We discussed this last night, @Igor, but you asked me to post here too.
I’m personally not a fan of these changes at all. I think it’s mostly because I don’t want to chill out, chat and play cards when I play Party Animals. I do understand some want to do this though, and I’m sure the map fits them well. You and some of the others on your Discord are good examples of this.
I totally agree that they shouldn’t have removed things from this map. That feels like a bad move to me, as I can no longer play the map with my daughter + bots any more. She was a big fan of this map. We tried it today and she got bored after about 5 minutes and wanted to do something else. If you don’t want to play Paws or don’t want to play with the jukebox there’s not much else you can do unless you want a basic 1v1 fight, but that’s a bit boring.
Also, when you’re with a group, if everyone wants to play Paws or chat and you don’t, then you’re stuck waiting for everyone to finish. We previously used the Winter Cabin as a bit of a chill out time. We didn’t fight, but all ran around causing chaos and just having fun. This kind of fun doesn’t happen any more when everyone sits down for Paws.
We’re all different though, and I know it’s fun for some. It just isn’t fun for me. I did read somewhere from the devs that many players were previously using the cabin as a chill-out zone, so there’s definitely a need for this. I just wish they hadn’t done it by removing the ability for others to fight on it with bots. It’s a move that I suspect was driven by the inclusion of Paws because they didn’t have bandwidth to implement AI players for Paws.
I have hopes that further improvements will be coming. I appreciate the devs trying new things out, giving us new content, and I also really do appreciate how hard creating games is. It’s just for me it feels like 2 steps forward and 3 steps back this time. I’ve noticed tweaks on other maps too that I won’t comment on here, and again, for me, those feel like negative ones too - although I need more time to confirm my suspicions on those.