Map Suggestion V5 WEEKEND

I think all of you are just nostalgic and forget how much of an improvement v6 is.

The city doesn't feel alive? Idk about you, but before cops didn't even bother patrolling the city because nothing would happen there except the occasional bank robbery and office raid. And of course ticketing people for parking.

Bazaar was a hotspot... Yes of death and people gawking at the shootouts until they died. It also fluctuated a lot in terms of activity, because one player can make the difference.

You couldn't drive on the highway without hitting the very common sweater.

There was rarely available properties at high population.

There was not a lot of escape routes when running from cops.

Slums staircase being a nightmare of combat.

City Hall being needlessly huge.


Of course there is improvements to be done to the whole map, but I think you're all forgetting how long the community begged for the map to be overhauled for these exact issues and many more!

I think some of you misunderstand the point of this post. This suggestion isn’t about shitting on v6 saying v5 is better. It is about breaking the repetitiveness of the current map for 2 days per month. Now v5 was far from perfect sure, but these imperfections was what gave the map a soul. For example hitting a sweater in the highway at 130 mph was a unique experience , or when driving from the city to business, you spot a car pileup ahead and trying to avoid a collision by improvising was an experience. I’m confident if we put v5 on for 2 days a month, only complaint you will be hearing is that the server is full.

So I hope you guys will give this a chance as a lot of us really want this to happen.

This isn't just a case of "would it be nice", I have read through most of the posts in this thread and many of them are clearly nostalgia, I could do a whole essay on how V5 was not more "lived in" or "alive", but that isn't the point of what I'm about to say, you're allowed to like what you like - and it is okay to be nostalgic. That being said, changing maps for a couple of days every month is actually quite impractical for a few reasons:

• Crash restore isn't designed to handle switching to entirely different maps. It is why when we first switched to V6 we had to manually wipe the crash restore data to stop everyone's props from spawning in walls (or actually the ground, as V6 sits about 2000u higher than previous maps. Even if we changed the restore system, the only solution is that switching maps would entirely wipe every prop/property off the map when switching both to and from V5.
• There are features of the gamemode that were designed around V6, and that V6 was designed around. Such as the advert system, shop wallpapers, the upcoming Fast Food worker job, items in shops (some of which don't exist in other map versions vice versa), and there are likely 100s of other tiny ways things will break that we would spend the next few months cleaning up.
• If you have V6 installed (which I imagine is most people, whether subscribed or cached), V5 is actually kind of broken. Textures are scaled wrong, some models don't display right. It is fixable, but would mean taking my time away from V7 to edit either V5 or V6, at a time when we are aiming for quite a short development cycle.
• The tutorials are designed around different maps, teaching you different things in different locations. If a player joined on a V5 day, did the tutorial (assuming it is working right), and they learnt about the V5 shops, monorail, general locations etc, it is going to be an inconvenience or maybe even overwhelming when the next day we are on an entirely different map to the one their tutorial taught them about, now with a metro, different shops, altered mechanics.
• It complicated adding new mechanics. We no longer have to get things working for one map, but instead two. And part of the advantage with V6 is that we can make changes to the map to support the gamemode (like the rework of Mcuews in preperation for the previously mentioned new job. We can't do this for V5, it just isn't a realistic option.
• Over the past year the rules and administrative practices have been changed and optimised for the new map. Part of designing V6 involved looking at the rules and seeing what could be made less strict and instead blocked by map/gameplay design. Not to mention rule changes that were very specific to V1-5's design (such as the intersection).
• The same point above goes even further for the Laws. A1L and the PLPD have done a lot of law refactoring since V6 has come out, not to mention specific references to stuff like images of the road signs. Players love to find loopholes and cause issues around gaps in the law, so whilst maybe this should be a "use common sense" point, we know it will just be used to either over-reach, or get away with crimes.
• Similarly PD training has been adjusted for V6's combat design. I 100% see IAs happening as a result of officers being trained (and policy being altered) for V6.
• And finally, over half the guides were rewritten for V6, some regarding changed mechanics, some because locations moved, but maybe most importantly, guides/rules around base defences and combat, which were refactored quite a bit to accommodate V6's more balanced properties.

For one off events and special occasions, switching maps is fun, and people can look past the issues (and if they can't, they don't have to put up with it for long). But I can't see a consistent rotation co-existing with V6 (or the future V7) being a practical possibility, regardless of whether you think V5 was the best map ever, or outdated and just nostalgic.

Tilin said:

You couldn't drive on the highway without hitting the very common sweater.

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okay but this was probably the best part of the old paralake maps tho

I don't see why we need to return to v5 of all the maps when v6 is soo much better. We've had map rotations before that were cool for like day and then got boring. Nostalgia fair enough but like come on like Evo city ( Wasn't in the community for that map or v1) or V2 are the true right in the feels. Kids these days...

Lurker (DilanTheSkarf) said:

okay but this was probably the best part of the old paralake maps tho

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Not according to the reports...

V6 is a big improvement on a lot of fronts, but is also deeply flawed, in my opinion.

- This isn't meant to be an insult, but Bazaar's current iteration looks like a slapdash attempt to fix what wasn't broken. Having more Bazaar shops was a problem, yes, but what we have right now looks a lot worse, and feels strange to be in. A 1 floor shopping center with a 40 foot ceiling? Couple that with the clothing shop having a railing that drops down into the shopping center, a move not one single contractor has ever pulled in real life, and rightfully so. There was definitely a better solution. Don't even get me started on the random connection to the subway, which adds onto the feeling that this iteration was rushed. Subway tiles on one wall, then it magically becomes the wall of the shopping center?

- Slums Warehouse is a property I asked for when playtesting, but it didn't get added until after V6 came out. I like it, but it needs a better interior design. Also... why the fuck can't I shoot through the glass?

- Suburbs is mostly an improvement if you ignore the fact that it's basically on an island separated from the rest of the map. It's probably the 2nd most empty part of the map, with the 1st being the forest.

- I like how the forest looks. I don't like the roads going through the forest. It's like they were designed to intentionally cause as many crashes as possible.

- The Bunker is better now, but still insanely broken. Cool idea, but the depth added to the tunnels makes no sense. Adding 3 lanes with no environmental garnishing makes it look so weird, and it makes it feel rushed just like Bazaar does currently. Why the fuck does the middle lane have 2 perfectly sized columns meant for players to hide behind, with it dropping off to a ladder? There's no rhyme or reason here. If you're going to make balance changes to the map, at least polish them like the rest of the map.

- The roundabout next to Bazaar parking makes no sense. I would most certainly not miss it if it were removed. If I were to make a list of things to be removed from V6, this would be right at the top, because this is the most nonsensical part of the map in and of itself. The entrance to business makes no sense - it's a long asphalt corridor that leads into a roundabout with no yield signs, and leads into a 1 floor parking garage with no gates, gatehouses, bollards, etc.

- Tidals is okay.

- J&M Glass Co. should've been moved somewhere else instead of outright removed. I like the road that replaces it, but I want Glass Co. back.

- Industrial 3 is cool. I remember seeing it during a playtest and I thought it was awesome.

- Cuckgate is cool. I knew for a fact it would be the most popular property in the server when I playtested it, but I think The Bunker took its spot eventually.

- Lakeview is great. Reminds me of that one building from Evocity. Same issue as Suburbs, though.

- The wood cabins are largely okay, but I really don't like the one next to Lakeview. This is nearly impossible to raid if PD are on, and if you are not a large group. Cool idea though.

- Running away from the police using vehicles got harder in this version of the map, for better and for worse. I wish we had more ways to outsmart Police than to just do loops on the highway and go on the wrong side of the road. Unfortunately this means I'm agreeing with one of Malek's suggestions, xP. Something like removing the bollards from the bridge between Lakeview and Suburbs would be great.

- Parker Tunnel is cool.

- Slums is cool, I was okay with both the current and previous iterations.

- Various nonsensical decisions were made in regards to the gas stations. In what universe would a city planner ever add a one-way exit to a gas station that only has 1 doublesided set of pumps?

- After a while of playing on V6, it seemed like it took too much inspiration from whatever @peeps was playing at the time. I'm not saying that's bad, but I find it jarring to see so many textures and models ripped from INFRA, to be Frankenstein-ed into a RP map. The assets in this game aren't conducive to a modern city, despite INFRA containing some city assets. That's not to mention the usage of the Morko concept from INFRA in the V6 eastereggs, which also take an insane amount of concepts/ideas from INFRA. I would much rather have a RP map that mostly used TopHattWaffles RealWorldTextures than something that tries too hard to look and sound like INFRA.


- Bank is cool, but being stuck within the bank during a robbery got old fast. I miss driving around the city and sniping cops, but this cannot come back with the current city's layout.

- Office's current iteration is... okay. Better than the first and second iterations.

- Foundry needs to be removed or reworked substantially. I'm not dealing with 9 kilometer sightlines with no counterplay (bombs can't reach most of the defenses within the property). This wouldn't be as big of a problem if the entrances weren't so funnel-y, and if long-range optics were actually viable (Yes bro. The ACOG is not in the center of the screen so you can't use it with your crosshair but WHO CARES!!!)

- The area around Roadcrew is heavily underutilized.

- PD is cool.

- Storage is cool. I liked the old one but it had the same problem the gas stations do with the stupid one-way exits.

- City shop is great. We need more.

These are the "flaws" I could come up with on the top of my head. For the most part, this map is fun to play on, and this post wasn't meant to disparage any of the people that worked on it. I just hope that V7 can help remediate these issues, as for the most part I was left longing for the more inter-connected tighter spaces of V5, even though V5 had a lot more flaws than V6. I don't think we should get V5 back. It's too late, and too many changes have been made to the gamemode apart from the map.