Good job on fixing the desyncs honestly but it has to be said that you were also the idiots to break it in the first place and then took 45days to fix it.
But today I will just be focussing on the remaining issues that have not been rectified or even acknowledged yet
I would like to say first of all that I indeed have extensive experience in playing wc3. From the european ‘pro-scene’ there is nobody I haven’t beaten (you can find my youtube page if u want evidence of that).
In a sense I have even more to offer than a ‘progamer’ because I have not spammed the metagame tactics like most do. I always have experimented with any tactic I can think of, and any map mechanic that I see.
As well as having a lot of experience with team-games (mostly 4v4), again in the same non-meta fashion.
I don’t want you to assume I’m just some ‘noob’, only to find out later that you wrongly assumed something.
One last thing, I don’t care if you love blizzard and want to defend them, this is addressing specific changes they made while outlining exactly why they are bad.
The changes made to LV maps are more often than not simply horrible. Especially for 4v4 maps.
In short: Some of the changes made seem to have absolutely no thought behind them, some changes absolutely abandon the original design/gimmick of the map, and some changes flat out made the map worse or seem to do nothing at all.
Details on that are coming but let me say first that:
If you reckon that you are a good mapmaker then by all means, create a new map and let the community judge you on that. Editing existing oldschool ladder maps (poorly) that we all loved and basically grew up with is not only lazy but just incompetent.
Of course community made maps are an option as well.
It would take me 2hours+ to write everything wrong about every map so I’m just going to cherrypick the one’s that are easiest for me to explain to you. However you can basically compare any LV map and its original file and spot the pointless (if not counterproductive) changes.
Battleground
The prime example of a good map being turned into a worse and very basic one.
In the original map, you had 4 goldmine’s in the middle which were hard to creep, defend, but also to siege. An interesting gimmick for a map.
For some reason they deemed this (basically the entire purpose of the map) ‘imbalanced’ and opted to instead place the goldmines in between player bases where previously you had orange/red neutral shop camps alternating. Turning the map into some kind of deadlock-but-with-snow map.
Again, if you found the battleground original file ‘imbalanced’ then you would be in the heavy minority, and you would be wise to make a new map according to your own vision rather than flat out bastardize one of the more unique 4v4 maps that we ever had.
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Another telling sign of this maps state is, that in the original file you had 1 orange camp per player, located far behind your base and not accessible from any other place. This was your late-game ‘rainy day’ camp since its ‘out of the way’ (you need to compete for middle early/mid) and it can’t really be stolen by anyone.
But what did classic games team think of this camp? Apparently they figured its a camp for early-game because they changed it from an orange camp into a green camp. If you creep this camp early-game you are clueless, sorry, which is also the only word I can describe the person who made this specific edit with.
Some kind of reasoning along the lines of ‘players need two green-camps herpderp’ right?
Nothing much more to say about this map except that they basically juggled all camps around and changed creep spawns, I can’t objectively show why different creeps are worse the same way you can’t show why they are better. Make a new map if you think that you know better. I’ll have you know by the end of this that you don’t.
Murgul Oasis
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Apparently CGT considers ground textures as imbalanced. Had to get rid of some of those lol, you can see this all over the map and IMO it looks a lot worse.
But more importantly, they decided to mess around with tree-lines. I can not tell you their thought-process behind doing so but it leads to this, units rallying through the middle will now aggro the redcamp. The screenshot is from the southeast redcamp but I’m fairly certain the exact same thing happens on other camps too, and it never happened in the original map.
Want to know why it never happened? Because the person/people who initially designed this map knew what they were doing. and had a passion for what they were doing, and they took their time with it. You however, have absolutely NO right or reason to change their work if you’re doing it so incompetently.
Besides the tree-line BS they also edited the type of items certain creeps can drop, and edited one camp to have stronger creeps. The buffed camp I can let slide, but the changing of item drops is not objectively better. I can’t see why it would be and that tells me that its not. Feel free to explain why you thought it was imbalanced on the old version for 10 years when we played this map just fine
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Anyway if their goal was ‘balancing’ maps’ then why did they touch aesthetics? Ground texture? Tree lines in the middle of the map? Nevermind that they created problems with it like rally points, but why did they do it to begin with ??
Sanctuary
While currently the best map on the 4v4 ladder (I would say) there is something obvious I would like to point out.
Both Sanctuary and Sanctuary LV have 2 red-camps (12 and 6 o’clock) which drop infernal stone from a level 5 ogre magi. Which can be obtained in the first 2-3 minutes of the game even by 1 player.
If we’re talking balance, this is the first thing any knowledgeable person would address since it often makes for dumb games(ie: infernal in human base after 3minutes)
The ogre magi has to be replaced with a tougher creep, or a different item drop, I how-ever like infernal stone etc. but it only makes sense for mid/late-game.
So yeah, they dropped the ball there, the single most obvious broken aspect of this map. They probably overlooked it, if you’re a sane person and you’re still following my thread then you will start to see a pattern emerge. Incompetence.
Besides all of that, they once again juggled neutral shops, goldmines and changed creep spawns. Which is at best not objectively better. Most noteable design error would be them placing 2 goblin labs (for both teams) quite close together. Its pointless. One of them should be a mercanery camp (the green one which they stuffed in the middle I believe).
Also they have two taverns on the map rather close together, I’d say about 800-1000 range apart. They did this so that they could put another red-camp in the middle. Which is fine but the taverns are simply too close together. It wastes valuable space in the tight pathways of the middle. one tavern near 12 o’clock and one near 6 o’clock would be a better solution (or 3 and 9).
Oh trust me I can keep going for another 5000 words easily to address all of the other maps too, but let me just end with their latest LV addition…
Echo isles
They don’t even bother to call this one ‘LV’ even though its exactly that, another poorly thought out change. This one especially left me wondering if they were attempting to buff or nerf something.
They changed one thing as far as I’m aware and its the left side mercenary camp tree-line.
This change seems to mostly address night elf players aow-creeping and it seems to be intended as a buff since the right-hand side has always been the easier one to creep. Nerfing the harder side seems like a weird approach but I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
The main problem with this supposed buff is that now you cannot see people coming to creepjack you from a distance, since the tree-line is directly blocking your vision. Which was never an issue on either merc. camp on this map.
They created a whole new problem while attempting to ‘balance’ things.
The distance between where you place your AOW and where the creeps are standing is not the only factor in making a camp efficient and/or consistent to do.
Symmetry =/= balance btw. When I say that the right-hand side was easier to creep that’s mostly true but not entirely, since on the left-hand side it was a bit easier to trigger lightning shield. and both could be crept perfectly fast enough to not be totalled by a CJ.
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As for from the perspective of other races it seems like a straight up nerf of the camp. Since now, in 2019, for some god damned reason, you can’t see people coming to CJ you. Unless you invest in extra scouting/sentry unit or something.
Some more stuff I need to mention:
In 4v4 they gave us blasted lands and took away full scale assault. The worst for the best pretty much. Blasted lands is a desolate ugly map with barely any objectives. Full scale assault a massive map with lots of objectives and its pretty. It should be obvious for you what to do next @classic games team.
Instead of nitpicking away at oldschool maps, make new one’s and expand the map list. More maps in total would not hurt at all. I’m sure that there is someone out there with the expertize to create balanced, interesting & pretty maps (Synergy2v2 for example).
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I’m going to write more (lots more) about this later but I already spent too much time writing the above. Running out of time right now to go into as much details as I would like to. Also I don’t want to information overload anyone (I realize it might be too late xD).
But I will give a quick and obvious example of a bad and poorly thought out balance change.
Tranquility
Was this intended as a buff or a nerf? And why?
Tranquility’s healing per second has been doubled and its duration halved. It heals mechanical units now. It gives a short invul when you start casting.
Unfortunately I don’t have any clips available right now to show it but tranquility in its current state heals things VERY FAST as you might expect. Copters for example will be fullhp in a couple seconds.
Tranquility has always been top-5 ultimate. Certainly for 4v4 and other game modes too.
How does buffing its healing make sense? If anything it deserved a nerf on its cooldown or something(its quite a low cooldown). If you were looking for an ultimate to buff then there are many crappy ones that you could pick from.
And the invul at start, is it intended as a buff? I heard many people claim that yes it is intended as a buff, because storm bolt cyclone blabla.
However that idea makes absolutely no sense if you consider that previously, on the classic tranquility, you could use an anti magic potion before casting and you would be magic immune for quite long. Much longer than the invul lasts for.
So if anything it seems to be a buff towards being able to interrupt the keeper. But this also falls short in the making sense department when you realize that starfall is(was) an even greater ultimate (again, especially 4v4) and still works the same way as old tranquility.
To me this change outlines perfectly how little understanding the classic games team has of wc3 as its been designed, and as its balanced.
I will make another thread probably tomorrow going into details about balance changes such as : kotg, t2 reinforced defenses, rifleman, militia, aow, bat rider, blademaster, mountain giants, archmage~ You’ll have to wait and see. But you should already be able to tell a lot from what I just told you aobut Tranquility.
![:joy:](https://dou48tnq0ocoa.cloudfront.net/en/warcraft3/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")
worked pretty well. haven’t played 4v4 in a while though because IMO its a complete waste of time with the current matchmaking as well. I consider 90%+ of the games as BORING, its either a level 1 troll/afk/leaver that ruins your game, or a noob(s) with 30-40% winrate in my game that just cannot compete on the level I’d play at, and because of that the game ends in some dumb way.
