Director's Take - Mapping Out the Future

news.blizzard.com:

Hi all! We’re back a little earlier than we had originally planned. Think of this as a bonus Dev Chat!

We’re going to mostly focus on maps and level design this go around.

Off we go!

Map Pools… You were right. We were wrong. Map Pools are going away starting in season 4. We aimed to provide a bit of freshness each season and concentrate the number of maps that people were playing, however player sentiment around map pools was pretty low, the map roster doesn’t have enough maps where we truly need them, and the impact they had on seasonal identity was fairly low. Additionally, the cadence for maps leaving and returning to the pool didn’t align with the time it took to make changes to the maps. Gibraltar was supposed to return in Season 4 but the playtesting and iteration we were doing for the map started calling that deadline into question. There’s the possibility that we bring map pools back in the far future when we have a lot more maps in the game. If we were to bring them back, they would probably rotate at a faster rate, potentially every week. If you hate this idea, set a reminder for 2 years from now and let us know!

Map frequency. Some players seem to think that we set the frequency of maps in the pool higher for new maps and game modes. The example we hear a lot is that Colosseo comes up much more frequently than other maps. We don’t have any special code that prefers one map over another. However, it’s not entirely random. We have been looking into this based off of player reports and there is a detail of the matchmaking system that does elevate Push maps a bit. The matchmaker tries to avoid people playing the same map as well as the same game mode over a short period of time. Since Push has fewer maps than other