[D] HotS beta maps

On September 06 2012 06:27 Plexa wrote:
Almost every map has stuff on it that I hate. Tons of proportion issues, weird ramps and other oddities. The maps are no better than the first batch of WoL maps.

On September 06 2012 18:29 Yonnua wrote:
The korhal one has a double wide ramp and close spawns enabled...

On September 06 2012 22:25 Aunvilgod wrote:
These maps were never made for tournament play.

Blizzard likes to do extreme stuff to make it more entertaining and diverse for casual players. Personally I don´t care, we got more than enough decent community maps.

On September 07 2012 11:06 iiAreJordan wrote:
The third placement on howling peaks is atrocious D:
I wonder what blizzard was thinking when making these maps...
From watching streams, the only thing I found a bit better was the different tile set. It seems to be brighter/less dull than current WoL maps.

On September 06 2012 06:27 Plexa wrote:
Almost every map has stuff on it that I hate. Tons of proportion issues, weird ramps and other oddities. The maps are no better than the first batch of WoL maps.

On September 07 2012 13:27 RFDaemoniac wrote:
While Blizzard's maps aren't great, the HotS maps are better than WoL, and the community maps aren't leaps and bounds better.

On September 07 2012 17:56 Ragoo wrote:


Excuse me?

On September 07 2012 22:09 OxyGenesis wrote:
My assessments of the maps. Baring in mind that I am by no means an expert, I have only been mapping for a couple of months. I just wanted to have a go at breaking down these new maps and describing what I believe their issues are. I welcome counter points to the issues I raise.

On September 07 2012 23:00 NewSunshine wrote:

I'll give it my best shot

Howling Peaks - The options for a 3rd base might not be as bad as people seem to think, the linear one has collapsible rocks at its door, and the forward one is very close to the natural. As for the natural itself, I think it's an experiment of sorts by Blizzard, to see if natural expansion design still needs to be as stringent as it is now, since the main problems with base design concern Protoss, who now have the Mothership Core. Even if it doesn't work, I think they're absolutely right to try it out.

Akilon Wastes - I don't see that much wasted space, this just seems like a complaint that people just sort of echo, without really understanding. Also, when it comes to airspace, it tends to be less significant balance-wise when it's next to a late-game base, which is the case here, so I don't see it as an issue. Also, having 4 XNT's on a 2-spawn map is really cute. :D

Star Station - I'm not sure I get why everyone's saying the textures will be hard to mix with. The cliffs, maybe, but there are some really solid textures in this set that can be used in cool combinations. My main concerns with this map are horizontal rush distances, which appear to be the shortest of the 3 setups, and the airspace on the left and right, which looks a bit much. The Xel'Naga towers are going to be important for holding 3+ bases, but I also worry slightly about the 12/6 bases. I think it's pretty solid overall though.

Korhal City - This is another map that I think they were correct in making, which is to say it is highly experimental. There are some factors which mitigate the deathball-ness of this map I think, the distance between late-game expansions being one. Also, there isn't really a choke outside your first 2 bases, but rather a large area, which will still enable runby's and other such things(until the armies get really big). The airspace might also act to encourage more air-play, which with Protoss of course means less deathball units. The main is another curiosity, another experiment that I definitely think Blizzard needed to do. I really hope, as strange as this may sound, that this map works out in the long run.

Fractured Glacier - This is perhaps my least favorite of the 5. It just looks hastily thrown together compared to the others. I do think, though, that there is some potential on the part of the attacker for abusing the rocks on the natural's ramp, which is something also worth exploring imo.

Overall, I like their new maps a lot, because they're trying to expand the gameplay, not conform to it. They all have fascinating designs that push the boundaries of convention, which is exactly what they should be doing for HotS.

On September 08 2012 00:04 OxyGenesis wrote:
The first 3 maps aren't terrible but I think the points that I raised still stand. There are issues that me, as a novice map maker who does it in their spare time picked up on. Blizz has a team of paid professionals. I disagree about Korhal City, if you manage to make it past 5 minutes (due to the double width ramp) you should have a fairly easy time of getting up 3 or even 4 bases by just parking your army at the bottom of your ramp. I get that it's an experimental map, that's cool, but it's definitely a deathbally map too. As long as they take the things they learn from this map and it is never seen beyond beta that's fine. That's pretty much the case for all these maps tbh, experimentation is great, but these maps really aren't very suitable for competitive play (at least by community standards, blizz have their own (low) standards)

On September 08 2012 00:51 NewSunshine wrote:

You're missing out on something extremely important here. Yes, the Blizzard team is a professional one, and that gives them a huge responsibility as the mapmakers for one of the greatest e-sports in the world. You have to realize, however, that Starcraft 2 is, above all, a game. If the key to mapmaking were simply cracking the balance formula we'd have been done making new maps a long time ago, there'd have been no point to continuing. Blizzard does something with each of their maps that few here seem to appreciate - they focus on everything. I've noticed that the outlook on mapmaking here is very analytical, almost to the point of excess, and I suppose that has something to do with it being TeamLiquid. Blizzard is responsible for making a game that allows for competitive play, but it means nothing if the maps don't add to the gameplay experience. The short of it - they need to be fun maps too. Whether these new maps are viable in a competitive environment remains to be seen - it's newly in beta, and even the unit balance is nowhere near final yet. And yet, all of these maps look more fun to play on than just about any map I've seen on TL. Look at Caldeum, a map made by one of the top Korean mapmakers. Balance is easy, capturing what makes a map fun and unique, one that adds to the gameplay and makes it worth watching, that is the hard part, and whether or not you remember it, it's the reason all of us got into mapmaking in the first place.

On September 08 2012 02:22 NewSunshine wrote:

I don't like to think I make any such equations about features vs. concepts. I don't want to get into a vague discussion which feels detached from reality, so I have no interest in equivocating aspects of a map vs. balance. I'm not saying that if a map is fun, it is therefore a gimmicky one and is imbalanced, I very much have been striving for this middle ground, though you wouldn't see it for how painfully standard Cerberus was. I am not saying Blizzard maps are all balanced and good in a world of statistics, they aren't, because balance is not the extent to which they think about a map, and that's fine. We actually need to have a group of mapmakers which does this, in my humble opinion. They focus a lot on the gameplay, just as Superouman did with Cloud Kingdom(just as an example). Blizzard, however, has a different philosophy from Superouman, one that attempts to cater for players of all skills, going from the top down, whereas Cloud Kingdom was designed more or less for top level play, and the positional games that the top players engage in. Mostly though, they think about more than just balance, which is why their maps don't always cater to standard games. For the debut of Heart of the Swarm, their approach is honestly best.

On September 06 2012 06:27 Plexa wrote:
Almost every map has stuff on it that I hate. Tons of proportion issues, weird ramps and other oddities. The maps are no better than the first batch of WoL maps.

On September 08 2012 11:00 Herect wrote:
I'm laughing at people making "extensive breakdown analysis" on these maps. If they don't have abusive shit, they're OK for a while.

HotS is for try out new things. We don't have a stabilished metagame to even start to make assumptions about these news maps. 2 entrances to a wide open Natural is bad for Toss and Terran against in WoL, right? But you cannot forget that both Toss and Terran can make units that could considerably increase their defenders advantage in the early game (BH, Warhounds, MSC).

I'm happy to see so much experimental things. The WoL map scene is so stagnated. All popular maps look the same and all maps that are trying something new are being rejected.

On September 09 2012 09:12 OxyGenesis wrote:


WoL map scene has stagnated due to lack of support from blizzard and tournaments, not due to lack of good maps. The fact is that some of the best map makers stopped making maps because they knew it was futile when there was no opportunity to get their maps used.

As for breaking down the beta maps, I'm a mapper, I like to analyse maps, sue me. I know they are trying new things out, but some of blizzard's decisions still don't make sense even in that context. This is a forum for discussing maps, I'm not sure what you expected.

Also OxyGenesis is right about the map scene stagnating because the process to get new maps in tournaments is so arbitrary and difficult. The highlight of the WOL community map scene was probably TLMC and the season 6 ladder pool, and nothing has really happened since then. Blizzard needs to be doing something like the TLMC every season, or seriously support a community effort to test new maps and get them added to ladder/tournament pools. The map pool is what will keep SC2 going after its production cycle is finished. With the added strategic depth HOTS provides, every new map that is proven 'good' can offer a larger range of interesting play that keeps viewers engaged. It's important for Blizzard to realize that now so the map scene can thrive once all the expansions are out and balance patches are done.

On September 10 2012 05:57 Sumadin wrote:


Well if what we have currently is a state of stagnation, then what we had before was massive oversaturation. The fact the story of the Starcraft 2 map scene, is that way too many maps are being created for the tournement scene to ever be able to use them all. You can argue that they aren't changing maps fast enough and i would tend to agree.

I can't blame Blizzard for using only their own maps for this test. Fact of the matter is that maps are not only part of the balance, but also part of the tuning process. They need maps that are experimental, to try out their new toys and see how stuff have changed. But they also need maps that are milestones and define what should be balanced.

If i were to take a guess i would say Star station is a map designed to be a milestone. Distance from naturals to naturals are relatively even, the conditions for the fourths are all the same and you can always take it away from your opponent. The only difference is the distances from the third, and it isn't that big. If this map isn't balanced they will make it so, through unit adjustment. Thats my theory anyway.

Korhal city is clearly an experimential map through. It got everything, larger ramps, inhouse bases, rocks of all kinds on the thirds/fourths, massive air space(in a game with 22 range air units). if they expected this to have perfect 50/50 balance they would be nuts.



Blizzard can't do a TLMC every format it would be impossible. Rememper it took a large voting process, and afterwards took 2 formats to implement the maps. I think the best we could ever hope for is that it could be an annual event. Well on the years where Blizzard aren't busy with an expansion.

As for season 6 it both shows the highlights and the pitfalls of mappools decided by community vote. There are 2 problems.

For one community mappers aren't really content to follow the "ladder rules" when they havn't got strict orders to do so(Like in the TLMC). I don't really wanna argue about if the "ladder rules" should be there, just wanna state that Blizzard seems to enforce them strict when it comes to their ladder maps. Point is both season 6 picks was adjusted slightly for their ladder version, which caused some degree of uproar.

Second and probably more important is metropolis. I have said this a ton of times, but metropolis is the disaster that couldn't be allowed to happen to community mapping. It did. It was a brand new GSL map when the voting on which GSL maps should be taken in started. Not much play had occured but pros were already a bit concerned with how turtlely games it seems to make. But noone could imagen how broken the map was. First of all the balance. Metropolis is so favored for ZvT that it becomes absurd. Blizzard might as well make the maps themself if this is the balance they aim for. But the true problem was the lag, and it have caused problems everywhere. Metropolis is the second map ever to be thrown out of the ladder pool mid-season for this, and now it is also out of the GSL.

Point is the map should never have been voted in, and if there was a reason for Blizzard not doing votes in S7 and S8 this could be it.

Phew another novel done. I need to learn to restrict myself.

On September 10 2012 06:19 DrowSwordsman wrote:


1. You're actually right - the TLMC process wasn't exactly efficient and even the "winners" were not chosen purely on how good the map was. The map "Haven's Lagoon" comes to mind as a map that won because of its idea (all expands decreased in altitude from the main), but to this day I feel that was a poor choice because in all of SC2 the TLMC was the one chance community maps had a chance of finding a way into the Blizzard map pool and Haven's Lagoon wasted the chance a good map could've had into making it into the current pool and taking out extremely dated maps such as Shakuras/Tal'Darim/etc.

That being said, I am convinced that if significant effort was put into it a more streamlined method could be created to determined good/better tournament maps at a faster rate (though I'll be 100% honest and say I'm not sure what that method could be). If mappers knew their maps would have a fair chance in getting exposure and eventually get into the Blizzard map pool and tournaments, there would be more maps being made.

2. You're also right about community mappers not following 'ladder guidelines' - this is something that needs to be changed in the future if Blizzard wants to keep an active healthy ladder after SC2's production cycle is over. Things such as having different mineral/geyser amounts per expansion add as much to the depth of strategy in a map as any other facet of the map. IIRC David Kim has said once Heart Of The Swarm comes out they can make the ranked 1v1 map pool more geared towards high end play as they can use a dumbed down map pool for unranked play, I hope this is the case - either way now more than ever the idea that all expands have to use 8m/2g is silly because you can now see the max amount of harvesters an expansion can have on the command center and gas geysers. The idea that low level players would be confused by the amount of minerals is no longer true - they no longer have to make the logical jump to realize that less mineral patches = less workers for optimal saturation, the information is explicitly shown to the player.

In fact, whereas before I was slightly on the fence about Blizzard showing how many workers were mining on minerals, I would be 100% okay with it if it meant Blizzard would be open to having maps that had non 8m/2g expansions in the map pool. The benefits of added depth of strategy would far outweigh any con (that I can see).

3. I don't think community votes are the absolute best way either so I won't argue with your point about Metropolis - I do think that it would be in everyone's best interests if Blizzard regularly worked or conferred with map making teams.


And no need to restrict yourself, I think these conversations are important to have because maps are a huge part of Starcraft II and often don't get as much as attention as balance/theory crafting.


As an aside because the first part of your comment wasn't directed to me but I've actually been thinking about that as well: you were right that for a short while there was surely an oversaturation of maps. IPL4 (IIRC) and NASL S3 pre-season had a ridiculous amount of new maps, and not all were tested. This hurt all of those maps in the long run because there was no way players could practice on the new maps, or give the tournaments enough time to determine map balance. Maps either ended up being taken out en-masse (NASL S3) or most/all maps were vetoed (IPL4). ESVDiamond did a pretty great post (that I imagine you read) that goes into detail how a 5 map pool is optimal, and having one of those 5 maps be considered new or different is enough to have a fresh map pool. If every tournament did that, the map pool would be fresh, yet not over saturated. However it seems most tournaments are either adding way too many, or none at all.

Blizzard did try to adapt their map to current play which is nice to see.

I would still rather see them take a step off on map-making and let the pro map makers (lsprime & others) make the competitive maps.

On September 08 2012 10:09 Fatam wrote:
I think the most depressing thing here is that this probably means that they won't be using many/any community-made maps for ladder when HOTS comes out (which there are plenty of good ones that are better than theirs).

On September 11 2012 11:03 OrganicDoom wrote:


I'm actually happy about it. A whole new map pool revitalizes the game.

On September 11 2012 17:15 Zombo Joe wrote:


Not when its composed of horrible maps. Were you around when Blizzard still used the original stock maps on the ladder?

The statements below are almost indisputably factual, and I am confident that 95% of professional players would agree with them.

Bunker time needs to be increased to at least 40 seconds. Siege tanks should be able to “overkill” units, rather than smart-targeting other units and not wasting shots. Siege tank range should be nerfed by at least 3. Marine build time needs to be increased at least 5 seconds. Colossus need to lose the range upgrade. Forcefield should cost 125 energy per sentry. Protoss should not be able to warp in away from their base.

These statements seem pretty radical, but how else can Zerg possibly win the game? Marine rushes are unstoppable. 4gate is impossible to stop. The game is flawed and unbalanced on so many levels that it makes playing Zerg a joke.

———

Do these argument seem relatively unreasonable? Not as unreasonable as you may think. In fact, these statements are perfectly reasonable, provided that our map pool is Steppes of War, Kulas Ravine, Delta Quadrant and Lost Temple.

One thing that people seem to forget sometimes when speaking about Starcraft 2 balance is that a lot of the progress we’ve made in arriving at this relatively balanced point in the game has come from a better map pool. Close positions have been stricken from all but blizzard maps. The absurdly small maps no longer find themselves deciding tournaments. Rocky thirds that only hurt Zerg are gone. Open naturals that make it impossible for Protoss to safely expand are unwelcome.

Starcraft 2 can be an entirely different game based upon what the current map pool is. It can be incredibly unforgiving to certain races (Zerg and Protoss are the two that are most affected by the map pool), or it can provide countless entertaining and closely-matched games. Even though people might not talk about it anymore, a lot of people would agree with these points, especially members of the mapmaking community (I’m looking at you, ESV.Diamond).

So why do I bother bringing it up?

Heart of the Swarm is currently being balanced on maps that would be laughed out of the Wings of Liberty community.
Let’s go over just a few of the basic problems with these maps.

Akilon Wastes
This is the only moderately balanced map in the map pool.

Howling Peak
The natural has two entrances. This makes walling off or defending Zerg all-ins as Protoss disproportionately harder than any other map in the pool.

Fractured Glacier
Rocks in front of the natural favors two base play. Chance for close position spawns absolutely ruins some matchups. Gold base favors T in TvZ, and Z in ZvP.

Star Nation
Third base is incredibly exposed, making it very hard for Protoss to defend Z all-ins. Close spawns (horizontally) destroys some matchups.

Korhal City
Internal natural expansion make defending as Protoss and Terran incredibly easy, makes for much greedier play than ordinary. Large ramp makes for boring ZvZs as ling/baneling becomes incredibly powerful (remember ZvZ on Tal’Darim altar?)

Obviously we don’t expect Blizzard to make perfect maps, and we know that once HotS is released the community will be releasing maps that are much more suitable for tournament play, but the main problem is that Blizzard is trying to achieve balance through patching on fundamentally bad maps.

No one wants to play a SC2 where Zerg is strong enough to hold off all-ins in close position, because that would make them absurdly powerful in far positions. If Protoss are able to cover open naturals and open thirds in close positions, imagine the impossibility of destroying them in far positions. The only way to balance races on such broken maps is to essentially make them “too powerful” for more conventional maps.

I really, truly hope that Blizzard doesn’t make any more significant patches to HotS without importing some maps from WoL, or at least inviting members of the mapmaking community to create some new maps for HotS. It’s impossible to know how good Swarm Hosts, Reapers, or the Mothership Core actually are without seeing them on maps that don’t grossly favor certain races in certain positions.

On September 16 2012 22:56 moskonia wrote:
Another thing is that the metagame will be very different in HotS, therefore some map features that are a must in WoL are not a requirement in HotS

On September 17 2012 00:44 a176 wrote:


such as?

On September 21 2012 13:42 a176 wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +

right, can someone tell me how the fuck do you ffe on this map

On September 21 2012 23:26 Adonminus wrote:
Who goes FFE in hots? It's now gateway expand era with mothership core.

On September 21 2012 15:01 -NegativeZero- wrote:

The ramp is 3 FF wide, just like on Entombed - it's very awkward to wall and takes a lot of buildings, but it's definitely possible.

On September 23 2012 10:02 Iatrik wrote:
To be honest.
The only good thing about new Blizzard "maps": More textures for map designer.
The amout of real blizzard maps in tournament games is very low. And theres a reason for it.

On September 23 2012 10:23 SuperYo1000 wrote:



Do most even use blizzard maps? or just modified ones...Now that I think about it...cant think of any

On September 23 2012 10:25 Iatrik wrote:


Entombed Valley comes to mind