Map Rotation Opinions

[iZumo]

Ah oops, my bad.

[Butcher]

Well, I like Highlander... anyway, there are hundreds of maps we never play, maybe a random selection voting would help...

[bOnO]

Why not doing something similar to Race VS As? Take the 10 most played maps and downweight them...

[Azarael]

So, working from the anonymous voting suggestion, here is my proposal for voting reform.

• map vote reworked to be closer to instant action map selection layout - seq / play therefore gone, and optimally map name would be read from LevelSummary instead of sending map filename to clients which is extremely 2003
• anonymous voting with server confirmation of your vote only
• server picks an option randomly, weighted based on votes for each map.
• 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

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
• vote for what you want without persecution or having to vote a particular way to stop a hated map
• no sheep effect - you actually have to think about what you want to vote
• no playcount effect - judge for yourself the quality of a map
• 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
• means that VIP voting boosts are ALWAYS effective, instead of being useless in the face of a majority voting a hated map (a complaint which I've received) thus increasing incentive to donate
• offers the opportunity to rework the voting to be more convenient to players by storing the recommended player count as LDG defines it as part of the map vote history entry and using this on the client's side to group maps into separate subsections of the main voting list. High playercount, medium playercount, low playercount, very low playercount, 1on1 would be my examples - this also prevents players from feeling overwhelmed by the massive list of maps

Disadvantages:

• lack of transparency - open to accusations (and I guarantee there will be at least one) of admins secretly manipulating the voting

[iRobot]

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

[focus]

This voting scheme will be essentially random pick of maps. With drift towards most popular ones.

Because:
When players dont see other's choices, that ensure that there will be a wide selection of maps on each vote round.
Probability of co-incidence of votes for the same map would be low.
But probability of player voting for a popular map will be high. Essentially, that will ensure that on each vote round there will be a high proportion of popular maps. And accordingly, probability of choice of one of them for the next match will be high.

For example. There are 100 maps on the server. And 20 of them are the most popular. That number is enough to fill all available time for play on each day. Of 20 players on the server, we will receive vote for 15 maps. And 10 of them will be in that 20-most-popular. Chance of choosing Highlander, Osiris, Goose, etc will be 2/3 on each round.

But if you make popular maps to interleave with non-popular by forbidding voting, you could get popular map choice only on 1/2 of all cases. (or even 1/3, if you chose forbid-forbid-allow pattern).

[Azarael]

I wasn't suggesting that the voting proposition above be the total solution to this problem. It was a general suggestion as well.

Besides, at the moment, the chance of Highlander if more than 50% of the server vote it is 100%. My solution at least gives the minority a chance.

[Skaldy]

Losing Seq/Play columns would help but I'd also suggest adding the recommended MinPlayers and MaxPlayers for each map too.

At the moment voters don't want to take the risk of being left at the start of a huge map, if there's only a few players on the server, or vice versa. Once that happens, some players usually bail out which makes it even worse.

[Azarael]

The Instant Action / Host Game interfaces show this. In our case, we'd make a judgment of the proper playercount as it applies to BW and send that to the clients.

[iZumo]

Hmm,

• map vote reworked to be closer to instant action map selection layout - seq / play therefore gone, and optimally map name would be read from LevelSummary instead of sending map filename to clients which is extremely 2003

The free space for seq / play still should be used for the actual filename, at least for the beginning, as people rather remember the maps by that + to see actual versions of the map.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• no sheep effect - you actually have to think about what you want to vote

Correct.

• no playcount effect - judge for yourself the quality of a map

Also correct.

• 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.

• means that VIP voting boosts are ALWAYS effective, instead of being useless in the face of a majority voting a hated map (a complaint which I've received) thus increasing incentive to donate

Possibly.

• offers the opportunity to rework the voting to be more convenient to players by storing the recommended player count as LDG defines it as part of the map vote history entry and using this on the client's side to group maps into separate subsections of the main voting list. High playercount, medium playercount, low playercount, very low playercount, 1on1 would be my examples - this also prevents players from feeling overwhelmed by the massive list of maps

Actually this is a pretty good idea.


Anyway, I myself was thinking of other changes:

- voting remains public so players can see what's winning
- underweight popular maps just as they are on AS / Race
- repeat limit set to cca. once / 1.5 days
- less restricted player count vote weighting, allowing the popular maps to be voted more freely
- hide seq / play count from voting and use the level summary map name to fill the missing space (actually 1st column would be the level summary, 2nd column would be the filename)
- rework gametype voting: count votes for maps and gametype individually - i.e select the map that got the most votes regardless of the gametype and then select the gametype that got the most votes regardless of the map
- grouping the maps by 1on1 / small / medium / large to help new players for better orientation
- possibly NOT allowing changing your vote after you voted to prevent stacking of hate votes