Come on though, who doesn’t know all the regularly voted maps by now? We could at least have 16-20 maps per rotation if we can’t have all the maps. More maps means quicker matchmaking no matter which way you look at it.
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I don’t, provided I define “know” as “has played at least five games on the map”.
Take this rotation: Water nomad? Never played before this rotation. Cenotes? Never played. Acropolis? Only once. Besides, your proposition did originally not just refer to the “regularly voted maps” but rather to all maps, which includes all these weird options.
I don’t see why this should be the case. Speed of matchmaking is independent of the size of the map pool, unless we assume that larger map pools make more players wanting to play in general (which I doubt).
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Matchmaking matches by ELO first yes, but more maps and more bans would mean more players would get the maps they actually want to play. Whereas now you often get maps which neither player wants to play. E.g. Arabia player who bans fast castle prison maps or water maps vs. someone who bans open maps like Arabia, so the algorithm defaults to both players’ non-favourite backup map.
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Those maps have been around for a while, most players have seen them. Acropolis has definitely been on the rotation loads of times. Cenotes is similar to Arabia; nothing crazy or special to learn. Most half decent players who are not complete noobs will study the game at least a little bit outside of playing. So looking at maps should be part of the learning process. All the info is available online.
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But what you describe will also happen if you increase the size of the map pool while simultaneously increase the number of bans. Whether you have 3 open, 2 closed, 2 hybrid/water maps and 3 bans or 6 open, 4 closed, 4 hybrid/water maps and 6 bans… it doesn’t change anything.
Just to reiterate: The purpose of the suggestions in this thread aim to establish a few more maps than just Arabia/Arena as kind of default with permanent or near-to permanent availability, which in my opinion, would be a good thing for the game.
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More permanent maps would mean we need more bans. Otherwise all our bans could be wasted on permanent maps.
Cenotes was actually first introduced with the “the forgotten” expension when it was still a mod for the original game.
It was actually seen as the potential next competitive map that could dethrone Arabia.
At the time Arabia had 3 issues that were seen as unpopular.
- cliffs (and their random, sometimes unfair distribution around the map)
- the oasis (small puddles of water with some trees around) → those were oftentimes tricky to wall and sometimes units found a way into the base even though you thought you were walled.
- the colour → some people didn’t like the desert colours and played on a green version (which is not the be confused with “green Arabia” which was a popular user version with more wood)
Cenotes had a very similar mapscript but got rid of those issues. → pretty and easily wallable “cenotes” instead of oasis , no cliffs, an a pleasent green colour.
Now, the playerbase still sticked to Arabia and instead of switching to cenotes those same adjustments got made to the Arabia map.
In fact, I would say that today’s mapscript of “Arabia” has more in common with the original mapscript of “Cenotes” then with the old school original Arabia map from AoC…
However, I don’t really like the DE changes to cenotes either. I think they wanted to make it more similar to “green Arabia” but the woodpatches spawnpoints are sometimes really weird and block of resources…
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