Please consider following these guidelines when building for rounds based competitions. Mixed comp maps in particular seem to run into issues with them.
- If the thing you built is unsafable (for the skill level of players in the competition you are submitting to), fix or delete it.
- If the thing you built is clippy (platform gap especially as an apex, clippable transitions, etc), fix or delete it.
- Avoid situations where losing a gear causes the entire next part of the map to fall apart. This snowballing of gears (gearballing™) can often force players to full risk to keep difficult gears (unsafable situation), and makes rounds feel horrible when you fail to keep the gear. Having difficult gears is fine, I would say it’s great, but make sure you ensure the next part is calculated even if you drop the gear.
- Don’t build blind precision sections/obstacles.
- If a turn already has an entry, apex, and exit wall, you don’t need to add more walls or objects. Having extra walls or random flags/lights/arrows that you can crash into if you take slightly different lines is unnecessary and annoying in many cases.
- Avoid having multiple objects you can crash into at once in precision sections. It’s not practical in rounds to constantly be paying attention to all 7 different walls you can hit at any given moment. Precision and narrow things are fine, but try not to expect the player to need to keep track of more than one at a time to pass through a section.
If you think about tech competition maps, its (usually) always very clear what the road is doing. When you crash it’s because you actually crashed in one of the turns. I’m really tired of mixed maps where I feel like I am crashing because there were some random objects in the road that I didn’t even see or because there’s 80 different things you can hit or clip. I’m really tired of sections that just feel like lottery in rounds because safing is not an option. And yes, skill issue may be an appropriate response in some situations, however, many competitions are intended to be played by people much worse at the game than me, so keep in mind who is actually expected to drive your map in rounds.
Here are some examples:
^ A clippy transition. Note that this is a much smaller issue in cases where you do not need to risk for airtime next to the point of clipping.
^ Here you need to go fast and risk in order to keep this gear, and if you don’t keep it you are fucked when you gear up again because its within a grass turn. This gear, while not easy, would be completely fine if not for what comes after.
^ Multiple objects and/or unnecessary walls. You must go around the checkpoint, but the actual thing you need to go around is the small structure thing behind the checkpoint, and if you miss that blind apex, you slam into a wall on the right afterwards (that you also can’t see).
^ Another example of lots of shit in the road (this is the middle of a drift).
More: TM Theory