Cheers for all the positive comments guys
Mouthpiece wrote:Though as someone noted - the map needs some polish in a sense that the map needs more dirt, more burning stuff and more shit on the streets. It's a battlefield after all. But those are just secondary things that won't impact the core gameplay (infantry would feel safer in the streets knowing that enemy can fire from advantageous elevated position anytime - i'm talking about all the buildings).
While I agree the map needs more polish etc, the map isn't all destroyed and full of shell craters, burning car wrecks etc as I was wanting to portray an untouched city, with you being the first wave of a surprise attack on it (similar to the
Battle of Inchon during the Korean War, but with choppers and other modern kit) and it isn't unheard of either for forces to hold back major firepower in/on a city in an attempt to preserve it (Battle of Hue for example, until the later stages of the battle when they eventually lifted the ban on heavy weapons and obliterated most of the city), where this also fits into my mini-storyline of the map since in it, the USMC are attempting to liberate the city from the MEC after the MEC captured Oman (MEC is largely, but not totally, based on Iranian armed forces for example).
Mouthpiece wrote:But, yeah, as I said and Wing Walker agreed - map badly needs new flag layouts. Like, for example, two flags in docks so 2-3 sneaky infantry guys can't cap their last flag and deny their spawns so fast. I understand that our resident genius Rhino measured time/distance from all flags and from both team perspective, but maybe it can be mixed up a little and tested as an ALT version (by tested I mean that players could playtest it).
Ye I agree that the map kinda does need a new flag layout simply because the current has been played so many times over it has simply gotten stale. But I disagree in having a new flag layout just for the hell of it, the new one has to work just as well, if not better than the last in order to be truly worth changing it. So many maps in the past had decent flag layouts, then when random flags came in, ditched their established flag layout which worked well, for totally random flags (not the AAS routes etc we have now), and then most games you played on the map, you hardly ever had a decent/balanced flag layout, with the flags commonly giving one side a clear advantage, and the games being totally sh*t as a result. I would rather have a good/balanced, but old/stale flag setup than random/new and the game be one sided and sh*t.
I have plenty of ideas for changing the flag setup for Muttrah btw, but really in order to make them really work, the map needs changing and updating and until then, I don't feel its worth changing it much.
As for having multiple dock flags, one of the bigger problems with that is it slows down the USMC at the begging of the round a lot and leaves them much more venerable to rushing from being spread out thinly over docks, which if a rush works, slows them down even more, and could even result in a situation where they are never able to even break out of the docks at the begging of the round. While yes, there are things you can do to slow the MECs advance down a bit too, they are already slowed down quite a bit as it is without forcing all the guys initially spawning to walking to their first flag
So ye, map balancing is a delicate thing, especially when dealing with asymmetrical map balance like Muttrah and if you change one thing, it affects a whole heap of other things and then changing something else to counter the last change, affects other stuff and ye, takes quite a bit to get just right
9 years of massive PvP battles ? 
I agree its overplayed but it doesn't bother me.