Design Goals

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What are the goals?

This page sets out the overall design goals this project follows. These are not rules, but they are always considered when making changes, along with player responses and feedback.

There are 5 main goals that changes should be designed to meet:

1. Gameplay balance
2. Exploit prevention and fairness
3. Player understanding and perception
4. Quality of life improvements
5. Quality control

Goals

General

• Observe how players adapt to changes and make adjustments as necessary.
  • Give time for players to familiarize themselves with changes before making further adjustments.
  • Sometimes a change will not always play out as intended, or can even go unnoticed by most players.
  • Try to understand players' perception of a change and adjust to improve it.

Gameplay balance

• Avoid blocking or removing established strategies entirely, instead try to find a way to balance for both teams and provide counter play.
  • Unless the strategy is particularly subversive and unavoidably unfair, it should still be possible to attempt it.
• Avoid changes that create a subversive strategy or tactic that is definitively worse for balance and enjoyment than it was before.
• Changes designed to address a very specific or arbitrary problem that could be resolved by fixing the original cause of the problem should be avoided.
  • For example: a balance change was made to a config that significantly affects specific areas of a map. While the map could be changed, the config is at fault and should be reviewed first, rather than changing the map to fix a config issue.
• Weapon and ammo placements are important for dictating how survivors can maintain their position in certain areas.
  • Avoid making ammo or weapon pickups too readily available in key locations, consider creating situations that put pressure on survivors to consider their ammo to balance a strategy or holdout spot.
• New infected ladders should not be overused or provide too easy access to unnecessarily powerful spawns, to the point where there is no downside to not using the new spawns over any other spawn.
  • Special consideration should be made for common tank fight areas, especially where rock tanks are already prevalent.
• New props can benefit both survivors and infected, but particular consideration should be made when adding props to key tank fight areas to be balanced for both sides.
  • Props should avoid significantly reducing the strength of hittables (unless that is the explicit goal), if they do the props should at least provide a benefit for infected.
  • Props should not make an area completely unviable for survivors to use.
• More powerful spawns or positions for tanks should be balanced out with the time and risk it takes to reach them.
• Props placed as pseudo infected ladders should be avoided where they restrict survivor movement, unless the prop is also intended to be used as a spawn or used by the survivors in some way.
• All skill levels should be considered when making changes.
• Distance points should reflected both the difficulty and length of the map, as well as how the map compares to the rest of the maps in the campaign.
• Ideally tank spawn ranges shouldn't be blocked unless nothing can be done to make those ranges fair for both teams.

Exploit prevention and fairness

• Exploits that are known and actively being abused that provide a definite unfair advantage for one team should be blocked.
  • However, not all "exploits" are necessarily problematic or provide an actual advantage with no drawbacks or risks. As such, judgement should be used to decide blocking an exploit is appropriate, or if it is a skilful use of map knowledge.
• Changes should not create a significantly unfair situations for one or both teams.
  • For example: creating a spot that is unreachable or unpathable spot for one team, but not the other team.
• Rather than blocking "unfair" spots where infected cannot reach survivors easily, consider adding infected counter play for those spots.
  • Now that new infected ladders can be added that allow infected to reach any part of a map, blocking these spots is less necessary.
  • Where there is no good way to improve infected access to these spots they can be blocked, but care should be taken to not restrict survivor positioning too much.
• Variety and creative use of a player's map knowledge should be encouraged.
  • In particular, try to prevent tank play from becoming stale or power creeping an area for infected through too many changes.

Player understanding and perception

• Players should immediately understand what to do in the map.
  • Players should always know how to progress through a map.
  • Players should not require someone else to explain to them how a new change functions.
  • Competitive configs should be immediately accessible to someone without meta knowledge of changes to maps by the config.
  • Players should not consistently be surprised by something that is changed in the map (being surprised the first time or two is expected).
• Changes that deviate too far from how any official map functions should be avoided.
  • Exceptions can be made if the change is implemented in a very clear, polished, and well designed way.
  • Avoid adding new types of interactions, complicated new events, or pathing that is not instantly clear to the player or clearly telegraphed with visual / audio cues.
  • Changes that deviate from this principle can negatively affect player and viewer perception of competitive configs, and also deter players that are new to competitive configs.
• Avoid removing "official" changes / intended map design where possible.
  • Time should be allowed for meta to develop around changes from official updates before deciding that they are bad and should be removed.
  • Changes should be considered critically and objectively, and not based solely on player demands and complaints.
  • Consistency and existing knowledge is important, especially for newer players.
  • Removing map elements that are restrictive is acceptable, e.g. invisible walls.
• Avoid adding too many new infected ladders while players are still getting used to the new official ladders.
  • Quality of life or stuck spot prevention ladders are fine, as well as ladders that are part of major area reworks.
• "Prop ladders" are fine as long as they are intuitive for players.
  • They should never go against lessons players have been taught about what is or isn't possible, such as props that are usually not solid or not climbable being used as ladders.
  • Prop ladders to access areas that can already be accessed in a faster / easier way can be unnecessary when new infected ladders are an option, it should always be considered why a prop is being used instead of an infected ladder.
  • Prop ladders should make sense thematically.
• Players on both teams should be able to easily tell which hittables are usable or not without needing to see the glows as a tank, especially in areas with multiple hittables or potentially hittable props.
  • Ideally, hittables should use colors to tell players if they can be hit, for example making unhittable cars white, or using a different skin for non-hittable dumpsters.

Quality of life improvements

• Survivors should never run out of ammo through normal gameplay, excluding tank fights or holdouts.
• Survivors should often have a choice over which gun to take, rather than be forced to take the only available option.
• Where possible players should be prevented from to getting unexpectedly stuck, stopped or having to jump due to level geometry.
• Useless pill spawns near the beginning and ends of maps should be removed or adjusted, this will improve the distribution of pills throughout the rest of the map.
  • Having pills at the start of some maps is acceptable on some maps due to tanks, events and chokepoints.
  • Having pills right at the end of a hard section of the map can feel unfair for the infected as all the damage done to kill the survivors is instantly undone.

Quality control

• Changes should visually fit into maps wherever possible.
  • Avoid using props that do not visually fit in the map, e.g. swamp trees in city environments.
  • Effort should be made to make the additions believable parts of the campaign, compare for example a randomly placed vehicle in the middle of a street vs. a car crashed into a barricade with smoke coming from the engine.
• Avoid adding in hittable types that do not appear in the map or campaign.
• Changes should not unpredictably block player movement and cause frustration.
• Changes should be implemented with great care, effort and accuracy, props and fixes should not be lazily added to a map with little effort put into their placement.
• Performance considerations should be made when there are a significant number of additions to maps.
  • Large numbers of props could affect performance on weaker PCs, by default dynamic props seem to always render regardless of range or visleaf.
  • Source engine maps can only contain a limited number of entities, going over these limits can cause instability or crashes. Some official maps are already dangerously close to these limits.
• Where Stripper:Source or other more reliable solutions are available, plugins or other mods should be avoided as they can cause unintended or unnoticed issues, while Stripper is 100% issue free when used correctly.
• Directly modifying the official anv_ VScripts should always be avoided where possible. Changes from these scripts can easily be removed or reverted using Stripper.
  • Modifying any of these files will cause issues when further updates are made to the game as any local modifications will overwrite the updated files.

Custom Campaigns

Custom campaigns have some additional principles that should be followed due to how infrequently they are played and the additional map knowledge required to play them.

• Keep changes to a minimum.
  • Glitch fixes and exploit blocks are perfectly fine.
  • Addressing major balance issues or unfair sections is fine.
  • Players are largely unfamiliar with most custom campaigns, adding more changes on top of limited knowledge can make playing these maps even less appealing.
  • The fewer new things players have to learn about, the better.
• Aim to improve quality of life where possible.
  • Many custom maps overlook infected ladders and spawns.
  • Custom maps often have many minor issues throughout that can be easily fixed.
• Avoid adding too many new spawns unless an area is particularly bad for the infected.