I have noticed that this map has had a big disconnect between the changes being made and the feedback in the system, what has been said in the demos and how the map generally plays. I decided to do one better than leave a phrase in the changelog in the system and make a big post explaining what I think are major fundamental flaws that this map has, because people are only going to start reacting more and more negatively when they have to repeatedly play a map that core issues are never truly addressed. It has genuinely felt like that the skybox has seen more changes than the rest of the map if you look past textures and detailing being added.
Let's start with the major areas of this map, all of them are essentially large boxes that have been filled with props and occasional buildings to break the sightlines, which result in large, flat and boring gameplay spaces that only really offer anything handful of nine classes in this game. Most of the height is very high and very absolute, there is little variation. If you look at the official layouts, they very rarely are fit into a specific shape and you can see that everything was built piece by piece, not filling a predetermined area. All the wide open flat space makes it hard to hold areas and the routing feel very spread out. Speaking of routing being spread out, there are a lot of hallways and long series of rooms on this map that don't really serve any purpose other than spreads the players out far and wide.
Look at all these routes that more or less lead you to same area, all starting out in such spread out manner. More routes does not equal better gameplay, generally if you want there to be a lot of routes, there needs to be a bottleneck somewhere. Choke from which most if not all options start from so that attacking team is grouped up, offensive engineers have an area to set up in and acts as a barrier to prevent the defensive team from wandering too far out from the area they are supposed to hold once they lose control of the said area. This map doesn't really have any of that, which results in a chaotic and confusing flow where trying to hold an area feels next to impossible because people just get scattered everywhere.
In some cases the routes are their own entire area, far away from the "main" routes, making them either useless and liability because teams once again get spread out too much. Case and point, this entire area after A:
Looking past these major issues, this map has a habit of giving blue very powerful high ground and areas for almost totally free with only play for red being putting all their eggs in one basket and holding that specific area. Case and point, these two areas below.
These areas give players in them almost complete overview of the points, the holding positions and the defensive entrances to the point, both of these areas also have multiple routes to them for the attacking team and no real route for defenders that don't require you to wander into blue areas to access. This totally negates the gameplay around the points and makes it all about controlling these specific areas, something this powerful should be earned through a fight. There is no reason, for example, the balcony on A point couldn't be like this.
This would let the defenders easily rotate between the two heights without having to leave the point they are supposed to defend and make the gameplay feel much more natural.
I know this post pretty much implies that you need to massively rework large chunks, even entire segments of the map, but I don't think this map is salvageable in it's current state without some massive reworks to it's most base components. If it is any consolation, the first half of the map has some potential to work without having to totally rebuild every single thing but I would personally just redo the second half and take the previous iteration as a learning experience for the future. A lot of B right now is built on a house of cards, a wide variety of patchwork fixes to sightlines, scaling etc., that is going to eventually come tumbling down when the push comes to shove.
- Jonny Boy
