[Muirdach]

Karinth has added small automaps and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Of course, there is a toggle so that the visually impaired (maps don't work well with screen readers) and those who dislike the maps can turn them off. It helps people to explore, and that's always good, especially when you have such a large world. They needn't be huge, even seeing a 3x3 centred around your character is very useful. In addition, we made it so that you can only see rooms that you have been in semi-recently, a kind of "memory" so that it doesn't take away from the "fog of war" type exploration effect.

As for Threshold, I don't know. One thing it does do is make people pay less attention, and just run everywhere. I know that Threshold thrives on making it feel as dangerous as if you were exploring for real, and the maps kind of take away from that. It's a balance between making exploration too easy, and making players feel comfortable enough to adventure. My personal advice would be to not do it there, or make the map very small, because (and this is a dated opinion) my experience with the game was that the danger aspect and the harshness of plain text made it very absorbing, that every word was important and could have fatal consequences, kind of thing. Of course, not telling you how to run your game, that's just an opinion based on memory.

For a game with a much larger world that is a little more lighthearted and less RP-enforced, I think the automaps are very useful and well loved by most players, especially the directionally impaired.