Please. Your thoughts on joining Monthly Challenges.

[Badger]

(3) having developed the skills and speed at producing maps necessary to complete the challenge within the one-month time frame.

You should join anyway, even if you don't get a complete entry, it actually motivates you to get it done and prepares you for things like making deadlines. Aside from that, experience has taught me that the more you map, the easier and faster you get with it. Not to mention, gaining a sort of library of what you need to make maps. With somethings, once you devolop the initial style, you have it in your arsenal (Take PS brushes for instance. When I started... I had what every other PS user has... the set of basic brushes it comes with ... now... I have a veritable plethora of brushes for forests, mountains and hills, just to name a few. Not to mention I have a number of actions that will complete some pretty painstaking tasks on command.) ... just keep at it.... you will get faster...

Maybe not as fast as GP, but GP is actually a futuristic machine sent back in time for one purpose .... to kill sarah connor. wait... no... to produce fantastic maps at fantastic speeds.

I love and live for the challenges....

Agreed with everything here. GP has great advice here, listen and heed those comments.

Maybe we should have a league or handicapping system

We've been discussing this in the CL threads, in fact, the poll was kinda 'spawned' off these discussions, which at the moment ... are still in discussion.

There are a few reasons why I think this months has proved popular, for me I was waiting for an outdoor mapping project, as right now that is all I have tried, and I want to discover my style for that before moving indoors or to more detailed projects.

The other thing I think is the indimidation factor. when it was just half a dozen big names entering, then I can understand people being nervous to enter, however once you had various rookies and others like myself entering, I would have thought that would make people think they could 'hide' with all the others and it became less daunting, hence you got a kind of snowball effect.

I think now you have such a large group this month, as long as you are careful and dont make next month overly esoteric then you should retain quite a lot of participants

That is something I hadn't thought about, a snowball effect. You probably pinpointed at least part of why this month was a success. If you look at the three largest participating challenges... this month, the month we had a random dungeon, and the month we competed for prizes. obviously the prizes were the motivation for one month, but I'm thinking that the generalality of the maps in the other two challenges were the factors for such a large entry base.

And, as far as intimidating competition. Ya, they are heavy hitters... but, when you place an entry next to those same ones, you get (usually) their opinions on _your_ map and their feedback on how you can improve... if you don't put your entry up there ... obviously they aren't giving you advice on what points you need to concentrate on.... What I love about the challenges is that not everyone is actually competing against one another ... we as a group are trying to push each other to create great maps.... noone is really tight lipped and secretive about their techniques... there isn't any underhanded clipping or any of that you might expect in a competition of 'who is the best'.....