Ranked is repetitive.

There is another point. And that is expected play time per game.
I would assume that a usual game on the ladder will take about 10 to 20 minutes on a sub 450r planet and up to 30 minutes on the larger maps. (This is far from accurate, for sure, since I don't play ladder and usually play small maps against AI, but I hope you get the point.)
I'm not sure how happy people are if you start throwing in larger planets and people start realizing that pressing that button will put them into a game ranging from a few 10 minutes to over an hour. I know what you are saying now, and yes, this will not happen on Uber or at least it will be not be that often. but if you take into account that matchmaking tries to match players with the same skill and you look at the lower ranks it suddenly looks completely different.

@cola_colin you have access to the pa-stats database. Can you give us a overview of the time spend on all official 1v1 systems played in an 1v1 configuration. I would be curious to see if there is any correlation between play time an planet radius on the current dataset. (I would recommend you to use median and not average, because I expect a lot of outliers in the dataset.)

what do you about a system generator for 1v1?

You mean randomly generated 1v1 maps? There was some debate about this a while ago. I seem to remember that the "pro" players were mostly against this idea, but that some scrubs like myself support this idea. I would love to play on random maps each time, if the map generator can generate nice maps. I really love the new maps with all the plateaus and stuff, and I'm not sure how good the map generator is / could be for generating this kind of stuff. Now that we have symmetry, I believe that random maps would be fair, even though I'm still in favour of the good old way of randomly generated asymmetrical maps. While it may not be as balanced, or as 'strategic' or whatever terms people like to throw around, I feel like random maps are more fun and diverse. I like that you have to adapt on the fly, and I miss the days when you had to scout not to see what your opponent was doing, but where they were.

I thought we settled this long time ago, randomized spawns are bad for competitive play because worse player can win vs better player just because he got lucky with spawns.
The answer is to implement some bigger maps and some exodus maps into ranked play, they are extremely good. Air is not imbalanced, there is plenty of counters, it's just strong sometimes but going mass air alone will never win you the game

Matiz, no one who isn't a derp has suggested randomized non-symmetrical maps be in the pool. No one wants those. We want symmetrical random maps.

"We" does not include me

Then you're a derp. Stawp being a derp.

I don't want random maps at all. They're just not as good.

Glorious way tto make an argument
It also does not include me. Random maps in general are bad and we have discussed enough about that really. Yes in theory there could be a map generator as good as real humans. In reality the generator doesn't even come close.

The Awesome system generator but actually a good generator I think. The would still go for 1v1.

The awesome system generator mod is a ton of complex javascript, but it doesn't place CSGs smartly. CSG placement is the real issue with random generators.

Smart, random CSG placement would be a very onerous task.

A task impossible to do via normal modding.

In reality they haven't taken steps to improve the generator. So the argument is moot.

Point is, ranked is only played by people trying it out and the rest of you diehards. Most of us play PA in a LAN party-style fashion. 10 or so people get together in a teamspeak and have organized FFAs or Team games that are both fun and challenging for everyone. And, the better players can help the new guys learn how to play. Its win win.

Few in the playerbase play ranked. PA is not set up for it right now.

Let me put this in perspective.

Colin, Matiz: Your points are good ones. Problem is, ranked isn't fun. The maps are ****. The playerbase is small. People want bigger maps, but dont want games to take longer - then there's people who want smaller maps because they cant handle the bigger ones (mentally, not PC). And they all come on here saying that *this is fine ranked is competitive yadayada*

And they're in the majority on this here forums.

And they're wrong. Because ranked is not fun - it's grindy. The same maps over and over and over. No. This isn't Starcraft or Grey Goo or whatever. We can be different than every other game out there. No one has tried random maps before because they dismiss them offhand as terrible and unbalanced.

PA can change all that and be an amazing example of what ranked 1v1 play should be all about: Pushing the envelope.

But right now?

It's the same as it was a year ago: stale. Uninteresting. Repetitive.

Thanks for telling me what is fun and what is not. It's always hard to tell for myself

as it would be if everyone could submit a map. The time being be played only in cutsom games. After the game, giving the participants a vote across the map. If the rating is well and gave the minimum number of votes, the map is adopted ranks in the 1v1. (Star rating)

in german

wie wäre es wenn jeder eine map einreichen könnte. Die vorerst nur in cutsom games gespielt werden. Nach dem spiel geben die teilnehmer eine bewertung für die map. Wenn die Wertung gut ist und die mindest anzahl von abstimmungen gab wird die map in die 1v1 ranks übernommen. (sterne bewertung)

Another problem with terrain that nobody else seems to care about; despite having a huge number of seeds, the number of distinct height maps you can get from them is somewhere in the magnitude of a few hundred, max (could be much less, but I'd have to cross-examine dozens of maps to get a good figure, and that would take far too much time). And those few hundred don't seem to be random, but some collection that falls in a small region of possibilities (like having a few hundred colours to choose from, but all of them being shades of purple).

Depends what you mean. A custom procedural way to place brushes should be possible, but may be restricted to something you'd run on a saved custom planet in localstorage (save terrain height data in the same way ubermap gets it, however that is, and the rest of the relevant data can be found in localstorage).

Surely this problem could be easily solved by adding a ton of new maps into ranked?

Definitely. Big maps, maps with lots of metal, comm boxing maps (lol) etc.

I'm down with that!

What we need in addition to Uber maps in a roster of 5 community maps. The maps would not be permanent, but will be voted in and stay on the ladder for a period of time. This should be community made maps that we want on the ladder It would not be there forever either. That would solve all the problems here. It would not be so repetitive. We would get better maps and different maps (bigger etc)