Rounds, point states, and why nobody likes koth a1’s

[I dinne ken]

A thinkpiece where I splain the design of a gamemode I don’t make.

​

I don’t like koth maps, but I love Viaduct and Lakeside​

And I’ve always wondered why this is. It doesn’t make sense on the surface. If I don’t like koth gameplay or the koth gamemode, why do I like the two quintessential casual koth maps?

Because koth sucks!

• It’s up to 6 minutes of fighting over a single point, if you’re winning all you do is sit there and shoot fish in a barrel, if you’re losing, you’re the fish.
• It takes like 12 seconds each time you die to reach the fighting area again (which you’ll be doing a lot of), and all that time you’re just walking through lobbies with no enemy gamers to shoot.
• To top it all off, statistically 50% of the time you lose.

But isn’t that the goal? If you lose 50% of the time on a payload map, that’s considered a well balanced map. A prestigious and slightly esoteric marker of good level design (which I’m not sure kemilnewthing, my payload map, is meeting haha).

But why does that fact suck so much on koth maps? Well I did some thinking and I think I may have an answer. And it lies in the gamemode structure itself.

Rounds (and gamemodes)​

On any map, a marker that designers generally try to meet is that Red wins roughly 50% of the time and Blue wins roughly 50% of the time. But between different gamemodes, the characteristics of how this is done can look very different.

Payload maps​

On payload maps (I’m looking at Upward because I lack creativity) this is done over a huge amount of play area. You generally have 4 points to meet this average in.

All these different areas play differently. And they all have different point dynamics and different qualities to the routes. Lots of “content” on offer for players to sink their teeth into. The sheer difference between how enclosed last is in comparison to how open first is stark when you think about it.

Koth maps​

But with koth maps. There’s only 1 point per map. Only one arena to make players duke it out on.

Ultimately, Koth maps just have less going on due to there only being one point, and due to their overall size just being smaller. Bit boring innit. 1 area to defend and contest. And next round? Same again.

But is that really the case? I don’t find good koth maps boring, and a lot of people share that view.

Specifically with Viaduct, fighting up this staircase with a heavy medic combo when you’re being spammed can be really intense.

This whole building is swiss cheese, some of my most stupid and funny encounters in this game have happened in it.

This balcony is fucked! Inaccessible for most unless you propjump there and it serves no gameplay purpose except catching people out it seems. Goofy but fun.

And then this cliff is just ridiculously powerful to be honest.

And all these areas aren’t even on the point, yet they’re really fun to fuck around with.

So what’s up? What makes Viaduct so great to me when so many koth maps fall flat? Well Valve is just good at design, but apart from that, I think the fundamental difference between koth a1s and Viaduct is that it is fun to lose on Viaduct. And I’ll explore why in my next point.

States (and how Viaduct does it different)​

Sometimes I like to categorise TF2 points in terms of states of play.

When playing a point on a good payload map, in my opinion there are six “states” per point. Three per team. As blue, you are either attacking the area leading up to the point, contesting the point, or you’re in the aftermath where you’ve won the point and you’re clearing out any remaining defenders. Red has its own states as well that are the counterpart to these.

Koth points have states too. With koth, you are either Contesting the point, or Defending it. Which looks roughly like this:

Contesting​

Contesting the point on Viaduct is characterised by trying to get as close to the point as possible while staying behind the bridge’s pillar for cover.

Defending​

Defending the point on Viaduct is characterised by standing on or just behind the point. Sitting quite vulnerable and open, but with easy access to cover if required.

This is similar to other gamemodes. You contest and defend points just the same on Payload maps.
But the difference between Koth and Payload is that if you have lost the first point, you have another three points to fall back on (and if you’ve won the first point, you’ve got another three to go). With koth this isn’t the case. If you’ve lost the point, you need to win it back.

And as such this means that per Payload map, there are 24 “states” (4 points x 6 states). But per koth map, there are 4 “states”, 2 per team. Overall, a lot less going on.

But is that really the case for Viaduct?

But wait, there’s more!​

For Viaduct, you contest and defend the point of course, but I’ve played many games where my teams look like this:

And in turn, I’ve had many where my team look like this:

And these extra “states”, which I’ll call “Dominating” and “Yielding” respectively, actually give Viaduct 8 states in total (4 states x 2 teams).

Dominating is characterised by pushing beyond the point, but subsequently being more spread out to cover the larger area you now occupy. Allowing for the attacking team to find more holes in your defence.

Yielding is characterised by being pushed to defensive positions that are pretty close to spawn, allowing for quick reinforcement.

These extra states make playing on Viaduct feel very dynamic. There’s many more conditions you can be under when fighting, many more types of gameplay to be in and to transition into.
Critically, these aspects are what I think most koth a1s are missing.

What’s missing from Koth a1s (TF2 is Free2play & Fun2lose)​

I think the biggest reason why TF2 is still going 15 years later, beyond the pretty stellar design, is the fact that TF2 is fun to lose. It’s not fun to be stomped during a match, but I digress. It’s better than most modern shooters I play like Valorant where if I lose I don’t have fun whatsoever.

Viaduct is, ultimately, fun to lose. And that is why it’s a good koth map.
It’s fun to lose when you’re Yielding or just Contesting. It’s fun to lose if you’d been Dominating the entire round then right at the end the other team caps, starts Defending, and then you’re Contesting for a whole 3 minutes. It’s even fun to lose if both teams have been Contesting and then right at the end you start Yielding.

Specifically the degree of dynamicity to what state the map can be in is key, and that’s what’s missing from the design of koth a1s.

koth_evergreen​

To not bully anyone but myself, I’m going to be taking a quick look at my own koth a1 to make this point.

Now the level designer brain I had 7 years ago is a bit less developed than it is now, but if I were to hazard a guess as to the kind of positioning that would be employed in each state it would be:

Contesting​

Defending​

These are serviceable enough positions, not very interesting, but decent enough for a first map.
But as for…

Dominating?​

Yielding?​

There’s not much here. And whereas a point area is always going to be more interesting to fight in than routes leading up to points, this still leaves players with nothing interesting to do in the intervening time.

Ultimately if the losing team is having a more fun and a more interesting time fighting you, you’ll have a more fun and interesting time fighting them.

But what about Lakeside?​

Lakeside, design wise, is like the jazz of good “canonised” koth maps.

Its gameplay is weird, it’s at its most interesting when it’s doing something you think shouldn’t work, and it’s very free from constraints in general. Viaduct in comparison is like early Rock, Beatles vibes.

How its geometry’s uniquely open and “non-dictatorial” nature works, I’ll not try and understand in this piece. But States wise, it’s on the surface very similar to Viaduct.

Contesting​

Defending​

These both exist fine, even a bit boringly, but where it gets interesting is at the Dominating stage.

Dominating​

Whereas on Viaduct you generally know what to do if your team is doing well, (keep pushing forward down the same routes you were doing before), Lakeside mixes it up. What Lakeside does is give you options. It’s a “choose your own gameplay” map in this state.

From these point, it gives you these paths to go down.

And subsequently:

Lots of running around and flanking, fun stuff. Fun to bully the Yielding team.

Yielding​

Yielding, in a lot of ways is a “test” to make sure you’re good enough to be able to Contest the point.
Whereas the “test” for the losing team on Viaduct is to win at more cohesive, team based gameplay. The “test” for lakeside is your ability to DM with small collections of players in interesting and favourable geometry.

As such, instead of it being a definable set of routes/engagements your team will go down/encounter, it’s a large collection of disparate DM sessions. And they might occur…

As a Sniper, with a Scout coming up behind you roughly here.

As a Soldier and Medic pair, fighting through this doorway against a Demo and Pyro.

Or sneaking up to this wall to catch someone out at a more favourable range as Demo or Heavy.


These aren’t as easy to conceptualise as Viaduct’s alternatives, since it’s more based on “drops in the ocean” than seeing a team manage something tangible, so that’s why I left it out til now.

One last thing, Visibility​

After talking to Idolon, they noted something worthwhile that I kind of missed. Visibility.
Losing is still losing, it’s more fun to win otherwise we’d not try to win. What Lakeside and Viaduct do to make heavily losing be still engaging, and in a lot of ways still recoverable from, is the high degree of visibility you have.

When in the Yielding state here, you have a huge amount of visibility over every route that the defenders could take to push into your position.

But in comparison, for the defenders during the Dominating state, the visibility when going down their routes is much much lower.

All you get is to be able to look out of these small “windows” marked in yellow, never allowing full view of a team.

In a sense you can think of this as the defenders having “fog of war”.
This serves to make the defenders have a much harder time pushing even further beyond the positions they’re in. As the attackers have “built in” coordination due to the extra knowledge they posses.

Ultimately, this helps make sure that being in the Yielding state doesn’t suck to be subjected to.

Synopsis and closing out​

50% of the time you’re going to lose your koth match. If you played a singleplayer game and 50% of the time it sucked, you’d consider it a bad or at least highly flawed game.

So don’t settle for your koth map sucking to play on if you’re losing! The way I’ve conceptualised it is that there are 2 extra States on a map. One for when you’re properly winning and one for when you’re properly losing. Don’t forget to make both engaging.

There are two approaches I’ve identified which let you do this, the Viaduct approach and the Lakeside approach. Make sure you give players in the Yielding state a decent way to come back from being in this state, and make sure to make the conditions you’re subject to in this state not suck.

You want your teams to try and win of course. And that will only ever be done on the point itself, but this method should let you have “backup” gameplay.

Ultimately, mapping, especially for TF2, is fucking hard. I’ve been doing it for 7 years and I’m still figuring out stuff every test it feels like.

But I think the reason why TF2 mapping is so hard is not necessarily that the maps we make are all that bad. It’s that the gameplay that is potentially on offer in TF2 is so outstanding and ours just lacks in comparison. So don’t give up or think that what you’ve made isn’t at least decent. It probably is.

If you have any critiques or suggestions please give me a shout. Thanks for reading.

 

[Lacry]

I said it a few times already but, I don't like KOTH, but not because of the gameplay, I think it's fine, but because it's so overused, I know that's a stupid reason to dislike something, but there is too many KOTH maps out there (over 3K in this website). I know it's an easy gamemode for begginers, but arena and ctf are also easy, and they have righ now around 1K combined (which is not even half of what KOTH maps have lol).

Also KOTH doesn't have "sub-gamemodes". CP has a lot of styles; A/D, 5CP, Domination... But KOTH is just KOTH, this gamemode gets tiring after a while.

 

[Sonoma]

I make cloak-types out of spite