Good point, Empyre. I was going to suggest that Valve could have our clients repack the maps as part of an update, but that might introduce slight variations in the files and produce incompatibility errors when connecting to a server.
Valve could provide a couple of repacked maps each time they release an update. Updates can happen once per week, sometimes. They seem to be less frequent when the team are working on something significant.
I think Snowplow and Suijin might be a bit of an exception, when it comes to judging the amount of hard drive space used by future maps. Snowplow is a massive map and its filesize is 122MB. Suijin has a lot of custom assets packed inside, and it comes to 44MB, but half of that size is made up by its compressed packed assets. Suijin is the poster map for the Japan pack, and 44MB is not that much. Borneo is a measly 24MB.
In total that's about 180MB. It doesn't sound like much, each quarter or twice per year, to add on to the total size of the game. If Valve repack a couple of maps each update, they will have repacked all of them by the end of a year, and they could save around 1.6GB of drive space. Plenty of space for more maps, and more weapon skins should there be future collections.
I think, for the sake of preventing disappointment and confusion, keeping the featured maps included in the game is a safe action. But that does raise the question of supporting them with stamps. That's not really something many people can have an opinion on.
The end of the Gun Mettle campaign could be an ideal time for Valve to direct significant attention to the map workshop. Valve might also be able to appease the concerns of third-party server operators by making the server browser a bit more intuitive for inexperienced players and revealing the presence of so-called custom servers by making the option to connect to them a bit more exposed. If we are to select maps from the workshop then it's important that as many people get to use it as possible (EDIT: and it's important that it all works properly. Valve take note).
Valve could provide a couple of repacked maps each time they release an update. Updates can happen once per week, sometimes. They seem to be less frequent when the team are working on something significant.
I think Snowplow and Suijin might be a bit of an exception, when it comes to judging the amount of hard drive space used by future maps. Snowplow is a massive map and its filesize is 122MB. Suijin has a lot of custom assets packed inside, and it comes to 44MB, but half of that size is made up by its compressed packed assets. Suijin is the poster map for the Japan pack, and 44MB is not that much. Borneo is a measly 24MB.
In total that's about 180MB. It doesn't sound like much, each quarter or twice per year, to add on to the total size of the game. If Valve repack a couple of maps each update, they will have repacked all of them by the end of a year, and they could save around 1.6GB of drive space. Plenty of space for more maps, and more weapon skins should there be future collections.
I think, for the sake of preventing disappointment and confusion, keeping the featured maps included in the game is a safe action. But that does raise the question of supporting them with stamps. That's not really something many people can have an opinion on.
The end of the Gun Mettle campaign could be an ideal time for Valve to direct significant attention to the map workshop. Valve might also be able to appease the concerns of third-party server operators by making the server browser a bit more intuitive for inexperienced players and revealing the presence of so-called custom servers by making the option to connect to them a bit more exposed. If we are to select maps from the workshop then it's important that as many people get to use it as possible (EDIT: and it's important that it all works properly. Valve take note).
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