In the end we need a good system that is fun for as many players as possible. Fun is pretty much subjective, but i tried to come up with some statements to which almost everyone would agree:
- Get into a game quickly.
- Get into a balance game.
- Play with the settings you prefer.
- It needs to fit as many players as possible.
Point 1 and 2 are pretty much done by using some kind of match making system. Match making makes is much more easy to get into a game compared to a lobby. Before DE i have played at Voobly. Getting into a game was much harder. Lobbies much be filled, sometimes the host went AFK. I always felt people were lurking into the lobby room, instead of making their own lobbies to get into the game. Match making pretty much improve the rate at which you can get into a game.
A rating system will make sure that games in match making are balanced. A good rating system will lead to balanced games. I feel like ratings at DE (1v1) are as accurate as Voobly. At voobly there was a pretty big gap between communities that just play one map only (for most of the time). At DE this seems to be much less an issue. Ofc the rating system at DE can be improved. Currently the TG ratings are bugged:
Also players will have better at which they preform better compared to other maps. Black forest plays different compared to Arabia, which also plays different then Four Lakes. If we really want it, we could expand the current ratings. Currently we have just 1 RM 1v1 rating. Just change this to some ratings:
- Overall rating
- Open land map rating
- Closed land map rating
- Hybrid map rating
- Pure water map rating
This will result in much more accurate ratings. Also Elo itself is pretty old. Microsoft already developped TrueSkill rating. Glicko is another kind of rating. Both are much better suited for TGs as well as far as a know. Moving on to such system could also improve the match making system so we get even more balanced games. Note: I am not saying that things need to change, but if someone says that we need to get rid of preferred map choices, because ratings are distorts, then changing the ratings calcultion seems to be a much better approach.
The hardest thing for a match making system is to give people the freedom so they can pick whatever settings they want to play vs the match making system to still function well. Some people love to play the same map over and over again. Other players love diverse maps. Both are part of the same match making system and the match making system has to deal with all preferences.
Currently you can already play every map in the map pool in ranked. Deleting the preferred map choice wont really improve anything. For those who like playing different maps, things wont really change. For those who like to play just 1 map, they wont like the change and will even more Alt + F4 to get their preferred map. I really see no benefits for deleting the prefer map choice from the game. I think it is a good thing for the game.