After some careful consideration, I decided to make the map medic only instead of heavy only. I had a lot of fun watching the replay where Egan had everybody play heavy as well as other classes, and I had to agree with him on what he said. Heavy as it stands is a one dimensional character in this mode, where you just smack people. You also can't take advantage of any sightlines. Medic feels much better, because his crossbow and melee combined make for a more meaningful experience.

BigFootBeto has consistently complained about losing his kill streaks as well, so I finally decided to appease him by changing how respawning works! I also added some visual stuff here and there.

  • Added caution tape and arrows to indicate where the goal is
  • tf_glow works better; also only shows the glow if it's being obscured
  • Your team is only ofrced to respawn after you lose
  • You cannot be forced to respawn during humiliation
  • The kill trigger is much more aggressive
Thanks to Egan last map test went really really well. I'm super thankful for him telling everyone to play Heavy when it didn't work, and even trying different classes like all Medic or all Sniper. Very nice of you : )

After watching the demo, I was tempting to make it medic only, but I was afraid that it would take away from the original intention of it being a grifball remake. I understand how melee only heavy is fairly one dimension while medic is much more complicated in that he has a ranged option, melee option, and a defensive option of healing his ball-wielding teammate. I might test it eventually.

In this version I focused on changing the layout to make it more interesting. Last should be a little easier to defend with a staircase I changed. Those two wooden stairs outside spawn have been replaced with one stair turned 90 degrees towards spawn. This should make it easier to spawn and stop a push into your zone. Think of it like a second option from the ramp directly to your left/right in spawn.

I saw one playtester get confused and punch the metal grate at upper mid. trying to get to the large kit below it. I completely removed the grate, making it easier to access. The tunnel is also extended to completely meet up with the water. I moved the medium health there too to hopefully make more interesting gameplay.

I removed the ugly signage from the previous version and took away the sliding doors because they got in the way of fighting too much from my experience.

Most importantly, I took Micnax's advice and created a kill trigger at the spawn exit that will kill you if you aren't heavy. This means even without sv_allowpointservercommands, everyone will have to go heavy. It will just be a lot more annoying for testers, but they will get the point after dying once (hopefully). If they don't, there is hard to miss text on your screen that screams at you to go heavy.

  • Removed ugly signage
  • Added fences back to mid
  • Added 2 small healthkits to make up for dead space created by changing the stairs
  • More cover near the top of mid
  • Grate is gone so you can access large kit easier
  • Hallway extended across the entire map
  • Kill trigger that kills you if you aren't heavy
  • Friendly text telling you to switch
  • Jack instantly respawns after touching water instead of after around 10 seconds
Thank you for bearing through that awful playtest if you were part of it

Apparently, once you turn pointservercommands on on your client and disable it after, it still carries over the effects, so I thought you could still use clientcommands. I was mistaken, and the map was totally broken

I'm going to go over the feedback given with reasons why I will/won't go through with them. Click the spoiler- I respond to almost every one of the 18 comments

"i dont know where the bonus goal it" - The bonus goal thing that appears is on every pass time map, I can't get rid of it, so sorry for the confusion

"if the jack goes into the spawn, it's kinda hard to get since you get uber again and cant pick it up immidiately" - I fixed this in a2a but I uploaded the download to the site incorrectly so it used a previous version :/ it should be fixed

"the map is too tiny - one single pass can cover it entirely, and whoever gets the ball first wins" - This is tricky because the original grifball also had very small maps, but it didn't have throwing. I tried to counter this by having obstacles in the way as well as stairs to climb to make the trek a little more difficult while staying small and simple. It will work much better when it's heavies only, because I noticed people were playing scout and demo and stuff... bleh.

"the long respawn essentially makes it arena where whichever team kills the most people is going to score" "respawn should be a lot faster" "the regular respawn wave is about 18 seconds, which is pretty long if you're just gonna force respawn people anyway." - I'm fixing this by making respawn take 2 seconds. Sorry

"the map is so small that you can throw a sandman baseball from one spawn entrance to the other" - Since the map is supposed to be heavies only this won't be an issue later. Scout is hilariously/depressingly broken

"the force respawn is getting annoying" "every score by any team rests the players to spawn" "it forced respawned us after we lost" "the respawning is really annoying" "i dont like the force respawn of everyone including the live people. what about my killstreaks?"
- So, about the respawn time. The instant respawn is meant to make it so one team can't snowball significantly more than the defending team. I think this would be an issue especially with how the spawns are lain out, and the issue will be dampened by the new respawn times. It's just to make it 5 completely fair rounds. If you think making it so one team is forced to respawn while the other stays, let me know, because it's something I thought of but have no idea if it will work or not. Hopefully this makes sense to people because I don't even know if it makes sense to myself anymore

"spawn rooms are too exposed to hunstman arrows" - shouldn't be an issue when it's heavy only, because you can't take advantage of long sightlines when you are just melee

"nice idea of integrating medieval mode into another mode such as passtime" - thank u



As it stands servers WILL need to have sv_allowpointservercommands to work. Editing the OP AGAIN >_<

  • Added sliding doors to each entrance to the capture zone. This will make it significantly harder to just chuck the ball as heavy towards the goal, as you will actually need a teammate to either follow up with the throw or keep the door open. If you still can't defend against this, you will actually have to tell players to play defensively to smack the ball out of their hands and chuck it somewhere else
  • Signage
  • Respawn waves are 2 seconds long instead of 20
  • Ball drops more towards the deathpit
  • Little things
  • Uber now works in a zone instead of being based on time (area infront of spawn and up the ramp are safe)
  • The jack respawns when it falls in the pit
  • Can't take the jack into spawn
  • Jack bounces off of the spawn entrance
  • Fixed being able to charge out of spawn as demoman to skip the interval that changes your class
  • Clipped stairs
  • Uber is more predictable- you get 3 seconds of uber leaving spawn instead of 5 seconds the moment you spawn