People always tend to prefer things they know, when they have a choice. This is why the mapgen can do what handmade maps cannot.
If a person goes into the map vault, they see a bunch of maps they have never seen alongside ones that they already now, and their brain is automatically going to dismiss the maps they dont't know because anything thats new is frightening on a primitive human level.
The mapgen solves this problem by frontloading that choice:
- Do you want to play an unknown map or not?
And then forcing you to stay with that choice by preventing your brain from categorizing it as just another map and therefore reverting your decision to try something new. So the way in which the mapgen creates an advantage is not necessarily by just creating unknown maps, but psychologycally.
Of course the mapgen should eventually still reach higher level of quality. But its important to realize how important the UI is here.
Lets assume that there is a way for the client to automatically select a handmade map that
- Follows some easy to use filters (size, amount of water, etc.) similar to map generator
- Guarantuess to select a map that is generally not very actively played by the community and of certain minimum quality
- Introduces some sort of UI-barrier to backpedalling from the decision to play something new
Then maybe handmade maps could in some way fullfill the same function that the mapgen does. However, we dont have that kind of UI for handmade maps, and as long as it is that way, people will resort to the mapgen to play unknown maps instead of simply selecting a not much played handmade map.
The mapgen also crates some sort of unspoken contract: The map is guarantueed to be new to everybody (in reality thats not true because you can regenerate a seed, but this is still the expectation that people have). This is of course very hard to replicate with handmade maps.
PS:
Could participants in this thread please stop assuming that everybody else argues in bad faith or against their interests? Turning this thread into a mapgen vs handmade war will not create many usefull insights on this topic. Too late probably.