Hello. Currently, with the ranked matchmaking, we have a pool of maps that rotates every two weeks. My suggestion is to get rid of this. It’s somewhat pointless and leads to a lot of problems. My solution: Give everyone the full list of maps, with infinite bans and up to 5 stars per map. The system can then try and matchmake, and once it finds a match, it picks one of the maps with the highest star counts from both players. That way, anyone can pick literally any map in the entire game, rate how much they want to play it, and then be matched with similar people. It would also be nice if they are given a predicted queue time based on their choices, that would be determined by the popularity of the map and number of people currently online. It would take a while for people to learn all the maps, but then everyone should get to play what they want, slowly introduce more maps if they feel like variety, and we don’t need to force everyone to play stuff they don’t like. What do people think?
I would make an arabia only queue and another queue with your proposal but without any bans.
Yeah, but if you have a queue with no bans, people could play any map. It could work though, if you had a 1-5 star rating for each map, and it picked the highest rated.
Actually we need more. If Arabia stays as restrictive as it is now we need a versatile old arabia replacement that allows all strategies to be viable to some extend,
We also would need an Arena only queue most likely.
The star sysstem I dont particularly like. Would be pretty messy.
Ara only queue could be good but there should also be one for arena or closed maps more generally. Because playing ara a lot in ranked is already possible while this isn’t really the case for closed maps. If you ban ara and favor arena half of your games end up on haboob or whatever map there is left in respective pool.
Other possibilities would be the indefinite map pools that you mentioned which means redesigning mm because matches are found based on map pref. Not sure how much work this would be for devs or how long queue times gonna be.
Also ranked lobbies can be a solution. Maybe with some restrictions concerning only allow conquest victory and standard pop limit but idk.
The simplest solution though would be getting rid of map bans. People defend current ranked mode by arguments about map diversity. But if your opponent bans the map you like and the other way around this neither is competitive or fair. Fairness and diverse map imo means giving everbody the chance to play their fav maps but still being open to play other ones.
In the end no matter which if these listed above are implemented all of them are better than current one.
An ELO reset of some sort for TG would be useful as they changed the system but we can’t know if it worked since people who already were 3k elo kept it and could then abuse the system in new ways to rise up even more.