This possibly needs to be in the beta map thread, but Donner is starting to become a bit of a problem. No offence to Veld as it was the first HotW map, but now there are a good number of choices its a little... wonkey for public play.
Thus far with the mod I've noticed people tend to gravitate toward that map when there are larger turnouts possibly due to the fact its familiar to them. Now Omaha is there people tend to vote for it less, but it still gets played. In the context of a warm-up map, I think it is in theory fine as it works well with low populations as a server fills up. However there are a few problems I have with it:
1) Time - The map lasts about 40 minutes. That is insanely long for such a tiny map. Omaha, now the biggest HotW map with a very static opening section, lasts just about 30 minutes. Essentially the smallest map lasts longer than the biggest. If it were about 15 minutes long for example I imagine it would be fine.
2) Cap progression - As all the caps are open at all times it quickly becomes a merry-go-round of capping. If it were 3 points it would be annoying, but the map has about 6. Even if you cap the whole map someone could go and cap your base point before you even know it.
3) Flow - Day of Defeat RO is not. The choke points are REALLY horrid here and when you can have 30+ people packed into what was a map originally designed for 16 people its a bit messy.
As mentioned, as a warm-up map for a session its ok to a degree, and points 2 and 3 are kind of moot in that regard, however the time that the map has is a real problem. Tonight on the French server there were people dropping in and out from the Donner map for most of the evening, plus one player got bored and started tempting people away to the 29th server as they had 45+ players on Omaha. The promise was that Omaha would follow Donner, and it did, but you had to play that warm-up for 30 minutes plus and that's no longer a warm-up really.
I know the 29th have some interesting drills and can make some more unorthodox maps work, but when it comes to public play the map is really messy. Sorry if this seems very ranty / *****y, but I'm noticing a loss in player retention on some game nights because of this.
