Sir, your post is awesome, except this part.
This looks bad if it is per-map voting. That is totally missing the point of the preferred maps system for me.
My problem: how will I tell the system in 3-5 clicks
- that today I’m in the mood to play Tunisia, Moscow or Japanese/Burma maps but nothing else?
- and that tomorrow I wish to skip Moscow maps but play anything else because yesterday it was too much?
- or that after this neverending and boring match I’m fed up with the confrontation mode for a while so let’s skip that for two days…
So the like/dislike will not solve the issues the merge caused and may be harmful - it may end up in dislikes to certain maps even in the case when the map was perfect just the match was bad/painful. (Instead of a singular dislike if I could tell whether it was a problem with the map, the game mode, the game engine e.g. network disconnections or the team/certain players why I disliked the match or perhaps because of RNG repetition, it would be actually useful for you at least.)
It may help to bring back e.g. Kamenka River which is not part of the map cycle any more (at least I did not see it recently) - but even that will work only if I can vote on all maps, not just the current. And if all maps are listed with modes intermixed and without text/region filters, it will be a bad experience to find the maps to vote. (Can you perhaps improve the custom match map selection so it becomes easy to set up an Avantgarde - Kamenka - etc map cycle easily without a huge amount of scrolling?)
For me a preferred maps system would be on the main screen, listing
- War theaters: Moscow - Stalingrad - Tunisia - Japan - Normandy - Berlin
- Game modes: invasion, conquest, confrontation …
And preference tick box next to each: preferred - neutral - not preferred
This way I could change my mind simply.
Plus a “detailed map selection” button to open a new screen where I can set my likes/bans per map+game mode, which could override the front page “global” settings.
(If this like/dislike will be a per-map thing after the matches, please don’t force us to vote - let us leave them unvoted as well as this is really not what I wish for map voting/vetoing, because I fear it will mix up the match and the mode.)
For the rest: thank you for putting this together. I like these reports about plans much more than reading about banning modders (can you perhaps ask to reduce Bazsi’s penalty by 50% to 500 years?) My only concern is that it is only planned features…