Written by John “SigmaFiE” Emerson & Nicklas “Scorp” Hansen

Atlas, as titanic as its forebear’s name, is one of the few Western designed maps chosen for use in major competition. Atlas bears the weight of map makers’ and players’ hopes and aspirations to evolve Starcraft II into the titan of eSports. The forging of their dreams began with authors such as Superouman and IronmanSC, culminating in the most recent adaptation of a young mapper. Continue reading →

For quite sometime people have stated that the map pool is quite stale and needs to be improved. That’s why IPL are introducing a set of new maps and a tournament to test them on!

“We want these maps to see as much play as possible, as at least two of them will be joining the IPL map pool. We may add more depending on player feedback, viewer feedback and overall balance and entertainment value.”

Source: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=394756

Here is the final map pool for the next season of SK Planet Proleague. KeSPA has been working on these new maps for a while now. And while many people are sceptical of the quality of the new maps, due to not being exactly what many consider to be the “ideal” map, we think everyone will be interested to finally see these maps in action!

The new map pool consists of:

• Bifrost by Str18-02 *new*
• Arkanoid by Jacky *new*
• Planet S by Jacky *new*
• CalDeum by LS *new*
• Tal’Darim Altar by LS
• Cloud Kingdom by Superouman
• Ohana by IronmanSC
• Antiga Shipyard by Blizzard

The Map Jam & Challenge start Saturday, December 8th, 10:00EDT 15:00EST and runs 24 hours. Topics need to be send to ScorpSCII via PM until one hour before the challenge starts. This gives the admin one hour to randomly select the double-topic. Via PM we will keep all ideas secret and fresh for the next round maybe and the double-topic is quite a surprise for everyone.

Topics will be announced in this thread.

The previous event was administrated by Samro, and this event by Scorp. In future events, other community members may administrate as well.

An Article has popped up on the korean site thisisgame.com, reporting that KeSPA is currently working on new maps, which happen to be mostly ports of old BW maps! Test versions of Gaema Gowon, Bifrost, Guillotine, Arkanoid, Transistor, Desert Flower and CalDeum have been published on the Korean Server.

For more images and english discussion see also the thread on Team Liquid!

Gfire of the ESV mapmaking team has posted a review of Blizzard’s new Heart of the Swarm map, Newkirk City.

“A lot of people feel that Blizzard is a bit out of touch when it comes to melee map making. The community doesn’t necessarily have it all figured out either, but I think we’ve come up with a lot of ideas and put a lot of thought into maps, and it would be good to share that in a place easy for Blizzard developers to see. …”

Read the full post over at the US Battle.net forums!

What is the Map Jam & Challenge?
The Map Jam & Challenge is a format by and for the community.
The Map Jam & Challenge is a regular map making competition.
The Map Jam & Challenge wants you to be creative and quick.
The Map Jam & Challenge provokes thinking outside the box.

How does it work?

• every other month, 6 times a year starting mid-November.
• 24h to allow all timezones a few hours. Over the weekend might be a good idea.
• all participants (!) send a topic to the admin via PM(!), e.g. ‘rocks’ and ‘low main’.
• By a randomized process two topics (!) are selected among all entries and made public to start the Map Jam & Challenge. This aspects helps to have no ‘cheating’ like preparing a map to give yourself more time.
• Within the 24h participants post the overview in this thread and upload their map to EU/NA (ask your fellow map makers at EU/NA)
• Public Vote decides on the winning map. Map makers who think they have the edge in evaluating how good a map is can post their choice in the thread to have a double-vote.
• win=fun and fame

The Map Jam & Challenge #1
The Map Jam & Challenge start Saturday, November 10th, 10:00EDT 15:00EST and runs 24hours. Topics need to be send to me via PM until one hour before the challenge starts. This gives the admin one hour to randomly select the double-topic. Via PM we will keep all ideas secret and fresh for the next round maybe and the double-topic is quite a surprise for everyone.

For more information please see the announcement thread on Team Liquid.

Now that we have had a few more Users come to the site we have noticed that the average rating have been rather low. Only 2 maps so far have been able to score higher than 6.5.
Because of that, we have slightly updated the rating guidelines that we had given out recently (thanks to your feedback) to encourage people to make more use of the 8-10 ratings. In addition to that, I have also added alot of new maps while I was crawling through the Team Liquid forum archives. We are hoping to see more maps populate the upper segment of the scale, as previously only 2 maps have been rated above 6.5. It is important to us to establish a reasonable standard for ratings before introducing the site to a larger audience.

As some have already noticed, there is now also a tooltip text above the rating bar which should help users in the process

Here are the current updated guidelines for rating maps (feedback on the best wording is welcome):

10 – Hall of Fame
9 – Excellent Map
8 – Great Map
7 – Good Map
6 – Enjoyable Map
5 – Playable Map
4 – Fixable Map
3 – Broken Map
2 – Bad Map
1 – Hopeless Map

Also, with so many new maps being added (there are now more than 250 maps in the database!) and new guidelines being set, we are also planning to reset all ratings in the coming days! Let us push more entries into the green

The goal of the Fallcraft Map Jam is to bring the same sense of experimentation, and the energy of making new things in a short amount of time, to the creation of competitive maps for Starcraft 2.

Organized like a short game jam, the FallCraft Map Jam will start in the morning with the revelation of a theme (islands! purple! fastest map possible!), and the theme might be as specific as ‘islands’ or as general ‘low resources’. Participants will then have 5 hours to create from scratch a competitive 1v1 map that fits with the theme of the Jam. At the end of the Jam the submitted maps will be judged by our invited pro and the captains of our two collegiate teams.

The creators of the three best maps will receive HotS Beta Keys!

And the best gift of all – the three best maps will be played during the Exhibition matches, deciding the victor of the Battle for Manhattan.

For more information visit the official announcement!