Graveyard Shift's Bi-Weekly Mapping Contest

Summary
Clan GS hosts a mapping contest every other Friday at approximately 6:45pm Eastern Standard Time. A genre and specific word as well as a description will be posted in the forum the moment the contest starts. Adhering to the given genre and using the word in some way, you have exactly one week to complete a map.

Judging/Scoring
The following Friday, each map will be played and tested by all available clan members, along with any other trusted people. After being impartially reviewed by the judge, using a standardized rubric (bottom of this post), every entry will be thoroughly and meticulously scored. The judge may participate for fun, but his entry will be not be tested, scored, and has no chance of winning. The testing will be done on the Azeroth realm.

This contest is designed for people searching for a new idea, for those who like to challenge themselves, or for people who just want to get themselves to "finish" a map. Though most participants are clan members, anyone else is welcome to participate!

The rewards? Bragging rights, publicity for you, your map, and your clan, your name in the hall of fame (on the GS forum), and all the testing and feedback resulting from the judging and scoring.


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This Friday will start the fifteenth (15th) competition. The other 14 contests, with the first being all the way back in early October, have been very successful. The scoring has been done fairly every single contest, and every winner was accepted by the participants: non-clan-members included.

The winners & runner ups can be found in the Hall of Fame.
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P.S. If this is in the wrong forum, I apologize, there does not seem to be an obvious place to place "contest" threads such as this one.

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Rubric:

Originality [Max 32 points]
--> Uniqueness [Max 12 points]
--> Theme-Orientation [Max 20 points]

Replayability [Max 44 points]
--> Enjoyment [Max 20 points]
--> Balance [Max 8 points]
--> Polish [Max 16 points]

Appeal [Max 24 points]
--> Loading Screen [Max 4 points]
--> Terrain [Max 12 points]
--> Miscellaneous [Max 8 points]

gj telling people timezone and server.

The timezone is Eastern Standard Time (EST) and server is Azeroth. Updated the original post.

Fortunately, the timezone shouldn't be very important, since if you're rushing enough to have to cram before the end--and worrying about the time difference, you aren't using your time well. And the testing is not mandatory for the participants, but it is recommended since it is actually quite fun.

i think that your grading criteria are dumb

Excuse me, but can you give us some feedback upon why it is dumb instead of saying it is simply "dumb"?

However, I assume you have something better than our rubric, or else you would not have said this. Can you please give us a copy, or make some suggestions to how to improve ours?

I personally will wait for TDG's mapathon over the summer.

And you give points for the loading screen having the clan's logo?
That's really silly.

Corrected. It is actually graded on logo/loading screen, not specifically the clan logo. The person who made the original rubric no longer plays, so I'll have to keep it in text form for now.

The information within the brackets [] is meant to be an example not a limitation--Sorry for not making that clear. As I said before, there have not been any complaints with the final grades: the rubric is a guideline, not a determinant. People who try to use the rubric to just try to "win" points have never won, and likely will never win.

Balance is only twice as important as the loading screen?

Polish in a one week mapping contest is almost as important as enjoyability, and more important than origionality?

Heh, if you don't want to participate, you don't have to. I'm just letting people know about it in case they are interested.

Like said in the first post, this contest for people "searching for a new idea, for those who like to challenge themselves, or for people who just want to get themselves to "finish" a map." It's not meant for people trying to prove themselves to be the best or try to get as many points as possible, so if you're interested in this contest, don't worry about the points. It's all about the mapping.

You have to wait until the contest starts.

I was wondering about the reasoning behind it.