Originally posted by GloomyLimiting in-game time reduces real-life time provided the designer doesn't make their level harder to make up for it, which like I said, can be avoided with a generous timer. I can't make this goal any clearer for you.
Well yes, of course it does. For platforming levels. Which I never disagreed with. It's just not true for any other kind of level.
Not to mention I literally explained how you were going against the goal you just stated you're going for in the post you quoted.
Forcing player to restart cause the timer ran out in a type of level which can't be conceivably designed around the timer because people take different amounts of times to figure out things or pass certain types of obstacles = longer game-time with no gain.
Some people got stuck on the blue switch palace in VLDC9 for actual 15 minutes taht I experienced live on stream. It took me personally around 2 minutes to figure out. This wouldn't have gone any faster for either of us if there was a 600 SMW-second timer, it wouldn't have affected me while the streamer would've died to it multiple times in the middle of puzzle solving.
And re: midway "time bonus" (since it doesn't seem like you accepted that part), that's still ass-backwards. You design your level to be beatable in one-shot and tying in the midway as "hey look, extra time!" is silly.
You know what has a forced timer? Super Mario Maker. Puzzle level designers in the SMM scene literally have to place midpoints in their levels just because of the forced 500 second timer, even in levels that can't even really kill the player. Just because in the first time trying to figure puzzles out, they will definitely eat up all that time, meaning the midway time refresh is actually required for a big part of the people playing it, even though there most definitely are people that will beat the level in one go (I'd try to find CarlSagan42 and GrandPoobear attempting to beat the same puzzle level where Carl does it in 5 minutes and Poo needs 7 hours, but I don't think this is really something that needs empirical proof).
Now while SMM obviously has a lot more puzzle mechanics built right into it, some people make truly enigmatic shit in SMW that rivals that in complexity.
Originally posted by GloomyA puzzle level with a timer isn't any different from a platforming level, where you have to repeat sections due to dying, either from obstacles or from the timer as well. In fact, it's also less likely for you to die from a timeout in a well designed puzzle level than in basically any platforming level with decent difficulty where everything is against you.
Except one of them is designed to be that way (the platformer level) and gets its entire gameplay purpose from avoiding obstacles, while the other would straight up be better off without the arbitrary timer that stands entirely outside of the designed challenge (the puzzle level in which you die to a timer).
If your puzzle level is any kind of challenging, there just will be people that take an extraordinarily long time to get anywhere, which does not cut down on real-time in any way and is already frustrating enough in a puzzle level where getting back to where you were is relatively quick, as opposed to, say, a level that is a mix of platforming and puzzling, where dying to the timer thanks to a tough puzzle will force you to replay portions of the platforming arbitrarily. I think Matterhorn was like this?
Non-platforming centric levels are absolutely 100% more shafted by a forced timer than platforming centric levels where the timer isn't designed as a part of the challenge (see "rising lava" levels as a modern counterpart to the timer), that is literally something written in every game design book you can buy.
Originally posted by DarkMattSays who? Because I'm talking about what it means to be a vanilla level, and how we can best make levels vanilla.
At this point should we even consider what being vanilla means? Are the people who are arguing for more limits arguing for no reason because you're stubbornly insisting there should be no more limits?
I actually have no idea what this is in response to.
I'm pretty sure that chain of conversation stemmed from something I said, not something you said, and within our exchange that your quote of me came from the argument of what it means to be a vanilla level didn't come up.
Also don't know what you mean by "says who?"... What do you mean? Who says that we don't want to exclude types of levels that aren't 100% platforming from the contest?
If that's the question, the answer should be pretty obvious. Everyone who enjoys those playing or making those types of levels, and who did not find their existance in previous VLDCs to be a detriment.
But yeah, no idea where the rest of those paragraphs came from or what exactly they're based on and responding to...
Originally posted by DarkmattIf you're going to draw the line at how restricted submissions should be, at least make it obvious in your posts. So far I think you just don't want any new rules for the sake of not wanting any new rules, which feels like you're not even considering the pros and cons of what I and others are proposing. It's getting frustrating.
Just because your point is not a good one that doesn't mean you have to pretend like it's not being considered. I've quite frankly been responding to everything that came my way, all my posts in this thread post-announcement have been gigantic.
I don't know how you can pretend like I'm not considering pros and cons, the simple fact is just that the cons (alienating entire level styles) much outweigh the pros (the single type of level that is not alienated being forced to improve).
By what I've been saying it should actually be pretty obvious that I personally don't think that any pros could outweigh those cons, if you restrict the sort of level people may want to enter by implementing rules that reduce their chances of success while boosting those of another type (potentially), you've already lost in hosting a free-for-all theme-less contest.
There's probably a way to make this fairer out there while still imposing an actually tangible restriction, it's just definitely not a hard timer (or screen) limit.
And if we don't find one, then worst-case a big fat disclaimer and harsh judgement in that area will probably do, since a lot of the offenders of "god this level is too fucking long" are long-time community members who are sure to read it.
Originally posted by DarkMattWe're talking about these because we want to improve the quality of submissions. That's where I figure the others are coming from, (I might be wrong and if I am I'm sorry for the assumption.) but speaking for myself, I'm trying to convince you of my point because I want to see a higher quality in user submissions. Does that just not matter to you?
That's... a really bad reply to a quote of me arguing that a suggestion would not achieve the goal we are trying to achieve?
Like, a literal example of me trying to attain higher quality submissions, just without excluding a bunch of them at the same time?
Again, as I've said earlier in this post, a potential increase in quality for platformer levels is never worth a potential decrease in quality for level types that aren't that.
"Potential" because of course by far not every level entered into VLDC9 suffered from being too long, and people may not fall for the same trap next time, meaning it's not something that just magically increases quality across the board.
Originally posted by DarkMattBut no seriously I feel like you're flipflopping over this topic. Here's an example:
Originally posted by leodI personally think that making it clear that the collab will be a best-of in the future would make for higher quality entries, but at the same time it'd also be less entries, so I guess it just depends on which of the two we prioritize.
Originally posted by leodAlso, VLDC is still just as much contest as it is collab.
Here you're open about either or in one post but in the next you say it's both.
So which is it then? Should we be treating this like a collaborative effort or a competitive effort? You can't just say both. Just spitballin' here but I'm pretty sure participant attitudes for a contest and those for a collab are very different, so just trying to insist it's both will cause a lot of contradictions of what to expect out of VLDC, like this one, where you've been implying you might want to make this more a collab but you're insisting it's both so ???????
I really don't understand how that is contradictory? People enter a competition, which we then later make a collab out of. Meaning we want people to be able to enter the competition to get their best efforts compared to other people's and have a good contest, and then we make a collab out of it.
The collaboration has always been secondary to the contest in our eyes, with the only restrictions placed on the contest in the name of the collab being those that make it physically possible to create the collab (map16 page limits, graphic file limits, level number limits, etc.).
It's been universally stated that people entering the contest just to be in the collab aren't as appreciated as people actually giving it their best in the contest, because it's first and foremost a contest. And then we make a collaborative hack out of it after.
However, that doesn't mean that these people who primarily enter to be in the collab don't exist, and, given the information that only the best levels make it into a collab, would either quit or try harder to make it there, thus in both cases increasing overall quality by either reducing the amount of bad levels or turning their bad level into a better level through effort.
Which one I prefer between more competitiveness and more entrants, I didn't give a stance on. I was just explaining the consequences of this becoming a best-of instead of a free-pass collab might have.
Originally posted by DarkMattAnd that's why I think your example is unrealistic. This all goes back into the "Do we want better levels in the next VLDC?" question that we've been pingponging around, and I'm going to focus on that because the main reason why I'm here is because I want to offer my input on how to make VLDC better. That's pretty much it. I don't really care about the hows and whys so long as we give something a try. The worst thing that can happen is if we just keep on keeping on and then complaining about the results of next VLDC being just as bad or even worse later. That would just be awful.
I think that is just where the contest + collab mix kind of falls flat. In a collaboration, we can have quality control out the ass and restrict everything to our liking to get a great result.
But VLDC as a collab just isn't that, instead it is/was a collaborative effort to make a game out of all the entries that our biggest annual event got, where we can't alter the results after the fact, our content is already laid before us.
Which is where my main point comes from: We shouldn't place hard restrictions that un-level the playing field for different types of submissions just to make the collab a better game. If you want that, you'd have to make a collab with quality control from scratch... or make a best-of and just disregard the bad entries. We're shooting for the latter because then we still get to make all of the great entries to the contest into a playable experience, one which is actually surprisingly far-reaching outside of the realms of SMWC.
Objective improvements to the formula would be very welcome, but as I've been arguing, the single example you've been kicking back and forth for 2 pages just isn't one.
So to sum those last few paragraphs up, we shouldn't place rules that un-even the playing field in the name of the collab experience, because VLDC is first and foremost a contest with the idea of being as unrestrictive as possible within the restricting made-up definition of "vanilla" we've developed over the years.
If you want to argue vanillaness, just don't, we know, it's the reason OLDC exists. The name is just tradition now.
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