JOATMON Incorporated, on 17 August 2023 - 09:50 AM, said:
Almost all the maps have their merits. The best maps support multiple play styles/builds on mechs. Regardless of what mech build you have with you, there is a fun spot you fight on that map. Other maps like Solaris and Alpine heavily weight towards favoring builds with a specific combat style in mind. If you happen to have the wrong setup as your mech for that fight, you are going to have a really rough time and it won't be a lot of fun. This isn't to say they are bad maps, its just that they require a much narrower set of tools to make use of them. If Alpine could have a large refinery complex put in the north or south side, so brawlers would have a spot to advance and fight, I think a lot of irritation would be faded for Alpine. This however would only work if Domination were removed from Alpine. This leads right into my next point...
As some folks have pointed out, some game modes just don't work great on some maps. If you could remove or at least weight the probability of certain game modes/maps combos happening it would be great. Additionally, for some game modes like Domination, please don't have the spot always be in the same place. Each Domination map should have like 5 possible spawn points that are equidistant from the two teams and one is selected by the game at random to be the Domination point.
Finally please bring back the old Polar Highlands map. The new one is great as its own map, but I really miss running around in the snow trenches of the original Polar Highlands in my RAC5 Urbie. I loved popping up on the steps and reenacting the trench wars from Hoth firing at enemy Atlas as they slowly lumber towards me across no man's land. The only thing would be maybe spawn the two armies a little bit closer together at the start of the match.
Void Angel, on 17 August 2023 - 11:42 AM, said:
I loved the original Polar Highlands; my experience of the people that hated it was that they would assume it was a "sniper map," and try to camp in place to shoot Gauwz Rifflez at people, and refuse to move. The problem was, there was a covered and concealed route to get most any place you wanted to go on that map - and once the enemy team got onto the same side of one of those low, rolling hills, there was no place for the snipers to run. It was the second map (the first being Viridian Bog) that strongly rewarded mobility: the side that maneuvered better tended to win.
That being said, the map had a
critical failing in its near-total lack of LRM cover. If one of the randomly-selected PuG opponents had a Light to spot, it turned into a hellish slog through high-explosive rain. Kinda like brawling, sometimes:
What I wanted them to do was add raised solar panel arrays (on poles, so you could walk 'mechs under them) and deepen the trenches a bit to allow for breaking locks and sheltering from missiles, but they chose to add a ton of vertical space. The result is a map that I like, but I really miss the style of the original.
Similarly, changing Alpine around to be less "long-range
required centric" would really help the map out. Maybe make two peaks, I dunno. The map is
so heavily weighted toward long-range play, especially in the Quickplay environment, that it's often simply not fun to play Sometimes, you can get up the back way and wreck the enemy team that's camping on that mountain, but if your 'mech can't climb, or your team doesn't have enough short-ranged builds, it's rough. The least-fun matches I have ever had in the game are all from Alpine Peaks. Even Solaris City, often touted as a brawler-only map by its detractors, has some longer lines of sight and choke points to balance out the average engagement range.
So I'm seeing a lot of similar themes in both of these posts, and all I can think is: those areas already exist on Alpine. There's a built up town with lots of buildings and cover towards the back of the map, there are two opposing peaks which can snipe at each other (over the top of that same town, and previously with similarly vertical walls, but now with major access ramps cut in one side).
I feel as though the issue isn't so much that the map lacks the available terrain, as it is that the spawn points don't encourage its use.
I LOVE the idea of the Domination point being randomly placed, though. Something,
anything, to break up the monotony of walking to the exact same microdot and ignoring 90% of the map. It's an impossibly popular game mode for some reason, though: I can reliably build up a multiplier of 8 or 9 just by voting against it, it's that common. Generally, the only time I don't play Domination is when it's not an option. So making it more varied would be very nice.
JumpingHunter, on 17 August 2023 - 03:25 PM, said:
That also is a good point. Domination simply lock matches down in the tiny circle, and everyone there are either being smelted together like fruits in kitchen blender or get sniped by those who don't participate in capture, and instead are sitting on nearvy rock and target practicing. When majority of players pilot a brawling mechs, matches become a slaughterhouse, with little to no places to regroup, and when more than half of players are snipers game becomes a sniperfest, while 2-3 guys actually run around circle trying to cap/flank/break enemy lines. On good and generally smaller maps, like Vittric Station, it works, but on larger maps that are designed around having big spaces for maneuvers it just becomes a very unnatural and forced experience.
I would suggest changing domination on some maps to this model: you get 3 or 4 smaller circles that are all required to be capped and held for 1 minute (or 30 seconds) just like original single circle. This would encourage teams to split up more, will force players to relocate from their main murderball formation to cap these circles. Ideally one lance will fight in one circle at a time, and after initial fighting is over and some circles are capped and held, players can go and either eliminate remnants of enemy team or cap hold their controlled circles. And win condition would be either if you eliminate everyone on enemy team and hold all 3 circles for equal or more time than enemy did, or if you had less time remaining on 2 circles at the end of match timer.
But it would ONLY WORK IF CIRCLES WILL BE NOT IN CENTER OF MAP! Conquest are suffering from Theta being in the center of the map, so majority of players simply walk there and make conq play as skirmish, and then lose to that one light who capped all other 4 points. If all 3 circles would be split around the map, withc NONE being near center, it would make game flow much differently from the skirmish or current domination with horrible brawling ring in center of map.
And conquest should also get some point displacement, because now it's also too center-based, most of the action often flows in the Theta point, locking game down in center of map.
So I like your plan, but it sounds oddly familiar.......
Conquest already does exactly this. Now, insofar as Alpine Peaks goes, I will agree: those points need to be spread out a bit. The fact that one well-placed sniper can deny access to 4 of the 5 cap points, and only because number 5 is out at the edge of the map in no-man's land, means they're too close together and need some space.
Otherwise, this is exactly what I loved about Conquest on Polar Classic, and find boring and repetitive about Conquest on Polar Ruined, is that on Polar Classic, the cap points weren't in a cross pattern, they were in a ring, and the fight was usually a
lot more dynamic depending on which way each team decided to rotate, and what cover they found.
As far as there "not being a lot of LRM cover", that was only true in the middle of Polar, which was also where the Domination Circle was set up, which, as noted above, was voted for so heavily as to be a reliable multiplier generator. If you stuck to the edges, there was (and still is) a lot more craggy terrain, larger rocks and ice chunks, and much deeper trenches where you could hide. And of course, there were the built up areas, if you had the option of camping inside one.
Ultimately, the ability to snipe on that map was definitely there. The ability to stay in the low ground and get close for a brawl was
also there, and depending where you stood, LRM cover was in abundance as well. More often than not, if I brought an LRM boat to Polar, and it wasn't Domination, I had a hard time being effective until I was directly supporting a brawler as fire support because the ranges were too long, and I couldn't reach with my missiles. Once the brawl started, though, nobody's looking for cover, anymore, because you're busy dealing with the guy 200m away, and a LRM boat can be a very effective force multiplier. Same goes on any map, though, because the brawler pushes the enemy 'mech out of cover to give the LRM boat a clean shot.
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