also before anyone else says it, it's not badlands

If it's not offseason it might be hard to find teams willing to scrim new maps that aren't in rotation. Pugs would probably be the best choice. As for the question though, usually someone asking me is more than good enough. If you wanna add me and ask to pug a new map whenever you do, feel free.

As for my thoughts on custom maps, this also kind of correlates with why I haven't much interest in putting myself out there to play them without being asked, is that a lot of them lately haven't been that great. Edifice(sp?), Process (pre-rotation), and only a couple of others I can't remember the name of have caught my attention whereas the other ones I've tried are usually pretty boring or honestly look boring.

Most people are going to want the top invite teams to scrutinize each map with several pugs/team scrims and give their verdict on them, and considering most top invite players/teams are already extremely busy with their own shit, it would probably be hard to organize everything or have the schedules align correctly

I play enough TF2 during the week that I don't feel like playing on the weekends. I feel like that might be a root cause of your problems.

We're also bringing up the hassle of actually testing WIP maps that aren't in beta yet.
What would be the best way for us, the map makers, to successfully test alpha maps with the community so that they can be fixed before beta? Scrimming is not really an option for maps like these since there is no real incentive for teams to scrim alpha maps.
In other words, what would make you guys want to PUG these maps? The last few times we've tried to organize pugs, they've failed. What would make them work for you all?

Same reason no one ever wants to play new maps. People want to have at least the illusion of fun so they won't play a new map that might cause their scrim to be unfun.

Its why everyone is so quick to not play new maps like metalworks, everyone in pug.na and scrims just dismissed it because they heard from that one guy that one time about how the map is horrible so they instantly make up their mind that it won't result in fun.

as nice as edifice looks and as "fun" as it is in pugs, if i wanted to scrim that map with another team i would probably go over the map with my team and try to get some kind of game plan for it. its hard enough even getting a gpit scrim when it isn't the week for it.

just jumping into an attack/defend map as a team and playing it wouldn't be that productive. it would be as productive as playing it in a pug, in fact. another thing to recognize in this instance is that a lot of people are trying players out for their teams, and a new attack/defend map isn't going to be the best map to try anyone out on.

edit: our circle jerk has pug'd edifice before as well. while it was fun to a certain extent, there was like 0 teamwork until we had to defend C, and then we defended it for like 10 minutes. killed the pugs for the night, never pug'd it again unless we had played through the rotation, and thats only if people were in a good mood.

It sucks to be an alpha/beta tester if the map changes a lot every update. Also confusing to run around and most lower level teams will be really disorganized because nobody knows what to call a place anything.

If you want a successful map that people might want to play, make it so that it's easy to uniquely identify places. Add a cow prop at a certain flank. Now it's called "cow." Everybody can remember what cow is because of the ridiculous cow prop that's there. Add kitchen props, now you have "kitchen." Add a saw/lumber, it's called saw room. People really overlook aesthetics that actually can have a much better purpose.

Map design itself is another issue, but please make everything easy to call out.

Fully Charged 28 or 29 with ScorpioUprising and Phi.

Pretty much this, I have other things to do during the weekend so our team does not scrim fridays/saturdays typically. After 4/5 solid nights of TF2, I wouldn't particularly be interested in pugging a map that could very well be aids in .bsp format.

I'd love to participate but I work friday night. They'd have to be earlier in the week.

Also what's wrong with unknowns showing up? You don't need full IM teams to play a good game and test things out.

all I'm going to say is, good maps don't happen if no one tests bad maps.
pretty much every good map started as a bad map so there you go. playtesting of bad maps is needed and changes need to happen.

Just something I want to touch briefly here: I know the term "beta" is being used in all sorts of ridiculous ways nowadays. gamedevs use the term "beta" when in reality, it's just a "demo" with all gameplay elements set in stone. If you test a tf2 map in beta, then it's not a demo, it's not a preview of what's to come, it's a work in progress, it's for playtests to happen and to find the things that need to be changed. The map will change and you should be happy about the changes implemented because it means the map is getting better based on the feedback you helped to provide during testing. If a map doesn't get better after playtesting, you're playtesting wrong (unless the map is just really that good).

I probably shouldn't have gone on this rant but w/e. I really can't stress this enough, you are required to play bad maps to get good maps and all maps need to change at some point, embrace those changes. Every map can be made better with the right changes. all bad maps can be made good with the right amount of playtesting.

I think what he meant by unknowns was people who don't participate in new map pugs regularly and aren't likely to be regulars. We get these people from time to time in my circlejerk as well and they often drag down the experience because nobody wants to play with a baddie on their team, and people will ragequit because they got rolled and then inertia sits in. Overall this eventually kills pugs and people lose the will to play because they're not having fun.

I get the whole " We need to have fun thing." But really the times that I did play new map pugs no one took it seriously, at all. I joined the pugs to test maps not to just run around on a map and get killed because my team is doing whatever.

I was refraining from posting because I didn't want to come in and sound like the big dick has-been going "HRRRRRRRR YOU KIDS THESE DAYS" but I just wanted to put in my two cents from when Wax, myself, and the guys from PS who wanted to get involved laid down the groundwork for the idea. Brace for big fuckin' nerd essay.

When we started off, we didn't have any IM connections outside of Healbot and the only Invite connections we had were the fact that Wax knew Sigma and I knew a majority of x6(THPS) from days of old. So we relied on word of mouth: have those participating ask their friends to keep it a not-so-foreign experience. The pugs we did were from a pretty low skillset, and there are probably still maps to this day that probably would have made the mark in terms of viability if we had better players testing them. However, just because you have a majority of unknowns doesn't mean you can't take the chance to turn them into regulars. Even if only one of them comes back, that's better than none, and on top of that even if NONE came back you can say that you tried your best to get new blood.

Honestly it sounds like you're expecting a good night every night and for the playerbase to be good every game. There were nights where we canceled the pugs because we couldn't get enough people or we knew people would be busy scrimming for matches or playoffs. There were times where I did think about talking to everyone about extending NMW into parts of the week to hopefully get better players, but from my view that kind of defeated the point of the "weekend" part in NMW so I kept my big dumb autistic mouth shut.

Another thing that we agreed to do was to test maps WE had confidence in. This sounds self-interested, and in all honesty it probably is no matter how much I could explain it down, but we chopped a significant number of good looking at first glance maps off the roster because we personally thought they just didn't look fun at all. Now I haven't looked at any of the maps you've put up because like I said, I'm not here to be a big assburger and tell you "NO YOU'RE WRONG BECAUSE I SAID SO", but if you're gonna shove maps down people's throats because they're 5cp or A/D maps that for some reason look plausible but not necessarily fun to play you're gonna lose a lot of people fast. From what I remember, we had some really high standards for map testing until the pool of maps we stockpiled started to deplete.

As I type this I'm struggling to locate anything of old I have saved in terms of the pugs, and all I have are some clips of me getting frags and a handful of pictures about some corrections/changes we wanted to two KOTH maps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W38kGuMjyO8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USeJn3Ut_wo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GmErrdqVSA
http://i.imgur.com/u40cF.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/F4m38.jpg

From what I remember, people will play a map that even has dev textures as long as the map looks fun and shows some major signs of completion/solidity. Unfortunately, koth_stark (and its brother cp_stark) lacked on the "fun" part and its creator had vanished a long time ago. It also depends on the group of people playing - you have someone who is loud/well known enough and unwilling to take a risk, any map they think they won't like will be shot the fuck down.

There were nights where we repeated player favorites and other nights where we just fucked around if we had big skill disparities in the attending players. Sure we've had some bad maps, but I like to think that we played on a majority of good ones. Even that one 32-player pub map (god that was so bad) was kind of fun. Even though I think I was playing scout and asking me to play a decent scout is like asking Phil Fish NOT to have terrible people skills.

tl;dr - Be more picky about the maps you have, be more accepting of the people you have, reach out to new guys, and realize that you're not gonna play every night.

I would be veery glad to play some new maps but all the custom map pug groups I join seem inactive

I would be veery glad to play some new maps but all the custom map pug groups I join seem inactive

i need da spires