I'm so glad that someone made a
custom skin to replace the stupid heavy football helmet. Giving an American football helmet to a Russian man who has probably never played the sport makes zero sense at all.
I don't know why Valve made payload race when the idea of two teams fighting over one neutral payload cart makes so much more sense. There's already an implementation of this in the form of the custom map pl_waste. The map is symmetrical with a cart in the center, and either team can push the cart in an effort to deliver the payload to the enemy base. I think this game mode has a lot more potential than payload race.
One thing that continues to baffle me is that Valve has consistently managed to pick the worst of attack/defend maps that seem to be so popular on pubs these days, first with egypt and now with hoodoo. I'm not a huge fan of cashworks or frontier, but either of them would have been better than the maps they've picked. Actually, considering that the only other attack/defend maps Valve has added are steel and junction, they have yet to pick a good attack/defend map. This isn't so much due to Valve's bad judgment as it is due to a lack of good maps to choose from. I've been hearing a lot of good things about furnace (a triangular-CP map like gravelpit), but the praise it's getting doesn't seem entirely different from the positive reception to junction and broma, two maps which seem to have fallen out of favor as of late.
freight is probably my favorite map of the moment. I really like playing scout on freight, there are just so many options for flanking. I really feel that freight is the map that well should have been. It has water-based flanking routes, trains, and unlike well it isn't a huge stalemate after one team caps the middle point. There was a pretty recent update to the map (cp_freight_r) which modifies the second and fourth points a bit to make one of the choke points a bit less vulnerable to spam. Fishbus is reportedly working on a "final" version (alluded to in the crossword puzzle in the latest blog post, see 4 down), I really hope it's included in the next update.
Another push map that I'm really liking right now is yukon. It's relatively new and I'm pretty sure that the creator is working on several revisions to it, so it's unlikely that it will be included in the next update. I really like the flow of the map, with the exception of the middle point. The paths leading off the middle point feel a bit awkward, mainly because two of them are right next to each other and follow almost the exact same route. Also, the "closet" areas around mid seem to be a bit too cramped considering how big the point itself is. Still, I think that the map has potential, and apart from the issues around the middle point it's a very solid map and still a lot of fun to play.
Valve already has the foundations for two good 5 CP maps in Lumberyard and Sawmill. It wouldn't take a huge amount of time or effort to make those two into 5 CP maps, like what they did with Arena_Granary, Arena_Well and Arena_Badlands but in reverse.
It might be easy to create a map based on this, but balancing it and getting it to the point where it's actually playable on the same level as granary or badlands is something entirely different. Just because you're working with a good foundation doesn't mean that the finished product will be anywhere near as good as you started with. Case in point: One custom map that I've seen a lot more than I'd care to as of late (follower) is basically a combination of badlands (midpoint) and granary (warehouse to final point). Despite the fact that it borrows from two very good maps, I don't find it at all fun to play. Although I wouldn't mind seeing sawmill or nucleus as 5-CP push maps, I don't expect them to be quick jobs and I'd certainly hope that time and effort would be put into making them playable.
