The reason why ladder is dead, and how to fix it

[Vee]

People have said this in chat and on the forum many times before, but I thought lets make another post then maybe with the new faf leadership it will finally be fixed.

The ladder map pool is currently full with stupid maps such as:

hardffa, cluster freak, four corners, and to a lesser extent shloob, crazyrush, paradise, wilderness, the ditch, etc.

Although some players may enjoy some of these (I enjoy the ditch, for example), most players hate most of these. The effect of this is that people stop playing ladder. Blodir put it very eloquently:

[B8]speed2: you will never be able to satisfy everyone
Blodir_irc: yes but you can satisfy 90% of players by reducing amount of cancer

I propose the following: we decide the ladder map pool by community vote each month/3months/year.

Everybody has to compromise. Assuming hardffa and the ditch are not voted into the map pool: The people who like ditch don't get it any more, but in return they don't get hardffa either. The people who like hardffa don't get it anymore, but in return they don't get the ditch. Everybody can play on relatively normal maps.

An alternative to this is a hard veto: everybody gets to pick 5 maps that he or she does not want to play. I think that's a good idea too.

Yet another alternative is to not match players if they don't have any maps in common. To make sure that people don't just select 1 map you can require minimum of 15 maps to be selected.

I volunteer to code this, whatever option the community decides (and when the server code is open sourced).

Discuss.

[IceDreamer]

I propose what is (I think) an updated version of the current system.

1: A huge number of maps are analysed and cleared for ladder gameplay based on reclaim, map balance, and good presentation (Mexes lined up, unit pathing OK etc)
2: When a player wants to play ladder for the first time, or at any point in the future they can choose to change this, the player MUST pick a minimum of 20 maps. The player can pick a maximum of 50 maps.
3: When two players are matched, their map pools are examined and any matching picks in both pools found. If there are matching maps, the map played is picked from those matches at random.
4: If there are NO MATCHING MAPS between the two player's pools at all, the map played is chosen at random from the top 15 most-played global maps.

I can't see any real downside to this system. The chances of two players having zero matches with a 20-minimum pool are practically nil unless someone's deliberately derping around and picking odd maps.

[Myxir]

short how the ladder system works:
check how many maps the two players have in common
a) 15 or more -> one of the maps in common will be randomly selected, done
b) <15 -> one of the 15 most played maps will be randomly selected (even if the players don't have it selected)


easy maths:
there are 90 maps in the pool.
if every player has at least 53 maps (59%) selected, there is no way someone will ever play a map that he has not selected
if we had a pool of 200 maps, it would be 108 maps (54%) for every player
if we had a pool of 1000 maps, it would be 508 (50.8%) for every player

the more maps, the easier it is to match on a mutual desired map with ~50% maps selected.


of course there are many maps that players don't like (some stated in the first post), which is usually why players have less than 60 maps selected.
probably easiest solution: add more maps
the more maps there are, the easier it is to find 15 or more maps that both players have in common.



there is no need for community votes to vote for the mappool, by selecting/deselecting you already have a personal vote which map you want or don't want to play. the problem here is the <15 common maps, so it's better to fix that than something differnt

[CrayzyNath]

So you want a pool of thousands of maps as ladder pool?!
Thats not how it should work..

The fewer maps, the better.
10-15 good maps, that are balanced for 1v1. That should be ladder. Everyone has 2 Vetos, thats it.
No one wants huge maps or maps designed for teamplay in ladder, if you want to 1v1 these, make it custom.
Ppl dont want too learn hundreds of New maps! It doesnt matter if you habe 1k maps with 3 different tutorials for each one. Ppl wont play, because its just too much!

When GW should go online again, what i hope, there can be all kinds of maps, even large ones, because its not just purely 1v1.

I think you get what i mean:

Ladder for the standard players that want to train better mechanics and compare each others skill in a specific 1v1 setting, while
GW would make the players happy, that like the huge scale of supcom with all its variety in exotic maps etc.
For everyone else, there are still custom games

Of course you cant make everybody happy, but i think that it would give the ladder more a ladder touch and encourage more casual players to play ladder.

[Lame]

no going back to small pool please it will be just some buildorder whoring and dubious map vote from ppl that dont even play ladder.
right now i can select my pool whenever i want (at least 33% of the time)

vote sure why not

[Myxir]

So you want a pool of thousands of maps as ladder pool?!
Thats not how it should work..

to clarify, i did not want to imply that i want 1000 maps in the pool
(just selecting 500 of them for games would be horrible already)

i wanted to show that more maps would fix the <15 maps problem, though many people are probably scared by playing a huge amount of maps that they might not know

[lextoc]

What about reducing the number 15 to 5

[josephbridges]

A lot of people on this forum talks about "what users want", politicians no thanks!
You want to know what users want, simple, make a voting system. It has been done in the past.
About 1milion maps or 10, my opinion is that map diversity increase player skill, some maps are more faction oriented, but it is not allways same faction, and that is good.

[FkR]

I play a lot of ladder at the moment and I really like the idea of 5 veto maps (that you never get) especially with such a massive ladder pool.

Also I tend to take very long breaks from the game and some kind of slow ladder ranking decay would be great. It really sucks when you don't log in or play at all for 18+ months and come back only to face top 100 players, because there's nothing but loses as far as the eye can see given how stupidly over rated you are. Maybe after 6 months of not loging in at all you slowly start decaying for example.

[IceDreamer]

Can I get more feedback on my idea? Also, going back to few maps or a set map-pool will just kill it further. There are a MASSIVE number of people, including me, who never played ladder anyway because we hated playing on the same maps over and over. We hate the 5*5 map sizes, we hate the fact that you have to learn certain build-queues instead of adapting all the time, we hated how imba some maps are. The current system was invented to make the more casual players (Of which SupCom is 90%) play a bit of ladder. The inclusion of dumb maps like HardFFA as well as no minimum map count has led to the current drought.