Your point still doesn't stick together though. CS:GO('s competitive scene) grew because of casual community made maps/game modes? How do you even know that and on what basis?
While I used Counter-Strike as an example in my previous post, I'm fairly sure that all Counter-Strike games gathered a very substantial amount of players that mainly play fun maps (there are so many iconic ones such as fy_iceworld, scoutzknives,..); crazy game modes (Warcraft 3, Zombie, Jailbreak) or simply fuck around on FFA servers. CS1.6 and CSS still have a fair amount of servers going on, and a majority of them are fun servers, or at least have some kind of extended custom modification running.
CS:GO doesn't have such a big modding community because I'm not sure Valve sees it as something they need to spend time on, so the possibilities aren't nearly as large as before, it's mainly centered around the maps rather than server/client-side modding now. Plus the fact that you have proper ranked matchmaking will drive competitive players to play only that. We don't have that incentive.
"It brings us players without requiring us to lift a finger ? Good." - someone at Valve, probably
To be honest, I don't really understand why RPers got ousted in such a way, it didn't really make sense to me either back then. Concerns were raised about the game's integrity and shifting the dev team's attention away from Open mode, but I agree that we're not exactly such a number that we can allow ourselves to be so seclusive.
Besides, what did it cost to let people have their fun on their own ? It's not like they really required for features to be added, they were willing to do it by themselves by hacking into the server configuration. I mean, MBII is a mod, it would have made sense to allow modding or at least some form of hacking for basic numbers tweaking. I understand the dev team wants control over their baby, but I'll always be in favour of allowing mod support, even more so when you started as a mod to begin with.
I'm really excited for the next patch and what it could bring to the game, but I don't fully believe that allowing people to do their stuff by themselves would have hurt this promising progression.
It's a debate that's already been had and I don't expect we'll see a change of mind though.
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