yes what zio sayd is important. you need to build a following if you plan to start using download maps. basicly you need to run a normal ctf server and have a few friends to play on it to get people in(thats the big thing, when you sort by players in game, it puts the games with people on top, and theres often only 5 or 6 servers with people) and also keep it fairly regularly admined. then once the server is reasonably populated during normal times for a couple weeks, if you have a autodownload location set up and everything, you can feel free to just force the map to a custom map sometimes. certain known maps can be added to rotation at this point if you want. once you have consistent users, you can basicly run any of the less file intensive maps almost any time, just ask them if their ok with it. you dont want to use maps that have a lot of imported static meshes, textures, sounts and other things, because then the file gets so large it becomes a long download. but when the sword of the wolf server runs like my maps, people generaly can get i the game within 2-5 mins of map change, which isnt too bad. recently we ran a beta of my map in pub mode on the server and it realy didnt affect the population much, we still had like 16 people on my map.
however if you can get a group of 10 or so people to comit to playing on the server for a specific time frame(like 7 PM - 11 PM EST), and you have a map download autoredirect set up, you might be able to actualy build a group on a custom map server without the prior steps. if i see a server with a few people running custom maps, il go on it to help support the custom maps. more people in the server means more people want in the server, its that simple.
