Everyone plays the same 10 maps all the time

[FunkySusie]

Some time ago I posted a thread about the available map pool. Vintage provided the list and I was shocked by how many maps were available, when the majority of time both NA and EU servers play the same 10 maps again and again. Only rarely do I see some unusual map being played. To be honest I'm getting pretty tired by it and really want to try new stuff out, but no one ever picks anything unfamiliar.

I had an opportunity to play cp_furnace once and it was so fun, a lot of people in chat said it was their first time playing on that map. I've been nominating it, but it has only been chosen once, unlikely when I didn't feel like playing. It's a tricky issue that I'm not entirely sure how to solve, but it's clear to me that with how things are set up right now, it doesnt help in varying the gameplay. Maybe some kind of change to how maps are chosen or putting people into commonly unplayed maps, but still allowing to rtv if people don't like it, would improve this.

 

[VintagePC]

Just offhand:

The map chooser should automatically exclude a few recent maps from the list and pick any non-nominated maps at random.

Something we've done in the past on non-official servers is picked random subsets of the full map pool at regular intervals (daily or weekly). Not sure the devs would go for that on the standard servers, but it's an option. The other possibility might be to exclude a higher number of recent maps from being nominated/picked.

 

[Olmus]

The other possibility might be to exclude a higher number of recent maps from being nominated/picked.

This sounds amazing.
Generally, when I hop on I'm guaranteed to face both variants of badwater + pl_upward.
Would be nice to push people out of their comfort zones a little and play some of the other fun maps.

 

[Stupid Sexy Flanders]

This sounds amazing.
Generally, when I hop on I'm guaranteed to face both variants of badwater + pl_upward.
Would be nice to push people out of their comfort zones a little and play some of the other fun maps.

You mean you don't want to play pl_badwater and vip_badwater back to back?

 

[VintagePC]

it's all about finding the balance between a known staple that generally draws people in and the attrition rate between less popular maps so you don't end up killing the server. But I'll bring it up with the devs to see what they say.

 

[kestrel]

strong agree. i had to stop playing TF2C because it was exhausting playing the same tiny handful of maps getting played ad infinitum. dustbowl into 2fort into payload badwater into VIP badwater into upward into dustbowl... etc etc

it's so frustrating trying to play a fork of live TF2 with its own unique gameplay style just to keep getting served up the exact same slop maps back to back because people are terrified at the mere thought of not playing 2fort constantly. i feel bad for the TF2C devs who put all the effort they do into making new maps - especially since most of them are of a high quality (except krepost, fuck krepost)

i think vaultF4 servers having the effective monopoly on providing servers for TF2 classic (besides custom weapons... but honestly fuck that shit) is enough reason to try pushing the lesser played maps at least a little bit more. i'll concede that sometimes mega-popular maps need to be run sometimes to attract players, i just wish there was more diversity in the selection

i'd like to propose organizing maps into different "pools" that the map vote cycles between for every single vote, rather than just picking maps at random so whenever a mega-popular map gets selected, it always wins by default
say on one vote you get to choose between 2fort/dustbowl/turbine/hightower, and then on another vote you get less popular maps like gravel pit/kong king/egypt/highpass, and then another you get maps specifically made for TF2C like jinn/amaranth/harbor/casbah. i think having distinct pools would ensure that unpopular maps have much more chance to get picked if they're the only options people have, so they can't just magnetize themselves to 2fort whenever it appears

 

[FunkySusie]

strong agree. i had to stop playing TF2C because it was exhausting playing the same tiny handful of maps getting played ad infinitum. dustbowl into 2fort into payload badwater into VIP badwater into upward into dustbowl... etc etc

true, nearly happened to me as well. i was on the verge on quiting for at least some amount of time, at the time of me making the op. It seems to be better now, but i don't really know what changed. more people like furnace at least and it gets voted for more often, but still

 

[VintagePC]

We doubled the number of excluded maps on the standard servers late last week, hopefully that helps a little. (Current value is 10)

Interesting idea about the map pools. I don't think the stock map voting plugin supports anything as fancy as what you're proposing.

There are other plugins from TF2, of course, but those come with their own problems because of TF2's pre-SDK2013 menu system; we used to use UMC in the past but it didn't support the SDK2013 voting panels and we had people griping that the map vote would interfere with their weapon quick-switch number keys if it popped up at an inopportune time.

It did allow for map pools and conditions based on player counts etc, so you could indeed set it up to pull in some of the "staple" maps that attract players if the player counts are low and encourage less common maps if the server is near capacity

Maybe it's been implemented since then, I'd have to take a second look.