I agree with aonie that the map is currently too niche, and even for its main use case, which is preventing stalling, a lot of the times you are unable to use it because you already spent your Role Points.
TL;DR
I think the item should be free in the end-game, + the price reduced to 2 Role Points and/or made more powerful by giving it aura-reading abilities.
For anyone interested about my reasoning and more specifics, here’s my logic for both mechanics:
Free map against stalling
Yes please, make this a universal mechanic.
The main argument against a free map for the endgame is that players should just save up to account for stalling like on The Hive, but whilst on hive this might’ve been necessary because players would be very spread around the map, this is not the case on KIG, which has a much more experienced player-base that frequently groups up around certain areas of the map and often actively attempt not to stall.
I don’t think players should be expected to avoid buying combat items (which make fights faster and more interesting) to prepare them for a scenario that might never happen.
The place where we may differ is, when should the map become free? I think if there’s a minute left, traitors should instantly get a map, but if there’s more time left, I don’t think they should immediately get it when there’s only a couple of innos left, to let the last innos have some counterplay where they can attack them by surprise. A good approximation (for cases with over 1min left) could be:
- If there’s X innos left and no one dies within ~45s, give out the map for free. This would let the innos know how much time they have if they want to catch you by surprise, and it’d still reward traitors who had extra Role Points to spend on a map by letting them deny this surprise attack.
A technically better approximation could check the time between combat logs between opposing teams rather than deaths, but that’s probably harder to implement and to communicate to players.
Unsure what the number of innos (X) should be but 2 innos sounds like a good spot.
Item price
The price is a big thing preventing the map from being an offensive tool. Simply because why would anyone save up 3 Role Points to buy a map when they can just buy creepers or a claymore for 2, and the other expensive items feel more powerful than the map. A tester bomb is way better because in most maps, innocents will stay close to the tester, and when you buy a map offensively, there’s so many more risks:
- It takes a while to interpret, see where you are positioned and identify potential victims.
- Players move fast; when you get there, the player might now be in a safe area. There often aren’t many isolated players for a long period of time.
- You can’t use it in public, as players will see that you have a map on you and will kill you for it.
- Even if you do find an isolated player with it, you still need to beat the player in PvP without the aid that other items would’ve given you, and the fact that the player is in an area with low player traffic will already make them very suspicious of you, often drawing their bow towards you, blocking with their sword to lower the damage of your first hit, or attacking you pre-emptively to leave
Despite all this, I still don’t think any item should cost 1 Role Point, simply because that would encourage inexperienced players to buy it when they get a safe kill at the start, thinking “why save for a 2 Role Point item when I’m not sure I’ll get another kill”.
It wouldn’t feel like you’re choosing an item vs another, but more like encouraging players to prolong the game to attempt to kill a player that’s isolated and get their Role Point back.
Do I think making it 2 Role Points will make it be used a lot? Not really, it’d get a slight improvement in use, and maybe help for high karma-record rounds but it still wouldn’t become meta, and it’d be an item that players that don’t want to draw attention to themselves with things like creepers, wolves or claymores could use as an alternative.
Another solution that would be great would be to improve the map. We now have the possibility to see player auras that the base game didn’t have (via mods/add-ons in 1.8 and base-game in later versions), so why not make the map give aura-reading abilities? Maybe let traitors holding the map see every player’s aura, or letting them see the auras of players with less than half of their health instead.
This would make the map way more viable, and it’d also give a use to it on TIMV maps that have a lot of verticality and where you wouldn’t know where a player is from just looking in the map, like Wintry Chalet, Withering Realms or Timber Hearth (well, as long as the players are close enough to be rendered…).