[MISSION] Coaltown - Charcoal

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Mission: Charcoal
Map: Coaltown
Difficulty: Advanced
Wave Count: 6

Credits
- trashbin (me) for making the mission
- Valve for making the map
- My friends Goblin and outpizza'd hut, as well as a few randoms, for helping me test the mission
- MANY others for making icons, guides, and other helpful resources

This is my first mission, so please judge it as such. It will have mistakes my friends.

The attached asset pack below contains the mission, a necessary robot file, and all the required icons.
(This post was last modified: 11-08-2022, 06:32 PM by trashbin.)
Judges present: Nuq, Damno, Oddschool

Team setup:
Scout
Demoman (oddschool)
Engineer (Nuq)
Pyroman (Damno)

Demo file: https://eu-testing.moonlight.tf:27107/de...66.dem.zip

This feels like somebody's first mission. I am incapable of listing all the things that are... bad? wrong? incorrect? with this mission.
Bluntly put, this mission has way too many gimmicks for the sake of being there, and no balancing of said gimmicks and mission overall. It is labeled as advanced, but in reality, it's intermediate with spikes of "hard advanced".
I am genuinely unsure if there is a way to salvage this mission and if there was no tolerance policy for strikes on the first run - this would've been the textbook example of one.

Instead of providing any concrete feedback (which would be fruitless with the amount of things), instead, I feel like I am better off giving a general guide on how to test and balance your missions for future runs.
1) Test the mission, repeatedly, with testers in Moonlight discord. Don't be afraid to ping. Feedback may be scathing - that is part of the point, but it would show you many holes that experienced people see.
2) Lay off the gimmicks. Moonlight, as a whole, expects more... "vanilla" missions, for the lack of a better word. This does not mean do not use custom bots at all - but you're better off taking templates the community already has, as those are already balanced.
3) Only after multiple runs with testers, only when testers mention little-to-no feedback - then you can submit a mission for judging.

Before you try and change this mission, I recommend, making a whole new mission from scratch only using Valve bots. Go through the whole cycle of testing, refining, seeing what ideas work and what ideas don't. That will allow you to get a sense of what a certain difficulty entails in the eye of community. After that, you can come back and re-do the mission you have, with limited custom bots (stick to ones community has - and maybe make couple of tame custom bots, maybe a chief/boss.)
Aw, I was afraid this would happen. I'll try the Valve bots I guess.
I did try to use custom bots sparingly, though. Most of the custom bots are subtle changes to Valve bots, and Wave 2, 4, 5 and 6 contain some Valve templates.
I guess I kinda thought Moonlight
was more like Potato.TF, with some of their wacky custom missions, but I get the preference for vanilla-style missions.
(This post was last modified: 11-13-2022, 05:25 PM by trashbin.)



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