What makes a map bad?

Tomes.

Bad Terrain
Unbalanced
Bad Map Style
Boring Gameplay
Lack of information (if map is somewhat complex)

Most people have touched on those points

Other - Polish (as also said)

Polish to me is very important in a map. If your map is buggy, tooltips don't match hotkeys, your custom hero sounds like the opposite sex of what they should be (I.E., a warlock sound like a sea witch, I have seen it), your only focus is just adding instead of improving, and stuff like that all lead to a very poorly made map in my opinion.

This in no way makes a map bad (considering some mapmakers that write english in maps speak some other 1st language) but it does get on my nerves when things make no grammatical sense. For instance:
This tower sends out an electric shock causing skin to fry and convulsions
Not quite the defenition of convulsion, oh well.

Yes, it's right that boring gameplay really spoils a map.

Another issues: lack of triggers in non melee maps. When the author doesn't know much about triggers and; therefore, the map doesn't contain many features. The person does not know how to use a single variable or jass or advanced triggers, making the map really limited.

A bad story or no story leaves me thinking "why am I playing?"

Bad Terrain makes me think the map was rushed through.

No doodads either means his memory (ram) is below average or he just skipped the decor.

If the map is unbalanced (ie, hero arena with PWNAGE chars) then it sucks to be anyone else, which takes the fun out of the game.

Boring gameplay... hmm. Well, I would say boring would be doing repetitive, semi-auto tasks (ie, creeping). The masses of *open* RPGs fall into this task. Now, if you had more control over what went on (actually using a button to attack, aiming and such) it would be fun.

A lack of instruction is frustraiting. Even worse, instructions that aren't organized are horrible. I can remember playing Lands of Fate RPG, scanning through the quests and their text on some understandable material related to spawning. Eventually I gave up and contacted a friend :|

Special things really add a "Wow, he did that?" feel to the map. But they are not important, just little things that are very fickle.

Too many cutscenes are ANNOYING... I played "THE EYE @.@" rpg (an Impressive RoC RPG). The gameplay was amazing. The details very nice. But all those damn cutscenes made me feel like I had no control! 1/4 of the time, a character was making a stupid little comment on a patch of grass. If you're going to add a lot of cutscenes, you should be making a cinematic, not an RPG.

I think the feel you get from the map is affected by how bad or good it is. I would like something that has an awsome environment and lots of basic natural things such as hills cliffs water and w/e else.

Change the title of this thread to "What makes a map unpopular?" Because there's no accurate way to tell if a map is "good" or "bad." However, here are a few things that I find important to mapmaking:

DETERMINE YOUR AUDIENCE. You won't see a whole lot of 12-year-old kiddies playing an RP map, but RP maps are hosted once in a while, by intelligent people who appreciate them. On the other hand, you've got your simple, action-packed maps like Footie Wars, that appeal to an entirely different audience.

BAIT AND SWITCH. The first impression is very important. Make the map as exciting as you can, so you may intrigue first-time players. DO NOT begin with a long cutscene. Making the map fun is only half the battle though; you must also make it deep (such as multiple hero selections), so that they may play for months to come.

KNOW WHEN TO END IT. Make your map last only as long as it needs to. You can't plop a bunch of heroes in an arena and expect the players to duke it out for an hour... something like that might last 5 minutes before it gets tired. Remember, short good maps beat long bad maps any day.

BONUS FACTOR. A prime example of this is in Diablo II (the retail game). Players are constantly rewarded for killing, exploring, and desecrating graves, with a ring, or a new sword, or any number of things. Offer plenty of rewards to stimulate players, and they may grow addicted to your map!

LEARN PSYCHOLOGY. You know that a map must be fun, but the problem is figuring out how to make it fun; well, that is where psychology comes in. There is actually a great deal of psychology involved in game design, and knowing about the mind will help you create a fun and addictive game. :)

That took longer than I care to say...

Having studied research methods for several years, I tend to believe that your method may not capture essential elements of bad maps. As several brilliant people have noted in this thread, it's more complicated than "something is bad" and "something is good".

You should try to narrow your research to very few maps with similar characteristics and find the most important research questions for them. Then you should consult an appropriate sample, containing the same distribution of people as the audience of your maps. Here, for example, most people are map developers and their opinions may not be representative of the whole audience.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,

Tommi

i think what makes a map bad is footman warz.. lol ..you get a hero that can wipe out half the map with one spell. i lost cause a tauren chieftan casted shock wave from the center of the map and killed my base....unbalance is what really makes a map terrible

Well go look for new version's of the game; They might just be balanced and you just might seem change your thought on the game . But yes determining a map if's bad or good is very complicated to say because there could always be potential and yet some people have different taste.

ok i disagree with you on that... a hero killing me from the middle... and yes i have found balanced versions and they do seem to suit me better... but... it kinda sux when you have no control of someone casting a spell 3000 feet away from you, killing you, and you can't do squat about it. like the potm in that map, one sent an owl from the opposite corner of the map and casted starfall. it hit me from like 7000 range! Anyone will agree with me that that is kinda cheap.

Ok then disagree with me. Not trying to start something afterall in your post you seem pretty pist off. Sorry if I made a mistake.

nah im not pissed. :D

you have to add in features and things which makes normal people not think its boring
Boring game is the worst. Maps and Warcraft III itself was made just for people having fun.
Add in features that keeps people stuck with the game..
It must many times come up new things.. (I dont mean new types of creeps rofl)
but new optional quests, new small features like a "map" item which shows a region of the minimap when picked etc.
minigames and more..
Sometime also sudden events,
for example suddenly you go across an unknown battle with all new units.. etc

Do everything you can to keep your map from being boring.

As said, it depends what kind of map you're talking about. Like the first option, if it's an RPG, that's bad, but melee maps and general maps like that aren't supposed to have a story, but assuming it's an RPG, here's what I say to all of those:

Bad story or no story at all

I've have to say that this is pretty annoying. I absolutely hate seeing RPGs with no story or a horrible story. In fact, I never play Open RPGs because of this, and whenever I see an RPG with a bad story or none at all, I just leave.

Lack of doodads/ Low-detailed or bad quality terrain

Well, I'd say these are more important as well. It horrifies me when I play an RPG map that looks like it has pretty much no terrain at all and very crappily done terrain and cliffs. Whenever I see a game with such horrible terrain, I usually leave as well, because if the creator can't even make decent terrain then I know the map's gonna be terrible.

Unbalanced game (very difficult of very easy game)

I think this pretty much applies to any map. I absolutely hate maps with one hero that's able to kill everything, and has insanely high stats compared to other characters. Also, I hate maps that are extremely easy. If you're gonna make it so you only fight a few creeps and then you win, I'd replan your map out.

Short or very long maps

Well, unlike most people, I actually prefer long maps over short maps. I like playing great maps for a long time and enjoy that it doesn't end too soon. However, if the map is really crappy, then it'd be worth it just to leave, because no one wants to play a long game on a map that looks like it was done by a 2 year old... so in other words, nobody wants to play a long game on pretty much most Battle.net custom maps.

Boring gameplay

I hate games with boring gameplay. I hate Open RPGs where you just go endlessly killing with no direction what-so-ever. I hate Progressing RPGs where you just kill everything in sight while advancing a bit, then buying a thousand tomes and beating the hell out of some overpowered in the first place final boss. That's the type of game I want to avoid.

Lack of quests/map instructions

In an RPG map has no quests, I personally lock it up in my "DON'T PLAY THESE GAMES" folder where I keep the crappy maps, and remind myself to never play it again. RPGs without quests shouldn't even be allowed to be hosted on Bnet. A lot of the FUN of RPGs are quests! Map Instructions are not really needed for RPGs, seeing as how they're pretty straight-forward, however, occasional tips are always good to make the map simpler to the player.

Nothing special in the map (no custom abilities, items, units or models)

If there's NOTHING custom in the map at all, then I leave as soon as possible. When I play a map, I expect to see tons of custom heroes with awesome custom abilities, and lots of custom items and units, as well as a few skins here and there. I'm not really a big fan of Custom Music or Models because they usually make the map very big and they're not really useful in particular.

Many cutscenes

Again, I'd have to say this is bad in RPGs, especially Multiplayer ones or ones in single-player RPGs that you can't skip. When I play an RPG, I actually want to PLAY it, not be swarmed with cutscenes every 2 minutes. I think they should just be as long as they have to be, and have them whereever they're needed. Not all over the place just commenting on the smallest of things.

Few cutscenes/ No cutscenes

I'm not a fan of too many cutscenes, but I don't like RPG maps that have too few cutscenes either. As I stated before, if one has no cutscenes, I just leave as soon as I can. As I stated before, I only think an RPG should have as many cutscenes as it needs without making the map crappy, or without overdoing it.

Other - Polishing it up

Okay, seriously, I've played some bad maps, but really, some maps I've played are so horrid that it looks like the terrain was done by randomly selecting terrain and just clicking the map all over the place, and the triggers look like they were all done in about 30 seconds with horrible cinematics, looping text that never ends, screwed up triggers which mess up the game and just bad unit placement and map arrangement in general.