[Altered Melee] What makes a good pvp map?

[Abyssion]

Hello all, I've been working on a 3v3 custom game for some time now and I have done a lot of things to make it non standard (and hopefully more interesting) than a regular melee map. It is a living vs undead theme with 3 undead vs 1 human 1 orc & 1 night elf.

Teams:
The Scourge
Player 1 - The Lich King (Light blue Frost Undead)
Player 2 - Teron Gorefiend's Legion (Green Plague Undead)
Player 3 - Kel'Thuzad's Forces (Purple Shadow Undead)

The Forces of Azeroth
Player 4 - The Alliance (Blue Human)
Player 5 - The Sentinels (Teal Night Elf)
Player 6 - The Horde (Red Orc)

Additional Features (The main ones, there are a lot more but these are the most notable)
- Custom/Enhanced units for all races. (Even the 3 Undead teams all have different custom/enhanced units)
- Over a dozen new custom upgrades for all teams
- Every Player automatically starts out with their main hero:
- Player 1 - Arthas (Lich King)
- Player 2 - Teron Gorefiend (First Death Knight)
- Player 3 - Kel'Thuzad (Master Lich)
- Player 4 - Tirion Fordring (High Paladin)
- Player 5 - Tyrande Whisperwind (Priestess of the Moon)
- Player 6 - Thrall (Warchief)
Note: Main heroes have higher stats than normal heroes, 0 food cost, and have 5 abilities instead of 4 (they gain an additional skill point every 3 levels). Only Main Heroes bestow an aura.
- Every player except player 1 can train 2 additional heroes from 6 possible unique choices for each player at their alter:
- Normal Heroes are broken down into the traditional cunning, warrior, and mystical hero. Stats vary greatly. (Some heroes are glass cannons others can be tanks etc. [Lots of combinations])
- Normal heroes benefit from Synergy. They gain a stat bonus (I.e. +100 hit points) if a certain third hero is trained.
- Hero abilities have different categories. (Physical, magical, Utility, Passive, Ultimate)
- Magical and physical abilities have "Limit Breaks"... casting them x amount of times makes them more powerful.
- Each stats gives an additional bonus:
- Agility: Every point of agility also increases movement speed by 1
- Intelligence: Each point of intelligence also increases magical ability potency.
- Strength: Each point of strength also increases physical ability damage.
- Bonus Loot
- All mobs have a chance of dropping bonus loot, even mobs with guaranteed drops. The stronger the mob the better the chance and the better the item.
- Charged items stack
- Instances
- There are 3 instances in the map that players can compete to enter, completing the instance gives the player gold, experience, and a powerful item to help turn the tides in their favor.
- World Bosses
- There are 3 world bosses on the map (2 stationary and 1 that roams part of the map. Yes being in the wrong place at the wrong time will end badly for you :])
- Stronger Mercenaries
- Custom mercs that are stronger than normal units making them more enticing to players
- Custom music for all races
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BUT I WANT MORE!!!
Do you guys have any ideas not listed here that you think will help make this PvP map more fun and re-playable? Anything from past experiences maybe or past custom maps that you have made?

 

[pick-a-chew]

I assume your map has a domination victory check (i.e. kill all enemy buildings/units).

You could try venturing for other optional objectives such as holding a point for X seconds for a strategic advantage, or having "neutral" buildings that give incoming/auras/advantage whilst you have units stationed. It may encourage players to fight over strategic locations. In normal melee maps this already occurs over taverns/goblin laboratories etc. but isn't particularly compelling. You can make the map more interactive by putting things around it that warrant a player's attention. Just be careful with balancing; you don't want players to snowball too much if they get an advantage.

Replayability can be achieved by making gameplay elements more random. Bonus loot wont really do that by itself and is probably going to be prone to balance/control issues. By random things i mean making creep camps randomized, making your instances have random elements, having world bosses have random elements (when your map is developed you can easily look at having a lot of potential bosses but only 3 are used in a game), making your mercenaries have random elements etc. Nothing too spooky as you'll probably want to keep the learning curve reasonable.

 

[Abyssion]

Hmm your idea reminds me of Halo's King of the Hill game. Definitely will try to incorporate that.
As to your second point I agree, I am trying to include more randomness in the map other than the bonus loot system
and I like you suggestions for that too.
Thanks for your help!

 

[Banelingline]

Generally, the most important thing is to be at least close to balanced as a direct altered melee map to maintain replayability. More importantly, though, I think the Scourge factions need to be different. Rather than being focused on the different WoW DK specializations and having extensive overlap, I'd have it be subsets to the faction as of WC3 that have rather large differences and can be easily retooled to be entirely separate factions. For instance, Cult of the Damned, Burning Legion and Nerubians.

Nerubians work best as a "horde" faction on the Undead side, as in spamming massive numbers of units, because the hat of their Creep version is spawning stuff on death and the Crypt Lord has two unit summoning effects, with one being their ultimate. Lots and lots of bugs (the insect and arthropod kind, not the code kind). For support stuff, they're canonically the source of Ziggurats and Scourge architecture in general, as well as Obsidian Destroyers/Statues, with Gargoyles being a possibility of introduction by them, so they might have some form of mobile defense tower akin to Ancient Protectors as a precursor to the Necropoli used by the Scourge. There's also a bit of lore weirdness with the WC3 era Nerubian lore in contrast with WoW era lore, as the WC3 Nerubian creeps frequently had Raise Dead.

The Burning Legion are the "elite" faction, with a high emphasis on small numbers of more powerful than usual units. Funding can be offset by resource drain, much like the Orc's own Pillage mechanism, but on units/corpses instead of buildings, making facing them directly a bad idea. Hero proliferation and build limits may be in place to represent the fact that they work more by resummoning the same relatively small number of Demons instead of making or portaling in ever more of them (outside of, like, Imps and Felhounds. Also Infernals, which are actually a type of Golem). This also helps balance by making it so that units which would be problematic to mass aren't available in large numbers, thus making stacking Auras something that works due to not worrying about having more than a set number that's counterable by typical anti-deathball tactics.

The Cult of the Damned, meanwhile, end up a matter of endurance to beat, with bundles of corpse recycling options to make grinding them down a problem. Stuff like having Frost Wyrms get a Death Pact based ability to eat your ground units for health, or Abominations being able to carry corpses like Meat Wagons alongside something getting the Satyr's non-invulnerable Animate Dead ability to get piles of extra Ghouls. More Wood use means you can get an accelerated economy from using Undead, possibly going as far as to have skeletal workers be an option for Raise Dead to turn corpses into gold. Corpse resource reclamation is unquestionable to refund dead units to extend endurance. Of course, they need to be cost-inefficient somewhere, possibly in time, to keep it from overwhelming everything.

For changes to the "Alliance" side, I can only think of making Night Elves dive deeper into tree shenanigans and Ancient use, with each Ancient working as a superheavy of whatever they do. You would probably have to come up with a new model for the mobile Ancient of Wind, as reworking it to look appropriate for flight is hard. Or it could be hit and run by having a "jumper" ability. Tree shenanigans can be assisted by abusing the way unit tags work, such that the lumber-harvesting ability of Wisps can target Ancients. Then Wisps can have research for Auras to buff Ancients they are attached to, turning Ancients into workable t3.5 attacking units via speeding up and getting more reasonable healing mechanisms (if it costs only wood, it may as well be a shared energy pool for all Night Elves care)

 

[Abyssion]

@Banelingline I like some of the ideas you brought up and I will definitely try to bring more difference between the scourge players... They have unique custom units but they do share the same base units so I will change that up a bit, as well as make their play styles different. Being that this is the Lich King's scourge I am not going to use burning legion type undead, and I am personally not a huge fan of nerubians as an entire race as I feel it is not really diverse enough. As for the night elves I actually do have the ancient protector enhanced to move faster and deal more damage but I'm not sure if I would want to spread that to the rest of the base.
Thanks for the insight!

 

[Banelingline]

Being that this is the Lich King's scourge I am not going to use burning legion type undead, and I am personally not a huge fan of nerubians as an entire race as I feel it is not really diverse enough.

Pick one of these statements, because Teron Gorefiend is the icon of Burning Legion type Undead. Seeing as how he's a 2nd War Death Knight, and all... If you're giving a small number of custom units to each to diversify them, then Nerubians work wonders, and if you're having Arthas and Kel'thuzad... Why not Anub'arak? And the Dreadlords are, in fact, Demons, so having Mal'ganis or one of the other named Dreadlord heroes fits right in.

As for the night elves I actually do have the ancient protector enhanced to move faster and deal more damage but I'm not sure if I would want to spread that to the rest of the base.

The idea is that Ancients count as trees for Wisps, then you can do research to give Wisps practically-zero-range auras to improve Ancients they're attached to. So it takes up 1 food per enhanced Ancient (and a Wisp production queue), and killing the Wisp strips away the buff, so the Ancients are rather vulnerable to AoE.

 

[Abyssion]

Okay I see what you mean about the Teron Gorefiend thing, but he was basically the only exception I was making as he was in fact a death knight
regardless of the fact that he wasn't raised by the Lich King, and so in my map it is explained that basically Teron Gorefiend found his way to Arthas and Swore Fealty to him, and joined his army willingly. Also I do have a Dreadlord type hero but he is technically not a Dreadlord, rather he is a "Scourge Lord" named Darkhan Drathir, an elf who betrayed Quel'thelas and helped Arthas sack it during the third war (RoC). As for Anub'arak, he is actually the second and only extra hero for player 1 (Light Blue)
so I've got that covered. However then perhaps I will add some custom nerubians to player 1's army as he has very few unit types to choose from anyway
and they are all custom.

As for the ancient idea it is a very cool idea and I will see what I can do with that.

Good stuff mate,
Thanks!

 

[Wark]

You could always go the Diablo route for creeps:
literally give random themed ability sets to specific creeps of specific levels on map initialization.
(For example: frost armor with frost nova, healing wave with brilliance aura, hardened skin with taunt)

This is completely doable with unit checks and GUI triggers.
This gives you an amount of control over the random factor to dictate themes, but enough variation to make it interesting. Especially so, if you do this with random creeps and themed loot to go with certain ability sets.