Yeah, but Damnation is like a basketball court where one of teams hoops is only 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide… I don’t have a study to back it up, but I bet if I did conduct one I’d find that in Damnation the team that starts the game closer to the top overwhelmingly wins in the end, everything else being equal. The top in damnation is just too easy to defend… or at least too hard to take. Maybe if screen watching was eliminated that would help…

I hear you, and you make a good point against using close games as the only metric, a map can be bad and still produce regularly close games. At the same time, I think snowballing is a symptom of poor map design. If a lesser player happens to take a certain position on a map and therefore, because of the position, not their skill, can go on to win the game by easily holding the position, then the map is clearly not properly balanced. I’m not saying that is necessarily true of Damnation, just that if the advantage conferred by holding a position is too great, then the map design breaks down.

Speaking of Chiron, you could just as easily apply points 1-4 above to holding the central rocket launcher room in that map and yet everyone agrees that Chiron is a tragically horrible map. Whats the difference?

damnation is awesome.

weak, justify your opinion. And lets have your list.

kegen pretty much said it best i think but i’ll try to elaborate a bit on the difference between chiron and damnation.

First of all, you speak of poor map “balance” without defining what good balance would look like. I assume you are talking about weapon placement only because asymmetrical maps with clear points of geographical advantage are very common, in fact high ground comes to mind and is on your list. high ground’s weapons are “balanced” however in that the sniper rifle and rockets are outside the fortress, not to mention the only vehicle with a weapon system (in team slayer games).

So assuming you meant weapon balance lets take a look at chiron and damnation.

chiron has no weapon balance whatsoever because the function of the map is such that weapons and players are forced to fight in one room at a time. you cannot shoot through doorways or down hallways. in fact the “map” that is chiron is whatever room you happen to be in upon engagement, therefore it should almost be considered 6 or 7 separate maps instead of one, given that there is absolutely no flow, aside from players passing through portholes, from room to room. This creates a unique circumstance where the room chosen for engagement almost always is the room the power weapon is in… regardless of placement. think about it. that room has three entrances. it would be much easier to defend the shotgun room that has high ground and only two entrances… one of which doesn’t immediately face the room, but players stay in the rocket room because that is where the rocket spawns. It has nothing to do with the shape or layout of the map.

Damnation on the other hand spawns two power weapons and the oversheild off of the top. the geographical advantage takes precedence over the advantage in arms and players would rather keep the top than camp in the rocket trench. To me, this is balanced weapon placement (or at least more balanced than chiron). Also, the map is about a thousand times more wide open than chiron giving you sight lines too and from the top from a myriad of places on the map. This is perhaps the biggest difference as more sight lines give you many more tactical options for taking the top in damnation than you have for taking the rocket room in chiron.

with solid play and a little bit of patience it is possible to take the top in damnation with skill alone. This is not as easily said about the rocket room that is chiron.

to summarize…
1. geographical advantage is fine as long as weapons are appropriately balanced e.g. high ground.
2. while the weapon balance is not necessarily perfect in damnation (pistol and long rifle on top) it gives enough of an advantage in arms to the bottom dwellers to have skill once again become a factor in the battle
3. chiron sucks
4. to quote kegen, “damnation is awesome.”

Yeah, but as soon as you finally “take the top with skill alone” in Damnation, and your shields are down, your partner is dead, and your clip is empty HCE will spawn both of your opponents right there on the high ground with you…. they kill you, then you and your partner spawn at the bottom of the map.

And you cited the placement of the overshield away from the top as a boon to the balance of the level, but the overshield is so far from where all the action inevitably happens (given the shittyness of the map) that by the time you hop across all the gaps and climb three ramps (in full view of the top) your shield is gone.

Honestly though, I think the map would play a little better system linked, to eliminate screen watching. It just too easy to, given the top, with a pistol (all powerful in HCE), the sniper rifle, invisibility, and ample grenades to check someones screen and then find an angle on them.

Really if you have the top, the only way you can loose in that level is to make a stupid mistake, like falling off.

The base in High Ground can’t even be compared to the top in Damnation. High Ground is SUCH a better level and is SOOO much more balanced. When I play HG I don’t really even feel like there is necessarily an advantage to spawning in the base or down the level. Where as in Damnation if I spawn on the top, I pretty much feel that its in the bag… and if I spawn and the bottom of the level by the waterfall I’m ready to quit.

I’m basically forming my opinion on 2v2 split screen play… I think Keenan is probably right that free for all would help or larger teams…. maybe.

I think defining ‘balance’ is important, but more important is defining the role ‘balance’ plays in determining the overall quality of a map. If I read you correctly, you are defining ‘balance’ as simply the trade off between geomorphological irregularities and the placement of weapons, equipment, and/or power-ups (referred to as ‘goodies’ here after) relative to those irregularities. The more extreme the geomorphological differences on the map, the more extreme the weapon placement must be to ‘balance’ those differences and if they are not adequately balanced, the “design” of the map would be considered flawed. Therefore, an unbalanced map is a badly designed map.

However, as you have rightly pointed out, ‘balance’ does not necessarily equate high map quality, e.g. an open room where everyone spawns with a BR and there are no goodies to pick up would be maximally ‘balanced’ but not a particularly fun or interesting map, and certainly unlikely to make anyone’s top 10. Movement away from this minimalist map design towards increasing complexity is possible by altering either the geomorphology of the map or by placing goodies in the map.

Of course, it actually is possible to add geomorphology to a map without affecting the ‘balance’ as you’ve defined it. To illustrate, I’ll continue our thought experiment building up from the minimalist map design. Instead of an empty room, the topography of the map could consist only of equally sized pillars equally spaced from the walls and each other. As long as every player experiences the map environment equally at all times, ‘balance’ remains the same despite the lack of compensation from goody placement. I should point out, for the sake of completeness, that it is theoretically also possible to place goodies on the map and still leave the ‘balance’ unaltered if you placed massive caches of all possible goodies with instant replacement everywhere on the map. Again, all the players are experiencing the map environment equally all the time. However, that is not to say that the addition of columns would not change the way the map plays. Now imagine, in addition to the equally spaced columns, each player spawns with a shotgun and sniper rifle instead of a BR. Depending of the spacing of the columns, the map design could favor different styles of play. This is some kind of second order interaction effect between geomorphology and weapons and is an element of balance that I referred to several times in my list that is not captured in your definition of ‘balance’, but I suspect is very important for map quality. I think the best maps accommodate multiple playing styles.

Going back to the room full of columns, you can continue to add complexity, making some columns thicker, differently spaced from each other, placing certain goodies in certain caches and not in others, etc. and ‘balance’ will remain relatively unchanged as long as the map environment each player experiences is equal on average through time. However, eventually these complexities accumulate to the point where the map environment is unequally experienced by the players, which means, depending on where in the map a player is, there is a significant difference in the likelihood of their successful completion of the objective. At this point, it does not technically matter whether the map is globally symmetrical or asymmetrical, it is the local environment experienced by the player that determines the ‘balance’ (incidentally, most symmetrical maps are bilaterally symmetrical, and it occurs to me that this global symmetry might work to balance 2 team games by allowing teams to experience the map environment equally through time, but I doubt it does anything to ‘balance’ 3+ team games or free for all games).

It is interesting, and telling, that you count only two power weapons spawning on the bottom of Damnation. I count three, the rocket launcher, sniper rifle, and shotgun. But of course, the shotgun isn’t on par with the sniper rifle and rocket launcher in terms of its conferred advantage on this map. This and the relative uselessness of the over-shield speak to a lack of balance in the interaction between geomorphology and goody placement.

It would be an interesting experiment to remove the sniper rifle and pistol from the top and see if people still camped up there, or if the camping would migrate down to the rocket launcher trench, or more likely the back room with the sender portal. My guess is that it would, in which case, it becomes less clear how much of the advantage is purely geomorphological and how much is an interaction between geomorphology and weapon placement.

A pistol spawning somewhere on the lower lever would do wonders.

The fact that teams start out in different areas throws the balance off from the start in a lot of levels, particularly ones that are less symmetrical. It’s just an inherent evil, and it’s a great scapegoat whenever someone is losing.
I love Damnation, even if I start on the bottom. And even if you know you’re going to lose, you still have to try to close the gap as much as possible. We should make a replica of Damnation in Halo 3, put the rockets up top and the Battle Rifle andSniper Rifle on bottom, and see what happens. There won’t be fall damage, but the only time people ever really die from falls is by the useless overshield bridges.

A Damnation remake for H3 (its already been done) would be fun, but comparing the dominance of the pistol to the BR is ridiculous, there is no comparison.

Damnation sucks, but I need to qualify that. It sucks 2v2, split screen, with the default weapon set and HCE’s respawn system.

For those interested:
http://www.forgehub.com/forum/competitive-maps/59363-process-damnation-remake.html