Playing unregular maps requires learning a different meta…
Mediterranean can easily get into a stalemate, causing the game to last very long. The others seem fine to me.
Then play with different people, shouldn’t be a problem with matchmaking.
Well, there was still Voobly.
Matchmaking has 8 maps, of which you can ban three.
Should be plenty of map variety.
Do you think it’s reasonable for devs to change the game for your preferences that much?
That would mean they sacrifice the experience for a larger number of people, causing more people to feel the dissapointment that you now feel…
I hope other games are able to make you happy. Or even better, you go have a family and not play games at all!
Add Forest Nothing, CBA, Sheep soccer, Jurassic park, and Lord of the Rings in the pool then. They will add plenty of map variety and require lots of different metas.
Still much better then Arena, Nomad, Steppe, Black forest.
You simply can’t play boats.
People only play one map. (Arabia/Nomad/Green Arabia)
I have to wait for hours to play some different maps, with the same players.
Basically you can only see other regular maps in the tournaments.
Very disappointing.
Only 2 are regular.
So it is reasonable to directly kill the fanbase preferring previous map pool?
I don’t think I am the only one who like old map pool more.
The ranked maps should be picked by the standard of balance and diversity to reflect the essence of the game, not simply by the people’s preference. Or the devs can just put Green Arabia in the pool with 300 pop and fastest speed.
This game had a chance to go further, but sadly the short sighted people brought it back to the dead end again…
I can only ban 3 maps on 1v1 but when i switch to 2v2 or more players I can only ban 1 map. Is this a bug? Id really like to ban at least nomad and islands as im a newer player and those maps are a different play style than the traditional game play im trying to learn.
It’s not a bug. Hopefully it’s a test or a quick-implementation. It’s very odd to have map bans take place before you are matched up. The most efficient way to get games going would be to match people up and then do bans, not have a system attempting to sort through every players map bans prior to matching them up.
What I do for 1v1s is ban arena, black forest and nomad. I figure that most sane people will ban team islands, so I dont ban it, relying on the fact that most everyone else is likely already banning it. So then I’m left with Arabia, Gold Rush, Steppe, and Megarandom. Megarandom is a joke obviously and should’ve never been included in ranked, but you have better than 50 50 odds of it not being a terrible map also, so I usually just play it. Once in a great while Team Islands does come up, then I just quit the game immediately and go back to the que. I believe this is your best shot at having a ‘normal’ aoe2 game, as a beginner or anyone else, and you shouldn’t have to deal with water or other ‘stuff’ messing up your build orders and enjoyment.
For team games, you are basically screwed and its unplayable as far as I can tell (non ranked there is no skill balancing and ranked is forcing unfun maps), just play on voobly or HD instead.
I’m not saying Nomad should be in ranked, just that two of your complaints sound contradictory to me.
The problem with water in mediterranean is the boats can’t reach anything important because there’s wood all around the water.
Apparently not to other players. I guess this is a complaint to them, not the developers?
At least with matchmaking is a huge improvement, or not?
I’ve seen Arabia, Gold Rush, Team Islands and Arena in tournaments and Steppe seems pretty standard to me. Have you tried Mega Random to see what you get there?
Considering your complaints about what other people - choose - to play and how much input the developers get, I’m betting that the developers have a better idea of what people want to play than you.
Even after realizing your preferences are very different from the vast majority of people, you remain narcistic.
It has to do with the terribly smal amount of possible maps that you could get.
They want to gurantee that there’s always a map that can be played.
Ideally they’d allow each team to ban the amount of maps in every game.
But currently each player chooses to ban maps.
So if in a 2v2 game each player could ban 2 maps, the total would be 8.
It seems a design goal was to fit all map types on the screen without scrolling…
If you call replacing almost all the regular maps with meme maps a huge improvement.
Been played in tournaments doesn’t mean it must be regular.
If you can accept tournament maps, fine then.
Put all tournament maps in the pool then I don’t mind playing these meme maps occasionally.
I want Archipelago, Baltic, Scandinavia, Highland, Mediterranean…
Just put all of them in the pool.
Let me teach you a better way.
Remove all the maps except Green Arabia with 300 pop and fastest speed. People will love it.
I have never seen any ranked map pool of any RTS game dominated by the meme maps like this. And the people who want to play something standard are called narcissistic? What a joke!
The meme maps become mainstream because this game has never had a ranked match system before. Image if Starcraft has no ranked match, the people will still play those crude money maps competitively!
I don’t mind playing some nomad, arena or blackforest, if the map pool will be rotated periodically and the meme maps just occupy a small part of it. I have already played tons of them in the HD after all.
But for now this cancerous map pool is simply not worth wasting my time.
The main problem with map pool is that you cannot make everyone happy. That’s a fact. I juste hope we will get map rotation (because playing the same 8 maps forever could be boring) without adding some extra ‘wtf-map’. Just make some map permanent (probably ariabia/arena and normad) and go with a rotation to discover new way to play.
For people enjoying only one map (like arabia), it’s sad for you. You miss a lot of other aspect of the game and you won’t encounter many civ of the game because they’re bad on certain circumstances… and you should probably go for unranked (when they will show ranked elo on lobby).
They should allow to select your favorite map(+ actual ban system). If all player selected the same favorite map, it’ll automatically go on this map. Otherwise, it’s a random map on the non-ban pool. For all the 1 map lover (i’m looking at you arabia 1v1 lover), it’ll increase the probability to get this specific map, for others it won’t change anything i guess. (and for team game, i agree that it won’t change a lot except maybe in premade vs premade).
Also when you go for 2v2+ and you invite some friends, they should be able to ban a map. Or the leader ban for them. IDK but it’s very annoying when you tag 3v3 and your team get only one ban…
Actually every person I’ve played so far where the topic has come up, has said that the map pool on release was way better. So the statistics gathered from this forum may not be accurate. Try it yourself, ask your opponent what they think about the map pool, and don’t phrase the question in a leading way just simply ask ‘so what do you think about the current map pool’? I have yet to play a person that is happy they got forced into playing ‘mega random’, although to be fair usually the topic of maps comes up when someone starts complaining about the map. The last time it came up, we both had hardly any gold and a lot of stone piles, and he basically lost because there was no way for either of us to get gold with minimal relics (megarandom map with lots of stone piles and almost no gold ), and I had Malay so I used forced levy. Is that really fair/fun?
One fix I found is to add the opponent I am matched with as a friend on steam, and then we can play as many games of Arabia as we want in unranked.
I like the new map pool tbh. i would just make BF a team game only map, replace steppe and revert the changes made to the nomad map generation. I like arabia, arena, team islands, gold rush (although i prefer golden pit), and I still have 3 bans for maps that I don’t feel like playing.
Game breaking issues were completely overshadowing the complaints about map pool, so you might have a perception that people prefer the old pool. Also people who tend to complain are much more likely to voice their opinion on it than those who are OK with the map pool.
I can guarantee the competitive community, (which ranked matchmaking is made for) greatly prefers the new pool over playing maps like ghost lake, mongolia, highland and scandinavia.
The new pool is great, but it still wouldn’t hurt rotating a few maps (mediterranian for team islands, acropolis for gold rush, etc)
Allow players unlimited bans, with a pop up warning message “are you sure you want to exceed the recommended ban limit of 3? Longer que times may result”.
As it is now, people simply quit games on maps they don’t want to play vs, even though both players might have been ok with Arabia for example. I just played a game where the worst map I’ve ever seen was generated on Megarandom (a massive forest with a single file one unit width corridor to get to the other player), and we both wished we had been able to play each other on Arabia.
I think this would be a simple, easy way to solve all of the issues discussed in this thread. Thoughts?