Difficulty Level of Civ6 GOTM's?

[Photi]

For me an important reason to play GOTM is that it is there. It is this single map that i have a choise to play for a month and i make it the game to play.
If i do not play GOTM, civ for me usually is like this:
I start a game, the start position doesnt look good. I restart.
I restart 10 times, but the start position actually never gets better than that second or third start i got but dont have the save file anymore.
Frustrated, I play hearthstone.
I start a civ game again. This time i am structured, i start 10 games, keep al the saves and select the one i like most.
I play for a few hours, things go well, but not perfect. (they of course never go perfect because perfect is a theoretical something that just doesnt really happen)
I discover some ancient game like populous the beginning for download and play that for a few days, when i get back to civ, i dont feel "in the game" anymore.
Instead of completing the imperfect last game that i am no longer really "into", i start a new game with the intention to do it more perfect. Of course when i start a new game, i start in a desert or tundra so the process starts all over again.

GOTM solves most of that. I still abandon most games before finish, because enough went wrong to make me want to play the next GOTM rather than finish the last or simply because time runs out or my civ fanaticism for the month runs out before i finish. But its getting much better when i just connect my civ game to 1 game for 2 or 4 weeks. I imagine i might not be the only one who has this sort of issues with civ and plays GOTM for that reason primarily. As it is thus more than just a competition against other players, having a semi challenging difficulty level is something i like. Hence i suggested the handicap option because challenging can never be the same for different players.

While i hardly ever finish a GOTM, or a game for that matter, you make many good points that i am sure ring true for many longtime players. Civ the game is unique bc it is always the same game, with each new iteration mainly we get some updated graphics and with CivVI some updated mechanics (with city unstacking). Any other game couldn't survive with this level of sameness. When (if) Half Life 3 comes out, it better be different and funner than HL2. With Civ, it's been the same concept since the beginning. So for those of us who have been playing more than a few years, starting and then stopping all the mediocre maps tends to get tedious no doubt. I remember in IV there was a mod or whatever that would generate map script after map script and then save the files for those maps that met certain conditions the player set. That was cool, but have no idea how to begin to program something like this which to those with skills is probably easy to program.

But yeah, i get what you mean by all the abandoned games.