GUIDELINES FOR MAPPERS

[bani]

copied from my post at marko’s forums:

If you want your map taken seriously in competition, here’s some guidelines:

1. Map should be offensively biased, this is especially important for stopwatch mode. Defensively biased maps end up causing 3 hour stopwatch tournaments, which arent much fun. Three maps are hated in tournaments because of strong defensive bias: battery, fueldump, goldrush.

2. Nobody uses covertops in competition. Alternate routes should be able to use dynamite or non-covertops method. Don’t use teamdoors as the only alternate routes.
   Example of bad design: battery

3. Maps should have more than 1 main path / chokepoint to the objective(s), but less than 3.
   Example of good design: radar, oasis
   Example of bad design: goldrush (this could have been fixed if there was a path to the balcony in the vault room)

4. Map geometry is more important than eye candy. A beautiful map is no good if it’s no fun to play.
   Example of bad design: montezuma’s revenge

5. Avoid huge maps. Nobody likes running around 5 minutes to a chokepoint only to get gunned down, spend 30 seconds in limbo, repeat…
   Ideal maps would have travel time of less than 30 seconds from spawnpoints to enter the action.

6. Avoid large open areas. Try to keep pvs areas small to medium sized. Large pvs areas are bad for bandwidth. Break up large open areas with hills/mountains/buildings.

[redfella]

Nice tips. I think that #4 is the most crucial out of all of those that you have listed. “Gameplay is king” as sock put it… and I couldn’t agree more. Gameplay needs to be a top priority when making a map.

[gerby]

2. Nobody uses covertops in competition. Alternate routes should be able to use dynamite or non-covertops method. Don’t use teamdoors as the only alternate routes.
   Example of bad design: battery

Hmmm, well, that´s their failings really. No-one forces a clan to run without a covert op, and quite frankly, I like a decent covert op, although more for his ability to spot the enemy for the team. Granted the team door in Battery is completely useless in competitive play, but that´s a failing of the map design, not necessarily of team doors themselves.

4. Map geometry is more important than eye candy. A beautiful map is no good if it’s no fun to play.
   Example of bad design: montezuma’s revenge
   Hmmm yes but a proper clan map should not look like a dog´s dinner. It IS possible to have a gorgeous map that plays well, and really people should be aiming for both. Ideally they´d concentrate on gameplay FIRST for early releases though.

5. Avoid huge maps. Nobody likes running around 5 minutes to a chokepoint only to get gunned down, spend 30 seconds in limbo, repeat…
   Ideal maps would have travel time of less than 30 seconds from spawnpoints to enter the action.
   I feel this is kind of badly worded. Huge maps are fine as long as spawn points shift to allow you to keep up with the action. Large maps allow a shifting battlefield. One of the things that used to annoy me about RTCW maps (eg base) was defence would basically sit in one place only, it didn´t make for very dynamic gameplay. I´d rather ET maps allowed the better strategically reactive teams to win rather than those with the best camping spots. That´s why I like much of goldrush and fueldump - the tank allows for shifting play. of course, then you reach the final supremely defendable parts, so are back to a ´camping ahoy´ scenario, but again, that´s not a failing of the tanks, but the final part of map design.

6. Avoid large open areas. Try to keep pvs areas small to medium sized. Large pvs areas are bad for bandwidth. Break up large open areas with hills/mountains/buildings.
   As a general rule of thumb that´s ok, but large does not need to mean slow, if designed properly, so it´s not a hard and fast rule. Eg radar isn´t slow because it´s large, but because of over-use of the irrelevant foliage.