well unfortunately mate HL2RP struggles as a competitive RP a la WW3RP, because any changes made by staff that aren't completely bipartisan in nature will fuck off basically exactly 50% of the playerbase.
either the rebels will get upset that there's combine favoritism, or the combine get upset that there's rebel favoritism.
and one of the actually plausible ways to solve this is to just make a side non-playable for the majority of the players, and instead make them NPCs played the staff who have no obligation to get upset whenever they lose an encounter
so yeah, the suggestion is to remove the combine as a playable faction entirely and allow the current CP players an out by effectively becoming softcore rebels
I'm sorry if you think that's dumb mate but unless something changes we're going to be stuck in the eternal status quo of:
- new map
- rebels and combine have a base that'd equidistance apart
- some opening skirmishes and fights accompanied by plenty of OOC drama and whining
- big map change event
- the events of the previous map are never brought up again