Aerowalk (hub3aeroq3)
Blood Run (ztntourney1)
Dismemberment (hub3tourney1)
Furious Heights (qztourney7)
Hektik <- this is a new map
Lost World (dm13)
Vertical Vengeance (tourney4)
So what! You gonna spoon feed everybody what you deem to "right" for them, no! you don't have to id have been doing it for years. Although there spoon seems somewhat broken in recent years...
not sure lol, but i still gotta go trought the portuguese qualifiers and that involves beating the guy who taught me ( eden ) :(
portuguese qualifiers end august 9th i believe
Just stating my OWN PERSONAL opinion here.
I think battleforged is underrated. It's a new map so it was not played much till now and all those 'battlefored sucks!!' comments prevent players in building an ojective and verified argument on it.
Killsen at least showed how the map can be played fast-paced in the last zotac cup and that the potential of the map has by far not been reached yet.
Finally we will and up on playing/seeing the same few maps that have been around the last 10 years. Any map additions will be rejected by the whole community - the same community that cries for new maps constantly.
First of all, I don't like the idea of 7 maps in the pool:
- "more maps" equals more playtime the players have to put into the game. It gives advantage to players who are able to dedicate their whole life to quake, because they have no other obligation. This means, we will see more similar tournament results (same top 5 everytime etc).
- many players that have other obligations won't train 7 maps (because they can remove 2 now - their weakest map and the strongest map of the oppenent). That means that we will never see some players on their weakest map, as long as we don't have bo7 matches.
With a pool of 5 maps, in a bo3 match, each player has to choose if he wants to remove his weakest map OR the strongest map of his opponent. In a bo5 he might have to play all maps -> it is much more likely that we will see each player on each map (example: cooller on battleforged)
- with 7 maps in the pool it is more difficult to change the map pool every season, because if you change only 2 maps in a pool of 7 maps it doesn't have as much as an effect as changing 2 maps in a pool of 5 maps due to the reason I stated above
I have the impression that battleforged was removed, because we have seen few, rather boring matches on it, and people at ESL weren't pleased with what they saw.
Now, battleforged is a new map with the more potential than the other new maps - players will find new ways to play it and I am certain that the map itself will be further improved in future updates.
While dismemberment is neither a new map (was played for several seasons in clanbase) nor it is very good (thats why it didn't make its way to major tournaments). It also is a map that can be played very defensive like battleforged - so f players want to play it defensive, it will give us boring matches, just like battleforged.
Hektik is a new map and I didn't play it much yet, but I my impression so far is that it is an ok map. On the other hand, it has been tested less that battleforged, so we might get some bad surprises.
T4 imo is not great map in ql, because of the overpowered shotgun, but still ok enough to have it in a map pool for one season.
So, what should ESL do in my oppinion?
- there should only be 5 maps in the pool
- for this season the map pool should be: ztn, hub, dm13, t7, battleforged
- organize a couple of the "map testing cups" where new maps like hektik are being tested
- for next season change at least 2 of the 5 maps. Now you can use new maps that have at least been tested to some extent.
I watched abso's hektik demo vs some other german eps player and well it was rather one sided. Hektik doesn't allow any mistakes, because if you spawn at ya vs stacked players like cypher, strenx and k1llsen you are screwed :P
sc2 uses bo7 afaik and it works fine, saying that players have to put in effort isn't very valid and they play alot before tournaments so it's not much of an issue, dismemberment has been changed since the old one and t4 and hektik should be good to watch, i think this change isn't that bad personally..
good choice imo, honestly cant see battleforged turning into the most awesome duel map ever, its just not gonna happen with its weird scale, raily, derp layout oO
did not like battleforged since day 1. hektik deserves a chance to be play tested, if nothing works out, I will be okay with t9 being back, maybe some more tweaks with spawns/ placements.
I think that House of Decay (qztourney9) would be a much better choice rather than Vertical Vengeance (qztourney4) as it is much newer than T4 and will be more interesting to see the newest maps possible, also I think that T4 is way too rail heavy.
7 maps :-/ (this is not starcraft, ffs, 5 maps is way enough)
t4 :-/ (yeah, let's keep t4 but remove dm6...)
dm13 :-/ (yeah, another 10 years on this map, nice)
aero clone :-/ (so that czm can be #1 with 1 month of practice)
people are fucking ugly & retarded, can't believe it
blood run
aerowalk
furious heights
battleforged
???
if you don't agree with me i smash your face with my crt
No amount of awesomeness in the map pool will overcome the idiotic spawn- and ammo system.
Beside that the map pool looks good imo, good mix.
Don't forget that, with all new maps, we would never see a dm13 like Cooller played it at qcon against cypher which needs years and years of experience. So a good mix of new and old is the way to go imo.
for the reason mentioned by leopold^ i think the best solution would be to allways keep 2 classic and undisputedly good maps like ztn, dm13, t4, hub (change them each season) and then cycle through 3 new maps, sometimes including dm6 and t9 (when some of the new maps turn out to be trash)
what im trying to say is that we have to have a solid base for competition and ztn, dm13, hub and t4 are great as sucha base cos they re proven to be perfectly balanced maps
we can argue whether they re boring or not but they re still the best
i wish i had more time for practicing cos i want to shaft rape u bad :3
i'm not dueling cuz t9 is average, dm13 is boring and overplayed. duel mappool isn't stable and solid enough. And netcode could be better (i want cpma netcode).
i don't care about dm13 being a tactical map. there's a lot of tactical maps, and less boring ones.
The map pool should be both spectator friendly and fair for the players. Hub is probably the best map to advertise quake live to a wider public, because it is fast paced and action-packed. So the best conclusion would be to add maps like hub but I think this would be the wrong approach. A good mix between "brain" and "aim/fast paced" maps would be the best, because
the best thing about quake is that you can have a complete different style than anybody else and still be the best. A hublike map pool would destroy the variety imo and we probably wouldn't have the variety we have now. I mean I don't like dm13 but seriously I love it when cooller and rapha do their chess game on dm13 and ztn.
Imo there are three maps which are one the one hand flawless and on the other hand complete different from each other.
- ztn
- aerowalk
- t7
Each map needs a complete different approach to succeed. I wouldn't change those maps at all. You just can't change them. I mean it would be like 1.6 without inferno -_________-
In addition I don't like t4 it is to rail heavy and if you face someone like k1llsen you probably won't have any chance if he hits like 70%. Yeah sure you can stay in the middle area but imo you are to limited on it. I don't know why they would prefer it over t9. I'm aware that t9 can the boring as fuck but plenty of pros like it and I prefer watching any cypher game on t9 than any other t4 game. I mean if your lg sucks you still can win with a strong rocket. Rl, plasma, lg, sg and even grenades give the map a certain flow. I missed at the last events :(. Even the way you can play the map is great. Lg heavy and control the mid or a cypher style with plenty of spam and so on. Sry, but t4 doesn't deliver like that. Maybe they should fix some spawns on t9 but in the end it is still superior than most other maps. So rather have a smaller map pool with great maps than new maps which haven't been tested enough on a pro level :x.
Another thing people have to consider is that new players like me don't know the old maps and have to learn five and now seven maps from scratch. I don't have any intentions to be a pro in the future but if I want to get to a decent level I have to know the maps and spend some quality time. Seven maps is quite hard for any new player and trust me every new player wants to play the maps the pros are going to play.
Imo a wrong move from esl and Carmack should have known it better.
I don't really like the idea of a seven mappool, because typically always the same maps will be removed anyway...
I would have a 5-mappool consisting of:
hub
t7
t9
dm13
ztn
Now since I believe some people will whine about the lack of 'new maps' into this pool, I'll reply that there might be some other 'new' maps like hektik, dismemberment, battleforged, but I think they simply cant compare to the 5 maps I named above.
If there were to be 7 maps, I would give the recently-edited battleforged a try, so it's one more new map in the mappool, and then one of the 3 following maps come to my mind: phrantic(edited?), hektik(noidea), dm6
EDIT: please read my post, knowing that I believe dm6, ztn and battleforged are my worst maps.
Whilst the maps aren't quite as good as old classics, they're mostly bad because the players haven't practiced them. The matches on Battleforged where both players had actually practiced it were great to watch. It's not a perfect map sure, but then neither really is T7. Just needs time...