This post got me curious as my impression was that Hospital was one of the more popular maps to this day. I ran some numbers and it would appear that SF Hospital is the second most popular map played across all tracked servers (which is pretty much all of them, anyway) only surpassed by Pipeline SF (which checks out).
Top 4 time played (As of 02/02/2024 since April 2023)
SF Pipeline: 2362 hours played
SF Hospital: 1901 hours played
Urban Assault: 1326 hours played
SF CSAR: 958 hours played
That's some interesting numbers!
In fact, Pipeline would probably have a few more hours if you considered the other variants of it (regular Pipeline, AA3 Pipeline, and mAAp Pipeline). Though I've got a feeling only the regular one gets any meaningful amount of hours.
From what I gather the change happened nearly a decade ago, my question would be even if the vast majority of remaining players were in favor of the return of 203s (remains to be seen) is there anyone left with the know how to make that change?.
Thank you for pointing out the obvious! So many seem to think these changes are trivial to make!
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before in other threads over the years, but there really isn't anyone here that deals with maps anymore. Hell, I don't even know if the software would run on modern Windows (7/8/10/11).
And even if we get over the map change aspect (someone might have the old file saved somewhere, after all), that still leaves distribution. I
think Possessed still knows how to do that. But how often do you guys see him around? And I'm sure as time goes on, more and more of this knowhow will be lost.
So all in all, this is something that would take a lot of time and effort to change. And we simply do not have the bandwidth to tackle it!
In hindsight, we might have been better off keeping both versions of Hospital (e.g "Modern" and "Classic"). But that's not really helpful now when a lot of time has passed.
Let's not forget that this change was made because there was a push from the community to make a change. Maybe the community sentiment has changed on this - I don't know. But what I do know is that the scope and capability of the team running things has certainly changed.