As more and more maps are added to the site it becomes more and more difficult for new players to determine which maps would suit them best.
Several ideas have been thrown around to combat this problem.
One such idea was to place the maps into categories. This ran into several problems.
- First, people wanted to sort by theme, but then we discovered nobody could come up with a good set of easily identifiable themes. I think the closest we got was Geography, History, and Abstract? Regardless it wasn't very helpful.
Second, we wanted to sort by territory count. This didn't seem to bad except for that it looked even more chaotic then the alphabetical sort with Classic first that we use now, so in the end, not very helpful either.
Towards the end we wanted to sort by complexity. I actually believe this would be the best way, except that DiM correctly pointed out that complexity is completely arbitrary. We have absolutely no way to mathematically determine complexity accurately.
I think I've come up with a way, but we'll get to it later.
Another idea, was to add some sort of link to an information page for each map, so that players could click and learn more about it. This actually looks promising. The only problems are who writes these pages and where do the links go?
So, I want to help combat all the problems with these two ideas, categories and information links and then put together something solid to submit to lackattack.
I'm pretty sure I'll need your help.