Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread

@morax said in Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread:

Could you actually provide some feedback for the maps aside your tier list which is basically just your personal feelings.

What is the metric? It sounds like you are mostly dissatisfied because of the mex count.

The question is worded in a bit of an confusing way. Of course my tier list is based on my personal feelings. What else would it be based on? The metric is my estimated satisfaction with getting the map on tmm. I can give a few pointers, but to go into detail would entail writing an entire dissertation on the map pool.

Let's start with the following: Primus Alfa, Hrungdaks, Verdanis, Moon, Mars Mangala. These are the most obvious examples of gunrush maps. Can you imagine playing on Primus Alfa and having your opponent roll Aeon and rush double gun followed by a leisurely stroll into your base? There is literally nothing you can do about that if played correctly and I'm not exaggerating. In reality you have to just rely on your opponent playing bad, which is fortunately very reliable indeed. Of course you could hope for you teammates to organize a rescue mission (snipe), were they not also getting pushed in by gun acus of their own opponents.

This kind of gameplay follows from several factors: balance (gun is really really really strong), rush distance between players, position of reclaim (or mex) and the amount of mexes.

If there's a lot of contested mex/reclaim that immediately forces a gun acu abuse situation, even in a 20x20 where players have to transport to the front or walk long distances you'll still see that strategy being extremely effective (read game winning) in a proxy war. If both players don't engage in gun abuse over the middle then the one that does gets a game winning advantage for free.

And btw, I want to give a special mention to Funeral Plains where gunrush is not necessarily enforced, but instead all ACUs have to go naked into the middle of the map to grab reclaim, which often ends up in someone (or all) dying since one player in one team didn't get the memo and went to their own side with their ACU while the others get blasted by 4 ACUs in the middle. Or maybe the players are just mean spirited and want to force a draw. There's no way to avoid that without giving up middle reclaim (large advantage).

Okay back to guns, how does mex count affect gun ACU gameplay? Well if you have a lot of mexes the relative strength of the gun acu is weakened as you can't buy more of them no matter how much mass you have. At 0mex the ACU is 100% of the strength of your army, as you go up in mex count (and increase production) that percentage steadily decreases until eventually in exp stage the strength of the ACU is close to 0% of the strength of your army. The more mex/reclaim each player is given the faster the ACU loses value. Eg. in the previous Primus Alfa example if each player had 20 starting mexes, one could easily defend a double gun push with t2 PD and quickly follow that up with sniper bots.

I want to note that the above is not the only reason that "high" mex/reclaim count is desirable. The general feeling that I get (and I assume many other higher level players also feel this given their preferences) is that a low amount of mass results in a game that is slow, boring and simple. The more mass there is on the map, the faster the game will progress through all tech stages and the faster a relatively even game will ultimately end (as the increased volatility of game ender stage guarantees the game to end once you finally reach it). Lots of maps in the pool have indeed too few mex for my tastes, for instance (excluding the previously mentioned maps, all of which have this issue too): Bermuda, Funeral Plains, Corona, Falcon Stone River, Crateria, Canis River, Monument Valley. Even the mapgens have too few as I mentioned in the last post.

@FtXCommando I don't mind Syrtis Assault as much - even though it is undoubtedly a gunrush monke spam map as you said - because there's a relatively large amount of mass (refer to previous point about mass vs gun acu as well as mass being increasing complexity, hastening the pacing, etc.)

I totally agree with Blodir and the points he made. But I also want to stress, that this is only a problem at the highest levels of play. Somewhere between 1800+ and 2k+ is where the mentioned maps become quite boring by forcing players into a single viable strategy, and most games being decided 6 minutes in.

I think the vast majority of this feedback is completely irrelevant for lobbies at or below 1600 average rating. At that level, the ability of players to see the optimal strategy for a map, and to punish opponents that didn't go with that strategy becomes so bad that a more diverse range of strategies is possible. I think a great example here is the map adaptive millenium. ~1200 avg rating custom lobbies seem to be an absolute blast on that map, but once you move to higher avg ratings the pool of viable strategies shrinks quickly.

Hello, I'm making the 4v4 map pool for february.

Unfortunately the change from map pool selection from lowest to average rating will probably not make it by the start of february so the pool is designed for the current system.

I'd like to hear any feedback / map suggestions / etc. that you might have. Highlighted in pool are the maps that are carried over from the last pool.

Note that this map pool is not final and is subject to changes.

Wheres my setons!?

@spikeynoob said in Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread:

Wheres my setons!?

Deleted like it should be!

I am not a fan of Point of Reach 1v1:

• Strict build order (map meta): I don't think I've seen anything other than transport rush (possibly proceeded by a couple inties) be viable.
• The middle (E, W) islands have a hill on one side. Twice I've been forced to land early then couldn't build a factory due to the steep hill. Note to self: never expand clockwise.

While several other maps require a transport rush, they're usually at least a little more flexible about where the transport first goes. (I'm not a fan of Glaciers either, but at least that map has a third option.)

trans rush on por is insane greed, you are drastically more safe getting a few ints out for security and the 15 second expansion delay isn’t going to be losing you games.

But I’ve seen plenty of tourney games lost because a dude got unlucky with his greed transport.

I think Point of Reach is the best 1v1 20x20 map. Every transport map has the trans/inty rush problem. On PoR it is likely you can get the opponents island if they take yours, or it is likely you can recover the island with ACU walking or dropping there, or just land units since there is space to set up. The map doesn't have reclaim that you need to spam and manage engineers to get so it is more chill to play than something like crossfire canal or bermuda locket. You can be successful with land/hover spam, ACU drops, raiding with air/frigates, or more chill ecoing into t3 air or big navy. It often results in interesting games to play/watch with ACU drops and battles for each island.

Adaptive Maridia has one less mex on the right side.

https://imgur.com/a/54k7gDS

Eonnacia, formerly only in the 1500+ pool, has replaced Adaptive Maridia while the latter is being fixed.

I dont think anyone appreciates fullshare abuse. With fullshare abuse I mean going for "extremely risky" ACU plays or even just ctrl k'ing them into enemy armies and not losing much of value because

1. the ACU did tons of damage and/or the ACU explosion eliminated enemy threats
2. its easy for one player to manage two bases.

Now this might be a hot take, but it's why I believe PoR is a bad map for 4v4 fullshare. The meta is to abuse fullshare to its maximum potential through comdrops, TML acus, or even just ctrl k'ing the acu into enemy navy (each preferably done with one of the acus on the island with two spawns). It easily has the potential to do game-winning amounts of damage while not setting your team back at all if you die. It might even help because it concentrates eco and lack of APM is a complete non-issue.

It seems every time I play this map my opponents know to go for comdrops/TML acus and whether I kill their acu or not, it sets us back a ton while not affecting the enemy team at all. I recall setons not being added to the 4v4 TMM pool because some players know how to play it while others don't, and that this would cause for extremely imbalanced games. From my experience, the same seems to be true for PoR.

Not convinced? See this.
https://imgur.com/a/k4fgTus

Thank you bully, I was on the edge until your ironclad proof came in.

It’s just one of those maps that suffer from the minimum rating for map selection issue right now I’d say, it’s fine as an introductory 4v4.

are you suggesting it should be in lower rated pools or in higher rated pools? i imagine the team that doesn't have a comdropper will lose either way. makes the map quite unenjoyable imo

I'm saying it should be in baby pools where people just don't think of doing that stuff.

@waffelznoob said in Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread:

I dont think anyone appreciates fullshare abuse. With fullshare abuse I mean going for "extremely risky" ACU plays or even just ctrl k'ing them into enemy armies and not losing much of value because

1. the ACU did tons of damage and/or the ACU explosion eliminated enemy threats
2. its easy for one player to manage two bases.

Now this might be a hot take, but it's why I believe PoR is a bad map for 4v4 fullshare. The meta is to abuse fullshare to its maximum potential through comdrops, TML acus, or even just ctrl k'ing the acu into enemy navy (each preferably done with one of the acus on the island with two spawns). It easily has the potential to do game-winning amounts of damage while not setting your team back at all if you die. It might even help because it concentrates eco and lack of APM is a complete non-issue.

It seems every time I play this map my opponents know to go for comdrops/TML acus and whether I kill their acu or not, it sets us back a ton while not affecting the enemy team at all. I recall setons not being added to the 4v4 TMM pool because some players know how to play it while others don't, and that this would cause for extremely imbalanced games. From my experience, the same seems to be true for PoR.

Not convinced? See this.
https://imgur.com/a/k4fgTus

It's one of the cases where I feel like that's one of (if not the) only navy maps that is suitable for the 500-1000 bracket. Like ftx said it's a bit of an map selection algorithm issue. That being said I don't generally like maps where the optimal way to play is toxic regardless of if players have the knowledge to do it or not.

In the end decision to include it is the lesser of two evils if the alternative is to not have a navy map in 500-1000 and instead have players jump into the deep end when they hit 1k rating. I think the main alternative for the pool is flooded tabula, but that feels a bit too reliant on the lower rating players knowing the way of the frig.

Anecdotally I don't mind playing PoR too much tbh, but I've also seen lots of comdrops. Last game I did a sparky drop myself B)

Loving the new higher rate of getting map gen maps by the way

Preliminary March 4v4 pool

By the way. Why the fck was MapGen-only-week removed?? It got such a positive feedback from all ranking ranges (as well as literally all my trainees I had during the past year) just for it to be used like two times and never again so we have trash such as Comet Catcher in the pool again.

I agree some mapgen only weeks could be nice the odd time but there's nothing wrong with comet catcher.

@jaggedappliance There's a good chance that I'm one of the few with that opinion, was a bit tilted and therefore threw in that random comment about Comet Catcher. I apologise for that randomness.
I didn't speak with a lot of people about that map, but honestly it's just boring to play in my opinion. The fact that there is zero reclaim and nothing "special" to fight for just makes it boring for me.
That's my perspective however and yes, I do hate the majority of 5x5 or 10x10 without a good amount of mass. E.g. Desert Arena is quite good imo, the counterpart such as Comet Catcher isn't.

(At this point I know the forum too well and want to note that I'm not talking about "it requires zero skill" or anything like that - so comments such as "just get good so it becomes more interesting and exciting to play" are kinda useless for me.)