21 replies to this topic

[Arctander]

First off - I think that the map rotation is either broken, or functioning terribly. And if this topic is posted in the wrong place, admins please move it. I tried to search the forums for a discussion on this but got nada - either the search function on these forums is broken, or just worthless. I search for "maps" and "map rotation" and it comes up "no results" - seriously? If there were a "general" sub-topic in the "map feedback" sub-form, I would've posted it there.

Second, kudos on a great mech game. I was one of those folks who seriously considered being a founder, but then chickened out having been burned by other game developers, and being under whelmed by earliest impressions way back when. But when I saw two old friends playing MWO all the time on Steam, I figured I'd give it a peek again, and I'm having a blast. I doubt I'll buy MW5, since I don't like single player... but MWO is very well done.

Now, on to the point. For starters I'm new, just a few weeks in and playing excessively. But new players are always the lifeblood of a game. I joined a month ago and I don't want to think about how much money I've spent already - and if you try to tell me I'm going to put my fingers in my ears and go lalalalalalala. Ok? Ok. Anyway, if I'm way off the mark on this topic, please help educate me on how to fix what I'm seeing as a problem.

Last night I tried Faction War for the first time with my clan mates. We got on Emerald Taiga and I immediately marveled at how beautiful the map was, and I did not think I had ever seen it before. It turns out that I had, once. In a total of 469 matches, I had landed on it once before. Which means I average seeing that map in .2% of my battles.

So I think that there is something very wrong with that.

With that all said, I want to show the issue here. Looking at my stats (I love stats btw, yeah I know... Nerd!) I see that there are 19 possible maps, and I've got a total 469 matches. Oh and I love the voting system btw.

Looking over these stats, 26% of the maps are 63% of my battles. And only 9 maps make up 88% of my battles. That means out of 12 battles, 11 of them will be on less than 1/2 the possible maps. Top 5: Frz City, Riv City, HPG, Polar, Grim Plex. And #6-9: Forest Col, Tourmaline, Crimson, Mining

And there are 5 maps (which is over 1/4 the total) which I have seen a sum of 7 times (or 1.5% of all my battles.) Emerald, Vitric, Boreal, Sulfurous, Grim Port

Clearly, something is not functioning well.

If those 5 maps are terribly imbalanced and everyone hates them (or maybe just the tier 5 crowd does,) then perhaps a little tweaking should be done to improve them - it has to be so much easier to tweak than to rebuild from scratch I'm sure.

Anyway... like I said above, I love the voting system. And held out hope that it was just that the tier5 players always picked the same maps (I am already tired of polar highlands btw, but I'm not a LRM boater...) And so far as a teir4 player it isn't any different.

So as it stands, I have a 12% chance of seeing one of 53% of the maps. That's more than half the possible maps! There has to be a better way to tweak this for folks to see more options. Because after only a few weeks in the game, I would really like more variety than the same 5 maps most of my battles. I know they're out there... and I know at least Emerald is purty... I'm going to guess some other maps are too, or at least they are going to be interesting.

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Just the facts - (link to my map stats)
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Top 5 maps (26% of the maps) 63% of my battles - 295 of 469 matches:
Frz City, Riv City, HPG, Polar, Grim Plex

Top 9 maps (47% of the maps) represent 88% of my battles - 412 of 469 matches:
Frz City, Riv City, HPG, Polar, Grim Plex, Forest Col, Tourmaline, Crimson, Mining

Bottom 5 maps (26% of the maps) total of 7 battles, or 1.5% of the time:
Emerald, Vitric, Boreal, Sulfurous, Grim Port

Bottom 10 maps (53% of maps) saw a total 60 battles, or 12.8% of the time:
Emerald, Vitric, Boreal, Sulfurous, Grim Port, Caustic, Alpine, Canyon, Terra, Viridian

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Anyway, I know this game has been out a long while, and I haven't been actively following it (I have a friend from the forums from 5.5 years ago, which shows that I was at least a bit interested...) but if this has been beaten into the ground, my apologies. But as a new player, it seems like a glaring weakness to have so few maps dominate the rotation so completely that it limits the game play options like it does. And with the voting system I would think it should be reasonably easy to fix. And if its just that the maps are terribad... then tweak/fix the maps

[Brain Cancer]

There's a reason for some maps being more frequent, other than vote popularity.

If a map cannot support a given game mode, it isn't placed on the potential choices for players. Thus, if a map can't support (say) Incursion and Escort, any game that has either as a choice automatically removes it from potential use.

This means maps that support all game modes end up potentially voted on far more than others. Alpine and Terra Therma are good examples.

[BiggRigg42]

You see PGI?

This is why we need to be able to drop on orbital defense canon maps in private matches. We cannot teach our new recruits how to play faction play without the ability to drop on faction play maps in private lobbies. Arctander would not be confused over this if we could just drop in the orbital defense cannon maps in private lobbies.

This game is super hard to learn. Make it easier for us to teach it.

[Arctander]

Good to know that the game mode limitations and faction war limited maps are at least part of why the numbers are so skewed.

[Arctander]

BTW, is there a list anywhere of which maps do or do not, show in QP?

[Lykaon]

Boreal Vault
Emerald Taiga
Grim Portico
Hellebore Springs
Sulfurous Rift
Vitric Forge


The above are only faction warfare maps

[N0ni]

BiggRigg42, on 14 October 2017 - 06:30 AM, said:

This is why we need to be able to drop on orbital defense canon maps in private matches.

You can drop on Faction Play maps in training grounds, you can roam around freely to learn the layout and can spend as much time doing so as you please (not time limited).

[Bombast]

Excluding the complaints about FP maps (Which have been answered I believe), theres one big solution to the problem - Get rid of map voting.

#DemocracySucks #LetRNGDecide

[BumbleBee]

Map voting is the real problem. You say you like it, but it is the very reason that you dont see the other maps.

Players will vote for the same 4-5 maps every time they come up, and short of someone saving their vote multiplier to play on a rare map, the only time you'll see them is if enough players try to increase their multiplier on the same map by accident.

Map voting really does need to be removed. I think I've played maybe 8hrs total over the last 2mths because playing on the same maps gets boring really fast. There just isnt any variety anymore

[BiggRigg42]

N0ni, on 14 October 2017 - 01:26 PM, said:

You can drop on Faction Play maps in training grounds, you can roam around freely to learn the layout and can spend as much time doing so as you please (not time limited).

Yes, one can go into a faction play map by himself. However, one cannot go into a faction play map in a private lobby with other people. My unit recruits people who are new to the game and trains them up. We need to be able to go into faction play maps with multiple people, in order to teach them how to do faction play.

[Arctander]

BumbleBee, on 14 October 2017 - 03:36 PM, said:

Map voting is the real problem. You say you like it, but it is the very reason that you dont see the other maps.

I don't agree with that. If there are 6 FW maps (of which I've seen 5,) then my numbers are a bit different, but the issue is IMO not the voting system, it is that the voting system is showing these favored maps too often.

Of my 14 QP maps,
The top 5 are 36% of the maps, and 64% of my matches.
Top 9 are 64% of the maps, and are 89% of the my matches.
Bottom 5 are 36% of the maps, and just 11% of my matches, Caustic, Alpine, Canyon, Terra, Viridian.

Now I'm not sure if there is a time of day rotation to it, and I do know some people definitely do not like the hot maps, but I definitely do NOT see these options in the mix nearly as often as I see Polar Highland and Grim Plex. So simply having the server be aware of what 4 maps are being picked least and putting those 4 up as the choice until they are higher in the rotation would be an easy way to resolve the issue and put all the maps out there more often. It definitely would be the easiest solution. And if after tweaking the server map rotation by that system, they found that one or two maps were far lower than the rest, perhaps they could tweak the maps to improve them.

Another option/issue with the voting system is that since we only get 1 vote, we can end up with one map getting 35 and the other three getting 30 20 15, while that 35 map got the most votes, its entirely possible that the desire simply NOT to get that is what drove the other majority of voters, but their vote was too split (and there's no way to coordinate.)

So, we could either get 3 clicks for choices of the map. First choice is 3 points, 2nd is 2 points, 3rd is 1 point. That'd be pretty easy to pull off. Lastly, we could get a "no" vote option, and could apply their points against a particular map instead of for a map? That might help balance those things out, because of the way that the weighting system works if your choice fails to be picked.

[Brain Cancer]

Quote

Bottom 5 are 36% of the maps, and just 11% of my matches, Caustic, Alpine, Canyon, Terra, Viridian.

This is because those maps do not support all game modes. If the matchmaker picks one of those unsupported modes, it automatically removes that map from potentially being voted on.

Since they have fewer chances to be voted on, there are disproportionately fewer games played on those maps.

[Jonathan8883]

For what it's worth, I always vote for Viridian Bog and Canyon if they come up. They are fun! Canyon was also the map that last year's world championship was fought on.

Caustic mire is very pretty, but I think it's hot? I usually have a better option when it comes up.

I am not a big fan of Alpine, unless I'm packing a mech with jumpjets and long range weapons. It's very limiting for immobile brawlers, and even my jumpy Arctic Cheetah backstabber has problems there due to the limited cover.

I usually stay away from Terra Therma because most of my mechs run hot.

Today, I ran into something I hadn't experienced before: Viridian Bog at night in a heavy rainstorm. Regular vision was useless, thermal didn't show the terrain well enough, and night vision was obscured at longer range thanks to the rain. Hurray for sensors. It was pretty fun and a nice change. In general though, I hate night maps because I run darker monitors and can't see well. Even HPG Generator forces me to use NV often.

[Bombast]

Jonathan8883, on 16 October 2017 - 02:28 PM, said:

...Viridian Bog at night in a heavy rainstorm...

Yah... that map/environment is bit rough.

I wish they'd get rid of all the filters, and then 'normalize' all the weather conditions with just normal vision in mind.

[Arctander]

Brain Cancer, on 16 October 2017 - 09:53 AM, said:

This is because those maps do not support all game modes. Since they have fewer chances to be voted on, there are disproportionately fewer games played on those maps.

Well, if it is that significantly disproportionate, they might want to add those modes to the other maps or perhaps vary it up a different way. Like I said in an earlier post, if they could watch the server to say what 4 maps were least chosen and put them into a selection of their own, then there wouldn't be that kind of disproportionate representation. Anyway... just a thought. Hard for me to think that I'm 3 weeks into the game and already feel like I see some maps too often.

Bombast, on 16 October 2017 - 02:47 PM, said:

I wish they'd get rid of all the filters, and then 'normalize' all the weather conditions with just normal vision in mind.

Maybe I'm weird, but I would consider that to be a huge disappointment. I love the inclement conditions, the extreme heat, etc.

Edited by Arctander, 17 October 2017 - 07:31 AM.

[Bombast]

Arctander, on 17 October 2017 - 07:31 AM, said:

Maybe I'm weird, but I would consider that to be a huge disappointment. I love the inclement conditions, the extreme heat, etc.

And I despise having to look through a mono-color filter for 10 minutes.

I'm not saying get rid of the conditions, just normalize them to a filterless game. Still have darkness, but not so dark it makes night vision mandatory, etc.

[Jun Watarase]

Its not a even distribution, some of the maps are weighted.

[Arctander]

Jun Watarase, on 17 October 2017 - 09:12 AM, said:

Its not a even distribution, some of the maps are weighted.

I'm seeing that. Though I guess my point is simply that if 1/3rd of all the maps are only shown 1/10th of the time, and 1/3rd of the maps are shown 60% of the time - that's a woeful use of the map variations.

[Sjorpha]

I agree, it's horrible that so many matches are played on a few maps.

Remove voting, map selection should be random and all maps weighted equally, map should be rolled before mode so that incompatibility cannot reduce the frequency of a map.

[Arctander]

Sjorpha, on 19 October 2017 - 07:08 AM, said:

I agree, it's horrible that so many matches are played on a few maps. Remove voting, map selection should be random and all maps weighted equally, map should be rolled before mode so that incompatibility cannot reduce the frequency of a map.

I still like voting. Though I would like if we had the option of using our vote as a "no" vote, just make it so that double clicking a map turns the outline red and it means we put our modifier points against a specific map. If that map were NOT selected, our modifier would reset to 1. Note: They would probably need to add the option of a 3rd click to unselect any maps, just in case of a mis-click.

I definitely agree that all maps should be in the rotation equally regardless of what missions are/aren't available.