The_Celestial_Warrior wrote:
audrisampson wrote:
On the map rotation thing is that something we even need? We have the back of Catina that could be easily used in restricted and so far Mas Transit 4 looks pretty good. That puts us at roughly 20 maps that would be legal in restricted play. That is already a ton of diversity and maybe it would get Anchorhead and a few others that don't see as much play back into use over time.
In my opinion, those are statements for a rotation. We have a lot of good maps on the Restricted List and some aren't seeing play. Essentially, any sort of rotation would cut the list in half with each half having half the year in competitive play. Variety, if split right, would stay the same but the maps we see should increase.
Yep, I think this is totally true. You want Ancorhead or Mos Eisley Residence to see play? Put them on a much smaller list (6-8) and have that be the restricted list. That's one of the main reasons I want to see a rotation.
The other reason is that it lowers the barrier of entry for new players. Right now there are 15 legal maps; that's a lot of maps to learn. If it were just 6-8, new players would be able to get a handle on them much more easily just because there is less of them at once.
One problem with that is that when the list changes they have to learn a WHOLE new list. That's why I think that only half the list should actually rotate at a time. Say we split the list up into 3 groups of 4 and a group of 3 maps, named A, B, C, D, where D has 3 maps.
In January 2013, lists A and B will be legal.
In July 2013, list A will no longer be legal but list C will be, so lists B and C are legal.
In January 2014 lists C and D are legal.
In July 2014, lists D and A are legal.
Now every map has been legal at some point, and each map has been legal for a total of 12 out of the 24 months. For any given set of 12 months there has also been some maps that have been consistent. That way if you start playing in, say, Fall of 2013, you can learn maps on list C and they will be legal all the way until July 2014 instead of learning maps and then they become illegal in January 2013.
In January 2015 you can switch up all the lists and do it again.
One problem with this is that it makes it very difficult to add new maps to the rotation, but I'm sure that could be handled somehow.