So I did something I hadn't done in nearly a year. Check my map making specific gmail account today.
For those who don't remember, I made several dodgeball maps to spice up the funbox with something other than float, castle, and tennis.
As we remember, a miserable failure. But I found homes for the maps in TF2newbs, Vault, and some other places. Did some redos based on what they wanted.
Everyone might remember a bad side effect of my maps, sometimes you could crash. This wasn't a mapmaking failure,
it was a 'feature' I didn't exactly do right early on.
My original intention was to lock the maps down to CSN. So I changed some stuff in the file that if played on other servers would crash the client.
At least that part still works flawlessly. I ended up getting it right later on and it stopped the wrong crash.
I never released the .vcf's of my maps and used a 3rd party mod to lock up the .bsp's. So if someone
tried to decompile, they'd be missing parts of the map and would have to start relatively over. I don't think someone should
get the option to change a few textures and call it their own. I still believe that but read on.
Later, I got busy and didn't have the ability to map make at work. So I stopped checking my alter-ego email. I also
stopped caring about my maps. I figured they played their course and people went back to 'simpler' fare. I had shit
tons of old email requests, so I checked game monitor and game tracker to see who was still using the maps.
It's a bit complicated because I changed most of the map names ( eg... tfdb_sandvich, _omgodmin) people outside csn didn't get it. But just in the csn names category, sandvich and blender have had over 30k plays. With the name variants, and custom variants others ended up doing later. My 4 core maps have had almost 100,000 plays in 2 years. And sandvich has been modified or 'reduxed' over a dozen times with new skins and other changes. I think it's kinda funny 1 group likes the shield in sandvich and another doesn't. Other communities forums are a riot.
I feel whole in my work. The saddest thing is someone reduxed my reduxed darkwater and made it darker than mine.