Do you protect your maps?

If so, what are you reasons? Are you worried about credit being taken, quality dropping due to morons, or version-spam?

What about this case: you've modified an existing unprotected map and add your name to it (leaving the creator's, of course). Now do you protect it?

I've had people modify one of my really old maps (baseball; they didn't even fix the bugs) then have the nerve to protect it. That means I can't see what they've done to my own map and I would consider that wrong.

I only protect because there are countless morons on battle.net that will edit a map to 'tweak' what they think is better and add cheats.

I've got about 60+ versions of Line tower wars and twice as many AOS 3-way. Although they're often shitty maps in the first place, there's a primal pleasure in blasting people with 12% death and decay sometimes.

Some noob edits are so rediculous it really damages my opinion of humanity.

Yes.

"Protecting maps to protect users." Definitely a good idea. Protecting is useful against n00bs of all varieties; cheat n00bs, tweak n00bs, mapper n00bs, n00b thieves, etc. Doing crap rip-offs of any map is just senseless, who really needs more crap on bnet? Honestly...

If someone wants to know more about my work, or if they really want to mess with it, they should have the courtesy to ask me for a unprotected version. Same applies if they want to use some resource of mine, they should ask for permission first, unless it's basically stated that it's up for grabs. And crediting should really be the first and most obvious thing people should do with other's resources, but that's hardly the case, sadly.

I'm sure there's a special place in hell for people who take line tower wars, replace all the models and unit names (but keep the hotkeys the same), and put "NEW" somewhere in the map description.

You brought up adding cheats to map. One thing to think about is that, given a protected map, it's a lot easier to add cheats to it than it is to modify it (you don't have to understand the existing triggers to add cheats). It's interesting that we have to punish the modders more than the cheaters. Of course, REALLY high-class maps can go that extra distance and try to detect any changes to game-play and warn the players.

all the points above + I don't wan't n00b mapper to lay their finger in my map!

Punish the modders more than the cheaters?
Any modder worth his salt can unprotect a map anyways, but is intelligent and respectable enough to not edit it with his own shit in.

All protecting serves to do is keep the kiddies (You know, the ones that make those lame map edits) out.
Anyone who is determined and knowledgeable enough can easily unprotect any map.

protect your maps, if not, dooms day will come and one of noobs will make your map better then you(C)

Oh, and all the stuff that you do when "protecting" a map, really just reduces it's size and does similarly beneficial stuff (the most popular protector is Vex's optimizer), so that's another thing to keep in mind.

If you ask me they deserve their "punishment", if they are incapable of making their own map, they are most likely too inept to improve the map correctly.

Preventing cheaters is way too easy anyways, they are so used to simply adding cheats that doing some changes in the map thus adding their cheat triggers makes the map explode would scare the heck out of themselves.


I am closing this thread since:
- All what's worth to say has already been said (kudos to mezzer btw)
- I hate the place where these discussions always get to.
- I like having the last opinion.