I love mapping and will always do it. But a lot of what I try to do here is figure out what people want in a map.
Right now we have a bunch of people making maps that do not have years of experience making maps. When the map is done they will find out if they "got lucky" and made a map the players want or not. My goal is to figure out what players want now, so these maps are started on the right path. So I am constantly looking at maps and trying to create some sort of metric to measure their success with. Distance between bases, distance to major points, width of map, size of engagement areas, etc.
Many of the complaints we get are for things that other popular maps do. If you put a house near a vital point people will freak out. Yet many maps in rotation have houses on vital points. No one complains. Faymonville for example has a house on every fuel and VP. The VPs are even large full health stone houses!!! No one cares. Top played map and is used in tournaments.
And from the limited feedback we get from top players etc, figuring out what they like/want is impossible. So it is a waste of time to even try to make a good 1v1 map. All we can do is guess. Or adjust to the small vocal minority that complain, which may ruin the map for the ones who do not complain.
Each player has their own wants. Some want a small fast map, some want a large map. Some want it open so units can move and flank, some want it closed off and lane based. So I look to the most played maps. Crossroads is good sized map and is open enough to let players move and flank. Kholodny is almost a lane based map. Moving side to side is almost impossible. The map is also huge. These are two completely different maps, yet both get a lot of plays.
Another thing is what SiphonX stats show. Right now we do not have data for map plays by rank. So adjusting a map to purely play numbers means we could be adjusting it for low rank players and ruining it for top rank players.
The only people who can make a good map into a perfect map are players. But they do not seem to care or maybe do not even understand why they like the map. So we will continue to crank out random maps and pray they are liked.
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Lion king
Private Mok
Relic Entertainment
보드카 중대 
Heartless Jäger 
