Staredit Network

Ahh, that makes sense.

ADDITION:
That's exactly what we're NOT talking about here. We're talking about YOUR maps.

LW, you should ignore him.

ADDITION:


*ahem* I said don't post here.

*must keep topic on topic using sheer will power alone*

Precisely.

So why don't you not protect maps because you have the choice to?
Why don't you jump of a bridge because you have the choice to?

I'm having trouble getting your logic here...

I simply do my math, and decide to protect, due to the fact that the advantages of protecting outweight the advantages of leaving an open-source.

Lets assume there was a perfect protection, in this case:

A map is released to battle.net.
This means that:
A. If the map is good, no complaints.
B. If the map is bad, no one will bother with it, and it'll be gone.
C. If the map is good but could easily be better: This creates two new options:
---A. The mapper will update it and improve it. Good.
---B. The mapper will not update it, for whatever reason. This can lead to 2 new cases:
------A. The map is protected. This leads to 3 new cases:
---------A. Bad mappers will not be able to change it.
---------B. Good mappers will be able to recreate it from scratch, and since they're good mappers, their new versions will indeed be improvements from the old one. Good.
---------C. There are no good mappers who like the map and would create new versions of it. The map dies. Bad.
------B. The map is not protected, this leads to:
---------A. Good mappers will be able to update it with better newer versions easily. Good.
---------B. Bad mappers will be able to create rigged and crappy clones of the map. Bad.

I believe I've gone over everything.

Looking at this graph-like-chart-thing, there are only 2 "Bad" cases, and they are the following:

1. Lack of good mappers who like a map of some genre.
2. Lack of protection.

I consider myself a good mapper, and I like my maps, which solves #1, and thus, to solve #2, I use protection, which puts my maps in the perfect condition.

Now, at this area, I only went over 1 aspect of a map - the fun it gives to people on battle.net. Lets go over another aspect: New mappers learning from maps.

A map was released to Battle.net. Some mapper wants to open it and learn how it was done, to improve his mapping skills. This leads to 2 options:
A. The map is unprotected. Which leads to:
---A. The person who would like to become a good mapper is a 9 year old kid that lacks the ability to come up with innovative, well-polished products. He has no chance to become a good mapper. Looking at the map will simply confuse him and will not help him get anywhere.
---B. The person who would like to become a good mapper is a mature person who can truly study from material, and this map will help him become a good mapper who creates his own good maps.
B. The map is protected. Thus:
---A. The person with no future in mapping will not be able to learn from this map, so he'll either:
------A. Forget about it.
------B. Look for places where he can get help, like staredit, and get instructions and guidelines written by humans specifically for him that will help him to learn mapping 10 times more than looking at that map would.
---B. The person who could be a mapper will not be able to learn from the map, so he'll either:
------A. Forget it. If he's such a quitter, he probably won't ever finish maps anyway, so he won't release anything to battle.net, and thus the only loss caused by the protection of the map is his own.
------B. He'll find other ways to learn mapping, like tutorials that are easily found online, sites with helpful forums like staredit.net, or self-teaching, which will work nearly as well for him as looking at the map.

As you can see, protection outweights unprotection here as well. Infact, it seems like the only ones that get hurt from protection are lazy people. Thus, this leads me to believe whoever supports unprotection is lazy by his nature.



This entire paragraph may be a bit ironic, because in the past I was unable to map in Warcraft III, and the thing that enlightened me was looking at the open source of a WC3 map. Also, I'm the laziest person I know.

La' irony xD

Because OSMAP closes doors for map makers.

I have nothing against believing in open source, but I have a lot against forcing everything to be open source.

GAH

THIS IS NOT ABOUT OSMAP! THIS IS NOT WHEN YOU MAKE A MAP, WHY YOU CHOSE TO USE A PROTECTOR ON IT.

STOP GETTING OFF TOPIC!

ADDITION:
Bloodmoon. I'm not talking about your program, I'm talking about your maps. Why did you release all those maps protected instead of unprotected.

You said "you chose to protect maps because you had the choice to?" which is a lengthier version of saying "because I can" methinks.

So I'm saying, that logic doesn't make sense. You have the choice to jump of a bridge as well, so why don't you?

For every post on topic I can post one off topic . I'm trying to convince you to not make another unprotector. The two issues are related.

It's not worth it. The reasons I'm doing what I'm doing are unrelated to this type of stuff, this topic was just out of curiosity.

It's all about DRM and how I want to kill it >:) (but that's a topic for another day, I might make a topic about my reasons for supporting unprotection on maplantis today)

Besides, the thing I'm making is a map editor first. The unprotection bit just happened to be a interesting side effect.

ADDITION:

I think I actually did that when I was a newbie. I would open the map in staredit, and click through the "staredit deleted all the stacked units" message. Then I'd edit the triggers and host it on battlenet.

A long time ago, I protected my maps because i wanted to preserve credit and prevent my maps from getting rigged. The preserving credit part was truly important to me back then because I had too many bad experiences of getting my masterpieces stolen.

But now, i protect for the latter reason primarily. I've already got the fame/credit down, especially now that there's websites like this. I just hate it when I have to re download maps or the fact that they get tampered with (thus ruining the fun).

If I take the time to balance my map, fix all bugs and glitches -- then there is no need for other people to do so.

Not only did it preserve my credibility for making the map, but I didn't want people to balance the map in the way they think is right.

It's like a random noob says
"hey look the marine does x damage"
I chose that damage through trial and error and testing. However they turn and say
"well y unit totally owns the marine, so marine needs x + 5, so that it can kill the other unit easily" but in the process making it easier to kill all the other units too.

Ok, this is turning out evil.

Before I got involved in this whole protection debate, I planned on making this map editor that would edit the individual sections. I planed it out before hand, first I'd make the string editor and second I'd make the unit and hero settings editor.

However my map editor just happens to be able to edit protected maps
Now it's turning out that the number one reason people protect their maps is to preserve credit, and credit is stolen by editing the strings. The number two reason people protect their maps is to prevent rigging, and rigging is done by editing the unit and hero settings.

It's all just a coincidence I swear

This came out evil because you knew it would.


You posted this topic on purpose. Since when did you have so much interest in protection and unprotection?


You involved yourself the minute you posted this topic.




So you created an editor that unprotects everything? Care to share about it since you've been so open mouth-ed about CSMaP?




It takes you a lot of time to balance your map, and 10 seconds for an OSMAP user to rig it.



You have no rights to balance in your map. OSMAP removes those rights.

You could have kept your mouth shut in the first place, none of this ever had to happen D:

This is what ive been talking about, and so have other map makers.
OSMAP essentialy takes away the map makers right to choose what is and isnt best for their own map.

SCWizard obviously has something personal against me.

Now, SCWizard, can I have the source to your program? You're all for openness aren't you? Unless your a hypocrite... Or you are afraid I will steal or do something with it? Hmm? Treat other people the same way you want to be treated.

To be honest, I don't think SCWizard has a clue what he's doing to the mapping community. Killing it. Nobody will make maps with map stealers and map riggers that can freely come in and do their dirty deeds.

This isn't about your map unprotector either yet you brought it up. Are you saying it's unfair to add things to strengthen your argument? Cause clearly you have.



To protect content.




Your logic doesn't make sense.

When does choosing to do something, and then following someone else come together?

The topic is on why you use protection, It really should only take one post to explain why you use protection, no more then that is required.

Indeed this is my second post, but it is one to get back on topic, don't reply to this as if it was a post, it is me trying to clarify that he requested you said why you use protection.

Sorry for responding but.


It usually takes more than one post to clearly define the point you are getting across.


So this was required? It was on topic?





If the poster was really trying to say why you should or should not use protection and was really strong for unprotection, why are his arguments so weak? There obviously a hidden agenda behind this thread.


He logged off. Coincidence?

There is a hidden agenda. If you read his maplantis thread you can infer that it's to see how much people will dislike him when he's done.

The same people who would do bad things with scwizard's program are the same bad people who would do bad things with OSMAP. Same intentions, same ends, different means.

Which is very right you are... but I havn't seen his program do a single thing other than crash.

If you guys havn't read... he made these "programs" to STEAL maps, not to open source etc, but to STEAL maps.

Well when I used to protect my maps I did it for credit, to moderate the downloads, and to keep people from editing my map. Then when I was at my friends house playing Starcraft, and I realised that like 1% of battle.net pubbies check to see who the creator is (and 1% of them remember the person) so I didn't really care about the credit part after that. Besides, people can just hexedit their name into your map. I started to not care about the amount of downloads because nearly everybody has DSL or higher and waiting ~10 seconds won't kill anybody. I started not caring about people editing my maps and rigging them because I figured that I am making the map for the people on B.Net and they should be able to do what they want to my map. I also remembered how much I learned from downloading maps from SEN, unprotecting them (I have a folder with 100's of maps I've unprotected), and browsing through the triggers, unit stats, etc. and I felt that I should just leave the map unprotected so that people who want to learn don't have to use screwed up strings.

Bloodmoon, can you stay on topic? You're ruining the thread and I don't think anybody cares...