I’m sorry, but playing Yucatan AKA Arena, or Scandinavia, AKA a map where civ pick does 80% of the win, is not very fun or engaging. Similarly, in TGs playing Michi might be fun for 800 elo players because Feudal aggression scares them and fighting before 200 pop is unacceptable, but higher elo players would rather avoid a snooze fest where only 1 strat is viable.
Low elo players don’t understand the intricacies of the game, and what makes certain maps have a variety of strats or 1 dominant strat, so they should not get to vote.
I am sorry if this doesn’t sound very democratic, but inherent in democracy is the responsibility to get an informed opinion, low elo players just wanna boom and their idea of fun is 200 pop vs 200 pop Imp slog fest behind fortified stone walls, and I for one think the game should be a bit more complex than that.
In last week’s vote, there were so many maps for RM that could have been voted and are both fun to play and offer a WIDE pool of civs that can win on the map. For example, Lowland, or Haboob. These are maps that allow both for heavy Feudal/Castle all-ins and (in lower elos and to a lesser degree), walling strats. At the same time, wood being in the middle offers a nice change of pacing in the sense that now wood is a strategic resource from which you don’t wanna be pushed off, but even so, if you get tower rushed, you can rely on the wood on the sides. This makes the map interesting to play and the number of strats you can adopt high. Scouting, thinking about a strat and making the appropriate army becomes key, something which I know low elo players hate.
Only mid/high elo players should have voting power.
People want to have fun.
Those who doesnt know that others have fun in their own ways, which can deviate from the first group perspective, shouldnt have the right to express their opinion. Thefore, you dont have any right to say anything. Not that democratic, right? But you yourself doent care about that, right? ¯\(ツ)/¯
Maybe you should spend your time banning the maps you dont want to play instead of writing long, non-sense, texts.
I would say, inherent in the concept of “democracy” is the obligation to inform yourself, if you want the right to vote.
Yes, this game has objectively more fun maps. If you choose a map like Arena or Yucatan, that map might be fun to a measurably smaller subset of the playerbase, hence it should not be the ever-present map. Likewise, Yucatan is a map where full walls FC and boom is the meta, to an 800 elo player that might be fun, but this game is supposed to be played with Feudal armies, with a variety of units… to an 800 elo player bypassing the whole concept of “strategy” might sound appealing, but this is a STRATEGY game in the end, not a “do 1 thing over and over” game, if 800 elo players struggle on the more open maps, maybe a game like Tetris is more suitable for them.
You missed the whole point of playing something.
Anyway, 1500+ is 8,2% of 1v1 Ranked RM community. So they are kinda of irrelevant. Obviously if WE will have to get someone angry, that group will be those small “elite” players, not the big chunk of the playerbase. And >>MID<< ELO is 1k, not 1500, that’s why everyone starts on 1k.
Also, why 1500+? To 2k players, 1500 are low ELO. To 2500, 2k are low ELO. There was even a video on youtube some years ago, when Viper was 2400, if my memory isnt failing me, and someone asked him the difference between him and a 2k player. His answer: everything.
Why, by the notion that “the needs of the many are more important than the needs of the few”?
Let me give you a couple of counter-arguments:
people at the bottom of some mechanism might not always be aware of WHY some things are the way they are. So if you are at the bottom, humility, and respecting more senior people is (generally) always key. You don’t just enter a new group, and say, we should buy a new table, and we should do things this way. This is the same concept. Low elo players should be focused on getting experience (for example by learning how Feudal Age is played), not forcing others to play the game their way. You can apply this concept to nearly any group of people: corporations, sports groups, etc. The newcomers rarely if ever get to speak and do things their way.
aside from the argument of "learning a broader version of the game, which I already gave you, we have:
many games have been ruined by this flawed concepf of “democracy”. On paper, yes, humanely it’s tempting to say “everyone has a say”. However, not all opinions are equal, and mix too many dumb opinions into the pot, and you get a rancid soup. This is not just abstract talk btw, I can give concrete examples from both IRL and other games. Let’s stick to games, there is a game called Overwatch, where they catered to a particularly casual portion of the playerbase. This game was “the game that moms & dads booted to blow off steam after work”, and had an emphasis on being casual and for everyone. By introducing too many low-skill heroes and mechanics, they scared ALL the elite e-gamers away (all CSGO pros for example made and still make fun of this game), and had their league fail. The game was fun to play the first 30 hours or so, but at high level, extremely depressing to play (and watch) due to the amount of “I win” and low-skill mechanics. Why were such mechanics in the game? Because their goal was to keep their casual player base hooked.
That game is now dead, with a VERY small residual playerbase, because… [big news flash] casuals are also the first to jump the sinking ship.
If we wanna do the same mistake with AoE2, that’s fine. But I will be the “I told you so” guy.
I am 1700 myself, and the 1500 threshold was somewhat arbitrary, and not something I will defend. For all I care, it can be higher, and I won’t get to vote. For me, it’s important that voting starts from an elo where a player knows EVERYTHING about the game at a basic level (when to 3 TC boom, how to tower rush, how to play hybrid maps, how to play cavalry civs, how to play archers, how to wall, etc.). I reckon that elo is 1500, but if you think it’s higher, that’s fine. I am not up to debate numbers, just wanted to deliver a general principle.
I don’t think it makes senso to remove a right to the majority of people just for the subjective opinion of the elite.
We should try to make everyone comfortable with the multiplayer game at every level instead!
As I already propose, it make sense to split the vote into elo ranges, so that e.g. 800- elo could get their map pool with more closed maps, while 800-1200, 1200-1600, and 1600+ could get more appropriate map pools.
Voting could be made only by players with an ELO score, while others could vote only for a Quick Play map pool.
This way you could have right maps without anyone losing their rights.
You are not senior to someone because you beat them at a video game and they are not any less of a video game enjoyer or player than you because you beat them at said game. If anything, it makes you a poor ‘good’ player for not being able to cope with maps you don’t like.
The goal isn’t to make you happy, the goal is to get as many as possible to enjoy the game.
The way that players at different elos enjoy the game aren’t necessarily transferable, and not liking how lower level players play doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the ability to play the maps they want. Sure, I might not want those maps either, but if the map pool means more people will enjoy it, I think that’s a good thing as it helps keep the ladder alive properly and grow the game. I do think that only active players should be able to vote though.
As a 2k player I completely disagree. However, only people that play the ladder should vote for the ladder - goes without saying. Don’t have a ranking? You cannot vote. Want to vote? Play the ladder.
Instead you could say mid/high elo players should have a different map pool and each elo bracket votes for their own map pool. How will lower elos switch between michi, amazon tunnel and oasis every 2 weeks if they lose voting power?
I also hate this a lot but this is a balance problem. Mongol hunt benefit should scale down non-linearly to reduce their power in such maps.
You seem a bit of a troll so I will put the dots on the i’s and j’s for you: it’s OK to FC, but it’s not OK when FC comes risk-free (like other strats). The game is supposed to be about decision-making and trade-offs. If you fight with a 200 pop army in Imp, that’s not decision making, as there are clearly auto-win and auto-lose civs.