[Melee / Ladder] Map Pool Changes Revealed, PTR soon

[StoPCampinGn00b]

While Hive may not have a big ladder playerbase, this is still quite a huge upcoming update. The map pools have been heavily altered, and many melee maps have be edited. What's mainly been edited are creep camps, gold mines, trees and such. There are also some maps with edited terrain. The new map pool will be tested on the upcoming PTR, and we expect the date of it to be released shortly.
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20758635866

This also means that Blizzard can finally focus on content (modding, ladder, custom game, etc improvements) more, which is a good sign. It's been a rough ride, but we're finally getting there. Enjoy.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

Yay for Gold Rush!

 

[Abovegame]

This is great news

 

[Eat_Bacon_Daily]

This is superb news, but they missed an opportunity to add the current competitive maps such as Amazonia or Last Refuge. I hope they will reconsider before it's too late, or Battle.net will continue to remain avoided by the pro-scene. It's already hard enough to play on it as the ping is still higher than other platforms.

Although this is amazing news for the casual 4v4s. They removed all the forced-tech maps and the abysmal Last Man Standing map. This is absolutely a step in the right direction for that aspect of wc3.

In summary, since they started updating wc3, they have done a fairly good job with the modding scene (fixing stuff the patch broke, increase map size limite, but breaking NG pack), they are moving in the right direction for the pro-scene (Updating item drops, reducing BNet Ping), they are doing a great job for the casual 4v4 scene with these last mentionned changes, but I would say they have messed up the community features of Battle.net (Removing the consolidated WarCraft III USA-1 channels for the terrible WC3-1 channels and allowing illegal characters into usernames). It still is overall a mixed bag, but they are moving in the right direction.

 

[StoPCampinGn00b]

This is superb news, but they missed an opportunity to add the current competitive maps such as Amazonia or Last Refuge. I hope they will reconsider before it's too late, or Battle.net will continue to remain avoided by the pro-scene. It's already hard enough to play on it as the ping is still higher than other platforms.

Although this is amazing news for the casual 4v4s. They removed all the forced-tech maps and the abysmal Last Man Standing map. This is absolutely a step in the right direction for that aspect of wc3.

In summary, since they started updating wc3, they have done a fairly good job with the modding scene (fixing stuff the patch broke, increase map size limite, but breaking NG pack), they are moving in the right direction for the pro-scene (Updating item drops, reducing BNet Ping), they are doing a great job for the casual 4v4 scene with these last mentionned changes, but I would say they have messed up the community features of Battle.net (Removing the consolidated WarCraft III USA-1 channels for the terrible WC3-1 channels and allowing illegal characters into usernames). It still is overall a mixed bag, but they are moving in the right direction.

Agreed. But I think the intention was that Blizzard wants to change up the map meta as much as possible, but they want to see if it'll work well in the PTR first. I'm sure if the 1v1 map pool has negative feedback during the PTR, they'll change it accordingly. But for now, they want to test it out and hope others can be fine with the massive pool shift.