As described in the wiki ......" If the player icon is smaller than it would be on a normal map, that means the player is a great distance away. When the player is less than 1027 blocks away from the map border, the icon will return to the proper size." This is not the case. The icon size is the same regardless of where you are. On the attached screen shot the mansion is more 11,000 blocks away therefore, according to the wiki, the icon size should be small and it isn't. Either the wiki hasn't been updated or this is a bug because it used to work until a couple of releases ago.
Attachments
Comments 6
It was not reported in any changelog, so it's not "Works As Intended" until it's officially corroborated some other way or the dev team says it is. I'm currently waiting for their answer. It's possible that it's a bug that nobody reported sooner because it's actually pretty useful.
@ Auldrick
It was mentioned in the 1.2.5 changelog:
The arrow marker on a map no longer becomes a dot when a player walks out of the map bounds
Check it yourself.
Minecraft Bedrock Edition 1.2.5
(Not sure about the size changing though because of version parity issues.)
Thank you, @unknown. That was actually the changelog entry I was looking for. I think I missed it because I was searching for "maps", not "map".
So the problem here is that the wiki is out of date. The player marker no longer changes to a dot, and it was the dot that changed size, not the pointer, so this works as intended.
That is WAI. They changed it so that the icon stays as an arrow no matter how far the player is. It is also better so that you know which direction to go. I also updated that part in the wiki.