I have never understood why people want to have only a couple of maps in the mappool. How does that make the game more interesting? For a game to be attractive there needs to be room for suprprises. With the standard 4 maps there is hardly anything that can go wrong for the top teams. Take last season. How many teams really had a good chance of beating say uQ on sd2 or how many had a shot the year before to beat u96d on Oasis. The number of both cases was around 3. give or take 1, and I'd rather take in this case. Now take whichever less popular map like Dubrovnik or even Ice (god I hate this map) and there are at least 3 times as many teams who have a real shot.
As crozz already mentioned in the warleagues article comment, we have A LOT of playable maps, at least two dozen I'd say, sure, not all of them are player favourites. But why call anyone ET champions if all they can do is play 4 maps.
I haven't watched ET since umm I don't know when. Since QuakeCon I have only watched idle.ee games and most of those because I've done Estonian shoutcasts for the community. Watching TV Shop 24/7 is more interesting and educational than watching sd2,sw_grush, oasis and radar over and over and over again. I mean, all of those are great maps no doubt about it, but there is hardly anything radical being made in the tactics on those maps so if you've seen one EC game you've seen them all. A small mappool is in my eyes also one of the biggest reasons why maps become so defensive and spammy.
Oh and one more thing, ET games are too short. If everything goes fairly well a top game starts already 20-25 minutes after its scheduled time. And then we play sd2 and say goldrush. 8minutes + 8minutes is 16 and then perhaps twice as much. Wow we had 32 minutes of game time and 25 minutes of waiting time, and I did not include the breaks between maps and two stopwatch rounds. Now those of you who have been here since the beginning of ET remember that a standard CW at the StoneAge of ET was Goldrush/Oasis both of which had a 30 minute timelimit and were more than often fullheld by both sides. That is 2 hours of pure gameplay. Sure that was a bit too much and uh, 10 mines, no hw restrictions, insane levelups made it go worse by each passing minute, but at least there was more game than pasting stupid irclogs in global chat.
I would suggest a bo3 or actually even bo5 on a predetermined map each week, but that just doesn't suit ET. Boah I'd rather watch Pimp TV than sd2 5 times. Someone might now say that take CS for example 30 rounds on each map, 30 times the same map gets played and that game does not have more maps than ET either. Uh the beauty of CS and mr15 is that each time a different tactic is used and that keeps it interesting, but in ET all the different attacks are used in one stopwatch round, one attack fails - try another or try again. So in the end 2 stopwatch rounds on a map will not be different enough to make the game attractive.
As already mentioned there are at least 20+ competitively playable maps in ET. And with the reduction of spam options most of them get played rather fast. It might be too much, but make both teams choose TWO maps from the big mappool and add a predetermined decider map for each week and play it all in a bo5 system. So the average time for a map to get played is around 20 minutes. If one team has a clear advantage and wins 6:0 it'll all be over in less than an hour. If the teams are evenly matched and the decider is needed its 100 minutes. 100 minutes compared to 25 of waiting time is not too bad at all. And if the game is so great, why shouldn't it last a little?
I am not suggesting this to all cups or leagues. But I think those tournaments that matter should really give something to watch if they want to be attractive. Bah Warleagues CB and ESL matches in my eyes would mean more like this.
A big mappool, new maps to the list and uh in such a scenario I don't even really give a fuck - add those rtcw maps in there too. The way I understand it playing ET today is either for fun or for preparing to be good at Castle Wolfenstein right from the start. If its for fun - playing sd2 and radar 7 times in each league can not be fun :x. And if it is to be good at Castle Wolfenstein then one ought to understand that in a new game it will be all about adapting to the changes as fast as possible and coming up with new and innovative tactics and approaches. Playing oasis night in and night out does not really prepare you for anything else than the next Oasis. Simple as that.
Flame :)
As crozz already mentioned in the warleagues article comment, we have A LOT of playable maps, at least two dozen I'd say, sure, not all of them are player favourites. But why call anyone ET champions if all they can do is play 4 maps.
I haven't watched ET since umm I don't know when. Since QuakeCon I have only watched idle.ee games and most of those because I've done Estonian shoutcasts for the community. Watching TV Shop 24/7 is more interesting and educational than watching sd2,sw_grush, oasis and radar over and over and over again. I mean, all of those are great maps no doubt about it, but there is hardly anything radical being made in the tactics on those maps so if you've seen one EC game you've seen them all. A small mappool is in my eyes also one of the biggest reasons why maps become so defensive and spammy.
Oh and one more thing, ET games are too short. If everything goes fairly well a top game starts already 20-25 minutes after its scheduled time. And then we play sd2 and say goldrush. 8minutes + 8minutes is 16 and then perhaps twice as much. Wow we had 32 minutes of game time and 25 minutes of waiting time, and I did not include the breaks between maps and two stopwatch rounds. Now those of you who have been here since the beginning of ET remember that a standard CW at the StoneAge of ET was Goldrush/Oasis both of which had a 30 minute timelimit and were more than often fullheld by both sides. That is 2 hours of pure gameplay. Sure that was a bit too much and uh, 10 mines, no hw restrictions, insane levelups made it go worse by each passing minute, but at least there was more game than pasting stupid irclogs in global chat.
I would suggest a bo3 or actually even bo5 on a predetermined map each week, but that just doesn't suit ET. Boah I'd rather watch Pimp TV than sd2 5 times. Someone might now say that take CS for example 30 rounds on each map, 30 times the same map gets played and that game does not have more maps than ET either. Uh the beauty of CS and mr15 is that each time a different tactic is used and that keeps it interesting, but in ET all the different attacks are used in one stopwatch round, one attack fails - try another or try again. So in the end 2 stopwatch rounds on a map will not be different enough to make the game attractive.
As already mentioned there are at least 20+ competitively playable maps in ET. And with the reduction of spam options most of them get played rather fast. It might be too much, but make both teams choose TWO maps from the big mappool and add a predetermined decider map for each week and play it all in a bo5 system. So the average time for a map to get played is around 20 minutes. If one team has a clear advantage and wins 6:0 it'll all be over in less than an hour. If the teams are evenly matched and the decider is needed its 100 minutes. 100 minutes compared to 25 of waiting time is not too bad at all. And if the game is so great, why shouldn't it last a little?
I am not suggesting this to all cups or leagues. But I think those tournaments that matter should really give something to watch if they want to be attractive. Bah Warleagues CB and ESL matches in my eyes would mean more like this.
A big mappool, new maps to the list and uh in such a scenario I don't even really give a fuck - add those rtcw maps in there too. The way I understand it playing ET today is either for fun or for preparing to be good at Castle Wolfenstein right from the start. If its for fun - playing sd2 and radar 7 times in each league can not be fun :x. And if it is to be good at Castle Wolfenstein then one ought to understand that in a new game it will be all about adapting to the changes as fast as possible and coming up with new and innovative tactics and approaches. Playing oasis night in and night out does not really prepare you for anything else than the next Oasis. Simple as that.
Flame :)
