Stellarium Review

Not going to lie, you've been my fav map maker for quite some time now.   But as of this map I just cannot keep putting so much work into these things.  Your maps are gorgeous, you are a great artist.  No question about that.

But quality wise, they have been going from bad to terrible lately.  I don't know if you're in a rush or what.  But I went from having to put a few days of work into each map I bought from you (I run 4 servers with thousands of players so obviously we can find a lot more map bugs than you can by yourself) to now having to put weeks of work into them.

And after spending a lot of time on this one I am actually just throwing it in the trash and moving on to something that will take less work.

Here are a few issues I find on almost all maps, but especially this one, and these are not all the issues.  Just the ones standing out to me as I type this ...

- Your coasts are terribly steep.  It is literally just a straight 100 meter drop on the edge of land masses.

- The edges of these coasts then have cliff rocks (and even a lighthouse) that are literally just half floating out in the open.  Players can just swim right up inside things.  No smooth realistic "gradual drop off" into the ocean.  Just a straight up cliff with rock formations sticking out and the undersides exposed.

- Most of your "monuments" are not monuments at all, just neat custom build locations (which I absolutely love by the way).  But for those of us not running build servers, this leaves the players quite bored.  I spend most of my time deleting duplicate custom build spots and then adding in my own monuments.

- The custom build spots are just duplicated over and over across the map.  Need less copy and more variety

- It is VERY obvious when you take monuments from others and plop them down in your map because you do not even blend in the splat.  Good example on this map is Warehouse.  It is in the snow.  But a perfect circle of green grass and green trees where you used "apply splat mask" etc.  At least fill it in so it looks like it belongs there.

- You don't need to name every single item on the map with map makers.  For example "Gargoyle".  While a very cool looking statue thing, it is nothing for players to interact with.  It is not a monument, it is not a build spot.  It is just a decoration.  No need for map markers.

- No need to map marker custom build spots.  These end up being player bases, no reason to map label them.

- If you're going to put floating ice chunks, at least put snow splat under them so they stay snow colored.

- Throw some puzzles or something in.  Even your largest "custom monuments" are just artwork.  And like I said, AMAZING looking for sure.  But functionality wise, they are dull and boring.  Again, I cannot state this enough ... BEAUTIFUL artwork you do.  But even the biggest and best monuments are just that ... art.  No puzzle, no keycards, nothing but decor.

- Road ends ... try to use some splat or even broken asphalt prefabs to make the roads look like they "end" better.  Right now they just END and are even floating off the ground a tad bit.   A perfect straight line ending on each road.

- Underwater circles from rock formations "height mask" look terrible.  It looks like the moon down there.  These random perfect circles all over the place  (EDIT: OK I just realized you didn't do that on this map, but I have all your other maps and most of them DO this)

- Same as underwater circles (and yes, seems you skipped that on this map thank god) but I always have to go delete tons of decor topology underwater.  This causes nodes to spawn down there.  And if players keep farming land nodes, then more and more water nodes end up spawning and eventually there are hardly any land nodes left.

- Be more mindful of entity counts.  Again, you make the best looking maps out there, PERIOD.  But I spend DAYS shaving off useless entities and those things add up.  For fully populated servers with queues (especially PVE ones where more bases go undestroyed) entities are very important.  So finding a custom build spot with like 400 "patch of grass" prefabs on the roof or something is a huge waste of entities.  Again, a lot of your art requires that, I know.   But there are definitely some instances where you could shave off quite a bit of entities.

- Blocking off vanilla subway tunnel entrances.  I know we all did this when they first came out because we had already placed our own and then Facepunch added them to the monuments so they were "extra".  But those days are long behind us.  I personally have revamped half a dozen of my maps to use the vanilla entrances now instead of having a second entrance just outside the monument and then covering the vanilla one with dirt piles.  There's no need to still be doing that now.  It confuses players by having multiple subway icons on the map and then we get reports of "this one is blocked off WTF admins?".  So now I have to go behind you and delete all the extra entrances, fix the vanilla ones, fix the monument because they adjust the height some, etc.  It is a pain for something I paid money for.

...... Look man, I am dead serious you are absolutely my fav map maker.  And I've known Lone longer than this site has existed and you're STILL my fav map maker.  But dude, this is getting out of hand.  I really cannot keep purchasing things that are all about "beauty" and not about functionality.

To any potential customers reading this.  The guy puts in work for sure.  If you are running a small server with just a few dozen players, have it at.  They probably won't notice most of the stuff I am complaining about.  But if you run a full server (queue) be prepared for a LOT of bug reports and a lot of issues.  We have a team of 18 map testers and give them two weeks to a month to go over our maps grid by grid.  We have a system where they report every thing they find wrong (literally even if a sliver of the underside of a rock is showing).  And then our 3 map workers go and fix these things.  And I hate to say it, but when a Gruber map comes up it's actually kind of funny.  My players cheer, because they love the look of his maps etc (and they only see the end product after we are done fixing it).  But my admins roll their eyes because they know this is going to be a thousand item punch list of fixes we gotta do.

Don't be mad at me Gruber, just being honest.  And it took me many months to get up the courage to even complain.  That's how much I love your work.