The title of this thread will likely attract some controversy, but it does so to illustrate a point. Please try to be chill. Also, I'm sorry if this isn't in the right place. I don't really know where it would go if it were just about the whitelist or game mechanics, and there's some stuff in here that it might help mappers to read too, so I figured this was a decent guess.
I was playing on HeresyBeta3 recently and, annoyed by the sharpshooters who had parked themselves at the bottom of either stairway, thus claiming all the enemies save crawlers and stalkers for themselves, called for a map vote by nominating Doom2-Final. I was quickly informed by one of the other bored non-sharps on the server that it had recently been taken off the whitelist, apparently because somebody at some point complained that it was a farming map.
This demonstrates a severe flaw in the whitelisting process, as well as the criteria for what constitutes a farming map. To be sure, Doom2-Final was often used for the purpose, however the way it needed to be done was such that nearly all maps are farming maps if D2F is one. The main differences between D2F and anything else were the relative smallness and the two powerful weapon pickups, which are ultimately not really significant elements. They basically amount to early game money savers and flavorful throwbacks to the original Entryway.
Firstly, let's talk about how farming happens. The basic idea is that players find a spot in the map where their face is toward a spawn, and their back isn't. It should be noted that equipment is largely unnecessary for this if done correctly. Until Scrakes show up, all that a squad with nothing but Berettas needs is to stick together so they don't get mobbed during reloads and don't run out of med juice. Once they do, a couple of guys taking shotguns can hold it together until FPs, and then everyone else can buy what they want to deal with that. The big guns are largely unnecessary for everything but the Patriarch, and are otherwise mostly a way to make sure you get a decent number of kills if somebody else goes Firebug or Demo early. The only thing that enables farming on any map that is not either built for the purpose or incredibly flawed is teamwork, and the only reason any one design is better than another for that purpose is that some of them are confusing, which is not a good way to make a map balanced.
In my opinion, D2F is actually a pretty good example of how to correctly make a map. It is quite small compared to the core maps, but ultimately it is mechanically very similar. There are a few different popular places to make a stand: the grass, the end of the hallway to the last room, the secret room, the blue room. The first two of these are fairly standard, places where the walkers come in one end with a relatively long line of sight, and creepers and stalkers occasionally sneak up from behind. The elevator in the last room can get pretty cheesy, but it's hard to get everyone up there, harder to convince them to stay there and not mess with it, and nearly impossible to get everyone to keep doing that for more than one round. Additionally, Husks and the Patriarch can still get you, so it's not going to work forever. The secret room is a good place for a pyro to clean up, but it's very cramped, and offers no escape should you be overrun, which is rather likely since the rest of the squad will probably be in the last room (or moving around the hallway, blocking your LoS, breaking up the group, and pulling everyone to the blue room) if you're in there. The blue room is a special case: nothing spawns in it if anybody is there, the single entry point is clearly visible from anywhere in the room, and there is a door that can be welded shut to trap the Patriarch and take a large portion of each wave out with grenades and pipes. Unless the weapons are a larger factor, (they really shouldn't be) this is likely to be the reason some consider it a farming map. However, for reasons I'll talk about a bit later, this is not meaningfully different from other maps which are whitelisted.
Before that, I'd like to talk a bit about the map I was playing when I decided to write this, the whitelisted HeresyBeta3. HB3 is beautiful, and when nobody's cheesing it, it's also pretty fun to play. However, it suffers from mechanical flaws which make it much more of a farming map than D2F, made worse by the fact that they'd be relatively simple to alleviate. As I mentioned earlier, a sharpshooter can sit at the bottom of the stairs on either side and grind out the entire match with no risk to himself whatsoever. There are only two walker spawn points on the entire map, those being just behind the wall on one side of either doorway. The only enemies left are crawlers and stalkers from the staircases, and the rest of the server has nothing to do if they don't kill them, so the guy at the bottom of the stairs never even has to worry about looking behind him. Not even Husks pose any threat, due to some kind of AI/geometry conflict causing them to fire in the wrong direction. To make matters worse, the Patriarch is rendered nearly trivial. While you can't trap him anywhere, his escape is often hampered by the pews, the lack of hallways and other things to break line of sight make his stealth much less effective, and his healing spots are so accessible that it really doesn't matter if you can't see him anyway. If somebody has an AA-12, he is toast, the end. The troubling part is that these issues would be pretty simple to fix. Stick a wall outside so you can't see from the stairs to the place where the specimens get stuck on whatever geometric failure is out there. (or fix that) Put some spawn points in the interior stairs, behind the setpieces, on the other side of the same doorways. Reduce the number of pews so they can be spaced out more. Make a simple basement the Patriarch can go in. Not hard. But HB3 is the way it is, and it's whitelisted. With free armor sitting right in the open every round, which is quite a bit more helpful than D2F's weapons. *shrug*
The real kicker is that as far as farming maps go, these two are weak sauce. The king of all farming maps isn't just whitelisted, it's core. BioticsLab's double door room makes everything nearly mindless. Absolutely everything spawns outside, including creepers and stalkers. Most of the zeds walk right to the door from either side, getting killed in the time it takes for them to turn towards the players. The remainder come down the red staircase to which snipers, pyros, and grenadiers all have a clear, easy shot. This all takes place in a room that, like D2F's blue room, incorporates one of the stores, and unlike the blue room, has a wall running down the middle of it that basically gives you an entire extra room to fall back to when things get heavy. This map is where the technique of sealing in the Patriarch was invented. The only real difference is that you have to weld the other door shut. The sole reason farming ever doesn't work on BioticsLab is the strong tendency for any given squad of six to be composed of two players, one AFK, one late join, one idiot, and one guy who gets lost and dies horribly because BioticsLab is a convoluted, multilevel, visually monotonous mess. (me) Now, this isn't to say BioticsLab shouldn't be on the whitelist. I think the map demonstrates something that Tripwire already knows: a little bit of cheese is okay if the map is still fun. D2F always is. HB3 never is unless nobody is cheesing. BioticsLab is... eh, gets old sometimes like anything core, but I still jump in it now and then.
All of this stuff illustrates three problems that should be addressed: the whitelist process, the way maps are made, and the way enemies behave in them. The standards for whitelisting are... do they exist? I can't find them. If they do, the fact that D2F got dropped despite ultimately being a small, easy-to-navigate version of many core maps indicates that they are somewhat ill-defined. Clear standards need to be posted and enforced, preferably by playtesting, or if TWI has no time for that, there should at least be a requirement for a mapper to write a description of their map detailing various ways they attempted to comply with tactical design concepts. Mappers (including those at TWI, to some degree) need to revisit their creations with an eye for where the squad is going to hole up. How many doors, how many weldables, where does LoS extend, where's the trader, where are the spawns, what's behind the player, etc. Finally, the zeds themselves could really use some help. Currently, out of a wave, perhaps one or two clots will get stuck and start banging on the welded door to the BioticsLab campground. That number needs to increase dramatically, whether by making some of them just prioritize doors, or by making some of them decide to take a path other than the most obvious one. A monster which specializes in breaking doors, or perhaps even one which can go through them, would also be helpful. There are many things which could improve the situation, and I hope that the community and devs take heed. Thanks for reading this monstrosity.
I was playing on HeresyBeta3 recently and, annoyed by the sharpshooters who had parked themselves at the bottom of either stairway, thus claiming all the enemies save crawlers and stalkers for themselves, called for a map vote by nominating Doom2-Final. I was quickly informed by one of the other bored non-sharps on the server that it had recently been taken off the whitelist, apparently because somebody at some point complained that it was a farming map.
This demonstrates a severe flaw in the whitelisting process, as well as the criteria for what constitutes a farming map. To be sure, Doom2-Final was often used for the purpose, however the way it needed to be done was such that nearly all maps are farming maps if D2F is one. The main differences between D2F and anything else were the relative smallness and the two powerful weapon pickups, which are ultimately not really significant elements. They basically amount to early game money savers and flavorful throwbacks to the original Entryway.
Firstly, let's talk about how farming happens. The basic idea is that players find a spot in the map where their face is toward a spawn, and their back isn't. It should be noted that equipment is largely unnecessary for this if done correctly. Until Scrakes show up, all that a squad with nothing but Berettas needs is to stick together so they don't get mobbed during reloads and don't run out of med juice. Once they do, a couple of guys taking shotguns can hold it together until FPs, and then everyone else can buy what they want to deal with that. The big guns are largely unnecessary for everything but the Patriarch, and are otherwise mostly a way to make sure you get a decent number of kills if somebody else goes Firebug or Demo early. The only thing that enables farming on any map that is not either built for the purpose or incredibly flawed is teamwork, and the only reason any one design is better than another for that purpose is that some of them are confusing, which is not a good way to make a map balanced.
In my opinion, D2F is actually a pretty good example of how to correctly make a map. It is quite small compared to the core maps, but ultimately it is mechanically very similar. There are a few different popular places to make a stand: the grass, the end of the hallway to the last room, the secret room, the blue room. The first two of these are fairly standard, places where the walkers come in one end with a relatively long line of sight, and creepers and stalkers occasionally sneak up from behind. The elevator in the last room can get pretty cheesy, but it's hard to get everyone up there, harder to convince them to stay there and not mess with it, and nearly impossible to get everyone to keep doing that for more than one round. Additionally, Husks and the Patriarch can still get you, so it's not going to work forever. The secret room is a good place for a pyro to clean up, but it's very cramped, and offers no escape should you be overrun, which is rather likely since the rest of the squad will probably be in the last room (or moving around the hallway, blocking your LoS, breaking up the group, and pulling everyone to the blue room) if you're in there. The blue room is a special case: nothing spawns in it if anybody is there, the single entry point is clearly visible from anywhere in the room, and there is a door that can be welded shut to trap the Patriarch and take a large portion of each wave out with grenades and pipes. Unless the weapons are a larger factor, (they really shouldn't be) this is likely to be the reason some consider it a farming map. However, for reasons I'll talk about a bit later, this is not meaningfully different from other maps which are whitelisted.
Before that, I'd like to talk a bit about the map I was playing when I decided to write this, the whitelisted HeresyBeta3. HB3 is beautiful, and when nobody's cheesing it, it's also pretty fun to play. However, it suffers from mechanical flaws which make it much more of a farming map than D2F, made worse by the fact that they'd be relatively simple to alleviate. As I mentioned earlier, a sharpshooter can sit at the bottom of the stairs on either side and grind out the entire match with no risk to himself whatsoever. There are only two walker spawn points on the entire map, those being just behind the wall on one side of either doorway. The only enemies left are crawlers and stalkers from the staircases, and the rest of the server has nothing to do if they don't kill them, so the guy at the bottom of the stairs never even has to worry about looking behind him. Not even Husks pose any threat, due to some kind of AI/geometry conflict causing them to fire in the wrong direction. To make matters worse, the Patriarch is rendered nearly trivial. While you can't trap him anywhere, his escape is often hampered by the pews, the lack of hallways and other things to break line of sight make his stealth much less effective, and his healing spots are so accessible that it really doesn't matter if you can't see him anyway. If somebody has an AA-12, he is toast, the end. The troubling part is that these issues would be pretty simple to fix. Stick a wall outside so you can't see from the stairs to the place where the specimens get stuck on whatever geometric failure is out there. (or fix that) Put some spawn points in the interior stairs, behind the setpieces, on the other side of the same doorways. Reduce the number of pews so they can be spaced out more. Make a simple basement the Patriarch can go in. Not hard. But HB3 is the way it is, and it's whitelisted. With free armor sitting right in the open every round, which is quite a bit more helpful than D2F's weapons. *shrug*
The real kicker is that as far as farming maps go, these two are weak sauce. The king of all farming maps isn't just whitelisted, it's core. BioticsLab's double door room makes everything nearly mindless. Absolutely everything spawns outside, including creepers and stalkers. Most of the zeds walk right to the door from either side, getting killed in the time it takes for them to turn towards the players. The remainder come down the red staircase to which snipers, pyros, and grenadiers all have a clear, easy shot. This all takes place in a room that, like D2F's blue room, incorporates one of the stores, and unlike the blue room, has a wall running down the middle of it that basically gives you an entire extra room to fall back to when things get heavy. This map is where the technique of sealing in the Patriarch was invented. The only real difference is that you have to weld the other door shut. The sole reason farming ever doesn't work on BioticsLab is the strong tendency for any given squad of six to be composed of two players, one AFK, one late join, one idiot, and one guy who gets lost and dies horribly because BioticsLab is a convoluted, multilevel, visually monotonous mess. (me) Now, this isn't to say BioticsLab shouldn't be on the whitelist. I think the map demonstrates something that Tripwire already knows: a little bit of cheese is okay if the map is still fun. D2F always is. HB3 never is unless nobody is cheesing. BioticsLab is... eh, gets old sometimes like anything core, but I still jump in it now and then.
All of this stuff illustrates three problems that should be addressed: the whitelist process, the way maps are made, and the way enemies behave in them. The standards for whitelisting are... do they exist? I can't find them. If they do, the fact that D2F got dropped despite ultimately being a small, easy-to-navigate version of many core maps indicates that they are somewhat ill-defined. Clear standards need to be posted and enforced, preferably by playtesting, or if TWI has no time for that, there should at least be a requirement for a mapper to write a description of their map detailing various ways they attempted to comply with tactical design concepts. Mappers (including those at TWI, to some degree) need to revisit their creations with an eye for where the squad is going to hole up. How many doors, how many weldables, where does LoS extend, where's the trader, where are the spawns, what's behind the player, etc. Finally, the zeds themselves could really use some help. Currently, out of a wave, perhaps one or two clots will get stuck and start banging on the welded door to the BioticsLab campground. That number needs to increase dramatically, whether by making some of them just prioritize doors, or by making some of them decide to take a path other than the most obvious one. A monster which specializes in breaking doors, or perhaps even one which can go through them, would also be helpful. There are many things which could improve the situation, and I hope that the community and devs take heed. Thanks for reading this monstrosity.
![[UIT] Akame](/data/avatars/s/14/14608.jpg?1568638684){kind=avatar}
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