Dear Devs, please expand the Masters Map Pool

Masters League is a special league in that a lot of the active players in our community spend a lot of time in it each season. The reasons for that are:

1. Below Masters, there's win streak bonuses, which makes climbing to the next leagues easier
2. Masters already has an L13 cap, which is far higher than most players' decks. This means they have to fight against higher-levelled decks a lot of the time.
3. The seasonal reset puts Masters players into leagues from where they can climb quickly back to Masters, but then need a lot of time to potentially get to Tiberium

You can say much of the above also for Tiberium. Yet, in Tiberium League, the map pool gets a lot of love from the devs:

• There is no limitation of Tiberium League maps to one tileset. In Masters, there's the limitation to "Ice tile set" maps.
• The Tiberium League map pool gets shuffled around each month
• The Tiberium League map pool is larger, i.e. you have more diversity within a season

In April, I had suggested to at least change the Masters Map pool, leveraging the other Ice maps that existed in lower leagues. And whether my suggestion was the reason for it or not, that's what the devs thankfully did a couple of weeks later.

Now, in my view, it's time to apply the same logic of the Tiberium League map pool to the Masters League. Map diversity for a large share of the core player base is just more important than the (in my view artificial) self-imposed rule that Masters maps must be of "Ice tile set".

Hence, my suggestion to the devs:

Please make the Masters map pool larger, and don't restrict it to Ice maps. Your community will thank you.

One additional, more optional suggestion:

• Assume there's a Masters map pool of 8 or 10 maps.
• Each month, there could be a public poll, sent to Masters players via in-game message, to ask them which 4-5 maps should be rotated out.
• That way, the players can help the devs in changing the map pool. And the devs can make the players feel more heard & involved.

To support this message to the devs (or prove it wrong!), you can participate in this short survey on map pools and map diversity. Thanks for doing so!

[Edit] The survey reached 45 responses so far, 70% of them from players who spend most of the time in a month in Masters league. Results:

• Most players want a map pool size of 10 (both average and median is at 10)
• Masters players' average is even higher at 11
• Only 3 of the 45 respondents want only Ice maps in Masters league
• 31% of the respondents don't care about the tile set, and 62% would even prefer tile set diversity in Masters league

I think the result is very clear. Of course it's a biased subset of highly engaged Masters players. But I cannot conceive that the average Masters player would have a vastly different opinion.

Besides Ice, Ice, Ice getting a bit one-sided aesthetically, the Ice maps also contain some "anti favorites", like good old Canal Row

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