f13.net

This games, what, a few years old. Why are there so few maps?

For the same reason the game doesn't have a replay function.  Because.....uhh.......hmm.....HEY LOOK A NEW CHAMPION!

I'd hazard a guess that a large majority of people don't even play Twisted Tree Line or Dominion. Releasing more maps seems to be a losing proposition for them.  I'd be interested to see statistics on what's actually played, but I don't tihnk LoL wants to release those numbers.

However, an official ARAM/ARAB map would be pretty cool, and I'd be down for that. But I really have no desire to play 3s or LoL's take on Arathi Basin.  

Were their a variety of DOTA maps that saw a large amount of play?  And yah, the team that does something other than champion design doesn't seem to be large/active.  

I think it's largely because there are probably a lot of cool things they could do as a one night mess-around with the map editor, just like a lot of custom DOTA maps were, but that getting it to their level of fit and finish is probably a lot bigger of a thing.

I always figured it was because of the focus on competitive play - the big-time ranked tourney guys don't want to learn new maps, they want to own on the maps they have. Twisted Treeline doesn't get a lot of play at all, and Dominion is kind of relegated to deathmatch style games. They are both fun, but I haven't played either in close to a month now, and it doesn't seem as if the LoL guys want to try to add either to the competitive scene.

I'm going to guess the reason we haven't/won't see "official" ARAM or single draft mode has to do with using a random pool of champions when some people might only own the free week champs.  Which is a bummer, I'm really enjoying single draft mode in DotA 2 (you are given 3 random champions to chose from).

Starcraft would suggest otherwise, there you have a ton of maps. Not all are used competitively and some are genuinely biased, but you can have diversity. I suspect the major limiting factor is the need to have the mobs pathing between bases, and with three lanes you only have so many practical topologies. I don't know why they haven't explored the possibility of more 5-player 2-lane maps though.

Well Molten Chamber should be released in 2011 so people can look forward to trying that.  :why_so_serious:

I guess I just don't get why after...what 2 years or so there isn't more. Considering the "world" map looks to allow for more. It can't be that hard to make some variety.

That's a fun sentence.

Competitive games aren't about the number of maps, Bloodworth. Not even a little. Creating one balanced, fun map is hard enough. There's thousands of maps for counterstrike. People play on about 2 or 3 of them.

New maps don't make them money, at least not directly.  They can sell you $7.50 spark ponies bi-monthly for little effort.  They're absolutely huge, and I think like WoW, they aren't going to deviate from their working business model until something start whittling down their player base.

Plus, it seems like their tools for creating new maps or implementing additional features are just not there.  I imagine their code base is a mess.  Someone asked recently why they couldn't just use the tutorial map for an ARAM, and their response was "it's hard coded, so it's basically a stand alone game.  There's no way to import it."

Jerk. 

LoL pretty much is Summoner's Rift.  That's all it'll ever be on the competitive scene as well.  This does influence things.

Would still love to see an ARAM rule set though, even though it probably won't ever happen.  Doesn't seem that hard though...just remove healing from the spawn completely, use a trimmed down one lane map, all random and you're done with the majority of it.  Although people would never agree on what the "correct" rule set is.

Right, because clearly you can't have competition on different layouts, or even themes.   :awesome_for_real:   I get that a fun balanced map is work. But, its not like they haven't had some time to work that out. Kind of interesting, they have sold this idea, so they only need to add champs. Brilliant.

They have a one-lane map. It's used in the tutorial section.

At the very least they could do a few more random pallet/model swaps like they have for Christmas and Halloween. Break up the monotony a little.

Duhr herp dur.

My guess is that most people just want to play whichever map they think they're most likely to win on... and, if they think they're equally likely to win everywhere, they want the one with the shortest wait time. As a general tendency: After visiting and figuring out which new map is "best", that's quickly the only one anybody visits.

I think that too much of the game is tied up in all the details of SR, and changing those requires tweaking so many other aspects to maintain balance that by the time you're done you can barely even consider the result to be League of Legends any more. Dominion, for example, has to apply a huge mana regen buff to all champions (in addition to all the free levels) to offset the more active play style and lack of blue. This in turn changes item balance because MP5 is devalued, and so on. One of the biggest reasons nobody plays Twisted Treeline is because there are so many champs that just aren't considered viable there.

This exactly.

I can't play Dominion because it's just a a totally different game. The value of items is different, the relative strength of champions is different, the important skills are different.

The map is not really separate from the game rules. A new map is a new game.

I would like an all mid map.

ARAM is pretty fun but the champion balance is atrocious. I played a couple All Draft All Mid games but the other team chose poorly and we completely crushed them worse than if the champs had been assigned randomly.