You assume that people are making a conscious effort to pick a vault from the map and then play that. But they don't.
Nobody is digging through the whole vault to find the perfect map he desires.
Many people don't even know how to host games/don't want to host, so their options are instantly reduced to currently hosted maps. Then they choose maps that they already know and voila you have arrived at the feedback loop that has been described many times.

The idea is that people aren't playing the types of maps produced because those maps are missing something that people just love above horses.

And that is being familiar with the map, plus confidence that the map will fill quickly. People are afraid of pvp environments, so they want mitigate their fear by playing in a familiar environment. Also many players just want to have a game quickly and don't care so much about the particular map.

People are unconsciously choosing the maps that create the best overall experiences for their time invested in the game.

They don't even know all the maps from the vault. They can't choose the best one.

A lot of the community here is unfortunately in denial about that

No, they just refuse your claim that all the gap and astro players chose these map specifically because they would have the best experience out of all maps on these.

The DoT idea and the name of the unit gave me an idea. I present to you the real firebeetle: https://imgur.com/a/rdL7f9q

Hello everyone,

As you may have heard, there is a league system in the making to bring back divisions like you know them from many other competitive multiplayer games. The backend logic is almost finished now, and we are actively working on client integration.

There is only one thing missing now: The actual names for the divisions plus icons to represent them.
We will have a tiered system: There are five tiers with five subdivisions (I-V) each and then one top tier that has no subdivisions.
For the graphic side of things, we plan to show small icons in the matchmaking tab, so they should be 20 pixels high and no more than 40 pixels wide.
We also want to show a big version in a new leaderboard tab. The design there is not finished yet, but I estimate that there will be around 150-200 pixels of height available. You can see a first idea for the new leaderboard below. The big division graphic goes where the empty rectangle is. Of course the rating plot will later show the division distribution instead of rating.

If you have ideas for division names, or are capable of making nice graphics for them, just reply here.

I don't know why you insist that your proposed changes are easy to do when multiple people have told you they are not.
You even disregarded the attempt to get the source code as half-witted, just because it didn't work. maybe it didn't work because square enix in fact does not have the source code? No amount of money will change that.
I advise you to do some research about compilation and decompilation of code and especially about the problems of the latter to get a better understanding why your proposed changes are not realistically possible. Everybody wants better pathfinding, it is not developers "playing hard to get".

make clients an input output engine focused on graphics

this is essentially a rewrite of the engine anyway, and that requires manhours worth millions of dollars.

Nobody claimed that retention is not relevant. It is just not relevant to the question "Is faf growing?" This is in the FAQ section and aims to provide a short answer to a short question.
Discussion about how we can measure retention and how it changes over time is probably best discussed in a different thread. (Because it is indeed a relevant topic, but should not clutter this only semi-related topic in the FAQ section imho.)

The DoT idea and the name of the unit gave me an idea. I present to you the real firebeetle: https://imgur.com/a/rdL7f9q

Can you make your full map list horizonal, but maybe two or three rows to accomodate for the space? It is really annoying to read sideways

Try deepl.com if it supports your language. It produces much better sentences.

Please keep in mind that we also need a big version. I don't think that a quite simple icon would look that good when it is ten times the size.

There is no need to put nazi in quotation marks. That eagle literally carries a swastika in his claws in the uncropped version.

You assume that people are making a conscious effort to pick a vault from the map and then play that. But they don't.
Nobody is digging through the whole vault to find the perfect map he desires.
Many people don't even know how to host games/don't want to host, so their options are instantly reduced to currently hosted maps. Then they choose maps that they already know and voila you have arrived at the feedback loop that has been described many times.

The idea is that people aren't playing the types of maps produced because those maps are missing something that people just love above horses.

And that is being familiar with the map, plus confidence that the map will fill quickly. People are afraid of pvp environments, so they want mitigate their fear by playing in a familiar environment. Also many players just want to have a game quickly and don't care so much about the particular map.

People are unconsciously choosing the maps that create the best overall experiences for their time invested in the game.

They don't even know all the maps from the vault. They can't choose the best one.

A lot of the community here is unfortunately in denial about that

No, they just refuse your claim that all the gap and astro players chose these map specifically because they would have the best experience out of all maps on these.

For your questions on implementation just contact me.

I talked to biass how we can fit the bigger icons in the team matchmaker ui and we came up with this:

Having 40x20 versions is still useful if we want to make the division icons available as avatars.

I really like your icons, but I don't know if anyone else ist still making some.
So if anyone is still working on a proposal for a different icon set, let me or FtX know as soon as possible. I think a two day grace period should be enough. (You don't need to have them finished by then, but I need to know if there is more to come.)

At the moment the plan is that you are placed a bit lower than you "should" be at the start. That is not necessarily the first subdivision.
But we will have a look at that in a test phase where we monitor the system while it is running in the background.

Sure, that's possible. This is not a competition. But it's an unlikely scenario, because the style should be consistent.

Can you rephrase that?