Choosing to not Complete Maps on the Atlas

We've been reading a lot of feedback about the Atlas and wanted to briefly address the concerns around players being able to choose which areas they unlock to influence what maps drop of a certain tier.

The ability for players to choose what maps they play is an important (and positive!) aspect of the Atlas system. Everyone has their own preferences for maps, and we want there to be some choices about whether to unlock everything or leave a few maps disabled in order to maximise your own goals.

Having said that, we wanted to address two important points that will hopefully mitigate concerns that players have.

Map Balance
Historically, some maps have been better than others in different ways. Some have had more linear or more open layouts and some have had easier signature monsters or bosses that are safer to kill. A lot of work has gone into balancing this out so that maps are more comparable. In some cases, additional monsters have been added (hence increasing item drops including maps) to mitigate the additional time or challenge that certain maps entail.

We will continue to work on improving this balance, even after release. Our goal is that the choice of whether to leave certain maps locked is a very debated one within the community and there's no clearly right answer.

Respeccing Decisions
We believe that the correct and dominant strategy will be for players to unlock all maps, but since players are afraid that they'll damage their account permanently if they unlock the wrong maps, we have decided to add a way to respec map completions on the Atlas. Three currency items (one for each colour of maps) will be available from vendor recipes for this purpose. They'll likely be measured in Cartographer's Sextants of the appropriate colours and won't be trivially cheap.

Thanks again for the feedback. We're really looking forward to seeing what you think next week when Atlas of Worlds and the Essence Challenge League launch!