Sandbox 30×30 Player Frontline Maps: Grand Canyon and Sunny Valley

*Opinion Below* 

Hello,

there are two new maps for the Frontline, to avoid confusion this is the…

Grand Canyon

mmap2

1.2×1.2 km

and

Sunny Valley

valley_760_encounter

1.4×1.4 km

The rules are simple:

Vehicles: All Tier X vehicles except for Premium and Special Event tanks.

Teams: 30 players per side. The matchmaker creates teams based on balance requirements and limitations established in 9.18, ensuring the difference in the number of light tanks, TDs, and arty within each part of the list is just one vehicle at the most. The difference in the number of Platoon players is set to two at the most. The number of SPGs is limited to six at the most per team.

Victory conditions: Capture the base (the enemy base for Standard mode, or the neutral one for Encounter battles) or destroy all enemy vehicles.

Battle duration: 20 minutes. If the time limit expires and neither team captures the opposing base or destroys all vehicles, then the match is a draw.

As for the Economy of the 30×30 battles, that’s still a work in progress.

Of course, things are still being tested but 1.2×1.2 km and 1.4×1.4 km will make things a tad too crowded for a match with 60 players in.
To put it into perspective, these are some of the 1000×1000 m maps:

  • Cliff
  • Abbey
  • Fisherman Bay
  • Fiery Salient
  • Highway
  • Malinovka
  • Live Oaks
  • Karelia
  • Mountain Pass

I doubt that even 1.4 x 1.4 km will be enough for 60 players without bottlenecking everyone given that the map modellers from Wargaming have the bad habit of leaving a lot of space unused/impossible to reach. You gonna be taking fire from every angle so Heavy Tanks or go home, simply speaking.

Personally got huge concerns about how the Grand Canyon map looks and again it just reinforces my opinion that the map creators in this game do not play the game long or/and well enough to understand the general player meta.

Doesn’t the Grand Canyon mapping model, a river in the middle separating 2 sides with only 3 ways to cross it, remind you of something?

xrdgtxw

Oh, hey there, Erlenberg!

Now at this point I know many of you already know where I am going with this, for those who don’t, it is well known that Erlenberg is much of a camp fest the higher the tier you go, in fact, most of my tier 10 battles that end up in Draw surely take place on this map, given that each team will drive to each of the sides and then sit on a nice camping chair for the whole 15 minutes of battle while feeding on Light and Medium Tanks who try to spot them for teammates who are too far away lounging just as much to even have the proper view range to see the enemy.

It doesn’t matter that Grand Canyon has a spawn on each side of the river, the spawns are close enough for people to cross the bridges at the beginning of battles and repeat what’s been happening on Erlenberg for ages.

As for Sunny Valley, I definitely favour more this map. Although I’m not a fan of all that unused space and it’s not yet established how the vegetation will take a part, the fact that it has lower and higher ground, plenty of open fields and cover makes this map fairer than the Grand Canyon for all types of vehicles in the game, my only worry is, will 1.4×1.4 km be enough for 60 players?

Let me know your opinion in the comment section!

Liked it? Take a second to support Rita Sobral on Patreon!
Sandbox 30×30 Player Frontline Maps: Grand Canyon and Sunny Valley

39 thoughts on “Sandbox 30×30 Player Frontline Maps: Grand Canyon and Sunny Valley

    1. Nocomment says:

      1.2 x 1.2 km!
      Lets hope that when they announced the 30 players per team they forgot the magic words “up to”.

  1. Headdie says:

    The river in grand canyon doesn’t give me much of a concern for cap fests, what does on the other hand is the whopping big battle line on the west side of the map meaning proactive players have only the maze on the east to even attempt to influence the battle

  2. CurseOfDeath says:

    ” Vehicles: All Tier X vehicles except for Premium and Special Event tanks.”

    Does this mean that you cant use Obj 260 ?

  3. Personally 1.2×1.2 and 1.4×1.4 would be good map size for 15vs15 battles and what current map sizes are increased to.

    For 30vs30 I think a 1.8×1.8 or 2×2 map size is what the devs should be looking at with the map opened up like on the 3×3 frontlines map

  4. Just Call Me Zo says:

    Maps are far too small as it is. If they think they can just cram twice the players into essentially the same amount of area, they’re mental. Add in the fact that 25% of the map is impassable terrain, and it makes even less sense. WG needs to get rid of the current map crew and start bringing in new blood for that. It’s obvious that they’ve been stagnating and doing the classic ‘wait for the problem to be a problem for years before addressing it’ bit. It’s pathetic that they don’t own up to issues and start addressing them when it’s staring them in the face.

  5. tango_35 says:

    I would like to see 1.2×1.2 and 1.4×1.4 maps used for the Ranked Battles. The Rank Battles running on the old maps on the test servers are nothing more than Random Battles.

    1.8×1.8 and 2.0×2.0 are needed for the 30 vs.30 format. Anything smaller will not work.

    In addition, the new maps should not be corridor maps. Tanks fighting against other tanks in urban areas, at river crossings, and within forests with multiple choke points have no historic basis. The Infantry and Combat Engineers operating in those environments successfully dominated the armor forces that ventured into such areas.

    Give us some maps that provide enough open space and concealment to use the new light tanks for scouting and allow mediums to exploit flanks. If the slow heavy tanks and td’s cannot keep up, let those players switch to vehicles that thrive in the new freewheeling meta.

    Good Hunting!!!

    1. skivster says:

      Luckly, youre not the one that makes the decisions.
      Leave it up to Drunk Russian Developers to Make The Game Playable Again!
      /sarcasm

    1. You do realize that WG themselves said that the economy on sandbox isn’t final? Instead of focusing somethign they haven’t touched yet, how about look at the gamemode as a whole.

  6. 1.2km x 1.2km Maps and for T8 to T10 the bigger 1.4km x 1.4km Maps

    both bigger map sizes should be in Random battles at least 2 years ago

    it just goes to show that WG dev’s CAN DO IT but they don’t as they don’t want to
    any new big maps will help stop the brain numbing frustrating 4 minute turbo slaughters we get now!

    of course WG know all this, but again just don’t care – 4 minute turbo slaughter battles its obvious there plan for Maps in WOT ..

  7. Anonymous says:

    math for dummies:
    1.4km*1.4km = ~2square kms
    any of the 1000m maps you mentioned before: 1 square km
    double the tanks, double tha area

    it’s actually not THAT stupid imho
    the 1.2km map would have roughly twice area of an 800 meters map

    1. more accurately 1.44sq km and 1.96sq km but that’s nit picking so close enough.

      I personally feel that a 15 vs 15 would fit this map better and allow LT to have a far better impact with scouting. Sure they can scout in a 1sq km map now but in a larger map with the same number of tanks they can utilize their mobility far more.

      As for 30 vs 30 they 9sq km map was nice but probably too big and a map about 1.8×1.8 (3.24sq km) or 2×2 (4sq km) would probably work best for it

  8. Wa says:

    I agree with previous posters that maps are too small, but would also question if a single cap zone in the middle of the map is actually viable?? Apart from the problem of team work, wouldn’t an ez win just be to push your whole team to the cap, leave a few tanks in there, and move the rest into defensive positions? Makes the rest of the map pointless. By the time enemy team realises you have lemming’d there, already halfway to capping. By the time they try rush back to flank, all they can try do is suicide reset through your defensive tanks. Only thing stopping that would be half a dozen arties on the enemy team, if they keep their current splash, decide to blind shot cap instead of whatever defenders are spotted, and work together to some extent

  9. Swatdennis says:

    I do not even understand their idea behind 30X30, 15X15 is already idiotic enough and WOT still has too much problems to try anything new…

  10. Partybooper says:

    So these maps are basically for 30v30 random battles, not frontline, right?

    What I’m thinking now is… Try to carry a 30v30 game if you have 29 terrible players on your side against a horde of greens, blues and purples. And even the amount of ammunition your tank can carry will stay the same… Good luck gentlemen… Good luck…

  11. heinz says:

    1000m*1000m=1.000.000m^2
    1.000.000m^2 / 30 tanks = 33.333m^2 per tank = 182,5m * 182,5m space per tank

    New frontline:
    1200m *1200m =1.440.000m^2
    1.440.000m^2 / 60 tanks = 24.000m^2 per tank = 155m * 155m space per tank

    1400m * 1400m = 1.960.000m^2
    1.960.000m^2 / 60 tanks = 32.667m^2 per tank = 181m * 181m space per tank

    1. heinz says:

      And we see: On a 1,4km map with 60 players everyone has about the same space like 30 players on a 1km map.

      1. Just Call Me Zo says:

        Easily 20% of which is impassable terrain. There’s no freedom to maneuver with that amount of area. Even if we had the same area, you’re still looking at tank crews in knife fighting range. That almost NEVER happened in the real world. The maps need to be way bigger, and WG have been dragging their feet like always. It’s up to us and those in the Community Contributor positions (read: Rita, QB, Jingles, etc.) to be passing this along to WG.

  12. zombietropa says:

    Just going to note, while the new map designs are easy on the eye, they offer near bugger all information. Topographical maps pls WG.

    But yeah, as people have already said, 1.4kmx1.4km is going to be big enough for 30v30, and the Sunny Valley map looks fairly laid out. But the Grand Canyon map… I’m not to sure about. It is definitely looking camped for 60 players (~1.5km^2 vs the 1.96km^2 of Sunny Valley). Like Derpenbery, its looks like whoever can camp on side harder wins, and atm, the eastern side of the map looks far more defencible than the west.

    I thought that WG had shuffled design teams around so they could make better maps?

  13. Cannyon will probably be either both teams rush each other on opposing flanks and kemp hard on both sides or one team will rush one side and the other team will be overrun fast.

  14. Moshpit400 says:

    The overall size of the maps could fit 60 tanks but that doesn’t account for the large amount of unaccessible space. Once you take that unused space out of the overall numbers then things start getting a little cramped.

  15. Escudoturbo says:

    There was a 1.5km x 1.5km map on console until last year (skorpion pass) that got reduced in size – it’s a shame they didn’t just make it a 30 vs 30

  16. For some reason, Wargaming delights in making maps which render 20-30% or more of the map unplayable. Especially if there will be 60 tanks involved, ALL the map should be usable. Over half the maps out there are actually much smaller than advertised because of terrain restrictions along the edges of the maps.

  17. Marc Schreiber says:

    I believe that they do not size up the maps for multiple reasons:
    – larger maps do not favor ht play with good armor.
    – larger maps might impact the performance of old PC’s
    – larger maps favor good players and punish the weak.
    – larger maps favor platoons as they can cooperate more efficiently.

    in other words, I believe that they deliberately keep the maps small so that newbies and noobs actually feel that they contribute to the game, as they usually fail in positioning, knowing when to push a flank and how to manage their hp.

  18. Tu says:

    Why create new maps …. they should concentrate on rebuilding some of the maps that were removed from WoT … like Dragon Ridge … etc.
    This new Frontline mode is like a bigger version of Domination …. etc modes that only lasted a short time.
    After 2-3 games playing on the SB – its back to the SEA or NA or EU to play

Leave a Reply