Echoe

MVM Echoe A4

Berry

resident homo
aa
Dec 27, 2012
1,056
1,898
A2
- Fixed spot where giants can get stuck
- Fixed floating rocks
- Some places have been nobuilded
- Removed weird shack
- Hopefully fixed players getting stuck by the tank

Pop:
- Added 2 new waves
- Made wave 3 easier (less caber demos, less support)
- Made wave 1 harder (more bots altogether, bisonmen support)
- More money throughout

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Berry

resident homo
aa
Dec 27, 2012
1,056
1,898
A3
- Changed up front area to be better for engineers and snipers
- Temporarily removed the far underground route to test the layout without that area
- Adjusted pickups

Popfile:
- Rapid caber demos on wave 3 no longer crit
- Miniman on wave 5 now has 45,000 health instead of 70,000

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Berry

resident homo
aa
Dec 27, 2012
1,056
1,898
A4
- Pretty things
- Added a shortcut vent from the shed beside spawn to the tank tunnel entrance
- Adjusted indoor area with shipping containers now that the underground route is removed to be better for defenders
- Fixed tank being weird

Popfile:
- Wave 2: Some Giant Escape Plan Soldiers changed to Giant Loose Cannon Demomen to make the wave more interesting.
- Wave 2: Removed final two Giant Escape Plan Soldiers as the wave was too stretched.
- Wave 3: Added crit scouts to make the wave less boring
- Wave 3: Removed second tankipede as it stretched the wave out too much
- Wave 4: Neon Annihilator Pyros move slower and do less damage
- Wave 4: Bonk scouts spawn slightly faster

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Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
I've played this map twice now, in a3 and a4 and I have quite a few comments.

Firstly, your waves have a bit of a pacing problem. The wave with the bonk scouts lasts way too long as the bonk scouts just come out at the end and you just have to wait for them to spawn to kill them as they come in. I feel you also need a bit more content in it before the final wave, multiple people went "Wait, final wave already?" when we got there, but that may be because of the previous scout pacing problem.

Your money is currently weird as well, second wave gives like 1500 and then the wave after that only gives 600? And the final wave drops nearly 2000 credits from the bots just as they're coming in, which is fine because buying canteens as it's going on is interesting, but it's just a bit ridiculous for no reason.

As for my other comments on the waves, the neon support pyros being a squad makes them move really weirdly, I feel they'd behave better if they were separate. We also felt you should rename them to jerkoff pyros because their constant quick attacking makes it look that way.

The new loose cannon demomen are a bit much, imo. There needs to be a break in their firing or only come out one at a time because the sheer spam is just ridiculous, at least as an engie or pyro who can't really do anything about it. Not to mention they do it as soon as they spawn so you spend about 20 seconds just trying not to die to their cannonballs before you can retaliate.

I feel much the same way about the final wave with the spamming scouts. Spam isn't really that fun and your waves are just full of it to artificially inflate difficulty. Maybe the final wave would be okay if you weren't being flung half way across the map (I hit the skybox many times) from the knockback soldiers that come with it - tone those down or replace them with something else because it makes trying to deal with the spam impossible. The final boss is an interesting idea but hardly threatening, especially with the 2000 credits you're equipped with when it spawns.

As for the layout, well I heard the building was a WIP but you need to do something about it. It's too convoluted as it is currently, and that's not helped by the upper route the bots get to spawn directly into it. If you look at most MVM maps they're actually fairly linear, and this is for a good reason, people don't like bots appearing from behind them without expectation and not knowing where to go to deal with them. The building has no clear defense spots for where you can fall back to because the bots come from and seemingly go everywhere. (By the way I should mention here your arrows are bugged, they show multiple routes at once so you have no real idea where the bomb carrier is going)

The fact that this building leads into the hatch area from so many different angles that flanking bots can take just makes the problem worse. I would heavily suggest looking into the second half of the map and streamlining it a bit with some better spots that players can fall back to and defend. Another thing that I've noticed in a lot of maps, including my own, is that there's no good place for a teleporter either.

I enjoy the theme, and your waves have some fun ideas, this map could be really good. But at the moment it's honestly more frustrating to play than anything else.
 

Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
Okay I'm going to show you something.

This is what it's like to play your map with ping.


This is not fun. At all. None of this wave is fun. Knockback spammers are the literal worst and everyone else was complaining too, and they didn't even have it this bad.

Also, as you can see, giants easily get stuck in that vent too.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
To add to that knockback problem. There are 2 ways these can be applied and there are some values worthy to note.

For soldiers since they often use the airblast method, its worth to note that these are considered most anoying as they can give a random blast direction based on how they hit you. They are heavily disorienting and on that should be scarcely used and never during an entire wave. 1 soldier with a medic delivers plenty of knockback to disorient the defense. There is a reason why valve gives these a slow fire rate aswel and reduces the damage and spreads the shots. Its to increase the chance to hit, but this also adds a disorienting randomness to the direction you fly. These soldiers are very often a problem and more often anoying than fun to face. (also, im not sure if the value isnt scalable on this. it might be based on the damage but i havent tested this)

For FaN scouts which valve used in mannhattan it might not be noticed there since many teams use a medic, but those scouts already have a significant knockback value while its only a multiplier of 2. I used 1.5 in giza and that was about the maximum i could give them. These already can push players away at a big enough distance that it causes frustrations to a pyro when overused. I would often recommend using these instead of the soldiers as their knockback is easier to predict and is easier to scale. In higher numbers a scale of 1.2 can do fine while in very low numbers you can keep the value of 2. And as they always launch you in the direction they shot you, it normaly would make you easier able to follow what happened and compensate for it.

And sometimes, not having knockback can be fine aswel.

If you arent facing enough knockback increasing the numbers might not be the solution, if you have a medic in the team its most of the time the cause of not facing the knockback due to his shield. The solution here would be to hinder the medic in ways that he cant just simply face his shield in 1 direction. Having some spies can do enough on that as a medic no longer can blindly face forward. And there can be more ways to achieve this! Always using spies might be effective, but again can feel dull when it happens for the 3rd time in the mission.

I have only seen 25 seconds of that video and already knew the problem was spamming knockback.
 

Berry

resident homo
aa
Dec 27, 2012
1,056
1,898
Okay I'm going to show you something.

This is what it's like to play your map with ping.


This is not fun. At all. None of this wave is fun. Knockback spammers are the literal worst and everyone else was complaining too, and they didn't even have it this bad.

Also, as you can see, giants easily get stuck in that vent too.

I wanna say I've had a new version in the works for a few weeks and that one is broken so testing it isn't really worth it (robots shouldn't try to take the vent route, there's a visualizer there so they got stuck on it). I do appreciate the insight though, and I actually initially thought you meant the loose cannon wave (which is problematic still too). I was never fully satisfied with that wave so I'll likely remake it (maybe all of them now that I know a bit more about making waves than I did going into it).