Originally Posted by
Shonji
You can't really say that since it is VERY easy to say what you would do vs actually doing it and maintaining such. It is easy to make it sound so simple when you aren't the one in charge of it all. Just the playtester part alone would be quite a bit of work since you would need at least one or preferably a few/several people that can play it repeatedly. And it isn't just merely having fun playing the map. It is seeing if there are any errors, suggestions that could make the map/s better, things that make the level too hard or too easy which in of itself is a very difficult thing to understand since people think differently. Some would find some things very easy while others find it not so. Hell hard and impossible alone would be difficult to tell apart. I remember a long time ago I had a friend make a map where an extremely strong party(I am talking level 10s, Samurai, Wizards, Giants and such) were already coming for you in the very start of the map and you had next to nothing at all, no gold, no pre dug out rooms, no starting creatures, no research, just 3 Imps all level 1 and a 3x3 Treasury to start with. You had to within an extremely short time secure enough resources, get room space dug out, secure the portal, and fortify all within the course of 2-3 minutes before they dug in and killed you, you also had to make sure you had enough funds to get several level 10 creatures or you would lose against that party. This is just the beginning of the map too, that isn't even including everything else. He said it was hard, while it was in-fact impossible to EVER do all that with nothing at all.(I suggested making the party go through a very winding path or give yourself at least a little time to get ready, or start off with some troops, or even start off with 1 Boulder, all that would have made it doable. He rejected it all, funny since he never beat it himself, said he wanted to make a hard campaign, give it to myself and a few friends, we all said it was dumb and impossible, and he never fixed it or continued with maps again.)
What I am simply getting at is it isn't as easy as people would think. Getting all that set up, making QUALITY maps, having a lot of playtesting as well as coming to a conclusion on how to rate it would all take a lot of time and constant effort. Moreso since the average map usually takes from an hour to even several hours to beat. Just imagine having to playtest a map even 5 times and see it works properly and is as balanced or doable as possible when the map takes 1-5 hours to beat each time. Also how long the mapmaker needs to take to MAKE it to begin with, then constantly having to tweak it since you will rarely have a perfect map on your first time. And these are all people that have lives that have other things to do than just DK. It is a lot of work unless you half ass it and don't care about quality which is the problem. It is easy to make a crappy map and just release it without doing anything, pretty much anyone can do that. It is hard and time consuming to make a truly good map and have it tested to make sure it is good before releasing, and then STILL taking in advice, very few can pull that off.