Topic: maps - Storm answers

First a bit of background: a player recently posted a blog entry, where he basically raged about the maps being bad. Storm got pretty pissed and wrote a short "counter-entry" and answered in the comments. Here is the info he shared:

- Komarin and Swamp will return in 2013 (Storm writes that on Komarin, the bases will be where the spawns are now)
- the re-worked maps are considered a failure and will be re-worked again

- Dragon's Ridge will be removed from the game in 0.8.4 and it will be reworked - how, Storm doesn't know yet
- Serene Coast will be removed also - also reworked, also not sure how yet
- all maps have the same chance to be selected  - except for the new ones
- Prokhorovka will be "levelled" more, there are too many holes
- special maps for modes - not for now
- only 3-4 maps out of 33 are considered problematic, Storm hints that the problematic maps will be removed in 0.8.4 (SS: could imply not only Serene Coast and Dragon's Ridge will get removed)
- the broken roads of Ruinberg were also unintended (SS: not sure whether they got fixed or not yet)
- Storm will look into the server aiming circle for arty issue
- Storm won't remove the problematic maps right now, because it's technically complicated, it requires a server patch and currently, another patch is inbound, it has also to be done manually by removing files on the server (noone made an interface to do that, as the maps are removed like this only rarely)
- the issue of selecting for yourself which 3-4 maps you don't want to play is complicated - there would be balancing issues during low activity periods (early mornings etc.) and they can't make it work in prime time only, as some servers (US, Asia) have low activity periods quite often and because players would (rightfully) claim "why doesn't it work when I selected that in settings". A player followed this with a question if it could be done for RU server only, as an experiment (just as the EU server has the experimental nickname change and Russians don't), but Storm stated that would create too much anger, as this option is very much desired and EU players would rage they don't have that. It would be possible to create a system where ONE map can be de-selected, but Storm is still afraid of implementing that, because he thinks it would backfire. It would also create MM issues and cause longer waiting times, which is not acceptable in this case.