[Suggestion] Cleaning up the map pool - Community-voted rotation: Revisited

[Velzerat]

Cleaning up the map pool - Community-voted rotation: Revisited

It seems to me like the current map pool is oversaturated and the map rotation is broken. There are currently two big problems with the map rotation:

• The map pool is oversaturated: There are too many maps.
  • There are a lot of bad/not-so-good maps, too. They aren’t terrible, but they’re clearly inferior to other maps and/or are just follow the beaten-to-death grass with stone formula which a thousand maps have been based on.
• The vote is uneven: Even though the map pool is so oversaturated, some maps appear in the vote often while others appear almost never
• There is an uneven split between Creative and Survival rounds (though this is probably a good thing—there are more Survival maps than Creative so an even split between the two would lead to the same Creative maps being played over and over again

These are subtle problems yet I think they’re important enough that they should be addressed. What I propose is the following few things:

A set amount of maximum maps in the map pool
This would make sure that the map pool would not be oversaturated and ensure quality within the map pool, as only the best maps would be kept while maps of inferior quality would get removed. You could also make it so that when new maps get added, only 5 more maps can be added than the map pool threshold—after that, an older map would need to get deleted.

Community-voted rotation
Some maps are liked by the community, others disliked. It only makes sense to get rid of the ones disliked by people, and keep the ones that people actually enjoy playing on. This could be done through a google form or similar. The best thing about it is that such a form could be created by a regular member of the community so it would take next-to-no effort for the administration team to get & extrapolate from the data. Re-doing this every six months or so would definitely help with keeping the map pool fresh, too.

Also, I don’t think the players alone should have a say in this. The people “higher up”, (ex-)staff, people who know RoF/mapmaking really well, should go through the map pool and get rid of all those unoriginal/grass maps. It shouldn’t be completely based off of the opinion of the playerbase.

Make sure every map has an equal chance of appearing in the vote
I don’t know how the map vote is coded right now but it seems clear that it’s not completely random. Some maps occur a lot more than others, while other maps almost never appear in the vote at all or always seem to be bundled with better/more favorable maps, resulting in them never getting chosen.

More options
(Refrigerated thought of this and it’s amazing) More options when voting would be nice too. Especially if it were an even split between two survival maps and two creative maps. I think 4 options would actually be the solution to most problems in this thread. It would also allow for more variation as more options are available.
So, to sum up, I think these are they key changes that would need to be made to the map rotation:

• Have a maximum amount of maps in the map pool at all times
• Make sure each map has an equal chance of appearing in the vote as all other maps
• Allow for more options (4 would be most optimal I think) when voting for a map, try to keep it balanced between Survival & Creative
• Have a community-voted rotation so that the playerbase can decide which maps they like and which ones they don’t (INCLUDING removed maps)
• Clean up the map pool by getting rid of all those grassmaps or otherwise low quality maps and keep them to a higher standard

Thoughts?

 

[Shadow5980]

10/10. I think the different votes for maps and survival or create will be good because people have more choices of what they would like to do.

 

[Jivvi]

remove everything that's not waterpit

 

[Love]

remove everything that's not waterpit

and nightmare

 

[Deleted member 4601]

Make sure each map has an equal chance of appearing in the vote as all other maps

Although it might not seem like this is the case, maps do have equal chance of appearing. It's just that human perception of randomness is a little weird. xD

We're probably better off by having the maps appear in the same order everytime.

 

[Mastersten]

We're probably better off by having the maps appear in the same order everytime.

Would we?
Agree there are many maps but letting them all slide in the same order isnt gonna improve much, people who join will almost automatically do the same cause they know what map is gonna come after this and they got 0 influence in deciding it.

If it needs to become more random we could always ask ComputerGuy_ since hes the expert of randomness.

But staying on topic, some maps are old so I personally agree with removing some.

 

[SirComputer]

public String getRandomMap() {
List<String> maps = this.controller.getMapsNotPlayed();
return maps.get(this.random.nextInt(maps.size()));
}

That's our random map code atm. It doesn't favour any maps, and makes sure all maps are played before going back round and playing them all again. The only way you could probably get more frequently occurring maps is if you're playing right around the time the mapsNotPlayed list resets. Maybe I could think of another way of doing this?

Oh, and a survival/creative split isn't going to work with Deathrun, unless you want to count deathrun in with survival.

 

[Velzerat]

Oh, and a survival/creative split isn't going to work with Deathrun, unless you want to count deathrun in with survival.

Wouldn't something like this work:

VOTE ONE - very high chance of survival map, very low chance for deathrun
VOTE TWO - very high chance of survival map, very low chance for deathrun
VOTE THREE - very high chance of creative map, very low chance for deathrun
VOTE FOUR - very high chance of creative map, very low chance for deathrun

 

[kuilin]

I think the way TF2 handles map switches is the best. Basically, any player can use a command to nominate any map that's on the server. At vote time, two maps are chosen from the rotation set randomly, plus all the player nominated maps, and voted upon. Possible fun extensions can be including a high score for the number of successful nominations, etc, to encourage quality nominations.

 

[SirComputer]

I think the way TF2 handles map switches is the best. Basically, any player can use a command to nominate any map that's on the server. At vote time, two maps are chosen from the rotation set randomly, plus all the player nominated maps, and voted upon. Possible fun extensions can be including a high score for the number of successful nominations, etc, to encourage quality nominations.

I quite like the sound of that, and it shouldn't be too hard to add, plus the high scores etc will be quite cool to see. If we were to go down this route, would a /nominate or /nom command work? I'm in favour of doing it this way at the moment.

 

[Mastersten]

I quite like the sound of that, and it shouldn't be too hard to add, plus the high scores etc will be quite cool to see. If we were to go down this route, would a /nominate or /nom command work? I'm in favour of doing it this way at the moment.

Add a mapcooldown to prevent maps being played too often

 

[Velzerat]

Also, a rock the vote within the first 2 or so minutes of the map would be nice, maybe.