Originally posted by Skuzzy
Don't get all wadded up about it. We made this change and we may change it again. Still stirring things around to see what looks good.
My $0.02, which won't change regardless of how long this new system lasts...
Having the map change at every reset is a
bad thing. It was the bane of organized squad and multi-squad ops the whole time it was in force. Because there was absolutely no way to predict which map would be up on squad night, very little in the way of advanced mission planning could be done. With the great differences between all the various maps, even specifying a general mission type was problematic, unless that mission type was so generic that it could be used anywhere. And such mission types get old after a while.
Thus, those of us who plan squad missions greeted with great joy the erstwhile system of having all maps up for a full week at a time. This enabled us to plan missions that actually fitted the special features of the map we'd be using. There was much celebration when this change went into effect. And this is why it's with great sadness that we face this new decision to go back partially to random maps. So please keep all maps up for a full week.
OK, that's MHO on the way maps change. As to the merits of specific maps, which is a different matter, I offer the following:
The best maps IMHO are those with lots of water and CVs, combined with some large land masses, to give ample scope for both naval and GV ops as well as air stuff. Also, the terrain shouldn't be extreme as to field alts. IMHO, the Pizza map fails on both counts, while the Mickey Mouse map fails on account of too few CVs and insufficient islands for the amount of water it has. If it was up to me, I'd drop both of those maps and leave all the others up for a full week. That would give us a 5-week rotation.
That's not to say that I don't appreciate the effort put into making the Pizza and Mickey Mouse maps. I know all too well what a pain making a map is, and I'm grateful for folks taking the time to do it. But IMHO those maps just ain't much fun. So if there's a choice between having all maps up 1 week each and dropping maps to make that possible, I'd go with dropping those 2 maps.
In the editor forum, I've seen authors say large maps like Snowflake and Pangea were ready months ago, yet they're not on the rotation today. What happened to them? I could see replacing NDIsles with Snowflake and Baltic with Pangea if HTC is determined to be rid of small maps. Both those new maps looked very cool. Just for the record, however, I happen to LIKE small maps. IMHO AH should always have 1 or 2 small maps to bunch everybody up into huge clots, just for a change of pace.
As for those who are saying that more folks should build maps, I say try it yourself before sounding that call. Making a map worthy of being on the AH host is NOT a trivial task by any means. The editor is pretty cool but there are still a large number of things that have to be done painstakingly by hand or they look like crap. Contours, coastlines, etc. Plus all the room for making errors in setting up fields, zones, spawn points, supply trains, etc. Then if you really want to do it right, you have to make new terrain tiles, new skins, and all that. It's a tedious nightmare unless you just groove on all that stuff.
I suppose this is cool on the balance. If making maps was a snap, we'd be flooded with them. OTOH, at present it's so difficult to do RIGHT that we don't have enough, perhaps. And I'm very curious as to how the terrain system changes in AH2 will affect all the current maps.
