No no, after the new person picks up the rune, BAM, the map goes back to the base values. No more debuffs. So no runes in map = good.
"claimed in a timely manner" Meaning if someone picks up after 5mins, it's still a cursed rune, no?
Here's the scenario I'm talking about:
Player A farms on Map X, spawns a rune, forgets to grab it and leaves.
10 minutes later
Player B comes to farm Map X and sees a rune. Doesn't know how long it's been there and doesn't want to activate it because s/he doesn't know if it's cursed.
Result, said rune is never activated because players don't want to get cursed.