Welcome back to the CRCorner. I'm not much for introductions, so let's get to it.

This was a pretty slow week for the CRC-there was only one issue on the menu, which was map voting. The captains just passed a veto changing the map voting process, so I'll explain that a little more here. The old process was to vote on all maps at the same time, and to forcibly include the top new maps even if they weren't more popular than maps played last season. Remember that the two criteria for maps are that at least 3 need to have not been played in MLTP last season, and at least 1 has to have never been played in MLTP. The new system, proposed by one of the captains, calls for two distinct votes. The first vote will be to select 7 maps from the previous pool of maps that were played in MLTP last season. The second vote will be to vote on the remaining 3 maps with a pool of nominated maps by the captains that weren't in the first pool. Of the 3 maps nominated 1 of course must be a brand new map.

There are two key differences that I saw between the vetoed rule and the original. The first difference is the potential number of new maps that can be added to rotation. With the old rule, potentially all 10 maps could be brand new maps, or maps that were not played in MLTP last season. With the new rule, however, the map rotation is heavily constrained. There will always be exactly 3 new maps every season in MLTP with this rule, and there will always be 7 returning maps from last season. I'm a little disheartened by this facet of the new rule, but looking at the maps that were voted in last season, there was never a chance that more than 3 new maps would have been voted in anyways; in fact, I'm 90% sure the 3rd place "new" map that got in received less votes than the first existing map that didn't make the cut. So I'm not particularly concerned about this change.

The second difference is the more important, and it concerns vote manipulation. Captains have been notorious for not voting for maps they already knew were going to get in. This of course led to the removal of Geokoala from MLTP rotation in S7, something that definitely wouldn't have happened had the captains simply voted for what they want the most. This could have happened again this season with a very well-liked map such as Smirk, which nobody wants to see. However, the new rule is an inherent counter to vote collusion, and the reason is because of the vote structure. Now that the existing and new map voting is completely separate, the chances of captains not voting for a map they know will get in is greatly lowered. Remember that captains will usually participate in this collusion due to the fact that they want to vote for more maps that weren't popular, i.e. new maps. Granted, this rule change won't completely eliminate this behavior; I'm sure the captains have something in mind to ensure they get what map they want in rotation. This is, however, a giant leap forward from where we were even last season with the voting. I'm very pleased with how we're handling map voting as well as the whole rules process so far in Season 9.

That's it for me. Remember to comment below or shoot me a message on Reddit if you have any questions. If you guys are interested, I can start talking about statkeeping or volunteer stuff in an extra post here. Thanks for reading and see you next week.