This one may go without saying, but please remove H1, H2, and H3 from the map pool.
Last war we made a big deal about having lots of diversity in the map selection. This was caused in part by the quantity of maps promised by MCC, but also be the fact that in the past we have had repetitive battle nights playing the same handful of maps over and over again. I think it is pretty clear that MCC did not live up to its promises.
After this last war, I'm done with variety. I want to play well made maps with limited lag. That means H2A and H4.
Another thing that would be nice and may help resolve issues with repetitive battle nights is to have the war map formed around having the most high quality maps in the center. I don't think people dislike playing the same maps over and over again. I think people dislike playing the same bad map over and over again. If the map is lots of fun to play on, I wouldn't have an issue with it being played more frequently that the less fun maps.
The most significant criticism changing how the map selection is done is the fact that this is different than what we have done in the past. Historically it has been the HCs decision to make strategic choices with regards to map layout. Honestly, I don't see a significant difference in how the placement of a specific map will impact the war. Whatever strategy is used when selecting map locations is not nearly as important as ensuring high quality and fun battle nights.
This would be really easy to implement. Just stick up a poll or a Google Form with all of the maps that would be in the map selection process and let the community vote for their favorites. The highest ranked maps are put in the most played locations, the lower ranked maps on the outsides of the war map.
We could even make an exception and put good maps at the capitals to ensure that the capital battles are fun.
To determine which map locations are the most played we could do some sort of analysis on past wars (provided somebody still has the links to the Statbooks and War Map images). But I don't think we really need to go that technical with this. Common sense should be enough to determine where the best maps are placed (the center). Hopefully we will have enough forge maps to complement the on disk H4 and H2A map selection so that even the "bad" maps that are placed on the war map are still high quality. Instead of playing bad maps, we'll be playing maps that the community wants to play and our favorite maps most often (theoretically).
In case you were interested in the stats of what maps where played last war (game: number of battle nights):
H1: 3
H2: 8
H2A: 10
H3: 4
H4: 5
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