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FMPONE

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Anyhow, I had put a pin into this because I couldn't reply on the phone, but haven't been using the PC at home lately either

On 10/17/2019 at 11:25 PM, Interfearance said:

@blackdog I for one am not really too opposed to the platform because the old one was pretty hard and more of a novelty than a reliable route. It is a good part to experiment on. This iterative mapping based on feedback reminds me: Why is stopping Valve from trying to find ways to balance unpopular maps like Train and Nuke? 

I can't make the jump, have never practised it, so it doesn't phase me. Without playing the map, my take is that the cubby is too protected and the platform is a good excuse to put a fence there to make it shallower.

For the question, I guess we would all like to be Valve employees to know the answer! ? I guess the ever-shifting manpower allowed by Valve's structure doesn't help. But hey! This iterative approach is the one they've taken with Vertigo, so one would think this is what they'll do with Mirage, or whatever map gets reworked next.

Popularity argument: I had to look this up because I haven't followed the tournaments closely, it felt every time I tuned in I would see (in order of frequency): Train, Nuke, Overpass, Mirage, Inferno... but the numbers say it's actually the other way around, with D2 to be the most played.
Would be interesting to see a breakdown by tournament phase, I mean do the most played maps get those numbers thanks to the BO1 and fall-off in the play-offs?

Balance: do we actually need to balance the maps to be as close to 50-50%? I remember at the time I was playing CS:S for fun (with a clan, but we didn't know what we were doing) that I used to be very mad when an imbalanced map like Aztec was voted next... but nowadays it seems to me that these maps fit nicely in the overall experience offering good stories (comeback!11) and in the contest of a pro-tournament are part of the strategy of a match in the map-pick mind-game: you float, you pick? And you can use it at your advantage doing what Astralis did with Nuke: perfect the T side that nobody wants to play and win the map right there and then.

Check this out:

  • Mirage and Dust 2 were "imbalanced" as much as Nuke in 2018
  • Mirage and Dust 2 in 2018 were "imbalanced" as much as Overpass is in 2019
  • Train in 2019 has a 4% higher delta compared to 2018, but then was as imbalanced as Nuke in 2019
  • Mirage, Nuke, Overpass are within a 5 matches delta, Dust 2 was favoured only 20 matches more than these in 2019, while in 2018 the two most played maps lead the others by ~100 matches!
  • Cache is the only map really favouring Ts
  • Vertigo is almost perfect 50-50 but nobody picks it anyway

Source:

What those maps have in common? Except Vertigo, they haven't been substantially updated in the last two years (Nuke update was in Feb 2018).

So what to make of all this and answer your question @Interfearance?

  1. I think that the perception of how well balanced maps are is probably wrong (eye test) given that the balance of maps shifts overtime as pros come up with new solutions despite the maps being unchanged;
  2. Manpower;
  3. I think Valve can't make substantial gameplay changes to more than two maps per year, but unless some unintended abuse surfaces, they want to keep it to one map, especially with an iterative approach, so that pros have always something to fall back to, otherwise teams would end up permabanning both the updated maps making it for boring tournaments and Valve not getting any data to improve the maps;
  4. A style choice: the current rate of updates encourages a tactical gameplay, which is the trait of CS; if you were to substantially refresh the maps more frequently than once every two years, you would favour teams rich in raw aiming skill, you would encourage orgs to create "super-teams" and the result would be a scene much similar to COD;
  5. Balance is also altered with weapon ballistics and economy, because all of a sudden you can encourage a certain type of engagement;
  6. Valve is also dealing with an ever-increasing e-sports scene, forget the competition from other games, there's still so much money on the line and companies are trying to cut bigger shares with exclusive, longer tournaments; there's the prospect of Majors not being the most prestigious award to get... so when you put all of this into perspective, updating a map can easily fall way behind in the priorities.

@FMPONE and Sal made the argument of "seasons" way back in 2015, and I had the same feeling as a casual player: I really didn't like that what I can play is determined by what pros deem "worthy". Nowadays, having followed the pro scene in the last couple of years, I'm quite happy because teams don't perfect strategies in less than 6 months. I can also try to emulate tricks the pros do, much alike when playing basketball I would emulate tricks I saw the NBA players do.
Right now what I'd like to see would be for Valve to rotate one map every year, giving to the new entry a minimum two year window of service. Also I'd love them to give a chance to community maps and promote them to the big leagues, but I can see very well how that is problematic (just think that if they didn't acquire or at least temporarily license the map, they couldn't guarantee the necessary updates the pro scene would drive).

Edited by blackdog
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  • 1 month later...

Hey I was messing around offline and I noticed you changed all the textures that previously had muck as their material to dirt/concrete. I was curious if this was intentional and if so why as I cant find it listed in any of the change notes.

I also saw this weird brace made out of dust2 crates has its material set to sand for some reason. Again I wasnt sure if that was international or not

de_cache0005.jpg.25dab0b32a676b70c69da8695ea67508.jpg

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55 minutes ago, fewseb said:

Hey I was messing around offline and I noticed you changed all the textures that previously had muck as their material to dirt/concrete. I was curious if this was intentional and if so why as I cant find it listed in any of the change notes.

I also saw this weird brace made out of dust2 crates has its material set to sand for some reason. Again I wasnt sure if that was international or not

de_cache0005.jpg.25dab0b32a676b70c69da8695ea67508.jpg

The sand one is probably a mistake, I’ll fix that. Probably related to WallWorm material selection default or something. The mud was indeed deliberate as you slide on mud, not intended and bad for gameplay. Makes a nice sound though.

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On 12/20/2019 at 4:17 AM, FMPONE said:

The sand one is probably a mistake, I’ll fix that. Probably related to WallWorm material selection default or something. The mud was indeed deliberate as you slide on mud, not intended and bad for gameplay. Makes a nice sound though.

Oh did you use WallWorm? Is it just for some models or you redid the whole map in it? Or you can edit the original with it?

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29 minutes ago, blackdog said:

Oh did you use WallWorm? Is it just for some models or you redid the whole map in it? Or you can edit the original with it?

Yes, I used WallWorm for every model in the new Cache. It’s an excellent tool that I highly recommend, I don’t even want to know how people managed without it because I’m sure it was painful

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On 12/21/2019 at 5:44 PM, FMPONE said:

Yes, I used WallWorm for every model in the new Cache. It’s an excellent tool that I highly recommend, I don’t even want to know how people managed without it because I’m sure it was painful

Just make the map and its details as a single model in sketchup and then manually copy and paste each vertex coordinate into a vmf. 

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  • 2 months later...

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