Map Protecting -- Rants, Raves, and all your stupid Thoughts

Of course it is. That´s the point. Even tough I don´t always agree with ppl, I keep developing tools. That´s my way to share something. :D

map protection is good, why? with the new kind of open rpgs where it's like a mmorpg map protection is crusial. Let me take a good map(very laggy though :( :) ) Legacies:Tides of Serpent. I wanted to crack this game so much :D , am I a noob? am I a bad person, NO, I was just frustrated with the toughness of the game, but after a while I calmed my mind, fair is fair. You want to beat the map, beat it on your own, without cheats. There's nothing wrong with cheating if you are playing alone, but in multiplayer, especially open rpgs, it just takes away the excitement. So, I have nothing against map makers that protect their rpg maps, open rpg maps, and any other maps done for multiplayer. Although I agree, sometimes people can help with a interesting but badly written map and that's when map makers have to really decide on their own, take the help or not

He didn't mean to have an unprotected version of it. I've heard around palces that his first versions were protected, but one of his later versions was accidentally unprotected. I guess I would be happy to see my map everywhere, but I definitly would NOT be happy if someone ripped it, unbalanced EVERYTHING, changed the terrain, some text messages, and put THEIR name on it and deleted Duke's. The maps that DO give credit to Duke I admire, but if I found the creator of one of those Gay Mauls or Family Guy Mauls, I would give him an ear-full. I think majority rules on protecting maps, since there are so many more advantages. And who says a map maker needs someone else's map to learn? Isn't that why we have forums? Learning from maps can be harmful, teaching wrong ways to do things. And specifically unprotected maps, they are sometimes in the '15minutejob' category, and have sloppy use of triggers. Then this map maker says, "Well if thats how its done, im gonna do MY maps this way". And so on and so on, everyone makes their games with these crappy techniques that cause lag and bugs, which ultimately drop the fun rate on B.net.

I feel that map protects are mixed blessings. I never opened a map because i couldnt beat it. i opened maps because i wanted to know how somthing was done. Balin's Tomb had custom attachments which i had never seen before. I wante to open it up so bad to see if they were new modles. i couldnt becase some asshole on battlenet would rig the map if it was unprotected. I just sugessted on another thread someone create a map protect that always ran a trigger saying "This is a tutorial map it is most likely rigged" at initialization. Someone could do this, (not me) and it would allow all the great maps to teach noobs aswell as prevent some smarass from making himself start with 999999 gold.

Hmm....I once took a Balin's Tomb map, and made it a LOT better (it had been screwed by 1.13 to the point it was impossible).

If it had been protected, it would have been dead, period. It is, in fact, dead.

But i learnt from it.

However, I protect my maps.

Why?

Because I really have seen a lot of stolen maps out their.

Mauls? Never played one in....about 4 months.

DotA? I think unprotecting it made it better...but some worse.

I think, if you are gunna keep on updating a map, protect it.

Then, if not, wait a while and then unprotect it, otherwise it will get boring and die.

Only my personal opinion.

map protecting both has good reasons for protecting and unprotecting...

so here is my p.o.v

map protecting: prevents noobs from making an unlimited suppy of crap a$$ed games that fills up b.net (there has never been a day where i played a footman wars where i didnt need to dl), makes you feel special and safe

not map protecting: allows people to 'learn', allows people (starts with an 'n' and ends with 'oob') to steal/hack/change/alter/unbalance your map, steal credits, give YOU a bad name, make it crappy and give YOU the credits, allow your wonderful (maybe) game to be sent to hell in an unorderly fashion


i think the choice is clear

Ok look at the original un-protected "real life"
now look at the 1,000 variations map stealers made.
Now look at Wintermaul.
Now look at the 3,000 <instert something here>mauls there are.

When you take pride and time in a map should you let someone steal it? It's like someone plagerising your writing, copying a movie you made or music, it's like pirating something. Just a lesser form. I just put in my 2 cents and i'm in no mood to argue just conside whats above :)

DIE WITH INTEREST? if your game IS good then IT wont DIE! As LONG as YOU keep making more VERSIONS!

I remember getting into a big discussion about this during the RoC beta.

Anyhow, back then I was firmly absolutely in any case against map protection. Then some stuff happened.

Anybody who played in the RoC beta or was in the early RoC mapping community will know of Mr123. He made one of the first maps with working keyboard support (via hotkeys) called WarKart. In the spirit of helping the community, he left all of his maps unprotected. Shortly thereafter some idiot changed nothing in WarKart except for the credits, protected the map, and rereleased it. Because Mr123's version was unprotected, everyone assumed that he had ripped off the other guy, and I received several nasty e-mails from people telling me that Mr123 was a horrible person because he had stolen the map.

Which really sucked. Because Mr123 got ripped out of credit, and his maps were definitely among the best available at the time. And it probably wouldn't have happened if he had protected his map. Strike 1 for not protecting your maps.

I examined why I was so adamantly against protection. I realized that it was because I wanted other people to be able to learn by examining the maps. So why not setup alternate resources for them? Instead of leaving your maps unprotected, write tutorials, or release portions of your code so they recreate some of the cooler effects. The pro-unprotected people will have you believe that protected maps will make n00bs absolutely helpless. They're not. There are tutorials, the JASS vault, the battle.net forums, the wc3c forums, the campaign creations forums, IRC.... Strike 2 for not protecting your maps.

Then I realized that all this anti-protection sentiment really came from my experience in the open source software movement, which Esoteric mentioned above. If this is your reason, start protecting your maps. Even stalwart advocates of Open Source, such as Eric S. Raymond (if you don't know who he is you don't know as much about open source as you think), agree that games are an example of something that should be closed source. Why? For the same reason war3 maps should be -- they would get hacked to pieces! The only truly secure game server wouldn't trust the client to anything at all, and would simply send images of what was happening to the monitor, with all calculations done server side. Not only does the bandwidth for that not exist yet, but it still couldn't prevents bots playing for you. Strike 3 for not protecting your maps.

Just thought I'd submit those anecdotes as food for thought. I'm against protection BTW -- Battledome is only protected to reduce file size.

Ok protected maps can stay popular! We got tha t straight? look at :
-Enfos
-Fuzas
-Spell Craft
-Skibis
-Pest Invasion
They're protected and still live, i admit some of them fear and are getting close to death only because they need a new version to let loose on Bnet. And when wintermaul got ripped that was the true death of it. I sweared a oath to my self and to everyone i know that i will never play a <something>maul! EVER! or 1,000 variants of Real Life with new ways to cheat and be stupid.

Map protection keeps your work your work. It's they're choice not yours. And many maps are ripped and passed off as other's work! which is stupid!

I see your other points. I would NOT PROTECT my map IF i knew it WOULDNT be RIPPED. However with those jerks on bnet, i'm guarnteed almost for a variant to be made, or a map ripping.

Wow, how in the hell has this thread lasted so damn long. LOL. Anyhow, I'm keeping the beta of my map im about to publish a protected one, simply because its a beta and I dont want anyone editing things until I have it the way i like as a finished version :) After that ill most likely unprotect it, and let people just have at it. After all, thats how alot of good maps end up so popular. ALot of good variations are spawned of it. True alot of crappy ones tend to show up too but the good ones usually outshine them.

This is a mixed thing for me because I like protection and the little bit of control it gives the map maker, but i also think new map makers need good examples to follow and the best way is to open a map that has something similar to what they want, and to learn the inner workings.

Everything I know about triggers atm Ive learned from either people here on these forums, or from just opening a buttload of maps in the TFT WE and screwing around with them until I found out stuff worked. I'd never even think of saving the maps i played with and posting them. I was just trying to learn how to make neat features in my own map that would work right, rather than try to build them all from scratch (which to a total n00b like i was is VERY overwhelming).

All in all though it just comes down to the map makers preference. Protection exists and prob. always will so its not really something that needs debating. You can love it or hate it all you want but theres always going to be protected maps, and there will always be unprotected ones.

-Huh

PS- anyone who wants to learn from my map just has to email me. its that simple. Im always willing to either send an unprotected version, or i might go as far as to make a learning map for the part the person wants to learn about. People have done the same for me so ill return the favor.

Protecting a map has both its good and bad sides, just like anything else in life. Protecting a map makes it difficult for a random idiot to edit it and/or replace your name with his. It protects something you spent a great deal of time on.

But, on the other side, it also prevents people who simply want to see how you did something from finding out. It slows the education of others, thus making it harder for the community in general to advance. Indirectly, every person that protects their map is possibly hurting the entire community. Of course, if your map doesn't involve any advanced triggering or impressive terraining, you've got nothing to worry about here. But then, if it doesn't, then why did you bother to make it in the first place?

What it comes down to, though, is a personal choice. Getting credit is important to anybody that does voluntary work making a map. And, since the person who made the map is the one who did all the work, they should be able to decide whether or not they want people to access that work and modify it. The rest of us can sit around and disparage their choice all we want, but everybody that goes through the trouble to make a map deserves that choice, whether we think they do or not.

I am more of a pro-protection person than some. Lets say I put in 30 hours (continous) into map design, another 40 testing it, and 3 balancing it (A little high, just to demonstarte my point). Do I want some Bnet n00b to open it in the world editor and:

1. Open the credits trigger- replacing my name with his
2. Opening the object editor, selecting his favorite unit and changing the damage to 10,000
3. Saves it named "<My Map Name> Da Rel 1337 versoon 1.222324"
4. Sread it on Bnet.

A guy in 5 minutes tops just discounted all my work, unballanced all my balancing, removed all my testing, and spreads it as a better versio, which makes me look like a moron, and makes people hate my map.

I'd just like to point out that the only reason n?x is believed to be more secure is because of its user base. It is much more difficult to use, so fewer stupid people use it. Less-stupid people are much better at not doing stupid things that leave their systems vulnerable. The same people can run a secure windows box too.

Also, the user base is much smaller, so there is less reason to target them with viruses etc (which, believe it or not, do exist for OSes besides windows). Why target a tenth (or less) of the market when you could hit millions of windows users by exploiting a bug thats already been fixed? Realize that most viruses for windows target problems with patches out, but most people don't update very often.

Recently there have been a few EXTREMELY serious bugs found in various programs distributed with some versions of linux. Some of them were 'allows the attacker to execute abitrary code as root', which is pretty bad considering how secure n?x machines are supposed to be. Of course, they were fixed as soon as the bug was published, but one of them has existed for years so it could have been exploited for quite a while without anybody knowing.

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Ok, you don't care about credit. Are you saying that everybody must agree with you? Some people do care about credit, and I think they should be allowed to try to enforce their own rules for their work. Its simmilar to program licensing - entirely unenforcable but companies still include them with any commercial program. Hrmm, I wonder if breaking protection would fall under the DRM since its a licence control scheme of sorts. Would be funny if breaking protection was illegal in the US.

We should research this. Many of us would be very rich men ;)