I also posted The Solution which allows for positive selection and incentives the selection of many maps.
Ultimately, I don’t think they’re going to get to the right answer on the map pool so I think much of the competitive community will go back to Voobly. I just don’t think they understand how unenjoyable many maps with choke points are for experienced players.
I think Age is just a really hard game to throw in random map types.
I much, much prefer the current mappool over anything 90% of this forum/reddit suggest.
that said, I would still like a seperate matchmaking queue just for arabia, in addition to the current mappool. (though in the latter arabia could be replaced)
In the arabia ‘pool’, players can see each others civs, such that they can decide to pick random instead of mirror/top tier civ. On HD/Voobly players can see each other civs, and know they can change their civ if the opponent decides to pick a strong civ.
Ironically I have had so much more variety in games I played on Voobly, back when 1v1 random civs on arabia was the norm.
I agree every even though I only played Arabia, given everyone went random there was so much more variety. Especially for team games with all the possible civ combos and team bonuses, I never got sick of playing Arabia with random civs. Now you can basically predict the civs based on map or people just do mirror. On top of that there’s so many maps that just are not fun to play. I’ve just been playing HD hoping they come out with a patch to fix ranked play. I don’t want to waste my time in DE playing mirror civs on a map like Black Forest.