IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
@mushookees wow.. typically I can always find flays in any layout.. but thats actually pretty solid as far as big picture goes.
Two small things:
1) i'd move that luggage conveyor belt more north, to put it more in the center of the room, lessening long LOS coming from bar.
2) Landing pad never worked well with an RT, so this will have to have a lot of thought put into it. I suggest a hanger maybe?
I haven't played new docking yet (out of town). But I figure I might as well chip in about that theoretical layout. That cafe-terminal tech point is just a tad huge. A push on that location would be nigh on imposible if its anything like how the place is now.
Docking worked great in public matches. There was no reason to make major changes to that map from a public point of view. No spawns were inherently stronger than any other spawns. Pretty much every room found a multitude of uses with plenty of action. Docking was a fun map that stood out from the rest. And now it is gone because it wasn't "competitive" enough.
I don't mind the changes but I love having lots of maps to choose from. Could you design a map for us pubbers please?
I too would love to see what amazing map Robotix can make... I mean it's obvious he knows what he's doing 100%! He's pretty much got it all figured out... Please share.
Let me start with this statement: Docking is my first map I played and my favorite. I haven't played a game on it yet, but I checked it in an empty server. Esthetically it is way better than the old version, in my opinion. The rooms feel larger and the entire map feels bigger, which is a pro in my book. There are many places, from where the aliens can ambush and have the edge. For, example, Maintenance and Stability. However, Courtyard would prove to be an interesting battleground, where marines can get to high places and shoot the aliens from afar. It will be tricky for the bugs but I think, there is enough cover for them to get close and personal.
Overall, I liked the changes. However, I'll have to play a few rounds on it to say whats I don't like about it. I will provide feedback soon!
I think in general the better you can balance a map for competitive play the better it translates to public play. I don't understand the argument that the new Docking has been designed solely with competitive players in mind. What argument is there that the maps now ruined for pub play simply because it's moving in a more balanced direction overall?
How are two even teams in a pub on Docking going to find the map broken in ways that two comp teams won't?
You can probably pick a few other e-sports games and find that the most popular maps are ones used in competitive play.
Dust2/Inferno
Bloodrun/Furious Heights/Campgrounds
Summit/Tram
Lost Temple/Daybreak
I think the reason behind that is once you get a good balanced map it becomes fun for everyone. It filters up from lowest level to highest level of play. There are exceptions though, I have a weakness for playing Mineshaft. :P
EDIT: (From what I said earlier about South West area of map):
South West has always been a problem. Aliens rarely if ever took it as a Hive location, it was always dead ground for marines who had locker/terminal and if not it became the 2nd tech point for marines while they turtled out for exos etc. (Generally from my experience playing pub).
Arguing that as a point now just because of the changes to other areas of the map holds no merit.
I do like 4 tech points on the map certainly. Maint and stability is certainly nice for aliens, but I in my honest opinion feel as if starting generator makes it feel like im sandwiched.
EDIT: When I mean sandwhiched, I would like to have the rooms a little bigger not many places to hide
Would have been great to not change docking and made a ns2_docking_v2 instead of making everybody mad. Problem is that then nobody would play the new map because on the 32 man server everybody is already sick of it already as its nothing more than descent2_electric_boogaloo.
AngeluszHarmonic entropistJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18072Members, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester
Even though I'm probably a bitbiased, I'm very happy with the docking changes and salute Dux and all of his hard work. Personally, I prefer 5 tech points as well, but the layout is so much better now.
Will have to play more games on it to be sure how it develops, but my initial reaction is: awesome!
To be completely honest, they aren't really helping the situation.
Sometimes you need to get aggressive to get the point across to people who just don't understand, much like the real world buddy; you keep not understanding something I'm going to to get physical and throw a nice right hook and send you down to stars ave.
People are saying, this and that sucks but not providing any reasons as to why; this is considered garbage feedback
Cafe/term would need to be smaller/merged a bit more, but otherwise that's a great looking layout.
Yeah, merging cafe with terminal produces a pretty interesting layout indeed. Maybe also shorten the distance from cafe/term to departures a little bit and remove one of those res nodes in between?
As it is, my first impressions of the new docking are pretty positive, but cafe and bar do seem a bit out of the way atm.
@dux
I'm trying to explain what I believe is behind many of the complaints (except really stupid ones like many in this thread), why people compare the new Docking to Descent, and why pub vs comp is brought up.
Descent and the direction Docking has taken have the same problem (if one considers it a problem).
Those maps are fine from a balance standpoint, and the new Docking is a *big* improvement in this regard (just think of Locker Marines vs Departures Aliens in earlier versions, oh dear). Balance is not the problem.
The problem is (please don't take this literally, it's just the coarse tendency) that these maps are (becoming) relatively
bland,
generic,
random,
homogenized,
just plain uninteresting.
Here's what I mean. It's not about graphics or build quality, those are 100% fine, obviously a lot of effort and money went into that.
It's about gameplay, or rather game playing experience.
The reason (old) Docking was the most popular map until now (and certainly my favorite, the map I think of when I think NS2) is that every room was unique and interesting, visually, spatially, and in gameplay.
A lot of unique spots (like the easily camped vent from Departures to Stability, or the long hallway in maintenance, or Ball Court which is Skulk hell, or the annoyingly exposed power node in release build 228 Departures ... the entire map was made of unique spots!) created interesting gameplay, even if some were technically "imbalanced". People don't mind these "imbalances", they like them (unless they were too bad, and some were consequentially improved/removed). These spots make maps interesting in the first place. Making the map more fair and balanced should not be done by watering down these spots one by one, but by balancing the inequalities of the map so overall no team or spawn location is too biased. Single rooms can be "imbalanced", because being interesting/exciting/unique trumps being "balanced" (except for comp players )
A great example of an "imbalanced" but very interesting map is Mineshaft. Comps hate it, pubs love it. Cave, Central Drilling, take a screenshot of any room, nobody could mistake it for any other room. The same was true for the old Docking.
I remember being lost on Tram and Summit after getting the game for quite some time, confusing locations and even maps, just because everything looked the same and played the same (generic sci fi hallway without really striking features) before I got used to the subtle differences and map strategies.
This never happened on Docking. You saw a room once, you remembered it forever (Generator! Terminal! The most memorable rooms in the entire game!). People loved Docking because it was accessible and interesting, so it provided for fun games where everyone could find their own "niche" of how to play, and nobody cared much about smaller imbalances. It wasn't about winning or losing, it was about having fun.
So what happened now? The north parts of the new Docking are generic hallways (sorry if that does sound dramatic, I just mean it compared to the old unique rooms). Generator is only a shadow of its former self. Those new parts are just way less interesting than the old locations, and feel more like randomly joined generic sci fi rooms.
This is ultimately the problem that Descent has. There are some good locations (Hydroanalysis, Gravity, Observation, Monorail, Water Treatment or what it is called) which provide unique and distinct room to room gameplay, but a big part of the map just feels like more or less randomly joined sci fi rooms, and overall games are not very memorable (it's still a great map).
I have the impression interesting rooms, no matter minor imbalances, are ultimately more fun to play and produce more memorable games than "balanced", homogenized maps (nobody ever votes for Tram in pubs, even though it's a great map).
And because Docking is taking this direction (and you removed quite some spots people just liked and for which they feel they didn't get a proper, better replacement), there are those kinds of complaints and comparisons to Descent.
Don't get me wrong, I don't say you ruined Docking. I don't say it's suddenly a bad map. I don't even say the old version was "better" (realistically, probably the new version is "better"). But the old version was probably more interesting. It's just that you homogenized the map, and people apparently don't like that part. This is why I believe they complain the way they do.
Why I mention this is that the Biodome screenshots give me the same feeling: great production values, great mapping... and looks boring (not talking about visuals).
Maybe it's just a consequence of making maps comp viable?
Maybe it's a consequence of making maps more corridor-ey?
Maybe it's a problem with the concept art, being too tame and unexciting? (the Generator concept is *great*)
Maybe it's the Gorgeous Skulk nerf, which made big awesome showcase rooms less viable?
Maybe it's just the UWE way of iterating, going the statistical top down route which tends to homogenize and filter outliers, instead of bottom up design?
Maybe it's just a tendency in HD game development?
Or maybe people should play the map for longer than 2 days
I don't know, I'm just saying something is happening. Whether good or bad, you people probably know better (realistically, again, it is probably for the better).
Cafe/term would need to be smaller/merged a bit more, but otherwise that's a great looking layout.
Yeah, merging cafe with terminal produces a pretty interesting layout indeed. Maybe also shorten the distance from cafe/term to departures a little bit and remove one of those res nodes in between?
As it is, my first impressions of the new docking are pretty positive, but cafe and bar do seem a bit out of the way atm.
Still wording it like it was serves no purpose other than to get a message across of "I am right because I'm right, fuck you".
And I believe it doesn't requires much else than to separate public from competitive if this map is what comp wants.
IMO as it stands the map has very little soul, just a bunch of random small rooms reminding me too much of decent.
A lot of unique spots (like the easily camped vent from Departures to Stability, or the long hallway in maintenance, or Ball Court which is Skulk hell, or the annoyingly exposed power node in release build 228 Departures ... the entire map was made of unique spots!) created interesting gameplay, even if some were technically "imbalanced". People don't mind these "imbalances", they like them (unless they were too bad, and some were consequentially improved/removed). These spots make maps interesting in the first place. Making the map more fair and balanced should not be done by watering down these spots one by one, but by balancing the inequalities of the map so overall no team or spawn location is too biased. Single rooms can be "imbalanced", because being interesting/exciting/unique trumps being "balanced" (except for comp players )
Most of what you are describing here is just a byproduct of familiarity. Locations are "memorable" literally because you "remember" them from previous games. When docking was first released, nobody had any association with different parts of the map being annoying or difficult. They built that up over time after playing many games on it. The same will be true of this iteration of docking. As an example, marines camping the western entrance to departures are going to be super super annoying. They can just gun you down in the choke of the door on the walkway, and set up a comfortable base behind it. This is going to make for a lot of interesting battles, but nobody knows it yet. Give it time.
Almost every time a new map is released once a game is mature, people say they don't like it. This is independent of the quality of the map. It's just a matter of familiarity. The map seems to lack the same "soul" of previous maps even if everything about it is objectively better. That "soul" is just the number of games you've already played on it and the memories you've built up there.
@dux I think what you've done with the top right of the map is fantastic. Courtyard went from being a big pile of crates to being an epic location. The new entrance to departures is really slick, and I've already had more interesting battles in the new maintenance than I ever had in the old one. The one thing I'd say is that I feel like somehow the lighting got less saturated in generator hive and the surrounding rooms. I remember those rooms as being distinctly blue, and I miss that now.
This looks nice because at the moment with the marine spawn in terminal the quick entrance into courtyard, the shortcut into lockers is back, maintenance is ridiculously easy to set up LoS in with marines like wise with stability.
Having looked at it, a simple vent from generator to the north west corner of maintenance RT and moving the stability vent to the south west corner of Stability would make it a hell of a lot better for aliens to come in.
The problem with stability was that it could be sniped. Aliens did have a relatively good chance to engage with the vent from generator to jump at the snipers.
The problem with stability now is that it's too quick to get to the first engagement spot and then too easy to setup a good position inside stability for marines and hard to engage for aliens.
Add/change the vents as I mentioned, or at least consider them, and you remove some of the strength of the marine positioning and the snipability.
Locker rooms need to be a bit more west and the cafe/terminal more north for this to work out imo (moving generator more south wouldn't hurt either). Otherwise, any alien team spawing in locker or departures would be getting an essentially free second tech node in generator.
Well its just the new docking isnt Docking anymore. I dont say no changes ever to Docking, or no changes at all to the game.
But why the hell did you _>remove<_ docking ?
It isnt Docking anymore. 4 Techs, heavily changed layouts, generic looking, the feeling of Docking is gone.
And on my opinion, the current balance is far worst then before, yea go on and make it comp. only,so make a new map, call it Docking 2 and let the old Docking be as it was, or make minor balance changes. Docking is now the least favorite map , of course that should tell ya what.
Please stop spreading this misinformation, the mapper has already explained that the changes were not made for comp only.
Edit: My only feedback after PT games and pub games : Its just too easy to lock down Maintenance and pressure generator, i feel. Maybe its the long hallway between that and gen that bottlenecks aliens?
Not sure.. All i know is.. at the start of the round if me and one other marine sprint to maintenance we can do an amazing amount of damage, drawing the team's focus on us while we shoot them like fish in a barrel. Wish that vent led into a safe place in maintenance, and not the room after.
Comments
Edit: :-t Those who believe they know best about map design/layout can always contribute to the product they love by applying to the map testing team.
Two small things:
1) i'd move that luggage conveyor belt more north, to put it more in the center of the room, lessening long LOS coming from bar.
2) Landing pad never worked well with an RT, so this will have to have a lot of thought put into it. I suggest a hanger maybe?
cafe spawn would be absurdly weak
I don't mind the changes but I love having lots of maps to choose from. Could you design a map for us pubbers please?
Overall, I liked the changes. However, I'll have to play a few rounds on it to say whats I don't like about it. I will provide feedback soon!
How are two even teams in a pub on Docking going to find the map broken in ways that two comp teams won't?
You can probably pick a few other e-sports games and find that the most popular maps are ones used in competitive play.
Dust2/Inferno
Bloodrun/Furious Heights/Campgrounds
Summit/Tram
Lost Temple/Daybreak
I think the reason behind that is once you get a good balanced map it becomes fun for everyone. It filters up from lowest level to highest level of play. There are exceptions though, I have a weakness for playing Mineshaft. :P
EDIT: (From what I said earlier about South West area of map):
South West has always been a problem. Aliens rarely if ever took it as a Hive location, it was always dead ground for marines who had locker/terminal and if not it became the 2nd tech point for marines while they turtled out for exos etc. (Generally from my experience playing pub).
Arguing that as a point now just because of the changes to other areas of the map holds no merit.
EDIT: When I mean sandwhiched, I would like to have the rooms a little bigger not many places to hide
[ViralXK already posted a mod that turns ns2_docking into the original version.]
I am outraged I no longer get to play the original version of tram and summit why is there no ns2_tram_v1.23 available UWE?
Will have to play more games on it to be sure how it develops, but my initial reaction is: awesome!
Cafe/term would need to be smaller/merged a bit more, but otherwise that's a great looking layout.
-Shrink courtyard
-Place cafe between marine spawn and courtyard
-Make the route to bar more direct
-Make the route from bar to locker less direct
Tah-dah!
Oh, and what architect in the world would put a cafeteria in the terminal. That's just tacky
Sometimes you need to get aggressive to get the point across to people who just don't understand, much like the real world buddy; you keep not understanding something I'm going to to get physical and throw a nice right hook and send you down to stars ave.
People are saying, this and that sucks but not providing any reasons as to why; this is considered garbage feedback
Yeah, merging cafe with terminal produces a pretty interesting layout indeed. Maybe also shorten the distance from cafe/term to departures a little bit and remove one of those res nodes in between?
As it is, my first impressions of the new docking are pretty positive, but cafe and bar do seem a bit out of the way atm.
I'm trying to explain what I believe is behind many of the complaints (except really stupid ones like many in this thread), why people compare the new Docking to Descent, and why pub vs comp is brought up.
Descent and the direction Docking has taken have the same problem (if one considers it a problem).
Those maps are fine from a balance standpoint, and the new Docking is a *big* improvement in this regard (just think of Locker Marines vs Departures Aliens in earlier versions, oh dear). Balance is not the problem.
The problem is (please don't take this literally, it's just the coarse tendency) that these maps are (becoming) relatively
bland,
generic,
random,
homogenized,
just plain uninteresting.
Here's what I mean. It's not about graphics or build quality, those are 100% fine, obviously a lot of effort and money went into that.
It's about gameplay, or rather game playing experience.
The reason (old) Docking was the most popular map until now (and certainly my favorite, the map I think of when I think NS2) is that every room was unique and interesting, visually, spatially, and in gameplay.
A lot of unique spots (like the easily camped vent from Departures to Stability, or the long hallway in maintenance, or Ball Court which is Skulk hell, or the annoyingly exposed power node in release build 228 Departures ... the entire map was made of unique spots!) created interesting gameplay, even if some were technically "imbalanced". People don't mind these "imbalances", they like them (unless they were too bad, and some were consequentially improved/removed). These spots make maps interesting in the first place. Making the map more fair and balanced should not be done by watering down these spots one by one, but by balancing the inequalities of the map so overall no team or spawn location is too biased. Single rooms can be "imbalanced", because being interesting/exciting/unique trumps being "balanced" (except for comp players
A great example of an "imbalanced" but very interesting map is Mineshaft. Comps hate it, pubs love it. Cave, Central Drilling, take a screenshot of any room, nobody could mistake it for any other room. The same was true for the old Docking.
I remember being lost on Tram and Summit after getting the game for quite some time, confusing locations and even maps, just because everything looked the same and played the same (generic sci fi hallway without really striking features) before I got used to the subtle differences and map strategies.
This never happened on Docking. You saw a room once, you remembered it forever (Generator! Terminal! The most memorable rooms in the entire game!). People loved Docking because it was accessible and interesting, so it provided for fun games where everyone could find their own "niche" of how to play, and nobody cared much about smaller imbalances. It wasn't about winning or losing, it was about having fun.
So what happened now? The north parts of the new Docking are generic hallways (sorry if that does sound dramatic, I just mean it compared to the old unique rooms). Generator is only a shadow of its former self. Those new parts are just way less interesting than the old locations, and feel more like randomly joined generic sci fi rooms.
This is ultimately the problem that Descent has. There are some good locations (Hydroanalysis, Gravity, Observation, Monorail, Water Treatment or what it is called) which provide unique and distinct room to room gameplay, but a big part of the map just feels like more or less randomly joined sci fi rooms, and overall games are not very memorable (it's still a great map).
I have the impression interesting rooms, no matter minor imbalances, are ultimately more fun to play and produce more memorable games than "balanced", homogenized maps (nobody ever votes for Tram in pubs, even though it's a great map).
And because Docking is taking this direction (and you removed quite some spots people just liked and for which they feel they didn't get a proper, better replacement), there are those kinds of complaints and comparisons to Descent.
Don't get me wrong, I don't say you ruined Docking. I don't say it's suddenly a bad map. I don't even say the old version was "better" (realistically, probably the new version is "better"). But the old version was probably more interesting. It's just that you homogenized the map, and people apparently don't like that part. This is why I believe they complain the way they do.
Why I mention this is that the Biodome screenshots give me the same feeling: great production values, great mapping... and looks boring (not talking about visuals).
Maybe it's just a consequence of making maps comp viable?
Maybe it's a consequence of making maps more corridor-ey?
Maybe it's a problem with the concept art, being too tame and unexciting? (the Generator concept is *great*)
Maybe it's the Gorgeous Skulk nerf, which made big awesome showcase rooms less viable?
Maybe it's just the UWE way of iterating, going the statistical top down route which tends to homogenize and filter outliers, instead of bottom up design?
Maybe it's just a tendency in HD game development?
Or maybe people should play the map for longer than 2 days
I don't know, I'm just saying something is happening. Whether good or bad, you people probably know better (realistically, again, it is probably for the better).
I hope this explanation helps you in some way
Changes give information which bring more changes.
Who says this is the final version of Docking?
And I believe it doesn't requires much else than to separate public from competitive if this map is what comp wants.
IMO as it stands the map has very little soul, just a bunch of random small rooms reminding me too much of decent.
Most of what you are describing here is just a byproduct of familiarity. Locations are "memorable" literally because you "remember" them from previous games. When docking was first released, nobody had any association with different parts of the map being annoying or difficult. They built that up over time after playing many games on it. The same will be true of this iteration of docking. As an example, marines camping the western entrance to departures are going to be super super annoying. They can just gun you down in the choke of the door on the walkway, and set up a comfortable base behind it. This is going to make for a lot of interesting battles, but nobody knows it yet. Give it time.
Almost every time a new map is released once a game is mature, people say they don't like it. This is independent of the quality of the map. It's just a matter of familiarity. The map seems to lack the same "soul" of previous maps even if everything about it is objectively better. That "soul" is just the number of games you've already played on it and the memories you've built up there.
@dux I think what you've done with the top right of the map is fantastic. Courtyard went from being a big pile of crates to being an epic location. The new entrance to departures is really slick, and I've already had more interesting battles in the new maintenance than I ever had in the old one. The one thing I'd say is that I feel like somehow the lighting got less saturated in generator hive and the surrounding rooms. I remember those rooms as being distinctly blue, and I miss that now.
This looks nice because at the moment with the marine spawn in terminal the quick entrance into courtyard, the shortcut into lockers is back, maintenance is ridiculously easy to set up LoS in with marines like wise with stability.
Having looked at it, a simple vent from generator to the north west corner of maintenance RT and moving the stability vent to the south west corner of Stability would make it a hell of a lot better for aliens to come in.
The problem with stability was that it could be sniped. Aliens did have a relatively good chance to engage with the vent from generator to jump at the snipers.
The problem with stability now is that it's too quick to get to the first engagement spot and then too easy to setup a good position inside stability for marines and hard to engage for aliens.
Add/change the vents as I mentioned, or at least consider them, and you remove some of the strength of the marine positioning and the snipability.
Locker rooms need to be a bit more west and the cafe/terminal more north for this to work out imo (moving generator more south wouldn't hurt either). Otherwise, any alien team spawing in locker or departures would be getting an essentially free second tech node in generator.
But why the hell did you _>remove<_ docking ?
It isnt Docking anymore. 4 Techs, heavily changed layouts, generic looking, the feeling of Docking is gone.
And on my opinion, the current balance is far worst then before, yea go on and make it comp. only,so make a new map, call it Docking 2 and let the old Docking be as it was, or make minor balance changes. Docking is now the least favorite map , of course that should tell ya what.
Edit: My only feedback after PT games and pub games : Its just too easy to lock down Maintenance and pressure generator, i feel. Maybe its the long hallway between that and gen that bottlenecks aliens?
Not sure.. All i know is.. at the start of the round if me and one other marine sprint to maintenance we can do an amazing amount of damage, drawing the team's focus on us while we shoot them like fish in a barrel. Wish that vent led into a safe place in maintenance, and not the room after.