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Howdy mapmakers,

The map development team is excited to announce the end of a season-long journey that is the Winter Mapmaking Competition. We greatly appreciate all 22 submissions made by the community. Over the past couple of weeks, we had great fun playtesting all of these maps. Our judging panel was impressed with the quality and time dedicated by the authors of all submissions.

As you will observe soon, the contest came to a very close finish, with the winner of Stratus’ third mapmaking contest: The Winter Mapmaking Contest is Skatole  with his submission: Outcrop, totaling 62.00 points!

Outcrop is a 18v18 medium CTW that features 2 wools per team. The map was aesthetically a masterpiece and its layout was quite unique from any CTW map that the judging panel had seen. The asymmetrical layout of this map provides gameplay which encourages solo pushes and a less forced map control. Middle is less emphasized upon and game progression continues without an excessive amount of stale-mating. Lane-jumping for defenders is a tactic reinvented by the map into public as it was only previously well-noted in Garden of Tholos.

Coming in from a very close second is Ceasefire by Blazy  and jam0828  with a score of 61.20.

In third place - with a tie, _shrp ’s The Bug and rockymine  & AlmightyBread 's Urban Sprawl both scored a 59.48.

A breakdown by category of all of the map submitted for the contest may be found here.

We were quite strict with the scoring for this mapmaking competition. Because we want to provide the best experience possible, the scoring was quite harsh when judging these maps, especially when it came to gameplay. As a result, the top scores were quite far off the best possible score. However, this doesn’t mean that those maps are necessary average. These are some of the best quality maps that we have seen in a contest.

On the topic of scoring, you may have noticed the ravage of all ratings in our database. The development team unfortunately cannot restore the public ratings of the maps. Due to this, we will be omitting the Public Rating section of the map scoring rubric, bringing the max raw score to a 90 as opposed to a 100.

Prizes ¶

The following prizes will be awarded to Skatole , Blazy  and jam0828 , and _shrp , rockymine  and AlmightyBread  respectively:

• Strato
  
• 5x Setnext tokens
  
• Competition Winner trophy
  
• Winner Discord tag
  
• Guaranteed spot in Rot. Update #21

• Nimbus (3 weeks)
  
• 5x Setnext tokens
  
• Runner Up Discord tag
  

• Nimbus (2 weeks)
  
• 3x Setnext tokens
  

More competitions will be held in the future, so stay tuned for that! Our build server is available for donors by connecting to anax.stratus.network. If you have a premium rank but are not yet whitelisted, message a Map Developer through discord with a link to your Stratus profile. You can find helpful tips for getting started with Anax in this thread.
Again, we thank all our participants for joining us in the journey that is the Winter Mapmaking Contest.

The Map Development team and Judge panel

Thanks so much everyone! Due to popular requests and my own reflection I will remove some terrain (grass, trees etc.) for better gameplay. Thanks again! <3

Congrats Blazy and Jam as well! I was really surprised you did so well considering it's your first map. Pleasure to work with you :)

:O I am so happy with this. Me and jam started Ceasefire with 4 days left in the contest and no intention of submitting it(We had never even used WorldEdit before), so I’m extremely pleased to be in 2nd (and by less than a point too :/ ).

Dowly, Outcrop was my favorite and aesthetically I don’t know that I can say another map is better(not just WMC). It played ok, but I don’t think Ceasefire’s play was anything special either. Congrats.