Master Debater #4 FLAPAN – Does 1.6 need new maps? (round 2)
Published on ESEA in 2008.
Thorin:
The point I aimed to articulate in my response in round 1 was that out of all the CS maps which have been used in competition for the past 9 years we’ve only managed to get four which are really good for competitive play no matter the teams or eras (inferno, dust2, train and nuke) Mill could have been considered a potential 5th but its exclusivity to the CPL and its shoddy remaking as tuscan have meant that map is lost in the netherworld right now.
The significance of only being able to establish four genuinely good competitive maps speaks volumes of the problems of map making in CS. Firstly the vast majority of maps which have been made throughout the last 9 years are just not suitable and even if they seem decent for a few months can’t stand the test of time and repeated play, huge problems with bombsite balance and choke placements are soon discovered and teams discover very simple areas which can be exploited ad infinitum. This is the key thing to understand about this debate: we don’t live in a perfect magical world where new maps will be made by map making geniuses and perfectly tailored to competitive play and tweaked by the world’s finest. Instead we live in a world where 99.99999% of maps we can choose from will have been designed by people who know next to nothing about competitive play and have designed them for public play (typically anywhere from 12v12 to 16v16 to higher)
These new maps will be BAD MAPS and as a result all we’ll do is compromise the quality of the already very elite tournaments around the world by wasting time and effort on maps which can’t hold a candle to the big four. Even other esports games with a higher degree of experimental nature to the players have struggled with this problem for years. In Quakeworld they have the big three maps which are still used to this day for competitive play, 12 years after its release, and cannot be matched by any of the more modern attempts at map making. In Quake 3 the same core maps have been established over multi-year periods. The only way new maps have been introduced is when old ill-fitting maps have been tweaked or new ones have been designed by people VERY in touch with the hardcore gaming community. Those people don’t exist within CS, you have people who know about the game but not enough about map making subtleties and people who know about map making subtleties but not enough about the game.
flapan
After a rough introduction in round 1 I will now clearly lay out the lines as to what I want to see. The so call “Big Four” are all fine and dandy and will continue to serve us threw the next decade. I will call the other maps the “others” haha, anyways, the “others” have their strong points and not so strong points but what went wrong was the mapmakers remade a map that was already made?! Insane right? To me that is like, I just changed my oil in my car then drove down the block to JiffyLube to let them change it again their way.
Maps have a few key factors which Thorin already outlined and I will repeat again; bombsite balance, choke points and exploits in the maps. Now even still some of the major maps lack in one or more of these categories, yet we continue to suffer in silence. With these being the guidelines to making maps I truly believe that in a community with some many ideas coming from various different viewpoints that in the end it would be pretty simple to construct a map that will live up to expectations and will prosper in competitive gameplay. Another note is that CS is still thriving and I have come to the conclusion that from this point out it can only get bigger and better. With the CS maps lacking a long overdue re-haul, and that the maps we play now were truly only made for public users in a pub server, it hurts my soul just a little bit. Within our CS community niche I am sure there is some hidden talent who will be able to rise to the calling and bring us some new GOOD maps.
GOOD new maps! Ahhh, what a refreshing day it will be when I can rejoice in a server on the newly founded de_NEWGOODMAPS. I really don’t know to much about quake but I do believe that is it not the same format as cs, 5v5. With new maps comes new ideas such as a medium to small sized map with only 1 bombsite yet it would have numerous entry points (just an example). The other main issue that you pointed out is people were taking old maps and trying to remake them and or tweak them, that logic is flawed and was a waste of time to the people who tried to fix the already fine map. With STEAM owning counter-strike and being a pretty large company I believe that with the newly formed steam group
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/ESEA we could voice our voice pretty loud and maybe work together with the CS killer steam and actually form some pretty new badass maps.