Fairen

Gamer whines about something it's popular to whine about, solely because it's a "rival" to thing that makes gamers feel like they're better than other gamers. Frankly, when something has a hatejerk towards it like Evilution does, that's more often a sign of quality to me than something that has rabid stans who'll treat it as the greatest thing ever and flip their lids at the slightest criticism. Better to enjoy something that has fans who focus on their enjoyment of it rather than taking offense towards people who don't. Plus, TNT isn't the Final Doom WAD that has the worst Cyberdemon placement in the history of Doom WADs.

Personally, just as a hypothetical, not something I've tested or anything... Split the BFG damage between direct impact damage, the tracers (at reduced damage) and a huge blast damage at the point of impact. Maybe make the player immune to said blast damage, maybe not—depends on if you want them to spam the BFG at point-blank crowds. Cybers and Masterminds would be immune to the blast damage just as they're immune to rocket blast damage, so it wouldn't be a cheap anti-boss weapon.

But then you might have people nominating different WADs, rather than just the latest artsy/hardcore mapset!

Fair enough. I'll leave y'all to enjoy and discuss the deep and rich narrative and symbolism at the heart of "Potato Rick".

And when people critique that which you see as Art-with-a-capital-A, proceed to treat them like they're drooling idiots who don't know what Good Art is. It is entirely a valid criticism that something is a wholly-unfulfilling experience if you don't do something you're never told or even suggested that you should do. And even ignoring that, even with the interesting technical bits, it's still a eyeroll-worthy cliche-riddled creepypasta that stops just short of exposition about how hyper-realistic the random blood in the bathroom is. (You walked around in a bathroom, and now it's bloody and there are Doom monsters there! This must mean something, probably, definitely!)

That's exactly what it is, though. Twelve pages of desperately trying to find meaning in something that has no real meaning. What is the significance of this car? Maybe it's because the creator had a model of a car to put into their WAD. The great thing about that is that it then allows you to dismiss any criticism of it by proclaiming "ART!". Why is it so incredibly easy to completely lock yourself out of any sort of satisfactory resolution if you were to click on this thing instead of that thing? Because that's good art, apparently. Imagine going to an art exhibit and without any warning being told that, because you entered through that door instead of this door, you don't get to view half of the paintings. You only get to see 60% of this one. Only a brief flicker of this painting. Want the full experience? Go figure out the right door and view all the paintings in the right order. Then you realize in the end that it was only about a half-dozen paintings and you spent so long on it retreading the same things, just figuring out how the stupid exhibit demanded that you approach its Art-with-a-capital-A without ever telling you of these requirements. By then you've lost any sort of appreciation for the paintings themselves, unless you want to believe all of that nonsense itself was Art-with-a-capital-A.

That's just Doom. The charm of it, the simplicity of it. Doomguy's helmet does not allow him to move his head. He can only turn his body and glance back and forth. He lives with it.

+1 to Pleasant Vibes from the Party Garage for a runner-up spot~

This isn't really a thing at all. The other problem is if you just "let your playthrough take you where it does", it's entirely possible to completely lock yourself out of entire sections of the game with zero way to know you've done so, and by doing so render the scavenger hunt impossible to complete. Which leads to the "no ending" thing.

Ten-to-one they'll have learned their "lesson" from the last movie and the plot will firmly keep women in the "men's possessions" camp, if they're trying to hop on the The Last of Us bandwagon.

So, playing through a few of the maps, my thoughts... Map 3: Comm Center - Pretty solid map! Had just barely enough ammo to make it through on UV. The start would probably be a bit too nasty for anyone who doesn't discover the secret, though. Only other qualm is that the doors have the "panel" bit of the graphic at the very bottom, which looks strange given that those door textures usually place the "panel" at roughly the middle. Map 4: Exit Planet Dust - Another good map! However, there's a bit of oddity with hidden monsters. The area where the pain elemental pops in behind you has a graphical glitch where the false wall is, and past the drop and brief acid pit, the revenants hidden in the walls can end up firing at you before being warped out of their hidey-holes. One in the open area seemed stuck in his hidey-hole, and never could find an angle to shoot out of either. Map 8: Traps and Tricks - There's two places with glaring hall-of-mirror effects—the column that lowers to reveal a pain elemental at the start of the map, and the area with the arch-vile past the rocket launcher. And a small nitpick, but with the second set of pick-the-right-teleporters, I feel it would be nicer if the teleporters were more neatly laid-out just to make it easier for the player to remember which one they picked. But all in all, good map! Map 9: Akuji Blood Pit - This was the first map I didn't really care much for, and the use of a music track from a Plutonia MIDI pack quite handily foreshadows why. It's the first map that really feels like it overuses revenants, with encounters that consists largely of mass revenant waves. But even those, like most of the map's fighting, is easily overcome at range and/or via choke-points with the abundance of rockets the map gives you. The level design is nice, but I just didn't vibe with the gameplay. I'll go through more later; judging by the number of enemies, Map 10 will be a fair bit longer than these maps.

Weirdos who can't stand people having any sort of opinions they can't tolerate and obsess over them and every little thing that they post. That's one thing I love. And neat mapping tricks, but I already said that here.

Interesting from a technical/design angle, though the whole creepypasta/spoopy aesthetic had me rolling my eyes a lot, coupled with a lot of moments of confusing progression and seemingly-pointless side-areas. Then it seemingly ends, abruptly and anticlimactically. I think, "Okay, I'll just look up where to go next. There must be something I missed." Turns out that it ends early if you didn't collect every single one of a bunch of objects. Throughout areas that you're unable to return to. After probably half an hour of gameplay. With zero indication of this requirement or how many Things you need to collect. And with decoy Things to boot! Which just made the experience feel like a complete waste of time. Like if you played through Doom and it just ends at the start of the Tower of Babel, because you haven't found every secret in every previous map (and if it didn't even tell you how many secrets were in each map). And again, while it's neat on a technical level, the cheesy creepypasta "horror" flavour and the complete lack of interest in a mystery scavenger hunt definitely doesn't make me interested in trying to get the—well, a ending.

"They must have really stuck to their comfort zone. I don't think it takes a lot of self-analysis to see the logical flaw in 'I have a strong opinion about this thing I refuse to play.'" "I think the contradiction is staring people in the face. If you're running around in circles holding down the fire key and you have to grind the RNG 20 times until you win, then what you're doing isn't actually a strategy. Good slaughter maps do require strategic thinking, but people aren't doing that because instead they're running in circles holding the fire key. And then they come to threads like this and say that the intended strategy is luck-based, while completely missing that A) they have no idea what the intended strategy is, B) there may not even be one, because the fight is super flexible and lots of things work except for circle-strafing, and C) they haven't actually engaged with anything that makes the map fun for people who think the map is fun. I mean, I'm not here to skill-shame anybody. ... Sometimes it's fun to figure out how to do things. Sometimes I don't want my fun handed to me on a silver platter. Sometimes I do. What's cool is that you can have both." "Also, it's pretty annoying that, people just don't admit they suck" "People suggest easy or introductory level slaughter, no one actually plays the suggested slaughter, rinse and repeat." "What's interesting is you'll never really hear these kind of generalized complaints over simple easy maps that do the same Knee Deep in the Dead stuff we've all seen for decades. ... And the reason to hate it is for the majority of the time not being good at dealing with it, it's frustrating." "I think one problem is so many people refuse to play on lower difficulty settings. They want to play on UV no matter what, and I think that should change. If you’re short on time and/or if it is too hard, try a lower difficulty setting." "Every time there’s a slaughtermap thread I ask the haters to post a non-tas max demo to show their hate isn’t about lack of skill. Are you going to be the first person to actually post a demo?" "My actual point was the comfort-zone, the sanctity of the zen state and the way distorted focus gameplay such as heavy crowd control takes this away from people as being the source of a sour mood." All quotes from this thread.

Because I made the git-gud clique feel like they're not better than everyone else. But you're right, it's entirely my fault the tryhards have been compelled to trawl through my posting history because they can't actually give real objection to my opinions. You folks should just start a thread and let the rest of us know what opinions we're stupid for having and not allowed to have, that would make discussions go much more smoothly. Hell, you guys can pin my review of Sunlust on that thread, and openly tell your little git-gud clique to send me hate PMs over it. The problem clearly isn't the ridiculous hostility towards people who dislike a certain kind of content that makes you feel better than other players, the problem is that you haven't bullied away everyone with a different opinion than you. (And no, I don't need to justify giving a one-star review of an utterly-joyless experience, because that's what opinions are for. Let's see how you folks would react to people combing through your reviews to hatejerk over every Wrong Opinion you have. Wait, that's right, you folks think your opinions aren't merely "opinions".) Again, to reiterate: Thread asked for opinions. People gave their opinions. Tryhards flipped out because those opinions made them feel less special, and now are pissed off that other people aren't obligated to stfu when they tell them they're not allowed to have their opinions.

There's something really magical about calling other people's opinions "surface level" when your own assessment of their opinions are just that themselves. OP asked for people who felt a certain way to share why they held that opinion. Other folks whom the topic was never addressed to began to complain about those opinions and the people who held them.

I'm just going to posit one more thing, and that's my absolute certainty that of all the folks talking about what they dislike about slaughter maps in this thread that specifically asked for the opinions of people who dislike slaughter maps... ...absolutely none of these people would be barging into a thread asking fans of such maps about what they like about slaughter maps to complain about other people having Wrong Opinions, insisting they're just not gud at the gam, expecting people to waste time doing something they don't like in order to justify having their opinions, or flat-out trawling through people's posting histories for the sake of laughably-petty personal attacks.

I only post demonstrations of my skills to people who themselves prove their own, by doing a no-death TGL mode run of The Guardian Legend without using Enemy Erasers and while singing the chorus of Andy Gibb's "An Everlasting Love" over and over. Only once a person has cleared this arbitrary hurdle do I consider their opinions on "skill" and lack thereof to be valid (unless, of course, I already agreed with what they were saying beforehand).

Several people here have given nuanced opinions; their opinions just aren't "nuanced" in the way you want them to be (i.e. agreeing with you). No, let's be honest here, what it really is is hearing that other people were invited to someone else's living room to have a discussion, and then deciding they were wrong to have that discussion and therefore taking time out of their day to barge into said living room and poop on the floor themselves. Then proceeding to blame the people who wanted to participate in the original discussion for themselves pooping on the floor. Typically, when someone online accuses those with other opinions of getting unreasonably offended by contrary opinions... ...no. You absolutely will see people criticize WADs for being too easy. And frankly, you're just flat-out saying that "people who don't like a thing just suck at it". I've played slaughter maps. I've beat those slaughter maps. That experience with slaughter maps is why I can say that slaughter maps are more tedious than challenging. When someone's opinion is "your opinion is wrong and you only have that opinion because you're not good at it", that implies that they believe they're better than other people for playing and enjoying that kind of content. Pointing out the common problems with slaughter maps, and daring to suggest that they're not purely down to skill and talent, thus puts that belief into question—and results in such people taking criticism of that thing that makes them "gud" as a personal attack on their perceived skills.

Naming favourite maps is usually tricky for me, but top WADs (in that I generally enjoyed the levels) would be Pirate Doom, Ray Mohawk 2, Revilution, KDizD, just off the time of my head. The slaughter maps I've played were mostly in WADs that had different styles of levels, or included them in later levels. Stuff like Alien Vendetta, Scythe, Sunlust, and various other less-notable WADs. So they've been from different folks, but still had the same "qualities" to them. The same sort of reason why fans of Dark Souls and the like retort "git gud" when people criticize the games for their lack of a pause button.

Or maybe folks have done enough of certain things to form opinions on those things, based on how those things are commonly done. It's surprising to think of on the internet, but sometimes other people have valid opinions that they arrived at through reasonable and rational means~

Certainly a thing that depends on the monsters themselves, how well they fit in and how well they're utilized. The WAD I've played with the most custom monsters was KDizD, which did have some interesting additions, but some of them did feel overly redundant with existing monsters; e.g. too many imp varieties. (But yanno they still reliably died to a super-shotgun blast...) Honestly, I feel like not enough WAD creators consider rebalancing existing monsters, alongside adding new monsters. Why do you need a Badder Imp if you could just make regular imps a bit more threatening, say with faster fireballs or movement?

"Unfair" isn't the same thing as "difficult". With a lot of slaughter maps, they're quite simple once you know what's coming. If you don't have the right weapon out, or don't know where monsters come out of and what monsters, then you end up in situations where things spiral downward; if you know what's going to happen, they can often be extremely easy. Ray Mohawk 2 was brought up earlier, and that's a WAD I really enjoyed, but that WAD still had a few obnoxious scenarios. Arch-Viland was one of the worst for this for two sections, one where crossing a linedef causes over half a dozen cyberdemons to spawn behind you, and another where a huge amount of arch-viles swarm into an area via teleporter. The former is simple if you know it's coming (and a map-design flaw lets you kill them without any threat whatsoever) and the latter is something I have no idea how you are even supposed to handle unless you know what happens beforehand, immediately go to where the arch-viles spawn in, and immediately start spamming the BFG. Otherwise, the arch-viles promptly chain-explode you to death. (I'll note too that one of the things that makes Ray Mohawk 2's large-scale battles better than more vanilla slaughter maps is that the entire arsenal is viable, rather than expecting rocket/BFG spam 24/7. In fact, gunning down 6+ cyberdemons actually isn't that big a deal in Ray Mohawk 2.)