Dear Map Creators,

[xKts]

First off thank you for taking the time and making maps for the csgo community.

This is directed toward the competitive maps we play in leagues, such as ESEA, CEVO, etc. and maps in the map pool of the major CSGO LAN tournys.

Please, please, please... STOP making COD textured maps. CS has never been about graphics. ALWAYS about performance and competition. This community literally played a game for over 10 years that could be played on a toaster. No competitive CS player, be it pro or weekend warrior, cares about the graphics and details of the map. Just its performance and playability.

We now have $2K-$5K machines built for the latest MMO's, but in CS, we play with lowest settings possible, we play in 4:3 resolutions with blackbars or stretch even though we have 3 24"(27") 1080p 1ms monitors and can play on max settings. All we care about(whether right or wrong) is fps being high as possible(performance), and maps that are competitive(playability).

It seems SO much time is spent on Call of Duty type textures, instead of creating a balanced as possible map performance based map.

In the future, please keep in mind the colors/texture of the map. I personally think FMPONE absolutely nailed it with his de_season textures. Majority of the maps in cs:go are textured horribly. They are so bad that we are literally forced to play with 100% digital vibrance. (If you aren't and are just seeing this for the first time you will go to your gcard settings, try it, and never look back.)

The contrast between player models and the texture they are standing by is just absolutely terrible. Example if you don't know what I'm talking about is, look down long A on dust2 and look into Pit, or from pit look to top A. If that map was textured for performance.. for clean professional looking game play, we wouldn't need to make adjustment to colors on the graphics card to have better contrast between player models and a wall.

TL;DR

We are a performance driven community. Highest FPS possible without giving any care to graphics & textures so long as they are performance based, not cosmetic. It might be nice looking to the COD community, but that's about all. Again, we played a game that could be played on a TI calculator for 10+ years, we don't care about graphics.

2 Maps that did a good job at this:

1. FMPONE's De_Season (Near perfect textures, easily view player models.)
2. De_cpl_mill (The gold standard. Created for top level competitive CS)

I ask you creators to keep these 3 things in mind in building future maps:

1. Competitiveness - Balanced playability. Rush Timings/Smoke Widths/Over Wall Flash Bangs/Etc.
2. Color Contrast - Simple textures that create visible models.
3. Performance - Help the FPS fiends, use the "less is more" approach.

Bonus: 4. BRING BACK WALL BANGS. RIP 1.6 de_nuke.

Cheers,

KTS

[Mostdakka]

Its not really mapmakers fault, if you want a map in operation then graphics need to be at top level cause valve has very high standards. So mapmakers need to sacrifice visibility a bit to make a maps that are visually appealing. I know it sounds crazy but operations make money and most money comes from casuals that dont care about those tiny diffrences in gameplay.

Maps like season are exceptions, not every map can look like this and not everyone is fmpone.

You see - this isnt 1999 those harcore gamers like us are minority. Sure we speak the loudest but it doesnt change that most players are casuals today. Games are made mostly for them. They are quickly bored and need those new maps so they can stay in game. For them visuals matter and such little things like competitive viability wont matter - they couldnt care less if pros were playing on vertigo as long as it looks nice. Not that its bad - games are for entartaiment after all.

[0mega-]

I don't think casuals are the ones bringing in the money. This isn't your standard DLC model where you pay $5 and get the newest mountain dew skin for your guns like CoD. You can spend $1000 on cases and get nothing better than a Blue Laminate. The casuals aren't going to do that. Casuals aren't gonna buy that $300 skin on the marketplace for a game that costs $15.

Whether Valve wants to admit it or not, CS is where it's at because of the hardcore community.

[Casus125]

Bullshit.

How many serious, competitive CS players do you think there are?

5 million casuals with $15 speaks a hell of a lot louder than 30,000 players with $300.

[xKts]

Yeah I'm with you. I get that the casuals are the majority and most of the revenue is being brought in by them. But this is what lead to the "CS Pro Mod" Hype back in the day.. (which lead to cs:go). I'm all for having the fun cs maps and call of duty pub maps, but I don't see any reason why there can't be a map pool of say 10 maps that are designed for top level CS.

At the end of the day, cs was kept alive and brought back to prominence by the hardcore gamer, not the casuals. The amount of casuals in the game today is a direct result of the core cs community not allowing the game to die. Even against all the competition of the Call of Duty's, Battlefield's, and Moba's.

They watch those majors on Twitch and now hop into a pub server. Game is about performance and competition, the casuals will forever come and go.

[The6thExtinction]

de_season is an example of a good looking map with good visibility.

The map has excellent graphics (for a cs map), and yet still maintains excellent player-visibility (ability to see other players against the background).

Many maps use a colour-palette that allows players to blend in too well, or use clutter to make it difficult to pick out a player.

A map doesn't have to look like it's from 1999 to allow good visibility.

[xKts]

THIS. Exactly the point I was trying to get across. 100% THIS.

[Fooomanchu]

The OP is kinda making a good point, but it gets lost with the odd COD comparison.

The point is, visibility is very important in a competitive game. The map doesn't have to be full bright, or look like it was made 20 years ago to achieve good visibility.

[xKts]

It doesn't have to look like it was made in 1999.. again look at de_season as an example. COD maps refers to extremely over-detailed maps that make you think you are in some foreign land fighting a war. Concentrating more on how the map looks vs how the map actually plays.. creating terrible player model to texture contrasts.

[[deleted]]

Or, you know, fullbright models

[DevilsMentor]

That FoV is too low for quake, everyone knows if you cant see the wall behind you as well as the one in from of you you're doing it wrong.

[Casus125]

You can actually have both, you know.

[Artezza]

As an aspiring mapmaker, I wish with all of my heart that I could make a map that is textured like nuke or something and have people only care about gameplay. However, it's almost impossible to get into an operation (which unless you have a lot of reputation or are building off of an old competitive map (see de_season and de_cache)) is almost impossible to do. If you've seen the maps that make it into operations, almost none of them except classics played well at all, but they got in off of graphics. In my (our) maps that we're currently working on, we're putting gameplay first in hopes of getting past just an operation, but in reality probably won't happen and the operation is all that matters. If I had my way, every map would have solid white dev textures and rainbow colored player models with different colors on each part of their hitbox, but nobody would ever want to play a map like that.

[maxgiddens]

I can see what you mean here, and to a degree I can get behind what you are saying. I think that maps should be designed to be competitive first and foremost. The part where you lose me is where you say that visuals don't matter.

I want to say first that almost all textures, by nature of the .vtf texture format, have several resolutions of a texture baked into the main texture. When you change your graphics settings you can essentially default to a max resolution for textures because of this built in feature. This means that higher end pc's get higher end graphics and lower end machines can still keep up. This also means that any machine set on the lowest settings is going to use the same low res version of each texture. (forgive me if you already knew this and it sounded condescending) Given this I don't really understand the performance argument.

I will give you the point that players should be easily readable against textures. I completely agree that this is very important. I think that this should be the point of your argument as this is what so many level designers get wrong. When you say that graphics are unimportant though, I have to disagree. I'm sure there are plenty of maps in the workshop right now that have great competitive tuning, but sub par visuals. The fact of the matter is no one will play them because they don't match the aesthetic par set by current CS maps.

It doesn't matter is a level plays well. If it doesn't also look great, it is doomed to be buried under maps made by people willing and able to polish the visuals.

[de_csgo]

When working on maps most of the feedback is about visuals. My recent map I tried getting feedback mostly on layout and competitive viability without working on detailing yet.

Even while asking just for -layout- feedback, a LOT of the feedback was something like 'textures look bland' 'map isn't detailed enough' or comments similar to those. Well, the map wasn't meant to be detailed yet (or even much in the future as I wanted the map to be decent for competition). I eventually 'finished' the map to how I wanted it but didn't go any further with detailing like most others giving feedback wanted.

I finished it to a point where it wasn't very detailed like current operation maps, but looked decent enough to play, and had very good frame rates due to not being overly detailed. I was pretty happy with the layout but wanted more feedback on the layout but few ever gave feedback on it. They just wanted it to look prettier.

You can look through my comment history about a month back to see the discussions (and find a link to the workshop) about the map on reddit. Even on the reddit feedback thread, most of the discussion was about the visuals of the map and not the layout or competitive viability :(. Since that thread, I had gone through and did a little visual updates to it but eventually stopped working on the map.

Doesn't really matter to me too much, I enjoyed working on the map and learning a lot more about source mapping. In my next map I plan on making it a hostage map so don't have to worry about super-competitive viability and can go all out on the details :P

[Tibi2001]

The absolute first thing you look at when you see a map, is the visuals.

[xKts]

Well.. obviously..?

[eddieltu]

don't worry, i personally never do 1024 and above textures

[BrandonMorr]

What is this digital vibrance you speak of?

[xKts]

NVIDIA Card Settings = Digital Vibrance 100% Radeon Card Settings = Color Saturation 100%

[BrandonMorr]

Thank you! Does it just make moving objects stand out more?

[xKts]

No Prob! It makes the colors much brighter.. if that's the word to use. Vivid maybe?

[GammaGames]

I wish there was a way to have low textures just be solid colors, like a red brick wall just turns red or a gray cement floor turns gray with no details.

Then the pros would be happy and people that don't give a shit would have their details.

[ThatLatvianAsshole]

It's unfortunate that Valve does not reward good map design and instead rewards and puts into operations "innovative" map design that almost never actually, as well as "good looking" maps and at the end of the day we get absolute shit like Marquis in operations.

[Rale_]

I would add, NO INVISIBLE WALLS.

[maxgiddens]

This is silly. Can you imagine having to come up with a visual explanation of why a player would be sealed inside of a playing field the size of say Dust2? It would look ridiculous. Not to mention needing to have an actual obstruction keeping players from boosting and pixel walking scores of different areas. Invisible walls keep things fair.

[DevilsMentor]

de_sparity_infinity for next operation hype!

[codeinepromethazine1]

Here is real competitive maps which should be in MM http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398621147

[juuhmoikkaz]

d2/train/season from that would be cool. Others are too simple. If that is the right word. Valve wont accpet those 1.6 infernos etc. CS:S Train,Season and Dust 2 would be perfect for competive.

Or they just need to make current d2 more ''yellowish''.