'Everyone' as in the context of the majority of participants in this thread? No, most of them have lead poisoning. I'm talking about the majority of the player body.
There is actually a good amount of truth to this, Specifically in map of the week discussion threads. In two out of the three times I won, there were only one or maybe two people who said in the threads that they were voting for me.
Now, I'm not saying that I don't care what forumers think, just that it is possible to reasonably take a majority consensus on the forums with a grain of salt as Nitr01 is doing.
However, I don't really have access to a larger player base than the forums. After all, the only meaningful ways for players to express their opinion about a map are:
1. Posting on the development thread before the map gets published. That is, if the developer even makes one.
2. Ratings and reviews, which come after publication.
Imperator I'm trying my best to appeal to you - ultimately it's your decision and I want to see this map maximize its potential. If you keep the colored borders, your map will have less flexibility and players might actually continue to prefer world nations 2014. If you make it black, your map will set the standard for diplomacy maps.
And I do appreciate your thoughts, as they are basically exactly what I was thinking that got me doubting the colors in the first place. I am still skeptical of them, but I have to go with what I've got, which is the forums. Even though I'm well aware that the two groups can differ drastically.
Basically either way I release it will be a gamble. If I release colors and it fails to catch on because most people do indeed prefer neutral borders, well then I just wasted a months work on an unpopular map. If I do release a black version, well it may be popular and people will start using it, but now I have all my reviews saying "ugh why did you make the same mistake word nations made?".
It is my decision of course, but I want it to appeal to as many people as possible, since after all if it does become popular I will not be the one who is primarily playing on it.
Ultimately I don't believe that having or not having colors will make or break the map. However, I do think that it's worth noting that almost every single popular diplomacy map besides World nations does use colors. For example:
Europe Big by Срећко
A Song of Westeros and the Free Cities by Dameon
The Iron Curtain 2.0 by Me... Okay, so it's a bit of a stretch to call it a popular map, but I do see a bunch of people hosting diplos on it.
Occasus Universitas - 1444 AD by xXOmegaXx
I don't think it's fair to assume that it's impossible for maps with colored borders can't be popular. However I do think it is reasonable to assume that people simply use world nations because there's no colored alternative.