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The matchmaker should pick punishing maps more often for higher-tier games and less often for lower-tier games. Below contains reasoning, background and caveats.
Perceived problem:
Polar Highlands yields a new kind of map for MWO which many people seem to really enjoy, yet many people find the map unplayable due to the varying experiences that players have with LRMs. LRMs punish players that make themselves good targets.
With that said, most players (~73%) enjoy playing on Polar Highlands, and a considerable number of players believe that this is the best map experience PGI has produced to date and would love to see more maps made in this style.
Some people say that LRMs are not effective enough because of how a skilled player can render them ineffective by choosing their engagements carefully. Some people never die to anything else, because LRMs clip them out of the match early. On one hand, it's part of the learning curve of the game to develop the skills to deter LRMs as a weapon group. On the other, it is a barrier that prevents many people from becoming more invested in the game. It has been argued ad nauseum that this is a L2P issue, but you can't just expect a quarter of the player-base to play differently intuitively (and even if you could, it might push the LRMs into extinction in all tiers).
There is a significant minority of players that do not enjoy playing in the presence of LRMs on maps with more punishing terrain, and that minority is weighted towards lower the lower band of skill. Not all players fit this generalization (whether it be high skill/dislike LRMs or low skill/enjoy LRMs) but there is a strong correlation present. Since matches are built with players targeting a specific PSR average tier, I feel the map vote selection should be adjusted according to that tier as well.
I would like to identify that many players who prefer/dislike Polar Highlands do so because of a divide in the population in terms of preference as to whether MWO should be a slow, tactical battlefield simulator vs a conventional twitch-FPS game. From my experience, this divide is well-mixed among the various tiers and so this cannot be solved by altering the game according to match tier.
Proposed solution:
I propose that the matchmaker consider a different set of weights when determining how often to include maps in the match voting process according to the PSR tier being targeted for the match.
For example, Polar Highlands could be considered a punishing map which might exacerbate the dislike of LRMs in lower-tier play, so it might appear more often in higher-tier games where it is sought more often. Simpler maps that tend to funnel players into fewer attack paths with tall geometry for cover (such as Crimson Strait) could be more prominent in the lower tiers as it provides more plain opportunities for decision-making as well as places to stand which naturally mitigate missiles.
Not everyone will agree with this solution, but I believe this change would align with most people's opinions as they change with the tiers.
Thanks for reading!
EDIT: I've started making a list of what I believe are good high-tier and low-tier maps. This is based largely on gut and guesswork, so I'm open to other people's thoughts here. I'm ordering my picks as well in order of how severely I believe these maps fit into these categories as my suggestion revolves around a sliding scale between tier 1/2 and tier 5. My goal is to make a list of maps which each extreme of the skill spectrum roughly prefers playing on, where the other extreme does less.
High Tier Maps:
1. Polar Highlands
2. Viridian Bog
3. Tourmaline Desert
Low Tier Maps:
1. Crimson Strait
Edited by Hornsby, 05 February 2016 - 11:10 AM.
