Hmmmm... maybe I should post here. I haven't rated this hold, because I'm still annoyed at what didn't happen in Architecture and what did happen during HA testing. I think the rating should be about the hold itself, and not about its circumstances. So I'll wait.
As described above, there are plenty of annoying features in this hold. I would add to that list the invisible scripted level entrances on room edges in Ranch and the secret room in Short Road to City - if the player steps on those squares in the process of solving those puzzles, they get teleported and must come back and start the puzzles over.
I'd agree with the opinions above that DyRsOfDh14 needs to be more responsive during beta testing - listen to advice, answer beta tester's posts, and correct problems as they are found. And he needs to be more patient - give people a chance to play his hold and find the problems, don't be in such a rush to submit to HA.
I'd also say that this forum is generally excellent at pointing out every last little thing that is wrong with a hold. But we're unfortunately rather lazy about pointing out the good things that we'd like to see in future holds by this architect. A new architect who wishes to make better holds needs to hear both kinds of feedback.
Here are some rooms in this hold that I really liked:
Magic Camps 2N1E, 1N1E, 1E, and 2E seem to be a tribute to the Oremite Breeding Grounds level in TCB. In each of these rooms, the player has a few oremite free patches of ground to kill monsters. The rooms are interesting and differentiated from each other because each one features monsters with different movement rules. (1S belongs in this series as well, but killing rattlesnakes under these restrictions turns out to be tedious.)
Magic Camps 1W and 1S1W are fun and more original too. These rooms are also covered in oremites, and include many close packed yellow doors infested with seep. The challenge is to safely manipulate a mimic or a clone to a pressure plate that destroys the seep. Even though the rooms look similar to each other, it's cool that they play quite differently.
Magic Camps 1N1W also deserves mention as a good room, as it's one of very few DROD rooms that includes stalwarts that's not either incredibly frustrating or incredibly easy. Here, the player must use pressure plates to create an arrangement of roaches that will be safe for the stalwarts to attack. Nice puzzle.
The Castle 1W is a room that initially looks like a mess... until the player looks more closely and realizes that the room has a simple and not-so-messy goal.
Click here to view the secret text
×Kill the tar and mud mothers in the same spawn cycle.
The Castle 2S involves some fun brained wubba manipulation.
The Castle 1N2W is a fun snake manipulation room. The player must lead a serpent through a maze of dead ends to a pressure plate on the other side of the room.
Other notable rooms in the hold:
The waterskipper horde rooms: Short Road to City Entrance and 1N, Dark Caves 1N, The Castle 2W. I felt that these rooms didn't have much to add to waterskipper horde management that wasn't already shown in The River Dugan level of TCB, although it could be argued that The Castle 2W was more original than the others (I also wasn't quite sure what the
intended solution was). The reason I mention these rooms is they do still show a good quality of the architect - he selected rooms that required very different strategies to complete.
Dark Caves 1S and 1S1W are tight tarstuff baby avoiding puzzles. I think optimizers will like these. I keep getting the strong feeling that I've played very similar rooms before, but I just can't remember where... maybe someone could remind me?
Postmastery Area - Well I won't spoil the pleasant surprise for anyone who wants to get there.
