Map Rotation Opinions

[Skaldy]

I'd also humbly request that VIPs get a bit more than 1.50 map vote weight. There's not many of us anyway (you're lucky if there's more than 2 VIP+admin, even on a full server) and looking at the poll results it's clear that we are keen on more map variety. Besides, we don't get much else for contributing (apart from that warm glow of satisfaction )

IMHO, players who contribute hard cash should easily be able to outvote 2, 3 or even 4 players who contribute nothing at all.

[iRobot]

- possibly NOT allowing changing your vote after you voted to prevent stacking of hate votes

Great suggestion. Vote should be locked once made. Maybe allow 5 seconds grace incase someone misclicks the map above/below.

It often happens on AS/Race where someone votes Assault, see's Unwheel about to win the vote and then allies with the RACE voters just to block Unwheel. They then leave the game.

The same can also apply to BW. Say for example, FreeTibet is winning the vote. A small minority is voting DownTownCity and a slightly larger group is voting Highlander. The DTC voters will ally with Highlander just to block Tibet. The maps are purely chosen at random but the principle happens often.

[Azarael]

• anonymous voting with server confirmation of your vote only

The result here will be completely opposite: a popular map has a greater chance to be voted, so it's more probable that the votes will be accumulated on the popular maps, because the votes for the "not-so-popular" maps will be shattered among the maps + many players will rather vote for something where they have a chance of winning effectively reducing the chance of rare maps to zero.

• server picks an option randomly, weighted based on votes for each map.

One bad vote for a shit map may get it voted and in some cases the server to get emptied. This is definitely bad idea, many of you have maps you wish not to play at all.

The reason anonymous voting is necessary is to obscure from the players those occasions where exactly what you say happens - a map which only one person votes hits the 1/26 chance necessary for it to win. If the players can't recognise this scenario, they can't cry about it. While this is objectively fair (individual votes are counted equally instead of majority dominating), a threshold could be added if necessary, with maps not meeting the threshold shown in a different color in the client's voting. If I thought that players could be fair about such proportional voting instead of believing that the majority should always get their way in the voting, I would be less inclined to suggest hiding the votes.

If more people have voted for a map, it has a greater chance to win. Conversely, if more people have not voted for a particular map, that map has a proportionally reduced chance to win, regardless of the distribution of the votes which are not for that particular map. That's all that should matter.

• influencing the votes of other players becomes an offense (in ALL forms - whether by calling out what you voted, drawing attention to a map just coming back up into the list, complaining that <mapname> hasn't been played in a while, anything like this) to stop bitching about the occasions when a majority vote is not selected through implication - chatbox could be removed from voting menu and chat blocked entirely during voting if necessary

Impractical - how do you want to check TS? How do you want to check trolls, that would have a shit map voted, because other players didn't see that map has high votes and had their votes shattered?

Honestly I think that anonymous voting is quite a step back and it's very uncertain if the result will be more diversity or no diversity, from math point of view "no diversity" is more likely. A map wins the vote because players want to play it, this part works well, no need to remove it. Secondly the goal is to achieve diversity but not at the point to play worse games because of it.

A map wins the vote because more people voted for it than for other maps, which comes with two problems: a) in a field of lots of maps, the map which wins might be opposed by the other players who didn't vote it b) tactical voting is usually used - players jump on a popular map to stop a less preferred map because only the map with the greatest number of votes counts. I'd suggest the effect to be the opposite - if you can vote for what you want and have a chance to win, the result will naturally be greater diversity in played maps. Popular maps gain even more support because those of us who are fighting the gametype/gametype battle need to vote them to stop a greater evil. A great example is Mercury on AS/Race. Because it enjoys popular support and is a good map, I must necessarily put my votes on it to get a game of Assault. Under the new system I, and all others, could vote a different map and our chances of getting Assault would remain the same.

What other people vote has absolutely no bearing on the chances of your own map to win. In standard voting, if an opposing faction try to vote a map you dislike, you counter by allying with a compromise option. Thus you negate their vote through the application of yours, at the cost of the map you actually want to play. This ability has resulted in a very conservative attitude to increased vote strength for VIPs, because of the potential for its abuse in locking race players out of the AS/RACE server. In my suggestion, if an opposing faction vote a map you dislike, their chance to win is consistent regardless of what everyone else votes - as is yours - which is still fair, because they have the same vote power as everyone else does. There is no such thing as vote shattering. It would be better to control such "bad maps" if any exist (how is this defined? some noob voting a 1on1 map with 22 players?) through proper playercount controls. If you're considering the case of 1 AS beating 25 RACE, it'll only happen 1 in 25 times and if even that is undesirable, the previously suggested threshold could be added for AS/RACE - assuming public voting only, since it would otherwise defeat the purpose - or the selected gametype could be decided by majority voting, with the map then randomly selected with weights.

While I certainly agree that noob maps won't be blockable via tactical voting, the same goes for good maps. There's simply no reason not to vote what you want under this system, since your action is treated independently from the actions of everyone else on the server - as it should be.

For the advantages

• no tactical voting, stops "<gametype> votes unite" because the chance for a particular gametype to win is exactly the same regardless of how the votes are spread across its maps

This is false because that assumes every gametype has the same popularity. Same effect as with the maps and also makes the chances even worse because two players may vote for a single map and different gametype and they would be counted separately.

This was aimed at AS/Race, since I assumed voting would be consistent on all servers. As we're all aware, Freon is dominant on BW.

• vote for what you want without persecution or having to vote a particular way to stop a hated map

Correct, although affilated because you may think that map xxx has no chance to win and the vote to be wasted.

You always have a chance to win. Random selection with chance to win based on votes accumulated for a given option is implied. I proposed the reform as a unified whole, not as a series of suggestions.

• far more fair and representative than pure majority voting is, especially in the case of 55-45 splits - works to prevent server domination by a majority which forces the minority to quit because they have no chance in the voting at all

As Bono pointed out, we can use similar system we have on AS / Race on popular maps.

Also possible.

[Butcher]

[*]influencing the votes of other players becomes an offense (in ALL forms - whether by calling out what you voted, drawing attention to a map just coming back up into the list, complaining that <mapname> hasn't been played in a while, anything like this) to stop bitching about the occasions when a majority vote is not selected through implication - chatbox could be removed from voting menu and chat blocked entirely during voting if necessary[/list]

Don't do this, is the only time I'm able to chat

[Skaldy]

Or...

...everyone votes (either under an anonymized or single-locked-vote system) and the server just chooses a random map from the results list only, using the vote weights as a probability distribution for its final decision.

(!)

[Azarael]

Is that not what I said, or are you commenting on my long-windedness? I prefer to cover all bases rather than wait for points to be raised later.

[Skaldy]

You're right - I obviously missed your line:

server picks an option randomly, weighted based on votes for each map.

That solution neatly allows players to continue to vote obscure maps that they like, because there is always a chance they will be selected. And removes the need to gang up and displace the current highest-voted map if they don't like it, because it's not necessarily going to be the one selected by the server anyway.

Nice one.

[iZumo]

@Aza:

I don't really want to touch AS / RACE settings, the balance there is fragile a bit and current setup seems to work, other things are that there isn't that many maps for AS and we solve that by giving particular maps higher sequence limit or undervoting which seems to do it's job well - there also is the problem of "quits on worse AS map" coming here and we don't want that and there really we no real complaints on lack of diversity coming from overplaying popular maps, at least not on this scale. And also RACE players should have the ability to block AS players, this block was once too tight, so at that time certain AS maps got extra vote weight to break. Anyway, here, we're primarilly designing necessary vote system modifications for BW, so let's focus on that.

Let's assume there won't be fraud on TS, chat disabled during voting (honestly, I have great doubt here about it being practical, you can just suggest "let's vote xxx" during midgame and lead to mutes / bans, which is undesirable). I still think your point has one flaw - you're assuming that everyone will vote different maps in "secret elections" and that it overvoted due to sheep/hate votes, or that's what I read from it. Which brings an interesting questions:
1) If there is so much haters for Highlander as the topic here looks like, how come that you were not able to stack your hate votes on another map?
2) Assume you have full server (22 players), everybody has equal voting weight and the winning map is a random selection from the votes. Let's do some math:

• - You have 4% chance of your map winning in the voting. Let's assume that average player plays 3 games in peak hours. You have then 11.5% chance of your map winning that day, 57.6% chance of your map winning in a week and 82% chance of your map winning in 14 days. You will not be able to do anything to do about it, because any manipulation is not allowed. I don't know about you but that's pretty low to me. Now it's safe to assume that popular maps will get more votes - because a) players are likely to vote what they think they will win (=> popular maps) and b) some players will simply like them. So if Highlander will get 3 votes every voting the chances of it are 12% chance per voting, 32% chance of it winning on that day, 93% chance of it winning in a week. If we take a look on that from the point of the view of the evening I recall hearing 60 votes takes place in cca. 22 hours, i.e there would be 13 votes during peak hours (counting 4 hours). So during these 13 votes, assuming 3 players would vote Highlander every time on full server, it still has very nice 82% probability of winning in one of the votings. I don't see how this would work or do you have a different math hinting otherwise?
• Setting a threshold will be a killer for one vote maps. Obviously popular maps won't be affected given the expectations.
• It would be like political elections without any advertising or propagation. Nobody would vote new parties, so their only source of votes are random votes, unlike for the old ones.

[Azarael]

Be mindful that the only reason voting need be secret is because of the voting being based on probability distribution. If players can be counted on not to cry about such a system if it is implemented transparently, anonymous voting is not necessary. This may even have the result that players who don't like popular maps can profitably ally on lesser played maps without being completely and totally dismissed just because the voting ended up looking like:

DM-Highlander 7.00
DM-DE-Osiris2 7.00
DM-YourMapHere 5.00

Visible voting would be better off using percentages in the display, to make it clear that your vote is adding to the chance of a pick.

Anyway, as I said to focus, I do not propose this reform as the entire solution to overplayed maps, but evidently both Skaldy and I opine that a system which allows you a chance, however small, of voting the map you like, rather than having to vote an overplayed map just to beat another overplayed map, is a better and fairer voting system. Sure, players are still going to vote Highlander and other such crap, but instead of it being guaranteed after 50% vote it, there is always a chance to beat it. This ties into why Highlander isn't getting blocked - if you don't have 50% or more, your vote is utterly worthless in the system. Factors like this dissuade people in real elections as well - this is pretty much a first past the post system, where unless you vote for a big party, you're pissing your vote away. Big parties (analogy: big maps) LOVE first past the post - it keeps them in power and ensures lesser parties don't have a chance in the voting system, because no individual will take the risk of voting any of the lesser parties, believing that they have no chance to win.

And I explicitly suggested gametype majority / map probability distribution setup for the theoretical case of AS/Race, which allows you to keep your tactical gametype voting while still forcing map variance. You already removed all the AS maps which we all believe are shit and we can playercount weight the rest. Just making the point, you understand.

On vote power, I'd suggest the following tiers:

0.8 - pirates (why should they engage those who shelled out for the game on an equal level?)
1 - standard
1.5 - staff
2.5 - donators

with donator vote / VIP being given for one month for every total 10E donated, up to a limit of permanency.

[iZumo]

After a brief discussion on the server, I think the topic here has moved a bit from solving the main problem - popular maps every night - into generally more map variance voting system. So let's just lock on that for now. For that, there are several easy things that could be made:
- set individual sequence limit on overplayed maps so they cannot be played the next evening (i.e smth like 90 instead of 60)
- from RACE / AS we know that giving such maps 0.80 votes as base worked, while 0.60 turned to be too much; so I'd give them 0.80 here
- make sure that player count restriction is more free on maps like Osiris, i.e generally playable with lesser playercount than full or nearly full server
- in voting, seq and played columns are removed and replaced with the actual map name, not filename

Remember this doesn't have to be the final solution, all it needs to be is a first step that can be refined later, it just needs to happen now. In the meantime, it would be good if you guys actually put a list of those maps together.

The poll here ended up 4 / 13. However I'm also considering challenging it with reviving ingame poll.