This map could be done by community best know map creators, using all the vanilla content in-game. Sadly most of curated maps are no longer played after few months of its release, they need to be REALLY good or have a LOT of luck to get stuck with the community in the time, for example, Elver at some point, and now Arid, but the rest of curated maps are almost unplayed
From what I’ve seen, Nelson stated he won’t be making more vanilla maps anymore, but they don’t need to be done by him to be on the official vanilla maps (like Russia)
Maps like PEI and Washington are nice because they have the perfect size to have constantly interaction between players, that’s why they’re the most played maps on servers, they’re fun. Germany and Russia are too big, suddenly there’s any server with a decent amount of players on those maps to be fun enough (maybe Russia from Pandahut and sometimes Germany from Kodak, and… that’s all?), and Yukon… well, it’s Yukon and basically it doesn’t exist
Maybe having another medium size vanilla map would be the game content players have been asking for since time ago? Last time a vanilla map was released was on 2017, 6 years ago, since then the content added to the game has been almost nothing. Having another vanilla map, even if it’s not actually real ‘new content’ at least would be another map to play with maybe a different gameplay from PEI and Washington, but still vanilla
I think part of the issue is that newly added content is clearly not official or permanent and players know that. I’m unsure if adding a new map to the official category would fix this (as you mentioned, Germany doesn’t get much playtime), but it would be interesting to see.
I think the problem is that there are too many bad servers that take 2 to 3 players each (even if its the bad ones that want an empty server because they cant handle playing with others) It messes up new servers that might be great if someone started playing on them.
The pandahut servers are not even that great they have that wonky decay system where if you leave your base for more than 4 days its gone due to decay.It only has 80 players since its one of the fullest servers if there was a different server with even close to that pandahut would have to finally fix thier server (not to mention the wipes like who actually likes losing thier stuff why fill up your base to just lose it all to a wipe not even getting raided)
Curated maps are good and many people play them its just the extra new players filter into the empty bad servers and im pretty sure they are region specific as in people in eu see different ones than na so that divides the player base into half again (this is only a hunch not sure if that actually happens). Ones that do play can always just ragequit since the game is plenty hard for the newcomers and way too easy for those playing a long time (new maps usually have thier own meta that you can never beat by just exploring towns and crafting so thats another aspect that should have to change) Thats without talking about how building a base with any less that 3 walls between loot gives you a small window to deffend your base any newcomer will get mowed down and ragequit.