Horus

I see your rationale, but I disagree. If someone believes that something that they played warrants a cacoward, I believe they should be free to express it. And whilst cacowards are not a popularity contest (and I’m really glad for that), number of mentionations do capture strength of feeling in the community and suggest to the reader (the general community, not just the cacoward judges) that something might be really worth their time, when you consider that many have limited free time and aren’t going to be able to play all of the year’s highlights. It also has an enforcement issue because it implies an expectation to read the entire thread before posting your nomination, and there will always be a % of people who forget / ignore that.

Your podcasts were great to listen to, but yeah I can imagine they were very time-consuming to do. Hopefully the SoBad collab will be easier on the schedule and it certainly sounds like an interesting concept. As others have said your SoBad interview was one of the best, you two seemed to gel very well with each other and communication was pretty smooth, so looking forward to it!

I don't doubt that, and I agree just turning off Extended HUD is a bit of a halfway house, I guess I just wanted to address that if you want a true blind experience going into each map, you can do so with one extra option to toggle the automap stats.

True but you can also switch off the automap stats too (for example there’s an option in dsda doom to tag automap stats on and off)

Credit where credit is due, that is a rational and measured response

Well, most people in this thread are saying why should a mapper adjust their default mapping style to fit the preferences of the player. Whereas I think your perspective is why should a player adjust their default playing style to fit the preferences of a mapper. The difference is as a player sometimes it is in your own self-interest to adjust your playing style. You may by default be a ‘100% everything’ player, but if a map has a lot of secrets that you aren’t enjoying finding, or the map is structured in such a way then you’re just making it less fun for yourself by pressing ahead regardless. Likewise, you might by default be a ‘UV or bust’ player, but if you get really frustrated playing a map far beyond your skill level, you could have saved yourself the trouble by dropping the difficulty or skipping the map/wad (to add a real example here, someone played one of my maps on UV the whole way and finished it but said it was too hard and that impacted their enjoyment. Whilst someone else saw they were dying a lot early in the map on UV, recognised their frustration and responded by reducing the difficulty to HMP. The latter player had significantly more fun as a result)

@Arsinikk Sure, players have their own preferences the same way mappers have theirs, and that’s perfectly valid. It’s totally fine to want to 100% the maps you play. What people are saying is that not every map is designed with that in mind, and aiming for that goal regardless may make the map less fun for both you and your viewers (decino’s playthrough of map 31 of AA may have been an example of that). Whether you decide to pursue that route regardless is ultimately up to you.

The opening monsterless section of Suspended in Dusk where you traverse the rocky terrain before entering the techbase is probably memorable moment of the entire wad for me. I agree with @LSC Lasico that monsterless maps, be it walking sims, pure puzzle maps or pure platforming maps, are interesting and underrated concepts.

Well, I think there’s enough content in this thread to at least cast doubt on this claim. Also, if one does untag all their secrets, it’s inevitable that there will be some players who make comments like ‘that should have been a secret’ / ‘why wasn’t that a secret?’. Point being you’ll never please everyone.

Whatever design decision you make, there will be people out there who don't like it (and conversely, people who do like it). As others have said, your proposal of not tagging secrets is trying to solve something that's not your fault. If the player is getting frustrated trying to 100% the map, that's on them, not you. Having said that, using untagged secrets is a perfectly valid design decision. But you should include them because you actually want to, not to placate 100% players.

I decided to try a prepared run and play much faster than I did on my standard run (albeit still not that fast). Got to map 06 with 148/209 kills. Happy with that overall. horus_ironman_2023_04_prep.zip

Cat 2 (because I played it on Ironeagle when it was picked) Dead: Map 05 Kills: 162/191 horus_ironman_2023_04.zip

He’ll yeah!

Is there anything that you do like?

May next month finally be the month that this club plays… +++ Jason Wainman’s 30 Levels of Doom II

The hindsight traps that you refer to are far from confined to slaughter though, they happen in all kinds of mapsets.

Well this thread received quite a response already! If you haven’t already received too many responses then please also count me in!

Kama Sutra 2: Time for annual beg. Gusta pls

Cat 1 UV Dead on Map 2 with 36 kills horus_ironeagle_2023_03.zip

Cat 1 Map 6 81/89 kills Time of death: 49 mins horus_ironman_2023_03.zip

I presume he is referring to the cyclone that's hitting there right now

Cat: 1 Difficulty: UV Dead on: Map 02 Not sure about kills or time of death horus_ironeagle_2023_02.zip

Cat 1 Dead on: Map 06 Kills: 0/56 Time: Not sure, around 56mins or something horus_ironman_2023_02.zip

To be fair, what is fun to speedrun and what is fun to casually play can often be two completely different things