seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread
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some facts:
upward is a good map
upward has considerable flaws as map (every point is ridiculously sniper dominant, last is a shitshow even without the dispenser block, aggressive forward holds on 2nd leave attackers with 0 options unless defenders make a mistake)
upward has been played in:
UGC seasons: 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13* 14 15* 16* 17 18 19* 20* 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 (* denotes multiple plays in a season)
RGL seasons: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
upward was first played in rgl s3 on 5/16/11
the current date is 8/21/21
the only time upward was not played was in ugc s7, which was a summer season without playoffs and only had meme maps
it has been more than a decade since the last time upward was not played in a season without playoffs
there has been a growing number of people asking for borneo than in years pastan opinion:
the league would be better off playing a single [one (1)] season without upward in the rotation
another opinion:
dogmatically sticking to poll results until the end of time does not a good league make
another third opinion, this one with feeling:
swapping out swiftwater instead of upward for another PL like has been suggested is beyond fucking stupid
a conclusion:
rotate out upward for borneo
it gives the map a break
it either lets a new meta develop on borneo or silences proponents of the map once and for all
i can stop making these threadsa postscript:
thanks for reading
spu need not respond to this threadan edit:
i don’t need borneo to win i just need upward to lose
millstone, gully, vanguard, rapids, synthetic, hell even sunnycoast would be tolerable
just give me a season without upward -
Exactly what I’ve been saying. Upward being subbed out instead of Swiftwater would be the best move.
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counterpoint: i dislike borneo
source(s): my feelings
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when that new alto drops
no idea why they’re rotating a map out for borneo in the first place but it should definitely be upward over swift
(please only replace cascade with lake and keep the rest of the map pool as is)
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I was one who defended upward when this was initially mentioned, mostly because it’s a map that has been consistently good for a long time and honestly doesn’t have much fault with it.
My opinion is still the same, but I do see the light of letting it be rotated out for a season. Speaking strictly on the payload maps, swiftwater and vigil have both seen very interesting changes to how teams play the map season per season.
For example on swift teams have adjusted how they’ve held second and third, we’ve seen first holds, we’ve seen aggressive fourth holds, and we’ve seen teams retake fourth while on last. Vigil has been a newer map now that has been consistently enjoyed, and teams are still settling in on how to play it and try new things all the time. Meanwhile for upward…well it just get’s played the same way, and you may say that’s the fault of the teams not trying anything new but really we’ve done most of what we can to innovate the map because it’s played EVERY SINGLE SEASON.
Product was rotated out for a season, no map should be immune to this, and I think upward is the least interesting payload map of the three. It also in invite has been picked the least amount for playoff games. I actually don’t think in season 8 it was picked at all.
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Chiming in to agree with the other commenters. We have three well rounded HL payloads in upward, swift, and vigil… then you have borneo. We went through years of testing for borneo, it was always unpopular for things that were truly never fixed, and that remained so until the map was made valve official. If you absolutely had to force us into playing borneo, I also agree that upward getting a rest season after literally 10 years of non-stop play is a fair compromise. Admins really should consult the community before making map pool decisions. What’s next, Badwater?
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If you want to know why boreno is a good payload map worthy of being played read my long drawn out essay about it, boreno is a great map that the players have chosen which will spice up next season greatly.
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im responding to tell you that your thread is stupid because upward, while extremely stale, is more fun than fucking borneo.
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blease understand i’m not willing to die on the borneo hill here
i just want upward gone and borneo is probably the most realistic way to make that happen next season -
the issue with threads like this is that most of the commenters are people who have been playing comp for years and are kinda bored with the map(because theyve been playing it for years)
especially these days, tf2 is made up of a lot more than the few invite players that have been playing for so long, and to have a a koth and a payload that are played every season is a very important thing for lower level players to learn how to play the game better
i know that personally, learning the flow of payload through playing upward repeatedly helped me tremendously, and same thing with product -
make or pro-version-tweak a better stopwatch map (rapids!) and rotate that in instead of borneo
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@Saturation said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:
the issue with threads like this is that most of the commenters are people who have been playing comp for years and are kinda bored with the map(because theyve been playing it for years)
especially these days, tf2 is made up of a lot more than the few invite players that have been playing for so long, and to have a a koth and a payload that are played every season is a very important thing for lower level players to learn how to play the game better
i know that personally, learning the flow of payload through playing upward repeatedly helped me tremendously, and same thing with productAn important point to underscore. In terms of maps which overlap both worlds, Viaduct, while extremely frequently played in the comp scene as its pro version, doesn’t have the same degree of popularity among pub players (aka the population from which new comp players are drawn) – not to mention it being the pro version, of course.
@Dimento said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:
It also in invite has been picked the least amount for playoff games. I actually don’t think in season 8 it was picked at all.
I was unable to compile full league playoffs map pick stats this season due to how tiny the window was between end of season and start of next season registration – the Matches pages get wiped between seasons and I was relying on those – but last season, while yes, Upward got picked in Invite zero times, it got picked in Amateur seven times. It was literally AM’s favorite map pick by raw numbers. Even Main and Advanced were picking it a decent amount of times – 5 and 4 respectively. Across the league, it was picked the same amount of times as Swiftwater and Ashville. So if you want to bring up playoffs picks, this is important information to note, and I think underscores Saturation’s point as well as the fact that non-Invite players even in middling divs like Adv and Main don’t hate it that much either if we’re using playoffs picks as a barometer.
Overall IMO a map should not be rotated out until one of the two following conditions is met:
- We have a better map than it to rotate in, or
- We have a bearably playable map to rotate in that has an active developer, actively working on the map based on feedback from league play, similar to Vigil or Cascade.
Borneo meets neither of those conditions as a replacement, so I am not in favor of Upward (or any of the other Payload maps) being rotated out at this point.
Think of Upward as a burger. It’s not the best in the world and it has definite flaws as a meal, and certainly many people could get sick of eating it every week. But if your only alternative options are 1) a bleu cheese sandwich whose execution most diners and critics previously disliked, and which certainly isn’t as popular a type of dish as burgers, or 2) underdone chicken… why would you take the burger off the menu?
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@Saturation said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:
the issue with threads like this is that most of the commenters are people who have been playing comp for years and are kinda bored with the map(because theyve been playing it for years)
especially these days, tf2 is made up of a lot more than the few invite players that have been playing for so long, and to have a a koth and a payload that are played every season is a very important thing for lower level players to learn how to play the game better
i know that personally, learning the flow of payload through playing upward repeatedly helped me tremendously, and same thing with productThis is a solid point, but here’s a counterargument: ashville’s been played every RGL season without being swapped out (as it should be IMO), as has swiftwater. No one’s calling out swiftwater out to be rotated despite having been played every season of rgl (although it wasn’t played in ugc s25, the last real ugc season before rgl, or in s22) because of reasons jacob mentioned earlier in the thread: the map is dynamic and still seeing changes even after all these years of being played. Swiftwater and ashville are IMO the maps that should be staples because they teach you more about how to play PL, koth, and HL as a whole due to their fluidity rather than upward and product which teach new players to fear sniper and be hyper-passive because those maps punish aggression unless your team is operating on a high level.
Consistency is good, but to counter @scaredy-bat’s point on when a map should be rotated out: if you’re only playing the same 7/8 maps every season and never have to learn new maps, you don’t actually learn how to play the game mode, you learn how to play the map. UGC would have 2-3 maps rotate every season and while I think that may have been indexing too far in the other direction, going from swift/borneo/steel to badwater/barnblitz/gpit and gully to process every season meant you couldn’t just rely on stock strategies every season and actually had to learn how the “theory” of the game mode applied to each map individually.
I’ve made a similar point in the past, but considering the relatively low stakes of this league, adhering to a ‘best maps at all possible times no questions asked’ policy in spite of poll numbers showing a large amount of players wanting maps to switch out doesn’t make a lot of sense.
also edit @scaredy-bat: i don’t know how meaningful playoff map picks are either way, since upward may have been played 5 times in season 8 main playoffs but it (or ashville, fwiw) wasn’t played a single time in s9 playoffs. playoff map picks tend to be extremely context dependent, like this season we had ashville 1st banned against us all 3 games and we banned upward all of our games, so that alone removes those two maps from half of the 6 total playoff matches. teams being good/bad at certain maps and aware of that doesn’t lend credence to a map being good or bad, necessary or rotatable either way imo.
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FWIW I am a player who wants there to be map rotation. I just don’t want it at the expense of having actually decent maps.
@Alto said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:
i don’t know how meaningful playoff map picks are either way
Only brought it up because Dimento brought it up, hence why I quoted the section I was specifically replying to.
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Having read the arguments above, the solution may be that maps get rotated out for invite and/or challenger (or back to advanced now I guess), while they stay in rotation for the lower div players so that they can learn the flow of the game without frequently switching things up. Clearly, top-level players seem to be asking for variety, while lower-level players don’t even know the current map pool well enough to want/need variety.
I think maps worth playing at least one season of would be borneo, ramjam, warmtic, coalplant (an interesting substitute for ashville), and gravelpit (possibly instead of steel for a season, which is another map that is played nearly every season).
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@TheS4rr said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:
Having read the arguments above, the solution may be that maps get rotated out for invite and/or challenger (or back to advanced now I guess), while they stay in rotation for the lower div players so that they can learn the flow of the game without frequently switching things up.
I mean, sixes just has Invite be pick/ban for the regular season and an extra map in the Invite pick/ban pool. S1 of RGL HL also had a constrained version of pick/ban where Invite had extra maps to choose from in the pool, but each week would still be constrained as either a stopwatch or KOTH week. Presumably this approach had problems and there’s a reason we don’t do that anymore, but I would be curious to hear details from anyone who played Invite that season.
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bring back millstone already
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how about pl_upward_pro_b2 :^)
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@pajaro said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:
bring back millstone already
@Alto said in OLD FORUMS:
threadly reminder that the millstone developer refused to make any substantial changes to the map for fear of upsetting pubbies who liked the halloween version
@Markers said in Question about pl_millstone:
Unfortunately the map maker doesn’t want to change anything for millstone to make it a staple map in highlander, so we’ll probably never have it played again.
@Jas said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:
how about pl_upward_pro_b2 :^)
Have you actually seen upward pro, or are you just spit-balling ideas around.