Clarification about "comp players still playing" and why I am so bitter about TF2

[Sergis]

i agree with grazr about environments. most maps here are being developed for pub play and it makes no sense to test a map that is supposed to end up being played with wranglers, sandviches and whatever the hell else in a vanilla environment. crits and damagespread only skew the battle outcome results a little bit, different weaponry changes the way battles play out.

 

[LeSwordfish]

I've said it before, so i'll say it again: if you are testing so little that individual weapon imbalances cause you to get a skewed picture of your map, you are not testing enough.

 

[grazr]

I think it's more a combination of the fact that certain weapons also ruin the enjoyment of the game, as well as throw off balance. But that's subjective so it's not something we can really moderate, as much as we'd like to improve the status quo of TF2, that's Valve's realm.

 

[Trotim]

Kind of contradictory how one guy says testing with imbalanced weapons is important because that will be the environment the map is played in when the other guy says you want people to respect the map author and not use imbalanced weapons ?_?

But alright then. Saves the server staff the trouble of actually testing the plugins and stuff too.

 

[Sel]

i agree with grazr about environments. most maps here are being developed for pub play and it makes no sense to test a map that is supposed to end up being played with wranglers, sandviches and whatever the hell else in a vanilla environment. crits and damagespread only skew the battle outcome results a little bit, different weaponry changes the way battles play out.

That was the same argument people here used in defense of crits/spread, and it holds just as little water as it did before. Now considering the wrangler is blatantly overpowered in just about every situation anyway, there isn't a whole lot map authors can do to make it "less op" (same goes for the sandvich and just about everything else), and testing it in that environment is more likely to throw the results of the test away from what they otherwise would be, and allowing it causes more grief than good. The fact of the matter is that the unlocks that stay the least bit true to the original game design have very little (if any) effect on the outcome of a map.

As I said before, there is very little the mapper can do to handle obviously broken unlocks, such as the wrangler, sandvich, etc, and the responsibility to fix them lies only with Valve, and no one else.

I find the whole, "but that's the environment they will be tested in", argument to be ridiculous, since first off, that environment changes every week anyway by adding more weapons that can have ridiculous effects on gameplay. Consistency in tests goes out the window for any map tested over a period of more than a week (this is a bad thing), making it even harder to get accurate information from a series of tests. The only environment that remains consistent is one that just outright bans any new shit straight off. If you don't think so, please try to seriously argue to me that maps like granary, badwater, etc, which were not tested in the current environment, are now trash maps. Good unlocks do not radically change whether good map design is still good map design, bad unlocks on the other hand do, and there is fuck all map authors can do about them.

The best possible testing environment is one that returns consistent results, since that's the only way you're going to be able to tell whether something's wrong with your map, and not just a shittily designed unlock throwing it off.

 

[Sergis]

alright, maybe unlock effect isnt exactly as bad as i felt it was.

still, i want my frontier critstick and minisentry and flaregun and demoknightery and banners and whatever the hell else. i just won't have fun being restricted to vanilla medlocks and i'd probably avoid playtesting any maps except mine if we had such a plugin.

 

[grazr]

Kind of contradictory how one guy says testing with imbalanced weapons is important because that will be the environment the map is played in when the other guy says you want people to respect the map author and not use imbalanced weapons ?_?

But alright then. Saves the server staff the trouble of actually testing the plugins and stuff too.

I meant more in a sense that the same way one team wont just heavy stack for the sake of being arseholes. The same is true that one team wont just stack any particularly powerful unlock and ruin a test. I consider the skill level of TF2m regulars to be above average so if one player is using a nonsense unlock against the other team, that team isn't as vulnerable as a team of random pubbers to being pub stomped with it. I sympathise, but i personally can't justify a blanket ban on certain weapons when the majority of people including map authors either don't care or are against such action.

I don't know about the other server mods...

 

[Trotim]

Nah I'm fine with that, figured really, just wanted to link to the plugin because we had been looking for one like it some time ago.

Though I am pretty sure someone used the Wrangler on koth_circus which promptly made people say the sentry spot is too hard to deal with :] Which really is just not the map author's fault, just like some other older maps are now way different because suddenly Scouts and Pyros got more mobility and Sentries infinite range. Kind of punishes you for really caring about the details of map design when Valve goes ahead and breaks half the gameplay constants.