I don't know about other people but if I see one more Turks/Bohemians game on a closed map I'm going to lose my mind. There are what, 900 unique civ matchups in this game? Yet in these high level mixed map tournaments we end up seeing a lot of the same matchups over and over.
An idea to fix that would be to draft maps and then allow players to globally ban 2-4 civs for each map and then do hidden pick no repeat from there. Once the blatantly "best" civs are out of the mix the pool of viable civs should in theory open up considerably leading to more diverse matchups. How much more interesting would Islands be if we saw, I don't know, Saracens vs Malay sometimes? Or Nomad without Spanish/Malians. Or literally any hybrid map without Japanese.
I think it's a comfort thing for players—they prefer to play these matchups over and over because they're used to them, they know what to expect and what to do. But for viewers it's less than ideal, and for me the average random civ ladder game is more interesting than the average tournament game at this point.
An idea to fix that would be to draft maps and then allow players to globally ban 2-4 civs for each map and then do hidden pick no repeat from there. Once the blatantly "best" civs are out of the mix the pool of viable civs should in theory open up considerably leading to more diverse matchups. How much more interesting would Islands be if we saw, I don't know, Saracens vs Malay sometimes? Or Nomad without Spanish/Malians. Or literally any hybrid map without Japanese.
I think it's a comfort thing for players—they prefer to play these matchups over and over because they're used to them, they know what to expect and what to do. But for viewers it's less than ideal, and for me the average random civ ladder game is more interesting than the average tournament game at this point.