We had a lot of fun on this map tonight while playing it 8-8. It's already one of my favorite payload maps, mainly due to the vertical fighting. Unfortunately there are some issues that you should address. Since we only played it a short while most aren't about gameplay.
1. You need to mark areas where people can and can't walk off of. Cliffs that you'll die when walking over should have little death signs every so often. One of the spawns, I believe on the second stage, exits to one side and overlooks the roof of a building on the previous stage. It's a drop of about 15 feet, but people die when jumping off. It resulted in 2 people dying right away. Things like that need to be made much more clear.
2. You need respawn times for the defenders. On the first stage I killed off 5 people on the entire team and 2 dispensers. While our team was fighting to kill the remaining 3 enemies the entire enemy team respawned and we weren't able to move the cart more than 30 feet. They said they were respawning in 2-3 seconds. I'd really suggest respawn times of 10-15 seconds for defenders on a map of this scale.
3. There are massive FPS drops at the first turn in stage 1, since you can see the entire map above you. It looks pretty, but I'd really recommend blocking a big chunk of the view with a building. Maybe even a building people can use so they can look out windows on the opposite side and see the view. I personally dropped from 110fps to 25fps at one point in that part.
4. There are a few too many nooks for sentries. I play a lot of engineer and was drooling over them. Adding some props into smaller corners and completely blocking a few of the larger corners should help quite a bit. I'd suggest just doing the smaller ones first and seeing if it makes a big difference.
5. The explosion at the end is a bit anticlimactic, especially since the cart just kind of falls 10 feet and explodes. You have a huge drop there if you extend the track 10 feet out... it'd be impressive if the cart rolled off that and made a big explosion.
6. Your spawns need some detail work, but obviously it's still in progress so that can come later. I don't like the narrow wall blocking the door in the first spawn. I'd recommend opening it up a bit and blocking on the outside to prevent sniping if necessary. It's just too cramped right now.
7. The ice wall was awesome, but confusing. We thought you could shoot through it to gain access. I like that it opens after the checkpoint, so maybe there's some way of clarifying this? A diagram in the BLU spawn would be excellent. Or maybe just leave it and people will figure it out after the first time playing?
8. You need some more signs showing people which way to go. A good example is that nobody noticed the alternate route over the water section (which everyone loved, btw). Maybe add a main arrow pointing left for BLU and a smaller one with "Alternate" pointing to the right when they get to that part? Little things like that will help a bit.
9. There was WAY too much health and metal on the map. I'd recommend switching 1/3 of the health and metal to mediums and 1/3 to smalls, or just removing some of them altogether. I decided to not make a dispenser for my sentry because there were two mega metals within 2 seconds of each other. The BLU team has the cart and the RED team should rely on engineer's dispensers for a bit of their metal. Same for medics and health. For comparison look at the metal/health on Badwater.
For gameplay it seemed like there were a few areas that didn't get used much, but I think more playtesting and heatmaps will help clarify that. I'll definitely keep my eyes open for more things since this map will be a permanent fixture on our server.
Once again, we absolutely loved the map and I think people will be very impressed by it. I'm betting you'll get a lot of feedback from floormaster on this one too.
