Looks like I eventually managed to warm back up to speedmapping, after the dreadful
rd_tiftid_mc15_a1 incident. Only took me two years!
Total Stamps / Possible Stamps:
16/25
Favourite prompt this season:
Two Wishes was an instant favourite for me.
The ability to choose between two different limitations is an interesting idea, and the ability to write the prompt for someone else to use opens the door to a lot of creativity, as well as the potential for a newer mapper to make something potentially better than what they've made in the past thanks to the guidance of an expert mapper's prompt.
However, both the choice of which limitation you'll use and the ability to write a prompt for someone leads to a lot of potential exploitation and misinterpretation.
Least favourite prompt this season:
Timer Attack.
I like microcontests for an obscure gamemode as a thought experiment of "what would maps for this gamemode look like?"
Timer Attack was not like this. Each contestant essentially had to build their own gamemode, which was a significant challenge and didn't really lead to any kind of consensus or new interest in gamemodes utilising tf_logic_cp_timer, since each gamemode being put forward really only had one layout as an example, and if that layout was bad, good luck getting anyone to think it's a good gamemode in future.
Favourite map I made this season:
Easily
ctf_tiftid_mc21.
I built a CTF map with the goal of fitting the microcontest requirement by having each intel room able to see the other, but by not letting players actually cross that space. For this, I used a death pit, with fans above it that would blow you down into the abyss - to prevent Soldiers from rocket-jumping to the enemy flag and then straight back again.
This would discourage engineers from brainlessly spamming sentries in the intel room and instead force them to pick one of the two ramps
up to said room to hold.
This, combined with the map's overall circular shape, meant that gameplay followed a typical loop of:
- Each individual player picks one side of the map to move along, creating a "strong" and "weak" squad of each team
- Your strong squad meets the enemy weak squad, demolishes them and moves into their base
- But at the same time, the enemy strong squad meets your weak squad, demolishes them and moves into your base
- You grab the enemy flag, their weak squad instantly respawns and exits their spawn room to try to stop you moving the flag out of their base
- The enemy team grabs your flag, your weak squad instantly respawns and exits your spawn room to try to stop you moving the flag out of your base
- If either team wins the fight at the enemy base and transports the flag out of it, it's implied that they'll go on to capture
To accommodate this, the spawn was built to have three doors that exit into very different areas, so that exiting your spawn to fight an enemy team who was already in your base was actually viable and you wouldn't actually get sticky-camped.
Additionally, the flag applies a slowdown effect for 5 seconds to the player who picked it up, so you were forced to stay with the rest of your team and fight the respawning enemy players instead of immediately running the flag back to your base while your teammates stop the enemy team from even reaching you.
To ensure that the enemy team doesn't get an insta-respawn every single time their flag is picked up, I made it so that the flag's OnPickup output would trigger an instant respawn relay. That relay would then disable itself so it couldn't trigger again, and the only way to enable it was to have the flag return to the enemy base. So, it would only insta-respawn when it was picked up
from the enemy intel room.
On top of all this, it had a lot of reasonably fun fighting spaces.
I built this map in just 6 hours, so I was like "fuck it I'll build another one", and tacked it onto the map as a second stage to encourage variety.
This was my biggest mistake - the second stage wasn't very fun.
This variant of CTF is very different from all of the other "CTF fixes" people have tried, and I'm very proud of it.
So, even though I think
cp_tiftid_mc24 is a very fun A/D map, ctf_tiftid_mc21 takes the cake over it for me, because it's just so much more
designed than that map is.
Distinctive map(s) made by others:
cowcitadel2008 (from MC21) for being very 2008-y.
There was some A/D map which everyone bashed for being hyper overscaled (especially around the final point), but in my opinon it was actually functional and very fun. I'll edit the post if through some miracle I find it.
Thoughts on the format:
The length of the season is low-hanging fruit to complain about, but still something that's gonna ruffle people's feathers.
In future seasons, I think you should enlist people to help with the finer details of running these, and break up the playtests more often (as well as running some normal playtests in between so that microcontests don't totally hog the playtest queue), so you at least get to
sleep which would probably make it more enticing to host these.
