Bytro Game Labs has chosen to do this because it created a lot of problems. Players abused the system by making their own map so they could have the country they wanted, have the advantage of being first in it, first access to the market at the best prices and set the game settings to get as much as advantage as possible to make it easier to win. You can imagine that this is not fair for the other players.

Secondly it's only the basic games that can be created being: clash of nations 22, road to war 10 and blitzkrieg 10. Those are basic maps and there were too many of them knowingly that also the system generated them. Causing these maps not to fill up or players leaving the game fast to pick another where they would have a better country or less good players. This is now over and this way Bytro hopes that maps will get higher activity.

Those maps that could be created are still there, if you want to join with friends you still can. Set a time with your friends, wait until a new system generated map that you want to play is created, share the game number with your friends and enter it.

With the new rotation of games and scenarios and cutting a couple of maps, the dev's will have more time to focus on the bugs on those maps and to create new events that will benefit us all.

And yet removing the ability of players to create games has fixed none of the existing issues. We still have accounts going inactive in the first few days leaving maps with more than half the playable nations being AI.

There is even a marked increase in accounts that do not even issue any commands when they enter the game, no build orders, no move orders, and I suspect no research orders. That suggests that people that want to be first in a map and have the choice of their nation as well as a run of the market have figured out the way to do this. I will not say more on this but if the devs want to know how just PM me.

If the devs truly wanted to address the issues generated by players creating their own games in order to better control things as we are being led to believe, then they could have simply changed the starting map conditions in any player created game to be "random nation selection" and "starts when full" as compulsory options. That would definitely deter players with ill intent starting games needlessly.

I think sometimes the reason there are no orders issued is that the person is just wanting to look at the map. If there was a way to look at the maps without joining a game that would solve that problem.

Sure that can be a reason, but it doesn't explain the recent increase in players not issuing any orders nor building any infrastructure or barracks on their ICs, when they enter a new game.

Thats a new reality ever since game creation was removed as an option to players and there is another more logical reason that explains it much better...

What reason is that?

Cannot talk about it as its against the rules but like I said previously if the devs want to know they can PM me.