*yawn* some words from the mapping team lead at FHT, just got back from vacation from denmark and quite tired.
One must not measure our tournament maps against the same benchmarks as the stock maps or most of the custom maps when it comes to call it "completeness" or beta stage.
Whereas stock maps are done over a rather long period of time (I assume that from the general update frequency of FH2) and most custom maps are done mostly by one person without any external factors like deadlines etc (also an assumption here by me), we at FHT hold a campaign twice or thrice a year with about 16-18 maps in it.
Therefore, we do have very tight timeframes in which we can do our mapping work, and we do have to work on many maps in a very short time. And if we fuck up, the tournament suffers, and then the admins suffer :-)
Therefore, we unfortunately often do not reach the level of detail or work out flaws (of which we often are very aware believe me), simply cause there is not sufficient time. And of course we always have too few mappers, so feel invited if anybody thinks he can contribute :-)
Also, we try to focus on the gameplay. That does not mean that eliminating every floating object or adding nice statics all over the place or making nice textures and under/overgrowth is not in our focus, but our tournaments thrive on good gameplay, not on the last 15 % of work put into a map.
The real work we have to do is balancing, which is I dare say probably the harder job. Every map that did not work out good in our campaigns did so because it was unbalanced equipment/kit wise, not out of call it "visual" issues.
Probably on the contrary up to a point. Look at Juin 44 from den75, which he allowed us to use in Wacht am Rhein. I converted it into a winter map, added some flags in the outer terrain, really beautiful map, detailed, and well thought out.
But: A lot of players had horrible lags in the city due to the high number of statics in the map :-( I think I have to twiddle some there, cause the map is really good and for those withouth lags it was a pleasure to play.
This of course does not excuse certain errors. Yes, there are some serious flaws. Unusable MGs and floaters are annoying, on Elsenborn the roads are still a major issue. Blame me as I did the map, but it was my 1st :-) I only got into mapping 03/2013, so don't be too hard on me
Regarding push and flag layout:
We do not use push in the tournament. We tried it on two maps this time: Bloody Gulch and Stoumont.
Both times it failed horribly because in organized teamplay, reducing the attackable flags to only two spells disaster, especially as we work with rally points instead of SL spawning which give another boost to the defending team. Push with 40-50 guys against two flags where all 40-50 defenders are organized in squads and follow the same orders. It's a meatgrinder.
Nordwind: it was said that the three center flags get all the attention and the rest lies barren. Again here, in the campaign this was one of the best maps with action all over the place because no flag is ignored. There may be lull at a flag for some time, but still it will always see action. This is the difference in comparison to public.
But i concur that Nordwind and Elsenborn in the 64 layer should have push for public. We might even implement it, only mapdata stuff I'd say.
Both do have 32 and 16 layers with 5 flags each if somebody noticed, those would have probably been more fitting for public us. Next time probably.
And as Odium said, it's a start.
