Hi, Wax from TLMC here.

With the new 1v1 maps going live on Battle.net, we wanted to give an overview of how the official map pool came together. Also, we have some initial thoughts on how ladder map rotations might work going forward.

Two maps from the previous pool

• Ley Lines
  
• Ultralove

Top 3 community voted maps from TLMC #20 finalists

• Last Fantasy
  
• Persephone
  
• Torches

Top 3 pro-player polled maps from TLMC #20 finalists

• Incorporeal
  
• Tokamak
  
• Magannatha

Top 1 pick from map-maker poll

• Tokamak (overlap with pro-poll)
  
• Incorporeal (overlap with pro-poll)
  
• Pylon

Previously, ESL was crucial in communicating with Blizzard and enabling continued ladder map rotations. When ESL stepped away from the process with the closure of the ESL Pro Tour, there was limited time for TLMC to step into the role and ready a new map pool ahead of the EWC tournament cycle. Due to the time crunch, we focused on the short term goal of readying a map pool that could serve as a rough approximation of the community's preferences.

The first provisional map pool began with the top six pro-player + TLMC public voting picks in an attempt to reflect the opinions of two key parts of the playerbase. While Last Fantasy was somewhat controversial for being the first 3+ starting position candidate map in years, testing did not reveal any serious competitive issues with the maps and all six were retained for the final pool.

We considered input from the map-maker community as well, as they are important stakeholders who enable map rotations in the first place. Polling of qualified map-makers (those who have won a finalist spot in the past five contests) revealed that their top two map picks aligned with the pros. As their third pick of Pylon placed highly in both the TLMC public vote and the pro survey, Pylon was chosen as the seventh new map.

With regard to the number of old maps to keep, public polling favored a full rotation of nine maps. However, voter participation was limited and the "swap all" option did not win by a large margin. Out of caution, we elected to keep two old maps and swap in seven new ones—essentially bringing in the same number of new maps when the map pool was smaller.

Ley Lines was by far the most played tournament map from the previous map pool, and also had reasonably balanced win-rates and play-rates across the three factions. Among the remaining maps, Ultralove had the next best overall balance numbers. While some maps had a similar number of total games played as Ultralove, their win-rate and play-rate numbers were skewed toward specific factions.

We'll be taking a more long-term view going forward, communicating with Blizzard, players, organizers, map-makers, and other stakeholders to try and find a more systematic and permanent framework for map rotations (for both 1v1 and team modes). An eventual goal of ours is to have a semi-automatic seasonal rotation system that requires minimal outside input—map-makers have certainly submitted enough ladder-quality maps to form the foundation.

In the meanwhile, we encourage organizations to keep trying out maps from outside the official map pool that fit their competitive needs. There's no inherent reason that competitive StarCraft II should be constricted to nine maps, and we've enjoyed seeing the variety of maps used in the past few months.

We hope you enjoy the new maps, and let us know what you want from StarCraft II maps going forward.