Since it is still our intention to bring variety to the pickup games, we collected a few ideas in the channel and developed them further.
For each game that starts the bot will pick 3 different maps randomly from a bigger map pool. That is, the bot creates a map pool of 3 maps for each game.
To decide which map is then actually played the bot will also select one captain per team. The captains should come to an agreement with their teams before a drop'n'pick is taking place.
The captain with the first drop is also being decided by the bot.
To not confuse people we tried to make the output for the teams reasonable and also created tools to simplify the map picking process even more.
In the team message within the channel, captains are bold-written and the captain with the first pick is marked with a "*". Instead of a map picker, the bot will display the 3 maps.
Since you don't want to switch from IRC to QuakeLive back and furth to figure out who's got the first pick or what maps are in the pool for that particular game, we released a new userscript a few days ago.
The userscript provides commands like /teams, /mappick, /captains and /missing to get all needed information within the game.
We highly recommend to install the script since it simplifies the whole process a lot. It also provides an information box on the right pane which will display the server of the game you're participating in once it is ready. (no copy/paste needed anymore to connect to a server!)
For more information about that script and how to install it go to:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/166645
Note: If you've got the old "PlayQuake Team Information" userscript installed (the latest QLPrism version has) you should uninstall it before you install the new version. This is due to major changes and to avoid conflicts.
We will change the system on monday, so that you have time to ask questions if something isn't clear. We will run that for a whole week. Depending on how it works out we may go back to the old system or leave it enabled.
We hope you'll enjoy this idea and we're looking forward to some decent games.