f13.net

I haven't seen a discussion on the new map / game-type.

For those who haven't played, this is the three part 'push teh cart from start to finish' game.

Plays almost like dustbowl only with each corner or chokepoint or ambush position along the route acting like a mini-control point. Though the slow moving cart means you have to fight each inch you gain even between the chokepoints, instead of having travel routes connect predictable standoff areas.

Good map for crap players like me right now, because the regulars haven't 'solved' the map yet. Probably suffers a bit in the short term because I'm not convinced it is a great map for medics (lots of health scattered around, and the cart acts as a dispenser), yet everyone is playing medic (though it might just be that the mass of jonny-come-lately medics are all shit). Seems good for Soldiers, Heavies, Snipers, Engineers (red only), and Spies (blue only), not so good for Pyros, Demos, Scouts.


Better than everything else except dustbowl and gravelpit imo. Huge advance on Badlands and fucking CTF Well.

Ah, my favorite two maps. Everything else is trash. Including Gold Rush. Just because it's better than Badlands doesn't mean it's good.

Haven't played it. Medics are broken. Will play when game is less gay.

I'm not a big fan myself, I think I'll just play a support class whenever I play it. 

Engineers are kind of key to it anyway.

Demos and Engineers are godly, just like you'd expect.  Since everyone is a medic though, snipers and spies are pretty important right now to get through the medic/x combos.

Scouts are utterly useless.  : (

I'm not sure how balanced or fun it will be in the future...but for now I'm content playing it 24/7.  Not literally of course, I mean playing on servers which feature it 24/7.  Right.

(btw, wtf is wrong with badlands?  I think it's an excellent map.)

That's wacky, my limited experience has been scouts are awesome defensively, and not too shabby on offense. A well placed sentry is definitely a pain, but there are so many routes that only scouts can get to easily. I've only played the map twice now, but the first time was fricking awesome and I was scout almost the entire time. The second time I was a spy, but we lost because of medic masturbation. I think I really like the map, but I need to play a few more times minus the masturbation.

It's unfun, claustrophobic feeling and a victim of design masturbation. It's a hodge podge of ideas that creates no cohesion and even worse, leaves you feeling like things are completely unbalanced due to fort placement. Not to mention that sort of thing was already done better with other maps. I like hydro more than Badlands and Hydro is a PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm digging Gold Rush. It's got some fantastic engineer sentry gun spots that take some serious pushes, good spies or luck to take out. I wouldn't say scouts are completely useless on it, but they have to be good or they are fodder.

Agree that the map is awesome, disagree about spies.  As on every offense/defense map, spies are the most useful on defense.  This map is pure spy heaven when you are playing defense...few pyros, many ambush spots to hit and melt away after they take the first point, few scouts and pyros, and everyone is facing one way.  I finish first with ease 80% of the time (crap pubbie servers, of course) as a defensive spy on goldrush.

ugh the second stage is ass

I have had good luck with every class but scouts on it. The problem for scouts is even with their x2 capping ability the cart just does not move that fast. This makes you worse than a sitting duck. Demo guys are insane on this map because they know darn well where the cart is moving and it moves slow so you can mine the living piss out of the track and have fun blowing people up. To move the cart I find I have the best luck as a hwg or a soldier so you actually have some hp to eat a few bombs if you huddle next to it and do it right you can avoid a lot of damage by using it to block line of sight from SG's and other attackers.

I had some fun last night we got onto the last map of it as the attackers and I found a way to get up into a building that over looks the cap point I never went into before. I managed to get about 8 headshots in about 40 seconds and we got the win before people even figured out where I was ganking them from. I am a horrible horrible sniper but that map has some pretty nasty sniper lookouts if you can get into position to use them.

On defense, I've had best luck as an engineer. On offense, I'm a heavy that ducks in the front of the cart letting it push me along. The cart's regen plus a medic makes me real hard to take down.

Has anyone done any tests yet to see how fast the cart moves if you have a whole team of scouts riding it?  Is there a cap?

I think I've finally come to terms that I hate Goldrush, engie FTW!

Gold Rush isn't too bad IMO but fuck Badlands. What an AWFUL map design. Basically, they managed to design a map so bad that whatever team solidly loses the middle cap point first loses, horribly. There IS no coming back from getting your second point capped.

If I recall correctly with cp maps the cap speed maxes out at 5 people( or 3 over the cap weight ), so it might be the same for the cart speed.

Scouts are crappy for moving the cart if it is under attack, but great for slowing down defenders and removing medics and snipers.

I always liked running ahead as a scout and distracting respawning enemies while the rest of my team capped points.  Haven't had a chance to try it out much on Goldrush since I agree that medics are gay.

I did have some fun spamming pipe bombs over a building on one map, though.  Found that I could pretty much do so endlessly from a particular spot.

Finally got a chance to play badlands for the first time.

Holy shit I can't believe valve made that crap  :uhrr:

Goldrush is a great map.  It's an homage to THE Enemy Territory map.  It also does a good job reminding me of it's namesake.  Not in this version is the ability to blow up the cart, which in ET (it was a tank), engineers could fix and start moving again.  God that was a great map.

GET THE GOLD!!

Playing some more, I'm finding that on the Red team I often get a 10 or 15:1 kill ratio playing engineer, but only because people still haven't completely worked the map out.

Playing blue, I usually go soldier, and rack up big points because all the good turret positions have somewhere a soldier can rocket them down from extreme range (or at least by being careful in how you approach) - so long as you know the map.

I expect the number of engineers to drop off as people understand the map better; soldiers and maybe demos will become more popular than they are now.

Snipers can rack up on this map as well, so long as they know which vantage point to snipe which area from. Considering there are at least 2-3 good areas to attack from on each of the maps, snipers can usually pick out the most vulnerable and start the headshotting.

i got a ton of sweet headshots on heavies trying to push the cart.  It was pretty amusing.

Heavies with a medic on them feel pretty close to invulnerable when pushing the cart.  The cart is refilling your ammo,  so might as well just hold down the fire key and walk forward (making sure to pop anything that looks like a sniper as you go). 

This is very evident when the other side gets caught without anyone decent on demo to mine up a section of track.

Heavies should really be able to deal with mines on the track by shooting them aside.

That said, it always surprises me how few people seem to realise you can push sticky bombs around by shooting them.

I have Steam. Now what do I do? Buy TF2 and play with you guys?

I posted in the Steam community thread but no responses...

Is there some easy way to tell if my computer can even run TF2? I downloaded the BioShock demo and it ran like shit, but HL:2 ran great.

If HL:2 ran good, TF2 should run good.  Also, don't just get TF2 on its own, get the Orange Box.  Trust me on this.

I think you do have to buy TF2 to play it; should be a tab called "store" that will let you do it.  Probably going to be near the top of the "top sellers" sub-tab if you can't find it.  You can also get the Orange Box, which has TF2 as well as some extra stuff (like Portal and Half-Life 2) if you want it.

I'm not sure if there's a way to easily tell if your computer will run it; the official specs are:


I'd think it would be more similar to HL2 than to Bioshock (it uses the HL2 engine) but I'm not positive.

If you haven't played Portal, it's worth the entire cost of the Orange Box, imo. TF2 is just the best fucking maple bacon icing ever. It's mixed with angel wings for the heavenly drug effect. Crushed angel wings.

I played the Demos for Portal and HL2 and they were pretty good so I got the Orange Box. I'm not a big fan of single-player FPS though, not sure if I'll actually play HL2. The Havok physics kind of annoy me in that a giant chest of drawers apparently has the same mass as a empty take-out carton.

Try throwing them both at a bad guy.  You'll see a difference.   :grin:

God on the last map of the attacking goldrush map I found a hilarious place to snipe from. I managed to get into one of the buildings looking down into the enemy spawn area nobody was up there defending it. I got about 8 or 9 headshots in about 45 seconds until we got the win. I managed to chain slay all the opposing snipers I could see they were looking around for me but nobody was spotting me. I am a horrible sniper but that was gold right there.

Valve maps in order of bestness:

1) Well (CP)
2) Granary
3) Hydro
4) Badlands
4) Gravelpit
5) 2fort
6) ctf_well
7) Dustbowl
8) Goldrush


Goldrush is atrocious, it's like Valve took Dustbowl and said "Hey how can we enhance the horrible  flaws of this map?"

Where are you guys playing these days? I see Bhodi on the LC servers sometimes; they are really really high quality servers. I'd recommend for everyone to play on them if you are interested in improving your game experience (and skills, vs regular pubbie servers).

Indeed. Lost Continent is where it's at; I stalk a few of you guys, Helm most recently, but the skill level of the players on the servers you guys play on is simply awful.

If you see me on and want to join, just bug me and I'll give you the password. It's like night and day, playing with people who know what they're doing.

Most of the servers are horrible and full of asshats. The good servers I've found are always full.

So I mainly play on servers full of  :uhrr:

Just to throw this in the works..

A decent custom map to try is pl_dbheights (http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/56090). Its a payload version of dustbowl.

I can't believe you people don't like Goldrush.  I think it's the best map I've ever played in any FPS.  Different strokes I guess.

It needs some balance work, but yeah, it's a fucking brilliant map.

Nothing against the map type itself, just I generally play on pubs, and a lot of maps (Goldrush among them) have a problem with one side completely blowing the other away based on relatively small differences in skill.

Granary, for example, originally had the middle CP as being the most difficult to capture; once that one went down, the team that capped it would respawn faster, and the centre CP has the longest capture timer.  So, there was sometimes a bit of a brawl over the middle point, but then once one team capped it, there was a huge landslide against the other team as it got harder and harder for them to defend.  Valve did this kind of thing to a lot of their maps, part of their "stalemates are for pussies" initiative or something, I think.

In Goldrush, there's a lot of inertia to the play, in the form of whether that cart is moving forwards or backwards.  So I see a lot of huge blowouts, where one team has a guy or two on it who are slightly better than the other team, and can move/stop the cart.  So they either win every point by this one guy inching it forward for twenty minutes, or lose on the first point because they don't have anyone who can do that.  Kind of fun for the winning team, but slow torture if you're on the losing team.

Probably in clan matches it's a lot of fun, but I generally find it a bit frustrating in games with random pubbies.

So, uh... what you're saying is, in Goldrush, skilled players can decide the outcome.  You're right.  That's terrible.

 :awesome_for_real:

I'm with you on the 5 control point maps though.  I hate them all.  I don't know if it's a matter of pubs not knowing to set up on the next one quickly enough after one gets capped, or what.  They either take too long, or someone got completely rolled and everyone feels cheated.  I think that's just a fact of life on pugs though.  I also hate 2 Fort because pubs don't go for the intelligence, they just try to kill people.

That's why I think Goldrush is so awesome though, because it's balanced for almost all the classes.  So no matter what, even if you're in a pub, there's something for the class you want to play to do at any given time.  Blue Scouts and sometimes Pyros are useless, but that's about it.  I haven't noticed the blow outs in Goldrush at all, at least not to the same degree as 5 point maps.

Goldrush's biggest flaw is that it's woefully imbalanced; the win stats are tilted very heavily toward red.  This is actually a pretty good thing for pubs, though, because the bad team gets to feel warm and fuzzy about holding the good team off at the last point, even if the good team's been holding off the bad team all the way back at the first point.

There are win stats?

What do you think makes it so imbalanced towards red?

Also, who plays TF2 in organized groups?  I'd be willing to bet that even those WITH organized groups spend the majority of their time in pubs.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php (http://www.steampowered.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php)

Scroll down to the bottom to see per-map statistics.  Goldrush is far and away the most heavily tilted toward one side (80%/20% in favor of red).


I think it's that the cart has a long way to go and a limited amount of time to get there, and certain sections of the map are relatively easy to lock down (e.g. spots where a sentry can cover the approach path with minimal exposure, such that it's easy for a sniper or other support class to protect it from the usual counters).

The only 5 point control map I've ever played that isn't over after the first center capture is toyfort.  I regularly see toyfort swing back and forth, and battles there are actually exciting.  I wish they'd add that to the rotation. 

The map design really hurts, a lot of the areas look too similar and it's hard to figure out where the different control points are. What little I played I found myself defending one control point or attacking one but not even really being able to find the others, let alone quickly enough to defend them after a previous one had fallen.

If I'm typical of a pub-server retard then that might be part of the problem.

Wait, you can't find your way from one control point to the next on goldrush?

... on GOLDRUSH?  The one where there's a railroad track connecting all the points?

No not Goldrush, I was talking about other control point maps. (Don't know the names)

Plus it means pubs get to see all three maps.

Higher the skill level of players, the more balanced Goldrush gets. The sentry thing is a good example.

Sentries are not espeicially useful against good goldrush players. All the good spots for killin' have somewhere to rocket the sentry down from.

I dunno man.  There are any number of explanations for that win imbalance.  Goldrush is a fairly new map, and defense is generally much easier for newbs.  I wonder what that imbalance will be as more and more people learn the map.  On the bottom of that stat page they have a topographic of where people die, and it looks like the only really imbalanced part is where blue has to go through that tunnel.  And now that I think about it, most games I play on that part of the map usually end up in standoffs at that point.  So yea, maybe that one half of one map.

goldrush 1.2, 2.2, and 3.3 are equally horribly balanced. In all cases the chokepoints to get the final capture point are brutal and the defensive spawn point is very close to the last capture location. Defensive snipers are also somewhat overpowered due to the incredible sight lines through said chokepoints. The only reason the death maps of goldrush 2.x and 3.x are so quiet is that very few games go that far. I think the other goldrush CPs are setup fairly well, but all the end points need some work.

If what you're saying is true then there should be big yellow blobs at the front of the other maps.  There's not.

 :oh_i_see:

Sooooo...  if the games don't get that far then the deaths should all be happening at the beginning...  which would cause big yellow blobs on the death map at the front of the other maps...

 :oh_i_see:

You guys don't like the map.  I'll live.

If blue doesn't make it past stage one because they all die there, they don't make it to stage two.  If they don't make it to stage two, they don't die in stage two, because they aren't there.  Stage three is right out.  Hence the big yellow blob in stage one and relatively little in stages two or three.

 :uhrr:

Also, I like goldrush.  As long as the sides switch frequently, imbalance isn't necessarily bad.  Though I do wish I got to see more of the map on a regular basis.

 :ye_gods:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/tf2/death_maps/pl_goldrush_deaths.jpg

Maybe I'm not being clear.  If blue doesn't make it past stage one, and in fact all die there, then there should be yellow blobs, or worse RED BLOBS at the beginning of the map.  But there aren't any.  In fact in all three phases, the deaths look extremely sparse in the beginning.  That should rationally lead you to the conclusion that people are dying at the end of the map, where correlating yellow spots on the map grow increasingly bright.  There's only one really ugly, unbalanced part of the whole thing, which is that tunnel/building thing where you see the big red blob.  There are only two control points on that phase of the map, and the really bad part is after the first point. 

So where are all these terrible choke points at the beginning of the stages?  It's been my experience that most times blue ubers like three different guys and blows the shit out of the first point.  If you look at Goldrush next to the other maps, the choke points don't look nearly as bad. 
 
I think it has more to do with the cart mechanic than omghax sentry spots.  So, yea red wins more.  You must push little cart.

The relatively "bright" spots in the later stages are the horrible choke points for those stages, whose horror is only diminished by the fact that so few survive the first one. 

In stage two (far left), it's that little tunnel between the two points that the entire blue team has to pour into to get the cart moving, and later that little underpass right before the second capture point (2.2) where the big wall of sentry gun death goes (on that ledge in the corner that's hard to bounce grenades onto).

In stage three (middle of the map), the bright spots are even less bright because fewer of the games make it that far, but again, there's one at that bend after the first point (again, a major choke point since EVERYTHING has to go through that one hallway), and one more at the bend before the last point (3.3, aka the Narrow Hall of Sniper and Pipebomb Death).

Note that in all cases points the brightest spot are right on top of the track -- hence, the problem is not that the blue team is not pushing the cart.

The coloring is scaled across the entire map. The fact those other chokepoints are barely yellow is a testament to how many people die in that corridor.

On the first part of gold rush (and the second part), you can really die anywhere on the map. It's total chaos. On the third part, there's a built in choke point where whether you win or die determines the outcome of the last round. That's to say, the map is colored exactly how it should be given how it's laid out.

Come on guys.  There's barely a slight hint of yellowish discoloration in the beginning of any of the three stages.  All the slowdown is toward the end of the maps.  You can't really say that 'goldrush is horribly unbalanced' because good defense is easy and fun.  You can't say that the map is broken because fixed positions are a broken game mechanic.  You can't ask for laser guided invisible spy starcraft ghost nuke dropping to take out sentries to make it more fair for the poor blue noobs who don't get to see half the map when they lose because shooting rockets at sentries is apparently hard. 

Goldrush's possession of awesome is a fact.  If you don't agree with that, it's cool.  But please find something else besides balance to excuse your foolishness.  It's like gazelles complaining about lion balance.  We should all know better than to expect shit to be perfectly balanced to everyone's satisfaction.  Defense wins more because defense wins more irl.  I think that's part of the awesome.

I'm not saying the beginning part of each stage is hard. 1.2, 2.2, and 3.3 are the last capture points for each stage. Those are the problem spots. As to defense having the advantage, in dustbowl the defense only wins 60% of the time as opposed to 80% in goldrush. That's much more reasonable in my opinion. You actually get to see all the stages on a regular basis! :)

Musashi, the people you're arguing with are on record ON THIS VERY PAGE as liking the map. 

At some point you might want to take a step back and say to yourself "self, am I being a douchebag?"  You might be surprised what the answer is.

I'll do that.

OH SWEET, I'M NOT.

I told you it'd be surprising.   :awesome_for_real:

I don't mind not getting past the first part of goldrush that much because on defense, it is the most godliest spy map ever.  I start the game crouched on the tire pile in the far right corner and get 4 or 5 kills before I die.  When they get to the point where they've really cleared out the first part and are just moving the cart, another 3 or 4 go down.  As for second point defense, I just sit in that little alcove where the ladder from the trench is and stab anyone who tries to move the cart.  If I get bored I stealth and go back in the first part and stab snipers and soldiers/heavies coming out of the spawn.

I don't claim to be good, but its an unusual Goldrush 1 defense pub where I don't win by 15-20 points.  Its just set up as a spy's dream.  Defense of 2 is also very sweet.