Intro

A few days ago I ran a poll here on reddit as well as in AverageJonas's discord asking people to rate the current maps from favorite to least favorite. I received 92 submissions, and while I was hoping for more, that should be enough to get an idea of how the community feels about the maps. If you haven't voted yet, please fill out the form which you can find here https://forms.gle/55DpV5nuUE6bMxb6A. If I get significantly more responses I will post an updated analysis at some point!

Analysis

All of the graphs that I will be referring to in this analysis can be found linked at the bottom of this post.

Favorite Map

The communities favorite map was a close race between Ascent and Bind, with Ascent winning at 28% of the vote and Bind picking up 24%. Breeze and Split were neck and neck fighting for 3rd and 4th place, with Haven and Icebox falling dead last.

Least Favorite Map

The community was pretty clear on this one, with Icebox picking up a whopping 42% of the votes for least favorite. Breeze comes in second with 19%, followed closely by Split and Haven at 14% and 12% respectively.

Overall

To compare the maps overall, I did a weighted average of each maps total votes, granting one point for a favorite map vote, 2 points for second favorite, etc. This gives a sort of "average vote" for each map, and allows us to see how the average voter voted. This graph can be found labeled as "Map Average Vote" and is a bar graph where lower is better. A value of 1 would mean all 92 people chose it as their favorite, and a value of 6 meaning all 92 people chose it as the least favorite. When looking at this graph is is pretty clear that Ascent and Bind are the communities two favorite maps, while Icebox is in a league of its own when it comes to "least favorite". Somewhat surprisingly to me, Haven, Split, and Breeze were all very close, with the community being split on how they ranked the three.

Additional Observations

• Interestingly, Breeze received very similar percentages of the vote for each position, indicating the community is very torn on how they feel about the map. Perhaps this will change once the map hits ranked?

• While Haven received very few 1st place or 6th place votes, it received many 2nd, 3rd, and 5th, showing that its not the favorite nor the least favorite, but somewhere in between.

• Ascent, perhaps the most "CS like" map currently in the game, did by far the best, receiving lots of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place votes, while receiving very little votes in the bottom half of the poll. Of note, Ascent received only 5% of the least favorite votes, the lowest percentage for any map in any position.

• Icebox, perhaps the map that deviates most from the typical "CS formula", did horrendously, a nearly a full point above Split in 5th place in the overall rankings. Its score of 4.6 means that on average people rated it between 4th and 5th in their ratings.

Conclusion

This poll had a mixture of expected results and surprises. I expected Ascent, Bind, and Haven to perform well, however I was surprised at the level of indecisiveness the community had about Breeze. Perhaps it is due to the newness of the map, and I am interested to see if this changes after it hits ranked play. Icebox surprised me a bit by just how badly it lost, netting nearly half of the least favorite votes. I think it is clear that Riot has some work to do to improve Icebox.

Overall, CS-style maps appear to be more in favor in the community, while maps that deviate from the CS formula, such as Icebox or Split, did poorly. The reason for this is not clear, and I would love to see a poll of the community on CS experience, as this would help draw some conclusions about this favoritism. It could also simply be that maps that lean more towards a CS-style are just better.

If you haven't voted in the poll linked above, please do. While 92 votes are enough to begin to see trends in the community, it is hardly representative and ideally I would like to see 200-300. I plan on running another poll after Breeze enters ranked to see if the community opinion changes.

Graphs

1st Favorite Map - https://i.imgur.com/xXiPnXi.png

2nd Favorite Map - https://i.imgur.com/vwGxjBm.png

3rd Favorite Map - https://i.imgur.com/1u3IxpG.png

4th Favorite Map - https://i.imgur.com/5L4xhR8.png

5th Favorite Map - https://i.imgur.com/cZgNN8f.png

6th Favorite Map - https://i.imgur.com/wynqS0w.png

Map Average Vote - https://i.imgur.com/8iPjPCy.png

Raw votes - https://i.gyazo.com/3fb8d0acb8f28144af89fbb8be4e0df2.png

Edit: Fixed graph link