#if nobody votes i'll queue them anyways but yeah

[newyorkkiss]

458 of these are spoon posts should i just start queuing these bc i feel like i'm never gonna manage to post them all myself

[doctor-badadvice]

Maybe it's late to talk about Scream Fortress but whatever. I'm going to talk about the new maps.

I love Scream Fortress. It's a great time with good (free) cosmetics and what made me get into tf2 in the first place. My first hour in game was spent as a very confused Heavy on Brimstone. I had fun then and I come back for the event every year.

This year, unfortunately, the game decided to test my patience.

There's a different between wanting new content and digging through garbage with the raccoons for just about anything. Every time for the past two or three years whenever they added something new, it was either boring or broken. We had absolute pearls like Laughter and Crasher, two maps that are both beautiful and fun to play. Then we had Soulmill, Bonesaw, Precipice, fucking Sinshine and Graveyard and of course, a whole bunch of uninteresting cosmetics and taunts that just happened to have many votes on the workshop.

And I know that if I wasn't a nobody on the internet, I'd already have an angry mob at my door because I dared saying community made stuff is not the very good. How dare I have an opinion on something that's in the game I've played for way too many hours.

So this year we had a crate that didn't even reach 50 cents on the market for the first evening (something that even Christmas crates manage, mind you) and not one, not four, but a whole twelve new maps to try.

For the sake of my memory and because I want to discuss the zombie mode later, I'll just go in order of whatever I remember.

Spineyard

Let's start off with yet another damn reskin. This time it's Vineyard, a map that I played once then removed from my queue because it's yet another payload map that suffers from the Overwatch condition. Wide empty areas, lots of unused hallways where you're meant to flank but you won't find anyone there because it's an open area, everyone's playing Soldier or Demo and spamming anyway. But there's more! Every once in a while you'll hear a bell and then the undead mafia shows up.

The undead mafia. On a map based on Italy. How fucking original the makers are. Congrats on being fucking boring. I hope you step on a Lego.

Also they're basically SMG Sniper bots from MvM with a bit of skeleton AI, nothing groundbreaking.

Lava Pit

This map made me wonder whether there's people out there who sit around debating which stupid maps should get a reskin next. Sawmill won the last vote, now it's the turn of the map that's only ever been good for promotional material.

So we have a map that is inaccessibility incarnate. It's dark so you can't see Blu team unless you crank up your colors to the max and the rest is lava so Red melds with the background. You can't see sentries for shit because everything is red and brown. This map gave me a migraine.

Slime

"Hey, kids! Wanna play koth with Salmon Run ripoff skeleton reskins that for some reason move at 3fps and teleport around making it impossible to aim at them?"

Yeah, fuck this map. The stupid fish spawn en masse and never stop, making it impossible to even get to the point if you're in a small team. The sea shantie never stops playing so that's added torture. The only good thing out of this is that my mini sentry was still up at the end of the match so I got 60 contract points by waiting for the game to reload the map while I was tabbed out.

I take it someone made a video explaining how to program the skeleton AI in custom maps this year. Otherwise I don't see why the workshop was hit such a wave of originality this past year.

Perks:

"Hey kids! Want to play koth but, like, less? This is the map for you!"

Why the fuck are we playing arena in 2023? Every time it takes ages to complete these contracts because you make at best 5 points per match and that's just if you're stomping the other team! I wasted too much time on this shit. May it burn in the same pit as Graveyard. Fuck play to spectate mode. Valve had a point in removing it from pubs.

Mannsylvania

Every year they add a new chokepoint fest. All you do is leave spawn and hope you don't encounter the same piece of shit who's been camping the rare spell for the past twenty minutes. It's a bunch of hallways. You run around staring at the sky like an idiot hoping that this next turn is going to make you bump in the guy with the points you keep seeing through the walls. Horrid design. Shouldn't have been added at all.

Sandcastle

I don't have much to say about this map. It's DeGroot Keep but sand. The underworld is cute but there's nothing different otherwise. It's a summer map with spells active. I played it a little longer than the others because I like medieval mode.

Corruption

I couldn't believe it at first. This is the one decent map. It's a payload map that isn't just a spam fest. It has the appropriate space for everyone, actual flanks and not just the same door slightly to the side. It forces both sides to be smart with and against buildings and charging in with uber is actually rewarded. And even better, you don't keep clipping into the clutter that's spread around the floor because ✨ aesthetics ✨ (Hello Bonesaw. Fuck you specifically). I don't get the logic behind the underworld being a mental asylum but still, a good map. It's incredible. I'd replay this one if I didn't run out of time.

Infection/L4Dvs/the zombie mode

Let's make a premise. Tf2 isn't good at explaining things. It's a game from another time where you were meant to learn through observation and a lot of trial and error. Minecraft is another game like this. You learn how to play from Youtube. But you know what Minecraft doesn't have? The projector.

In the old days, when you joined payload in quickplay for the first time, the game would show a little video with footage of the mode so you would know that Blu pushes the payload and Red tries to stop them. This zombie mode comes with a tutorial but it tells you 10% of what you're fucking supposed to do.

This is a community mode. Fine. What if I never played it? How am I supposed to know that the zombies can only…bite? Punch? It's a clunky melee attack that doesn't even feel good to land like a wrench swing or an actual punch. They don't tell you that the zombies have unique abilities. You just get a meter and then you have to figure it out. I played through all the maps and still don't know what half the classes do.

Well, obviously they're in some way based on the infected from Left4Dead, a game I often found myself thinking about while playing this mode. But what is, say, a guy who started playing the other day supposed to know about this?

Next time someone says Valve should fix the game's learning curve, I'm going to personally apply their clown makeup. This isn't 2016 to find out the latest updates from VNN.

What about the maps?

Murky

Red sits on a little platform surrounded by sentries. It's pitch dark next to the water so you have no way to even get close enough to look at it as a zombie. 60% of the map is unused. The grass is annoying as hell. I left as soon as the contract was finished because fuck.

Woods

The famous wild turtle engineer evolves into a skunk engineer by hiding in a mine with two small entrances crying and whimpering while the level 3 sentry delays the inevitable. What these players fail to realize is that the sentry doesn't shoot faster depending on how much meat throws itself at it. They're simply wasting everybody's time and for this…they should really feel bad.

Atoll

This map manages to be worse than Murky entirely because of the broken hitboxes. I've bumped into several invisible obstacles. Atoll gets the "Bonesaw of the Year" award entirely because I died to fake gaps and platforms with questionable tangibility.

Devastation

The spirits of Bonesaw and Lavapit came together to have a child named Devastation.

This map is too dark. There are corners where you can only spot players because of their cosmetics. Sometimes zombies have to simply walk into the whole Red team and die because they spawned in a place with only one exit and some zombie classes simply don't get to use their ability here because the rooms are too small. The only good thing about this mess is that it bugged out and Red won the round as soon as it started. 30 points with no effort at all. That saved me precious time.

Sanitarium

I kept the best one for last because it's the one I actually enjoyed playing. The setting isn't too dark for once, the inside of a building isn't covered with assets from Mann Manor and it actually feels like a location from a zombie game. You'd expect hordes of rabid Left4Dead infected charging at you from the front yard, past the reception and in every room up to the top floor.

You can't keep a sentry down here for too long either, meaning that everyone has to actually play the game and there is no one just stalling for time and I've seen people have a lot of fun messing around in the elevator.

The only negative I can think of is that it could have used some more polish. The elevator uses a noise that I think comes from Half Life which distracted me because I'm weird like that. But it's a Source noise™️, it's not that big of a deal. The more glaring flaw were the floating zombie skins around the map and the console commands popping up in the chat. It doesn't look great but hey, Bonesaw dropped without a playable objective, didn't it? There’s always worse.

In conclusion, I guess we got 12 maps because Valve noticed that there isn't as much junk to throw in the crates as it used to and is adding gamemodes to make people shut the hell up. The zombie mode left me craving for L4D2 but I don't have as many people to play it with anymore. The other maps were the usual random crap they've been tossing in the game for the past few years. There was nothing really outstanding from the regular gamemodes visually but it was refreshing to get a good experience gameplay wise instead of something that only looks good in screenshots.

I hope we can go back to having a reasonable amount of maps added next year. Less is more these days of games diluting the experience so you stick around to buy the next season pass. Tf2 has no right, nor does it need these practices. It's a good game at the core without gachas or similar crap.

Also, the Toastmaster hasn't been broken for 0 days.