@Flare You base what you said over me thinking we need new maps.
Upward Vigil Swiftwater Ashville Lakeside Product Cascade Steel is a solid 8 map selection and I don’t think we need new maps at all.
CS:GO rocked Dust 2, Mirage, Train, Overpass, Nuke, Inferno, Cobblestone for the longest time and it was fantastic to play and watch. Only recently/semi-recently (correct me if I’m wrong) did they swap out Cobble for Vertigo officially, and literally today swapping Train for Ancient in the active duty pool.
Yea you can say the maps received updates and changed over time, some even got overhauls like Dust 2, Nuke, and Inferno, but it’s still the same deal.
Ashville got its overhaul thanks to Rorek and Hino, vigil, cascade, and product have been updated, even lakeside got a “refresh” technically.
I think new maps can be cool and fun to play on and testing them can be fun too, but I don’t think they are necessary.
Is a long time bad? Yes! If a team is getting rolled so hard that they get a 14 minute time on Vigil, that is not the map’s fault and is in fact usually “team dif” where you wouldn’t have fun no matter how good the map is.
Using sand’s spreadsheet of invite stopwatch times here we can see that the average time for Upward is just about 8 minutes, Vigil is about 7 minutes, Swiftwater is 9 minutes, and Steel is 7 minutes.
Yes, the slowest times for all the maps were around the 15 minutes mark give or take a minute, with upward not fitting in having the slowest be 11:30. But these are the slowest times, that should only happen around 2% of the time. A map like borneo has 15 minutes as the average meaning it’s the most likely outcome.
