H2H4 / Favorite Park of Week 6?

Whoa, Mamba's sure taking a beating here that it doesn't deserve.

I think more than anything this is influenced by "maybe that park shoulda won" factor.
I actually think that the fact you have to search for this poll in the forums, rather than it being on the front page, filters out at least some of the n00bs that voted for RCT2 by default. I think a similar thing also happened with the Week 1 best park poll.

I'd have to agree with the "second thought" thing that it's changing people's opinions more than it should.

At least Ed will be happy to know he can win by building a park and then talking people into voting for it.

I'd have to agree with the "second thought" thing that it's changing people's opinions more than it should.

At least Ed will be happy to know he can win by building a park and then talking people into voting for it.

...

Personally I think the reason the vote turned out the way it did is that people look at the parks very quickly and then vote. If a bunch of people post right away saying "OMG this is the greatest park ever!" than people might pause for a second and reconsider voting against it. If the first dozen people post "this is unfinished, it sucks" than people disregard it, and vote without looking at it for more than a minute. Maybe knowing that a building was made by stacking scenery blocks and bushes together makes it a little more impressive. Maybe people don't notice right away that all the walkways are hacked to make them look that way. Maybe the boat ride is a little hard to follow the first few times you watch it (which was also my fault for not starting the park at the start of the ride). Maybe it just took time for people to actually realize what they're looking at. If putting "Coaster Ed" next to the park and posting a few screenshots (WHICH ANY PERSON WHO ACTUALLY LOOKED AT THE PARK IN GAME WOULD HAVE SEEN ALREADY ANYWAY!) and telling people where things were hacked makes the park this much better, than I should stop making parks and start advertising for people. You could all win spotlight!

Or maybe winning a spotlight or H2H MVP earns you a reputation for not making crap, and people give you the benefit of the doubt by looking at your park for an extra couple minutes before deciding if it sucks or not. If that's the case, than I consider that reputation well-earned.

Ed, hearing you speak about this match is like hearing a musician thinking about changing their style to appeal to the charts. You've even mentioned it might be your last park. Because you lost when other people didn't pay attention? Fuck that shit.

No...because we're not going to make the playoffs. I'm not changing anything about my style, believe me. But H2H is all the parkmaking I have time for. And it was already going to be my last LL park. That's why I put so much stuff in it.

Please don't hurt me.

Isn't voting considered for what you like the most? Maybe some people didn't like it.

(I thought it was awesome Ed )

Edited by Regulatin, 16 September 2006 - 09:19 AM.

You're right though, and in retrospect it doesn't surprise me that much that a number of people just didn't like my park. The architecture isn't very pretty, there are long sections of walkways without any buildings or rides attached to them, I left portions of the landscape without trees or bushes, and the two main coasters are very complex and tangled and maybe a little hard to interpret for that reason. What I didn't want to do was make an "idea park" -- where there are lots of cool ideas but it's one big jumbled mess that doesn't look very good. But then for a couple of reasons (lack of time, some confusion over the best way to make the buildings) that's pretty much what I've made. I love it, but it's definately got some problems. Maybe it could be fixed? I might return to it later and give that a shot. But for now, I'll see if I can do a better job with the next one.

After having actually seen it in game Ed, I think this was your first park where you got so caught up in the various hacks that you lost sight of the park as a whole. Every other park you've made incorporates the amazing hacks into the park to the point where the viewer is forced to acknowledge them, whereas in this park it was as though the hacks made the park a jumbled mess as you said. It was still a great park, but not on the level of most of your others IMO.

I think it was actually the trees and bushes that made it into a jumbled mess, not the hacks. I had a real problem with the trees on this map. The portions I like the best are the ones with the least foliage. And I don't like the architecture at all, with the exception of the castle and the Black Powder building. Which is kindof funny because I spent a month gathering pictures of Japanese castles and drawing sketches and trying to figure out how the hell I was going to do it in LL and than I ended up throwing the castle together in literally 20 minutes because I was going to be late for work and the park looked like crap without a finished castle in the middle. And for all the worrying and planning, it's actually the most effective building in the whole park. Well, mostly. There's still a couple things that bug me about it. I think the reason the castle works so much better than the rest of the architecture is that it has a solid foundation. The shape of it is right -- because it isn't all slapped together using ghost train stations which always look rectangular. I think the answer, for me, involves taking things back to their roots a little bit and building up from a solid foundation rather than trying to piece things together out of ride chunks and pretending that it looks good. I like the buildings in Egyptopia. That kind of architecture works in LL. And while I really like how Blood Island turned out, that park had some architecture related problems too of the same kind. And Cajamarca was an architectural disaster, but otherwise pretty nice.

But anyway, I was always thinking about the park as a whole, that's the way I build. I work on chunks at a time and step back and see how it's all coming together. Maybe I'll post my sketches again sometime. I have lots for this park. But I've forgotten how to make good buildings in LL anymore. And the tree selection isn't really appropriate for the kind of theme I wanted to make. And I definately screwed up with the vines. They clutter it up in the wrong kindof way. Those are the problems I see. But the layout of the park is great I think, and I love the rides, and I love the entrance and the castle, and I love the landscape with the little river winding through the valley and the harbor area with the rocks, and the theming in the water. So maybe I can eventually make this into what I really want it to be.

Ed, honestly, I think you'd like RCT2 if you took the time to get used to it. I'd love to see what you could pull off in RCT2. It seems to me that LL frustrates you nowadays.

I don't think the frustration is limited to LL. A lot of things frustrate me nowadays.

you should lighten up.

Easier said than done my friend.