Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Map Packs encourage multiple downloads of maps without huge downloads.. you get some choice and you know you wont get 'map not found' every other map.
After a couple of months of map packs we should have a greater number of people with 'most of the maps' and then if all maps are put back into rotation more people will have the right maps...
essentially this is a convienient way to get people loaded with the right stuff.