thanks kevbama

there were a few nice maps with dev textures only that i remember playing a long time ago. there was one called koth_idioteque with a floating platform? that one was so cool, I don't remember seeing it ever get out of infancy. in the inhouses i used to play a long time ago we'd kind of cycle through maps, so process/badlands was always first but those 4 hour weekend marathon pug seshs sometimes included other more interesting maps.

I'd like to see maps played at the very basic dev textures level and balanced for gameplay. really not sure why we don't pug maps from the beginning as they are developed rather than artpassing them before comp players even touch them. it's trivial in hammer to move a corridor if its all dev textures and simple geometry. maybe a few crucial props. maps with a lot of displacements are harder but even those can be tweaked.

also, i tried to make my own map once, got it into a barely playable form and did some pugs on it and it was pretty terrible. so props to map makers for sticking it out that shit is very hard to get right.

i'm typically the type of guy to vote for badlands or process 80% of the time but honestly kev your post has made me reconsider my position.

edit found my old map:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10322990/cp_miwo/cpmiwo/index.html

Maybe if comp wasn't so hostile towards testing maps without _rc in the filename we'd have more good comp maps.

This is what I did with logjam and I've got not much to show for it. Yes mistakes were made and yes as someone said mappers are bad at selecting what feedback to listen to (I was guilty of this) but there's only so much we can do. It's an incredibly frustrating experience to try and do anything with maps for competitive... I want to make something of logjam but the vast majority of people are just done with it.

Having some higher level pugs on new maps would be awesome as I felt a large part of the issue with the various iterations of New Map Pugs was that a large majority of the people who did play in them did not even have one season of experience (myself included at the time). This made determining good feedback from bad much harder than it should have been on the respective map makers. I would imagine it would be pretty hard to get people to agree to play the maps in pugs unless you had a specific time/day set aside for playing new maps? The other issue would be getting feedback from the players to the mapper, I know that the tf2maps servers have a feedback thing that might be possible to setup on the pugme servers since it seems to be a really effective way of getting feedback to the mapper.

As for Granary I think that Dagger has done a mostly good job with the pro version and while I do not agree with every single change that he has made he does seem to be taking feedback into consideration and actively making the changes to improve the map. Currently I cannot think of any map that could be even considered as a replacement for Granary as we have voted it out and back in for multiple seasons in a row at this point.

P.S. Dagger please change the prop doors out for simple brush ones like Process/Metalworks/Sunshine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHLQDtQPvMw

You don't know unpuggable maps unless you've pugged gravelpit (back when it was in the pool). Always a stomp.

You don't know music unless you've heard The Beatles live (back when they were alive). Always an amazing show.

Thats not true, everyone is always asking admins to change map if its sunshine

I'm really not a fan of sunshine or metalworks. Sunshine because it's like an army training obstacle course for medics - there's no flat ground on the whole map just about, and any time there is, there's some sort of prop to jump over or walk around. That's my only major gripe. Metalworks transition from mid-2 and 2-mid is awful. It's certifiably bad because there's only one viable way to push (always valley) because lobby and under are just non-starters you're going to get crushed 9/10 if you try to go those ways against a team that has 6 competent players on it who are actively able to play video games.

But all told there have been far worse maps in the US rotation than metalworks or sunshine - though I wish GPIT were still in :( RIP my favorite map lol.

For Pugs I'm fine with anything. I prefer not to play sunshine because I can't cruise control on med (it's an active struggle just to move around efficiently) for pugs anyways, and Viaduct is bad because you need a reasonable level of team cohesion to have any sort of fun on viaduct, and you're not likely going to get that on viaduct because little jimmy wants to have "fun"

do you wanna know the biggest issue right now? There is so much of a difference between a competitive player and a mapper, in cs, almost every mapper plays comp (unless of course u can tell they dont care and are making a jailbreak or minigame map), but because of these two things coming together, cs usually has better maps put out more consistently.

Another thing is just how so many mappers are AGAINST taking feedback from a competitive standpoint, now I believe that if you want your map to get into the game, it has to first be competitively viable. Valve leans to picking up maps that are enjoyed by the competitive scene. My co-admin from new new map pugs and I go over any koth, gpit style A/D, or 5cp map that goes up on TF2Maps, we decide, "does this have potential to be good, where would be by beta?" If yes, we start theorycrafting and try our best to formulate good feedback and a mapper has ver batim said "No, Im not going to take feedback from a competitive player."

There seems to be a lot of distate for competitive players in the TF2Maps community and I get it. There are a lot more "bad eggs" that will give terrible and non-constructive feedback, but you have to have tough skin if you want to be successful with anything in life.

Csgo is much more open to trying new maps and maybe thats because its honestly easier to play (just play sites) r/globaloffensive holds community nights to playtest maps and have huge turnouts, and everyone is willing to give feedback, I would love for tf2 to just atleast try to work out the kinks for maps.

tf2 is a pub game

the mappers are pretty much a sampling of the game's community

most of the mappers are pubbers QED

mm might fix it but it still comes back to the problem the 6s community always had of being so far removed from the game's regular player base that trying to cater to us means you have to borderline ignore the other 2 game modes that people give a shit about.

It's true but whenever there is a metalworks or basically any unpopular map people just won't add and it will take around an hour just to get 12 people

Mapping for pubbers is more profitable too. The majority of non-valve made official maps are pub maps. Gotta get them stamp dollars.

idk man as a proportion of comp playerbase/pub playerbase vs competitive official community maps/pub-oriented official community maps I'd say we're doing pretty well

granary pro is worse than regular granary

proto...........

is regular viaduct better than pro versions too proto

no but it just doesnt make sense that after 8 years someone just starts changing random shit from the original in hammer and whips up a half baked not tested "pro" version. same thing happened to badwater. mid is what's so garbage about granary and it wasnt changed at all in this new "pro" map that people have seemed to adopt so passively.

its not badlands

sunshine plays fine in pugs imo, metalworks plays eh and viaduct and gran are just terrible to play in pugs tbh.

how can you say pro is worse when the big thing your complaining about is in both maps??
also mid was definitely not the worst part, the forward spawns and spawns on last were absolutely terrible on stock granary.

from the standpoint of effort:output, you're getting about the same output currently, but pub maps hold significantly less effort to create

my hope is, once matchmaking rolls around, mapmakers will learn to focus more on comp maps, simply because a map in the MM list is a map getting paid by passes, which means a mapmaker making far more money than they would normally get from stamps and cases

Metalworks pugs arent too bad until you get to last atalemates with people on heavy/pyro/engi. Granary pugs might be ok but mid is kinda shit and 10 min 5-0s kill pugs. Sunshine id be ok with but same issue w last as metalworks, and mid is so goddamn big you have to be coordinated to be aggressive so i think itd be a lot of pussy level play.

I don't know anything about redditors playtesting maps but nevertheless the maps that are in csgo competitive play are almost all maps that could be found in previous versions of counter-strike, usually changed aesthetically by valve (like mirage and 'cobblestone'). The difference is that the maps are essentially made for competitive, because public and competitive counter-strike are actually the same thing. competitive counter-strike is public cs taken to the next level. the difference between the 6s format we play and the who knows what format they were expecting format that pubbers play is enormous. so it's much easier for counter-strike to keep the same "old" maps and the newer maps aren't really stressed as much. especially considering map knowledge and timing is far more important on counter-strike, as you can die in one shot if your timing is a few hundred milliseconds off, or the map's sound queues aren't hardwired into your brain well enough yet. because of that i have an inkling that cs players would much rather play maps they're used to (which is why it took so long for overpass to actually become a popular map).

that being said I'm not quite too sure why testing new maps seems difficult to do in tf2. I think the communication usually isn't there between map makers and players, because I never seem to even know what the new hotness is for maps unless I check the maps section of tftv. but one thing for sure is that i've always felt a disconnect between map makers and players, like map makers just *create* maps and sometimes high level eu players will test it, then I never hear anything afterwards.

best case scenario would be to get esea to actually adopt a method by which we can veto maps that isn't completely inefficient, so we could use the off-season to test at least 1 or 2 maps thoroughly to see what we'd like in the new season. obviously pugs are one way to go during the season, but the majority of scrims are going to be played on the maps that are featured for the week.

are you kidding me dude badwater pro is the best highlander map i've ever played

you and zebbosai would be good friends

Ive been saying this forever but mappers should make one or two more GOOD koth maps. Seems ridiculous to me that we play an entirely different game mode for only 1 week out of the season yet it can potentially be the deciding map in a grand finals. Warmfront mid was actually really good and balanced, would take minimal effort to make that a solid/fun koth map

#bringbackashville

warmfront mid does not work as a koth layout, there are WAY too many changes that would have to be made to make it a good koth map.

of all people to actually be right