal from thier servers of maps recieving consitantly low vote scores.

I'm presuming this could be a server option and could be put into a patch rather than having to involve the next client

[erorr404]

It would get in the way of people playing, I would personally be annoyed to see that at the end of every race. People shouldn't have to be bothered with this while they're enjoying a game, and I see the potential for abuse (when people get pissed cause they lose or want to play another map). If this were to be implemented, I would make it an optional console command the user must enter instead of a prompt.

I think the best solution is for the authors of the good maps to advertise their maps in the Mapping forum so they get more exposure (but then again, that could get flooded with crappy maps as well).

Also, server admins should be responsible for the maps they put on their server. They can't go wrong if they set up a filter for maps that are 5 stars only with at least 15 votes (the latter filter isn't available currently).

[Guest]

I think this is a great idea, maybe a bit intrusive though.

Maybe make it a console command ? You can type say... "ratemap #" into the console, and it reports back, and logs your IP, to stop abuse.. ?

[Si|ent]

They can't go wrong if they set up a filter for maps that are 5 stars only with at least 15 votes

But thats the point, it can and will go wrong. There are some superb maps on there with no votes at all, and some simply terrible ones with 4 and 5 stars. This is the problem.

I dont see a 1 second popop window being annoying. hell theres between a 5 and 30 second delay between each map anyway with nothing to do but look at stationary smoking vehicles, give the vote option then, and/or when a player dies. Make it a configurable option and those admin who don't wish to be involved can disable it.

[erorr404]

A map with a 5 star rating AND a high number of votes has a much lower chance of being poor than a map with relatively few votes.

Maybe a vote wouldn't be too annoying but it is just out of place.. it's the servers job to find good maps and the players job to enjoy them.

[Blokker_1999]

off course not all maps are from the same quality. And we can not moderate the center itself. It is up to server admins to decide what they do, and due to the server bug you can not just download every map anyway since the server can only handle 256 maps at this moment.

Voting never works, no matter what you do. People are also complaining about the map voting in the game and how bad it is. And having a vote at the end of each round is a bad thing. People would first have to login to the center trough the console, then they would get a popup after every map, and if a server is let's say destruction derby only then they would get the same request over and over again, off course you can do a check if someone has voted.

But then we have another problem. At peak moments there are more then 1000 people playing in the public servers. That would mean a 1000 votes every few minutes. It is really doubtfull our server could handle something like that. We noticed what a couple of hundred people did when the countdown of mta:sa hit 0, our server was maxed out on it's 10mbit connection.

[eAi]

We've considered a kind of reverse RSS feed which would inform the center of what maps a server has installed (so people could find what servers had a particular map). We could build some stats into this such as how often each map had been played and perhaps a way of rating maps and storing it in this feed.

This would obviously only be uploaded automatically if the server admin was happy with it.

[Si|ent]

We could build some stats into this such as how often each map had been played and perhaps a way of rating maps and storing it in this feed.

This would obviously only be uploaded automatically if the server admin was happy with it.

Good to hear.

[PacMaan]

Man jus about every server i been on this weekend its been custom maps - sure, there are some really good maps out there but they are very much in the minority at the mo. Its actually been very hard to get a decent race past few days as you spawn on a ledge 3 miles up halfway into the concrete then the 132 barrells around u explode and you get shot off at 300mph down a tunnel filled with more barrels then exit the tunnel and spawn into a stuntplane facing the wrong way still 2.5 miles up go thru a blue ring checkpoint where u respawn into a speedboat which falls for a bit then lands in the sea upside down and you drown.

I'm pretty sure this is just a temporary thing with most custom maps being the authors first map though so i aint too worried

[orappa]

I'm pretty sure this is just a temporary thing with most custom maps being the authors first map though so i aint too worried

Yeah, but the maps will still remain on the site though.

[Si|ent]

And more and more people will make thier 'first map' and upload.

Ideally it needs a manually intensive hands on approach with each map being tested and rated or vetoed by humans, can;t see there being enough people to devote thier tiem to doign that though so my initial suggestion seems a good compromise.

[UK Red]

We could build some stats into this such as how often each map had been played

Maybe how many times the map has been completed would be a useful marker. After all, starting a map, everyone groaning and changing it 3 seconds later shouldn't count as a vote.

Voting on the mapper as a person, or their average map rating might help seperate the wheat from the chavs, but it still won't help good newbies get their maps played