It’s pretty much the fairest map out there. But yes, even Arena will have minor variations. Otherwise you’d just have to draw a completely fair map by hand. Not sure how many people would find it interesting. So this is why Arabia should be restored to voobly version, removing the variables of the Arabia map just makes it dumber and dumber, so for people who want fair maps… just dont play Arabia.
Yea, honestly who asked for this? This is now the most horrible map I am inclined to ban it when I play ranked games.
Was it? Was it really?
Arabia to me was most known for being an open land map. As such an aggressive map. But also the most balanced map. Especially DE has very much pushed for all civs to be at least tolerable on Arabia. Sure it is still a map where early eco bonuses are the king and the slower civs have and always will struggle to keep up, but everything is perfectly playable.
Arabia also has the special clause of being the map that seems to be the standard first map for every professional tournament set. So it has the most pressure to give the most balanced generations since it is seen in basically every professional set.
I am not exactly sure does your argument follow from your premise. More randomness does not equal a more developed meta. Consistency allows people to polish their strategies, perfect their timings and find ways to squeeze water out of the stone with just the tiniest of improvements. Moreover it allows for players to test their strategies far better to find vulnerabilities in the existing meta. And that is exactly meta developing.
It also simply worth noting the professional play is now of higher level than it used to be. So what used to be setback from the map generation you could still try to make work can now sometimes be an unsalvageable situation. The fundamentals are better and now people at the very top can really stretch that inch a mile.
I think conflating ranked Arabia and Tournaments is not useful. Tournaments tend to come with their own designs & map scripts, even for Arabia. So if some specific objective needs to be met for Tournaments, that’s already possible, irrespective of the status of a map in ranked.
It just means as soon as a pro player publishes something on youtube, everyone and their mother copies it without putting any of their own thought into it. That’s my experience anyhow.
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Okay that… admittedly is very true. However, I would imagine that the ranked Arabia wanted would be the one that most resembles the one used for professional games. Ranked is still a competitive environment that fundamentally faces many of the same challenges of making sure it is the better player who wins.
There is truth to that after new patches and such when people are trying to figure things out in the new landscape and abuse the new op things.
Outside of that however, it often doesn’t work out like that. One can try to copy some early Castle age Xbow pressure timing. But if they aren’t good enough to try to dance around mangonel shots while still managing their eco. They’re not gonna get far. Lot of the ways the meta develops tend to be strategies that come into existence because they top players are now skilled enough to make it work consistently.
I agree with you. That’s why for pros almost any variety of Arabia in DE has been acceptable. They “grew up” on a more “harsh” and varied Arabia. So even if maps are consistently bad, pros are fine with it, they’ve already “seen it all”.
Well, I think the other problem is that there has been way too much tweaking around and rebalancing, and imho the number of viable civs and strategies compared to late voobly era has fallen drastically.
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