Hello! As some may already know, I carried out a survey among the WZ top strategic players to find out their opinion on the 50 templates used on the Multi Template Ladder (
http://md-ladder.cloudapp.net/) as well as some other things linked to that competition. The poll was mailed to all players who were ranked on MTL on 17 December 2020 or who are playing in divisions A or B in Clan League, plus a few players who met these criteria in the past and who expressed interest in filling out the poll.
I'm happy to announce I got a total of 56 valid non-troll responses and it's time to present the results!
The results presented are split by div-A-only responses and the rest, to check for potential differences. Div A is defined as the 7 clans currently up there as well as the MASTER clan players who secured promotion to A a good while ago.
The full results are available to see here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MYV7kO11xiLAohwfOdKZJqjuHTUm_hmM6HraTYVxwVw/edit#gid=505703832That's a lot of numbers though, so I recommend downloading this interactive graph:
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=40327767968973571662Here I'm going to commentate a bit.
First thing we see is that the majority (59%) of players are fine with the current number of templates on MDL. Those who aren't fine are pretty split: 11% would like more, 25% would like less, but have different opinions as to how many less.
It all comes in pair with the extra comments I got. The most popular mention was that participants don't want drastic changes to the MTL format. Just remove the worst of the worst and replace them with something better, or even keep all the bad templates but then add more vetoes - this seems to be the common opinion.
Another opinion which was voiced by multiple people, and keep in mind it's completely unprompted, is that the East Asia&Oceania should be changed from WR to SR. Of course this result is biased since you don't expect people who are OK with current version to just mention they like it. Nevertheless it is definitely something worth noticing.
Now let's move to the individual templates!
Starting from the worst, we can see that
Snowy Mountains MA and
Austria Airports are easily the least liked. If any templates should be removed, it's these two. Contributing to their low scores are most likely the lack of wastelands on SM MA, which combined with the MA setting makes the picking very repetitive as you can always finish the same bonuses first turn every game, and AA being an extremely low income template, making it usually impossible to make any use of the map's unique features - airports.
Also worth mentioning is that the average score in the survey given by participants is actually 3.4, not 3.0 as one could expect, which makes their 2.24 score look really not that great.
Now it gets more interesting.
Greece LD, Macedonia No-Split, MA Battle Islands V and Turkey LD are all in the bottom eight, but end up with high deviation in scores (Y axis on the graph). Meaning, that they did get a fair number of high scores and they have some supporters. Seems like perfect examples of unpopular templates that probably should stay, and let people veto them.
On the other end we have
Atlantis and
Discovery. Low scores, low deviation, hardly anyone would be sad if these templates were gone. Atlantis gets the record for the template with lowest number of positive scores: two people gave it a 4, noone gave it a 5. Out of 56 responses, wow.
Then we have 25 templates with scores between 2.86-3.42, very crowdy here. More interesting than average scores seem to be the deviations from them, as we have some records here.
Blitzkrieg Bork holds the title for the most controversial template by a pretty huge margin. Despite averaging at 3.29 it only got six 3s out of 56 responses. Another wow. Honorable mention to
Georgia Army Cap which is also high up there.
We also have the record for most average template, which appears to be
Baltic Sea, although the competition here was very fierce with
Laketown, Basilea and
Greater Middle East III also having under 0.8 ST DEV.
Now we're getting into the above-average territory with 9 templates scoring between 3.5-4.0. And my personal #1 surprise, the curious case of
Landria which got 10th place in overall score, but 3rd place when you ignore div A votes... A huge gap which I cannot explain.
And now for the best of the best: the 8 templates which scored higher than 4.0.
Strategic Greece, Battle Islands V, Strat MME, Guiroma, Elitist Africa, Strat ME, and the winners:
French Brawl and
Biomes of America(s). I see two winners, yes. Because, to be honest, I was spying on the average scores as the results kept coming in and from start to finish it was only FB or Biomes who held 1st place at any time. In the end, the difference is small. Biomes wins in overall ratings, but French Brawl wins if you only look at div A responses. And we have another curious cases of Battle Islands V and Strat MME which among div A responses got 0.7 more average score than among others, a huge gap again. Div A likes their vanilla I guess.
Well, I guess that was it. I hoped it was interesting. Thanks to all for participating, and for reading this.
Edited 12/23/2020 11:29:14
