96 replies to this topic

[Summon3r]

terrycloth, on 08 April 2015 - 02:09 PM, said:

Yeah, I pretty much only solo PUG because the group queue sucks

nuff said

[Kyle Wright]

Rebas Kradd, on 08 April 2015 - 11:47 AM, said:

Agreed heartily. PGI seems to be trying way too hard with their terrain design. They could probably manage with much simpler terrain and still accomplish the same gameplay.

I will say, however, that you need to be careful with that. Think back to previous Mechwarrior titles and how they featured enormous, wide-open maps with no terrain cover. What kind of gameplay did that create? Long-range, almost exclusively. Be honest - did ANYONE use anything besides PPC, Gauss, and large lasers in those games? Really?

One thing MWO has done better than any other title in the franchise, is create an environment that allows every type of role. Map design is part of weapons balance, and all these maps feature frequent cover, lots of obstacles, and approaches that let brawlers get in on the action as long as they're willing to do the footwork. So if you want wide-open prairie map, those rolling hills and ravines had better be frequent enough to break up the sniper fire, or it becomes a PPC/Gaussfest really quick.

You can still have large maps without tons of wide open terrain, just more simplistic. We dont need these fancy waterfalls or waky mountains made out of giant crystals. What happen to simple rolling hills with some greater then others, a simple river or two .

Hoggar Mountains Algeria










Sample of some hills in the desert of Arizona. Its simple, its realistic, no giant mountain in the middle

Edited by Kyle Wright, 08 April 2015 - 03:41 PM.

[Kyle Wright]

Above examples would have plenty of cover, open space, they arent to complicated and overboard.

[Kyle Wright]

here are some examples from spooky777 on deviant art

[terrycloth]

So, did the mechs in those pictures just get dropped into the middle of the open like that? I can't think of any other reason a battle would play out that way on the locations pictures.

[Anjian]

KraftySOT, on 08 April 2015 - 09:47 AM, said:

I find that hard to believe. Unless you simply dont play alot of games. Maps are bad these days. And have been for a while. You have cop outs like Arma that just make realistic places, and you have utter failures like Richochet. Whenever a medium that is originally the domain of only artists, becomes mass produced, quality takes a nose dive.

MWO is certainly the worst game when it comes to maps that I ever played. To start with, I played Crescent Hawks as my introduction to Battletech and Mechwarrior 1 is my second mech game. I try to collect and play, every mech ever since, Battletech, EarthSiege, Heavy Gear, Armored Core, and otherwise. I also try to play every tank game I can find. Quite frankly I am very impressed about the maps I saw in Chromehounds, Armored Core V and still view those in Mechwarrior 4 with fondness.

No game has made me quit because of the maps than MWO. Specifically Terra Therma. The moment that map came out, my playtime on MWO started to wane and within two months, I joined Final Fantasy 14 A Realm Reborn. Then came the Clan mechs, I rejoined MWO again, and the maps made me want to quit again. And so I did, joined up World of Tanks and War Thunder. The only reason why I am back again is Community Warfare. I still can't play the public queue (now made worst with the Bog). The only reason I go to the public queue is to test mech configurations and to level up new mechs. Heck, when CW ceasefire comes, I just go play War Thunder, and come back to MWO in an hour or two.

If this game wants to continue to espouse itself as a "thinking" shooter, you should not create a map where there is only one "think" to it, where the solutions are few and obvious. That is exactly what Terra Therma is, along with those maps where you NASCAR around the map, or do peek and boos around gates.

Just some comments on the various maps, which ones I hate which ones I like.

Any map that forces you to use heat vision, night vision, all the time, is an automatic fail in my book. I gather PGI already knows this by now, which is why they have not made any new ones that forces so. Hence even the newer dark maps, like HPG Manifold and Mining Collective, have little need to resort to night or thermal vision most of the time.

Forest Valley, that just looks too freaking muddy. This needs a visual pass, like they did to Caustic.

Terra Therma needs to be REMOVED from the rotation. Or they should just close off the central volcano.

Canyon looks like a trash heap. Some of the worst ground textures I have seen. Hellesbore is what Canyons should have been. But I am okay playing in it, much better than the other maps.

River City needs to be removed from the rotation, period. Or at least they need to return it to the original spawn locations.

Alpine used to be one of the best maps in the game, until they change the spawn locations and ruined scouting. The spanw changes now forces you to fight on the peak, and this makes you waste the rest of what is otherwise, an excellent map.

Tourmaline and HPG Manifold are two of my favorite maps in the game. They look very scifi and they should continue to pursue that approach.

Frozen City is too narrow. This is the map for the wrong game. What's the point of making wide torsoed mechs that could barely pass between the buildings.

The Bog needs a complete overhaul. Any map that traps feet should be given a complete overhaul.

Community Warfare maps --- I like to play CW now because at least all their maps have repetitive value. Sulfurous however needs an overhaul on the spawn location of the defensive side. Otherwise a great map to fight on. All maps suffer from the peek at the gate tactic, but once beyond that its a much different but better story. Textures on Boreas doesn't look that good though, not convincing for an artic map, it feels a wireframe covered by paper mache and painted with white latex. But I still enjoy playing on it, especially around the platform, which is the best in the game so far. Never tried the latest one yet, but Grim Portico so far has been the best and most visually arresting of the new CW maps. Overall, I wish there are public pug queue versions of these maps to replace the old ones (River City, Terra Therma, especially), so that reflects my net positive attitude towards these maps. This should not be hard to do since it recycles your current textures.

Comment on World of Tanks --- They have some excellent maps, and they got some horrid maps. But they do something PGI doesn't ---- they continually revise bad maps, and there are maps they just take out of rotation completely. They got the creative courage to think this map really sucks, and pull it out. I wish PGI would do that. WoT maps especially excel in scouting, which seems to be a non art in MWO. They do have a problem with the small size of the maps. WoT maps don't funnel tanks into one or two corridors; there is always at least three if not more, along with wide open spaces for sniping and enclosed covered areas for close range brawling. Your team advances in at least three fronts, left, right and center, and the collapse of one front, or the lack of a holding force in any of these areas, can lead to the collapse of your team. My impression is that PGI is trying to recreate this phenomenon on MWO by dividing a company into three lances and situate them randomly but it always fails as the lances would just seek to rejoin into a single mob cluster.

My best impressions of their maps are those of their city maps like Kharkov, Stalingrad, Ruined City (especially in fire) and Himmelsdorf. These are just beautiful to see.

Comment on War Thunder Ground Forces --- They made one horrible map at the start --- Karelia. This is probably their earliest map, and one of the worst ever maps I ever played. Every map since then learned from that mistake. While War Thunder does not remove maps from the rotation, they do tend, over time, to change and fix the maps. Karelia today now has multiple avenues of advance, and areas leveled to make it easier to reach the cap points. It's the only map with chokepoints and now those chokepoints are all gone.

War Thunder dislikes clumping or mobbing tanks with a mania and chokepoints tend to create and funnel forces into mobs. War Thunder have mechanisms meant to destroy these mobs --- aerial bombing, artillery barrages that are randomly lethal. Tanks do not work best when clumped in a mob like you do in MWO --- this is a game where you can be blown up in one shot across the map in a fresh tank. While in MWO, there is one basic big mob, WoT has three mobs, WTGF relies on tanks advancing across a broad front, like they actually did during the war. You can especially see this in the Kursk map, which is intended to recreate the historical Battle of Kursk. To give the map and the teams some focus, there are capture objectives in each map which can change in another mission. Their intentions is to make maps feel like they were during the war, not arena like or a manufactured theme park, and their next map is in fact, a 4km x 4km section of Berlin in 1945, during the Battle of Berlin around the Reichstag and H's bunker. WTGF's maps in general, are glorious eye candy with destructable environments and dynamic weather. I believe their main flaw is scale --- I don't mean scale in numbers, their maps are always meant to handle 16 vs. 16, but technological scale. There is an enormous gap in range and lethality between a Tier 1 Panzer II and a Tier V M103 heavy tank, and as the tanks become more technologically advanced the maps are becoming small (even though they are huge by MWO standards) for their gun ranges, making it possible to make one shot kills well over 1km. WoT has similar problems on their top tiers but they have however an artificial spotting mechanism in place that requires scouts to extend their visual range.

Edited by Anjian, 08 April 2015 - 10:36 PM.

[N0MAD]

Anjian, on 08 April 2015 - 10:27 PM, said:

Stuff..

Totally agree, worst maps ever in any game played, just no idea on what is needed, so small tactics are a joke, role warfare non existent, couple of the maps as stated are ok but no way good, sorry if it upsets map maker but he is not good at his job..

[Bigbacon]

Bog just needs the steps fixed...it is so difficult to get up them.

[SirMad]

many great ideas in this thread.
But some people here are thinking only in absolutes: "Because i dont like the map, it must be a terrible map".

Especially the size of maps is very controversial.Some people like big maps like alpine, but in reality most people come to mwo to simple shoot at robots.
In my view the change of the spawn points on alpine made this map playable. Before this change, when dropping alone with pugs, i often wandered for minutes without seeing the enemy. My record was 10 Minutes (with an atlas) without any enemy contact.
And if maps are so big in size that PUG teams without scouts needs 10 minutes to find each other, the map will be hated by most of the players.

A good way to create enjoyable big maps would be, if the map changes dynamically like in battlefield, where the objectives are moved along the map.

Edited by SirMad, 09 April 2015 - 03:46 AM.

[Rebas Kradd]

Anjian, on 08 April 2015 - 10:27 PM, said:

Any map that forces you to use heat vision, night vision, all the time, is an automatic fail in my book.

While I agree with much of what you said, this is unfair. What's the point of having heat/night vision if the maps don't require you to use it? I like a good challenge involving atmosphere and hostile conditions. The biggest problem with Terra is just the constant climbing you have to do.

Anjian, on 08 April 2015 - 10:27 PM, said:

But they do something PGI doesn't ---- they continually revise bad maps, and there are maps they just take out of rotation completely. They got the creative courage to think this map really sucks, and pull it out. I wish PGI would do that.

WoT also has just a sliiiiightly bigger dev team than MWO does.

In general, though, I think what we're looking for in MWO is not maps to fight on, per se, but theaters. Larger scale environments where scouting and info warfare is required, divided forces are a must, flanks are legitimately useful rather than doomed against a deathball, terrain is still broken up to keep brawlers viable, assaults are at a distinct disadvantage yet carry huge value if escorted properly to an attack point, forces are occupying regions rather than fields.

I realize that the current thinking in PGI's offices, at least by some, is that people don't want five minutes of walking and then ten seconds of terror and boom dead. BUT, this is a phenomenon that would be mostly limited to assault and slower heavy pilots. And what it MIGHT do is make taking an assault a real tradeoff, even more than it already is, and help equalize the queues by encouraging use of lights and mediums.

Edited by Rebas Kradd, 09 April 2015 - 08:44 AM.

[Koniks]

terrycloth, on 08 April 2015 - 04:45 PM, said:

So, did the mechs in those pictures just get dropped into the middle of the open like that? I can't think of any other reason a battle would play out that way on the locations pictures.

Armies maneuver between distant objectives. Sometimes they get outmaneuvered.

[Almond Brown]

Kyle Wright, on 08 April 2015 - 03:52 PM, said:

here are some examples from spooky777 on deviant art

Just paint that White and you have Frozen City.

[Almond Brown]

Rebas Kradd, on 09 April 2015 - 07:14 AM, said:

While I agree with much of what you said, this is unfair. What's the point of having heat/night vision if the maps don't require you to use it? I like a good challenge involving atmosphere and hostile conditions. The biggest problem with Terra is just the constant climbing you have to do.

WoT also has just a sliiiiightly bigger dev team than MWO does.

In general, though, I think what we're looking for in MWO is not maps to fight on, per se, but theaters. Larger scale environments where scouting and info warfare is required, divided forces are a must, flanks are legitimately useful rather than doomed against a deathball, terrain is still broken up to keep brawlers viable, assaults are at a distinct disadvantage yet carry huge value if escorted properly to an attack point, forces are occupying regions rather than fields.

It would seem reasonable thought that a "theater" of combat would require "Battalions" of Mechs and not just two opposing "Companies".

[KraftySOT]

Anjian, on 08 April 2015 - 10:27 PM, said:

MWO is certainly the worst game when it comes to maps that I ever played. To start with, I played Crescent Hawks as my introduction to Battletech and Mechwarrior 1 is my second mech game. I try to collect and play, every mech ever since, Battletech, EarthSiege, Heavy Gear, Armored Core, and otherwise. I also try to play every tank game I can find. Quite frankly I am very impressed about the maps I saw in Chromehounds, Armored Core V and still view those in Mechwarrior 4 with fondness.

No game has made me quit because of the maps than MWO. Specifically Terra Therma. The moment that map came out, my playtime on MWO started to wane and within two months, I joined Final Fantasy 14 A Realm Reborn. Then came the Clan mechs, I rejoined MWO again, and the maps made me want to quit again. And so I did, joined up World of Tanks and War Thunder. The only reason why I am back again is Community Warfare. I still can't play the public queue (now made worst with the Bog). The only reason I go to the public queue is to test mech configurations and to level up new mechs. Heck, when CW ceasefire comes, I just go play War Thunder, and come back to MWO in an hour or two.

If this game wants to continue to espouse itself as a "thinking" shooter, you should not create a map where there is only one "think" to it, where the solutions are few and obvious. That is exactly what Terra Therma is, along with those maps where you NASCAR around the map, or do peek and boos around gates.

Just some comments on the various maps, which ones I hate which ones I like.

Any map that forces you to use heat vision, night vision, all the time, is an automatic fail in my book. I gather PGI already knows this by now, which is why they have not made any new ones that forces so. Hence even the newer dark maps, like HPG Manifold and Mining Collective, have little need to resort to night or thermal vision most of the time.

Forest Valley, that just looks too freaking muddy. This needs a visual pass, like they did to Caustic.

Terra Therma needs to be REMOVED from the rotation. Or they should just close off the central volcano.

Canyon looks like a trash heap. Some of the worst ground textures I have seen. Hellesbore is what Canyons should have been. But I am okay playing in it, much better than the other maps.

River City needs to be removed from the rotation, period. Or at least they need to return it to the original spawn locations.

Alpine used to be one of the best maps in the game, until they change the spawn locations and ruined scouting. The spanw changes now forces you to fight on the peak, and this makes you waste the rest of what is otherwise, an excellent map.

Tourmaline and HPG Manifold are two of my favorite maps in the game. They look very scifi and they should continue to pursue that approach.

Frozen City is too narrow. This is the map for the wrong game. What's the point of making wide torsoed mechs that could barely pass between the buildings.

The Bog needs a complete overhaul. Any map that traps feet should be given a complete overhaul.

Community Warfare maps --- I like to play CW now because at least all their maps have repetitive value. Sulfurous however needs an overhaul on the spawn location of the defensive side. Otherwise a great map to fight on. All maps suffer from the peek at the gate tactic, but once beyond that its a much different but better story. Textures on Boreas doesn't look that good though, not convincing for an artic map, it feels a wireframe covered by paper mache and painted with white latex. But I still enjoy playing on it, especially around the platform, which is the best in the game so far. Never tried the latest one yet, but Grim Portico so far has been the best and most visually arresting of the new CW maps. Overall, I wish there are public pug queue versions of these maps to replace the old ones (River City, Terra Therma, especially), so that reflects my net positive attitude towards these maps. This should not be hard to do since it recycles your current textures.

Comment on World of Tanks --- They have some excellent maps, and they got some horrid maps. But they do something PGI doesn't ---- they continually revise bad maps, and there are maps they just take out of rotation completely. They got the creative courage to think this map really sucks, and pull it out. I wish PGI would do that. WoT maps especially excel in scouting, which seems to be a non art in MWO. They do have a problem with the small size of the maps. WoT maps don't funnel tanks into one or two corridors; there is always at least three if not more, along with wide open spaces for sniping and enclosed covered areas for close range brawling. Your team advances in at least three fronts, left, right and center, and the collapse of one front, or the lack of a holding force in any of these areas, can lead to the collapse of your team. My impression is that PGI is trying to recreate this phenomenon on MWO by dividing a company into three lances and situate them randomly but it always fails as the lances would just seek to rejoin into a single mob cluster.

My best impressions of their maps are those of their city maps like Kharkov, Stalingrad, Ruined City (especially in fire) and Himmelsdorf. These are just beautiful to see.

Comment on War Thunder Ground Forces --- They made one horrible map at the start --- Karelia. This is probably their earliest map, and one of the worst ever maps I ever played. Every map since then learned from that mistake. While War Thunder does not remove maps from the rotation, they do tend, over time, to change and fix the maps. Karelia today now has multiple avenues of advance, and areas leveled to make it easier to reach the cap points. It's the only map with chokepoints and now those chokepoints are all gone.

War Thunder dislikes clumping or mobbing tanks with a mania and chokepoints tend to create and funnel forces into mobs. War Thunder have mechanisms meant to destroy these mobs --- aerial bombing, artillery barrages that are randomly lethal. Tanks do not work best when clumped in a mob like you do in MWO --- this is a game where you can be blown up in one shot across the map in a fresh tank. While in MWO, there is one basic big mob, WoT has three mobs, WTGF relies on tanks advancing across a broad front, like they actually did during the war. You can especially see this in the Kursk map, which is intended to recreate the historical Battle of Kursk. To give the map and the teams some focus, there are capture objectives in each map which can change in another mission. Their intentions is to make maps feel like they were during the war, not arena like or a manufactured theme park, and their next map is in fact, a 4km x 4km section of Berlin in 1945, during the Battle of Berlin around the Reichstag and H's bunker. WTGF's maps in general, are glorious eye candy with destructable environments and dynamic weather. I believe their main flaw is scale --- I don't mean scale in numbers, their maps are always meant to handle 16 vs. 16, but technological scale. There is an enormous gap in range and lethality between a Tier 1 Panzer II and a Tier V M103 heavy tank, and as the tanks become more technologically advanced the maps are becoming small (even though they are huge by MWO standards) for their gun ranges, making it possible to make one shot kills well over 1km. WoT has similar problems on their top tiers but they have however an artificial spotting mechanism in place that requires scouts to extend their visual range.

Ah yeah then youre right. Out of that series of vehicle combat games. We have the worst maps. Ive played probably every game released that was worth a crap, since 1989 or so. Comparatively to some of the maps ive seen. Were not that bad.

I still stand by that World of Tanks is bad. Mobs are bad. Hence why War Blunder goes to such great lengths to make that not happen. When you blob, or mob, or whatever you want to call it, it makes the map play the same way, every time.

Three mobs, in their own lanes, in World of Tanks, is absolutely terrible and to me, unplayable. I hate that game with a burning passion. Its boring, its repetitive, its a grind fest, its pay to win, the art and maps are terrible, I just loathe everything about it.

And yeah Keralia was terrible. That was more like a beta map just to get their tanks going.

Now theyve improved quite a bit, even Keralia. War Thunder is slowly kicking WoTs ass.

[KraftySOT]

Kalam Mehkar, on 08 April 2015 - 10:15 AM, said:

I can't like your posts enough. I understand where Thad is coming from, but your replies are incredibly well thought out and provide constructive criticism (I understand most of and agree with almost all of) while staying courteous and professional to the developer who took time out of his day to give some insight into his own processes and thoughts.

Thanks!

I do my best. I know what Thad goes through, because I went through it. Albeit in a less structured era. We were writing the book as they say, at the time. There was alot more freedom. There was alot more expression. There was alot more discussion. Ive sat around for hours, and hours on end, talking about map design philosophy with peers in the industry.

Now things are alot different. Theres alot more hats. Theres alot more focus. Theres alot more bottom lines and bosses. Real bosses. Not just some guy you hang around with and drink beers with who is absolutely astounded at everything you do. At Raven Software, we spent more time talking to each other than actually making Hexen. Heretic was already popular, so Hexen was just a case of "give the fans what they want, more Heretic", we were really allowed to go wild. That was a great environment to cut your teeth in.

Today its not like that. Our office was a warehouse on the outskirts of town. We had a giant industrial fan for an AC. We played softball and smear the...*politically correctness alert* in the warehouse next to ours that was empty. Completely different environment.

By the time the brothers sold out (in a good way) to Activision and the rest of us went our separate ways (I went to the Final Doom team, most everyone else went to Human Head studios), I dont think we'd ever had a water cooler, a morning meeting, or ever used the white board in Brian and Steve's office.

A faaaar cry from Russ and Paul (Who I think are great guys, even if Paul makes bad decisions. He does it from a place of love and thats all you can ask) and the PGI studios, which....actually has an AC system I hear.

I like this game. Ive always liked games. I like PGI, though I didnt always. Im interested in what they do, how they do it, and their end result product. It fascinates me.

Some people are into sports. They can tell you every thing about a sports team. Who plays on it, who has ever played on it, their strategy, the effect of the coaches, the weather, the stadium. Thats what theyre 'into'. What they sit around reading about in their spare time. What they do with their kids on the weekends.

For me its gaming, and the gaming industry. It caught me back in the early 80s, and its never let me go. Its show business, with math. And theres no business, or people, I know, like show people, and show business. Whether you make maps, or play a guitar, or hold a gaff, or boom mike, or sing, or write, or paint, youre a part of the 'content makers' on planet earth. And these are the greatest people I know. Its a heavy responsibility if you let weigh on you. Its something only creative people struggle with. Your art, and your job. Your dream, and your reality. Your heart, and the real world.

Edited by KraftySOT, 09 April 2015 - 09:02 AM.

[Anjian]

Going to expound further on what I believe or my theories about vehicular maps.

The two things we want to avoid in a map about team based vehicular combat.

1. Camping. The camping habit is reinforced when the camper is rewarded by grabbing --- and staying in that spot. Reward comes in the form of getting multiple ambush or sniper kills. The game will fail when campers are most rewarded, especially in high KDRs.
2. Clumping. We also like to call this mobbing. I believe a "thinking" game will fail when the predominant winning solution is to mob together in one clump and zerg the opposition. Hence there is no other truly winnable solution but this one.

We like to destroy these two, as much as possible.

What creates a negative player experience? Wasting your play time waiting at the back of a team mob where its a lot easier to shoot your teammate's back than the enemy. Wasting your play time waiting for the enemy to make a mistake so you can shoot him. So you wait, in a mob, then the antimob mechanisms hit you --- artillery, air strikes... The negative experience reaches a new level.

What creates a positive player experience? When much of his play time is moving and shooting at the enemy. I will just sum it up as fluid warfare.

I believe WoT is failing because some, now more like most, of their maps are promoting both negatives simultaneously.

The most negative maps in MWO, promote a lot of clumping. The entrance towards the volcano in Terra Therma. I believe if you remove that feature, the experience in that map would positively increase. The area near the tower and the bridge at the river's entrance in River City. That map's experience took a downturn when PGI changed the spawn locations that led to a lot of clumping in that area. It wasn't that bad with the original spawn locations. My solution to this is go back to the original spawn locations. The mountain top in Alpine. Again, this is due to the newer spawn locations; the original spawn locations tended to promote a more mobile game with considerable scouting. Forest Valley has a clump near one of the tunnel entrances where there seems to be a stone arch. This map tends to be more fun when there is a flanking maneuver across the water. Maps that have the least clumps and promotes the most fluid warfare tends to be the most fun --- Tourmaline, HPG Manifold, Canyons, Crimson, Caustic. A map treats like a team like its fluid --- fluids naturally flow in directions that automatically look for openings.

The fail experience in CW maps have always been the gate. There are people that I know who simply gave up and won't play CW because of the clumping around the gates with the peek a boo tactics. The gates tend to promote both camp and clump at the same time. The positive experience in CW maps tend to happen when you move beyond that gate considerably, creating a situation of fluid warfare in the breakthrough areas. This is actually fun for both attacker and defender a like. The game becomes boring when much of the play time is concentrated around the gate, and when it becomes fun when less time is wasted at that. I believe CW was greatly helped when we began to have the Counterattack mode, and the game became a bit more fluid than Invasion. I also believe --- as so many have also opined --- that CW must have a gateless mode, a skirmish or assault mode without the gates, bringing even maps like Tourmaline into the mix.

Some thoughts of mine about the evolution of War Thunder maps.

The early maps were horrible Karelia especially but Ash River also suffered some problems. Karelia promoted clumping in four spots, or two for each team --- one a camp-clump near the eastern spawns, where the teams could literally shoot each other, and at the bottlenecks of the B and C cap points. Modifications in the map have eliminated the clumps near B and C but there is still the camp-clump near the eastern spawns. Ash River doesn't promote clumping, but it does promote a lot of camping. The earliest version of the map have tanks shooting at each other --- killing and dying --- near the spawns. Since then that map had corrections for that. For that reason I tend to prefer Kuban, Karpathia, and Jungle, though the latter tends to have a clump at the cap point near the bridge. War Thunder resolved this by altering the cap points time to time, and by introducing the Break game mode where you have dynamic capping points. Karpathia though tends to suffer from having camp spots, and the Break mode is also a response to that.

The real turn around for War Thunder Ground Forces was the introduction of the Poland map. The map simply has minimal clumps and less opportunity for campers. It always have multiple avenues for attack that rewards daring lone wolves looking to surprise the enemy. Success in that map is determined by the entire team able to hold a wide front across the town to prevent the other team from flanking your position especially around the A and C points. Since then, other maps are modeled similarly, like the Eastern Europe map and to some extent, White Caste. Earlier maps fail by having capping points in higher terrain, discouraging heavy tanks from capping, while encouraging them more to camp. The capping points are now in even and low terrain, which is much more encouraging for the heavy and slow tanks to attack these points, thus improving the fluidity of the game. The value of low terrain capping point is also shown when Karelia, which used to have on one capping point at the top of a hill, added two new capping points at the bottom, and the map gradually became more interesting then.

The "wide front" phenomenon I am seeing in War Thunder Ground Forces appear evident in the Jungle, Kuban, Carpathia, White Castle, Poland, Mozdok and Kursk. It appears less in Karelia and Ash River, which in my opinion are the two weakest maps in WTGF.

When I started War Thunder in the late winter of 2014, the game had an online counter that showed peaks of under 40,000 players simultaneously. A year later the peaks are over 90,000.

Edited by Anjian, 09 April 2015 - 09:15 PM.

[Sandersson Jankins]

Even though certainly there are plenty of tricks of the tongue that any dev can use to pacify the community...Thad seems pretty legitimate. I feel like he's doing the best he can.

I'm also not horrifically upset at maps like you guys are....I'm also a CW-only player. Probably has something to do with it. When I play "normals", I am usually impressed by how the map looks and feels, in terms of aesthetics. Sometimes I'm happy with the maps playability, sometimes not. Don't play enough normals to say any more.