Showcasing maps valve pick is a way for those who don't know about our community too much, or know that we make a lot of maps, to see that ' these maps are by our members and that 'hey, we CAN make cool stuff.' The showcase also allows us to do internal gratification of those members. It's like a little in-house party.
But on this i still think that you shouldnt have picked all those 4maps and none of the others. The showcase post of last month for example was a very good one by mixing them.
To repeat: my issue isnt that official maps got showcased. the issue to me was that it was exclusively official ones without any mentioning to non offical ones (which need to be mentioned more to become better known).
Note that for those 4 official maps there is already a very important factor on which shows players those maps exist: its called quickplay. The first option displayed on the screen is for exclusively those 4maps. The blog showed those 4 maps and im sure that one is read more often than the front page of tf2m.
I didnt say its useless to post about them. There can allways be a few that werent aware of it, and for that reason i have no issue if half of the maps were those that went official. But its still very likely that those who visit this site already are aware of all the official maps. So the message would just be 'we supported these maps' or anything along those lines. Which is fine. You are supposed to be proud as community to have some maps that started within the community to go official. The issue isnt even that they get a post.
At the times i was still looking for maps to be put on ukcs i specificly tried to search non official maps that were at high quality. The showcase was ideal for that as it gave a very good basic filter. And what if an other server group does the same action? They will see the 4 official maps only and by that already stop searching. Thats why i find it a waste. Those maps that could have gotten a chance now got outclassed.
And especialy for those that try to find new maps, showing non official ones should be a key factor. Thats why i wanted some non official ones to go with it.