Please fix the MAP generator

Hi everyone,

I know we all love the hard work the devs do to keep this game wild and fun.

However it has come to my attention that the new map gen maps are far to unbalanced with reclaim mass spawns. Its difficult to get a wanted result even after adjusting the "slider" that allows you do randomize this and generating 10 or so maps.

Wolla you spend 10-40 mins filling a lobby late a night for oceanic and you spawn in with 50k plus reclaim on the map with reclaim "slider" set to 0 and its a rush to t3 and t1 phase is gone.

Its almost every game like this. Please adjust the slider to be more accurate with the mass generated on the map please.

If you like map gens please comment if you also find this to be the case.

Could you link some replays with unexpected amounts of reclaim?

In the games that you launched yourself with phong that was just created with the boulderfield prop generator which has the most reclaim. If you want full control over the prop generation then you need to select a prop generator as well as setting the reclaim density

@sheikah Thanks for the info ill try and play around with these settings however this only solves the problem if i create games.

Its a little unclear how to setup these new settings to get consistent map styles. It there was a bit more description it would make a huge diff. Rather than lots of trial and error.

Since the settings update of mapgen it has gotten literally 100x harder or almost impossible to generate a "good" map (considered good by me and some other guys like Rezy and so on). I don't really know how to explain this or how to fix it, but it feels like most maps are either generated so that the game gets static (nothing really to fight over, mountains in the way or just spawns being too far away from the shore), or it is an all or nothing drop situation.
I mostly use the settings random with adjusted mex and reclaim slider - nothing else. Maps are slightly better when choosing diagonal symmetry, but still not that good as before.

I like the switch to separate generators and away from sliders in general. I always felt like the impact of the sliders was very unpredictable before, whereas now the overall shapes of the map are more controllable.

That being said, the default, minimal fiddle, all random behavior does tent to make boulderified maps way more often now, and more often than the UI would suggest, which is worse.

I don't know specifically if the prop generator now gets picked completely randomly if set to random, with the reclaim slider later acting as a parameter to the one that got picked, or if the slider affects the probability distribution function over generators, but maybe the latter is worth considering. Although I'm not familiar enough with the other prop generators and if they can easily fit into such a scheme, it seems to me the most intuitive behavior should be for this specific one to only start showing up if the reclaim slider is set quite high.

If such a fix is not quite quick enough, another very interesting suggestion by @snoog was to make the drop-down menus of the map generator multi-select. This would allow users to opt out of specific prop generators or biomes while still enjoying most of the diversity on menu. It's a (hopefully) small change to the UI that improves things a lot for the users since most people have negative preferences - they don't want a specific biome for instance, they just want to avoid the white one.

The prop generators get picked at random if set to random, but they have weights attached to them which influences the pick chance. Sheikah recently reduced the chance to get the boulderfield and large battle prop generators to reduce the chance to get a map with lots of reclaim.

Before, the sliders affected which map styles could be chosen, so that might be the reason why people perceive that the probability to get certain styles of maps has changed.
Now the two remaining sliders act as input of the chosen generator. We should probably disable them unless you choose a specific prop or resource generator. It doesn't make sense to specify random prop generator and low reclaim amount at the same time. Some prop generators will produce a lot of reclaim even with a low reclaim density as input.
As you said, it's very unpredictable when the slider decides which generators can be chosen because it's not transparent to the user which slider setting disables certain generators. So switching back to this doesn't seem like a good option.

Someone is working on a multiselect option to make this kind of opt-out behaviour possible.

When you use a custom style the prop generators and all the other generators are chosen with a uniform probability.

There are weights that come into play when you use the non custom styles to produce reasonable maps with reasonable frequency. But that all does not apply when you choose to customize the map yourself.

Interesting, I didn't know all this about how the probabilities work. So if I understand this right, by ticking the "use custom style" checkbox, I've also switched from hand-tuned to flat probabilities that each generator option gets picked when set to random? In that case what I said earlier about default behavior is not true, as my assumptions were incorrect, and it seems this problem is already addressed for casual hosts.

Correct when the use custom style is ticked the end user is assuming all responsibility for the map generation and any "smart" behavior is turned off.

So anything not explicitly specified is chosen at random from all the options.