It worries me that even though there are many good new maps on the way, some server admins (notably the ones near me, AU) may be reluctant to stray from official packs and patches. (Some servers near me haven’t even installed the patch, yet.) I was thinking that perhaps SD could get a number of good maps together and give them an “Endorsement”, making them semi-official semi-standard, encouraging server admins to install them.
Just an idea I thought I might share. Your thoughts?
Yeah this was one of the problems with RTCW… A lot of server admins would only install “official” map packs/patches.
Let us hope that SD release a mappack with favorite custom maps. i feel the same if i see that noone uploading the new and good maps. 
Not likely.
There’s not exactly (m-) any that merit an official seal of approval - if I was choosing custom maps that had the same standard of quality throughout that matched the official levels, I’d pick… possibly my own map but that’s it 
Given time, maybe, but by that time there’ll be a million maps out, and the custom scene will be dead through saturation of crap.
I’m such an optimist 
What you COULD try is heckling one of the popular MOD makers though, maybe Bani / Shrub makers or someone - I think one or two of them expressed an interest in having ‘approved’ maps for their mods?
That’s kinda what I was thinking. You’ll have to wait until we get a number of decent maps to choose from before this idea might be feasible, of course, but that would be just the right time to do this sort of thing so that all the many individual server admins don’t have to wade through all the crap maps just to find the occasional good one - an endorsed map pack should in theory do this once for all of them. It would certainly lengthen the lifespan of the game, IMO.
There are many of us Admins out there that like to run custom maps, this attracts all sorts of players, At this time I am waiting on a new server that will only run custom maps that you guys have released, I usually run one at a time in SW mode for a day, see how the ET community likes the map and will add it to our campaign server if it is popular!!
I thank the mappers for there time and effort on making these maps for us to enjoy!!! 
PIE
I’m sure there are, the problem I see is that I know of no such admins near me and my puny laggy 56K. This is what spurred my map-pack idea. (I’m selfish; so sue me 
)
My thanks go to anyone who runs a custom map server for sure 
What I think might be a good idea is for servers to ‘associate’ themselves with a filedownload site, and create their own map-packs, or better yet, get together with a bunch of other custom server places and all run the same rotation.
Of course, the problem with that is, custom servers exist to offer variety, so server admins often like running different maps (and indeed that’s half the fun of custom servers).
I dunno - there’s a few decent looking maps coming out soon, so maybe the issue will sort itself out by there being enough good or reasonable ones to filter out the crap.
Now I’m off to set up my 64 player mp_ice server
I already raised this question a long time ago.
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2301&highlight=map+model
I have another idea that the Enemy Territory MOD page (http://www.pcgamemods.com) could be helpfull with.
See more under this topic http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3743
How about setting up a /etmain folder for server admins to point to for the maps. Then downloading the maps from an outer sorce with great bandwith would be real simple.
Darn. And I thought I was being unique. Oh well, it’s still something to think about. :lookaround: