Kuiper
10-27-2009, 11:32 PM
It's pretty obvious by now that cp_well isn't very well-liked by the TF2 community in general, competitive or otherwise. Right now the biggest problem that the map suffers from is stalemates outside of CP 2. CP 2 is really easy to defend, given that there are only two routes into the base and it's right next to the defenders' resupply. It's also pretty hard for the defenders to push out and take mid, further compounding the stalemating problem.
At a bare minimum, I think that the defenders need to be locked out of their forward spawn: make the door one-way so it can't be opened from the outside. It works this way on Granary and I see no reason that Well shouldn't be the same way.
Another relatively minor change that might make the map less prone to stalemates is adding health and ammo to the yard. If there is health in the yard, the attackers have a fallback position that they can pull back to if they fail an attempt when pushing on CP 2, allowing them to be more aggressive. It also provides a greater incentive for the defenders to try to hold yard, rather than just holing up in their base as soon as they lose mid.
There are also some structural changes that could be made to the second point, like adding another route into the base and removing some of the vertical posts around the point to make it a bit more open, but these are a bit more drastic and I'm not sure to what extent you could make these kinds of changes without risking negatively impacting the map's balance.
One thing that has bothered me about Well is the timing on the last control point. Well has a 1-2 second timing, like Badlands. This seems a bit short to me. Badlands can get away with having short timing on the last point because of how tiny it is, but it seems cruel that the defenders on Well can lose last in a single second if a scout touches it. Then again, the defenders do have a number of nifty places that they can defend the final point from, like the upper tier encircling the point. Unfortunately, the defenders' options are usually limited by the control point's short timings, and they need to play pretty close to it if they don't want to get ninja'd. I think that using Granary's final control point timing might be a bit fairer, and allow the defenders to stray a bit further from the point. However, I'm not sure how anyone else in the community feels about this.
Is revising cp_well something that Valve has considered recently? If not, it's something that players in the beta might want to bring up, as the map has definite room for improvement. The fact that virtually every league has left it in rotation suggests that any time invested in salvaging it would not be wasted.
At a bare minimum, I think that the defenders need to be locked out of their forward spawn: make the door one-way so it can't be opened from the outside. It works this way on Granary and I see no reason that Well shouldn't be the same way.
Another relatively minor change that might make the map less prone to stalemates is adding health and ammo to the yard. If there is health in the yard, the attackers have a fallback position that they can pull back to if they fail an attempt when pushing on CP 2, allowing them to be more aggressive. It also provides a greater incentive for the defenders to try to hold yard, rather than just holing up in their base as soon as they lose mid.
There are also some structural changes that could be made to the second point, like adding another route into the base and removing some of the vertical posts around the point to make it a bit more open, but these are a bit more drastic and I'm not sure to what extent you could make these kinds of changes without risking negatively impacting the map's balance.
One thing that has bothered me about Well is the timing on the last control point. Well has a 1-2 second timing, like Badlands. This seems a bit short to me. Badlands can get away with having short timing on the last point because of how tiny it is, but it seems cruel that the defenders on Well can lose last in a single second if a scout touches it. Then again, the defenders do have a number of nifty places that they can defend the final point from, like the upper tier encircling the point. Unfortunately, the defenders' options are usually limited by the control point's short timings, and they need to play pretty close to it if they don't want to get ninja'd. I think that using Granary's final control point timing might be a bit fairer, and allow the defenders to stray a bit further from the point. However, I'm not sure how anyone else in the community feels about this.
Is revising cp_well something that Valve has considered recently? If not, it's something that players in the beta might want to bring up, as the map has definite room for improvement. The fact that virtually every league has left it in rotation suggests that any time invested in salvaging it would not be wasted.