[M. Bison]

Heh, I remember seeing someone (likely you) suggesting that map in-game. I'm not sure whether the regulars of popular maps are actually ready for some additional maps. There's been quite a bit of players who ragequit from fairly standard maps (and small might I add) like de_contra, de_season, de_cpl_mill, etc which were implemented months ago. I'd rather not push anymore maps down their throats until they decide to download and get used to the ones that I've already added.

I remember when we had the Full Rotation server which was practically always full; that I made the mistake of adding new maps every couple of weeks, and it did eventually lead to the server collapsing over the span of a month from the strain. The way valve handles the downloading of maps, textures, sounds is extremely annoying and idiotic in general. You don't know how many files there are to download, you don't know how large these files are, you don't even know know how fast you're downloading them, and consequently don't know how long to wait.

A lot of people simply cancel the download and go elsewhere since they don't want to wait around indefinitely (even I'm guilty of this). Generally, if I wait a couple of minutes at the download screen and there's no end in sight, then I'll typically cancel it and do something else unless I'm there for a mildly important reason. The problem is that the download could take mere minutes or upwards to an hour or more and waiting no matter how you look at it is no fun. The download length depends entirely on the file size and the download speed you're getting off the download server. I could be on a 1Gbps connection and still download at 5KB/s were my ISP and the download server routed together inefficiently and through slow saturated networks (which happens surprisingly often). A common way download managers/browsers/everything else overcomes this obstacle is by making multiple connections and downloading lots of small files at the same time or downloading multiple chunks of a big file at the same time. This is a technique valve doesn't employ in their download manager. Take into consideration that a fairly small file, 5MB in size downloading at 5KB/s would take about 15 minutes to download, and the typical good custom map is 30MB or larger while bz2'd. :-X

Then there's the second problem... We had a custom maps server in the past and although the maps were nicely textured and fun, problematically not many people actually wanted to take the initiative to download the maps and play on it since no one else was. If you sat around in the server long enough, then you'd see a connecting message for a player and seconds or minutes later a disconnect message, but they never actually make it all the way into the server. They rage quitted at the deterring download screen no doubt. : The server never did get anywhere which eventually caused us to give it the axe.

If we're going to try something like that again, then the only way I'd see it getting somewhere is if we could get the WAR-LORDS.NET steam community group 10x larger. That way we could spam community alerts suggesting that they come and play on the server at a rapid pace until they eventually give in and do it simply to see what all the fuss is about. Although, I'm fairly sure quite a bit of people may simply leave the group due to the overwhelming spam (that's why the group needs to large ).

Sorry for my nonsensical tl;dr rambling.