Hidden Cup 4 is likely the most anticipated Age of Empires Tournament in a decade. Most E-Sport games have some in-game reference or connection to big tournaments but AoE:DE does not have anything yet.
Hidden Cup 4 features 10 competitive 1v1 maps (+ Arabia). It would be great to get those in the 1v1 mappool during the Hidden Cup 4 Event.
Arabia + Arena could stay up as usual while the 5 rotating maps could be replaced with HC4 maps.
I think this would be a great step to help AoE2:DE become a more established E-Sport title.
I like the HC4 maps a lot, too. I agree it would be great to have them in the regular mappool, though I do think they need to be tweaked a bit to make them more random. I can see why in a large tournament with money on the line, you would want to e.g. always have a group of deer of fixed size spawn at a fixed location and fixed distance from all Town Centers, but in a random map, I think it would be more enjoyable if the different map generations would be more distinct, and each game you would actually need to scout what this particular generation has given you. The general idea of the map should be kept, though.
The devs did this before, as Golden Swamp seems to be inspired on the Hidden Cup map Cup. I like that Golden Swamp has random starting positions (as opposed to Cup, where players always start at fixed positions) and some extra random features too, but personally I would have liked if Golden Swamp kept the Cup feature of there being two lakes instead of one. The mere fact that it features one lake makes Golden Swamp much more of a water map than Cup, and so the identity of Cup was, in my opinion, changed too much.
This is a great idea. Even just adding 1-2 maps from the event would be great publicity (and make an announcement saying ‘we added 2 maps from this tournament that’s running on twitch’).
Not only for HC4 but for all other major tournaments
I my opinion, it’s always better when considering any change in the game, to do it in regard to the majority of occasional players. The priority of the devs shouldn’t be on high elo or pro players but on the average player, and that’s how it is so far and should remain this way. Hidden cup is a big event for people following AOE2 news, but it’s not the case of most players.
They’d have to release a patch with the map scripts inserted into the game files to do something like that. Suffice to say, this was not going to happen on short notice. That could have been done with multiple weeks of heads-up, and the map scripters, testers, and casters wanted to keep this map information under wraps until the event started.
Also, we certainly don’t know if the maps are reasonably balanced, and inserting them into the map pool is going to make things odd for a bit. I’m not particularly worried about that side effect but it’s worth noting.
