It seems to me all serious mappers must hate these killboxes, and they must bash them. If more players play killboxes, that could in a sense mean they are better than all maps that took months to create, with pretty architecture and all.
First, popularity is in no way a marker of quality.
A killbox, by definition, is a big empty box where generally everyone in the map can be seen by everyone else. This means that there is no cover, no way to escape combat, no way to outmaneuver your opponent. Using the 'original' hldm killbox as an example pretty much 95% of the combat is on one plane with no cover and no height differences which requires zero skill or ability to kill your enemy. The other 5% of the combat is campers sitting on the floating platforms waiting to gib respawners. Most of the weapons are useless due to the extreme distances between players so you are left using the pistol over 2/3rds of the available arsenal.
My hatred has nothing to do with graphics, newb authors, effort put in creation, proper compiling, or any of that s**t. It has everything to do with gameplay, which each and every killbox is bereft of. Gameplay is not 2d fighting on a big empty plane. It's being able to outsmart your opponent, get the jump on them, outreact them in unforseen situations, escape them when things are looking bad, use personal combat and movement strategies, and yes, beat them down in a face to face fight. None of these are possible in a killbox besides the most basic 'see person shoot person til he or you die x100', and you can get that same gameplay in a box with the most basic bots that do nothing besides run in straight lines and fire at you if you cross their FOV. Killboxes essentially strip human intelligence, skill and variance from deathmatch.
Killboxes are a cancer on player communities, and nothing more needs to be said. They promote terrible nonexistant gameplay, encourage stupidity in players, and increase the rate in which people stop playing deathmatch. They discourage real mappers, ruin custom map servers and any server that has votemap active, and drive away the legitimate deathmatch playerbase. And that's without mentioning the terrible mapping practices they encourage.
This isn't a matter of thinking they suck, it is a matter of empirical suck and there's no way to escape it.
Oh and Finger, congrats you figured out the mysterious idea of 'big bloody killzone' that has existed since deathmatch was invented. It doesn't take analyzing a killbox to figure that out. Crossfire, 'The Bad Place' for Quake, 'The Edge' for Quake2, scary_one's early HLDM maps... all tremendous maps that have exactly what you are describing. Also, maze-like maps have poor connectivity and too much sprawl, which means they suck for more reasons than 'people aren't willing to figure them out'.
I agree, too much discussion already on this topic.
