DEATHSTROKE #2 (AA Edition) - Aug 12th - 9pm BST, 4pm EDT

ARCADIUS by prototypetom - I've seen this be updated a few times on social club this week and is now out of WIP so should be event ready. 

Industrial Development by me - I've made some (very) minor weapon alterations this week to it. As there's been a definite slow down in captures and DMs this last few weeks I may as well take the chance to submit (24 player max)

thanks agrajag

I think I'm going to have to reduce ARCADIUS players to 24 or less though. It plays out a bit too hectic with a fullish lobby. but you played it, so i'll leave it for now incase you liked it NerfThis_97 (be cool to try on 3 team perhaps)


I'd like to put this one forward I've been working on - which is more specifically designed for 20+ players
Mount Zonah - socialclub.rockstargames.com/games/gtav/ps4/jobs/job/vnSqdn-Q-0iTBNaquoNt0A

It was one I had sketched out ready to create with the new props - and then they didn't come and I abridged the plan a bit.

Live Stream for tonight:

Okay, so as usual here's my personal and frank opinion of the jobs last night, no added sweetner...

Mount Zonah prototypetom
Well, turns out those Ripley's don't stop bullets quite as much as I imagined. Not a problem, but not quite the mobile cover I thought they might offer. Pretty pleased - but what i wouldn't give for just 20 more props to make it prettier.

The Skybase Troopers nortoncaferacer
Really enjoyed this. Felt good and epic, and the opening of the briefcase chamber at the start was a nice touch to bear witness to. The only two small issues I had with it were... I didn't realise cargobobs windows were quite so bulletproof, it rendered you quite powerless on foot. Although I have no idea what the remedy might be - HW's would probably spoil the flow of the job. And I did feel the respawns where a little too far away in the slow cargobobs - maybe another helicopter type for respawning would remedy both things?
I guess a 3rd thing might be that I'd have liked more encouragement to spend time on the floating island, as it looked so cool. Having said all that, I probably wouldn't mess with it at all, it's a really neat capture and the irks are very minor. Oh and one really simple detail, but something that really shone for me - team colour copters meant you could see friend or foe beyond the range that the players info shows up. the right thing , the right use, in the right job. Nice.

Rails Contract Zex-Vortion
Second time out for me on this one. Its fun, it's cool with the train, it's built well - but it's just too campy for me. It felt like we were fighting half a team while the rest were having tea and biscuits in their huts (and possibly ditto for the other team). I suggested before that the 4 towers need to be closer end to end, but I had a different idea tonight - that it should just be two towers on extended arms either side of the current central hut (a cross shape when viewed from above) - this would make them towers to pushed for and pro-actively taken control of, at distances more suited to pistols. I would leave some cover on the platforms, just quite a bit less to encourage more people to get involved in actively taking the middle ground. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the map very much. I just feel it's a bit too enabling to players content to just sit and wait and prey on players who are pro-activly trying to get the most out of a cool map.

The Police Experience #1 -_JeRK_-
As LTS go, it was good fun. Being critical, I found the weapon distribution and starting points problematic. What I would call the 'defend' side was absolutly fine, the weapons spawned frequently enough to require some conservation of ammo, but not too much. There was a nice subtle tension running back and forth trying to pick something up. And I liked that naturally ammo became more readily available as the team thinned. That all worked perfectly. On the other side though, if you spawned by the construction site you were getting a much better deal than in the opposite car park because you were not in the line of fire and had time to identify and locate weapons. In the 3rd round (I think) I spawned all the way at the opposite end, couldn't find a weapon and found myself fighting opponents with rifle and pistol while I only had a gas canister - that might tie in with the of the theme/description, but that's a really crappy position to find yourself in on an LTS map - so yeah, i had to sit that round out. Still, despite that blip and the unwelcome politics of the description, it was a fun and atmospheric map.

GR-75 Medium Transport stronktank
Great. Super atmosphere. A little frustrating at times with dead ends, lack of location identifiers and bit too much dense clutter in places. But bang on the money with the default weapon and a great adaptation of the area. Stronk inspiring me again. Who knew the undersides of dumpster ramps were so sexy?!

ARCADIUS prototypetom
Yeah, confirmed it needs to be limited to 24 players. I'm also questioning whether it suits 3 teams or not, or if I'm just blindly following there being 3 areas and thinking it preordained. And I've found some channels which are too long and enable spawn killing - back to the lab - but it's almost there.

The Purge: Legion Square C0NS1GL1ER1E
Great location for... well, pretty much anything. Fun LTS until people exploiting the turret trucks became a thing. I would have prefered it without the trucks, but I guess they're a fundamental part of the concept. I wondered about rendering them stationary with appropriate nearby cover to give people on foot more of a chance, maybe with a couple more grenades on the map too. but then I wondered if a better option might be to create an arena wall to tighten the outside circuit width, almost to the inside curb, which would make the existing cover more useful against the trucks and the trucks just a bit less manoeuvrable, like a sushi conveyor belt of death.

Rockford Rooftop Arena J_-2010
Other than possibly being a little bit larger than it needs to be, great map. Rifle-tastic and appealed strongly to my tastes.

Turf War: Oper. Aintree  HerrLarson
Cool idea and executed very well. Perhaps it lasts a little bit too long given the simple objective. However in each round my team 'took' the bridge for most the time limit, I wondered if perhaps the invading team might need a little more opportunity. perhaps some alternate vantage points to shoot into the bridge. maybe the means to get the opposite side a little quicker?

Roswell aftermath therealSUB1000
cool theme and premise. Started well, but lost it's way when the tanks got involved IMO. They felt like a good example of theme taking precedence over gameplay. It was a wee bit congested down the paths in places too, I got stuck between props a couple of times and that put me off exploring the advertised 'hidden areas'. However having watched EyezGamer's video, I regret that choice, looked like some cool propping in places. Personally I'd lose the vehicles... except that UFO though! That's really cool. I also noticed that most of the area is contained like an arena map, except on one side there's a way out. I wasn't sure if that was intentional or not to allow roof access, it's quite a trek and no weapons up there. But a tank blew me up the second i looked over the edge anyway. bloody tanks! I only had a revolver! And finally, marksman rifle as default weapon on a convergence map was a little odd and left me a little too desperate to find pick ups. It also discouraged climbing and exploring. I think a modest automatic weapon like the mini rifle, micro smg or even pistols would have given me more licence to explore.

Pitfall 2 ManOfFire
Tough review this, but this was a map for the creators among us (so nearly everyone right? ). I had to spend time explaining to people that the redwhite cabin is invisible viewed from below and that in one sense they were indeed shooting at an invisible force field in front of the opposing snipers - they had no idea that the opposing side were facing the red checks the same as us and we had the same invisible barrier in front of us from their perspective. The feeling it generated was suspicion, frustration and the assumption of it being unfair. In context of creators... then it's a neat and tight, all-action LTS. But to non-creators (at least to the couple of guys I was with) it seemed like a troll map akin to one of those 100000$$$RP things where you're either in on the 'trick' or you're in for a miserable death. I think there's some good uses for the redwhite prop's 'feature', but it's much better in jobs like the capture ManOfFire created where more casual CC players have time, and room for error, to work out what's going on before eating a grenade sandwich. I would suggest changing the GL's to rifles so that people reaching the middle gain a great advantage, but it's not just game over. Undeniably a clever map, but right on the edge of being a bit too clever for it's own good for some punters.

Subjective Review of the event itself.
(not counting mine of course) I really enjoyed 7 of the jobs, and the 2 others were far from bad, but didn't light me up like the others. Which makes a really great average for the evenings experience. Very impressed with the offerings.
That said, it just went on a bit too long. The load times for capture and LTS are a horrid grind (god knows why they have to load for so long!). Also while I did enjoy all the maps myself, to be blunt, by the 3rd or 4th round of the captures and LTS' I'd had more than enough and desperately wanted them to end. The exception was Pitfall 2 because the rounds were so quick, but I would much much prefer LTS and captures a more comparable time (in TOTAL) to the 10min of TDM's - eg, first to 2 wins, not 3. After a little over 3 hours of play, I couldn't make it to the 3rd playlist. I might be remembering the specific round settings to some of the maps wrong, but I'm pretty sure they all, bar one, ran over 15min total.