I have play many AOE2 games online. The developers push three maps. Arabia, Arena and black forest. There isnt any other maps that come up. Maybe once ina while they will toss in a Bucharest. There is a Wolf Hill. Did you know that? Of course you didnt because the develpoers dont go past the letter B. over and over and over the same predicatable and meta maps. Arabia…scout rush. Arena…Fast imperial… Black forest…wall wars and fast imperial. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Snooze fest. Oh but dont worry we will let you vote on the maps you want. We will give you the same 6 over and over and over again. Month after month after month. Of those 6 three wil be in rotation. I propose the dev stop favoring map. BAN ARABIA ARENA and BLACK FOREST for 6 month minimum. New landsapes. Wolf hill has like 20 relics in it. Might be fun to try it out. But all we get is maps that let players without imagination play the meta. ^ on sheep, 4 on weood…3rd houszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
you want to know why the developers choose those maps more often then not? because they are very popular among the community and would be voted in pretty much non stop if they didn’t put them as mandatory.
this way people can vote for other maps. as for the variety of the other maps - from what i’ve seen if a map doesn’t get voted in much they tend to not put that one in for votes much because it’s pretty much a waste.
I would like to see devs adding challenges like:
“Play 20 ranked games with no maps banned.”
But allow to ban as many maps as you want (you probably will have to wait a long time then ofc).
Banning the most popular maps which have endured in popularity for over 20 years would be career suicide for the game.
I think one problem with non-meta maps is also that some tend to heavily favour one particular civ, so you’ll end up with either many mirror matches or max 5 playable civs only, since Randoming and getting a bad civ there just feels like you should resign from the start.
Arabia, Arena, Black Forest at least have a ton of civs that are viable, and certain S-tier civs on Arabia will not be the same for Arena or Black Forest.
it used to be better
then they dumbed down the game and let people choose whether they spawn in front or back and also let people change their civs after seeing the map, so even normal maps like arabia have become 1-dimensional garbage. games end 10 minutes with the same ultrafast feudal age rushes and blind spam of archers + cavalry. no need to scout. no need to plan or strategize. no time to research cartography.
it used to be that only fake maps like arena had these uncounterable cheese strategies, but the position-pick + civ-pick settings combined with power-creep let people do that for every map. it’s not the players fault for lacking imagination when the games are ending before people can even make anything interesting
I feel like the Voobly thing of insisting everyone goes Random civ before starting the game was actually good for the variety, I kind of miss that. Aside from actually being able to choose which maps i want to play, that’s probably one of the only things I miss about Voobly though.
Enforcing random civ in the ranked queue would make me stop playing the game immediately, because it takes away the opportunity to practice one civ at a time.
But it will never happen anyway, simply for financial reasons: What’s the point of selling DLCs with new civs if the players’ probability of actually getting the civ is around 1 in 50? 
And you can’t practice in an unranked lobby or skirmish against the AI…why?
Playing civ pick only makes people want to quit too. Tired of mirrors, spanish/persian nomad, turk/cuman/khmer arena, briton/mayan flanks, franks pocket. Italians, vikings, byza, portuguese on water/hybrid maps etc.
Whats going to give you more practice? The ai? Or against opponents your own skill level? Now how easy is it to get opponents your own level with consistency in lobby?
For every 1 player who wants to “practice one civ” there are 100 civ picker players who either just play 1 civ like Hoang or cycle through the same few civs with the same strategy.
The only thing you can reasonably practice vs the AI are build orders up to hitting feudal. But that’s the easy part.
First of all, this is a massive exaggaration. But even if it was true: what is the problem, if that’s how they like to play the game?
According to your own statements, you’d prefer to always decide precisely which map you’re going to play, yet you wish to take away the civ decision from the opponent? That doesn’t make much sense to be honest.
I do understand these sentiments. I suppose it matters a bit how much you play. People who played 10000 games in the past 20 years may share your viewpoint, others may not.
I haven’t encountered a feeling of staleness yet, but I’m not playing every single day.
I think we can safely avoid this thread going forward. Op didnt want to have a discussion, just a rant. Hasnt even been on since posting.
To be fair i think what he ment was that yes he could pick civs for strats, but the statement stays that you can do this vs ai
There is no real reason to get rid of civ picking honestly bc imo the skill lays in playing every civ in one or another way be it generic or creative
Also im not sure but it feels like we stray of topic
I don’t really mind civ picking in 1v1, it’s more team games where I think would benefit from more Random civ. It also feels like team game players are more likely to civ pick than 1v1 players, based on the pre-game chats. But I would much rather allow civ picking + infinite map bans than random civ + limited map bans.
Not agreeing with this part. for example landnomade got voted in teamgames all the time but you can vote for it only like every 3 months. Some maps barely get love even tho they are pretty popular.
but yeah arena and arabia should always be in the mappool. Not sure about black forest tho. I don’t mind playing this map but people dodge it a lot…so not sure if it’s more popular than other maps
From whst I’ve seen land nomad routinely lost votes when it was up. The two nomads that won most often were regular and African clearing
I don’t know about solo…but in teamgames it was even most of the time first place. Nomade is popular i think but not sure about african clearing…they were never both at the same time in the voting to beginw ith.
I voted pretty much every time in the past 2 years and i’ve never seen that landnomade didn’t get voted in.
and african clearing isn’t often in the map pool as well btw. THis time yeah…but it’s usually also only like every 5th rotation…maybe even less.
I stopped for lack of variety in playable MAPs. the dev choices are always the same, the winning votes are always the same. The game quickly becomes boring except for ultra beginners under 400 élo.
Remember that the ranked is there to train in order to win competitions (even if some forget it!). So yes, only playing one map, one civ, one strat is counterproductive and leads average players to quit the game (I’m not talking about average players pick civ, pick map because in tournaments they get demolished)
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Fan MAPs played and tested in tournaments should automatically be included in MAP rotations (like in StarCraft or Ark)
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MAPs that have been played in 1V1 OR TG in the last three rotations SHOULD NOT come back in the votes OR in the developers’ choices
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Having stable maps is good, having a stable map rotation is better (Arabia could be in rotation with RuneStone, Arena with Fortress, …)
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Ranked MAPs should only be voted by ranked players
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Unranked rotation (rotation, rules and votes) shouldn’t be the same as ranked rotation
