csWaldo

You should honestly reconsider what you want this map to be. Your're hardly pushing boundaries and inspiring others here. Verticality, free movement and jumping puzzles are nothing new to cs so much so that the community has made entire game modes around those things and they have been popular through multiple instances of the game. Many old cs layouts feature large verticality, uncommon layout structures and other novel ideas. None of this is news to us. The idea of a fun, casual map is nothing new either. People have been making them to play with their friends and on LANs since forever. We have playtested maps like this here before. And they can be good fun. However, none of these maps claim or try to be competitive because they simply are not. What you are doing with this map in regards to competitive is pushing boundaries in the same way that playing chess with only kings would be pushing boundaries. It was obvious that this would be the case with your level from the start to a lot of us but when we told you, you acted like you know better than all of us despite barely ever having played the game let alone made maps for it. We still playtested it and everyone at the playtest gave you the same feedback: It was kinda fun, because it was very chaotic and wild. But it also didn't even rate as a competitive layout. The concepts youre trying to add to the game simply don't work on a competitive level on the scale you are trying them. If you want this to be a competitive map, you need to actually understand how competitive is played and build your level towards that. Dismissing this feedback from the entire professional community as "you guys just didnt learn the map well enough and you just dont care enough to figure it out" is silly and arrogant. So, figure out what your goal is here. Wanna make a crazy, fun map that has all the features a competitive layout is generally missing? Go for it. Just dont keep telling us about how it is actually the best competitive map ever and all other maps are stale and generic. Because by your own admission, you know nothing about that. Or try to make a unique, well working competitive layout. There is always room for innovation and new ideas. But if you want to subvert the rules, you must first properly understand them. People here are generally very helpful and give you tons of great advice and feedback. Just stop dismissing everyone and take some of it.

No, my objections do not come from a lack of comfortability. They come from years of level design experience in cs, playtesting experience, running playtests for another community for about a year and hundreds of hours of match making. I'm wondering where your confidence is coming from. Anyways, it playtested the exact same way as one would imagine. There was little to no structure each round. Chokepoints and meeting points of the teams are not really defined, so setting up a real attack or defense is pretty much impossible. In most areas, you are open to about half the map, so instead of methodically clearing areas, you are just kind of running through, running and gunning. The map feels much more like a general shooting arena, rather than a comp layout. Theres really not much more to it.

The map lacks structure. Competitive CS is all about control and information. Both teams are trying to either defend or attack one or both bomb sites at all stages of the game. Knowing where the enemy is, what options they have to reach their objective and how you can stop them is key to the cs experience. It allows all players to make meaningful decisions about where to push or where to hold. It removes unpredictable kills and allows each players decision making and aiming skill to decide the match. On the level design side, maps should be built to enable and emphasize this. The official map pool has a number of different takes on how a cs layout can look, but they all share some common design ideas, because they are simply necessary to allow for players to take control over their match. such as: choke points Pretty much all maps have roughly 4 choke points that seperate the T and CT side of the map. Controlling these choke points means controlling which team has access to what area of the map, so they are key in giving matches structure and players control. setup and rotation areas Bomb sites are a given on any defuse layout, but these always need to be connected to a network of setup and rotation areas, that allow teams to prepare their attacks and move to other objectives and choke points on the map. Level designers need to make sure that the amount of options in these areas are fine tuned. Teams only have 5 players each, so for example, if each bomb site would give terrorists 3 options to attack from, the CT team will simply not have enough players to watch all of them even before any CTs have died. At that point, it becomes more about the luck to choose the right entry to defend rather than the skill to set up a proper defense. number and type of angles Say you need to defend any given area. The number and type of spots you can position yourself in and the number and type of positions you can be attacked from need to be fine tuned. There is only so much that can fit on your field of view, so too many positions already remove control from the player, as there is simply no way to tell angle to hold. Verticality can add to this problem. Having to move your crosshair large, vertical distances is difficult. Having to do so gives the attacker pretty good advantage. plant zones Plant zones need to be set up so that Ts get a good chance of planting when attacking the site and CTs get a good chance of defusing. Otherwise the game can end up very stale, where almost no bombs are planted or almost all bombs explode as they cannot be secured and diffused in time. In regards to your map: The ability to walk on almost all walls and roofs removes all that. Choke points become meaningless and rotations become unpredictable as players can move very freely across the map. At the same time, players moving on the walls are exposed to unmanageable amounts of angles from all directions. This is very high risk, high reward without much influence over the outcome. Neither team can really control when or where they will be attacked from. Skill, prediction and planning and overshadowed by trying to rush your enemy from behind with a p90 or jumping on their head with a shotgun. This also means angles all across the map are just unpredictable. You cannot properly defend any area, as you can never be sure where you can even be attacked from. Smokes and molotoves lose meaning, as there are no clear choke points you can block off. At the same time, flashes become overbearing as just throwing them towards the center of the map will flash 3/4 of the server. The plant zones dont encourage skill either. Having plant zones on multiple heights on both bomb sites makes it very easy for Ts to sneak in a bomb plant, as CTs simply cannot watch all possible points of attack at once. It also makes defusing hard and frustrating, as you first have to figure out where the bomb is even planted. Wasting 10-15 seconds just on finding the plant spot will doom most retakes, as there just isnt enough time to clear the site and diffuse the bomb anymore.

Calling the top contest maps conformist and not innovative and saying their creators are only in it for the prize pool seems to be popular with people who haven't really been part of the community that produces these maps. But it doesn't reflect reality at all. From my experience, for the guys who make these maps, level design and environment art are their passion and the prize pool and competition only serve as an excuse to spend the time required for such a project on a hobby. These maps are the communities best effort to create new competitive Counter-Strike maps. That is also the reason you are not seeing crazy new layout formats, 3 bombsite designs or highly overdeveloped layouts sparsely decorated with stock assets. Competitive Counter-Strike is a massive esport with a huge playerbase. The expected gameplay loops have long been defined. The amount of complexity and control players have on maps is expected to be fine tuned to what people are used to. The aesthetic and its priority in relation to gameplay has long been defined. At this point, for competitive CS making an innovative map really does mean coming up with fresh spins on old ideas. If you don't want to be tied down by those restrictions, the game has a few other game modes that are worth mapping for. Dangerzone and Wingman are getting a lot more attention in the community right now. Both of these game modes have not been around for very long and are still very open to new concepts and ideas. Hostage desperately needs an entire rework of its mechanics and or economy. And nothing is stopping you from developing your own game mode. 3 bomb sites simply do not fit what 5v5 competitive cs is all about. Doesn't mean you can't make a fun game mode around 3v3 maps. Just a bit pointless to complain about all those things not being part of or winning in a contest that is about 5v5 comp maps.

You could say this cliff is made out of rock.

A little more space would be appreciated

Could you post the brightness and ambient settings of your light_environment? The light looks quite yellow and dark to me, making the map look very 2012.

If everyone is stuck making awful maps, just make a great one, win the contest and get into the game then.

This argument would hold more weight if a single person complaining about zenith was actually impacted by it. The rules encourages older projects to be picked up and finished, which is a good thing imo and 8 months is enough for anyone to make a contest winning map. If you can't, then you should probably use this opportunity to practice rather than to tear down other peoples work.

Not sure what any of this has to do with the theme of the contest. Yeah, a really specific theme would have made less already in the works ideas eligible. So what? If the theme was more specific and this map happened to fit that theme, would that be ok because it was less likely? By your logic the way it currently is would be even more fair than a specific theme. If pretty much any map can be entered, then we all have the option to use our old ideas. It's not much of an advantage anyways. Everyone gets enough time to make a completely new, winning map from scratch. This is entirely down to the rules and they allow previously worked on maps by design. It'd be pretty much impossible to check whether a map had been in development or not. Right now the rules make it really easy to disqualify a map that had been largely finished already while still allowing older WIP projects in. I think this is much better than making it about who was able to hide their old projects best, just to be able to submit them here. There's a point to be made about the time lapse in this post. Clearly the map had pretty advanced art before the start of the contest, even if it hadn't been published. I wouldn't worry about it though. Anyone who deserves top 10 will get there, with this map in the contest or not. You probably don't have to worry about it stealing your spot.

That's not entirely true. A lot of these assets (including Yanzl's) are free for non commercial use only. I doubt anyone will be upset if you're just submitting your level to be part of the contest, but if there's any chance of you winning money in this contest with someone elses assets, you would probably want to talk to the asset creator beforehand, unless the assets are specifically licensed for commercial use. Custom assets aren't just set dressing that some artist will make for you in return for prize shares, usually. Environment art is just as much part of a map as is level design. People have different strengths and both aspects require a lot of work hours so most experienced people here will gather in small teams and split up the work to get the project done in time. If environment art isnt your strong side then ideally you should look for a partner to share your project with who can deal with that side of things. Though a single person can still manage on their own. The best example of that would Biome, the winner of the last contest.

Afaik Yanzl allows the use of his assets for commercial use if you give him a cut of all earnings. You just have to talk to him to work out a deal. Doing your own assets is preferable though. Unique assets really help a map to stand out visually.

I can definitely see why youre getting that feedback. Your connectors kinda look like corridors that only exist because the layout needs them to. They look like they are only meant to be walked through, not played in. In the game however these serve as vital areas to attack or defend mid and the bombsites. Try to flesh them out to be their own proper areas. Doing that will probably require them to grow a bit in size, giving you a bit more negative space and map size as a bonus.

The AC isn't perfectly era accurate and part of a gameplay gimmick became slightly less gimmicky. If this is the feedback you get then the map must be near perfect Map looks cool, good job

The path from T spawn to B looks particularly tight and corridor-ish. If the radar is anything close to the actual area you'd probably want to flesh that out a bit more and make it less constricting. From the radar the mid area also looks a bit worrying. It connects to pretty much every part of the map and even withit itself there are multiple paths you can take through multiple doors. Seems to me like its going to be almost uncontrollable and it'll pretty much mean that once CTs lose control over that part the map falls into utter chaos because everyone can rotate from everywhere to everywhere without really being seen. I would probably either cut this into 2 areas, one for A, one for B. Or simplify it into a single, more controllable area with clear chokepoints around it. I'd probably also reduce the number of ways that lead to mid a bit.