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I've played almost every tournament dating back to the Beta Tournament on OCN. In AotC, cores were always getting dewatered before being leaked through a tube. In BC, infinite water pools above and below cores became relevant and this was a lot harder to leak. In HoC, people placed shit underneath cores and to this day, it's been like this.

When I play DTC/M on 2 mon 1 core maps, generally the goal is to break both monuments and try your damn hardest to leak it in the end. If a core was leaked, you would 100% have a huge advantage in the scoring system but the safest bet is going for an objective that you can progress your way to completion. These 1 mon 1 core maps made me completely ignore cores in some cases because it was clear what the easier objective is to complete. Cores are simply too difficult to leak right now. There is no way to progress your way unless you can somehow dewater it if they had a shitty start.

Not only that, but you sometimes have these one sided games because you're out of resources early and there isn't much you can do to get any back as you don't steal stuff and take it back. Yes, it is your fault for not protecting it, but the match shouldn't be over there. There should be an opportunity to get back into the game and the maps currently don't offer a way to do that.

Because I'm really bad at organizing my thoughts in a good way, I'm just gonna do a list of suggestions and why I think they're good and bad. These are individual suggestions, so these don't all tie into being 1 big suggestion as removing cores while doing this other stuff makes no sense. Here we go.

• Get rid of cores: Cores are too difficult to leak because of the infinite sources and shit people put underneath it. Being hit under water just forces you onto the roof of the core and it's difficult to successfully make a tube to leak without being blocked or hit. If we want to continue 8v8 and focus one 2 defenders, it's either the super close together 2 monuments on SSB with a core, or a core and monument, or 2 monuments.
  
• Count core leak distance and revamp the scoring system: It's ridiculous how DTC has been around for years now and someone one block broken on a giant structure counts as 50% of a monument. It's so easy to touch too that it shouldn't count for that much. We should turn the core system into tracking the leak distance. So if you leak it 1 block under the core when it's a 4 block leak, it's 25% completed. I think you know where the math is going with this. This will at the very least reward people for having better pushes on the core when it comes down to a core vs core and result in less ties. Another idea is proximity towards the leak distance.
  
• Cores need to be placed a LOT closer to front lines: Cores should be open to cannon fire if people want to be able to do something with it. The closer it is, the easier it is for skybridge to get to it and drop down while potentially getting rid of water walls. Wallop 9000 did a nice thing where even though it was far back on the width, the height of the core was so high that knocking people down or holding the versatility was a good way of controlling the high ground over fresh spawns. Mars was way too close towards the top spawn.
  
• Supply Drops: There isn't much to really fight for in the middle of the game currently. Wallop 9000 has a mid island that is constantly contested but imagine having diamond supply drops there. People can prepare to push for these with the timer countdowns or even ignore it and instead icarusing over for objectives while giving it up. Things like this can really throw the mid game for a bit of a twist and really help trigger some offense when we have the "nothing is happening" part of the game. If mid islands aren't the best thing, perhaps a spot for skybridges to meet on like Deepwind Jungle use to do can be good. What's in the supply drops? Diamonds
  
• Core Regions: Anyone remember Retaliation 2 and how it limited how high you can water? That was back when people didn't know what they were doing when it came to infinite water and people actually tried dewatering. A limited space for watering can help give another option for leaking and can make sponge very powerful especially if it's something fought for like a supply drop ^.
  
• Give ice rather than water buckets in maps: Force players to actually get iron if they want a bucket. Those buckets are useful for defenders putting back water in TNT and when it comes to ice, you can't water it without a block under either. Just a small thing I want to see. This also limits how fast people can water things at the beginning of a match like on SSB. I don't want stacks of ice, I mean I want to replace buckets with 1 block of ice so there is a small amount instead of stacks on Blocks DTC where you can make an actual ice cube for a core defense.
  
• Maybe some gapple kill rewards? Painlooping unarmored should get you punished. When you're icarusing and you get a kill, you were already at a disadvantage in the first place and I don't see how you can survive any longer.
  
• Start introducing some 1.9 items so we can see some new stuff. My team found some pretty cool stuff when it came to using sponges and slime blocks on Mars. I want to see teams do some wacky stuff with this and these are the things that can really surprise people.
  
• Scaling respawn timers: When it comes to resource maps, finishing a core is very hard to do and with a scaled respawn timer, this will make going for kills even easier and makes painlooping a lot weaker very late in the match.
  
• Water breathing/fire resistance/aqua infinity for offenders on enemy side: This will give offenders a buff underwater around objectives and hopefully allow people to break stuff quicker if they fuck up their tube or something.
  

I'd love to have a good discussion here on what we can do as map makers and ask of the developers in support of making DTC a better gamemode. I think a lot of us have complained about the "meta" for a while now and we need to do something together to make this even more competitive.

Wallop 9000 is the best DTC map that has been made since Fractal Descent, and I will explain why now:

1) Core placement: It is extremely centered, allowing for it to be cannoned relatively easily, and high enough for it to actually be somewhat hard to defend.

2) Shape: The way the map is shaped is extremely brilliant. The monument and core are close enough to each other that rotations can be quick and efficient. The map is 2 levels, and every part of the map is genuinely useful for one reason or another (a genuine flaw with every map besides ssb and wallop was that a significant portion of the map is completely useless). There are also various places with multiple horizontal layers to the map, in that most chests are behind pillars, etc.

3) Supplies: The supplies are important, and there are a lot of them, but if you lose them, you can still win the game (unlike ssb and riots te)

4) Objective Completability: Each objective is about equally difficult to complete entirely. However, on an unfortunate side note, the monument is (in my opinion) too tall, and simultaneously too dense. Something more like SSB’s monument, but with bedrock in the middle, would be a lot better, or even something more like fractal descent’s.

Map makers should use these things making maps on the future.