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Posted by: Achronos
It isn't our shiznit anymore.
It's really not anything specific from your survey. Just like with weapons, vehicles, and core game mechanics, Competitive maps need a fair skill gap. Symmetry is preferred (unless you can make an asymmetrical map whose differing characteristics cancel each other out. I would not recommend doing this). Having map geometry knowledge should be rewarded with shortcuts like "jumps". Power weapons rewarding map control, map layout giving the controlling team an advantage but not too much of an advantage that the rest of the game is decided in the first minute (a la Reach maps).
Teams getting spawnkilled should always have a way out, but it should not be handed to them. There should be multiple ways to get to every part of the map, so no bottlenecks. People shouldn't be able to turtle inside their bases the whole game (Boneyard). You really won't be able to get a specific formula for what makes popular competitive maps good, these tips are only guidelines (and pretty common sense ones at that). My advice would be to check out some of the popular competitive maps on other FPS games like CS, Quake, UT.
To make it easier, you'll notice every good competitive map has great "flow" to it, which is the sum total of everything I've just listed above and more. It's how a player gets around a map and how firefights play out on your map. Bases, power weapons, "jump"-ups, vehicles, pathways, they all affect how a player gets around. The smoother the flow, the better.
A word of warning: competitive maps aren't complicated at all, and many of the most famous ones are very simple to understand yet at the same time have great depth to them (Midship, just a big circle). You don't need complexity to spur depth (often times I see a map's overly complex nature actually hindering its depth and from that, flow), and this is what I see to be the fatal flaw of a lot of potentially competitive maps. Just make the map simple, smooth, and rewarding.