It's amazing how just a few small changes could make the system much much better.
A quick three steps:
1. Add search to the join list.
2. Filter out empty (no hosts) maps from the join list.
3. Allow sorting and inverse sorting by popularity, name, type, date of publish, and time of hosting.
For bonus points, 4. Do the thing as seen in the first post with the drop-down thing showing all the hosts, the amount of players in those games, the modes, etc.
Voila, the system is improved from WC3's. It would take a week to code this, tops.
It's amazing how just a few small changes could make the system much much better.
A quick three steps:
1. Add search to the join list.
2. Filter out empty (no hosts) maps from the join list.
3. Allow sorting and inverse sorting by popularity, name, type, date of publish, and time of hosting.
For bonus points, 4. Do the thing as seen in the first post with the drop-down thing showing all the hosts, the amount of players in those games, the modes, etc.
Voila, the system is improved from WC3's. It would take a week to code this, tops.
Your post is clear and concise. It defines an ideal system given the restrictions, well said. With that, I suggest an additional point.
5. Allocate space for a "map maker" only upon first launch of the editor on an account.
This would go hand in hand with a nice beefing up of current thresholds for map makers.
I actually like the popularity system as it is.
Ive published 3 maps, and 2 of them has grown popular. The first one (the one that didnt) is understandable since it was my first map ever made. I guess its just to give ppl what they want, which isnt much. CUS games (Create unit spawns) and TPS (Third person shooters) and Survival maps.
Alot of ppl is to creative for this and make AMAAAZING maps, which is to bad noone plays, but still its up to the simple minded players to decide. Blizzard say they will change, but right now their just giving the playing ppl what they want, and isnt that the point of being a multi billion company?
How about having tiered map system? Maps move from tier to tier, if a map is popular enough, it moves up. There should be three tiers, tier one belongs to new maps. Map listing on this lobby have a very short life, they disappear very quickily. So empty maps will tend to disappear on its own. If enough people play a map at a time, it'll move to tier 2 lobby. People who boost their maps will stay in tier one since it never gets popular enough to move into tier 2. Or it'll fall from tier 2 back into tier one when others don't join their boosted maps. Page 1 in tier one should have a different listing of games every couple minutes because games will fall off quickily if no one joins, or it gets moved into tier two lobby if there's interest.
Tier 2 is more like the current system we have now, where map listing stays for a long time. If a map in tier 2 gets very popular, it'll move into tier 3. Tier 3 belongs to all time popular maps such as nexus wars and desert strike. This way, they won't take up space in tier 2 and allow more map visibilty to other maps.
This is essentially blizzard's ladder league idea, its a competition system for maps. Copper league = tier 1 maps. Gold league = tier 2 maps. And diamond league = tier 3 popular maps.
There needs to be some more filters for maps. For example, filters for old maps, new maps, popular maps, and unpopular maps. "Old maps" are from 5 weeks to infinite weeks old. New maps are from newest to oldest and end at 5 weeks. Popular maps are from most popular to least, like the current system. It's the exact opposite for unpopular. Also, shouldn't the system also filter for maps that currently have people in them? For example, I want to find a map that has from 2-14 people in them. It should give me a list of maps. Why doesn't the Battle.net 2.0 have that?
@DarkRevenantX: Go
Agreed. Although the main problem for me is that I can't play certain good maps because everyone else is just playing the top 5/6 in popularity. There is no easy solution to this, my only option when I am really desperate to try a dead, multi-player custom map is to go into popular lobbies and recruit. When people are asked they are usually more than happy to join-in. This brings me to my point, where are the chat rooms?
Also where are the custom achievements i.e. 'Nexus Wars champion', 'Night Special Forces super-Archon "get an Archon up to 20,000 kills in Night Special Forces"'. And with popular maps like NSF, why is it that with 5,000 games per hour SC2 isn't placing all the players that have completed suicide difficulty together so they can have a crack at impossible, all the newbies together ans so on... StarCraft knows how many games of everything we have played, how long we played them for and what we achieved, why is it not using this information!?
3 months after uninstalling SC2 in disgust a friend told me the custom map system was 'totally revamped'. I was happy to be able to work on Roadkill (which I believe to be the logical step ahead from Dota) again.
But alas, nothing has actually changed.
This is looking grimbleak. :(
This is pretty much the perfect game to mod - huge player base that is competitively multiplayer oriented, easy and powerful editor, wide variety of assets - and it's ruined unless you want to roll the dice with your project or spend more time worrying about popularity tricks than about gameplay. Noticably if it's 6v6 it'll never be popular unless it is called Dota.
There is no reason for any of us to continue to map with StarCraft II, unless your lucky or a celebrity. The community is dying simply because of the poorly designed custom map list. It should have been the strongest part of the entire chain, because oddly enough that's where you play the damn maps!
After like 6 or so years of mapping for Blizzard games I just can't continue doing the same thing now that things are turning to shit. There is no purpose if there is no community.
/ranting
Essentially, they could go back to the Wc3 system and build upon that. hmph.
Perhaps a protest would be in order? Meh, I'm an anarchist so not such a bright idea.
I have another idea, that might help. It's about integrating a profile section for your selection of custom maps.
Posted it at the official forums, so it would be nice if you log in and comment and press the "Like" button for it :P.
Here it goes:
As we all know, the list of custom maps is terribad, and discourages anyone from playing and creating custom maps. The worst of it is to find the map you want to play, and then, if it's below the 3rd page, to find the people to play it.
Battle.net 2.0 has an awesome feature, called profiles. There, you have your leagues, your achievements and whatever.
My suggestion is pretty simple: make a new section, called maps, and let players choose a selection of favorite maps and show them to friends.
....................
Oh, shinnies, but how would this work?
The best example is the "Leagues" section. There, you have your 3 favorite leagues, and then all the others. This "Maps" section would allow you to highlight, say, 3 maps, and then show, in the space below, the rest of the maps. No need of subsection bars at the left side.
....................
Hey, wait a minute, how is this linked to the custom game lists?
The "Maps" section would have a limit of, for example, 20 maps. That means you can only tag 20 maps as favorites. Once you tag a map, you give it a "score". The system, then, could build a different classification from that very score compilation. This way, you have a real popularity list, instead of the "popular of the day" list (we should have both of them, to make the search easier).
....................
Yeah, awesome, but what new functionalities do I get for adding maps to my profile?
By clicking over the map names, a small screen would appear, with the image, the description, the number of players, the author (with a link to his profile) and all that information you already get by clicking over the map names at the custom games list. Inside that window, you would be able to change your score, and remove it if from your list, too.
In the case of the 3 highlighted maps, you wouldn't need to click over the name to show that window, because they would appear up already (just like 3 favorite leagues).
The best feature would be that, from those windows, you would be able to click "join game" and "create game", without having to go to Multiplayer section and search the map.
....................
So, how would I select my favorite maps in the first place?
There's a lot of different ways. The button that allows you to remove a map from your profile could become the "add to favorites" button in the profiles of the other people. Also, you should be able to add it to favorites from the custom games list itself, and from the score screen once the game has finished, too.
....................
Well, that's all. I think this idea would help the mapmaking community a lot, and encourage everyone to make their own maps. If you can't reach the high popularity lists, well, you'll always have your group of friends to play it.
More could be asked, like charts of statistics for each map, but I think this is enough for now. Opinions, suggestions, criticism? Feel free to post any of that :).
Alot of ppl is to creative for this and make AMAAAZING maps, which is to bad noone plays, but still its up to the simple minded players to decide. Blizzard say they will change, but right now their just giving the playing ppl what they want, and isnt that the point of being a multi billion company?
at the moment i can´t find my new map myself in the list ...
It's amazing how just a few small changes could make the system much much better.
A quick three steps:
1. Add search to the join list.
2. Filter out empty (no hosts) maps from the join list.
3. Allow sorting and inverse sorting by popularity, name, type, date of publish, and time of hosting.
For bonus points, 4. Do the thing as seen in the first post with the drop-down thing showing all the hosts, the amount of players in those games, the modes, etc.
Voila, the system is improved from WC3's. It would take a week to code this, tops.
Why can´t they do it like that? this IS the easiest way to solve this problems. And 0 justi don´t understand why they don´t do it...
A quick three steps:
1. Add search to the join list.
2. Filter out empty (no hosts) maps from the join list.
3. Allow sorting and inverse sorting by popularity, name, type, date of publish, and time of hosting.
For bonus points, 4. Do the thing as seen in the first post with the drop-down thing showing all the hosts, the amount of players in those games, the modes, etc.
1. Yes they desperately need to implement this.
2. This wont and shouldn't because that defeats the point a centralised system. A popular map disappears and 6 people will go and host it sitting in their empty lobbies while if the map had stayed up they could be playing. This obviously affects less popular maps more probably making the entire situation worse.
3. Would be nice but lets face it most people would never use it unless number 2 was implemented also.
The images on the front page are excellent. I hope Blizzard find enough spare time to check this thread out. I can appreciate that it takes time and money to make changes to a game like this, but frankly with these issues hanging around since beta its kind of disappointing the lack of involvement.
Fixing the popularity system so that it doesn't have to be reset would be better. The show only new maps check box applies to everything because of the resets. It's completely pointless!
From my understanding that check box is supposed to help people who have recently released a new map get people playing the map. So you can filter the old 'classics' from the new awesome ones. Especially long term this will be great, its just that it resets way too much because its broken now. :(
That spells it out perfectly! I am hoping that they will make a list of all existing lobbies display when you first hit join game, with options to sort them how you please, such as recently created lobbies, popular map lobbies and even by favourite maps (hopefully).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
As far as the search for join map is concerned, it would be cool to have but the way the search is at the moment it would come up with so many matches you still will be pressing Show More to no end. Adding more search filers is important too. Partial matches are cool and all but exact matches would help out as well. Try searching for "blood" in the create game list. Good Luck!
Even searching by number of human player slots or something would be good, seeing that it can say 6 players for a certain map when it only accepts 2 and doesn't bring up the proper error message. Oh and filtering the results too please :)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The final thing I will say (before I start to build a wall of text) is that I forgot what I was going to write here and may write it later.
Several improvements have been made to the Join Custom Game section:
The Details panel has been removed from this page. Map details are now shown inside a tooltip for each game.
Players can now bookmark their favorite custom games! The number of times a game has been bookmarked will be shown in that game's tooltip.
Games are now organized into several pages to make finding your desired game type easier:
Featured: Our team is always on the lookout for new games that are lots of fun. Our latest favorites are shown on this page.
Most Popular: Shows all game types, with the most played games sorted to the top.
By Category: This page allows you to browse through Custom Games based on Category.
Up & Coming: This page highlights games that other players are recommending, but haven't yet become popular.
Fun or Not: From this page you can automatically join a random new Custom Game. After the game, players using Fun or Not are asked to recommend the map (or not). Recommending maps helps get them onto the Up & Coming page.
Recently Played: The last several games you’ve played are shown here. Use this to quickly get back into games you play often, or to easily bookmark a game you enjoyed playing.
Bookmarks: Use this page to view your Bookmarked maps.
A search option has been added to the Join Custom Game interface.
Blizzard are aware of this problem thats why they instituted the up and coming system, Which is not reaping massive effect from what i have seen so far. But i do have a solution.
The option to view player created game in a list which should be a copy of Warcraft3/Starcraft2 Create game lobby system. it will be more inefficent for navigating but will work out what people actually play. Because 99% of the Custom maps are not being played even the good ones.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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It's amazing how just a few small changes could make the system much much better.
A quick three steps:
1. Add search to the join list.
2. Filter out empty (no hosts) maps from the join list.
3. Allow sorting and inverse sorting by popularity, name, type, date of publish, and time of hosting.
For bonus points, 4. Do the thing as seen in the first post with the drop-down thing showing all the hosts, the amount of players in those games, the modes, etc.
Voila, the system is improved from WC3's. It would take a week to code this, tops.
Your post is clear and concise. It defines an ideal system given the restrictions, well said. With that, I suggest an additional point.
5. Allocate space for a "map maker" only upon first launch of the editor on an account.
This would go hand in hand with a nice beefing up of current thresholds for map makers.
I actually like the popularity system as it is.
Ive published 3 maps, and 2 of them has grown popular. The first one (the one that didnt) is understandable since it was my first map ever made. I guess its just to give ppl what they want, which isnt much. CUS games (Create unit spawns) and TPS (Third person shooters) and Survival maps.
Alot of ppl is to creative for this and make AMAAAZING maps, which is to bad noone plays, but still its up to the simple minded players to decide. Blizzard say they will change, but right now their just giving the playing ppl what they want, and isnt that the point of being a multi billion company?
Search function.
Add to Favorites function.
Sort by Modified, Name, Author, Popularity, Size, or any custom category.
Whatever you do, wholeheartedly, moment by heartfelt moment, becomes a tool for the expression of your very soul.
How about having tiered map system? Maps move from tier to tier, if a map is popular enough, it moves up. There should be three tiers, tier one belongs to new maps. Map listing on this lobby have a very short life, they disappear very quickily. So empty maps will tend to disappear on its own. If enough people play a map at a time, it'll move to tier 2 lobby. People who boost their maps will stay in tier one since it never gets popular enough to move into tier 2. Or it'll fall from tier 2 back into tier one when others don't join their boosted maps. Page 1 in tier one should have a different listing of games every couple minutes because games will fall off quickily if no one joins, or it gets moved into tier two lobby if there's interest.
Tier 2 is more like the current system we have now, where map listing stays for a long time. If a map in tier 2 gets very popular, it'll move into tier 3. Tier 3 belongs to all time popular maps such as nexus wars and desert strike. This way, they won't take up space in tier 2 and allow more map visibilty to other maps.
This is essentially blizzard's ladder league idea, its a competition system for maps. Copper league = tier 1 maps. Gold league = tier 2 maps. And diamond league = tier 3 popular maps.
There needs to be some more filters for maps. For example, filters for old maps, new maps, popular maps, and unpopular maps. "Old maps" are from 5 weeks to infinite weeks old. New maps are from newest to oldest and end at 5 weeks. Popular maps are from most popular to least, like the current system. It's the exact opposite for unpopular. Also, shouldn't the system also filter for maps that currently have people in them? For example, I want to find a map that has from 2-14 people in them. It should give me a list of maps. Why doesn't the Battle.net 2.0 have that?
@DarkRevenantX: Go Agreed. Although the main problem for me is that I can't play certain good maps because everyone else is just playing the top 5/6 in popularity. There is no easy solution to this, my only option when I am really desperate to try a dead, multi-player custom map is to go into popular lobbies and recruit. When people are asked they are usually more than happy to join-in. This brings me to my point, where are the chat rooms?
Also where are the custom achievements i.e. 'Nexus Wars champion', 'Night Special Forces super-Archon "get an Archon up to 20,000 kills in Night Special Forces"'. And with popular maps like NSF, why is it that with 5,000 games per hour SC2 isn't placing all the players that have completed suicide difficulty together so they can have a crack at impossible, all the newbies together ans so on... StarCraft knows how many games of everything we have played, how long we played them for and what we achieved, why is it not using this information!?
3 months after uninstalling SC2 in disgust a friend told me the custom map system was 'totally revamped'. I was happy to be able to work on Roadkill (which I believe to be the logical step ahead from Dota) again.
But alas, nothing has actually changed.
This is looking grimbleak. :(
This is pretty much the perfect game to mod - huge player base that is competitively multiplayer oriented, easy and powerful editor, wide variety of assets - and it's ruined unless you want to roll the dice with your project or spend more time worrying about popularity tricks than about gameplay. Noticably if it's 6v6 it'll never be popular unless it is called Dota.
@BrotherLaz: Go
There is no reason for any of us to continue to map with StarCraft II, unless your lucky or a celebrity. The community is dying simply because of the poorly designed custom map list. It should have been the strongest part of the entire chain, because oddly enough that's where you play the damn maps!
After like 6 or so years of mapping for Blizzard games I just can't continue doing the same thing now that things are turning to shit. There is no purpose if there is no community.
/ranting
Essentially, they could go back to the Wc3 system and build upon that. hmph.
Perhaps a protest would be in order? Meh, I'm an anarchist so not such a bright idea.
I have another idea, that might help. It's about integrating a profile section for your selection of custom maps.
Posted it at the official forums, so it would be nice if you log in and comment and press the "Like" button for it :P.
Here it goes:
As we all know, the list of custom maps is terribad, and discourages anyone from playing and creating custom maps. The worst of it is to find the map you want to play, and then, if it's below the 3rd page, to find the people to play it.
Battle.net 2.0 has an awesome feature, called profiles. There, you have your leagues, your achievements and whatever.
My suggestion is pretty simple: make a new section, called maps, and let players choose a selection of favorite maps and show them to friends.
....................
Oh, shinnies, but how would this work?
The best example is the "Leagues" section. There, you have your 3 favorite leagues, and then all the others. This "Maps" section would allow you to highlight, say, 3 maps, and then show, in the space below, the rest of the maps. No need of subsection bars at the left side.
....................
Hey, wait a minute, how is this linked to the custom game lists?
The "Maps" section would have a limit of, for example, 20 maps. That means you can only tag 20 maps as favorites. Once you tag a map, you give it a "score". The system, then, could build a different classification from that very score compilation. This way, you have a real popularity list, instead of the "popular of the day" list (we should have both of them, to make the search easier).
....................
Yeah, awesome, but what new functionalities do I get for adding maps to my profile?
By clicking over the map names, a small screen would appear, with the image, the description, the number of players, the author (with a link to his profile) and all that information you already get by clicking over the map names at the custom games list. Inside that window, you would be able to change your score, and remove it if from your list, too.
In the case of the 3 highlighted maps, you wouldn't need to click over the name to show that window, because they would appear up already (just like 3 favorite leagues).
The best feature would be that, from those windows, you would be able to click "join game" and "create game", without having to go to Multiplayer section and search the map.
....................
So, how would I select my favorite maps in the first place?
There's a lot of different ways. The button that allows you to remove a map from your profile could become the "add to favorites" button in the profiles of the other people. Also, you should be able to add it to favorites from the custom games list itself, and from the score screen once the game has finished, too.
....................
Well, that's all. I think this idea would help the mapmaking community a lot, and encourage everyone to make their own maps. If you can't reach the high popularity lists, well, you'll always have your group of friends to play it.
More could be asked, like charts of statistics for each map, but I think this is enough for now. Opinions, suggestions, criticism? Feel free to post any of that :).
Well, that's it.
Official forums thread here: http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/1302704289 (comment and like for Blizzard to see :P)
at the moment i can´t find my new map myself in the list ...
Why can´t they do it like that? this IS the easiest way to solve this problems. And 0 justi don´t understand why they don´t do it...
1. Yes they desperately need to implement this.
2. This wont and shouldn't because that defeats the point a centralised system. A popular map disappears and 6 people will go and host it sitting in their empty lobbies while if the map had stayed up they could be playing. This obviously affects less popular maps more probably making the entire situation worse.
3. Would be nice but lets face it most people would never use it unless number 2 was implemented also.
popularity reset each month would be nice...
To make a point of why we need drop-down or map expanding on click, here is a diagram containing screenshots from SC2 and War3...
@KratsAU: Go
The images on the front page are excellent. I hope Blizzard find enough spare time to check this thread out. I can appreciate that it takes time and money to make changes to a game like this, but frankly with these issues hanging around since beta its kind of disappointing the lack of involvement.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
@jangsy: Go
Fixing the popularity system so that it doesn't have to be reset would be better. The show only new maps check box applies to everything because of the resets. It's completely pointless!
From my understanding that check box is supposed to help people who have recently released a new map get people playing the map. So you can filter the old 'classics' from the new awesome ones. Especially long term this will be great, its just that it resets way too much because its broken now. :(
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
@OneTwoSC: Go
That spells it out perfectly! I am hoping that they will make a list of all existing lobbies display when you first hit join game, with options to sort them how you please, such as recently created lobbies, popular map lobbies and even by favourite maps (hopefully).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
As far as the search for join map is concerned, it would be cool to have but the way the search is at the moment it would come up with so many matches you still will be pressing Show More to no end. Adding more search filers is important too. Partial matches are cool and all but exact matches would help out as well. Try searching for "blood" in the create game list. Good Luck!
Even searching by number of human player slots or something would be good, seeing that it can say 6 players for a certain map when it only accepts 2 and doesn't bring up the proper error message. Oh and filtering the results too please :)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The final thing I will say (before I start to build a wall of text) is that I forgot what I was going to write here and may write it later.
Patch 1.3 will fix all of this. About time. I have high hopes.
So true. :)
Several improvements have been made to the Join Custom Game section: The Details panel has been removed from this page. Map details are now shown inside a tooltip for each game. Players can now bookmark their favorite custom games! The number of times a game has been bookmarked will be shown in that game's tooltip. Games are now organized into several pages to make finding your desired game type easier: Featured: Our team is always on the lookout for new games that are lots of fun. Our latest favorites are shown on this page. Most Popular: Shows all game types, with the most played games sorted to the top. By Category: This page allows you to browse through Custom Games based on Category. Up & Coming: This page highlights games that other players are recommending, but haven't yet become popular. Fun or Not: From this page you can automatically join a random new Custom Game. After the game, players using Fun or Not are asked to recommend the map (or not). Recommending maps helps get them onto the Up & Coming page. Recently Played: The last several games you’ve played are shown here. Use this to quickly get back into games you play often, or to easily bookmark a game you enjoyed playing. Bookmarks: Use this page to view your Bookmarked maps. A search option has been added to the Join Custom Game interface.
I'M SO EXCITED TO TRY THIS OUT!!!!!!!!!
SEARCH OPTION!!!!!!!!!!
This would fix all issues IMO. Dunno why it was scraped in the first place.
Blizzard are aware of this problem thats why they instituted the up and coming system, Which is not reaping massive effect from what i have seen so far. But i do have a solution.
The option to view player created game in a list which should be a copy of Warcraft3/Starcraft2 Create game lobby system. it will be more inefficent for navigating but will work out what people actually play. Because 99% of the Custom maps are not being played even the good ones.