How come whenever I come online, half of the servers that have a low ping for me are running the Hallway map? It's not that great a map, all-in-all, and I, for one, hope it goes the way of Bridge Wars.

The biggest problem is the levels of danger relative to your position. Your own spawn is the most dangerous place for you to be, but camping over the enemy spawn is extremely safe (I once ended a 35-kill streak sniping because I got bored). On a vanilla map, things tend to gradually get more dangerous as you advance (although the back of enemy spawn is usually less dangerous than the middle of the map), and that makes for better combat mechanics.

So why does everyone else seem to like Hallway?

The pretty colors? I don't like it much either. I think it's the simplicity that draws people to host/play it.

The colors are pretty cool, I will admit. It'd be nice to see a better-made map with the same color scheme.

I haven't found much about the vanilla maps to be complex, though. Apparently some people see it differently.

I agree, I don't like hallway very much.

I wish for outlandish maps with crazy physics like letting us use floating blocks. It'd make for some really crazy fun gameplay, and let us roleplay helicopters without actually having them.

Please Mr. Aksoy, let us toggle block physics within our servers. It'd also screw griefers out of half their fun.

Togglable physics could be neat, yes.

It'd also silence those people who clamor for lava. By just removing the lowest series of blocks so there's no land, it'd be impossible to get out of water. You could still run around killing people, but getting the intel would be harder if not impossible.

The problem would be three-dimensional block-spammers who leave crap floating all over the map.

That would add to the fun in my opinion. Having all sorts of crazy islands in the sky to build to and capture.

It's like griefers would actually begin adding to the gameplay instead of being faggots 24/7.

The only thing that we'd need to fix is to keep the CP and intel from being stacked up and have them at a fixed level, say, 1-2 blocks up from water level, so it wouldn't become impossible to capture it.

Yeah, the first version of Caves that I made had a problem with spawn being dangerous, so I moved the face of the mountain back some. It's still a little worse than I'd like, because I couldn't move it back too far without making the mountain too thin, but at least there's hills to hide behind too.

(Not that anyone really runs Caves anymore, but I have no complaints, it had its day in the sun.)

It seems pretty straightforward to explain why these maps are the popular ones. They have the most action. There are plenty of prettier-looking maps now but they are less popular because you can easily get lost, wander around for a few minutes, and then get sniped. rq

Which goes back to something I keep saying I'll work on - expanding /follow in pyspades so that:

1. It can keep you in the action 99% of the time, regardless of the map, without having to actively search for teammates playing offensive.
2. It has a default behavior that promotes #1, which savvy players and admins can turn off, but is tuned so that average Deuces are happy.

This feature should help boost the popularity of the sprawling, slower-paced maps out there, at least on the servers that choose to use it.

i personally think that hallway is the new bridge wars

I don't like the hallway map.

I grew to hate bridge wars- it's such a useless map once the bridge goes down (and it always goes down). Hallway was a massive breath of fresh air. True spawnkilling can be a problem, but efficient sniping really gets a workout and once again tactical tunneling is actually possible again.

Then Island came out. I'm finding it almost impossible to get into island. Enjoying a match is entirely reliant on the whole team working together to hold off the enemy waves, and good luck seeing that ever happen. Intel capping is virtually impossible in it too.

Bring back paradise someone, please...