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It's a running joke. Even a post Ho like me shrivels at the thought of trying to explain it all in one post. The simple version is that once apon a time, there were cetain players who padded their Ladder standing by feeding on newbees. They are called sharks. Not sure why. I think that had something to do with SG ( Steel God, the former 1st Moderator) and Weasel starting up the Mentor program. Sharks were bad for the game, since the could be quite depressing to newbees. Here is some nice, clean cut young man who thinks he is the second coming of Rommel because he has defeated the AI twice in a row. So he looks for a HI opponent and finds the Blitz and posts a challenge. Blood in the water to the shark. The newbee gets ran thru the meat grinder, the shark gets the ladder points for an overwhelming and nobody really gains anything from it, except perhaps the shark, who is emotionally challenged from the get-go. Sharks are not willing to play a fair game against an equal opponent. No ladder points that-a-way. Newbees don't know enough to go and look on the ladder to see if the player who is chewing on their leg has played any of the first page of the ladder lately.
So some of us have taken to warning the newbees. I think it was greybeard who started doing that, but I don't remember. Anyway it's great fun teasing the sharks and scaring them away from their prey. It gives the newbees a chance to at least learn to swim long enough for Weas or GenSP to find them a mentor.

In WinSPMBT (after 1960 or thereabouts) I always play with the max 160 x 200 map. Accuracy and range of "modern" MBT guns (not to mention ATGMs) can kill anything anywhere on the map that can be seen if the map is too small.

I recently played an Iran-Iraq '81 game when my opponent insisted on an 80 x 80 map with 10K points. Everything that moved, died!