Originally Posted by Keres

Remember that this isn't a "competitive" tournament so-to-speak, it's an in-community tournament, and that even though Hera and Nothing aren't great for competitive play doesn't mean they aren't awesome for in-house play. This tournament should be enjoyable for everyone who plays in it, and I 100% support using the community to find out what they want to play instead of playing what everyone *should* be playing.

I agree the community should have a hand in choosing the maps. However, I do think that we can go beyond our comfort levels a little, with 1 or 2, or dare I even say, 3 maps that aren't as regularly played.

I think for those who have been regularly playing the game for a while (over a year or two of active play), part of the thrill has been lost. I'll attribute part of that to playing the same maps over and over again, contributing to an overly stale feeling. These maps are so well known that the way it's played, whether marine or alien, is generally the same, or in other words, growth is pretty stagnant.

Remember when you first played Super Mario Bros. (or any other new game)? Part of the excitement was exploring, discovering, and learning the crooks and cranies of the map and game. I think it's more rewarding to work together, tactically (pun totally intended ), as a team, to figure out the map and their opponent... to come up with some sort of strategy for this "newer" map. When it fails, oh, it will fail miserably... but when you end up victorious, your win will end up feeling all that more rewarding. And, likely, we will see more variety in the way the game is played (different strategy and tactics).

Competitive players would have played those "newer" maps a bit more than the regular in-house/pub player, but honestly, compared to their play time of the top played maps, such as veil, tanith, etc., relatively, it can be considered negligible.

Besides, I think one of the goals of this tourney is for the less experienced players to learn from the more experienced players... a bridging of gaps, so to speak. This transference of skill and experience such that disparity is reduced is good, for both the individual (they get better), and the community, as games on the pub server will reach a new level when the skill level of all players are closer together (think experienced/registered users vs. the majority of question marks; I think there was a post earlier about the teams with more question marks tend to lose more frequently).

Finally, when we play those less frequently played maps, we contribute overall to the game we love, NS, and the NS community. One, we have more options (instead of just tanith, veil, etc.). This helps to maintain the "freshness" of the game rather than the stale feeling. Two, in doing so, we encourage talented people to create more new maps (more contribution to the community... to add more "fresh" ideas)... I mean, nobody wants to put in the time developing a map for a game that nobody is going to play because they only want to play the top 3 maps over and over again. More maps and more development is good for NS!

So let's go for fresh over stale. Let's push ourselves a little. The tournament is supposed to be more for fun anyway...so what if you lose on a map you and your team don't know as well. While it's fun to win, I don't think that's the main goal of the tourney right? After playing it in the tourney, your knowledge of the map and game will have increased... you only get better by pushing yourself and by playing with better players. And hopefully, by working together on a difficult challenge towards a common goal, the TG community will be all that much closer as bonds develop within the motley crew of players.

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If you're worried about big blow-out losses against better teams, esp. on less frequently played maps, one solution would be to schedule these games against teams of realtively equal skill levels. That would be fairly enjoyable. I think this tourney is supposed to run swiss system style anyway, which I think is supposed to work this way.

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On a related note, I would like to see machina on the map list. I've played it a number of times, and out of the newer maps, it seems more balanced than most (when I say this, I am mainly thinking of the unbalanced lucid).