Greatest Map of All Time Tournament - Page 3

On June 23 2020 23:11 Nakajin wrote:


It's gonna be overgrowth, because deep down we're all boring people.

On June 22 2020 15:11 ZigguratOfUr wrote:
My analysis:

Group 5

Paladino Terminal is the most WoL of LotV maps. And it's not just the tileset or the anachronistic Line of Sight blocker corner in the main. It also repeats mistakes of the past. All the mapmakers thought the double opening to the nat. was an awful idea that had already been tried unsuccessfully over and over. All the TLMC voters hated the map as did all the pros. And yet by the grace of Blizzard and TLMC judges it ended up on ladder. Luckily we all learned from that mistake and never did we make it again. Oh wait. It got replaced by Defender's Landing. And of the 14 'rush' maps that followed it in editions 7 through 10 of the TLMC, 12 of them were somewhere between bad and irredeemably awful. I really should be more brief about such terrible maps.

Sky Shield is another GSL exclusive. In the words of the mapmaker it is "hard to remember as a good map" and has "bad balance except ZvP". Incidentally Jacky wrote a nice piece about the making of New Gettysburg: https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/511426-production-note-of-new-gettysburg.

Now Metalopolis is a storied map. It was in the map pool for two years and came back for Dreampool. It's the OG map for lifting off to the gold. There's so many great games that happened on this map. It's hard to choose one, but for me it's always the IdrA vs HuK hallucination game that comes to mind.

Triton's a nice balanced macro map.

Typhon Peaks' a Blizzard map. Liquipedia tells me that it was not picked up for GSL and that's not much of a surprise given how poorly designed it looks.

Moonlight Madness is a funny map. It's most distinctive feature is the droppable 'Lost Temple' style ledge. There's some "fun" games where the terran drops tanks on it, builds turrets there and does the most abusive things imaginable. There's a reason we don't do droppable ledges anymore.

Metalopolis is the obvious choice for this group just for the history.

Group 6

Whirlwind is arguably the best four player sc2 map ever. It saw play in both HotS and LotV, was decently balanced in both. It has a simple clean design, and while it has the same rotational issues that people always bring up with 4p map, it's still the best in its class.

Maze is one of those experimental Proleague maps that we don't get enough of nowadays.

Catalyst is the textbook standard medium sized LotV. Games of every type happened on it from the dirtiest cheese to extremely drawn out carrier split maps. It had lots of epic games. And it's so textbook that we've had half a dozen clones of it on ladder since, which means I now hate it.

Stasis was on ladder for only something like two months which was roughly seven weeks too long. Terribly balanced, with crazy abusive stuff for terran around the narrow passages,, it's probably the LotV map I remember the least of possibly due to repressed memories.

Ohana means family, and immortal sentry all-ins. It's another iconic map with lots of great games though most of them were rather short. My pick for the game to remember on Ohana would be the PartinG vs Suppy game where Suppy blind countered with a dozen spines but PartinG won anyways. Suppy went mass spines literally every game in that series because Scarlett had told him that PartinG was going to soul train every game.

One of the original maps from WoL beta. I remember playing on it in 'practice' mode which meant there were rocks everywhere to enforce no rushing.

It's a tough group with two contenders in Ohana and Whirlwind (three if you aren't biased against Catalyst like I am). In the end I chose Whirlwind since it holds up more as a map from a modern standpoint.

Group 7

Waystation has the cool concept of two and one maps, and an absolutely horrendous execution which made the two in one concept feel like an utter coinflip to the pros. You'd win or lose on the close or far spawns.

I have some fond memories of Entombed Valley and tanks sieging the area between the nat. and third. It was a pretty good and balanced map in its time.

Yeah Backwater Gulch is another Blizzard map.

Coda was a very solid map despite doing absolutely nothing interesting or new, and despite the drama and accusations that it was ripped off of Muspelheim.

Mech Depot was a very average map. Fun fact: unlike most maps of that era it has no overlord pods because IronManSC was just coming back to mapmaking and forgot about them entirely.

It's actually hilarious that Muspelheim and Coda are in the same group.

This group is very weak overall. I'm voting for the 'imitation' in Coda over the lesser known original, since it just had that many more games on it.

Group 8

Outboxer was another average map.

Orbital Shipyard was the second best map after Dusk Towers in early LotV, but only because the other five maps were terrible. It wasn't terribly balanced.

Klontas Mire and Fractured Glacier are more ladder map that never got played in any big tournament.

Acid Plant was well liked, but I personally found it to be quite average and rather formulaic with tank pushes from across the debris, medivacs hiding in the dead space behind the main and so on. There were some quite good PvZ and PvTs on it despite the very long rush distances.

Fruitland! You can mine the giant lemons for resources. And obviously I voted for it and you should too.

On June 24 2020 22:08 [PkF] Wire wrote:
I'm pretty sure KSS would win handily vs Daybreak / Overgrowth