I don't understand why an idea has to be "motivated" or "addressing issues" to be worth trying. If you don't have a good reason to discourage someone's idea, just let them experiment. It might work out better than you think.
This would be a fair objection to my post if, anywhere in it, I discouraged him from pursuing his idea. Maybe I could have worded it better? I agree with you, for the record, and just made a similar post in another topic.
I wanted to open a discussion on SD design, because this topic is labeled "concept" which implies (to me, at least) that it's open for discussion and debate. Or at least feedback, right? And I haven't really seen anyone discuss SD since Doomsday was released; there's only the one official map and a dearth of custom ones. Why are there no SD maps? What doesn't work now that we've had months, years to think it over? Even if two rockets doesn't "fix" a "problem" with SD, why was that the adjustment made to SD? Like, where is this coming from? What informed the decision?
In asking for his motivations, and what he wanted to accomplish, I was hoping to learn more about
how the idea got to its present state. I thought we could give better feedback on it (or other ideas) if we started a conversation about the ideas themselves. Perhaps that conversation could lead to more SD variants or something. Or other maps. I don't know. I definitely didn't want to question his motivations to the point where the concept is abandoned.
I brought up Sabotage because it's one of the only SD variants I've played and it's also pretty good. The points I made about it -- teams, etc -- were things YM said during a test of his map, and they struck me as great points. Not just about SD, but also CTF. It even makes me view stock RD in a new light (rather than assigning all value to the intel carrier, teams can progress toward goals through normal play). I thought YM's observations and conclusions held value and wanted to share them. So I did.
I don't care what anyone does with their time. I really don't. I only want people -- literally
all of us -- to try to think critically about why we make decisions and what they're meant to achieve. I don't want to discourage people when I ask questions about why they're making a variant game mode; I just want to understand their thought process so I can understand what their aim is, and therefore be better off to help them.
That's why in the thread for my current map, Theory, I've been posting my reasoning behind my choices, what I hope to achieve, and what I'm struggling with. A few people responded very positively to that with some excellent view points and ideas of their own, and I thought that was wonderful. We need more of that in general. Those posts were incredibly helpful to me and helped me to see things I never had before.
It's my feeling that people rarely discuss level design on this site outside of tutorials, and I think here's a great example of why: when I tried to leverage this topic into a discussion, I got ignored and/or misinterpreted. I think that happens a lot, and frankly it probably comes from the age range of the site. But I think we need to stop doing that. We need to move the discussion on game design out of the tutorial threads. We need to be actively questioning why we make choices and how to improve them.
We can and should question our choices, motivations, and design goals without also questioning their validity. Since coming back to TF2M after an absence of several years, I see many people exasperated with the poor level of help and feedback they get on design ideas. Guess what: that's probably because we never talk about design. So let's fucking talk about design.
So, with that, I return to my original question. What led to two rockets, and what will that achieve? With other game modes (and some variants) I have enough information (Valve design posts, in game commentary, etc) to figure it out or make conjectures. With this, I don't, so I want to know. I want to discuss it.