Comments on: Scout Update Day 4: Community Maps & Details

By: Oak

Oak — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 01:18:56 +0000

Also, uh, just look at it.

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:18:26 +0000

The orange maps are all awful. Utterly, utterly awful. Instant never return to server if they come on.

By: Nimic

Nimic — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:19:40 +0000

Dave, I certainly agree that Snipers and Scouts are quite a bit ahead of the rest on orange_x3 and the lot, but then I’d argue that orange_x3 simply isn’t a good map. Sure, it’s fun once in a while, and I play it occasionally myself, but it’s not very balanced. It’s basically a big open space with a tower and a couple of walls.

By: Welka

Welka — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:11:30 +0000

Pod: I could go on at length about how ridiculous your claim is, but I won’t. Instead I want to remind you that Horse Armor costs $2.

By: Yam

Yam — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:03:03 +0000

Pod, it’s an effort to keep the community vibrant and make pubbing “work.” Think of it like this: for TFC, Valve released no community maps. They released 2fort, well, cz2, push, hunted, and rock2 originally. Badlands, crossover2, dustbowl, epicenter, ravelin, and warpath came later. These maps had vastly different levels of popularity in pubs versus clan play. Clans used 2fort, well, crossover2, epicenter, and warpath. Pubs stuck to 2fort, well, hunted, rock2, badlands, crossover2, dustbowl, and warpath. The problem is that there was a vast library of “community maps” that played better than any of the official valve maps. Shutdown2, pitfall, monkey_l, schtop, 2mesa3, mortality_l, mulch_trench… most pubbers never played these maps even once because they required a download, and the vitality of the pub game collapsed because of it.

Valve is trying to avoid that by picking guaranteed-good maps and releasing them officially. Clan play is all well and good, but it can’t keep their game alive, so they want to make it as easy as possible for people to experience the good maps that the community generates.

By: Pod

Pod — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:38:22 +0000

I’m a little dissapointed aboout “community maps”…. after all, those maps have already been out a while. It feels a bit….lazy, on Valves part.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:04:54 +0000

I play a lot of orange_x3 and their variants, and scouts are fairly awesome there. Snipers are terribly useful, but that just makes being a spy that much more fun.

Scouts in dustbowl, though… not so much.

By: Nimic

Nimic — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:10:29 +0000

The scout is dangerous, but I’d hesitate to call him the most powerful. If we’re talking in truly skilled hands here, I’d say the Demoman is the most powerful. I’m a pretty good (even very good) demo, but the truly top demo’s will rip anything apart.

By: espy

espy — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:23:46 +0000

Strange, I always get a page load error for that feed :( Must be something on my end, then.

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:01:24 +0000

This espy? http://feeds.feedburner.com/RockPaperShotgun

Seems fine to me.

By: espy

espy — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 10:36:12 +0000

Scuse me, has the RPS RSS-feed stopped working for anyone else? The feedburner thingy is apparently borked, and has been for quite a while now.

By: the affront

the affront — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:10:40 +0000

Scattergun to get a poor-man’s rocketjump and compensate for the loss of doublejump from the bat thingy – that’d be awesome. Quite possible totally overpowered, but awesome.

Now there just need to be more open-area maps to race around and scout-duel or shoot people in the back pointblank on instead of all the pl_ crap :P