The time system has worked well for us ever since we started at PAX, and I doubt it's going anyway. One of the problems that comes up is how do you break ties. With only 17 states (0-16 wool) there's obviously going to be players with the same number. Obviously the most straightforward way to decide a clear order of winners is to go first by points (which we do) and secondly by time. In the interest of fairness though, we do use something which I'll call a "staggered start" time. Common in races where you might have 1000's of people, your official time is just your personal time to finish. In a marathon, you try for the first person to break the tape to be the winner, however that's less important for us. Secondly, points and times are basically the two things we can easily track on a central server, so that helps out when trying to manage a competition like this.
As I've said before, the maps we produce for PAX are not the same we would produce specifically for an internet target audience. However, there's no reason in wasting a good map, when only 100 people are able to play it at PAX, so we release it on our launcher where anyone who wants to can try it out. Unfortunately, timing this year prevents us from doing too much between competitions at PAX. We did look into some other options, but it's basically come down to not enoguh time to design a new map from scratch for East. Instead, we will be polishing up the map we have, making some world and technical adjustments to hopefully avoid as many of the issues we had at South. However, that's not to say what works at PAX works everywhere. Not at all. We have ideas for more typical FTB maps, some of which we've started already, and that we'll contiune to work on once we've finished and recovered from PAX East.
I'm sure we can take any serious suggestion into consideration for a "proper" old-school FTB style map for the general internet community, however please stop saying what we have PAX is bad. (Seriously, please stop. We have first hand experience at PAX, and know what the players there can associate with. Most of them would go "HUH?" on a map that requires a significant amount of modded knowledge, where as a parkour map using mostly vanilla elements is immediately accessible to a wider range of people. They may not be *good* at it, but that's beside the point. They can at least try it, and most importantly have fun.) As for now, there's only a few precious days before East, and there's still much work to be done on the map to fix it up, so we probably won't be doing much else until after PAX. After then, we'll see.
