Mapping Challenge: Pick 1 in each Block
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I like a lot of the ideas here for maps, however the challenge in general is far too open. The point of these challenges is to be a challenge. If you are free to choose between all of the proposed genres and options at will, the challenge prompt might as well read "make any kind of map you like".
In the past, less popular challenges have fallen into one (or multiple) of four categories: Too specific, too vague, unpopular idea, busy time.
The latter two are always hard to gauge when posting the challenge and always difficult to see how much they can be overshadowing either of the first two, though it is often telling from comments or from past challenges (when we were doing the single month challenges, December was unsurprisingly a busy month for a lot of people, but often some of the summer months people's schedules could be taken up with commissions). With unpopularity there will always be people who don't like the current challenge, and I appreciate with two month challenges this problem can be more pronounced (the slowing down of forum traffic in general also hasn't helped, but that's a different story).
The former two are a bit more controllable however, and I believe this may fall into the 2nd category - it's a lot of choice which can be daunting and will also result in such a wide variety of maps that will be hard to vote. It also raises the question of what to do for future challenges - each of these choices could easily be their own challenge. "Map an Elven Town" is kinda weird when following "Map an Elven Town, Forgotten Ruins, Floating Market, Arcane College, Cliffside Town, Ruined Factory, Derelict Space Station, Raider Settlement, Crashed Alien Starship, or Sieged Mining Colony, etc".
Again, not to discount the idea, I think the choices in general are great, however I think a little tweaking and gamifying would help to fit a challenge format.
Personally I would propose trimming out a few of the genres (if the format goes well, we can add some of them back in future iterations), and then combining it with Straf's previous suggestion earlier on here. I think being able to choose the genre is important, many people don't like/are not familiar with mapping some of the settings. However, for the choices we can use a random generator wheel to pick the choices. I'd add some amount of reroll/choice so as not to be too limiting (Like roll 4 times and choose and least 1. I also wouldn't limit the choices to each genre, which could make for some very interesting genre twists on certain choices. What would a sci-fi elven settlement look like? A cyberpunk dragon's lair? A high fantasy corporation?
