Let's have a "map favoring" system instead of "avoid map"!

General Discussion
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TL;DR: Map favoring vs map avoidance should be a thing.

I made a topic that was recently locked that was mostly expressing my bewilderment at something game related, but not really in a constructive way. As such, I decided to take this topic, which is relevant to the other topic, and edit it to expound on the scenario constructively.

Earlier today, I was getting tired of getting the same maps repeatedly. It felt like I had played the same three about a dozen times or more, and I really wanted to just play a KOTH map, because I like those quite a bit.

So in my exasperation, I repeatedly joined QP matches and left them as soon as I saw what the map was, trying to get a KOTH match. I was not successful. (And yes, I made sure to wait a little bit between each so I wasn’t joining the same game repeatedly :stuck_out_tongue: )

Eventually, I saw that I had a leaver penalty for 14 games of -75% XP, which is when the unconstructive post was spawned.

This thread was originally titled “We don’t need “avoid map”, but…” and is now the thread you see here.

I don’t think “Avoid Maps” is the answer, however I would at least like to have a “favored maps” type of system. You’ll get those favored maps more often, but this won’t stop you from getting put into an unfavored map if bodies need filling.

It’s win-win for everyone.

You can have maps that you favor show up more often, but every so often you will still get put into a map you may not favor to fill the player slots.

Example: I favor Oasis and Nepal, and because of that they appear some degree more often in my game time. Not a ton, not all the time, just more often. Now, say I’m in a small group of people that favor those maps, and we don’t quite have the people available to actively fill those slots full of people that also favor it, the game will still pull queued people into it regardless of their favors.

Now, you might be thinking “Well what’s the point of that, then?!” The point is that, as I said, every so often you may still get pulled into maps that aren’t on your lists of favored maps, but you will be slightly less likely to see them.

The distinction is made on the map favoring because if we were given the option to completely avoid some maps, there would surely end up being someone somewhere down the line that has a map favored that almost never gets to play it because very few people favor it.

With a system like this in place, I wouldn’t have had to try and leave and re-queue repeatedly trying to get a KOTH map, because I would be more likely to play those maps throughout the day. In all seriousness, I honestly feel that if such a system were in place, I would be MORE likely to hang around and play an unfavored map, because then the scenario becomes something akin to “Wow, Hanamura? I haven’t gotten this map in a LONG time, I’ll play this!”

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This…is actually a map avoidance idea that I’m okay with.

GJ OP

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for me it’s oasis, something about the color scheme and the way it’s designed makes me so angry

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i want like that system almost every multiplayer game I can remember had where you got to vote on the next map/mode.

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I dislike Watchpoint: Gibraltar. I dunno why I don’t like the map so much, but I don’t like playing on it. This would be a nice feature.

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Then almost everyone would be un-favoring 2CP… which should be really obvious to Blizzard that players don’t like 2CP… maybe just leave 2CP maps for tournament mode…

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Map avoidance/preference sounds amazing, do want.

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Perhaps so, but I’m sure there are plenty of oddballs out there that like it, and it will group them up and occasionally pull us into as well when it needs bodies.

Everyone wins!

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Yessssssssss

2CP is complete trash <3

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Oasis is my favorite map :frowning:

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No avoidance. Just preference. This distinction is why I like OP’s suggestion.

Maps and heroes should never be “avoidable” to the point that you never see them. Lots of man hours went into making them, and the last thing we want to do is waste blizzard’s time, energy, and money. It would incentivize them to develop less and monetize more. And that’s not what we want.

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Right. The distinction is there because we don’t want to end up in a scenario where there’s a handful of people that really like playing X map, but they rarely get to see it because too many people have avoided it.

With this, I can play more KOTH maps that I enjoy and less 2CP or King’s Row (I don’t mind most payload maps, but King’s Row has gotten stale to me).

This doesn’t mean I will never play those maps ever again, but I will play them some degree less, and I would know that I got that map because it was my turn to fill (or whatever). I think this would actually make me more likely to want to play that map in those scenarios, because it would be like a “Oh hey, I haven’t played this map in a while!” kind of feeling.

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i love 2cp :"( …

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And so you would favor your 2CP maps, and play it with other people that also enjoy them!

And sometimes some other guy that wasn’t expecting it, but what the heck, he hasn’t played Anubis in a while, let’s do this.

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I wanna play comp hanamura on repeat.

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Also, players should never get to specifically choose what map gets played. Not in the “every player gets to choose and then live with the queue” scenario, or the “let the lobby vote” scenario.

I’ve played games in the past with the first (think every single game ever released that had a server-browser) and I’ve played games with the second (Mechwarrior Online) and neither work.

In the first, the servers with unpopular maps are few and empty because it’s more fun to play on a full server than it is to play the map you actually enjoy with only 1 or 2 other players.

In the second, the lobby will never pick the less popular maps. Not even when your votes are being heavily weighted because you never get to play the maps you enjoy and are always being out-voted. It also introduces a map-vote meta-game where people will try to game the system for more voting-weight which just introduces noise and makes figuring out what players actually want to do more difficult for the developers (erm…logic to piranha games devs…we like shooting our weapons. Stop making hot maps. Nobody enjoys playing on hot maps).

OTOH, like you say, if all you get is a slight weighting towards your favorite map, you get everything you want and the downsides are far fewer and less abusive. The worst thing I can think of is the least popular maps getting a slightly smaller community where people will start to see the same opponents game after game.

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Yeah, I considered that also and don’t really have an answer for it.

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Well, as long as people can’t absolutely avoid a map, there isn’t really a problem since no matter how unpopular a map is the matchmaker will always gap-fill those games with randos.

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I haven’t been able to get a KOTH map all day, and I’m currently joining and leaving over and over again, and can’t get one.

It’s annoying.

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I actually have the same issue, also same kind of thing with Junkertown to a lesser extent.