On Map Removing from WoT

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Hello everyone,

those, who follow this kind of thing on forums might have noticed that last week or two, WG staff on EU and ASIA (in this case, I am talking specifically about Tanitha, but there were several threads on EU, including the Czech section) are actively asking players, which maps do they dislike the most.

Based on that very feedback, developers are deciding what to do with the current maps. Now, the fact the developers are unhappy with some of the maps is well-known and the first result of this initiative seems to be the fact that Severogorsk and Ruinberg on Fire are getting removed in 9.5 (apparently completely removed, not just pulled back for overhaul).

Now, Tanitha is asking for more feedback on this topic on ASIA forums, but he also posted a list of “untouchable” maps, that should not be suggested:

  • Severogorsk
  • Ruinberg on Fire
  • Himmelsdorf
  • Prohorovka
  • Ruinberg
  • Murovanka
  • Siegfried_line
  • Cliff
  • Steppes
  • Arctic region
  • Tundra
  • Kharkiv

Please note that the presence of a map on this list does NOT mean that the map stays in the game at all costs (notice it has Ruinberg on Fire), more like it means that the fate of the map was already decided, one way or the other. Not so long ago, I ran a poll about which maps would you remove (8481 votes in total) – top scorers:

Komarin (32%, 2,687 Votes)
Hidden Village (26%, 2,214 Votes)
Severogorsk (24%, 2,053 Votes)
Ruinberg on Fire (19%, 1,571 Votes)
Swamp (17%, 1,419 Votes)

For a complete list of results, check here.

Seems to me that these are the prime candidates for removal. I would be VERY surprised if Hidden Village was not either significantly reworked, or removed completely. Severogorsk and Ruinberg on Fire are getting removed and – yea, Komarin, that one’s not very good (ironically, I liked the old one much better).

68 thoughts on “On Map Removing from WoT”

  1. 4 years, and Komarin is still the worst map ever.

    Just scrap it, it’s bad.
    The concept is bad, and it plays even worse.

    Tiny map with killzones everywhere, leading to drawn out Mexican standoffs, and the team that wins that retarded “I hit you, you hit me” fight gets greeted by bush snipers camping by the flag.
    You win a fight? Fuck you, have some invisible death that grinds the game to a deadlock for 5 minutes, until someone does something stupid and loses the game for his team.

    • Himmelsdorf is worst imo. You have a map with one base completely open to attack from all sides, while the other has plenty of cover and advantageous starting points. It’s not uncommon for the team on the North side to absolutely demolish the other

  2. For the sake of diversity, I would leave all those maps in the game (ok, take the Fire version of Ruinberg out).
    They are not THAT bad. All of those “bad” maps have some unique gameplay, and I haven’t seen any gamebraking camping bullshit in them like it was on old Komarin or old Redshire. Mostly people are simply crying because they have no idea, where to camp effectively in them, because normal players can and will wipe those campers out.

    • I would also like to have as many maps as possible and I wouldn’t remove any o them,also I miss Dragon Ridge.
      On the other hand,since the majority of players do want some of the maps removed It only makes sense for the devs. to take steps in that direction.

      • Yes! I feel you man, I want Port back! That map just disappeared suddenly, it was actually a lot of fun, mainly because of the memories I have as a nooby in my Sherman. If they’d replace the walls with small hills (or dikes) I think it could return someday. I loved the racing a few weeks back because it was on port :)

  3. No Prohorovka? Wut?

    I can deal with any map in the game, not this one. You get punish if you play heavies and you must work for SPG to win the game, which is very annoying. And Massive Campfest too.

    • Oh look, one single map in the game where Heavies get punished and you want it removed. Cry me a river. On half of the maps in the game artillery and light tanks get punished, along with lightly-armored TD’s TD’s. Should we remove every map without TD sniping positions? You’re already driving the strongest class in the game (heavy), what more do you want, instant-win?

        • Yes, I don’t play it myself anymore either, but that doesn’t change the fact that Prokhorovka is good for every class except Heavy, and just because there’s 1 map where heavies aren’t the best these fanatic want the map removed. Like wtf.

          • when there is no skycancer prokhorovka is quite awesome for HTs when you know what to do and arent sitting in a relatively low viewrange HT like those poor, poor IS3s

      • Thing is, Heavies aren’t what they used to be, any single player with functioning brains can shoot gold at you and still pen…

    • Prokhorovka is quite a good map if you know what to do and if theres no arty. Whichever team spots the hill better has a huge advantage, because the incoming flanking fire from the middle can be devastating. At the same time poking over the ridgleline in the western part of the map will provoke the enemy to shoot at you, then theyll likely be spotted and your hopefully close enough teammates can shoot at them.

      Basically this map is awesome when there is no arty and when you know how to use renderrange, spotting mechanics and teamplay to your advantage. Sadly this rules out 95% of the playerbase, but for the rest it is an entertaining and challening map

      • That map has everything, passive scouting, active scouting, sniping, working ridge lines, going hull down, flanking galore, except side scraping, but people will always cry.

      • Well, I would say Prokho is awesome until there is only one arty per team. Even hard hitting ones are not as big of a problem.
        For idiots who camp the road beause they fear clicker it’s actually the best news that there’s arty on the map. Their bigger problem is alpha TD like pretzel which aims faster and shots faster than arty while doing the same damage but it’s them who whine the most on forums because CqGC shot them 3 times and they couldn’t do shit about it. They’re the fun ones.

  4. Do not know why everyone hates new Komarin so much. There still are fields of not-giving-a-fuck and there are nice hiding places all over the map. One step in wrong direction and you get “love” all across the map from camping TDs. Like a mine field.

    However compared to some other maps, here you have a lot of places where to poke out and spot enemies. I love this map on LTs and MTs. It is bit boring on TDs and HTs (that lately i play very rarely).

    And main thing that i really like in the new Komarin – you can move around if you do not get stuck in a place on the map surrounded by “mine fields”.

    And at the end is the sweet revenge when team rushes in on all kinds of SPGs camping flag.

    • Yes camping on hill and water side camping next to enemy base to spot for td’s. Most of animals already realized that loosing hill is a lost.

    • If WG would just show some outside the box thinking, they might come to realize that the best way to “fix” standard Campinovka would be to move the spawns to where arties currently spawn. Spawning in those 2 locations would place each side where they can’t instantly spot the other team, would have no instant lines of fire on the enemy. And it would instantly resolve the problem of enemies rushing along the SW coast road.

      But this is probably too obvious and simple a solution for WG to come up with.

      • YES!!! I have been thinking the same damn thing. People only camp on Malinovka because it’s convenient and they don’t feel the need to get into a position. Like you said though, too obvious for WG. Look how good the Encounter battles play out.

  6. I really dislike both Prokorovka and Fiery Salient (Both versons of the same map). I never seem to be able to do the right thing no matter what class I play.Would love to see both removed from the game.I prefer the current Komarin to these two maps. Oh and Province still sucks at low tiers, it should also be removed completely. Why it was kept and Dragons Ridge was removed is beyond me.

    • I play lights and I have 60% WR on Prokorovka. It is an open map which is refreshing after all the new corridor maps.

    • If you can’t succeed on Prok/FS no matter what type you play, then the problem is you and not the map.

  7. I have never played a map on wot that I hate, I usually dislike playing new maps because I haven’t figured them out yet.
    And that is in fact the only challenge, figure out the flow of players and where you can be arty safe. Then play it to your advantage, and yes, I miss port.

  9. Hi !
    I completely agree with the fact that all maps should stay in the game, because of their diversity., no matter what some players think about some of them. But i also think WG should give, as an option to the players, the possibility of removing some maps (maybe 3 ?) from the pool…
    Would that be difficult to compute, i wonder…

    • I agree with your opening statement. Other than removing Ruinberg on Fire and Winter Himmelsdorf, I see no reason to remove any other maps, except perhaps for reworking.

      OTOH, I am very much against allowing players to deselect maps.

  10. Sand River… Remove it! in anything but a nimble fast tank it’s a nightmare. So slow to get around and if there’s arty it’s horrible.

    • That is the point, keep your light tanks alive and then you win the match. If we did not have the mediums and heavies with such a good view range and people realise the value of light tanks, then these maps would not be a problem.

    • God no! I’m not the biggest fan of Sand River, but there are few enough desert maps in this game. We don’t need to be removing one of those three desert maps.

  11. Of the list of the most disliked maps:
    Komarin (32%, 2,687 Votes)
    Hidden Village (26%, 2,214 Votes)
    Severogorsk (24%, 2,053 Votes)
    Ruinberg on Fire (19%, 1,571 Votes)
    Swamp (17%, 1,419 Votes)

    I will keep all of them but Hidden Village. Obviously people dont drive light tanks like I do.

  12. Well, looks like us ASIA server folk have so far successfully voted for Swamp to go.

    One clan tried to lobby for Mountain Pass to go, (which had predictable results).
    Komarin is looking like a favourite as well to go (disclosure: I voted for Komarin to be removed).

  13. my votes:
    komarin(all the “beauty” surgerys made it an unplayable monster), shit storm (bad bad map… city is a chaos, and north is non sense), karkov (how the fuck can the designers of this atrocity still work for WG?), stalingrad(same as karkov… but at least the 8-9-0 lines are playable), and enks (it needs to be reworked, make it bigger and remake all the mid zone with the trains)

    • You’re nuts! Those city maps are entirely playable and fun!

      You describe the city in Windstorm as “chaos”? So? Chaos is great in Windstorm’s city section! It’s a great city to fight in!!! I love that the streets aren’t straight. I love the Windstorm city in general!!!

      Kharkov? Great map! Stalingrad? A little early, but my early impression is that it’s also a great map.

      Ensk? I agree that it needs to be make bigger … much bigger.

      Komarin? I don’t mind Komarin at all. I don’t think that it’s nearly as bad as the whiners think it is.

    • Mind you, I’m not a great fan of Campinovka. That said, I’m glad that it’s a map with few to no “close combat” areas, aka brawl zones. Brawl zones are gawd awful boring!

  15. Without touching the maps listed as “protected”, these maps need to go:

    1. Hidden Valley.
    The map is won in the canyon between heavily armored tanks. Village has no influence on the outcome of the game unless one team is completely incompetent and can’t shoot down tanks crossing 400m of open field between village and the base. Because brawling distance is so short there’s not enough space to maneuver, and the map is often won by sheer numbers (or yolo) of who has less tomatoes going to village. Of course, good players in mediums might also go village but only because they’re out of ideas what on earth to do on this map.

    2. Ensk.
    This one will be a surprise because it’s generally accepted as a good map. I have a different opinion because it’s a low skill ceiling map which is most obvious in low tiers where battles are won purely by yolo. In high tiers it’s simply too small map, sorry. If they enlarge the map then I’d say keep it.

    3. Airfield.
    The “who crosses middle losses” kind of map but less fun and tactical than Prokhorovka. Boring to play and just overall bad for any class but artillery.

    4. Komarin
    The map is getting worse with each rework, not better. Not gonna waste words here.

    5. Sacred Valley
    Enough of corridors. The map offers nothing new or interesting.

    • I agree with you on Ensk, but rather than remove it entirely, perhaps limit it to, say, tier 5 and below.

      • Hidden Village? Too predictable. Don’t want it removed, but would LOVE for it to be reworked to use that unused area in the SW corner to increase the unpredictability of the map and make battles more dynamic.

        Ensk: Either tier limit it or make the map much bigger.

        Komarin: Disagree. This map was greatly improved since the last version, no matter what the whiners say.

        Airfield: If I have one gripe about this map, it’s that it’s too predictable. Every battle ends up being a fight for the middle of the map. And if your team doesn’t go there in force, and tries to do something else, like push a force along the beach, you will invariably lose badly (from my experience) because gaining control of that center area is critical for winning the battle. Too critical.

        Sacred Valley: I don’t like the new revision to this map very much. IMO, WG went overboard here. I think that all this map needed was to lower the old northern “high road” so that there was no big climb up it. With that change, I think that the map would have been fine. But instead, WG turned the entire NW into another corridorized brawl zone and stripped way too much foliage and too many buildings from the middle area of the map. WG needs to learn that sometimes more subtle changes can make map better than major overhauls.

  16. Mountain Pass has to be one of the worst maps in the game, what were they thinking?!, REMOVE IT ALREADY.

  17. I hope WG can tell the difference between a disliked map and map which is broken (by design).
    Sometimes balanced and fair maps are just boring or shit-stormed. Sometimes a certain map requires team-play across all classes and a general lack of it fuels the hate.

    I disliked Hidden Village until I found my how-to. Currently I dislike Stalingrad because I still don’t have a clue how to play it. And so there might be heavy tank drivers which hate Encounter on Lakeville because they never make it through the valley in time … :-/
    On the other hand Mines and Live Oaks are – imho – imbalanced but they don’t made it to the Top5.

    • “I disliked Hidden Village until I found my how-to. ”

      There is no how-to on a Hidden Village map unless you’re in a tank that’s good in a corridor. You can do slightly better with your how-to if stars allign but it’s still a terrible map.

      That’s like saying you found how-to for artillery on Himmelsdorf. Yeah, but it’s still gonna be a bad map for artillery unless all stars allign.

      • I actually found my SPG how-to for Himmelsdorf, indeed. But tankers deserve a rather arty-safe map as much heavies deserve a close-quarter brawling corridor as much as TD’s should have a sniper map. You can’t have everything on every map – so I don’t mind as long as every class gets its balanced share.
        I have just two points:
        - “disliking a map” tells sometimes more about the player than about the map and
        - WG should focus on fixing broken maps based on the data they have.

        Because after a polled-base removal of Komarin, Hidden Village will be top of the list. After that Swamp after that [your add here] and so on and so on … an endless vicious circle of trial-and-error which just leads to twenty clones of one city, one desert and one jungle/forest map (as Ruinberg , Himmelsdorf, Stalingrad aka Ensk+Kharkov already show).

  19. Arctic region & Tundra are both big steaming piles of shit so why are they “untouchable”? Designed by the CEO’s son or something? lol

  21. Komarin is the map I hate the most. Malinovka is second (although there I hate the way players play the game). And Mountain Pass, where one side has undeniable advantage over the other.

    But what’s anyone’s problem with Severogorsk and Swamp?

    • Swamp is completely imbalanced artyfest that results in 15 minutes of camping and Severogorsk is so retarded it should be renamed to Corridorsk.

  24. Pingback: Které mapy jsou „nedotknutelné“?

  25. I don’t have a particular problem with any map, except that I would like the ability to turn certain maps off for certain tanks. While this is not a current example, sending a T28 Proto on to a map like Dragon Ridge would be cause for court-martial for a tank commander. If they allowed players to turn off, say up to two maps for each of their tanks, that would undoubtedly silence most complainers.

  26. Komarin, Severogorsk, Westfield, Fiery Salient, Mines, Northwest, Serene Coast. Just fuck those maps. They are either an open artyfest with nowhere to go or a retarded hillbilly corridory clusterfuck.

  27. Well, I don’t know about protected list of maps? But I will give my opinion:

    1.) Lakeville: Seriously, something needs to be changed with this map. Do something about the valley, redesign city, open a passage way into the valley with a bridge perhaps over the water leading into the city for more dynamic game play. Stop the not so bright “Stupid Factor” tankers from dooming everyone else by going to the valley.

    2.) Malinovka: Are you sure this map is fixed yet?

    3.) Murovanka: Um? sheez, even one of the Devs. admitted that they maybe have messed up removing the Magical Forest area. The brawling corridor area is not working out all that well. I think most people just wanted the key points fixed on this map basically. Some of us do miss the forest.

    4.) Prokhorvka: high tier play can be very unpleasant on this map, especially tier 9/10. It can turn into a camp fest, teams can be steam rolled in mere mins, or just disappointing results at that level.

    5.) Swamp: Just get rid of it.

    6.) Westfield: This map needs rework. Those hills are getting to be very tiresome, and the village you can be flanked so easy. Map needs some redesign.

    7.) Kharkov: This map needs some adjustments in various spots, also a little more lighting would be helpful

    8.) Stalingrad: Look, I know Wargaming put a lot of heart felt effort into this, but there are some problems with this map. Many people are already complaining, and I can see why, its not balanced, too many obstacles, there are some spotting issues where tanks suddenly pop up behind you that do not light up, or set off the 50M detection, firing line of sight pathways are screwy etc. Others are noticing a high loss rate already on the Map.

    In general, I think with the upcoming view range Nerf, and accuracy Nerfs that are coming and given the fact you are changing the maps toward more of a brawling corridor, lanes, funnels, passes, you are running the risk of virtually removing certain tanks from game play. (ex: TD’s)

    Why not have a more balanced approach on the some of these maps? A little of each for brawling, view range, forest cover, scouting etc. So when MM assigns a tank to a map it has a change to do something?

  28. Ugh. Mines doesn’t need to be REMOVED, but it does need to be Tier-Limited. While there are other small maps, most of them don’t actually feel that small, regardless of tier. Mines is different. Mines feels absolutely cramped in anything past Tier 7, in large part, I think, due to the hill fight that occurs every battle, and the fact that anyone going “island” in anything other than a Light Tank seems to get spotted as soon as they hit the water. That being said, the Encounter Battle version of the map should be reworked so the cap zone is in the logical area to have it – The top of that hill.

  29. Why/how the f(*& nobody talking about Prohorovka??
    Currently the worst map in the game, i play this map, anything negative i talk on the chat every battle 2-6 guys completly agree that this map is shit, the others don’t care and no one defend this map.

    The map is horrible for every class but scouts with full camo and sixth sence to be able to passive scout (no fun to drive around like an idiot in the middle of the map the entire match, neither to die while passive scouting cause you dont have good cammo on your crew yet), and camping tds or any other class that decides to camp on 1 line.

    I’m saying its horrible when it have no artys, because when it does have artys….forget about it, you are lucky if you die soon so that way you can go back and play one decent map next match.

  30. Map I’d remove is….. Westfield. I’ve had success on that map but it always seems a bit of a luckfest. Unless I’m in a platoon, then it’s bearable. The problem is that in random there is no over riding strategy and people do whatever. In corridor maps, you can at least see a pseudo strategy occurring, even if said strategy is a lemming rush. In a platoon, I can count on at least one person for support so that helps but over 90% of my games are solo.

    Actually, I’m ok on this map in lights and arty, mainly because I don’t get stuck into the plateau village. The other side of the valley is ok.

  32. Hey, I just joined the blog, congrats to SilentStalker and the contributors for an interesting read.

    There are a few maps that I would like to see removed, but my trust in the new style of map-making by WG is so low that I would rather stick with the mediocre bunch we have, rather than see it replaced by yet more corridor/brawling/peekaboo/city maps. I have only played WoT for about a year but the map changes so far have been mostly bad, turning what was an often enjoyable opportunity to snipe and flank/fight from medium range to a constant head-on combat from behind corners – not the kind of tank battles I would expect to fight.

    Personally I would remove some city maps as there are nearly always cities in all maps anyway, but I think it would be more interesting to ask users about what kind of NEW maps to introduce, it’s more constructive. For instance, why not introduce a map with mostly forests, to mimic the battle of the Ardennes for instance? Murovanka was a little bit like that, but they squashed it.