CP artpass_bench

Make sure you're lighting isn't too dark. Add Spotlights or Floodlights to the outside of areas, make sure it's as lighted as for ex. Pipeline or Doublecross, even though its nighttime you always want players to identify enemies and the geometry.

Making lighting brighter also helps with making things more interesting, generally you always want to have players looking at the outside expanse of maps, and if everythings dark you won't be able to!

You did well for being new at mapping though!

it isn't too dark, but it wouldn't hurt to increase spotlight's intensity by a good one to two hundred. normal lights by 50 to 100. slightly tweaking the environment's ambient light colour and value couldn't hurt either.

Looks good so far.

Its very gray, but its looking good so far. I'd switch some of the textures around to put more colors in, but thats my opinion. So of the lighting is a tad dark, but its passable.

Note: It isn't THAT dark in-game, you can see everything fine.[/QUOTE]

Are you testing that with bots placed? Being able to see the details is good but what you really need to clearly see is:
1) players
2) team colors
3) class silhouettes

So if you haven't, try placing some spawn points around in the open, spawning bots in the compiled map, and looking at them. If it's not instantly obvious exactly who a character is, you'll need more light.

Also you can tweak the ambient outdoor light with a light_environment entity (http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Light_environment). That's like the only mapping trick I know, and I say it a lot, but give it a spin if you want to keep the "dark" look with sparsely placed bright lights while not ruining gameplay.