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I am not a fan of these maps but they are fine.
Remove all the pre-walled, explored, nomad maps and all maps with inconsistent start condition from the regular pool. Only keep the maps with standard start condition: 1 TC + 1 scout + 3 villigers + civ bonus. Put maps of different game settings in one pool is a big huge mistake, whether these maps are popular or not. Seriously why the hell the devs think it would be a good idea? It makes the rank mode like a joke and only makes the new players who just finished Art of War tutorial confused. No rank pool of any other RTS is like this!
Nomad should be an individual rank mode like Death match with a map pool and special rules (e.g. treaty) of its own. The maps can be Nomad, Mountan pass, Nile delta, Steppe, and Water nomad.
I suggest add an Empire Wars rank mode with a map pool of its own. Then you can put explored map like Blackforest, pre-walled maps likes Arena, Hillfort, Fortress, and maps with extra default buildings like Budapest, Bog forest, Ravine in this map pool.
(So there will be 4 rank mode: Regular, Nomad, Empire Wars, and Deathmatch.)
Remove map ban or make map ban not 100% block maps. And please take action to stop the map dodgers!
3-5 default maps for competitive ranked, maybe give players 1 ban.
Then the goofy map enthusiasts can ♥♥♥♥ off to custom games
9 maps for a rank pool is totally fine for a competitive RTS.
And 4 ranked modes is totally fine too, because the devs (or their friends) insist to involve these nomad and other irregular maps into ranked game. Of course if I can make the decision, I would simply kick all these explored, nomad, pre-walled, and inconsistent start condition maps out of rankd mode, instead of mixing all the map of different rules and settings together to make the pool a stinky messy crap manure pit.
And the reason why we should play water maps we are not familiar with is because naval units and civs are important part of this game. And a good rank pool has to reflect all the aspects of the game designs whether we like them or not, or the pool is biased! Of cource we can discuss how to make water maps more fun or more balanced but this is another matter!
It would be nice if they includes some more of the tournament maps.
PS: I miss islands...
In this game, you have arabia as the standard map. And maps that adhere to the same design principles, not really any. Like sort of golden pit, but its not an open map. Obviously not megarandom, arena, mountain pass, Hill fort, or Bog Islands.
Like if you want to play a closed land map, you have options. If you wanna play just some super weird map, you have options. If you want to play an open land map, where 80% of the games took place when people could choose what map they play on, you have 1/9th of the map pool. 2/9th when serengeti was in the pool.
That's absolutely ridiculous. Honestly, just replace all these maps with arabia or arabia clones. We can have arena because its popular, maybe 1 more closed land map like golden pit, a water map, and then a map land madness that's more open than arabia. Then, if you wanna play arabia, you just ban all those maps.
But actually there should be either a map favoriting system or an arabia only queue, because none of the other maps in the game are designed to play on for months. They get boring, and half of them suck from the start.
Its not like you can't ban out navy anyways. There's 1 map with water. You can' ban out closed land maps, cause there's like 3 of them every rotation and if you spend a ban on any of the weird maps you're just out.
2) Make the pool 8 maps per season instead of 9.
3) Give people 1 more map ban choice (for both 1v1 and Team games).
This change alone would help a lot!
Personally im not a good player, Im still relatively new. But what im looking for is consistency to develop my gameplay, and I find it hard to develop when its different maps every game.
The random map generation system on its own is hard enough to get used to for a MOBA player like me, and that paired up with this insane map pool its just too much to take it serious.
Some of the map generations are also just out right unfair in its generation sometimes. I was playing hill fort and my opponent got 3 tiles on his side whilst I only got 2 like wtf?
Not to mention it would be boring to watch some pro players playing Arabia 24/7 and then forcing the others to play Arabia too because of the queue time.
But I agree they should choose better maps to the pool, maps that are a bit more consistent (like for example better wood lines). Some maps need better "map design" tbh.
Why though? Tell me why I should bother to LEARN to have fun on water maps. Seems weird to me. Just let me play something that I already find interesting by default?
And I believe that que times are already very long for the top players for the sole reason that the map pool is too split and that different players perma ban the same maps every game. So there is essentially already different map ques.
Imo the ideal situation is they develop an actually good map pool and add in a sort of map favorite system. That way probably what happens is between 2 players and 9 maps, 4 are banned (not like 6 because if the map pool is actually good they may not feel the need to use all 4 bans), and between the 5 remaining both players have arabia favorite. That adds like 1 extra chance of arabia for both, so there's a 3/7 chance of arabia and a 4/7 chance of some other map. If they end up with a really bad map pool, there might be 5-6 maps banned between both players and they can play arabia over half the time.
But with the map pools we have currently, what are players even learning? There is no hybrid map, and there's 1 weird water map. Closed land maps teach you nothing except how to boom (something you could learn on Arabia anyways). Arabia only would teach people more.
Like if we look at the top players, several of them played only 1 map for years. Mbl and Hera at least both were arabia only players, viper played land nomad for a long period of time, I think its obvious that playing 10 different maps and learning nothing from all of them is not the best way for players to learn the game.
It probably helps a player like Hera who was already a top player and just needed a bit more experience on water maps. That describes maybe like 4-5 players total. Nobody else needs to learn these maps in the first place. We're not playing tournaments, who gives a ♥♥♥♥ if we can play hybrid maps, especially when 99.9% of us can't play Arabia properly.
Like personally I like aggressive land maps. And if aoe 2 can't give that to me because it wants me to play 4 closed land maps, 2 water maps, nomad, and megarandom, I can and will just go back to playing starcraft. If I really valued being good at games, I'm better at starcraft than aoe 2 anyways.
Who wants to play the map on which he has more fun goes to Unraked. Aoe II is already too robotic (Build Orders if you want to have any chance for example), we will not encourage to make it even more robotic.
The only problem is that the maps do not have the same starting conditions for everyone. Or, not having a counterpart for those who have had bad start conditions, or else a player from each team starts in a bad position and one in a good position.
Sounds like a great idea, it remains to be known if there are enough players for 4 different ranked modes. "Regular" looks much more concrete, more inclusive and better theorized than a "Ranked Arabia".
When you watch an rts tournament, they don't play game 1 in starcraft, game 2 warcraft, game 3 is aoe 2, game 4 is company of heroes, etc. Because that's stupid. They're different games, and each game has strategic depth by themselves. You don't need to spread your game into every little thing possible just because. Just like starcraft doesn't say "well what if you started with 4 bases, what if you couldn't expand, what if we played big game hunters, what if the map just was completely random for no reason". Starcraft 1 went through like 20 years of tournament play and the weirdest thing the maps included was island maps (something not currently in the map pool). I'm pretty damn confident they never had a megarandom.
Similarly here, there are full tournaments that don't include closed land maps. There are full tournaments that don't include any full water maps. There are full tournaments that don't include nomad starts. And I don't think any tournament includes megarandom.
If you play Hill Fort or megarandom or mountain pass or killimanjaro, you're not playing those maps because of competition and all that stuff. Because if you get good enough for tournament play, those maps are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless.
This whole argument falls apart when you realize the competitive level of play does not use half these maps.
Its kind of like how forest nothing requires adapting, and yet we haven't seen it as a tournament weirdly enough. Maybe because adapting to stupid inbalanced meme maps that have nothing to do with core gameplay isn't fun or interesting (if you're taking them seriously at least, its fine as meme map).