what are the worst pvp maps that everybody played on all the time?

[MysticSlayer]

Downpour (Call of Duty 4): I could understand having this map in rotation if the server didn't allow wall spamming, but I simply cannot comprehend how any server could think this was a good idea to run if wall spamming was allowed.

Spoiler: For those who didn't play on PC with wall spamming allowed

Basically, people would jump on the turrets and just shoot randomly in the direction of known high-traffic areas. Considering you could get 12-25 players on a team in the PC version, there were plenty of people to shoot out and build up killstreaks. This often left many people too scared to use about 75% of the map if they weren't waiting in the queue for the turret. Even if you managed to kill the guy on the turret, you'd often have to deal with all his friends waiting to use it when he goes to call in his killstreaks.

Wake Island (Battlefield 2): I wasn't the biggest fan of this map in BF1942, but BF2 took out what little fun there was. It always felt too restrictive, and the way that the game flowed generally made it annoying/frustrating to play when losing or boring to play when winning.

Spoiler: Further explanation for those who didn't play the game

The island is set up like a horseshoe where all the bases are initially controlled by the Chinese. The Americans are out on a ship and have to storm the island. The problem is that it takes a very well-organized attack to even get set up on the island, and most teams simply don't play that organized, so it often is just making the long trip to the island only to get killed before even really getting established. Even if you can get onto the island, the map's design almost requires a linear progression through the bases. On the flip side, though, if the American team is organized and you are on a disorganized Chinese team, then the American team will absolutely route you and you'll be running around the island without any clear sense of direction of how to hold off the attack.

The problem is, if you're winning, it is often because your team is significantly more organized than the other team, which really just makes victory easy. With the Chinese, you're often waiting for something to happen, and with the Americans, what should be a hard, epic battle gets turned into basically walking into bases and taking them. The map really requires two highly organized teams to enjoy, but the idea that you can get 64 people to all organize for their respective teams and squads is just ridiculous. No matter how team-oriented you believe the BF community to be, they aren't that team oriented.

And yes, a lot of these problems exist for any map, but Wake Island is where the problems come up at their worst.

 

[Lord Garnaat]

Hm, I actually liked Operation Metro. Well, it was hit-or-miss, really. It could be very tense and frantic if the teams were relatively equal in terms of skill, but it certainly turned irritating if you couldn't move without being shot. Actually, I like 2Fort as well, so long as it didn't devolve into complete stalemate. When people are actually trying to get the intel, and not just camping the base or lurking on the balcony as Snipers, it can be very fun.

I seem to remember becoming very sick of Nuketown in Call of Duty: Black Ops. The map itself wasn't horrible, but it was too small for my liking, way too open to grenade spam, and chosen far too often. If voting came up for the next map, Nuketown would always, always win, and playing on it constantly got a bit tedious.

 

[bliebblob]

Tf2 dustdowl is literally a 10 my sentry sim, very narrow choke points, and limited skybox room! All topped of with some of the most stupid kit placements ever!

Love live cp_badlands <3

Try the original incarnation back in team fortress classic 1.5! Where later all stages of the map had at least two entrances into the battlezone, back then there was often just one. The sticky spam on those doors was the stuff of legends. The one saving grace about it was that instead of standing on the point for a good few seconds, all you had to do was touch the cap while holding the flag (which spawned in the blue spawn room). Because of this, dustbowl became the one map where you really had to adapt your gameplay: rather than focusing on shooting back, the trick was to have the blue team burst out of the spawn area like bats out of hell, pick up the flag from wherever the last guy dropped it, and then kamikaze onto the cap with it in one glorious rocket jump (or whatever). That was your one job as the flag carrier, and everyone else's job was to be meatshields. So basically, dustbowl was tfc's hidden rugby mode.

The nice thing about that style was that, even though it was even more of a meatgrind than the current dustbowl, there was at least always that sense that the tide could turn at any second thanks to one sly move by one blue player. And as long as you knew and accepted that before going into a dustbowl match, it was actually quite fun. But if it came up in a queue of regular maps? Forget it, servers would just clear out. Because that's not what they signed up for.

 

[Arshaq13]

Fy_Iceworld on Counter Strike.
Seriously, I hate that map.

AND! awp_map, although that's pretty much because I'm not really the greatest of snipers.

 

[Duster]

The "Defense of the Ancients" map. How the map remained the same after 12 years baffles me.

it was technically changed in the latest patch, 6.82.

 

[USIncorp]

I hate Dust on CS:GO, but that is pretty much because it is the one map that is played over and over and over again. I just got sick of it more than actually hating it. Then again, the constant getting AWP'd through doors within the first few seconds got pretty irritating.
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Actually, Dust is just in general a terrible map, (in addition to being played over and over again).
For me it would definitely be Dust, because it's so hard for terrorists to make anything happen, as well as ctf_2fort from TF2. Seriously, CTF in that game is just bad in general, but everything about that map is just... blech. The layout of the bases makes it so easy for sentries to completely lock down an area, and the mid area is so poorly thought out. Yet you can look on the server browser and find about 100 or so servers on 2fort 24/7. It really baffles me.

Last one would probably be Firebase Ghost from ME3. I don't really know, just something about that map, its layout or something, just makes me hate it.

 

[smithy_2045]

I hate Dust on CS:GO, but that is pretty much because it is the one map that is played over and over and over again. I just got sick of it more than actually hating it. Then again, the constant getting AWP'd through doors within the first few seconds got pretty irritating.

You're thinking of dust2, rather than dust. They're very different maps, dust being very ct sided while dust2 was quite well balanced.

Also, it's pretty easy to avoid getting shot through double doors if you don't run/jump directly across. Move closer or further away from the door, mix it up, because any half-decent awper learns where to shoot to hit people who run/jump directly across pretty quickly.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

I got absolutely sick of a few Smash Bros. stages. Particularly, the big ones. Hyrule Temple was good in Melee, when the pace of the game was much higher, but fighting in it in Brawl was an ordeal. The surplus of space made matches extraordinarily long; the boundaries are HUGE compared to other stages, so it took way longer to KO someone, especially since they's a ton of horizontal space on the stage's upper parts and the lower half of the stage is boxed in. Of all of the stages on this list, however, Temple has the best design, and I consider it rather iconic from all of the time I spent on it in the Melee days.

New Pork City is another one. Everything is way too spread out; at least Temple had the benefit of the platforms being coherent. Additionally, a lot of the floating platforms are impossible to pass through, so there's no clear paths around the stage.

75M is so bad for fighting that I'm surprised that they're bringing it back for Smash Bros for Wii U. It's a recreation of the third stage from the original Donkey Kong. It's a cool concept, but the design is better suited for an arcade platformer than a fighting game.

They're also bringing back the Bridge of Eldin from Brawl. It's featureless, at best, and at worst it's near-impossible to traverse. By default, it's a gigantic flat stage, but sometimes the middle of the stage gets a hole blown in it. Here's the problem: the hole is so big that most characters all of their jumps, as well as their recoveries, in order to get over it. That's dangerous, so generally the hole just brings the fight to a standstill. The one benefit is, if both fighters end up on the same half, then a smart fighter can fight close to the boundaries and put an end to the match quickly.

Don't even get me started on Hanenbow. Its existence and purpose are an enigma. The angled platforms (which change their angle when they're hit with an attack) make it hard to hit things. There are platforms EVERYWHERE, making it hard to get around. The boundaries are gigantic, making it a pain to KO anything. Plus, it doesn't even have any music; It relies on ambient noise, rather than music. This makes the stage very boring compared to every other stage, which had a gigantic selection on awesome songs.

EDIT: Temple is the only one that people I know played on all the time, but all of the other ones are great examples of bad stage design in Smash Bros.

 

[shootthebandit]

Metro on BF3 comes to mind. I hated that map, felt like a complete corridor and it was very un-Battlefield IMO.

I like metro. I tend to specialise as an engineer so it doesnt really play to my skillset but its a refreshing change

My answer is pretty much any COD map. COD has the worst respawn system and the maps are just terrible. I especially hated nuketown but everyone loved it. Nuketown for me was just spawn, death, spawn, death repeat

 

[GloatingSwine]

Speaking of which, Noshar Canals conquest, the spawns favour the US team, whilst the Russians can get spawn camped.

Wasn't it the other way around? IIRC it was russians ashore and US on the boat on Nosehair Canals, I distinctly remember getting in the machinegunner seat of a tank and just getting infinity XP as my mate with the guided shells killed literally every vehicle that tried to spawn off the assault carrier.

Rank up whilst you're off making a cup of tea.

(You could break out if you had put a mobile spawn down as a scout in the first wave, IIRC best place was in a pipe in the top left of the map because you spawned in the pipe not paradropped, so you weren't seen until you'd capped a point at the back, played that and metro so much we had to learn how to break the boring sieges.)

 

[wooty]

Plenty of people have said it already, but Operation Metro in Battlefield 3. One long corridor, 32 campers to contend with. Complete rage every time.

While we're on the subject too, most maps in Battlefield 4, mainly the city maps. So much roof camping going on, getting shot by fuckers you can't even see because they're several hundred feet up in the air. May as well call the game Battleroof 4 sometimes...

 

[shootthebandit]

Speaking of which, Noshar Canals conquest, the spawns favour the US team, whilst the Russians can get spawn camped.

Wasn't it the other way around? IIRC it was russians ashore and US on the boat on Nosehair Canals, I distinctly remember getting in the machinegunner seat of a tank and just getting infinity XP as my mate with the guided shells killed literally every vehicle that tried to spawn off the assault carrier.

Rank up whilst you're off making a cup of tea.

(You could break out if you had put a mobile spawn down as a scout in the first wave, IIRC best place was in a pipe in the top left of the map because you spawned in the pipe not paradropped, so you weren't seen until you'd capped a point at the back, played that and metro so much we had to learn how to break the boring sieges.)

Noshar canals is fully dependant on your team. A half decent team can pretty much take down anything leaving the boat. We used to have a recon with a laser designator, one with a spawn point near the hangar and 2 engineers with javelins. Pretty much our squad alone could hold them off. We also had AT mines submerged in the shallow water at the dock ramp as a back up

It takes a really good team to get off the boat and start a good assault. The speed boats are the quickest way to get off the boat and then put down a spawn beacon

 

[fix-the-spade]

Wasn't it the other way around? IIRC it was russians ashore and US on the boat on Nosehair Canals,.

Both sides can get spawn camped, but the US get the AMTRAAC and a transport heli, so they get two armoured moving spawn points.

If the Russian team is extremely well organised, you can get to the shore, take A/B and then hold them against the US team, but it's really really rare to see and good air support can keep the shoreline clear. More often the US team skips A and goes for B/C/E as the helicopter and AMTRAAC lets them get to those points before the Russians, then use the chopper and boats to take D leaving only A, which can be taken at will.

If the US gets a lock out, the Russians have to travel over open land or by a narrow waterway, if the US team is switched on it's extremely easy for armour and attack chopper to hold the right from the hill top whilst infantry holds the warehouses to the left (APC/AMTRAAC takes the centre road and stragglers). The Russians don't get mobile spawns either, so they have to either start from their base or rely on a spawn beacon parachute, both of which are extremely exposed.

I see the Russians get locked out of Noshahr conquest extremely often, it takes a lot of aggression and mobility on their part to keep track of the US two mobile spawn. The Russians don't have a C-RAM either, which can kill infy on the shoreline for the US team.

 

[Evonisia]

If this was for just overplayed maps I would definitely say Raid from Call of Duty: Black Ops II. It's a fine map in its own right, but it is so overplayed that I literally let out a voice cracking "RAID?! RAID?!" much like that woman from The Simpsons who loves diamonds.

But in terms of being a bad map: Nuketown 2025. Don't get me wrong, I love how they updated it to look all futuristic and stuff and there are plenty of little details about the map that I enjoy, but oh Jesus the map itself is just awful. Black Ops II's spawn system was born on a different planet with a shitty internet connection and doesn't quite understand that even if a map is small, the enemy shouldn't fucking spawn in your sight or directly behind you.

It's nowhere near as bad as MW3's... any of the none-Face Off maps spawns and nowhere near the abysmally awful spawn system of Ghosts, but it still kills this specific map dead. I'll bring up things like the shortening of certain textures so you can headglitch better, the reduction of heights of some objects which allow for C4 spamming (grrrrrrrrrr) and the painfully awful positioning of the B flag/One of the Bomb sites in Demolition. The only way you can enjoy the map is when your team pull their finger out and work at the objective, allowing for a push back and forth. It's terrible and the fact that it wasn't that bad in Black Ops is probably the second biggest reason people choose the map after seeing the map as an excuse to quickscope and use their fucking awful Target Finder LMGs.

I recorded how many non-DLC (+Nuketown 2025 since it's a free download) maps I played and how many I played from 8th July until 8th August this year, and Nuketown 2025 and Raid were both tied at 9 (not including ragequits for any of the maps). I am bewildered by this.

Edit: Also why does everybody love Dark Carnival in Left4Dead 2 so much? It's got two decent chapters and the others are just irritating when you don't have a competent team (either side).

 

[Crash_7]

Unreal Tournament (99) - CTF-Face. Two words: spawn sniping. Putting the spawn points in direct line of sight of the enemy team's tower was a horrible design decision. It leads to a frustrating sequence of die, respawn, instantly head shotted, respawn, try to dodge, take two body shots, die, respawn, continue until ragequit. Okay that was more than 2 words, but seriously I'm still annoyed by it more than 15 years later.

I was just going through the posts to see if someone mentioned that one before I did. Facing Worlds was visually impressive for the time, but really kind of a crap map. Besides the points you mentioned, I'll point out all those teleporters. To me, teleporters always meant lazy level design. Like the mapper couldn't be bothered to build proper architecture to get you up there. Ok, maybe that's too high for steps, but build a lift or something for Pete's sake!

 

[Random Argument Man]

I would've said Downtown in the Last of Us, but nobody likes that map.

I really don't like Final Destination in any Super Smash. It's not the fact that it's too simple. It's the fact that the "pros" won't play a map that has a little chaos factor in it. I really hate playing with "pros". You must play "tournament rules" and most prefer to stick with the "tournament approved" maps. 99% of the time, you must play on Final Destination. If not, they will make a hissy fit about it.

 

[Dietz]

Tf2 dustdowl is literally a 10 my sentry sim, very narrow choke points, and limited skybox room! All topped of with some of the most stupid kit placements ever!

Love live cp_badlands <3

Not to date myself, but the dustbowl from TFC. Or 2fort. Both were grossly overplayed, and I hated both of them. I wasn't very fond of well, either, but that might be because I was a Soldier specialist, and that map had too much room for medic conc jumping.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Let's see:

Southern France from MOH:AA. I used to play this all the bloody time, but it's an objectively stupid map that just leads to everyone running around in circles in the hope of catching someone when they ran through a door or came up a stairwell at the wrong time.

Carentan in the original CoD: the spawn locations are just behind a wall of the main road, so with any more than a few players the strategy became nothing more complex than "zerg spawn and nade spam".

El Alamein from BF 1942: as much as my inner child hates me to say this, most of the map is just empty and you spawn so fucking far away from everything that if someone runs off with a vehicle before you can get in then you're likely to spend the next five minutes walking slowly across the desert before being sniped by an MG.

Also, Warsong Gulch. A CTF map that's completely open in the middle? No real strategy involved, just whichever team can spam snares better wins.

 

[the_retro_gamer]

I can't stand turbine from TF2. The whole match can boil down to a stalemate because half of the enemy (and ally) team are engineers or getting spawned camped. Top that off with only two ways to get the flag, and you got yourself a crappy map.