Official update maps, and their future once the "campaign/event" ends.

Jethro

MUSty Complainer
Nov 2, 2009
287
281
Today, the Invasion event officially ended. With this, the official Valve servers for the event also shut down, removing all chance of playing the officialized Invasion maps on official Valve servers.

When the Gun Mettle campaign ended, the maps that were added to the game were added to the standard Valve rotation on Valve servers. In other words, the servers would randomly roll on to them, and can be voted for them to be set as the next map.

However, for Invasion maps, none of the maps are available to vote as the next map on Valve servers currently. Gun Mettle maps are still there, however.

There's roughly 20-ish servers currently running arena_byre, pd_watergate and koth_probed, and another 20 running ctf_2fort_invasion. As it stands, those servers are the only way to play Invasion maps currently.

While understandably arena_byre is a bit of an oddball to fit on to any of the current server rotations, what with there being no Arena servers, koth_probed can easily fit in the KOTH rotation, and pd_watergate could either go in KOTH or CTF/SD. ctf_2fort_invasion could also fit in the CTF section, but might be best left to throw in to the Halloween rotation next year.

I hope Valve considers adding some of those maps to the main rotation. Otherwise they're doomed to die a wet, hydroelectric death.
 

Zed

Certified Most Crunk™
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Aug 7, 2014
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They should add a specialty rotation for Hydro, Asteroid, Doomsday and Watergate.
 

worMatty

Repacking Evangelist
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Jul 22, 2014
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These maps could be a good way to attract players to community servers.
 

ics

http://ics-base.net
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Jun 17, 2010
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It looks like that Valve keeps the Gun Mettle and Invasion maps within the game files but only uses Gun Mettle ones on their servers. It could be oversight and they simply just forgot to add them into the cycles. Also could be they are not planning to do so, because the maps are different from the basic maps.
 

fubarFX

The "raw" in "nodraw"
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Jun 1, 2009
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a thing to note is that, as opposed to other updates, the invasion maps were not hand picked by valve and they might not want to have them outside the context of the update.

that said, I kinda expect the halloween maps to end with the same fate even if picked by valve. we'll have to see how things play out. It might be that there is a tiered system for map officialization
 

Freyja

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Jul 31, 2009
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a thing to note is that, as opposed to other updates, the invasion maps were hand picked by valve and they might not want to have them outside the context of the update.

I don't think they were, actually. They were picked by the invasion team with guideance from valve.
 

Jethro

MUSty Complainer
Nov 2, 2009
287
281
a thing to note is that, as opposed to other updates, the invasion maps were not hand picked by valve and they might not want to have them outside the context of the update.

that said, I kinda expect the halloween maps to end with the same fate even if picked by valve. we'll have to see how things play out. It might be that there is a tiered system for map officialization

I can see the same happening to the Halloween maps, if only because they only have Halloween servers at...Halloween, funnily enough.

I'd argue that is part and parcel of submitting a Halloween map, though.
 

ics

http://ics-base.net
aa
Jun 17, 2010
841
540
a thing to note is that, as opposed to other updates, the invasion maps were not hand picked by valve and they might not want to have them outside the context of the update.

that said, I kinda expect the halloween maps to end with the same fate even if picked by valve. we'll have to see how things play out. It might be that there is a tiered system for map officialization

I agree with you on the invasion maps and i think they stay within the game because map stamps also stay.

For halloween maps, they are on the servers only during the event anyway, and not going to be entered quickplay after this event is over. Atleast not untill next year, if at all.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
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Sep 8, 2008
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Each full moon those maps show up in quickplay as far as i know.

EDIT: or that was because the steam servers are down and it just displays everything, thats an option aswel. i however did see it multiple times happening during the year
 

Jethro

MUSty Complainer
Nov 2, 2009
287
281
The option to search for it on Quickplay appears, but the Valve servers hosting the maps do not go up every Full Moon.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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Yeah, like the ones that some of these were edits of....
 

Jethro

MUSty Complainer
Nov 2, 2009
287
281
As of today (13/11/15)'s update, ctf_2fort_invasion and koth_probed have been added to the valve server quickplay mapcycle, along with arena_byre to an arena mapcycle, although there aren't any official Valve arena servers currently. pd_watergate does not have a server associated with it either.

Still, better a half measure than non, eh?
 

Crash

func_nerd
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Mar 1, 2010
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As of today (13/11/15)'s update, ctf_2fort_invasion and koth_probed have been added to the valve server quickplay mapcycle, along with arena_byre to an arena mapcycle, although there aren't any official Valve arena servers currently. pd_watergate does not have a server associated with it either.

Still, better a half measure than non, eh?


Yayyyy! That's awesome news for Probed.

Lame about Byre/ Watergate though.
 
Jan 20, 2010
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Yayyyy! That's awesome news for Probed.

Lame about Byre/ Watergate though.

Well, Byre makes sense. What would be best is if they'd actually add arena to the quickplay but I guess it's too "advanced"... I dunno. :/ Same with player destruction, although I guess that would only include Watergate, which would be kinda boring after a while...

I guess we just need more Player Destruction maps?