Let's try to analyze together some unused Valve maps (and maybe some unknown community maps) and find the problems they have and how we could solve them.
I'd like to start from coldfront/wormfront/warmerfront.

http://i.imgur.com/jVJDsPS.jpg

At a first sight i see a veeeeery long map that lacks of a real choke points between 2nd and 3rd.
While the middle point is quite perfect, i think the second one is the real problem. That's why i'd probably move it on the outside steel bridge making it more difficult to reach from mid adding chockes with some kind of building in the middle (like gully).

Last point shouldn't be much a problem; maybe it is a lil bit large and with a low roof...

That's a quick draft i made (maybe it's too much ambitious with that flip of half of the map...)

http://i.imgur.com/RZj0Jcd.jpg

What do you think? Would it be enough? Is it a too drastic solution?
Let's keep alive this discussion!

I don't really get this. Process is widely considered to be one of the best TF2 maps ever and it started as basically granary mid, badlands spire, and well last all put into one map. Thing that are derivative of great things tend to be great themselves. If a spire as a second point is a beloved aspect of many maps, then why the fuck would you complain about a new map including it. smh at the people who get mad at maps for being ripoffs

Phi hit the nail on the head.

Mapping for competitive is really frustrating and draining and most of the time you don't get anything out of it. If I could get a reliable group of people to test maps that wouldn't just tell me that they didn't like which barrels I chose or to "literally go kill myself" (Yes I've been told that...) it would be wonderful.

I haven't done anything to Logjam recently because I really don't know what I need to do because I get a mixture of vague responses like "well it kinda sucks because the whole thing is a clusterfuck" or "It's decent but not that good" or "I like it" which really doesn't tell me anything.

If you guys want new custom maps, get a good map group pug or something going with some higher level players and make it a regular deal. We should probably do this sort of thing even if what people want is updated/modified valve maps or others- those would still require testing.

Hyce, in your opinion is it possible to do something like the draft i draw without too much work (aka don't have to do it from scratch)?

I know you guys are focusing on 6s here, but just wanted to throw my hat in as the creator of Glassworks.

I did everything I could to have it tested as thoroughly as possible. I did high level, extensive testing for about a year before it's debut in UGC this past season. I poked and prodded as much as I could just before the season started to get as many eyes on the map as I could.

Then as soon as it's week came up, suddenly all the people who hadn't cared to look at the map yet started paying attention and taking issues with it. It was dead silence until just before their matches, and suddenly the map was to blame for their losses and half the league seemed to have problems with it. The commonly thrown around notion was to scrap the map because it would always be "terrible."

I'm not saying it's perfect, it has room for improvement, I got some valid feedback that I plan to implement, but after two years of development on the map, getting it dismissed on a passing glance is frustrating. The actual legit issues could've been found had more players bothered to look at new and upcoming maps and taken time to provide feedback to them. It's hard for mappers to see their map the way the players do because they have been so close to it for so long. If you want solid maps, the feedback loop has to happen.

Once again, that sounds pretty familiar. In my case when Logjam was in ETF2L it wasn't great but so many more people just dismissed it as bad because it was new without even looking into it. That's one of the most frustrating things. Phi saw it with Sunshine when it got in ESEA. It's an annoying mentality.

Cirlo, moving the point would be really easy. Making the lobby room smaller could be hard depending on the level of optimization and how everything fits together, but it would be doable.

I talked to Fishbus, creator of cp_freight and cp_steel once he started taking feedback (mostly from the SomethingAwful TF2-thread) on both new and existing maps. I don't want to speak on his behalf, but he seems to have a lot of the same frustrations with the comp community that have come up in this thread. I think he also had some frustrations with Valve being unresponsive to his willingness to revisit old maps, but I think that was just before they announced the maps workshop.

He's since added an update to cp_freight which could be interesting for 6v6 and a new payload map to the workshop without much of a fanfare. (goldrock should have been added in gun mettle IMO.)

I'm not really going anywhere with this, but I just wanted to bring some attention to his work since the comp community mostly pay attention to maps that are posted here or on the etf2l forums (?) I may be wrong about this.

I also have a feeling item creators garner more response and lucrativity from Valve while map makers are the ones who actually contribute to gameplay with fresh polygons to run around and jump on. They need to be encouraged more.

And what about flipping half of the map (2nd and last) of 90° so that we have better connection between 2nd and mid?

Not to defend the sporadic/lousy feedback, but PUGs are probably only good up to a point for quality map feedback - coordination and comms are lousy in the first place. It's only when teams start scrimming a map that a lot of things they see will start to come out.

Of course, then you get into a chicken/egg situation - no great feedback until league inclusion means it's really hard to get good feedback!

That is to say, having a non-league testing ground for teams to play new maps with something on the line would probably help get good feedback earlier in the process.

Feedback on glassworks from a med perspective:

+There is only one way to play on mid for most classes, the only things that matter are where your sniper and soldier go. On maps like process you can either push right or left or through point, on glassworks you can only trade spam through house and wait for a sniper kill or your soldier to get an easy pick bombing the med behind house (as that's the only place you can stand "safely").

Possible solutions: The low ground beneath the point bridge could be moved up allowing teams to either push left or right and rotate out of sniper sightlines without killing momentum (this would also alleviate my next concern) My personal opinion would be that it would work better with a wider mid like process or gully as this one seems super cramped for something designed for highlander.

+Pushing from second to mid or mid to second is almost impossible to do without getting a sniper pick. Pushing with advantage means your med must pop immediately through the chokes (in garden or tunnel) because a sniper can watch both easily from the opposite choke with little risk of being countersniped. Trying to push from flank is easily shut down because both lead to lowground situations where you're easily spammed. Furthermore, the flank from second to mid isn't any farther up than the regular choke and all entrances can be covered by the same couple of players.

Possible solutions: Separate the chokes so that a sniper cannot watch all 3. Move the flank farther up into mid so that a fast push can catch the retreating team out (i.e. big door in gullywash, IT on process). Equalize the height so that pushing on the flanks doesn't leave you at a disadvantage.

I didn't have any issues with last but I think people had some problems with it. The map was playable but it wasn't super fun or intuitive in it's current state in my experience.

I've always wanted to get into making maps. I think if I ever actually stop making videos, I'll probably move onto this.

The big reason why Glassworks' complaints all flew in at the last minute before the official matches is because of how Highlander's season is structured.

The season as much as we want it to be a testing ground for new maps, really isn't a great place to test maps. This is why the pre-season worked well, and it became an opportunity for UGC to throw in maps that were experimental.

During the off-season, teams are trying to put their rosters together, and they will favour staple maps over anything experimental. Even coordination maps like cp_steel are rarely practised in the off-season because there simply is not a consistent group formed to play and criticise these maps effectively.

I played Glassworks with a team once in the off-season, and did not see it scrimmed by other teams until S16 Week 7 when it was to be played. This is the weekend that of course, your team had to play the map as you were scrimming in preparation to play. This is where teams really began to see any problems they may have had with that map.

I don't see UGC ever bringing back pre-season, and there are other reasons why. The main one being teams simply didn't want that extra week, and would often opt to forfeit. At the same time, it allowed us that one opportunity to scrim on maps we wouldn't normally play; best of all, without the fear that we would lose match points because we weren't comfortable with the map.

The most fun I had critiquing a map would be when Aero would invite me and his other friends every so often to look at his maps. In his early stages, we'd sit in Mumble and look at the work he did. After a while, we ran some PUGs with friends and continued the critiquing stage. Unfortunately, it's such a small scale like many other PUG groups these days it's not a great way to really know how the map's opinion will fare.

League matches provide the most diverse survey for critiquing a map. Simultaneously, it just makes people frustrated that they become expected to perform their best on a map they have to learn; flawed or not. Pre-season was the best chance at playing experimental maps since your score did not count towards your overall ranking.

So i've been lurking this thread a bit and want to give my thoughts on why mappers gravitate away from comp a lot.

I'm just going to dump this here: http://www.teamfortress.tv/24307/esea-map-poll/?page=4 no one gave proper feedback. I'm not saying the map isn't absolute shit, but going into other projects without knowing stuff I need to start avoiding is utter shit.The reason i'm bringing this up is because it's pretty much why people don't want to map for competitive, getting feedback is a lot harder, getting an environment to actually test is a ton of work compared to other alternatives, (This was actually one of the first proper tests of sandstone, it had a few before hand but not as good)

Getting more map makers is simple as providing an environment to properly test, weekly gamedays for example is how tf2maps has pumped out so many pub maps, and why people tend to gravitate there. It's as simple as dumping the map in a thread, and on the following Monday watching the .demo, reading the feedback, and talking to players. If a similar service was available for competitive map testing, a lot more could happen

But I liked logjam :(

The problem with that is 99% of prem/ivite players have 0 knowledge of level design, despite having game knowledge. You need a good balance. The ideal would be a mapper invested in comp (who plays or follows it actively) with a bunch of prem players backing it up and analyzing it.

The problem is also the feedback a lot of these people give is destructive and not constructive so they will just bother saying "this map is fuckin shit", "this mid is aids" and nothing more, leaving the mapper in the blank (and feeling pretty bad) and leading nowhere.

When logjam was introduced on etf2l I loved the map, I tried to give as much constructive feedback and ideas as I could within my knowledge, but so many people were destructive about that map that Hyce ended up changing the mid like 10 times and by the end of it everyone was turned off from it.

Also I really think 6v6 has great potential for a ctf map that's not turbine. I love playing ctf, and Im sure there's something cool to do in comp with it. (I still remember converge (I think that was the name) being playing in the nations cup a couple years ago, and that was a pretty cool ctf concept, there were a couple others ctf concepts I think could be worked on a bit more for 6s.

I think what's needed more than anything right now then, is a consensus of what makes current 6es maps good when creating potentially new maps by looking at how current maps are played. I don't know a huge amount about hammer although I've tried using it a couple of times before but it seems to me like the hardest problems to fix involve things around the 2nd points of maps and the connectors between points as it involves changing large parts of the map as everything there is connected to something else. Mids seem to be an area of really common complaint on maps. Lasts historically seem like they've been easier to fix.

I might detail some of the stuff that I feel about 2nds and connectors in another post, but I can talk about mids right away.

In the 5cp maps in etf2l's rotation there generally seem to be 2 kinds of mid: Mids that feel "large" and mids that feel "small".
"Large" mids all seem to have something in common- the point is on the floor with quite significant height advantage around it (e.g. Granary, Sunshine, Process). The footprint of the mid on the map isn't necessarily bigger than somewhere like badlands with the huge valley area but more of this is used because of the way the mid is played. On these mids, when playing aggressive, most teams seem to try and take a side and push across the point on this side together often going around the point rather than directly over it.
Maps with "small" mids tend to have the point raised rather than the surrounding area, often on a bridge (e.g. Badlands, Gullywash). Most teams play or jump onto the point and push across to the enemy team, or jump the enemy team's side and try and take it, rather than going "around" or under the point, so teams tend to end up playing closer to each other.
The only map that really doesn't follow this trend that's played is Snakewater, where the point is on the floor and there's height advantage directly above it. The lower part of snake's mid is actually really enclosed and there's nowhere to push all the way around the side of the point so teams are forced to push directly forward. In addition to this, the point itself isn't so easy to spam from the height advantage as it's actually directly above it.

I think if people have how they want the mid (and other parts of the map) to be played in mind when they design it, it makes it easier to come up with something people will like.

In the world of non 5cp 6es, I think people have less of an idea about what makes koth maps good as we only have one we really play. However, as koth maps are small and arguably the easiest type of maps to make, I'd imagine TF2maps.net has a wealth of koth maps nobody's ever even tested before because they weren't even designed with 6es in mind. Unless I'm mistaken, nor was viaduct though so it might be worth having a look through some of them just because there might be something that does it right accidentally.

I think ctf is even less well understood, but there have been some pretty radical modifications to the ctf format that could be interesting, I remember there was a map called fusion that allowed you to cap by bringing the enemy's briefcase to your own dropped one which could be interesting, although I'd imagine it might just discourage pushing entirely.

If anyone is interested Sideshow is streaming a map test pug on cp_draft_a3.
Seems funny.

After reading through this thread, and more specifically reading through the responses of map makers (seriously, everyone in this community needs to read those posts a few times, because the way we have treated the few map makers who have tried to cater to our needs is utterly shameful) I think the problem is one fundamental to the current system of feedback.

Right now the most common form of feedback (beyond the literally useless "this map sucks" comments) is that the map is a poor clone of some other more familiar map. And I don't think that this is because map testers are lazy and intentionally hurtful or negative (though there are certainly bad apples out there). It is more a factor of testing maps through pugs. TF2 is a game of coordination and positioning. Holds only work when every player on a team is aware of their role in that hold. Pushes only succeed when every player on a team understands what their objectives should be. This is why there are often wildly different opinions of even the more widely played maps.

When you pug a map you are not only putting together a disparate group of players who may or may not work well together, but you are placing them on a map they have little to no knowledge of. Of course they are going to attempt to apply strats from familiar maps to that map. They are going to look for layouts, holds, pushes, etc that they recognize. And once they find those things they are going to attempt to recreate holds from other maps.

Obviously these holds aren't going to work perfectly, it is a different map and there are different considerations that need to be made for pushes and holds. Players get frustrated because holds that *should* work fail and they don't always understand why. So their feedback becomes an expression of this system of testing: that the map is a poor clone of another map because it 1) resembles that other map, and 2) does not perfectly cater to the holds and pushes used on that other map.

What you need is to create a 2 part system. A pug group that not only plays on the map, but also does a comprehensive review of the map. Get teams, ideally existing ones, not just pug teams, to spend an hour walking through the map, talking about attacking and defending each point and working through not only strats but counter strats for various holds and pushes (they aren't going to find everything, but this will give them a solid idea of how to try to play the map, and can often catch some of the more critical flaws in a map without the need to play a single round). Once they've done that let them play a few rounds on it. This way they have a chance to test the theories they created during the map review portion of the testing process.

I guess, the really short version is this:
1) The maps we like are liked because they are also the maps we know (there are other factors, but honestly, the biggest factor in liking a map is knowing what to expect on it)
2) Playing on unfamiliar maps is always going to lead to 2 things: Comparing that map to more familiar maps, and being uncomfortable on that map because despite similarities it is still fundamentally different (which most players have difficulty translating into anything other than negative feedback)

Like byte with Obscure? :D

There was a great in-depth article that some mapmaker made a long time ago explaining why badlands was so popular and such a good map for 6v6, although I can't find it anywhere.
Probably a good reference point for new mapmakers trying to make a good 6v6 5cp map if someone knows what I'm talking about and can find it

It was written by cube or someone, can't seem to remember who it was, but it was specifically analyzing badlands as a map and what made it so perfect for 6v6

http://tf2maps.net/threads/valerias-guide-to-competitive-mapping.21718/

Someone make an arena map with 2 plant zones and a bomb like in de_csgomaps. Would be cool to use the pass time ball, so the bomb carrier had to be protected or good at throwing it around. No idea if it would be good in comp but it would be fun to try out even as a pub map.

Nice. I'll post the link on the other thread.

found it
http://www.nodraw.net/2010/08/detail-of-tf2-pt1/