Please let map votes carry over between cycles

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

So first of all, again, I do like that we vote for maps.

The current map selection mechanism has a few flaws though:

  1. When I vote on a map and it gets 30% of the votes but some other maps get 40% of the votes and so only those maps get played, it feels like my vote was wasted. Which feels bad.
  2. tactical voting
  3. some map types never make it through the selection-by-voting. I’m mainly noticing the water maps and veryRandom maps, and also nomad maps. These aren’t extremely unpopular maps. As it currently stands, megarandom has 33%, and last cycle land nomad got 34%. (Last cycle there was no water map, and this cycle the water map is team islands…) Compare that with the winning maps which got 37-43%. People who like these maps are a minority, but not a tiny minority. It seems a bit sad that their votes have no effect whatsoever.
  4. the devs have to make a selection before we can vote. There’s usually at most one veryRandom map, at most 1 water map, at most 1 nomad map. So players who want one of these map-types don’t get very much input. Only in cases like in the current cycle where team islands was selected and a lot of players are like “it may be a water map, but its still potato”. Also I think the only veryRandom map they’ve selected so far is MegaRandom.

I think it would be nice if votes would carry over between voting rounds. IE if at the end of the current vote the votes are distributed as
A-130
B-120
C-100
D-80
E-60
F-50
G-20
then at the start of the next vote the maps would start with a number of votes, distributed as
A-30
B-20
C-0
D-80
E-60
F-50
G-20
So it’d be very likely for map D to make it into the next map pool.

Of course this wouldn’t solve all problems. The size of mappool available for voting would have to be increased. The threshold for getting into the mappool would be expected to rise gradually. Arabia & co would still have fixed spots.
Those challenges aside, I think it’d be an improvement.
If the current voting is anything to go by, we’d have water, random & nomad maps in the pool about 33-50% of the time. (Unless the mappool size is increased, which I think would also be a good idea.)

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