51 replies to this topic

[Kjudoon]

Kusunoki Masashige, on 21 January 2016 - 01:08 PM, said:

worst map ever, great for LRM trolls

Lemme guess. Anyone who doesn't laservomit is a troll to you? I submit you are the troll if this is the case.

[Kjudoon]

Pwnius, on 21 January 2016 - 03:08 PM, said:

I agree with OP. The spawns can be moved closer and the map will still be big but there will be less than 5 mintues before a battle starts.

If you want a boxing ring, you are now playing the wrong game. Distance allows for strategy and scouting and a much richer tactical experience. Why not just spawn everyone in the middle 4 grids and just ignore the rest of the map? No reason to go to Bullet Town in J8, it's behind you and you don't want to run that far for serious cover. You just press the E key for 5 seconds and start shooting and nobody has much cover in those low drifts.

I mean come ON! How lazy and intellectually dead do you have to be to want just more button mashing?

This is also why Conquest on this map is THE best variant since they got rid of the original Alpine Conquest points. You dare not deathball OR nascar.

Edited by Kjudoon, 21 January 2016 - 03:39 PM.

[_____]

The map plays differently from any other map in the game, and in a good way. No strong position on the map means no focal point. This makes the enemy movement unpredictable, which means you have to do some scouting. Good job PGI.

[Mad Porthos]

So, been playing this alot since it dropped. I like it. I like it alot. No worries about size, the game needed a realistic map or two, rather than what essentially seem to be "intelligently designed" arenas and bowls with an afterthought to some structures or things that you might supposedly fighting for if as if it were deliberately the target of a military operation. The realistic environs of a battlefield should be vast and varied, with all the tactical options that offers and denies. "Cover" for 10 - 20 meter tall mechs should be a rare thing, on the geographic scale that these sorts of battles happen. While a real mountain is great cover for your whole lance and even dropships to come in under radar, in places like River City, Crimson Straights, the roughness of the terrain is unusual, given most cities end up flattening, grading and levelling all the areas around, in order to make them more traversable for wheeled vehicles, pedestrians as well as things such as protomechs/loaders/construction mechs.

Polar has a pretty realisitic sort of ice field terrain which has been well modelled to offer realisitic cover, something other maps have done much more artificially and also which results in deliberate, designed in hard counters to missile usage. This has not been "good map design", rather it has been designers coddling players in an unrealistic but necessary way. All maps to date have had to err on the side of much missile cover, much opportunity to break locks and blatantly obvious ways one can advance in lanes toward the enemy or objectives. Claiming that a good map has these things designed into them comes from a gamers perspective and a designers perspective when you are designing a map for the lowest common denominator, the worst players and the least able to take initiative. If you keep designing that way, you never will have growth in your worst players, because even if they do by trial and error learn to play effectively on each and every map you create, it's only by doing the specific lockstep manuvers that work in each instance, without learning the reason and rationale for them. They never grow and this then is also revealed when you get a map like Polar and you see the behaviour and grief from a significant portion of the player base who have not previously been challenged. They fixate on one or two things that are killing them and blame them, to the exception of anything else and demand things go back to the way they were, the way they know.

I believe we've some growing to do, even those guys who consider themselves "old hands" at the game and I welcome Polar and more maps like it. We are trying to play a game that emulates a sort of far future sci-fi warfare in giant stompy robots, so realism isn't exactly the most stringent of requirements, but when you end up dropping on the same map again and again, and it has the exact same features again and again and you learn through repetition, just where to stand, what angle to snipe at, what timing to push at... what you are doing is not combat, it's memorization. It's not really possible to mix it up to show the infinite variety of environments and battlefields we could possibly have conflicts in, but large maps without overly central and pivotal features at least manage to break this monotony up, allowing varieties in the areas of each maps that you might engage in - also making it more difficult to perfectly learn each nook and cranny, or know exactly which building will or will not have an "invisible wall" that you can see through, but not be shot through, while sniping around it with one arm.

More Polar is what I say. And I don't use LRMS. But hey, tomorrow I might.

P.S.: I agree with Kjudoon, about Conquest here. Best since Alpine, before they moved the spawn points. Winning on that map back in the day forced one to split teams and was contrary to what so many wanted to do at the time, bring the biggest baddest assault around with practically no movement. Instead what won out was a closer placement of resource collector points which one could deathball and mop up one by one.

Much harder to do on Polar. While one can do a clockwise or counter clockwise sweep of points, it's a slower process and capping can be much more dependent on first flipping points with lights and then "confirming" them when slower moving forces arrive, either to kill those who try to counter cap, or because they are on the way to the next location. Those who try to cut the circle or the tail traverse into no mans land often in the center, even when enmasse they are not as effective because the dunes in the central ice rise make lines of sight unreliable and force them to repeatedly skyline themselves, allowing avoidance and flanking when necessary.

Edited by Mad Porthos, 21 January 2016 - 04:58 PM.

[Kjudoon]

The map has actually forced me to start diversifying my builds so I have a good mix of DF long and short range as well as LRMs for those times I just can't get LOS on the target but need to start shaping the battlefield or damaging the enemy somehow while I close or maneouver. Sure, it's only 10-20LRMs which isn't that much with all the AMS, BUT.... it's something.

Edited by Kjudoon, 21 January 2016 - 10:29 PM.

[Tjaresh]

So, a few days passed, I played it some more (obviously I had to since there is no way avoiding it. Every time it pops up it is voted. So I guess many people like it).
I have diversify my first comment.
- I still don't like it, but for different reasons.
The map is huge, but that was never my point and it still isnt. I like a bit of positioning before the fight.
LRM do have a huge advantage on this map. They stay hidden and wait for the targets to pop up while the teams are closing. I had to learn how to use the ditches properly to avoid it. I'm still not good at it and every mistake is rewarded with instant death, but thats a learning process. It helps to have some flanking lights that take out the "artillery" in the back.
Overall I think its a decent map that takes some knowledge of the area, some skill to maneuver smart and a good team that acts as a team.
And here is why I still don't like it: I mostly play pug matches. Every time I play this map it painfully reminds me that most pugs are a bunch of solo player lone wolves with mostly no sense for tactics, teamwork and sometimes even without any skill (take that "me shoots da lazors in da air caus me likes da colours and de pew-sound". It makes a nice map for faction play where the teams know what they are doing. I think most of all I hate how much my performance depends on the other players.

I know thats not something that can be changed but its the reason why i dont like this map.

[Alienized]

i wonder where all the people are finding the map flat...
there are so many trenches, rocks, buildings etc to be sneaky.
i guess all of them are just running like chicken on the open field without even noticing whats actually on the map.
you can brawl just fine in there.
you can snipe just fine in there. just dont be stupid.

[Cold Darkness]

what a wonderful post, made me save alot of time typing all that out in a much more complex manner:

Alienized, on 22 January 2016 - 08:34 AM, said:

i wonder where all the people are finding the map flat...
there are so many trenches, rocks, buildings etc to be sneaky.
i guess all of them are just running like chicken on the open field without even noticing whats actually on the map.
you can brawl just fine in there.
you can snipe just fine in there. just dont be stupid.

the map only did one thing wrong: it doesnt cater to the people that still do not realize that this is not quake or unreal tournament.

please remove mode-vote and make that a choice again, i have enough of all that skirmish-only crowd. especially since maps like terra therma and polar highlands are immense fun in a proper conquest. instead we get people doing the same **** every time on every map. polar highlands showed us that people will just nascar around its middle and cry about the lack of cover. who dared to imply that people needed landmarks to act stupid. they do that just fine in the middle of nowhere.

Tjaresh, on 22 January 2016 - 08:25 AM, said:

I know thats not something that can be changed but its the reason why i dont like this map.

you see, you came to the wrong conclusion. you should not not like the map, instead you should have come to the conclusion to not like the people. because they do that **** everywhere, its just more blatantly obvious on this one.

on a side note: isnt it funny how people cry about the totally absent role warfare, which is given a chance on this map simply because it is bigger and people cry about the map being big and thus indirectly about role warfare being introduced to the game?

Edited by Cold Darkness, 22 January 2016 - 09:01 AM.

[Fat Jack Murphy]

stop complaining. see you in polar highlands.

LUV THAT MAP.

its a light mechs paradise.

*fires up reactor on his locust and goes hunting stupid LRM buggers*

[Aedwynn]

Fat Jack Murphy, on 23 January 2016 - 03:35 AM, said:

stop complaining. see you in polar highlands.

LUV THAT MAP.

its a light mechs paradise.

*fires up reactor on his locust and goes hunting stupid LRM buggers*

And explodes the moment he tries to kill one - good team will notice you way before you can flank it on this map. But you never play with good teams... since pugs are full of lone wolves you can flank even on absolutely flat map.
During all playthroughs I never missed a single attempt to flank team, but sadly it depends on whether team notices your warning.

Edited by Aedwynn, 23 January 2016 - 06:48 AM.

[Tesunie]

PopWillie, on 23 January 2016 - 09:35 PM, said:

How many Mechs did we have in MW4 if i recall it was 4 here it is 12, can't control 12 IF I am wrong please correct me but I don't think I am

I recall far more than 4 mechs (per team) in MW4. I believe it could get up to 8 per team?

MW4 maps tended to be larger than our maps in this game, from my own recollection.