I've been noticing a few things about a number of our maps (particularly our old zombie maps), now that I've been catching the daily afternoon (for me) AoD party more frequently; many of them throw the team powers to rtd (sometimes the survivors get good loot and camp out, untouchable, and sometimes the hunters just flatten everyone in 5 seconds), which contributes very little to the fun of AoD and a lot to the salt, and let's be honest, most of the fun in AoD just comes from being with friends who you might or might not know irl.
To resolve this, I have a number of ideas, a few of which I implemented in my latest submission:
*Increase on items that don't drop after death (I recommend using the curse of vanishing on select items that would destroy kit balances in the hands of certain people).
I kid you not just how many maps there are where if there are more than 4 players, a bunch of survivors will camp out somewhere, wipe out the dark hunter(s) with little effort, and then use their gear to become virtually untouchable.
*Decreased emphasis on chest loot; a number of maps put some pretty ridiculous things in chests (like that prot 10 gold chestplate hiding in Western Nightmare), which often enough define the outcome of the match based purely on who got to the good stuff first (this is particularly bad on maps that have lesser known chests with particularly good loot that some person just happens to know about and exploits it every time they play the map).
My recommendation for chest loot is to prioritize food and ammunition among other knickknacks that can provide more options, support, and utility to players without making them god-like powerhouses.
*Heavy decrease on parkour in general. Granted, it's perfectly fine just throwing in some basic jumps here and there, but many maps have a bad case of every 3 blocks, another huge jump.
Hardcore parkour is quite honestly a bad thing in most cases with pvp, as it often alienates a lot of people who just can't merge advanced platforming with intense pvp in their mental processing, and then you get a bunch of Terres and Unus who become legendarily hard to catch or evade in these sorts of maps.
Doubtlessly, the infection game mode is the worst offender here, but a number of CTF and zombie maps have also been marred by brutal parkour courses.
On top of scaring away half the people who occasionally come to us for AoD, parkour-focused maps often end up looking like a singular land mass with tons of little squares dotting the sky with mazes of narrow walk-ways mixed in. This can be appealing in some cases, but often times, it can look like a kid tried to make a mario game with a bunch of free-floating legos or something, and just look at Safari if you want to know how blatant parkour maps can be about being parkour maps and not even trying to have a nice theme.
My recommendation on parkour may also be very long winded, because there are a number of conditions where parkour can work and work well.
Firstly, if you want to do a parkour-focused map, I suggest:
*setting a theme and putting your all into making the parkour match the theme
*keep the parkour fairly easy while making it look relatively interesting (a trail of 2x2 platforms isn't very interesting, but jumping from tree to tree can be pretty cool).
*use moderate-difficulty parkour sparingly or for exposed bonus loot if the map utilizes bows or enderpearls a lot.
*refrain from using the advanced or harder forms of parkour unless it's for an easy to attack spot with treasury worthy of the effort.
*Don't copy that map that was literally void with a rainbow grid of stained clay blocks.
*Try to make invovative and interesting maps with well balanced kits (prioritize the kit balance): this should honestly go without saying, but there's nothing more fun than trying something new and fresh, especially if the kits lead to very even, fair and fun fights. I can't say for certain if my newest map submission is balanced on the kits department, but I can say that it does sport some simple bow puzzles, which I have not seen in any AoD maps prior.
*Also, don't make a maze map where people can easily get lost and never find each other in. There is nothing more distasteful than having all your excellent gear and feeling all powerful and raring to go, only for anyone you could hope to use it on to just seemingly not even exist anymore, and then the round ends and they (or you) get rewarded for getting lost. Super anti-climatic and where's the fun in being all decked out with something when you just can't use it?
*This is more a suggestion for the admins to address, but a number of us have started to notice that our fantastic natural regeneration we get just isn't fantastic anymore. What I mean is, it seems to take an hour just to recover half your hp after getting battered in a cat fight with some random other person, which means that once that person has respawned, they have literally all the remaining round time to come and effortlessly 2-shot you while you're still trying to recover for an easy kill. I understand the hunger nerf we have is to stop people from just becoming invincible because their armor combined with 1.9 food healing, but honestly, when you're eating anything not made of gold, that food regen quickly runs out (or at least it does now), like a single steak will probably be good to recover 15 hp (7.5 hearts), but if you were to try and eat during a fight, you wouldn't be able to finish before you just got battered to death by whoever you're fighting, unless something intervened.
My recommendation here would be to completely re-enable the 1.9 food healing, though if it once again becomes an issue, reduce the saturation capacity instead of the hunger capacity. That way at least, we can recover at all without aid of potions when not fighting but still have quick fights that aren't prolonged by food-spam.
As a final note, these are recommendations towards making more entertaining maps and potentially being rid of those maps that instantly drop the player count from 16 to 3. If a map you are making is intended for something that would conflict with these guidelines, then do what you can to ensure that you execute that decision as best as you can.
To resolve this, I have a number of ideas, a few of which I implemented in my latest submission:
*Increase on items that don't drop after death (I recommend using the curse of vanishing on select items that would destroy kit balances in the hands of certain people).
I kid you not just how many maps there are where if there are more than 4 players, a bunch of survivors will camp out somewhere, wipe out the dark hunter(s) with little effort, and then use their gear to become virtually untouchable.
*Decreased emphasis on chest loot; a number of maps put some pretty ridiculous things in chests (like that prot 10 gold chestplate hiding in Western Nightmare), which often enough define the outcome of the match based purely on who got to the good stuff first (this is particularly bad on maps that have lesser known chests with particularly good loot that some person just happens to know about and exploits it every time they play the map).
My recommendation for chest loot is to prioritize food and ammunition among other knickknacks that can provide more options, support, and utility to players without making them god-like powerhouses.
*Heavy decrease on parkour in general. Granted, it's perfectly fine just throwing in some basic jumps here and there, but many maps have a bad case of every 3 blocks, another huge jump.
Hardcore parkour is quite honestly a bad thing in most cases with pvp, as it often alienates a lot of people who just can't merge advanced platforming with intense pvp in their mental processing, and then you get a bunch of Terres and Unus who become legendarily hard to catch or evade in these sorts of maps.
Doubtlessly, the infection game mode is the worst offender here, but a number of CTF and zombie maps have also been marred by brutal parkour courses.
On top of scaring away half the people who occasionally come to us for AoD, parkour-focused maps often end up looking like a singular land mass with tons of little squares dotting the sky with mazes of narrow walk-ways mixed in. This can be appealing in some cases, but often times, it can look like a kid tried to make a mario game with a bunch of free-floating legos or something, and just look at Safari if you want to know how blatant parkour maps can be about being parkour maps and not even trying to have a nice theme.
My recommendation on parkour may also be very long winded, because there are a number of conditions where parkour can work and work well.
Firstly, if you want to do a parkour-focused map, I suggest:
*setting a theme and putting your all into making the parkour match the theme
*keep the parkour fairly easy while making it look relatively interesting (a trail of 2x2 platforms isn't very interesting, but jumping from tree to tree can be pretty cool).
*use moderate-difficulty parkour sparingly or for exposed bonus loot if the map utilizes bows or enderpearls a lot.
*refrain from using the advanced or harder forms of parkour unless it's for an easy to attack spot with treasury worthy of the effort.
*Don't copy that map that was literally void with a rainbow grid of stained clay blocks.
*Try to make invovative and interesting maps with well balanced kits (prioritize the kit balance): this should honestly go without saying, but there's nothing more fun than trying something new and fresh, especially if the kits lead to very even, fair and fun fights. I can't say for certain if my newest map submission is balanced on the kits department, but I can say that it does sport some simple bow puzzles, which I have not seen in any AoD maps prior.
*Also, don't make a maze map where people can easily get lost and never find each other in. There is nothing more distasteful than having all your excellent gear and feeling all powerful and raring to go, only for anyone you could hope to use it on to just seemingly not even exist anymore, and then the round ends and they (or you) get rewarded for getting lost. Super anti-climatic and where's the fun in being all decked out with something when you just can't use it?
*This is more a suggestion for the admins to address, but a number of us have started to notice that our fantastic natural regeneration we get just isn't fantastic anymore. What I mean is, it seems to take an hour just to recover half your hp after getting battered in a cat fight with some random other person, which means that once that person has respawned, they have literally all the remaining round time to come and effortlessly 2-shot you while you're still trying to recover for an easy kill. I understand the hunger nerf we have is to stop people from just becoming invincible because their armor combined with 1.9 food healing, but honestly, when you're eating anything not made of gold, that food regen quickly runs out (or at least it does now), like a single steak will probably be good to recover 15 hp (7.5 hearts), but if you were to try and eat during a fight, you wouldn't be able to finish before you just got battered to death by whoever you're fighting, unless something intervened.
My recommendation here would be to completely re-enable the 1.9 food healing, though if it once again becomes an issue, reduce the saturation capacity instead of the hunger capacity. That way at least, we can recover at all without aid of potions when not fighting but still have quick fights that aren't prolonged by food-spam.
As a final note, these are recommendations towards making more entertaining maps and potentially being rid of those maps that instantly drop the player count from 16 to 3. If a map you are making is intended for something that would conflict with these guidelines, then do what you can to ensure that you execute that decision as best as you can.