See, you yourself are sporting the nice sentence bit "not sure" quite often.
All changes that have been made can have a positive effect on balance, but then again it can also be easily negated by great teamplay. This is the hardest thing to test prior to a release and I think I know at least one mapper who lost his sanity trying to balance a map while having stacked tester teams playing the map one version as allies and the other version as axis
I fully understand how difficult it is to test prior to release and have total understanding when maps turn out to be "unbalanced" after initial release and during public play. You probably can't even reproduce typical public play during the beta testing? (as you have more experienced players in beta testing only?)
However in the "2nd test phase" after the release and during public play two things occur.
1) players come back with feedback
2) you can see the stats of the maps played (I would love to see these as well if possible ;-) )
Combined you should be able to derive that certain maps do not play as well and balanced as others. Not going into details (i guess thats what the feedback forums are for) maps such as Tunis & Luttich are really unbalanced currently and should probably be given a rebalancing try. If this does not work out in the next release, then so be it..
I for one enjoy changing to the 'harder' side of a map just for the challenge. Sure my blood boils when good players stay on the easy side just for their K/D and W/L score, but hell that's humans for you.
Yeah, I know what you mean. But I beg to differ. I also like the "harder" side on maps such as St. Lo (where storming the hill is really hard), Ramelle (stopping the tiger) etc..
In these cases one has a real challenge and gets some sense of satisfaction when overcoming the obstacles.
However on maps such as Luttich (as Allies) this IMHO turns out to be highly frustrating as the inbalance is just to grave.
Just my 2 cents of nagging.. :-)