124 replies to this topic

[Revis Volek]

Novakaine, on 01 January 2016 - 09:15 AM, said:

TryHard Candy Mountain everyone just loves TryHard Candy Mountain.
The least tasty and interesting spot on the map.

FTFY

Edited by DarthRevis, 01 January 2016 - 01:17 PM.

[The Image]

DarthRevis, on 01 January 2016 - 01:12 PM, said:

Seriously, this map is only losided because the hill is such a tactical advantage on that map, Make the hill into a BIG VALLEY and watch the game play change dramatically.

and like you said, add some cover, more terrain dips and hills just enough to hide mech or most of them. Add some trees and stuff and again, MAKE THE BIG MOUNTAIN TWO SMALLER MOUNTAINS with a VALLEY in the middle.

Yeah, but seriously, there's 3 mountains in that area that the battle could take place, it's because the majority of idiots in this game decide to load up short/medium range vomit builds that requires a charge up the ONE hill.

When you have more people with longer ranged weapons fighting, you can fight from the antenna tower, or from the bigger mountain BEHIND ****** ridge...

ONLY, again, people are lazy, unskilled, and stupid and insist on charging DIRECTLY for the enemy.

[patataman]

Wintersdark, on 01 January 2016 - 12:40 PM, said:

Yeah, sure, you can just spend 15 minutes doing nothing too. I'd sooner fight and lose personally.

But as I said, the map is totally fixable. Hell, just make the mountain the northernmost part of the map, and make the southern slope easily climbable. The map south of there is fine, and as I said it extends south way further than most people realise.

So, if you are in the top of the mountain and the enemy team negates your advantage by not charging the mountain, you are going to leave the advantage position?

Then the tactic works perfectly. Bonus points if they send a few lights to the south route and said lights hit your rear when your team leaves the mountain

[Bobzilla]

Could you imagine throwing away 1/4 million bucks?

Adding a new map will just eliminate the least played, no point with the vote system. Hopefully its flat, cold and clutter free with unlimited visibility so ppl will pick it. So a flat alpine.

[Johny Rocket]

This

BearFlag, on 31 December 2015 - 08:42 PM, said:

Too bad. Russ calls it an "unfair" map. It's problems are fairly easy to enumerate and fix. Flatten the plateau on the Hill of Death and add more terrain breakup. Maybe some crevasses!

Above all, for the sake of this and just about every map, variable spawn points, variable base/resource locations. Use more of the big maps for crying out loud by altering the closing angles.

Edited by Tractor Joe, 01 January 2016 - 01:40 PM.

[Lyoto Machida]

Bobzilla, on 01 January 2016 - 01:35 PM, said:

Could you imagine throwing away 1/4 million bucks?

Adding a new map will just eliminate the least played, no point with the vote system. Hopefully its flat, cold and clutter free with unlimited visibility so ppl will pick it. So a flat alpine.

No need to imagine...we're going to see it done here in MWO.

[The Image]

Lyoto Machida, on 01 January 2016 - 01:42 PM, said:

No need to imagine...we're going to see it done here in MWO.

It's stupid to think that PGI is wasting so much fan man-power. Release a map making tool and let the players design their own maps.

We'd do it for 'free', all PGI would need to do is alpha/beta test them and clean up any 'issues' they found.

It certainly couldn't be any MORE expensive to do it that way than they current method...

[Wintersdark]

patataman, on 01 January 2016 - 01:24 PM, said:

So, if you are in the top of the mountain and the enemy team negates your advantage by not charging the mountain, you are going to leave the advantage position?

Then the tactic works perfectly. Bonus points if they send a few lights to the south route and said lights hit your rear when your team leaves the mountain

I'll eventually charge before the match ends, because I don't feel like wasting 15 minutes of my time for nothing. It's just not fun.


Can you not see how that is exactly the problem?
Look, I'm not stupid. I get the "brilliant tactic" of waiting them out. But these are public queue pointless fun matches. I want to actually have fun, not stand still and do nothing for 15 minutes for basically zero payout.

[patataman]

Wintersdark, on 01 January 2016 - 02:04 PM, said:

I'll eventually charge before the match ends, because I don't feel like wasting 15 minutes of my time for nothing. It's just not fun.

Can you not see how that is exactly the problem?
Look, I'm not stupid. I get the "brilliant tactic" of waiting them out. But these are public queue pointless fun matches. I want to actually have fun, not stand still and do nothing for 15 minutes for basically zero payout.

It's completely understandable. But charg

Edit: i hate my cell phone and my cell phone hates me lol

But charging the mountain when the other team is already there is quite suicidal. It works sometimes, but if both teams are balanced, the team at the top has a big advantage. I guess our playstyles are different, i like to shoot big stompy robots, but i'm quite happy to not fire a single shot if i'm playing conquest/assault and capturing everything to win.

But you are completely right about the payout. It sucks to win by playing for the objectives and to receive a sub-100k payout.

Edit 2: My point is that people complains about the mountain being an advantage. I think it is, but a direct aproach it's not the only posibility. My default move in a situation where i'm in the bad side of the mountain and the other team is in the top is going behind the antena and then use the F10? (I think it's F10) ridge to fire at them.

Edited by patataman, 01 January 2016 - 03:05 PM.

[Chuck Jager]

DrPetPyroShark, on 01 January 2016 - 10:19 AM, said:

There were only minor issues with Alpine, and it's a combination of PGI's lack of any kind of imagination, public queue drops, and the fact that the majority of players are lazy, unskilled, and can't be bothered to think outside the box.

Alpine's primary problems are with the spawn locations for Assault and Skirmish modes combined with (in solo queue) how lances are formed up.

If you haven't noticed and I bet most of you haven't in the solo queue lances are created in the following manner:

Alpha - Light to Medium
Bravo - Medium to Heavy
Charlie - Heavy to Assault

In Alpine, Charlie Lance is ALWAYS spawn FARTHEST from the action, so your slowest 'mechs ALWAYS end up with the longest slog to the battle.

[sarcasm]Whee... What fun it is to trudge for 3 minutes to get to the battle... Oh joy...[/sarcasm]

Simply swapping alpha/Charlie spawns could go a LONG way to livening up the dynamic on the map.

Second, the spawn locations are near to the center of the map... And spread VERY far apart from each other, as far as your team members.

That's stupid.

Instead, change the spawn locations, but make the lances spawn CLOSER to one another to ENCOURAGE grouping, not this continuous "slower 'mechs chasing light 'mechs" idiocy that PGI seems to favor.

I completely agree with the drops. Good players especially in group Q know how to exploit this. In pug Q, there is zero chance of letting folks know this.

Even more so than Terra this map does not have corridors for close to mid range mechs to loosely work with long range mechs. At t4-5 levels and groups with the same level of players on comms there is either enough randomness or an equal responsibility for team work. In these situations this is a great map. With a broad MM in both solo and group Q, the map is too easy to steam roll or be on the obvious loosing side. The biggest difference is the wasted time getting to the engagement. We can always say team work etc etc, but changing human nature is harder especially the humans who play online games.

I kinda wonder what it would be like if they just removed the BIG AS* MOUNTAIN and changed the lance drops. It would probably cause as many if not more problems than just removing it. PGI is maybe going with the rip the band aid off quickly theory.

[cazidin]

PGI, I'd gladly trade you Caustic Valley instead.

[The Image]

Chuck YeaGurr, on 01 January 2016 - 02:45 PM, said:

...

I kinda wonder what it would be like if they just removed the BIG AS* MOUNTAIN and changed the lance drops. It would probably cause as many if not more problems than just removing it. PGI is maybe going with the rip the band aid off quickly theory.

The problem is PGI has continuously demonstrated that they think playing "blind" is fun.

All the crap they put in the game to obscure vision is abso-f'ing-loutly ridiculous.

So imagine more stupid smog, or non-flammable leaves to strain our eyesight.

[The Image]

cazidin, on 01 January 2016 - 03:01 PM, said:

PGI, I'd gladly trade you Caustic Valley instead.

Rather we got a new Frozen City.

So old...
So small...
So tired...
Solo queue - Skirmish spawn spots are the absolute suck...

So much more could be done with it...

[RussianWolf]

DrPetPyroShark, on 01 January 2016 - 03:07 PM, said:

The problem is PGI has continuously demonstrated that they think playing "blind" is fun.

All the crap they put in the game to obscure vision is abso-f'ing-loutly ridiculous.

So imagine more stupid smog, or non-flammable leaves to strain our eyesight.

yes, its horrible that you may actually have to fight in less than ideal weather conditions.

I'll let the boys fighting in the real world know that they should tell the generals and governments that they will only fight during good weather, daylight hours, during the summer, with lazer tag vests, and only for 15 minute engagements. Don't want anyone breaking a sweat do we.

{sarcasm off}

[Deathlike]

RussianWolf, on 01 January 2016 - 12:31 PM, said:

Team moves for top of mountain.....

We move to the slope base (well out of range of all but gauss), they come to us or time out.

No one MAKES you fight for the mountain.

Or pull into the hills to the SE of the mountain with cover and wait for them.

Not a bad map, just bad players with little imagination.

Or move to Radio tower so you have the other peak in the way, limits the ability to use the hill as an advantage.

The only time I get a bit mad at that map is when I'm dropping in a slow, short range mech. But then its up to the team to help pull them into my range.

If the players are smart, it truly ends up being a standoff. If one takes the H9 mountain, and the others take the radio tower.. it ends up being a literal stalemate (and occasionally it ends up being a last minute brawl).

It doesn't promote the kinds of things you'd actually want.

Alpine has actually been "not included" in league/comp play for these very reasons. Mind you, comp play isn't dictating map design, but it's actually THAT bad.


Alpine is the actually one of the primary reasons that people would want a "pick my own mech after map is picked" type of arguments. I doubt many players like being caught on Alpine with a brawling build. The problem is that this issue NEVER comes up on a map like Tourmaline (well, outside of heat, but creating a colder map similar to Tourmaline wouldn't break existing builds either).

[Wintersdark]

DrPetPyroShark, on 01 January 2016 - 10:19 AM, said:

If you haven't noticed and I bet most of you haven't in the solo queue lances are created in the following manner:

Alpha - Light to Medium
Bravo - Medium to Heavy
Charlie - Heavy to Assault

In Alpine, Charlie Lance is ALWAYS spawn FARTHEST from the action, so your slowest 'mechs ALWAYS end up with the longest slog to the battle.

This is objectively false. Lances are laid out by weight, but which lance spawns where is NOT hard coded, it's random. The thing is, people remember the times Assaults spawned in the furthest spawn.

[Mystere]

Deathlike, on 01 January 2016 - 03:49 PM, said:

If the players are smart, it truly ends up being a standoff. If one takes the H9 mountain, and the others take the radio tower.. it ends up being a literal stalemate (and occasionally it ends up being a last minute brawl).

It doesn't promote the kinds of things you'd actually want.

Alpine supports what I like to call the "Assassin's Gambit". Kill one of the enemy or die trying. The resulting differential -- plus enough goading, smack talk, insults, etc. -- creates an impetus for the deficient team to move.

It's just another variation of the "Patience Game".

[Wintersdark]

Deathlike, on 01 January 2016 - 03:49 PM, said:

If the players are smart, it truly ends up being a standoff. If one takes the H9 mountain, and the others take the radio tower.. it ends up being a literal stalemate (and occasionally it ends up being a last minute brawl).

This. Where the best strategies on a map are "Take the strong location near you and hold it, and don't actually play at all if you don't need to", that's just unacceptable.

If it was CW and winning the match actually meant something (* ignoring current CW issues, you get my point) then that wouldn't be so bad. However, doing that in fact pays out WAY worse than simply charging and having a nice brawl that you lose. You'll make an order of magnetude more cbills by fighting and losing.

Quote

It doesn't promote the kinds of things you'd actually want.

Alpine has actually been "not included" in league/comp play for these very reasons. Mind you, comp play isn't dictating map design, but it's actually THAT bad.

Alpine is the actually one of the primary reasons that people would want a "pick my own mech after map is picked" type of arguments. I doubt many players like being caught on Alpine with a brawling build. The problem is that this issue NEVER comes up on a map like Tourmaline (well, outside of heat, but creating a colder map similar to Tourmaline wouldn't break existing builds either).

Yup. If played smartly, Alpine promotes... Nothing. No combat at all. That's a terrible, terrible map design. Because either way, the team that out-waits the opposition has a strong advantage. Bad gameplay.

Nobody walks away from a virtually zero damage tie feeling good about those 15 minutes.

[Wintersdark]

Mystere, on 01 January 2016 - 04:14 PM, said:

Alpine supports what I like to call the "Assassin's Gambit". Kill one of the enemy or die trying. The resulting differential -- plus enough goading, smack talk, insults, etc. -- creates an impetus for the deficient team to move.

It's just another variation of the "Patience Game".

Which makes those matches fun in the Group Queue, but increasingly horrible in the solo queue. You get some random bad rambo who tears off to get that kill, and dies instead, and oh... your team just lost.

Yuck.

[DAYLEET]

Wintersdark, on 01 January 2016 - 04:10 PM, said:

This is objectively false. Lances are laid out by weight, but which lance spawns where is NOT hard coded, it's random. The thing is, people remember the times Assaults spawned in the furthest spawn.

It's per game mode.