Inverse Popularity

[NoirSuede]

As you guys can see, all shity maps (2fort, dustbowl, goldrush, hoodoo) somehow manage to be really popular (there's a 24/7 server for those maps), while the best official maps ever (Gullywash, Yukon) rarely gets played except on pugs. So what do you guys think about this trend ?

 

[GPuzzle]

Brazilian pubs do ignore all the possible rules out there. Really. They just say "Oh, look, new map, let's play it!". And Gullywash gets played, Yukon gets played, Coldfront gets played...
So I can give no opinion. Most people are used to the maps, so they know how to play in those maps. It's hard to find a shape-shifting guy, someone who can play well on all maps and adapt to a new one fairly quickly. These maps are fairly "old", so people get used to it. It's more of "I got used to this map, I do not want to leave this one". It's kind of a "home map", you know? For example, mine is Coldfront, Jerma985's Nucleus (seriously, check out this video where he asks us why does Nucleus works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH0IufJbIhA ) and my friend's Doublecross. It's a map where you feel comfortable and know you'll feel good and have fun, even if you lose.
Those are my opinions to awnser your questions.

 

[thaumiel]

tf2 is primarily a casual game, and the "worst" maps cater to casual players, who can easily do well by going heavy or engineer and sitting on point B for twenty minutes (like dustbowl), or have fun by DMing or using silly loadouts/playstyles without paying attention to the objective (like hightower). On the "better" maps it's much harder for people to get lots of points very quickly and/or derp around as caberknight or whatever, and in general play is much more reliant on actual strategy and teamwork, making them favoured by people who actually play tf2 competitively (not to say people involved in "competitive tf2") who are comparatively rarer seeing as it's a cartoon game based around silly hats.

edit: also many of the "worst" maps were among the first maps in the game, so there's the nostalgia factor

 

[Sergis]

Badwater is the best official map ever.

 

[Deodorant]

Claiming that pubs like bad maps and dislike good maps is an oversimplification. Maps have a vast variety of traits that appeal to different types of players.

Maps like Dustbowl, Turbine and Badwater are simple and straightforward. You can quickly figure out how they work, and once you've done that you can easily get a lot of kills with very little effort. Less-than-good players who are self-conscious about their performance enjoy this kind of map. People looking for more tactical and varied gameplay don't.

Maps like [REDACTED] are just broken. They have flaws that impact the fun factor of gameplay negatively without providing any benefit to any type of player. There may be some awesome things about them as well that get them played by people now and then, but on the whole no type of player will enjpy playing them regularly.

Maps like Hightower and.. Uh, Hightower, are broken and exploitable but in a creative way. They're great for half an hour of fucking around after a though day, but terrible for coordinated and intelligent play.

Maps like Gullywash and Yukon are carefully crafted and fine tuned to provide balanced, flawless play. This is definitely a good thing and the creator of such a map deserves respect for it, but the nuance is lost on more casual players and the lack of extravagant design choices can cause the maps to come across as a bit sterile.

This is basically just an incoherent ramble and I'm sure someone with a better grasp of mapping than I would do a lot better at identifying and systematizing the various traits at play. I guess my point is that lazy/unskilled and diligent/skillful mapping can manifest in a whole lot of ways that are enjoyable or unenjoyable to different types of players.

 

[Shovel-Head]

Maps like Dustbowl, Turbine and Badwater are simple and straightforward. You can quickly figure out how they work, and once you've done that you can easily get a lot of kills with very little effort. Less-than-good players who are self-conscious about their performance enjoy this kind of map. People looking for more tactical and varied gameplay don't.

This is true. But I've always considered TF2 to be a "simple and straightforward" kind of game, so that works out.

Maps like Hightower and.. Uh, Hightower, are broken and exploitable but in a creative way. They're great for half an hour of fucking around after a though day, but terrible for coordinated and intelligent play.

The only possible way to have fun on Hightower is to not play seriously. (or play gunslinger engie and ruin everybody else's fun)

Anyway, I don't know how there's 24/7 2Fort servers, but Goldrush and Hoodoo can be great fun. And Dustbowl gets good around halfway through the map.

 

[GPuzzle]

The only possible way to have fun on Hightower is to not play seriously. (or play gunslinger engie and ruin everybody else's fun)

I think Hightower point is to take an unplayed kind of map due to it being way too long (plr), and shortening it. VALVe takes a lot of inspiration from Nightfall Stage 3, where there's an U-turn for both carts and a ton of height difference, but it still works. That's something wierd with PLR that doesn't show up with PL. And Nightfall is really fun. Hightower is kind of an inverted Nightfall Stage 3 in my opinion.

Also: 600 posts!

 

[PoignardAzur]

NoirSuede : maybe because the notion of "good", "best", and "shitty" is subjective, and it's not because you don't like a map that anyone who likes it is retarded ?

Personnally, I like hightower because of its two big slopes you have to climb for each payload, wich seem to yell "You don't have to worry nor to hurry up ! No one is gonna move forward, so you can take you time and spawncamp snipers !". And the fact that there's no timer.

I like dustbowl and badwater, because, while not very equilibrated, they provide tons of strategic possibilities for any kind of player (except the sniper), but I don't like Yukon, mainly because it's ugly.

 

[Deodorant]

NoirSuede : maybe because the notion of "good", "best", and "shitty" is subjective, and it's not because you don't like a map that anyone who likes it is retarded ?

Personnally, I like hightower because of its two big slopes you have to climb for each payload, wich seem to yell "You don't have to worry nor to hurry up ! No one is gonna move forward, so you can take you time and spawncamp snipers !". And the fact that there's no timer.

I like dustbowl and badwater, because, while not very equilibrated, they provide tons of strategic possibilities for any kind of player (except the sniper), but I don't like Yukon, mainly because it's ugly.

Yes and no. Enjoyability is subjective, but there are nevertheless maps that are objectively better or worse made.

I personally love Hightower and find Yukon boring as shit, but I'm pretty certain more effort, more knowledge of design theory and more technical skill went into making the latter.

Also, Yukon is ugly and Hightower isn't? Seriously? Yukon has a wonderful melancholy, low-key early spring feel to it. Hightower just has absurdly exaggerated proportions and uncomfortable color clashes.

 

[Tarry H Sruman]

...all shity maps (2fort, dustbowl, goldrush, hoodoo)

 

[Fish 2.0]

Dustbowl and Goldrush are fine maps and I don't know what this guy is on about.

 

[RaVaGe]

Dude goldrush is like the best map ever, remember the time when the only new weapon was the medic one, the gameplay was really fun, and everything played so well, it's not the map fault, it's the weapons wich break everything. Same thing for dustbowl.