[caesium]

As I see it, the current main problems with map voting on public servers are:

1) Voting uses weapon slots (so people often vote accidentally or have it interfere with their game).

2) Votes get split over too many map options (this is a huge issue imo).

3) The list of maps to vote for is often very poor.

4) Not all servers have it and it's often not consistent across the ones that do.


Possible solutions:

1) Use keys that aren't used by FF (e.g. the F-keys as suggested by others) or do the voting after the map ends. I prefer the former.

2) Have the map voting display remain visible after you vote (along with a countdown timer) and show in real-time how many votes each map has so that people can easily press just one button to re-vote when they see how the votes are being distributed.

3) Have a tight list of "good" maps*, have all of those maps on the vote list every time (no matter when they were last played), and then also allow anyone to nominate (any time before the vote starts, or perhaps even ends) any map that's not already on the vote list. This needs #2 implementing in order to work well.

4) Make something good, include it with FF and enable it by default.

* Clearly this is very subjective, but I mean maps which are more likely to be enjoyed by more people on average (even though that may not include your and my personal favourites!) for which I'd suggest:
- CTF: monkey, destroy, schtop, sd2, openfire, 2fort, bases.
- Non-CTF: ksour, dustbowl, palermo, napoli, warpath.


While I'm at it, I also feel that public servers should have:
- At least 30 seconds prematch.
- 20 minute timilimit.
- No weird sounds that must be downloaded to join the server then play until I can't stand it any more and quit. If you enjoy them and want them then great, but please have an option to enable them that's disabled by default.