Originally Posted by Sir Ementaler

"This level is huge, so I'll give it as many as 5 power-ups."
That's the mentality that killed most JDC events I attended. These days events may have anywhere between 16 and 32 people and guess what: 3 to 6 power-ups will never suffice for that many. How many power-ups would you place in a 4-player level? 2? 3? That's at most 2 players per power-up. What makes you think that 5 players per power-up will work well in a larger game where, additionally, people die a whole lot more due to the deficit of carrots? Where does the thought of adding 5 slowly spawning carrots in a level intended for 15 people come from?
What I want to do in battle mode is grab a power-up or two, use weapons strategically depending on situation, then run away and seek a carrot when on low health. How come all levels I've seen during events instead encourage creating a clusterfuck of 6 people around a single power-up spawn point that finally, after 20 seconds, generates the monitor, only to be taken by one person on low health and lost within the next second? Carrots become completely obsolete because you're unlikely to gather anything valuable enough to care whether you'll die, and even then, there can be so few of them and spawning so rarely that they're not worth the wait.
I say: make the power-ups and carrots rain. Place 15 or 20 of them, it doesn't matter. The more there are, the less campy your map becomes, the less luck is involved, the wider the strategical possibilities become. Don't stick to your traditional long generator spawn times. Pickups with a short spawn time are more likely to be found by people who are new to the level and, unlike you may think, won't result in increased camping.