I took a look at the TF2 steam stats page just now, and looks like all the recent community maps have been added, along with stats: http://www.steampowered.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php The one thing that jumps out at me is how almost all attack/defend maps favor defense (Red), Gravelpit being the notable exception Question: do you agree that an even 50/50 win percentage is the ideal balance to shoot for? What are the difficulties in attaining that, and best approaches to do so? (I <3 mapping theory discussion)
i think its feels nicer to beat red team during a hard struggle for the control points. I think you feel more accomplished that way. I perfer it not to be easy or 50/50
How the toss did hoodoo end up all the way like that?? All the stats I've seen for hoodoo put it at 50/50 almost exactly! Evidence! = http://stats.tf2maps.net/map.php?id=95
Looks like the stats have finally been fixed, now they make sense. Unfortunately, it seems the complaints about the balance on hoodoo were justified... :/ Too bad we don't get the death map for it.
how? http://psychostats.canardpc.com/map.php?id=33 (pre-update) http://psychostats.canardpc.com/map.php?id=47 (post update with ~0 change) :blink:
Yea, that puzzles me too. I always got the impression Hoodoo was at the least more balanced than Goldrush Possibly we're seeing the effect of the dreaded 32-player IR server
It's easy enough to defend a point staticly, it takes time for offensive strategies for maps to develop. Give hoodoo enough time and those ratio's will pobably even out somewhat along the lines of goldrush. Just give players enough time to get used to the map.
That, and lack of player knowledge of the map. A/D maps require more coordination by the attacking team.
...or it may simply be terribad teams with an insufficient number of medics, with many people oging sniper or spy to rack kills and achievements and try out the new unlocks, which really doesn't help pushing the cart much. Personnally, I really can't tell, hoodoo seems never to pop on the servers I usually play on.
Total time played (server hours) ctf_2fort 8500 hours cp_dustbowl 5500 hours pl_goldrush 5000 hours cp_badlands 2000 hours a little piece of me died but then I saw cp_junction 300 hours and I was OK again. On topic: Wholly fuck, pl is stacked. My reasoning is that with more players (32) the sheer amount of spam on the tiny cart makes it impossible to push. No wonder valve but a health pack there. @youme: :| oh, and cp_badlands has the most even spilt! FTW! edit: fuck you arena_well.
Play on instant respawn servers?? Hoodoo was designed to be balanced on 24 man unmodded servers. The links Mouse provided show this very clearly, canard PC run an unmodded server and have over 24 hours playing the pre-update final, and they have NO problem getting past the middle stage. That also explains goldrush's stacked win/loss ratio, although it's been affected to a lesser extent.
Im not sure, on both IR and normal spawn times it seems to be a tricky section of the map- I have only ever been in the final stage less then 5 times ahah.:unsure: However it might just be ebcause the map is new to the public and so they don't know how to take advantage of all the side routes yet.
The lesson here: Steam stats are not an accurate representation of map balance, because of modded servers I suspect pl maps get skewed even more because they're more popular on 32pop IR. You don't see those servers running gpit or Badlands
Weird enough the map plays better with it after the update. thanks to the spy and sniper spam the defence at least remains a bit decent. Lately i saw alot of stage 3 playing simply because of that. Normaly the map doesnt work at all in instant respawn with the exception of stage 3 (due to the red spawn being designed very well there) The reason of that is because goldrush doesnt have 1 realy big bottleneck route. your map has a very long corridor which is just wide enough for the cart and a few players next to it. this suffers alot from the spam and the side route cant counter that, 2 sentries and it wont work anymore. In goldrush that wide corridor is replaced with a shorter one splitted in 2 routes. This makes it easier to reach the cart. If i noticed a lockdown on hoodoo its allways at that place. Btw, as IR is very popular i think its important to balance the map a little bit for those settings also (usualy a longer walk for the red team does the job). they dont have to be ideal but at least it makes the maps better for those settings also as they are played alot. Play on UKCS:TF2#2. even though its only a 24 player IR it does play maps like badlands, granary and some other normal ones. They also have some 32 player normal respawn servers where the balance often seems fine. And pl_badwater works better on IR btw, even though blue doesnt win alot there is a clear linear skill curve per CP where it even can be fun with unbalanced teams. But thats about the only payload map that improved. even though repository does well also. 32 player IR is actualy bad and asking for deadlocks. And even though they are skewed by 32 IR servers it remains important. those servers clearly show an impact meaning there are alot of them. a map should be aimed for as many servers as possible meaning 32 IR is important also. This is why junction and egypt also quickly failed, no balance on those servers at all and so disliked.
