Completely agree with Gravelpit being "below average" I used to turn off Gravelpit so often that my game somehow had autosaved Gravelpit always being off when I logged on
A fun fact for you guys, Mann Manor and Mountain Lab were actually not full reskins of oneanother where one came first and the other followed, Valve hosted a contest on TF2maps where you were to detail a map they made and the winner would get put into the game, Mountain Lab and Mann Manor were those winners made by completely separate contestants. Highly recommend looking at the other entries, Iirc the video for the contest showing them are still shown on the TF2maps RU-vid channel.
Also, minor amusing fact: Doublefrost isn't even merely a reskin. It's actually *worse* than Doublecross, because the sewer level has ice with ice physics, making it an unreliable location to navigate and thus effectively funnelling everyone through the upper layer instead. Plus, being in the daytime also hurts spy.
It may be because I'm a fairly new TF2 player, or because I'm a dumb teen who doesn't know any better, but I fucking LIVE for the chaos of Halloween. I don't really care how awfully the maps are designed (Lookin at you ICS), how many gimmicks are thrown into it, or how much the maps artstyle apparently don't fit (I honestly don't get most of the Overeatch comparisons), I will 9/10 times find myself having fun when playing just about any Halloween map
The thing that really baffles me is despite the fact that after all these years, ICS has had the time and experience making maps and to this day he cannot make a good map to save his life. He holds the title for having the most maps added to the game and having the worst maps in the game, like all of his maps are terrible. Valve needs to cut ties with him, I don't know how many of his maps need to be added to the game before Valve realizes that they're not good for the game. We're currently at seven, do we need to go for eight+?
They won't, because that requires them to think, and they just look at him and go "Oh yeah, we've done business with him more than once. He MUST be reliable!" instead of actually looking at the shit he peddles.
53:08 To add onto this the geniuses at Valve decided to add this map when it was still not even close to finished (and it still isn't given the optimization issues) and was filled with exploitable areas and glitches. Granted I guess this has also become a standard cause there have been multiple maps since that also had missing textures meaning Valve likely picks these maps by just looking at the front page on the workshop.
Bread Space even had "BETA" in it's workshop description, so it was ino way, shape or form, ready to be added. It's 100% Valve's fault and I feel bad for the creators involved.
I’ve always felt like your argument (which I agree with) of holiday maps changing visuals with color correction and aesthetics applies to 2fort invasion as well, that map looks out of place to me but you put it in s tier
He probably just likes the aesthetic. Halloween and Christmas maps are super tacky with tons of them using the same style while 2Fort Invasion actually looks cool while being pretty unique
@@presseagainidareyou4704Yeah, the Halloween and Smissmas looks are overdone and it’s exhausting now. No one else has matched 2Fort Invasion, and it was such of a surprise of a map when it released out of nowhere.
there is a version of pd_suijin that carves a small cave out the mountain with flank routes. It puts control points/capture zones in the mountain, the middle, and the flank temple and constantly rotates between the three. its called pd_shogatsu, pretty awesome map!
I love zesty but man I play this game basically daily and I basically NEVER run into these god tier sniper mains that he bases a lot of his opinions on, it seems like he runs into them daily. I play a lot of uncletopia and casual and I only really see them very rarely (usually on harvest) I’m not saying they don’t exist but I don’t think it’s as big of a problem as he seems to treat it
@@AppaBoy Playing Jesus' advocate here, but I used to play a lot of Upward back in the day, and one time I faced against this one Sniper Main on defense who was being pocketed by a Medic. You could barely leave spawn on first, and getting to him was near impossible since he always had the whole team around him. And I mean, I've had runs with problematic snipers on the third point a couple of times before, but not to this extent. The guy wasn't cheating or anything, but man, I swear that experience freakin' traumatised me, to the point I instinctively refrain from playing the map in fear of having to go through that shit again, even though I still find playing on the map a lot of fun and the chances of this happening again are still a 1 in 1000 scenario. I'm guessing Zesty has had one-too-many encounters in a row with these God Snipers, and he is more afraid of the prospect of having to deal with them, than he does actually deal with them. Although it doesn't help that as a RU-vidr man, he is very likely to get stream-sniped.
@@AppaBoy you need to play for longer, you havent found the dreaded BBargain/cozy camper/pocket medic/pink cosmetics/18heads snipers, which you will encounter. On good maps they are a threat but in fcking harvest/mt lab/upward they make the game literally unplayable Hell it doesnt need to be a single good sniper, you can see it in the first two points of badwater, you just need 2-3 average snipers and 2 engies to make it painful to push
fitting, nowadays it's rare to find a game with not one or more above average snipers that can just CRUSH on defence and really hinder the defence on offense, only a good map can limit their chokehold on the fate of the game
These modern TF2 maps are all horribly optimized, and my theory is that with how modern map-makers all have beefy computers since they have to compile their maps so often, they don't even notice that their maps run like crap when they playtest them. TF2 is a very old game and it ran pretty well back in the day, and this including the fact that back in the day people were still running Intel Pentium CPUs. Nowadays these people just don't care anymore.
After all of this talk of what does and doesn't "feel like TF2", I'd really like if you did a video where you clearly outlined what does and does not fit this game's artstyle and provided tips to new workshoppers so they can better adhere to this game's aesthetic
Coalpit is a bit of a glimpse into Valve's map selection process. As he said, he didn't intend for it to be in the game, he just put it on the workshop so people could use it if they wanted after he made it for a special event. But then the Valve overlords deemed his map the chosen one, and he needed to scramble to polish it up for modern TF2, and he enlisted the help of a couple friends to do it.
You know what i think? Halloween and christmas maps (at least for the most part) shpuld work the same as pyrovision and romevision. Rather than having an entirely seperate map, it's a reskin setting you can opt into by using a specific cosmetic. Like all the halloween restricted cosmetics would activate terrorvision and any particularly festive cosmetics would activate jollyvision. It'd cut down the amount of map files, while still letting you see certain maps differently during different holiday events. To be fair halloween bosses would get screwed, but are we really losing much with that?
@Bird Brain the bosses can be coded to show up only during the event kinda like how rick may statues only appear april 8th. It could also force 'terrorvision' kinda like one player using the hearty laurel in mvm forces romevision on everyone.
Honestly, tough choice. On one hand, I'd rather have new bad maps than reskins. It's at least something new. On the other hand, reskins defined Scream Fortress back when things were run properly. So if DONE properly, reskins could work too. Sadly mappers slap commercialized Christmas into tf2 rather than stylized content, like the older scream Fortress updates, which were made for the game and it's environment rather than it just being PUMPKINS SKULLS BATS KOOKY SPOOKY y'know?
Tf2 players when they cant play the game bc the hitscan instakill class is sitting across the map: WOW TIMELESS MASTERPIECE IM HAVING SO MUCH FUN THIS GAME HAS NO FLAWS
I don't knowif this is an American servers' quirk, i am amazed by how much worse snipers are in your description than in my experience. On European (Frankfurt amd Stockholm servers mainly) it is much more difficult to meet a real 30000 hours sniper main, and even if you do, usually he will be only one on the server, so it won't be as much of a problem. Usually they are rather harmless, can only throw a rew headshots throughout the entire match and are easy to counter or destroy. Why is there so big difference?
I don't know what kind of blessed servers you're getting, but i'm in the eu region too and I get those every other game, which further adds to the auto-requeues that i'm forced to do when you add it to : -botted servers -ending servers -ended servers -laggy servers -friendly servers if I don't want to be friendly -tryhard servers if I don't want to be a tryhard -empty servers -servers containing a cheater that wont get kicked Nowadays I rarely bother going for casual because I don't know if i'm gonna find a suitable match right away or if i'm gonna have to sift through shit for half an hour to a full hour
@@AppaBoy i play in the south NA servers and oh boy every match has either a sweaty comp sniper or 3 average snipers (swallow those 3 150dmg bodyshots) in every match so i believe him
@@AppaBoy You have yet to meet the SCARY snipers. You want an example of what causes people to be like Zesty and abhor that New Zealander? Fatmagic. Canadian. Sniper Main. Angry. _Nightmare fuel to take on when he's using his Strange AWPer Hand. Like, it has _*_TENS OF THOUSANDS OF KILLS ON IT._*
ctf_sawmill actually has those flaks closed. In order to capture the flag you must go through the centre if you are not an exlposive double jumping class
47:10 I converted my slide into a trickstab on the ice once. IMO It can make fights fun and interesting down there if you're Spy (potential trickstab shenanigans) or Scout (double-jump to avoid downsides of ice). It's really fun to slide around on, but this map feature needs to be implemented in a larger area on a map where it can be fully appreciated.
I like arena modes I get why people wouldn’t, but I’m a sweat lord and the thrill of picking people off one by one is so much fun to me. To me the no respawn makes every engagement so much more fun and meaningful
The two vids were extremely fascinating to watch through. I think a lot of my opinions mostly align, tho I'd probs would have changed one to two things: I do think Cursed Cove in presentation and customized content would be placed a bit higher. I think some of the things it brought did elevate it a bit more above some of the others. Also for me personally, I would have ranked Erebus the lowest. I think throughout the entirety of my time playing TF2 (I've been playing since high school when I first got into it late 2008), I think Erebus is easily my most hated map. I'm usually pretty forgiving of a lot of Halloween stuff since it's my favorite time of year. Even some maps that you ranked low like Hassle Castle and Bloodwater give me a bit of a short fun dopamine rush, if I just want to fuck around in absolute chaos. But Erebus was one that came and fucking slapped me hard. Terrible direction, terrible pacing, the fact it's a 3-stage CP map, defending is a goddamn nightmare. It's almost not even a map, but an endurance test of how long you're willing to play it. I'd rather play on goddamn Wutville than Erebus. Because at the least the creator of Wutville was caught off guard when Valve decided to add their map and they tried to amend/fix some shit. But Erebus is absolutely deliberate in its shittiness. I'll never advocate harassing creators, but I'd love to ask ICS what the absolute hell they were thinking with that one.
Precipice is the true worst TF2 map. It's just one long and narrow hallway with zero alternate routes, which despite that, still manages to be horribly optimized.
@@Gonnluv Precipice is a true nightmare, I agree. Honestly, I feel like it'd be a hair's edge on deciding which of the two is worse and it all boils down to personal opinion. I still think Erebus is worse for me just because of my own dumb personal experiences, but I'll happily concede that Precipice is easily the worst payload map in the game.
@@gent7379 I can tell why someone would despise Erubus, with just how boring and messy its layout is. As someone who unironically enjoys playing on Brazil, I just saw it as contract fodder. But to be honest, you wouldn't catch me willingly playing on it either.
I feel like people have fond memories of pass-time because it was just 1 map, with one goal (much better than the confusing 3 goals) and it was pre MyM update As always no sweat and basically a giant dm map
I love tf out of Crasher, but it is definitely a very meta-heavy map. Not having a vaccinator medic (or quick-fix medic), a giant brass heavy, or a giant batt's backup soldier, or a giant demoman makes for easy points. Giant with half-zat is risky, but the heal and overheal back on kill is nuts.
as a scout who frequents harvest, i completely agree with the "competitive scout" part. Im the competitive scout. Put a good scout in that area, a place with p good geometry that can lead to some CRAZY movement and jukes, good luck killing that nuisance.
36:53 preach brother! . they having ton of gimmicks and events to halloween maps make them badly optimized and it's not fun to go and kill the halloween bosses mid fighting . it ruin the pace of the game and frankly . most of them look ugly too and play badly .
Last two scream fortress events I tried to play on the newer maps, and I almost immediately switched them off to be qued for after playing them like twice. I thought I was the only person that felt the recent "festive" maps were over the top (especially with the spells), guess not.
Ghostfort most people drop out after finishing the first round: 7 min round + forced truce every time a team caps followed by Merasmus fight is horrible. On top of that there's always that annoying engy that takes advantage of truce to put a level 3 wrangled sentry somewhere hard to reach thanks to low gravity.
all the Mannpower maps are really bad but I like the Hellfire. It has a stupid amount of flanks and it's really fun just to explore. The only thing I don't like about it that it's a Mannpower map. But you can't really make it into something else because the whole map was designed around the grapling hook. And its center is very spamable. It feels like this map was made for a singleplayer game smh.
23:34 I'd like to add another reason to hate Suijin is that snipers can hide in the trees in that map if they jump correctly. They can shoot at you while completely concealed ala wutville
One thing I don't understand about matchmaking is why we can have alternative gamemodes and have mannpower and passtime exist with their dwindling player counts, but Arena has just been scrubbed from official servers for years. I genuinely have alot of fun with arena mode at times, but the only time I ever see it is when I'm not even playing official tf2, I'm playing TF2classic.
I agree with the PD maps, but the game mode itself can be sometimes frustrating since you get the outline that everyone can see at all time, which often results in the entire enemy team focusing you no matter what, and I feel like there's a hidden damage vulnerability when you have more pick ups on you, and another very annoying thing it just takes one decent demoknight to completely dominate the entire map
I suppose one more thing is that probably the reason some people hate certain halloween maps is because of the contracts, and valve's refusal to create custom contracts per map.
i used to think that zesty was a man of good taste and factual knowledge. and then i saw him put powerhouse and invasion at the top. and i realized his taste in skins is not as good as his taste in maps.
As someone who regularly plays arena maps, I feel like Zesty might have forgotten how older maps treat props and movement, where you can go wherever the fuck you want leading to sniper not being nearly as strong as he said (also first blood crits are bs)
Remember the time(Invasion update) when Arena's 18 player limit, meant a third of the people on a full server were automatically forced to spectate? I forgot the name of the map, but I've never forgotten how quickly it emptied servers. The ones that got forced to spectate automatically were the first to go, but it didn't take long until everyone else followed suite. Graveyard only has the benefit of Halloween contracts keeping servers occupied for any length of time, but even then everybody bails as soon as they can turn it in. Kind of the Hill is the replacement for Arena and the appeal of arena is just too niche for it to see official play.
19:10 lazarus, I am a scout main, and I hate closed areas bc of spam that rather usual for all scoutmains at least ig, but I fucking love lazarus, bc even thou there is so much closed areas they r still very well design, like most of the time if enemy goes after u and u run into those hallways u have high ground in many of them which I think is great, also its really easy to escape from enemy in those bc of home many paths u can take, main point is very fun also
I don't really agree on Crasher because of what you mentioned, the map revolving around this single meta can ruin it for me and make it become quite competitive in casual, during Halloween of all seasons, I think if the map worked full year round it'd be much worse in how persistent players would be to use the meta
38:30 I don't understand how the halloween maps, that change WAY more than christmas maps are ok but the snowy ones change too much. I like both, i dunno. I think i like the halloween ones more BECAUSE they change so much, making it feel special and different. I just hate reskins because it's a waste of potential. If the lazy shits at valve can't be bothered to give us anything but maps, might as well have them be different. Even if that different something sometimes happens to be Wutville.
let sniper do 120 headshot (or 130) . and add a headshot crit cooldown (it short but it still stop quick scoping) make the sniper charging time faster to compensate for the nerf . but the red dot get bigger the longer they charge . but longer they charge , the bigger the red dot on the wall get . the red dot will have two shade of red/blue so sniper can still know the center of it but now they can't just stay in one place expecting to get free kills by just standing there and fully charging it. delete the razorback or make it just leave you with 60% of your hp after backstab . REWORK THE darwin's danger shield .
I'd make it so it goes by percentage of target's health, rather than the arbitrary 150-450 it currently. If it started at 50% for a quick-scope and up to 150% for a fully charged shot it'd be fine. Being able to delete 5 out of nine classes quicker than a sneeze is why quick-scoping is such a problem as is. I'd also add a slight delay to quick-scope time, since that's what the whole charge up time thing was allegedly supposed to stop in the first place.
