The new map rotation for the ladder

[Nub_Fried_Rice]

the map pool was absolutely ridiculous from a competitive ladder stand point. i'm very happy with the changes and look forward to map rotation. it is very similar to other very successful competitive rts games. half of the maps before were imbalanced and poorly designed and favored certain factions. that's my 2 cents (and i really only play rts for ladders/competitiveness) if you want to play on the ditch please go host a custom game and rush a soulripper or ten minute strat bomber. that's not how ladder works sorry.

[Mad`Mozart]

Morax, I think the point is of ideals: In an ideal world, the rating system would take your skill - that's what we are trying to find, right ? regardless of factors e.g the map pool.
We obviously can't avoid these factors, since they are required.
What we should do though is lessen the effect of a particular factor as much as possible. We don't want to know who is the best at a set of maps. We want to know who is the best.

Well you managed to contradict yourself in your statement.
The game basically cant exist outside of a map, so its kinda natural that maps represent skill. But this game scales a lot and has different meta on different maps, so if you want to find out who is the best, you should put a player in condition where this factor is present at 100% - e.g. a map pool where maps with all possible metas present. So if you want to lessen the effect of this particular factor, you take away some of the maps with specific meta (like 5km, navy, 20km etc). And the more you reduce map variety, the more "best on a set of maps" players you get.

Current ladder works better towards this idea cause we now have somewhat equal map kind distribution, whereas in previous system you could easily exclude maps you dont know how to play or even abuse the system to favor your preffered maps more.
And now lots of players are annoyed cause they cant evade some kind of maps anymore (which imo not how ladder is supposed to be).

At least, thats how it appears to me.

[Reaper Zwei]

Well this is a rather opinionated thread.
TA4life what was the overall objective in changing the ladder? (please no opinion answers like: to make ladder more fun)

[Blodir]

Morax, I think the point is of ideals: In an ideal world, the rating system would take your skill - that's what we are trying to find, right ? regardless of factors e.g the map pool.
We obviously can't avoid these factors, since they are required.
What we should do though is lessen the effect of a particular factor as much as possible. We don't want to know who is the best at a set of maps. We want to know who is the best.

Yea in a perfect world we would all be playing Debris and Voodoo Tournament in 1v1 ladder so we can finally find out who is 'the best'

[ax0lotl]

I'll repeat what I've said in other threads: a small pool for real ladder competition seems good, but not at the cost of losing matchmaker with a big map pool.

Now in ladder we get a small map pool, while effectively in team games we already have an even smaller map pool.

You can say I should just host my different maps in custom, but it takes ages for someone to join my Corsica Duel or whatever. I'm sad to see the old matchmaker go.

[Gorton]

Morax, I think the point is of ideals: In an ideal world, the rating system would take your skill - that's what we are trying to find, right ? regardless of factors e.g the map pool.
We obviously can't avoid these factors, since they are required.
What we should do though is lessen the effect of a particular factor as much as possible. We don't want to know who is the best at a set of maps. We want to know who is the best.

Well you managed to contradict yourself in your statement.
The game basically cant exist outside of a map, so its kinda natural that maps represent skill. But this game scales a lot and has different meta on different maps, so if you want to find out who is the best, you should put a player in condition where this factor is present at 100% - e.g. a map pool where maps with all possible metas present. So if you want to lessen the effect of this particular factor, you take away some of the maps with specific meta (like 5km, navy, 20km etc). And the more you reduce map variety, the more "best on a set of maps" players you get.

Current ladder works better towards this idea cause we now have somewhat equal map kind distribution, whereas in previous system you could easily exclude maps you dont know how to play or even abuse the system to favor your preffered maps more.
And now lots of players are annoyed cause they cant evade some kind of maps anymore (which imo not how ladder is supposed to be).

At least, thats how it appears to me.

I don't know what you mean about contradicting myself. You've just agreed with me in different words.

Yea in a perfect world we would all be playing Debris and Voodoo Tournament in 1v1 ladder so we can finally find out who is 'the best'

I fail to see where I said that.

[Blodir]

Yea in a perfect world we would all be playing Debris and Voodoo Tournament in 1v1 ladder so we can finally find out who is 'the best'

I fail to see where I said that.

If you think that big mappool is reasonable because a good FA player should be able to play all kinds of maps and improvise their buildorders, then why stop at ~80 maps? Why shouldn't we make the system plain random of every map in the map vault? That would give the best estimation of player skill, no?

We don't want to know who is the best at a set of maps. We want to know who is the best.

If that is so, then why are there no 40x40+ maps included? Why were crazyrush, cluster freak among others removed? Why isn't there Zone Control on ladder? We don't want to know who is the best at a specific set of maps, after all.

Actually the FAF map vault is also a very specific set of maps, I think we need a map generator. But that also generates maps according to very specific rules, we need an algorithm which completely randomizes the map - it will be one in a million chance to get a playable map, but at least we will find out who is the best player in FAF

[Lionhardt]

Yea in a perfect world we would all be playing Debris and Voodoo Tournament in 1v1 ladder so we can finally find out who is 'the best'

I fail to see where I said that.

If you think that big mappool is reasonable because a good FA player should be able to play all kinds of maps and improvise their buildorders, then why stop at ~80 maps? Why shouldn't we make the system plain random of every map in the map vault? That would give the best estimation of player skill, no?

We don't want to know who is the best at a set of maps. We want to know who is the best.

If that is so, then why are there no 40x40+ maps included? Why were crazyrush, cluster freak among others removed? Why isn't there Zone Control on ladder? We don't want to know who is the best at a specific set of maps, after all.

Actually the FAF map vault is also a very specific set of maps, I think we need a map generator. But that also generates maps according to very specific rules, we need an algorithm which completely randomizes the map - it will be one in a million chance to get a playable map, but at least we will find out who is the best player in FAF

Hm, that's not a very reasonable argument, Blodir. Obviously there are limits. You are taking what he says literally, even though you know he doesn't literally mean that.
Within a certain framework, like given max map size and min map quality, he says skill should e measured on a more diverse set of maps. Most maps on the vault and 40km maps are not in the set of maps described by that framework.

[Grothe]

I see a lot of arguments and opinions back and forth from mostly highlevel players. What I don't see is data to back any of this up.
(I hope) we all know that personal experience is no substitude for actuall number crunching, if you want to change a system for everybody.
Who has access to the database (replays) and can make some actual analysis?
btw: Who is maintaining the replay-database... someone should... (cause it really needs maintaining).
and give me some numbers!

I too have a personal opinion: I played over 2000 ladder games (last 9 month) and didn't got very far (peaked at 700 now 570), because my attentionspan and concentration is declining (gameintensity*gametime).
So I would prefer more smaller (5k) and more maps in the pool.
I kinda don't see the point of rotation, the arguments for it don't resonate with me.(it would replace randomness with scedule, as soon as new maps appear a lot of player would learn/reherse the new pool maps... to keep up to the challenge).

'We' could reduce the number of maps in the old pool and remove the 1/3 favorite-maps part in map selection and just randomly pick one of the selected maps of both players.
There is the possible tendency of a huge number of players having only one map selected and play that close to 50% of the time.
The old system adresses that with the 15 maps minimum. Sound resonable and is in the same range as the new pool number, but could be lower.

(but as I allready gave up team games (too long for me)... I might give up playing alltogether...)

[Gorton]

Lionhardt said it, blodir.

In an ideal world, the rating system would take your skill - that's what we are trying to find, right ? regardless of factors e.g the map pool.
We obviously can't avoid these factors, since they are required.
What we should do though is lessen the effect of a particular factor as much as possible.

This is what I mean. Tell the difference from what I said and what you suggested in sarcasm.

I'll give you that "set of" as used in this context isn't very clear.