Thanks to the ever amazing @arma473, I have been able to make a spreadsheet with the frequency that ladder matches on particular maps are aborted. I consider a game aborted if it ends within 90 seconds (initially I was doing 3 minutes, but it seems there are some openers such as first bomber, intie rush killing transports, etc. that will potentially end the game within 3 minutes). The data are composed of ladder matches going back to March 1st 2020 and are broken down by ladder rating.
@Valki while I’m not saying you’re wrong, I will say that your anecdotal experience about people quitting frequently on Badlands simply does not agree with the empirical data. 8 - Badlands_v4 has a 1.92% abort rate at <300 and a 2.12% abort rate at 300-800. For reference, the median abort rate for the <300 bracket is ambush the enemy with a 2.91% abort rate and is Vulcan's Reach with 4.44% for at 300-800. In fact, out of the 88 maps that have been played by ladder players at 300-800, only 8 maps have a lower abort rate than Badlands.
@Brutus5000 it seems your experience does match the data. For the 300-800 bracket, outside of Moonlight Mesas with a 20.95% abort rate, the next 4 aborted maps are all 20x20 maps (Seton's Clutch: 10.11%, Roanoke Abyss: 10.24%, Seraphim Glaciers: 11.13%, Crossfire Canal - FAF version: 15.00%). These are very high abort rates and should be taken into account.
Other interesting stats:
- 62/105 maps in the 1800+ bracket have a 0.00% abort rate.
- The highest abort rate maps are in the 1800+ bracket with Adaptive Kusoge at 22.72% and Broken_Vows at 22.22% (small sample size).
- The average* abort rate in the <300 bracket is 3.40%.
- The average* abort rate in the 300-800 bracket is 5.04%.
- The average* abort rate in the 800-1300 bracket is 4.19%.
- The average* abort rate in the 1300-1800 bracket is 3.03%.
- The average* abort rate in the 1800+ bracket is 2.47%.
*average calculated by weighting every map equally.
Overall, the higher the rating, the lower the abort rate. Perhaps the better you get, the less picky you are with maps because you are more comfortable playing a variety of maps (with a few notable exceptions). Or, perhaps the willingness to play on a greater variety of maps makes you a better player. Not sure which direction the causation arrow points. Also not really sure why 300-800 is the pickiest bracket by a decent margin.
Going forward for future ladder pools, I will also take abort data into consideration as an additional criterion when making the map pools.
@MarcSpector if you’d like to go through the trouble of going through the entire ladder map pool and marking each map by color I could take color of map into consideration.