Stop Using Microstate-and-Small-Spots-of-Coverage-Heavy Maps (ACW, AOW, AAW, AVW) for competitive duels at any level.
0xGG
ACW, AOW, AAW, and AVW all have a particularly dense overrepresentation of tiny countries and territories like San Marino and Guam as well as countries where the coverage is just a few tiny spots like the Dominican Republic and Pakistan. Under duels scoring, what this amounts to in most cases is that these locations purely serve as multiplier padders, not to mention other incentives like how in a map with such a distribution if a location in the Italy area just feels like it might just have a 20% chance to be San Marino it's beneficial to just guess San Marino because under the scoring you're that much more likely to have a good score margin.
I anticipate that some people will bring up the objection "only change this for higher levels, for players at lower levels they are not multiplier padders", to which I will point out that the overrepresentation of tiny places is not good for players at any level: to more beginning players this amounts to fostering a distorted view and understanding of the covered world.
Ayli
I, as a master 1/2 do actually like this way better. Otherwhise you would create a "propability" meta, where you say: "Oh it's never this country because that's extremely rare." I believe it is necessary for the game to have a very diverse map in place so we can think more open-minded and have more fun playing the game.
TheLyonsDen
Ayli This is a belief you would only have because you came to believe the distorted distributions of ACW/AOW/AAW/AVW are the normal ones. Divide the area of Italy by its number of locations and then divide the area of San Marino by its number of locations, and you'll see it's actually the distributions of ACW/AOW/AAW/AVW creating what you're calling a 'probability' meta, by stuffing huge numbers of locations into a small amount of area at the cost of the vastly larger diversity of locations within larger countries.
MiraMatt
Ayli Plot the locations you get, and you can see that either way it's a probability meta - it's just 'locations per square km' that's distorted, instead of 'locations per country'. And since geoguessr is a game of distance, that affects game scores more.
I personally don't like to say any map is good or bad on the basis of theoretical considerations alone - I think there's something to be enjoyed in nearly all the different distributions and approaches. So I'd take a slightly less dogmatic approach than OP, and suggest that more, different types of maps should be included in the weekly rotated for duels maps.
icepelican
I (1600 elo) would rather want a map with more country diversity (as this means more diverse locations) as long as they aren‘t a free 4950+ (which often can be the case in small countries if the map includes good locs) because guessing 10 times in a duel a boring midwest us cornfield or even more boring midwest/east suburb is not fun
TheLyonsDen
icepelican I (silver division / N/A Elo) completely disagree with this statement: "as this means more diverse locations". Do I even need to elaborate?
attackHELIchopter
icepelican There are plenty of boring fields in France, Poland, Czech republic etc..
Just because the states of europe are all "countries" does not make them any more relevant than the states of the US, the states of Brazil, the states of mexico, the states of india. Most of the states of europe are subdivisions of the EU anyway.
Maps like AVW degrade Geoguessr into Euroguessr
Maybe while india is just shitcam we should not use AWCW for, but once gen 4 drops it will be so over for the bad maps where there are only 10x more Brazil locs than Bhutan locs...
benzmarkus
Rumour has it a pretty good moving map came out recently by a small map maker, slashG or something like that I can't remember exactly but the map is great