Talking about slaughtermaps

>"hardcore and softcore"
>heated so quickly

Wow. Alright.

Now on topic, well, they probably could, but most people aren't quite capable of expressing their distaste for something without bashing it. Yeah, I'm well aware I bashed slaughter stuff in the past but at least I kept it more or less civil and left it at "I'll never understand why people play these things." since these discussions aren't going anywhere, just like the BD bashing.

It isn't about slaughtermaps or player type, because there is a common denominator in each of these cases: The rainbow-haired anime avatar group, who can't behave in a civilised manner if their lives depended on it! That's all there is to it.
For example, while I think that the so-called "slaughtermap" fad is a collection of unimaginative shit, I realise that others might have a different opinion, and that's all right. What isn't all right is that some people instantly jump to personal attacks (or sarcastic remarks) when they come upon a conflicting opinion. There's nothing wrong with a heated debate, as long as people offer some good points to back up their claim, but if it goes directly to insults, skipping that part...

You're absolutely right about this. It would be very boring for a lot of us if the difficulty of everything stayed at a sub-par level. We would cruise through everything carelessly, and still make it through without breaking a sweat. I get that. I don't necessarily want a world where everything is easy either just so new doomers can feel welcomed into the community.



This is the thing I'm not so sure about.

There are easy wads out there. A common trait with these easy wads is that they're very old. This often means that while the combat is pretty tame, the layouts and puzzles are weird and confusing to solve, the maps are ugly looking and boring, etc. All of the community's best looking wads that have been released in the last five years happen to have a really high bar for their difficulty level

I guess what I'm saying is that given how many people have been playing Doom for the past many years, the interpretation of what's easy and what's normal has been getting broader and broader, but what is considered easy to us can be really challenging for people entering into the community for the first time. I'm not really able to back this with any straight evidence, but its coming as a shock to me in recent years that the Doom facebook groups, reddits, discord channels, and twitch streamers, combined make up a much greater population of people who are actively playing Doom outside of posting on doomworld. But for all of my time on invested in the community, ive never seen the enthusiasm for playing Doom so low. Often I find twitch streamers I've never watched before playing Doom, either bitching about shitty level design or complaining about how lame this trap is or not being able to figure out where to go, OR they'r'e playing with a gameplay mod that lets them throw grenades at every horde of monsters and jetpack around the level freely in a place that would otherwise be a lot of pressure in vanilla doom.

What I mean mostly by "killing off the community" is that I don't think this Doom 2016 bubble of new doomers are going to stick around very long. New games are going to come out, many people will have dipped their feet into Doom mods, and I think the vast majority who don't really know the technical ins and outs of Doom's gameplay and aren't very experienced with playing hard maps outside of Doom 1 and 2 will find that the community is very unforgiving to new players and they will have to spend a lot of time and work very hard to get to a point where Doom can be fun. Stuff that seems very basic tactics to us are not always known as an option to newer players. Like how to utilize infighting to preserve ammunition, or how Mancubi and Hell knights go down in 3 SSG shots if you're accurate enough, or that you don't necessarily have to kill everything on the map yourself, or that the weapons and items you want might come later towards the end of the map and the trick is to run past the monsters to get them instead of kill everything with your pistol and fists. A lot of this stuff isn't very obvious to new players, and even lower skill settings don't account for this kind of stuff.

I can definitely agree with the points made here.. There is indeed a lack of low difficulty (yet high effort) wads out there... Although to combat this i would say people need to be actively encouraged to make more casual run and gun stuff to fill the void.

No type of gameplay or map will ever be able to satisfy everybody, generally speaking i love slaughter (and being abused by ludicrously hard maps), yet there are some slaughtermaps i absolutely hate, for varying reasons. Forced secrets, lack of atmosphere or otherwise. Depends on the map itself i guess.

I would also add that imo the community has become pretty complacent in recent years, in an instance where a wad would have been an "instant classic that could do no wrong" a few years ago, things have come along so quickly that nowadays its "just another mapset" and gets buried under the mountain of content being continually pumped out every day.

I guess im just wordfarting, trying to say that every map and genre of gameplay has its place.. Whether thats super laggy overdetailed slaughter or quick and easy run and gun maps, i dont see an issue with any of it. As long as people enjoy playing what they make, its a non-issue imo... However if there is a genuine gap in the market for the doom 2016 crowd, i think everyone can agree that gap needs to be filled asap. Increasing player retention is never a bad thing!

There will always be people who enjoy hardcore stuff, just as there always will be people who don't.

The difficulty will only continue to rise from my POV, there's probably no doubt about that, but at the same time I think less difficult megawads will probably always be around.

"It seems very normal to me that people who have beat Doom 1 and 2 on ultra violence should expect to have some level of competency playing new wads on ultra violence as well. " - That very much depends on the nature of the wad. The standards have drastically risen since the days of the original games, therefore I feel that even in the case of easier stuff what was seen in the games on UV is no longer representative of what is seen nowadays. One could easily finish the originals on UV, but a modern megawad on the same difficulty? Unlikely.

"back with telling new players that they suck" - Good point. No one wants to play a game or be part of a community that's toxic and unwelcoming.

As someone who came back to Doom in 2015 after previously only ever finishing Ultimate/DOOM II (Played a couple others in coop).. The WAD/mod selection for this game is absolutely astounding.

DOOM is a surprisingly deep game built around many simple yet obscured mechanics, you don't begin knowing all the information. The game has been expanding and evolving for 26 years now, you can't realistically expect to finish DOOM II on UV then go into a brand new shiny WAD from 2018 and set it to UV and expect everything to be alright. You are literally picking the hardest difficulty a WAD creator has available in their toolkit outside of Nightmare. This is why DOOM is so interesting to me though, the entire historical archive of WADs where the game evolved didn't just vanish.. It's all still around and there is many paths to sharpen your DOOM skills if you really want to play what I would consider the crown jewels of modern DOOM on UV.

People who invest time into making high effort WADs obviously are really devoted to DOOM, so they make something they perceive as fun or interesting for their current understanding of DOOM mechanics... Which as it turns out is usually pretty high for these mega projects. WAD creators should make whatever the hell they want to. Try to please everyone and it ends up being mediocre overall instead of being a laser focused experience. In a perfect world everyone would take the Ribbiks approach and design a 'normal' mode on Hurt Me Plenty and Ultra Violence is actually hard instead of the default pick but this is all unpaid work built with passion, most people only have time to design and fully tune one difficulty.

To address the actual topic.. I feel like it's just vocal minorities on both sides yelling at each other and the vast majority don't care what you enjoy. Also probably doesn't help that if you asked 20 people what their definition of slaughter is you'd get 20 somewhat unique answers. Hard content is always going to have the side effect of some people calling it trash and elitist players being dicks.

The more modern Doom-tier difficulty wads could be played instead of the iwads, since most of the maps in the iwads have aged rather poorly.

Great first post, you should be proud. I agree with your sentiment however, as I do understand slaughtermaps and really don't like them (for the most part). Watch what you say about NuMetalManiak by the way dude, he has a super-photographic memory and will not forget. You've been warned, have a nice day!

Well, Project Brutality or PB is already bloated mod with all those sprites, executions and scripts, so complaining about about unplayable maps is understandable, because all vanilla things are replaced and executed at the same time, it gets worse if maps contain more than 200-300 monsters.
Regards to slaughtermaps - honestly, those who can control them like doll on strings, never come to those discussions( I mean those first or established ones). Only new age slaughter players feel like they must prove that everyone who dislikes slaughter map genre are wrong.



P.s Oh, yeah, I'm first poster too, don't mind me that much.