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I have seen many "UMS is harder than Melee" arguements and vice versa, so I wanted to find out how hard a complete UMS'er (AKA:Me) would find melee. Right now, I just really don't any real clue about melee. Where's the best place to start?

Where to start: I guess you could read Entropy's mapmaking guide, it's one of the sticky's in this forum.

Entropy's guide looks like its meant for people already familiar with melee.
(I've heard melee mapmaking requires melee skill. Is this true? I'm complete melee newb.)

Look at some of the maps at broodwarmaps.net, try to figure how those maps would play, what the concept behind them is. If you're supposed to expand alot and fight it out in the middle, or if you are supposed to play micro harrasement with small drops. If you need to be aware of second entrances bla bla bla. Then You think about how you want your own map to play, which strategies would be good to play on it etc. Then you can create a map according to your ideas and post it to get some feedback. And finally it can be tweaked into perfection.. and so on.

I'd say UMS is hard because it is technically hard to master (for me atleast) and it takes alot of time to finnish a good map. Melee on the other hand is more about knowledge in the original StarCraft game to know how to make a balanced good map wich is fun to play.



Btw. Could someone look over your proffessional melee archive? All the promaps is in user-normal or whatsitcalled. And in promaps you find maps like "stardock 69" which unfortunattely is a joke build on imbalance.

Yeah, I forgot to mention to a DLDB Keeper that there are bad maps in the pro section and maps like Nostalgia in the normal section.

Look at past/recent promaps.

Don't look to amatuer maps; most recent ones are just decorated imbalance.


edit:

Also, go here and download some videos of televised games (those are older, for newer ones go to TeamLiquid.net and browse the forums). Actually, all of those are fantastic except for Grrrr vs. Hot Forever, which is a bit too old school to be a good source of information.

Some of them have really long introductions for the first game (and you can't skip them because the files are .asf), so I'd look at the SlayerS_`Boxer` vs. Kiss)JinNam series first.

SlayerS_`BoxeR` took the game from the level of Grrrr (which used to be considered very good) to a quite frankly godly level (much closer to the games you see today).


That advice applies to everyone who wants to learn more about the man's game.


edit2: Damnit, I didn't realize who I was helping.

Can't believe ihatett didn't flame me to death.
Ahh, just saw edit2.
ihatett, just because of ideolgical differences doesnt mean you can't help me.
Aigh damn 56k. I'll proabably have to get these vids from a friend.

If you don't want to actually play melee and get good at it, watching lots of replays and looking at what people (pick people who are good... highly rated wgtour.com replays are usually reliable) are doing doesn't hurt.

I'm really trying to get good at mapping, but I've heard you need palying skill to map melee.

You do, but you can fake it if you know what players do. You need knowledge of the game really, rather than being decisive, you need to know that players are, rather than having great control over units, you need to know that players do. Just know that if the starting positions are unfair people won't like it, because it's a very competetive atmosphere now.

you dont acualy need great playing skill to make melee maps-you just need to know how all the units function and what players are likely to do with them (example: like if you put cliffs at the mains, people ARE going to siege/lurker/hightemplar/goon harrass them)


pretty much you need to know how games are going to be played out

Yup, the Melee DLDB is :censored:ed up so badly. What makes it even worse is that there's no minimap pictures accompanying each file.

Well, since this page is very UMS orientated (and very good at that) i'd suggest restating this topic at broodwarmaps.net instead. The site focuses on competitive melee and the databases are looked over several times a day. However our forums could use more posts, but we who actually use it will help you the best we can.

We tried telling the DLDB keepers to fix the melee map sections and place the maps in the right spots but usually they don't listen or just don't feel like doing so.

melee requires you to be more artistic, and strategic minded, UMS requires computer skillz

Yes, you cant really compare these two categories.

It's like comparing Starcraft with Counterstrike; it doesn't work that way

What do you mean comparing SC with CS?

Comparing two totally different things. Starcraft is a strategy game, Counterstrike is a first person shooter game. These two categories are totally unrelated to each other so you can't really compare them. Same with UMS maps and melee maps