- Dec 18, 2022
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Typeracer submitted a new resource:
dust devil - new years resolution complete
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dust devil - new years resolution complete
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- Thread starter Typeracer
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- Dec 18, 2022
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Typeracer updated dust devil with a new update entry:
diet flank
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diet flank
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- Dec 18, 2022
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Typeracer updated dust devil with a new update entry:
to my tf2 family
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to my tf2 family
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- Dec 18, 2022
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Typeracer updated dust devil with a new update entry:
forgot to check clipping
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forgot to check clipping
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- Dec 18, 2022
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- Dec 18, 2022
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- Dec 18, 2022
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- Sep 10, 2016
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Hello,
I've noticed that a lot of rounds on this map seem to have been one-sided.
Here are some of the factors that are likely creating that imbalance:
The easiest sign of the captime being too long in a round is when the point unlocks, but isn't captured by either team for a rather long time.
This usually means that one team has won the fight against the other at mid, but the other team was able to respawn and come back before the attackers could even capture the point - NOT good.
This map is actually pretty good at doing that! The area leading up to the point is very separated, so it's hard to camp, and the cover is mostly designed so that you have full cover right up until you have visibility of the point.
But the trouble is that only having VISIBILITY onto an area doesn't necessarily equate to actually being able to REACH that area.
So, you can get KOTH maps where it's easy to have visibility onto the point, but not easy to actually contest that visibility and capture, which lends itself to a point that's very easy to defend and not very easy to attack.
This is what's happening in this map - sort of. The defensive positions themselves are not strong, so in a normal scenario this would hardly even be a problem, but it just so happens that the defensive positions on this map can't just see the point, they can also see the enemy team's approach to the point.
Here are a few examples:
Both of these spots can clearly see both of the main routes that players use to approach the point, and kill them long before they actually reach it.
The second spot even covers the low-ground route that players use to sneak behind each other - which itself can be used by enemies to see both of your main routes!
In KOTH maps, the lobbies before the point should be areas where it takes a very short time to rotate between entrances to them, and a very short time to rotate to health - this makes it easy to attack the point area, and makes it hard for the team who owns the point to attack the lobby (and therefore gain a forward hold that would make it too hard to attack the point).
By comparison, the point area itself should have very long rotate time between entrances to it, and should have almost no health so that if you're defending the point, you have to retreat all the way back to your own lobby for health - which is, by definition, ceding the point area to the enemy team.
At first glance, this map seems to achieve these design purposes very well.
The lobby is hard to push into, the rotate times when in the point area are long, and the point area is very exposed with almost no health.
But the doors between the lobby and point being so far apart also means that the attacking team has to spend a long time rotating between them, thereby making the point harder to attack.
This may seem trivial, but it is in my opinion the single largest problem with the map.
Here's a quick diagram:
This diagram depicts the two most critical rotates for the attacking team (blue, 10 seconds | light grey, 6 seconds) and defending team (red, 5 seconds | orange, 3 seconds).
By adding them together, you can get the time to rotate from the far left route to the far right on each side, although the actual figure is much lower for the red + orange rotate, since it's a path that can be shortened drastically.
This should hopefully demonstrate how much longer the rotate times are for the attacking team compared to the defenders.
I didn't do a diagram about retreat times, because the retreat times on this map are, quite frankly, exemplary - and so nothing really needs to be changed about the health placement on this map.
Now for my horrific diagrams:
Raising the ENTIRE hill the point area is on top of would make it so that you can no longer watch the enemy team's approach to the point area without physically being on the point yourself.
You'd actually need to raise it way more than I did in this diagram!
Adding stairs up to a shack with a dropdown hole in the floor here would allow the attackers to use the dropdown as a quick rotate from this route to the other one, while remaining confident that the defenders can't use the rotate against them without being a Soldier or similar.
You could also add stairs up to a doorway into the shack here, so that the rotate in the reverse direction is also slightly faster (because you can use this doorway, and then go down the other set of stairs from the shack).
Hopefully that makes sense!
With all this in place, I think you probably wouldn't need to do anything about the low-ground route.
My analysis of this map has impressed on me the skillfulness in its design - it seems to me that you understand what's needed to make a good KOTH map, and this particular map just needs a few finishing touches.
Let me know if I said anything that you don't really understand, or that you think is totally wrong! Always happy to explain my reasoning.
Also, here's a bonus:
Adding a couple of low walls here will make gameplay around the control point more interesting at virtually no cost.
And if you're worried about raising the CP hill making defensive sentries too OP, don't - the capzone is large, so you can huddle slightly behind the hill, and these low walls will help you evade sentries while capturing.
I've noticed that a lot of rounds on this map seem to have been one-sided.
Here are some of the factors that are likely creating that imbalance:
1) The captime is too long.
In KOTH maps, a captime value of exactly 6 is suitable to make it easy for the team who doesn't own the point to capture it, while not making it totally unfair for the team who does own it - although you can go lower than 6 and it usually doesn't break the gameplay.The easiest sign of the captime being too long in a round is when the point unlocks, but isn't captured by either team for a rather long time.
This usually means that one team has won the fight against the other at mid, but the other team was able to respawn and come back before the attackers could even capture the point - NOT good.
2) The point area itself makes it difficult to reach the point alive.
Generally, in KOTH maps, I like to instruct designers in a simple principle - "keep players safe right up until they reach the point".This map is actually pretty good at doing that! The area leading up to the point is very separated, so it's hard to camp, and the cover is mostly designed so that you have full cover right up until you have visibility of the point.
But the trouble is that only having VISIBILITY onto an area doesn't necessarily equate to actually being able to REACH that area.
So, you can get KOTH maps where it's easy to have visibility onto the point, but not easy to actually contest that visibility and capture, which lends itself to a point that's very easy to defend and not very easy to attack.
This is what's happening in this map - sort of. The defensive positions themselves are not strong, so in a normal scenario this would hardly even be a problem, but it just so happens that the defensive positions on this map can't just see the point, they can also see the enemy team's approach to the point.
Here are a few examples:
Both of these spots can clearly see both of the main routes that players use to approach the point, and kill them long before they actually reach it.
The second spot even covers the low-ground route that players use to sneak behind each other - which itself can be used by enemies to see both of your main routes!
3) The rotate times are long.
The time it takes to rotate between entrances to an area, and the time it takes to retreat from health while in that area, act as measures for how easy that area is to attack or defend.In KOTH maps, the lobbies before the point should be areas where it takes a very short time to rotate between entrances to them, and a very short time to rotate to health - this makes it easy to attack the point area, and makes it hard for the team who owns the point to attack the lobby (and therefore gain a forward hold that would make it too hard to attack the point).
By comparison, the point area itself should have very long rotate time between entrances to it, and should have almost no health so that if you're defending the point, you have to retreat all the way back to your own lobby for health - which is, by definition, ceding the point area to the enemy team.
At first glance, this map seems to achieve these design purposes very well.
The lobby is hard to push into, the rotate times when in the point area are long, and the point area is very exposed with almost no health.
But the doors between the lobby and point being so far apart also means that the attacking team has to spend a long time rotating between them, thereby making the point harder to attack.
This may seem trivial, but it is in my opinion the single largest problem with the map.
Here's a quick diagram:
This diagram depicts the two most critical rotates for the attacking team (blue, 10 seconds | light grey, 6 seconds) and defending team (red, 5 seconds | orange, 3 seconds).
By adding them together, you can get the time to rotate from the far left route to the far right on each side, although the actual figure is much lower for the red + orange rotate, since it's a path that can be shortened drastically.
This should hopefully demonstrate how much longer the rotate times are for the attacking team compared to the defenders.
I didn't do a diagram about retreat times, because the retreat times on this map are, quite frankly, exemplary - and so nothing really needs to be changed about the health placement on this map.
Suggestions
First, and easiest - reduce the captime of the control point to 6.Now for my horrific diagrams:
Raising the ENTIRE hill the point area is on top of would make it so that you can no longer watch the enemy team's approach to the point area without physically being on the point yourself.
You'd actually need to raise it way more than I did in this diagram!
Adding stairs up to a shack with a dropdown hole in the floor here would allow the attackers to use the dropdown as a quick rotate from this route to the other one, while remaining confident that the defenders can't use the rotate against them without being a Soldier or similar.
You could also add stairs up to a doorway into the shack here, so that the rotate in the reverse direction is also slightly faster (because you can use this doorway, and then go down the other set of stairs from the shack).
Hopefully that makes sense!
With all this in place, I think you probably wouldn't need to do anything about the low-ground route.
Closing statement
I provide this feedback in the hope that it is helpful and not discouraging.My analysis of this map has impressed on me the skillfulness in its design - it seems to me that you understand what's needed to make a good KOTH map, and this particular map just needs a few finishing touches.
Let me know if I said anything that you don't really understand, or that you think is totally wrong! Always happy to explain my reasoning.
Also, here's a bonus:
Adding a couple of low walls here will make gameplay around the control point more interesting at virtually no cost.
And if you're worried about raising the CP hill making defensive sentries too OP, don't - the capzone is large, so you can huddle slightly behind the hill, and these low walls will help you evade sentries while capturing.
Last edited:
- Dec 18, 2022
- 30
- 2
This is insane, thank you so much! Never thought my work would be analyzed like this. Not sure if you've been on imps for newer versions of this map, but the one-sidedness has largely went away. Since I made the version you are analyzing, I implemented a shorter respawn time for attackers, which seemed to do the trick. The sightlines going through the center overlooking the approach will definately be taken into consideration though.
Seemingly counter intuitive things like the default 12 second cap time and sightlines out of the pit I want to keep intentional, but I appreciate them being pointed out as potential problems. Im not sure if I'll follow through with making a connector like the one on image 6 out of it making the map too complicated. Regardless, getting feedback like this feels awesome. It shows that other people on this site see the maps potential and want to help. I'm still learning, so this post you made was a giant ego boost for me.
Anyway, a lot of people requested opening up the shack in the middle. I was hesitant but I did it anyway because it sounded cool. It's still yet to be tested, so be sure to come around when imps start running! Massive thanks for making the analysis.
Seemingly counter intuitive things like the default 12 second cap time and sightlines out of the pit I want to keep intentional, but I appreciate them being pointed out as potential problems. Im not sure if I'll follow through with making a connector like the one on image 6 out of it making the map too complicated. Regardless, getting feedback like this feels awesome. It shows that other people on this site see the maps potential and want to help. I'm still learning, so this post you made was a giant ego boost for me.
Anyway, a lot of people requested opening up the shack in the middle. I was hesitant but I did it anyway because it sounded cool. It's still yet to be tested, so be sure to come around when imps start running! Massive thanks for making the analysis.
Last edited:
- Sep 10, 2016
- 602
- 465
I don't really understand the appeal of opening up the shack.
It just feels like it would be incredibly annoying to have a Soldier up there while you're trying to cap, and having it be nearly impossible to kill him because he can just retreat to full cover anytime he likes.
I also only somewhat understand the idea of the shack I suggested making the map too complicated.
From the perspective of the outdoor fence route, it's not a route you have to worry about at all while attacking the point - by design.
So, you can ignore it and the map stays exactly the same as before.
All it really does is make something players were consciously choosing to do before (rotate) faster.
From the perspective of the indoor areas, it definitely does make them more complicated, but the indoor areas are already complicated - presumably by design, to make them harder for the defenders to camp.
And indoor areas will always inherently feel more complicated than outdoor areas, since you can't see one room from the other.
I should've been clearer about how I actually advised keeping the pit exactly the way it is.
Yes, it does see both of the main routes to the point for the enemy team, but what it does NOT see is the pit on the enemy side, so it's not all-powerful.
It's also a great way to take out enemy Sentry encampments from afar (thereby making it harder to maintain a long hold over the point), and its (seemingly) deliberate lack of cover makes it just unfrequently travelled enough to make it the perfect secluded back-alley for each team's Spies, who without it would assuredly have a hard time playing on this map.
In short, it does a LOT more good than it does bad.
I'm not opposed to a map having a negative element if the same element also introduces several positives, because in the end there's no perfect map - instead, perfect design is a map that fulfills the potential of how good it CAN be, even if that doesn't necessarily make it the best TF2 map ever.
But this is getting very esoteric.
I would be very careful about assuming the one-sidedness has gone away.
When judging a map, I like to look at bad rounds rather than good ones, because they're the ones that'll present problems for me to solve.
If I can solve a factor that's creating bad rounds, without creating a new problem that'll make more bad rounds, then I've made my map more fun.
So, I don't test my maps until I get a good round - I test them until I get a bad one.
If I test it an outrageous amount of times and don't get a bad round (specifically, a bad round that suggests a problem with the map), then it's time to artpass.
A good qualifier for when gameplay in a KOTH map is going wrong is the amount of time a team holds the control point for.
Generally, in good KOTH maps, a team will keep hold of the point after capturing it for no less than 30 seconds, and no more than 1 minute.
If this isn't happening, it suggests that some problem in the map design has prevented it from happening.
For instance, in the most recent playtest, in the first round RED held the point for three minutes after the first time they took it - until BLU's plot armour took over and they captured it with 0 RED seconds remaining, then almost immediately had the point recaptured and lost.
From what I could see, it looked like BLU was having a really hard time pushing out of their lobby - which is why I called that the map's "biggest problem" in my last post.
This is not to say that EVERY round will go like this - merely that it's a problem, which exists and will ruin approx. 3 in every 20 rounds, as I make it.
(It also happened, but to a lesser extent, with BLU in the second and third rounds, so maybe 3/20 is an overly generous estimate!)
As regards the captime - I understand the desire to have a long captime, or at least I think I do. Long captimes can lead to intense, fun capture points where you have to make a long series of good decisions to stay alive and capture, and it is indeed usually the best thing to combine with a large capzone that has a lot of cover - which makes it easy to stay alive for a long time, and is also what this map happens to already have (well, minus the "a lot of cover" part).
But I once made a map called koth_slums, and the fountain capture point on that map (the fountain itself was actually designed by @zythe_ ) has players coming in from all angles, and cover in the form of the statue and the railings around it.
So, the point follows the same general gameplay style of a point where there's a lot of cover, but not from all angles, so you constantly have to be weighing up the pros and cons of your position - who you can get shot by, and who you can't - to stay alive and capture.
That control point has a captime of 6, and what I found in playtesting was that it was actually still really intense despite the short captime - because it's a KOTH map, so if you have a central cap point with a lot of cover, there's a good chance that players on both teams are going to be alive on it at any given moment - so the captime isn't even going down until the fight reaches a decisive conclusion.
I actually considered lowering the captime below 6 on several occasions because of this!
So basically, the mantra should be "more cover, MUCH less captime" - which was part of the point of my bonus suggestion being two low walls around the capture point.
It'd be a good idea, so do it!
It just feels like it would be incredibly annoying to have a Soldier up there while you're trying to cap, and having it be nearly impossible to kill him because he can just retreat to full cover anytime he likes.
I also only somewhat understand the idea of the shack I suggested making the map too complicated.
From the perspective of the outdoor fence route, it's not a route you have to worry about at all while attacking the point - by design.
So, you can ignore it and the map stays exactly the same as before.
All it really does is make something players were consciously choosing to do before (rotate) faster.
From the perspective of the indoor areas, it definitely does make them more complicated, but the indoor areas are already complicated - presumably by design, to make them harder for the defenders to camp.
And indoor areas will always inherently feel more complicated than outdoor areas, since you can't see one room from the other.
I should've been clearer about how I actually advised keeping the pit exactly the way it is.
Yes, it does see both of the main routes to the point for the enemy team, but what it does NOT see is the pit on the enemy side, so it's not all-powerful.
It's also a great way to take out enemy Sentry encampments from afar (thereby making it harder to maintain a long hold over the point), and its (seemingly) deliberate lack of cover makes it just unfrequently travelled enough to make it the perfect secluded back-alley for each team's Spies, who without it would assuredly have a hard time playing on this map.
In short, it does a LOT more good than it does bad.
I'm not opposed to a map having a negative element if the same element also introduces several positives, because in the end there's no perfect map - instead, perfect design is a map that fulfills the potential of how good it CAN be, even if that doesn't necessarily make it the best TF2 map ever.
But this is getting very esoteric.
I would be very careful about assuming the one-sidedness has gone away.
When judging a map, I like to look at bad rounds rather than good ones, because they're the ones that'll present problems for me to solve.
If I can solve a factor that's creating bad rounds, without creating a new problem that'll make more bad rounds, then I've made my map more fun.
So, I don't test my maps until I get a good round - I test them until I get a bad one.
If I test it an outrageous amount of times and don't get a bad round (specifically, a bad round that suggests a problem with the map), then it's time to artpass.
A good qualifier for when gameplay in a KOTH map is going wrong is the amount of time a team holds the control point for.
Generally, in good KOTH maps, a team will keep hold of the point after capturing it for no less than 30 seconds, and no more than 1 minute.
If this isn't happening, it suggests that some problem in the map design has prevented it from happening.
For instance, in the most recent playtest, in the first round RED held the point for three minutes after the first time they took it - until BLU's plot armour took over and they captured it with 0 RED seconds remaining, then almost immediately had the point recaptured and lost.
From what I could see, it looked like BLU was having a really hard time pushing out of their lobby - which is why I called that the map's "biggest problem" in my last post.
This is not to say that EVERY round will go like this - merely that it's a problem, which exists and will ruin approx. 3 in every 20 rounds, as I make it.
(It also happened, but to a lesser extent, with BLU in the second and third rounds, so maybe 3/20 is an overly generous estimate!)
As regards the captime - I understand the desire to have a long captime, or at least I think I do. Long captimes can lead to intense, fun capture points where you have to make a long series of good decisions to stay alive and capture, and it is indeed usually the best thing to combine with a large capzone that has a lot of cover - which makes it easy to stay alive for a long time, and is also what this map happens to already have (well, minus the "a lot of cover" part).
But I once made a map called koth_slums, and the fountain capture point on that map (the fountain itself was actually designed by @zythe_ ) has players coming in from all angles, and cover in the form of the statue and the railings around it.
So, the point follows the same general gameplay style of a point where there's a lot of cover, but not from all angles, so you constantly have to be weighing up the pros and cons of your position - who you can get shot by, and who you can't - to stay alive and capture.
That control point has a captime of 6, and what I found in playtesting was that it was actually still really intense despite the short captime - because it's a KOTH map, so if you have a central cap point with a lot of cover, there's a good chance that players on both teams are going to be alive on it at any given moment - so the captime isn't even going down until the fight reaches a decisive conclusion.
I actually considered lowering the captime below 6 on several occasions because of this!
So basically, the mantra should be "more cover, MUCH less captime" - which was part of the point of my bonus suggestion being two low walls around the capture point.
It'd be a good idea, so do it!
- Dec 18, 2022
- 30
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- Dec 18, 2022
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- Dec 18, 2022
- 30
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- Dec 18, 2022
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Typeracer updated screwshack with a new update entry:
a6c cleanup
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a6c cleanup
Read the rest of this update entry...
- Dec 18, 2022
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