Continued:
As Minecraft mapmakers, making maps for people who we can reasonably expect to already have some experience playing survival Minecraft, we have a huge advantage over people who design
Breaking and placing blocks, mob spawning, the day/night cycle, lighting, hunger, enchanting, brewing
Adventure mode, mob spawning being turned off, the day/night cycle being turned off, the course being already lit, players being given the saturation effect, pre-enchanted items being players, pre-brewed potions being provided to players
The one notable exception I would make to this list is weather. Many people who play with lower-end computers and don't use Optifine experience significant client-side lag when it rains in Minecraft.
Rely on Minecraft's already-existing dynamics - they're great.
Key vs. Diamond Ore
Including sections that reward teams for competence at technical skills like PvP can increase the depth and variety of play, but
second dungeon of Arcane Realms
In order to make a map primarily a test of the competing teams' creative abilities, it's important to de-emphasize the importance of other factors that could give one of the competing teams an advantage. One of those factors is familiarity with the map.
Battle of Ages started the trend of including mini-maps of PvP maps on their starting platforms (image), which has since become the norm on RFW maps. Cluster Chunk expanded on that idea by making its mini-map 3-dimensional and letting players on the starting platform walk around it. Calamity improved on the idea further by turning essentially the entire starting platform into a mini-map of the actual course, at larger scale than and prior mini-map, that players could run around before the game started, so more details could be seen (image). Another idea is to put a labeled image your map on one or more mounted map items or retextured paintings, like this example from an unreleased map that I've been working on.
Only give teams a bare minimum of essential resources in locations that they would travel through anyway:
Put larger quantities of essential resources and some amount of valuable non-essential resources in out of the way or difficult to reach locations:
As much as possible, have every area of your map be a point of importance where player activity is likely to occur at any point during any match on it:
Maximize the level of team interaction:
Have a significant barrier between each team:
In order for a map to encourage creative tactics that may take several minutes to collect resources for and set up,
Constant pressure to work toward objectives:
Make your map as compact as possible without compromising any other principle:
