I'm not sure if this is around elsewhere here, but I doubt we'll be seeing any of these returning anytime soon. Port Mackerel Tower has disappeared most likely due to the strength of Splash Walls and Killer Wails. Since the Tower is on a set route, Splash Walls and Killer Wails completely block off most of the Tower route, which causes a lot of blockades and brings the game to a complete standstill, which isn't fun for either team. Blackbelly Rainmaker has been gone for a long time, it did resurface a few times in January, but has disappeared again. This is down to how close the Rainmaker base is to the centre, I myself have created a thread where I drew suggestions on a top down view of Blackbelly and how Rainmaker could be improved and you can find it
here. Unless something along the lines of my suggestion happens, or if the Rainmaker base is moved to where the Tower's finish point is, this map won't be seeing a return any time soon to Ranked Rainmaker. As for Saltspray, I'm not sure why Tower has disappeared, but it has a fairly decent route length (since 2.0.0 changed it). However, due to the nature of Saltspray, I most likely believe this was taken out due to spawn camping and other issues with the map balancing-wise. Unless Saltspray gets an Urchin-style update, I highly doubt this map will appear in Ranked except for Splat Zones (arguably the worst mode of the map). As for Rainmaker, it briefly resurfaced in January when it got the Prohibited Rainmaker zone, then it disappeared again. Biggest issue of Saltspray RM is that the team goals are too close to each other and the lower corridor is filled with way too many obstacles, making pushes ridiculous difficult, not to mention that you can take the Rainmaker from 30 on your side to 29 on their's in a ridiculously fast amount of time when you get the push. On top of this, the sponge wall they added in front of spawn allows Splash Walls to be placed next to it for spawn camps and the like. Again, this won't resurface unless Saltspray gets the aforementioned fix. The issue is that the Splatoon devs took these 4 map mode combos out of rotation without any warning or with any explanation as to why they were removed. Obviously we can draw our own conclusions from this based off of our experiences of playing the maps on these modes, but we won't know the true intentions of why or if they'll ever be fixed and returned to the rotation.
