Well, let me go over my own responses to this....
×Trickster's Bar
Entrance: Positioning Halph and the snake was annoying. Not critically so, but very trial-and-error. If it were easier to position Halph *correctly* (like there being a place you can permanently stop Halph before letting the snake out), then it would seem a much nicer puzzle to me. I also agree that the secret wall should really be a broken one.
1N: This room seemed a bit messy, but it becomes quite clear you can't complete it until you start at the right square once you've exhausted all the possibilities to get to rafts. There just seemed to be a lot of stuff here that was really surplus to requirements, even when you ignore the red herrings. Not a bad room, but didn't feel well designed.
1W: The black square was a "
cheap trick"
, yes, but fairly obvious. If nothing else, a simple right click reveals what you need to know. But as I will mention... I don't mind a properly designed horde room. They're not my favourite type of rooms, but done correctly, they can be somewhat impressive. This was not one of those types of rooms, though: the monsters were just pasted down at random, it seemed, and other than the graphics (which as I've mentioned to you, are under copyright, so something will have to be done about that), there was nothing to make me marvel at the architect's ingenuity. As such, it was not a rewarding room. There are several examples of *good* speed potion horde rooms, especially in larrymurk's and Rheb's holds, if you wish to play them for inspiration for later holds. And finally: no, you can't hide potions under Mud. It's simply not possible.
Inside the Bar
Entrance: I have no strong opinions for or against this room. Horde rooms are not my favourite type of room, but I don't completely loathe them either. I don't like to see them *overused*, or sloppily designed. Entrance was neither, though there is, of course, debate about the secret wall. In my case, again, no strong opinion. A compromise here might be better though: broken on the wall edges, secret for the passage between.
1E: The vision token is a nicety to your players. It means they don't end up either right-clicking every single possible 'wall' square looking for the entrance ahead of time, or just give up and install a tar transparency mod. Hiding the openings adds very little to the puzzle here, and given the wubbas and the brain, most people won't want to release too many of them and will look for ways to discover the route without, again, trial and error.
2E: Still not really sure about this room. Getting at the decoy potions themselves was fine, as is working out that you need 4 decoy potions. The grid seemed superfluous though: you can just place all 4 decoys either killing all southern eyes immediately, or on the lowest 4 floor tiles of the grid (waking up all 4 southern eyes and the southernmost eastern eye). The pressure plates seemed pointless other than preventing you from waking up all 8 eyes using decoy potions alone. I mean, it's a fairly nice room, but I had this nagging feeling I wasn't doing it right.
3E: The size is the *major* thing. You could have a decent puzzle with a *quarter* of the room size here. Also, I tend to prefer more ordered puzzles to chaotic ones: which is why I love the tarstuff puzzles in Museum of Ooze or Advanced Concepts 2. These are the main reasons I didn't find this fun. And also, vision token is *very* required for this room, because tarstuff is going to grow over all those lovely checkpoints, and I really didn't like right-clicking in vain trying to remember where the next one was.
1N2E: Yes, this was a nice room, and one I did enjoy a lot. It was also a very short room, but that's not always a bad thing. I wouldn't have minded if it were slightly longer, but it didn't overstay its welcome either, so it worked well.
1N1E: It did annoy me by being tedious. It wasn't *overly* tedious, but it was still too long by half, mostly because the seep really weren't a menace, and as an optimizer, I'd rather get through to the Conquer Token *first*, then come back and clean up (and by that time, the clean up was tedious *and non-scorable*). In short, too much space used, so overstayed its welcome.
1N: A smaller room *would* have been better. Wubba shifting puzzles aren't unknown, and again, not my favourite type of puzzle, but this just seemed like a fairly chaotic and "
lazy"
room. And I know that you mentioned that the previous iteration of this room *didn't have* as many wubbas as it did.
In any case, the problem wasn't the *brained* wubbas: that much becomes fairly straightforward once you get the idea. The problem is when you kill the brain and they're suddenly unbrained, and you have a very large trial-and-error to walk through in both setting up the correct formation and then making it out without being trapped. So in short, yes, there was too many wubbas because you didn't need nearly that many to state your point.
As an aside, there's a few rooms in one of boyblue's holds
"Madness in the Spring" (which you should really play) which deal with brained Wubbas, including one room where you have to kill a brain without getting trapped by the *single* wubba in the room. Less really can be more at times.
The Food Shed
Entrance: Personally, I prefer Gel cutting without Gel Mothers, but I admit that it can be an interesting conundrum at times. Just seemed like a bit much after all else that had come before.
As for the scroll, yes, I read it, but quite a while after the contents were any use to me. (This was still before I had mastered or even completed the hold though: so I did do it legitimately.) And currently, clicking on a map room when you're not in that room actually shows spiders on the screen. But I don't see the existence of the scroll here as a real excuse for the couple of throwaway spiders (whose existence you can eventually figure out anyhow if you try to solve the room from the first open inside room), especially given that once Entrance is complete, you can no longer read the scroll (and you must complete Entrance to complete 1E anyhow).
1E: Secrets on scrolls tend to be used for answers to convulated orb puzzles (Witherwood series) or scripting puzzles (Gigantic Jewel Lost). I don't think the quick optional scroll in Entrance works here, largely because it's optional *and* 1E is required. So yeah, felt slightly cheap... not *difficult* to figure out, just unfriendly.
1N: It's fairly straightforward to kill the goblins if you know the required techniques. My main concern is that it's another example of 'too much'. It's just a big glob of green slammed down in the room, trying to make it difficult to traverse. Which works (but it's not impossible, I'm afraid), but looks ugly. And it just makes the proper solution take a lot more time to boot. Again, less can be more.
1N1E: I don't particularly like 'war rooms', but that's a personal opinion. Other than that, this isn't too bad a room, but I just prefer rooms that showcase architectural brilliance rather than "
I found a way to kill this configuration of monsters, now you try"
. Still, there wasn't a huge amount of monsters in the 'war area', so this, in itself, wasn't a *bad* room... it's just that I'd already had my patience eroded by so many other rooms that it got on my nerves a bit more than it usually would.
In short, I do have a preference for lynchpin-type puzzles and rooms that have a logical flow to them. But that is a preference: not saying all rooms must have this. I like "
Madness in the Spring"
, for example, but I didn't like Level 3 (which was entire rooms filled with various tarstuff and mothers... thankfully no black gates, so it wasn't *too* bad, but it really didn't entertain me or amaze me or make me think anything other than 'glad that's over with' once I'd done it).
I'm not sure if this answers your questions about how I felt about each individual room, and I will of course note that many people *did* enjoy your hold as is (just as many players enjoy various different types of holds, even among us optimizers). But I thought I should comment to make my own stance clear.
Your entry was simply outstanding, you really deserved to win this.
.
I mean, did you beta-test all of your holds?