What ever happened to map variety?

[VoltySquirrel]

Okay, I brought this up in another thread where I pointed out that on both Slayboxes, 9/10 times, the map being played is either Goldrush, Badwater, Dustbowl, and Upward. I love all these maps, but I get tired of them. That's the same reason I don't play CS:S often, because they only play 2-4 maps consistently. The map voting/nominating system is there to get maps out of a rotation and into the communities hands, but all that's ever played is those 4 maps. A round or two of Gravel Pit, Doublecross, Granery, or Viaduct ain't gonna kill us.

[Vivi Hill]

The thing is, there are a lot of people who will quit if a map like koth_nucleus is voted for. The server might go down to 6 players, even. People join our server for the rotation, and if they get something out of the ordinary they leave. I know what you mean about map variation--I think the maps no one plays are fun and I wish we could play them more often.

The plugin we have now puts those popular maps (upward, dustbowl, freight, goldrush, badwater) in the top option. This way people who don't care will generally vote for it. It works very well for keeping the server stable. We could try randomizing the vote order so that the popular maps are always there but not always the first option. This could improve the variety while still giving people the option to have the standard rotation.

What do yall think about that? I think it could work. We could at least experiment for a couple days and if it empties the server then we'll have no choice but to change back.

Another solution is to be very vocal near the end of the match. Ask people the map they would like to play, "Anyone want to try nucleus?", nominate that map, and see how the vote turns out. Along the same lines, I think nominate should allow you to nominate any stock map as an option. I will work on that config at some point.

[VoltySquirrel]

I don't know, but anything that randomizes things is welcome by me. I actually am happy when a unpopular map pops up. Well, we'll find out when people talk about it.

[supersonic5000]

IMO the more maps that are played the better. I hate playing the same map over and over but that's just me.

[Divide by NaN]

Yeah, I don't get why people bail on Nucleus. I like your idea of having standard rotation with the option to nominate whatever map the server has. There's got to be some way to easily find out (motd?) which maps the server hosts though.

[Vivi Hill]

Well, if you type "nominate" you'll see the list in a menu.

[GoDM1N]

Don't know if you can do this, but why not make it so every other map is a set map, maybe the more popular maps or just maps you'd like to see more of, and then make it so between each map theres a vote for the next map? So it would go

Set map

voted map

set map

voted map
ect
ect
ect

Had a chance to play a KotH map, something I've not played since it came out for the most part, and actually had a good time. Server didn't die, and before we knew it we were back on dustbowl.

[Failhorse]

I was on the old server tonight and kept it pretty oddball all night. as soon as i went away it went back to normal tho.

[John Magnum]

How difficult would it be to give different rotations to the different slayboxes? Maybe Slaybox I could have the more popular maps be more prominent in the voting screens, and Slaybox II could be more randomized and give the less common maps a higher profile. I don't know much about managing servers, so maybe this would be prohibitively difficult, but it might satisfy everyone.