I'm not going to mention him by name (though I'm sure some of you know or can figure it out), because this post is not about him. One of the judges, a professional Terran player, went over some of his judging on stream recently, and it was so bad that I decided to make this post.
Starcraft 2 heart pro playet pro#
The one thing that I'll focus on here is the judging, particularly the judging from pro players. TLMC 15 has had some scheduling and QA issues but nothing out of the ordinary awfulness). There's endless problems to discuss with the TLMC which have mostly been hidden away from the community as a whole (TLMC 6, 8 and 11 in particular had some awful problems that are beyond the scope of this. And because no one has any visibility, and judges are unwilling to bother with spending the time to give feedback into what's happening people don't have the info to complain.
Judges give a single number from 1 to 5 per map, they average them and that's that. Mapmakers have no idea if their maps even reached the judges or got cut earlier, no idea why a map succeeded or not. There's no feedback from the judges, scores for maps aren't revealed to the mapmaker which keeps them guessing as to what they should submit next time.
There are so many problems with the contest to the point where it's little more than a lottery that leans towards standard and pretty maps. Then Blizzard picks from among the maps from the contest to put them on ladder. A panel of judges consisting of pro players and community members narrow the submissions down to 16 finalists which play in a map contest tournament and are voted on publicly.
Every so often a TLMC is announced, and mapmakers submit to it. Maps generally get to the ladder and tournaments in the following way.