Map Wave XV ingame voting phase, Q&A date and more!

Greetings glorious game greybeards,

The past few weeks had quite a few changes made to CTF. But enough of the past, the following four sections describe what's coming up, so read on!

Wrapup of Spotlight Saturdays
The past three Saturdays held the first Spotlight Saturday events. Successfully submitted maps that were built well enough to test ingame were played in order to give you a chance to leave direct ingame feedback for the map makers using the new /comment command. While we didn't believe there would be many messages, it turned out to be quite a successful event with many comments for several maps. The following graph shows you the amount of comments for each tested map:

Spoiler: Statistics - Click here!

Unfortunately we overlooked a handful of maps and did not feature them in the Spotlight Saturdays. Likewise, maps submitted after the events just before deadline could not be tested, they will be put into ingame voting directly if they match the standards.

We will hold more Spotlight Saturdays in the future, planned is holding one per month if there are enough map submissions made to warrant it. We might have to revise the event structure a bit, as some maps were played rather shortly due to team strength or the map itself, resulting in a low amount of comments. As a quick fix, we repeated those maps at the end of the second and third event.

Map Maker information
All maps submitted until May 5th are considered for ingame testing. If your map has been featured in a Spotlight Saturday, please finish tweaking it as soon as possible. We will be committing all maps on Thursday, May 9th to initiate the ingame voting.

Furthermore, regarding the usage of secret rooms and player heads on maps: The inclusion of such rooms into CTF maps has seen a recent influx. I have been getting complaints that some players get trapped in these rooms (easily fixable by respawning) or camp there with the flag, hiding away from players who might not know the location of the room. As such, we will be starting to clad the floor of these rooms for maps in rotation and new submissions with spawnblocks of the teams' side in order to prevent holding the flag there. We don't want to be spoilsports so they are not closed off completely, but please remember to use spawnblocks as flooring in the future should you decide to integrate such rooms into your map.

The usage of player heads on maps has also increased over time. Map makers used to hide a head or two of themselves or others on the map as tribute, but it has since gotten out of proportion, with map makers putting up billboards with heads of them and their friends. While a mild annoyance, such player heads have been found to produce FPS lag for players (such as on the parkour at the spawn box of Moria V). In the future, please tone down the usage of heads to prevent people from lagging, thanks!

Wave XV ingame voting phase
The ingame voting phase for the Map Wave XV will run for ten days from Friday, May 10th to Sunday, May 19th 2019. For the duration of the event, submitted maps will replace the current rotation. You can vote on the maps whether you want to see them added permanently to rotation or not. Voting will happen ingame and anonymously over a Google Form we will provide in a following thread.

Q&A date
As mentioned in a previous date, we will host another Q&A which will be live streamed. You handed in questions earlier and we are eager to discuss them! The Q&A will take place on Saturday, May 11th 2019 at 3pm EST / 8pm BST / 9pm CEST / 12pm PST on the CMS YouTube channel.


May the flags be in your favor,

~ The CTF staff team