Problem is getting that crucial early feedback is virtually impossible. Ppl will only join page 1 maps and their bookmarks.
I think that's another big problem with the arcade. It's awful at fostering the actual development of games. You don't want to publish for public a work in progress. What do people do when they encounter a game-breaking bug? One star. Not enough content to want to keep playing? Three stars. You fix the bugs, and add more content. But the bad rating is a death sentence for filling lobbies. People very rarely go back and reevaluate your game so they can update their review.
I will continue to work on maps because I enjoy it. But I won't publish a map until it is near finished. My testing pool is limited to whatever AIs I can make and friends, who become less active and eventually disappear because SC2 is a dying game.
I think that's another big problem with the arcade. It's awful at fostering the actual development of games. You don't want to publish for public a work in progress. What do people do when they encounter a game-breaking bug? One star. Not enough content to want to keep playing? Three stars. You fix the bugs, and add more content. But the bad rating is a death sentence for filling lobbies. People very rarely go back and reevaluate your game so they can update their review.
I will continue to work on maps because I enjoy it. But I won't publish a map until it is near finished. My testing pool is limited to whatever AIs I can make and friends, who become less active and eventually disappear because SC2 is a dying game.
yea the rating system is very unforgiving at the moment. I've seen interesting games rated 4 stars but don't get enough attention since most people only play maps with 5 stars..
I understand that Arcade has problems keeping players there but why talk about esports around it?
Quote:
If Blizzard wants their E-Sports scene to grow and actually be successful they need to keep players active and playing StarCraft 2.
wtf? It IS successful already, unfortunately ever since commentators appeared and this became a job, replays stopped getting released unless some mediocre players and tournaments.
Most of the players that watch tournaments and WCS are people who play melee, from what I understand you are saying that esports will lose the audience if the Arcade falls apart but I don't think people who are only interested in custom maps like RPGs, and such who never play or care about melee watch WCS or any esports events...
Alright. Let me rephrase my opinion in such a way that I might get more reactions to it than "lol nah".
First of all, look at who everybody is currently blaming: it's either Blizzard or the playerbase. Let's compare all these things to how they were during the SC and WarCraft 3 era and start with the first.
Blizzard. A lot of people keep saying they screwed up, the whole decline in the scene is their fault and that their support has been bad. I'm not buying it. I'm not saying Blizzard hasn't changed over the years, but to say that the company itself to has THIS huge of an effect on the mapping scene is overstating it. WarCraft 3 used to have a BOOMING mapping scene, with maps of all types being played constantly and all over. I'm not saying Blizzard didn't drop the ball with the popularity system and I'm not saying the SC2 editor is harder to fully comprehend than the War3 editor either, but think about it: Blizzard has added much of the same functionality that WarCraft 3 had to StarCraft 2. What they missed out on they updated and improved lateron. The editor is still WAY more accessible than virtually any other map editor I have ever worked with. Keeping that in mind, do you honestly believe that Blizzard has changed from what they were into a cash-grabbing devil that has single-handedly killed an entire scene? No way. WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 custom games are way too similar to be used as an explanation for the non-existance of the SC2 mapping scene. The differences there are could be used to explain a decline in interest, sure - but not to explain the complete status quo.
The playerbase. I'm not buying this either. It's a stupid argument. The playerbase is no worse than it was during WarCraft 3. Of course opinions and expectations have been altered, but do you honestly think that gamers nowadays are so different from eight years ago that an entire scene remains non-existant? No way. If you say that people nowadays only play the games on the frontpage of the popularity page without thinking, don't explore new games and want every game to be as quick as possible, I'm going to call your bullshit. You're being a grumpy old guy whining about how everything used to be better in the past. People haven't changed in this way. There isn't a 'stupid ADD generation' that rose over 8 years time. People aren't any (or at least 'much') more stupid and twitchy now than they were back in WarCraft 3, which did have a booming mapping scene. I'll agree that the playerbase has 'changed', but mostly in make-up; and due to another reason.
That other reason is what I dubbed originality in my earlier post. With Blizzard and the playerbase both not being powerful enough factors to explain the huge difference between the WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 mapping scenes, there's only one explanation left: the world surrounding them. Or: the industry and situation of custom games themselves.
Think about it: back in WarCraft 3, the map editor literally spawned a new generation of games. There were a number of completely new games: Tower Defense was an original concept, DOTA fermented itself and Hero Defenses came into being. And then there were maps like Life of a Peasant, "Escape from X", The Silmarillion, Footman Wars and Cat and Mouse. Life of a Peasant was something not really done before at that time, "Escape from X"-style maps were completely new in their format (they used to only exist in older and arcade style games, like Frog), The Silmarillion was a combination of styles that had only existed strictly seperated before (Total War series and Total Annihilation), Footman Wars had only been done before with way less features in StarCraft and Cat and Mouse was a game that had never existed in a digital form.
Name me one other map that compares to any of the ones I named above that currently exists in the Arcade. I'll start you off: Mafia, Battleships and Eiviyn's Catalyst and Magicide. That's it. Aside from those couple of maps, there's absolutely nothing even remotely 'new' on the Arcade, whereas WarCraft 3 gave life to multiple genres and genre-combinations. Sure, there's interesting maps, but nearly all of them have been done before in some fashion. It's the old "why play SOTIS if you can play League of Legends for free?" syndrome.
The point I'm trying to make here is that THIS is the main reason custom mapping is dead. It's not Blizzard trying to steal your money, nor is it people being too impatient to play anything but Nexus Wars. It's the fact that custom mapping has very little left to offer. WarCraft 3 custom mapping gave players the tools to create completely new things. StarCraft 2 custom mapping has given players the tools to make cool maps, but nothing that hasn't been done before. It's not anyone's fault - it's just the sad state of gaming.
It's the fact that custom mapping has very little left to offer. WarCraft 3 custom mapping gave players the tools to create completely new things. StarCraft 2 custom mapping has given players the tools to make cool maps, but nothing that hasn't been done before. It's not anyone's fault - it's just the sad state of gaming.
I'm actually working on one, essentially you have 4 people, 3 of them control heroes fight their way to the end, and each start in separate locations. The 4th is the overwatch. He can't see anything they can on a normal basis, also he has limited contact with them (He can buy satellite time to view the others or parts of the map, but not communicate). However he is the one who has access to the supplies and new items. However they earn the money he uses by completing side missions, and can only send it back to him from certain stations, where they may also communicate with him. Also he is the only one who can view the whole map at once (the other mini-map's are restricted to the players visibility radius). As I said i'm still working on it, and it's a work in progress, but at least i still have a clear idea of what i'm aiming for.
Name me one other map that compares to any of the ones I named above that currently exists in the Arcade. I'll start you off: Mafia, Battleships and Eiviyn's Catalyst and Magicide. That's it. Aside from those couple of maps, there's absolutely nothing even remotely 'new' on the Arcade, whereas WarCraft 3 gave life to multiple genres and genre-combinations. Sure, there's interesting maps, but nearly all of them have been done before in some fashion. It's the old "why play SOTIS if you can play League of Legends for free?" syndrome.
Exactly. I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating. Back in 2002-2007(maybe even till '08), PC gaming was in a pretty big lull. Most PC developers were canned by publishers, went bottom up, or became console only developers. We mostly had some shitty late ports at best, subscription-based MMO's (with various quality), and mods for games (HL1 mods, WC3 Maps, etc). The latter there was probably the majority of games played by us when we were younger, poor and lacked finances for an MMO, and lacked fancy computers to run those crappy ports.
Now, technology to run the latest games is incredibly affordable and even 5 year old hardware can run latest games quite well. Theres' a plethora of cheap indie games that can suck up a lot of time and way too many F2P games (some good, some mostly bad) so people aren't restricted to the third catagory so much anymore. I know my Steam backlog is insanely large as it is and ever growing. For me, it's a time constraint now and most customs don't warrant more than a playthrough or two.
Even the most popular SC2 maps aren't that popular. I'm the main developer for SquadTD and our actual community is pathetically small, I've tried to encourage a lot more in-game chat and forum use but it's just not happening as there really aren't that many people playing it. Sure Blizzard could have and should have done a lot of things better (more visibility to custom maps, better arcade system, open-lobbies from the getgo, etc) but there really just aren't that many people interested in playing custom maps that much anymore. And I doubt it's even a creativity issue at this point.
Yes there are people who want new types of maps. There are also those who want a remake of a previous "classic".
Being one of the big naval guys I have had literally a few dozen requests (a large number considering how often I am actually online) for a remake of WarCraft 3 battle ships.
However as for allocating blame. Look through this website own recruitment forum. How many of those got remotely close? How many of them were futile unless they could get a competent data editor? (That would be 95% or more).
Blizzard had a good GUI for such a data editor. And many community suggestions would have been relatively painless to implement and would certainly be better then much of what they did implement to resolve the issue with the data editor.
I wonder if many of you remember the outrage over the Fun or Not system when it first came out in 1.3.5. It was a major eye-opener. Back then there were 2 schools, scrap the popularity system and put the old system back in or try to make the popularity system work. Most suggestions were variations of one of those 2 general ideas. The problem was the fun or not system was neither of those.
The idea that Blizzard isn't at fault for any of this (I'm not saying all, I'm saying most of it) is completely blown out of the water by what they did with 1.3.5. If it had worked, it would have been considered genius. If it had failed it would have... well we all know what happened afterwards.
1.3.5 was the dividing line. People were willing to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt and wait before that. 1.3.5 was supposed to be their "big fix" that would cure the problem. It didn't.
Now even that is not where the bad part really starts. Its what they did afterwards that really did the damage. Nothing. Nothing was done to remedy the situation for over a year afterwards. I'm not saying Blizzard shouldn't have tried something new, something had to be tried, Battle.net 1.0 had huge flaws. But not fixing it after their experiment clearly failed is simply inexcusable. Blizzard can not claim a lack of resources like smaller companies can. Any company that can afford that large of a campus can afford to remedy a mistake like that.
As for E-Sports failing?
I'm not sure if you understand the nature of any modern sport, let alone an E-Sport, Eimtr. The profitability of StarCraft 2 E-Sports has fallen. Events to hold those tournaments cost money. Renting convention centers isn't cheap. Nor are all the computers, servers, cameras, staff, production equipment, catering, graphics, props etc etc. I use these examples because I've actually worked for a few TV stations.
Now who pays for all of this? Well usually it comes down to an investor of some sort. But that's still money going out. Where is the money coming in? Well since streaming is simply a new version of broadcast its selling the time slots between games and other promotional stuff at the convention.
Now back in WoL we would still see Blizzard's "big partner", Razor doing promotions. We would also see Intel, Nvdia and other nerd/geek stuff that was tailored to that audience.
The last WCS I watched, as I stated above, was just a few months ago. What did I see for the advertising? It was a western hemisphere tournament and the add was in Korean with English subtitles. It was a single add played over and over again. There was no Razor, no Intel, no Nvidia, nothing. They didn't get a company based in the Western Hemisphere to out bid a Korean company for that time slot. 2 years ago they got plenty. Now they are not even getting that. And this was the regional finals we are talking here. One of the biggest WCS runs. And it has be written off by major western hemisphere companies.
Its profitability has been lost. Blizzard will continue pouring money into E-Sports but for progressively diminishing returns. Its already been happening for quite some time. Now lets go into the time frame. This is year 3. Usually years 2 and 3 are the "golden ages" for successful video games. Instead the active player base, given by battle.net 2.0 is at some of its lowest ebbs. It has only been a short time after HotS was released and already activity is dying down.
Back to the arcade.
Not fixing it for nearly 2 years was a willful decision by Blizzard. It was obviously well within their resources to do something about the popularity system and the editor.
As for no new innovation. For god sakes all sorts of new shooter hybrids have been put into the arcade. One of the posters in this thread, I think, has one. It very nearly works. If Blizzard would allocate some resources to sort out the client/server issues it would have opened up a lot of new possibilities.
Also another huge tool WarCraft 3 didn't have was the dialogs. GUI's have allowed for far more interesting, smooth and diverse gameplay than ever before. Implementing complete custom interfaces was something extremely difficult at least in WarCraft 3. Its still a major pain but there is at least native support for it now. GUI is up to at least 70% of game play for many games. Heck blizzard themselves implemented a GUI based game (Star Jewled) and look how well it did.
The argument that "nothing new can be done" is also false. Designing completely new video games is now possible.
I'm not saying Blizzard didn't drop the ball. I think they messed up in various ways, and none of that really helped StarCraft 2, E-sports, or the mapping community. The point I'm making is that they're not the primary cause of the situation we're currently in. SC2 mapping was never as large as WarCraft 3 mapping, from the moment the game was released. It shrunk over the years, sure, but it was never much to begin with. This is why I'm saying you can't really "blame" Blizzard for all this - there's more to it than their mistakes. There's more to it than 'Blizzard messed up'. I'm convinced that if this has been WarCraft 3, they could've messed up a lot more stuff and gotten away with it.
E-sports is another thing entirely: the SC2 melee scene more closely resembles the WarCraft 3 melee scene - small and niche. There's various reasons for that failing, but I genuinely don't even want to get into those (as I'd need to do a lot more thinking on that specific subject).
You're missing my point completely when it comes to originality, though. I guess that's partly my fault, because 'originality' is a very subjective word. Let me try and explain what I mean by it. You linked Subsistence. Ask yourself - what is Subsistence? It's a total conversion of the StarCraft 2 engine. Great, so what does it turn StarCraft 2, this great story-driven military-focused RTS game, into? That's right - a story-driven military-focused RTS game. That isn't originality.
And by saying that I mean absolutely no offense to the lads of Blue Isles Studios: the mod is looking splendid. The point is: it's yet another staple RTS. The names and places change but the faces are the same. It doesn't compare to the first Tower Defense or DOTA maps in WarCraft 3. Those maps literally encouraged a COMPLETELY different playstyle. An entirely different way of thinking and handling your units. THAT is what I call originality - SC2 doesn't have it. And shit; even the original DOTA was nothing more than a clever combination of RPG and RTS. DOTA in turn doesn't even get near to games that really defined genres, like Dune 2 or Wolfenstein 3D.
In StarCraft 2, even the slightest hint of that kind of originality is missing. There are only a couple of maps that come close - Mafia can be compared to Cat & Mice, and has thus (rightfully so) been played as one of the most popular maps in the game. Aside from that, there's Eiviyn's maps (Catalyst, Battleships and Magicide), which really are just DOTA maps with a very unique twist (ridiculous amounts of balanced hero customization). These maps too, rightfully so, were immensily popular for at least a short time. Everything else in the popularity list is Nexus Wars - and THAT is the kind of map that melee players hop into when they don't feel like laddering for a bit.
The problem started with Blizzard. And only they can fix it.
Moazared already touched on this, but no they can't fix it. Especially not now. Look, I have a lot of resentment towards Blizzard, albeit probably for different reasons than most other people, and they absolutely do deserve to be shit in quite a lot of ways which could easily fill up a page of which most people would concur; but even if they did everything "right" the mapping scene wouldn't be considerably bigger. PC gaming is radically different from the WC3-era and it's not their fault.
"SC2 mapping was never as large as WarCraft 3 mapping, from the moment the game was released. It shrunk over the years, sure, but it was never much to begin with. This is why I'm saying you can't really "blame" Blizzard for all this - there's more to it than their mistakes."
I'm going to have to claim that this assumption is incorrect.
First of all, back in WoL Beta the mapping section was more alive than it has been before or since. The smart ones left before StarCraft 2 came out. They saw what the popularity system would do ahead of time. They warned about it. They were ignored. In fact almost everyone was claiming with confidence (myself included) that Blizzard would fix it.
And you are also missing one very large point. Sure it may never be as large as WarCraft 3... if all the mod makers and players actually came from WarCraft 3. Roughly half came from StarCraft 1 though.
And that is where a lot of you seem to be missing the point. At the very early stages of StarCraft 2's life the scene was saturated with the custom mod communities of both WarCraft 3 AND StarCraft 1. That is, combined it was larger than either of the previous game's communities.
StarCraft 1 had a mod scene every big as large and vibrant as WarCraft 3. There were at least as many 3rd party editors made for StarCraft 1 as WarCraft 3. And it lasted for even longer than WarCraft 3's scene ever did.
That is why I keep nailing what happened pre and post 1.3.5. Most were content to wait for a fix. Not more than a year sure but most were watching to see if Blizzard would fix it. 1.3.5 proved to them, in their minds, that Blizzard would never fix it. At least not in time. And they were right. And then games began to be uninstalled.
Now why is the StarCraft mod scene not raising their voice. Well they are, you still see a mod maker who claims to have done work in StarCraft 1.
But if the Galaxy Editor was difficult for the WarCraft 3 people, it was completely alien to the StarCraft 1 mod makers. And since no documentation or tutorials (minus a few, like those made by OneTwoSC. Without him the community may not be alive at all today) were ever made by Blizzard they were left out on a limb. So most of them jumped ship.
You can speculate what was wrong with the community all you want. You may be right, you may be wrong. But the crux is the community was never given even the chance to fail or be at fault.
The popularity system, and the lack of documentation or ease of use in the editor is what did the initial damage. Whatever fault may be of the community, maker and player alike is irrelevant. No one was going to risk the time it took to make a genuinely new and innovative map because the cost of failure, all that work going down the drain, is was and is so high that almost every single mapper that held on decided the tried and true was a better bet that all their work wouldn't be for nothing.
Again its a flaw in the design of the system that was never fixed. And the responsibility for that rests solely in the hands of Blizzard.
StarCraft 2 saw the merging of all of the Blizzard mod communities into a single game. A single community.
However the catch about monetizing E-Sports is that, on average, the viewer is going to be someone who owns and actively plays the game.
The last WCS I watched, back in March or April I believe, the only add I saw was in Korean with English subtitles. They couldn't get a company in the Western Hemisphere to fill that add slot. Now either their sales staff is being lazy (possible) or companies have realized that StarCraft 2 is a write-off E-Sports wise. I mean the Razor commercials I used to see 2 years ago were not there. There were none of the nerd companies like Intel, Nvidia, AMD or other ones that tailor to the audience. And there is certainly not the major mile stone, advertising products like Old Spice, Axe and Pepsi that indicates serious competition for those time slots.
Blizzard failed to understand that anything that keeps players playing StarCraft 2 also keeps players watching their E-Sports. The custom mods we make fall into that category. Players who need a break or cannot succeed at a sufficient level in melee can take a break and still play the game, although kind of not. League of Legends, anyone can be reasonably good at that. MOBA is merely a cross between a real time strategy and a first person shooter. It has elements of both mixed in. And most certainly there is less to keep track of than with a real time strategy. MOBA also brought in a lot of players, mostly from the first person shooter genre that normally wouldn't touch over-head cameras with a 90-foot pole.
WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 1 had a very broad appeal because of the vast content. We keep hearing people bitch about players leaving because they want novelty. Well what do they think the arcade provides? No two maps are exactly the same. They may be mostly the same, but there may be a variation that fits someone's niche. If Blizzard wants their E-Sports scene to grow and actually be successful they need to keep players active and playing StarCraft 2.
They are making no move to do this. Because they still seem to fail to realize (judged by what they have done to date about the situation, namely next to nothing) the above bold line is the crux of the matter I don't think the arcade is reviving. I am seeing increased activity. It isn't enough to be called solid. It could drop at any time. Like it has always done in the last 2 years (see my last post).
You know a lot about Arcade, now let me tell you about esports. WoL was starting to get boring in the last year with the stale TvTs, insta win of Zerg with Fungal, PvP was boring in general. This drove lots of people away from even watching tournaments, yet alone playing it. This plus, we are talking about the last year - way before GLOBAL play, Clans were introduced (in the first Q of 2013) - this killed lots of the activity of the game. You are right, the viewers and audience would be the return of all investments made into hiring a hall for gaming, computers ,decoration, etc.
And yet - I am not sure how much you follow the scene, cause I do it to some extent - esports in SC2 are like they have never been even during war3 - so much money and so many sponsors come, who cares about the names you mention? There are newer and newer sponsors coming, esports is still developing, I don't see the decrease you're talking about.
When the Stats, the Global Play and the Clans were finally released, this brought a lot of people back - but lots have already made up their mind and it's like 'Too late Blizzard, you could have done it in 2010, now I am with another game/company'. - This is a serious mistake by Blizz I agree and that's why the playerbase is not like war3. The initial strike on the expectations of all - all the features that were missing in Bnet 2.0 was a serious hit below the belt for the scene. And it is now too late to pull people back.
The new units added with HotS made the games interesting - people who were mostly Broodwar die hards said 'Wow, now that's more like broodwar games - dynamic!'. But yes, people have already been repulsed from coming back and instead looked for Dota or other communities.
Also face it - the game itself has been made easier, so new players can adapt.
But in a world where people use Iphones, smart phones, like they say - people get dumber with too much automation, I won't be surprised if people just feel too lazy to learn an RTS and expect it to be baby easy and instead prefer moving to games that are easier to play. If the game has to be made easier - I can much disagree, even though you are right, it may bring more people back. But it looks like it's from the process of people getting dumber and having to use their brain less and less.
Either way, it's absurd to claim lack of activity in Esports because of people not coming to SC2 due to Arcade issues - those who play the non-Melee Arcade are never interested in esports, in like 90% of the cases, so was in war3, it's the same here.
Plus, I certainly don't see esports falling for SC2, it's in fact growing.
Let me ask you a simple question: were you even a part of the WarCraft 3 or otherwise the StarCraft custom map community? Your argument is shaky on all sides when you look more closely at it.
For starters, at not a single point in time was the scene as vibrant as it was in WC3. It's hard to provide any good numbers for this, but I'm basing that claim here on my experience playing since launch. Whereas in WarCraft 3 there were always 30+ open lobbies on the EU server playing at least 10 different maps, the entire first year of SC2 custom mapping was Nexus Wars. There may have been a similar amount of players at some points in time, but there was never much in terms of maps to begin with. And it wasn't even that other maps simply weren't played 'because of the popularity system'; it fits multiple maps on the frontpage and you'd expect at least half of those to be original content if the mapping scene were then as it was in WC3.
That is why I keep nailing what happened pre and post 1.3.5. Most were content to wait for a fix. Not more than a year sure but most were watching to see if Blizzard would fix it. 1.3.5 proved to them, in their minds, that Blizzard would never fix it. At least not in time. And they were right. And then games began to be uninstalled.
If that point is true in any way, then why are there absolutely no indications that this is how it happened? There was never a huge outrage on these forums about 1.3.5 specifically. Searching for "1.3.5" brings up one thread by Rodrigo, who (as awesome as he was) spent most of his time here complaining. There wasn't a huge outrage on TeamLiquid. The patch was released in July 2011: Google Trends shows that the search terms StarCraft 2, StarCraft 2 maps, StarCraft 2 mods, StarCraft 2 galaxy and Galaxy editor were all on massive declines way before that date, which had no real impact on any of those searches.
I may suffer in part from nostalgia, but I'm pretty confident in saying that SC2 was never even close to what WarCraft 3 was (and that's just WC3, I was never into SC1). Back during those days I was an active member on www.wc3campaigns.net, which, as a site, was more active than Sc2Mapster ever was. And that was just ONE of the many mapping hubs - there aren't really any others than Mapster when it comes to SC2.
All in all, I don't buy your "1.3.5 made everyone leave" argument, if only for the reason that there's absolutely no indication that this is what happened. Which brings me back to originality: there are plenty of indications that show a lack of it when comparing SC2 to the WarCraft 3 mapping scene.
StarCraft 1 had a mod scene every big as large and vibrant as WarCraft 3. There were at least as many 3rd party editors made for StarCraft 1 as WarCraft 3. And it lasted for even longer than WarCraft 3's scene ever did.
Let me ask you this. Did StarCraft 1 have First Person or Third Person maps? Not only that but were there 1st/3rd person survival horror maps, 1st/3rd person racing maps, 1st/3rd person RPGs? WarCraft III's modding community is still going on. StarCraft 1 is extremely limited compared to WarCraft III.
The reason why there were so many 3rd party editors is because StarCraft 1's editor was so extremely limited. You couldn't create new units, only edit them. So of course, new editors would have to appear.
Stop spreading lies!
It's not possible to add new units to SCBW. Even when you create a mod (= alteration of the game exe and a new patch mpq), you can't add units, just edit the 227 unit slots that are existing.
SC1's editor didn't let you do everything you could possibly do. So, editors like scmdraft2 expanded the possibilities: editing terrain on a tile basis, a few more data things like upgrade#60 that alters worker, turret, and psi storm damage and a few other things like a way better editor UI, string recycling, color code generation via text tags, extended player units (-> altering things like the game speed or altering player supply limits via writing into other areas in the editor using these too high player numbers), extended player colors, inverted locations, trigger conditions that check other memory locations, text based trigger editor, ...
But "new" data wasn't added. 3rd party editors were created because these unnecessary limitations and horrible default UI [thaaaat tiny trigger editor back then...]. SC2's editor has no limitations we can't overcome with a text editor editing xml. At least this is how it seems right now, after 3 years.
"SC2 mapping was never as large as WarCraft 3 mapping, from the moment the game was released. It shrunk over the years, sure, but it was never much to begin with. This is why I'm saying you can't really "blame" Blizzard for all this - there's more to it than their mistakes."
I'm going to have to claim that this assumption is incorrect.
First of all, back in WoL Beta the mapping section was more alive than it has been before or since. The smart ones left before StarCraft 2 came out. They saw what the popularity system would do ahead of time. They warned about it. They were ignored. In fact almost everyone was claiming with confidence (myself included) that Blizzard would fix it.
And you are also missing one very large point. Sure it may never be as large as WarCraft 3... if all the mod makers and players actually came from WarCraft 3. Roughly half came from StarCraft 1 though.
And that is where a lot of you seem to be missing the point. At the very early stages of StarCraft 2's life the scene was saturated with the custom mod communities of both WarCraft 3 AND StarCraft 1. That is, combined it was larger than either of the previous game's communities.
StarCraft 1 had a mod scene every big as large and vibrant as WarCraft 3. There were at least as many 3rd party editors made for StarCraft 1 as WarCraft 3. And it lasted for even longer than WarCraft 3's scene ever did.
That is why I keep nailing what happened pre and post 1.3.5. Most were content to wait for a fix. Not more than a year sure but most were watching to see if Blizzard would fix it. 1.3.5 proved to them, in their minds, that Blizzard would never fix it. At least not in time. And they were right. And then games began to be uninstalled.
Now why is the StarCraft mod scene not raising their voice. Well they are, you still see a mod maker who claims to have done work in StarCraft 1.
But if the Galaxy Editor was difficult for the WarCraft 3 people, it was completely alien to the StarCraft 1 mod makers. And since no documentation or tutorials (minus a few, like those made by OneTwoSC. Without him the community may not be alive at all today) were ever made by Blizzard they were left out on a limb. So most of them jumped ship.
You can speculate what was wrong with the community all you want. You may be right, you may be wrong. But the crux is the community was never given even the chance to fail or be at fault.
The popularity system, and the lack of documentation or ease of use in the editor is what did the initial damage. Whatever fault may be of the community, maker and player alike is irrelevant. No one was going to risk the time it took to make a genuinely new and innovative map because the cost of failure, all that work going down the drain, is was and is so high that almost every single mapper that held on decided the tried and true was a better bet that all their work wouldn't be for nothing.
Again its a flaw in the design of the system that was never fixed. And the responsibility for that rests solely in the hands of Blizzard.
StarCraft 2 saw the merging of all of the Blizzard mod communities into a single game. A single community.
I 100% agree with this.
I'd like to add, if Blizzard had actually done a decent job with the Arcade system from the get go, with NO popularity system, just an opens games list. I'm convinced the mapping community today would be 10x more vibrant and active.
Why in the hell was StarCraft 1 able to produce so many "classics"?
The thing you fail to realize is that is not always about what the game itself can and cannot do. Almost every format of custom mod in WarCraft 3 started life in StarCraft 1.
It not almost about how flashy or realistic you can make a unit. People kept enjoying games because of gameplay, not about what was possible or not in the game.
I mean there was of course many, many popular grand strategy maps. There were also many, many RPG's, one of my favorites, every today, being Space Pirate War.
Heck I'm sure you've heard what game the inspiration for DotA right? AoS.
So what if StarCraft 1's editor couldn't do as much as WarCraft 3 or StarCraft 1? People still made plenty of very good mods and plenty of people played them. Heck I went beck a little before StarCraft 2 Beta came out just so I could brush up on melee play. There were still a few new custom maps coming out even after a decade. Heck I checked back into WarCraft 2 and they still had one or two custom mods going.
Just because you have primitive mechanics doesn't mean you can't have creative and fun gameplay. For crying out lead even today one of the most popular games is Tetris. Pray tell me what is extremely complicated about that? Or what about Super Mario? Or the old Mortal Combat? Heck I still have a working N64. My favorite racing game of all time was Star Wars Episode 1: Podracer.
You cannot go around claiming that a gaming scene can't be active just because mechanics are out of date. I mean try these guys:
Forged Alliance Forever.
Its a similar story to ours. They kept the old game alive because the new game, Supreme Commander 2, was seen as crap. Who's fault is that? The developing company.
Now about how active the early StarCraft 2 scene really was. I agree plenty of people were leaving. Even then maps were still racking upwards of 30,000 hours. People started quitting from square one because of the popularity system. They couldn't play the maps they wanted to play. Its a design failure and the responsibility for creating and fixing it is Blizzard's.
People wanted StarCraft 2 to succeed. Many of them still do. Most have given up hope. And after nearly 3 years of neglect, who can rightly blame them? But for a short time. A very short time, there were a lot of players. Google trends for SC2mapster supports this (hey, you wanted numbers right?). And then Google Trends shows another spike for SC2mapster around 1.3.5.
The second peak, around 1.3.5, would probably have been close to the sustainable level had the system been made well in the first place. You can clearly see from the numbers (now you've seen some accurate ones) What happened to the activity of the mod scene. This is what I base my argument on and you cannot say it isn't a credible and concrete source. In fact, its probably the most accurate data outside of Blizzard's own internal data. It's the best anyone can go on.
So bad popularity system, bad data editor, lack of an 'all-purpose' model like the WC3 villager, it all hurts. Personally, the arcade-maps are just straight-out conventional and plain. Censorship and a fear of getting banned probably makes people do this. In WC3 there were LoAP maps where you could get married, maps with ripped-models, porn maps, maps about non-Blizzard IPs, maps with huge amounts of swear-words that Blizzard did anything about, all this stuff but in StarCraft 2, you'll get banned for having a map with the word 'damn' or 'god'. That really hurts creativity.
Very little of what you say here is true. First of all, SC2 also has "all-purpose" models, (whatever thats supposed to mean). We have those villagers, too, you know. Also, there are just as many variations of maps in SC2 as there were in WC3 - probably even more in SC2, because the editor is more powerfull. We also have maps themed on different games, ripped models and all that jazz as well, you just do not bother to take a look at them. And are you seriously saying you miss "porn maps"? Im glad those dont exist anymore.
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I think that's another big problem with the arcade. It's awful at fostering the actual development of games. You don't want to publish for public a work in progress. What do people do when they encounter a game-breaking bug? One star. Not enough content to want to keep playing? Three stars. You fix the bugs, and add more content. But the bad rating is a death sentence for filling lobbies. People very rarely go back and reevaluate your game so they can update their review.
I will continue to work on maps because I enjoy it. But I won't publish a map until it is near finished. My testing pool is limited to whatever AIs I can make and friends, who become less active and eventually disappear because SC2 is a dying game.
yea the rating system is very unforgiving at the moment. I've seen interesting games rated 4 stars but don't get enough attention since most people only play maps with 5 stars..
@Zolstice: Go Good maps start below 5 star:)
@FockeWulf: Go
I understand that Arcade has problems keeping players there but why talk about esports around it?
wtf? It IS successful already, unfortunately ever since commentators appeared and this became a job, replays stopped getting released unless some mediocre players and tournaments.
Most of the players that watch tournaments and WCS are people who play melee, from what I understand you are saying that esports will lose the audience if the Arcade falls apart but I don't think people who are only interested in custom maps like RPGs, and such who never play or care about melee watch WCS or any esports events...
Alright. Let me rephrase my opinion in such a way that I might get more reactions to it than "lol nah".
First of all, look at who everybody is currently blaming: it's either Blizzard or the playerbase. Let's compare all these things to how they were during the SC and WarCraft 3 era and start with the first.
Blizzard. A lot of people keep saying they screwed up, the whole decline in the scene is their fault and that their support has been bad. I'm not buying it. I'm not saying Blizzard hasn't changed over the years, but to say that the company itself to has THIS huge of an effect on the mapping scene is overstating it. WarCraft 3 used to have a BOOMING mapping scene, with maps of all types being played constantly and all over. I'm not saying Blizzard didn't drop the ball with the popularity system and I'm not saying the SC2 editor is harder to fully comprehend than the War3 editor either, but think about it: Blizzard has added much of the same functionality that WarCraft 3 had to StarCraft 2. What they missed out on they updated and improved lateron. The editor is still WAY more accessible than virtually any other map editor I have ever worked with. Keeping that in mind, do you honestly believe that Blizzard has changed from what they were into a cash-grabbing devil that has single-handedly killed an entire scene? No way. WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 custom games are way too similar to be used as an explanation for the non-existance of the SC2 mapping scene. The differences there are could be used to explain a decline in interest, sure - but not to explain the complete status quo.
The playerbase. I'm not buying this either. It's a stupid argument. The playerbase is no worse than it was during WarCraft 3. Of course opinions and expectations have been altered, but do you honestly think that gamers nowadays are so different from eight years ago that an entire scene remains non-existant? No way. If you say that people nowadays only play the games on the frontpage of the popularity page without thinking, don't explore new games and want every game to be as quick as possible, I'm going to call your bullshit. You're being a grumpy old guy whining about how everything used to be better in the past. People haven't changed in this way. There isn't a 'stupid ADD generation' that rose over 8 years time. People aren't any (or at least 'much') more stupid and twitchy now than they were back in WarCraft 3, which did have a booming mapping scene. I'll agree that the playerbase has 'changed', but mostly in make-up; and due to another reason.
That other reason is what I dubbed originality in my earlier post. With Blizzard and the playerbase both not being powerful enough factors to explain the huge difference between the WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 mapping scenes, there's only one explanation left: the world surrounding them. Or: the industry and situation of custom games themselves.
Think about it: back in WarCraft 3, the map editor literally spawned a new generation of games. There were a number of completely new games: Tower Defense was an original concept, DOTA fermented itself and Hero Defenses came into being. And then there were maps like Life of a Peasant, "Escape from X", The Silmarillion, Footman Wars and Cat and Mouse. Life of a Peasant was something not really done before at that time, "Escape from X"-style maps were completely new in their format (they used to only exist in older and arcade style games, like Frog), The Silmarillion was a combination of styles that had only existed strictly seperated before (Total War series and Total Annihilation), Footman Wars had only been done before with way less features in StarCraft and Cat and Mouse was a game that had never existed in a digital form.
Name me one other map that compares to any of the ones I named above that currently exists in the Arcade. I'll start you off: Mafia, Battleships and Eiviyn's Catalyst and Magicide. That's it. Aside from those couple of maps, there's absolutely nothing even remotely 'new' on the Arcade, whereas WarCraft 3 gave life to multiple genres and genre-combinations. Sure, there's interesting maps, but nearly all of them have been done before in some fashion. It's the old "why play SOTIS if you can play League of Legends for free?" syndrome.
The point I'm trying to make here is that THIS is the main reason custom mapping is dead. It's not Blizzard trying to steal your money, nor is it people being too impatient to play anything but Nexus Wars. It's the fact that custom mapping has very little left to offer. WarCraft 3 custom mapping gave players the tools to create completely new things. StarCraft 2 custom mapping has given players the tools to make cool maps, but nothing that hasn't been done before. It's not anyone's fault - it's just the sad state of gaming.
Boom!
@Mozared: Go
Perhaps a thread should be made, challenge the community to come up with a new genre
I'm actually working on one, essentially you have 4 people, 3 of them control heroes fight their way to the end, and each start in separate locations. The 4th is the overwatch. He can't see anything they can on a normal basis, also he has limited contact with them (He can buy satellite time to view the others or parts of the map, but not communicate). However he is the one who has access to the supplies and new items. However they earn the money he uses by completing side missions, and can only send it back to him from certain stations, where they may also communicate with him. Also he is the only one who can view the whole map at once (the other mini-map's are restricted to the players visibility radius). As I said i'm still working on it, and it's a work in progress, but at least i still have a clear idea of what i'm aiming for.
Still alive and kicking, just busy.
My guide to the trigger editor (still a work in progress)
Exactly. I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating. Back in 2002-2007(maybe even till '08), PC gaming was in a pretty big lull. Most PC developers were canned by publishers, went bottom up, or became console only developers. We mostly had some shitty late ports at best, subscription-based MMO's (with various quality), and mods for games (HL1 mods, WC3 Maps, etc). The latter there was probably the majority of games played by us when we were younger, poor and lacked finances for an MMO, and lacked fancy computers to run those crappy ports.
Now, technology to run the latest games is incredibly affordable and even 5 year old hardware can run latest games quite well. Theres' a plethora of cheap indie games that can suck up a lot of time and way too many F2P games (some good, some mostly bad) so people aren't restricted to the third catagory so much anymore. I know my Steam backlog is insanely large as it is and ever growing. For me, it's a time constraint now and most customs don't warrant more than a playthrough or two.
Even the most popular SC2 maps aren't that popular. I'm the main developer for SquadTD and our actual community is pathetically small, I've tried to encourage a lot more in-game chat and forum use but it's just not happening as there really aren't that many people playing it. Sure Blizzard could have and should have done a lot of things better (more visibility to custom maps, better arcade system, open-lobbies from the getgo, etc) but there really just aren't that many people interested in playing custom maps that much anymore. And I doubt it's even a creativity issue at this point.
My experience has been entirely different.
Yes there are people who want new types of maps. There are also those who want a remake of a previous "classic".
Being one of the big naval guys I have had literally a few dozen requests (a large number considering how often I am actually online) for a remake of WarCraft 3 battle ships.
However as for allocating blame. Look through this website own recruitment forum. How many of those got remotely close? How many of them were futile unless they could get a competent data editor? (That would be 95% or more).
Blizzard had a good GUI for such a data editor. And many community suggestions would have been relatively painless to implement and would certainly be better then much of what they did implement to resolve the issue with the data editor.
I wonder if many of you remember the outrage over the Fun or Not system when it first came out in 1.3.5. It was a major eye-opener. Back then there were 2 schools, scrap the popularity system and put the old system back in or try to make the popularity system work. Most suggestions were variations of one of those 2 general ideas. The problem was the fun or not system was neither of those.
The idea that Blizzard isn't at fault for any of this (I'm not saying all, I'm saying most of it) is completely blown out of the water by what they did with 1.3.5. If it had worked, it would have been considered genius. If it had failed it would have... well we all know what happened afterwards.
1.3.5 was the dividing line. People were willing to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt and wait before that. 1.3.5 was supposed to be their "big fix" that would cure the problem. It didn't.
Now even that is not where the bad part really starts. Its what they did afterwards that really did the damage. Nothing. Nothing was done to remedy the situation for over a year afterwards. I'm not saying Blizzard shouldn't have tried something new, something had to be tried, Battle.net 1.0 had huge flaws. But not fixing it after their experiment clearly failed is simply inexcusable. Blizzard can not claim a lack of resources like smaller companies can. Any company that can afford that large of a campus can afford to remedy a mistake like that.
As for E-Sports failing?
I'm not sure if you understand the nature of any modern sport, let alone an E-Sport, Eimtr. The profitability of StarCraft 2 E-Sports has fallen. Events to hold those tournaments cost money. Renting convention centers isn't cheap. Nor are all the computers, servers, cameras, staff, production equipment, catering, graphics, props etc etc. I use these examples because I've actually worked for a few TV stations.
Now who pays for all of this? Well usually it comes down to an investor of some sort. But that's still money going out. Where is the money coming in? Well since streaming is simply a new version of broadcast its selling the time slots between games and other promotional stuff at the convention.
Now back in WoL we would still see Blizzard's "big partner", Razor doing promotions. We would also see Intel, Nvdia and other nerd/geek stuff that was tailored to that audience.
The last WCS I watched, as I stated above, was just a few months ago. What did I see for the advertising? It was a western hemisphere tournament and the add was in Korean with English subtitles. It was a single add played over and over again. There was no Razor, no Intel, no Nvidia, nothing. They didn't get a company based in the Western Hemisphere to out bid a Korean company for that time slot. 2 years ago they got plenty. Now they are not even getting that. And this was the regional finals we are talking here. One of the biggest WCS runs. And it has be written off by major western hemisphere companies.
Its profitability has been lost. Blizzard will continue pouring money into E-Sports but for progressively diminishing returns. Its already been happening for quite some time. Now lets go into the time frame. This is year 3. Usually years 2 and 3 are the "golden ages" for successful video games. Instead the active player base, given by battle.net 2.0 is at some of its lowest ebbs. It has only been a short time after HotS was released and already activity is dying down.
Back to the arcade.
Not fixing it for nearly 2 years was a willful decision by Blizzard. It was obviously well within their resources to do something about the popularity system and the editor.
As for no new innovation. For god sakes all sorts of new shooter hybrids have been put into the arcade. One of the posters in this thread, I think, has one. It very nearly works. If Blizzard would allocate some resources to sort out the client/server issues it would have opened up a lot of new possibilities.
Also another huge tool WarCraft 3 didn't have was the dialogs. GUI's have allowed for far more interesting, smooth and diverse gameplay than ever before. Implementing complete custom interfaces was something extremely difficult at least in WarCraft 3. Its still a major pain but there is at least native support for it now. GUI is up to at least 70% of game play for many games. Heck blizzard themselves implemented a GUI based game (Star Jewled) and look how well it did.
The argument that "nothing new can be done" is also false. Designing completely new video games is now possible.
I mean look at this: http://subsistencegame.com/index.php?page=home
Nothing like this ever happened in WarCraft 3. No there are plenty of new things that can be done.
The problem started with Blizzard. And only they can fix it.
@FockeWulf: Go
I'm not saying Blizzard didn't drop the ball. I think they messed up in various ways, and none of that really helped StarCraft 2, E-sports, or the mapping community. The point I'm making is that they're not the primary cause of the situation we're currently in. SC2 mapping was never as large as WarCraft 3 mapping, from the moment the game was released. It shrunk over the years, sure, but it was never much to begin with. This is why I'm saying you can't really "blame" Blizzard for all this - there's more to it than their mistakes. There's more to it than 'Blizzard messed up'. I'm convinced that if this has been WarCraft 3, they could've messed up a lot more stuff and gotten away with it.
E-sports is another thing entirely: the SC2 melee scene more closely resembles the WarCraft 3 melee scene - small and niche. There's various reasons for that failing, but I genuinely don't even want to get into those (as I'd need to do a lot more thinking on that specific subject).
You're missing my point completely when it comes to originality, though. I guess that's partly my fault, because 'originality' is a very subjective word. Let me try and explain what I mean by it. You linked Subsistence. Ask yourself - what is Subsistence? It's a total conversion of the StarCraft 2 engine. Great, so what does it turn StarCraft 2, this great story-driven military-focused RTS game, into? That's right - a story-driven military-focused RTS game. That isn't originality.
And by saying that I mean absolutely no offense to the lads of Blue Isles Studios: the mod is looking splendid. The point is: it's yet another staple RTS. The names and places change but the faces are the same. It doesn't compare to the first Tower Defense or DOTA maps in WarCraft 3. Those maps literally encouraged a COMPLETELY different playstyle. An entirely different way of thinking and handling your units. THAT is what I call originality - SC2 doesn't have it. And shit; even the original DOTA was nothing more than a clever combination of RPG and RTS. DOTA in turn doesn't even get near to games that really defined genres, like Dune 2 or Wolfenstein 3D.
In StarCraft 2, even the slightest hint of that kind of originality is missing. There are only a couple of maps that come close - Mafia can be compared to Cat & Mice, and has thus (rightfully so) been played as one of the most popular maps in the game. Aside from that, there's Eiviyn's maps (Catalyst, Battleships and Magicide), which really are just DOTA maps with a very unique twist (ridiculous amounts of balanced hero customization). These maps too, rightfully so, were immensily popular for at least a short time. Everything else in the popularity list is Nexus Wars - and THAT is the kind of map that melee players hop into when they don't feel like laddering for a bit.
Moazared already touched on this, but no they can't fix it. Especially not now. Look, I have a lot of resentment towards Blizzard, albeit probably for different reasons than most other people, and they absolutely do deserve to be shit in quite a lot of ways which could easily fill up a page of which most people would concur; but even if they did everything "right" the mapping scene wouldn't be considerably bigger. PC gaming is radically different from the WC3-era and it's not their fault.
@willuwontu: Go
willuwontu, wtf.
Member since 2010. Made the -The Thing- [Revival] game. Nostalgic of the WC3 days.
"SC2 mapping was never as large as WarCraft 3 mapping, from the moment the game was released. It shrunk over the years, sure, but it was never much to begin with. This is why I'm saying you can't really "blame" Blizzard for all this - there's more to it than their mistakes."
I'm going to have to claim that this assumption is incorrect.
First of all, back in WoL Beta the mapping section was more alive than it has been before or since. The smart ones left before StarCraft 2 came out. They saw what the popularity system would do ahead of time. They warned about it. They were ignored. In fact almost everyone was claiming with confidence (myself included) that Blizzard would fix it.
And you are also missing one very large point. Sure it may never be as large as WarCraft 3... if all the mod makers and players actually came from WarCraft 3. Roughly half came from StarCraft 1 though.
And that is where a lot of you seem to be missing the point. At the very early stages of StarCraft 2's life the scene was saturated with the custom mod communities of both WarCraft 3 AND StarCraft 1. That is, combined it was larger than either of the previous game's communities.
StarCraft 1 had a mod scene every big as large and vibrant as WarCraft 3. There were at least as many 3rd party editors made for StarCraft 1 as WarCraft 3. And it lasted for even longer than WarCraft 3's scene ever did.
That is why I keep nailing what happened pre and post 1.3.5. Most were content to wait for a fix. Not more than a year sure but most were watching to see if Blizzard would fix it. 1.3.5 proved to them, in their minds, that Blizzard would never fix it. At least not in time. And they were right. And then games began to be uninstalled.
Now why is the StarCraft mod scene not raising their voice. Well they are, you still see a mod maker who claims to have done work in StarCraft 1.
But if the Galaxy Editor was difficult for the WarCraft 3 people, it was completely alien to the StarCraft 1 mod makers. And since no documentation or tutorials (minus a few, like those made by OneTwoSC. Without him the community may not be alive at all today) were ever made by Blizzard they were left out on a limb. So most of them jumped ship.
You can speculate what was wrong with the community all you want. You may be right, you may be wrong. But the crux is the community was never given even the chance to fail or be at fault.
The popularity system, and the lack of documentation or ease of use in the editor is what did the initial damage. Whatever fault may be of the community, maker and player alike is irrelevant. No one was going to risk the time it took to make a genuinely new and innovative map because the cost of failure, all that work going down the drain, is was and is so high that almost every single mapper that held on decided the tried and true was a better bet that all their work wouldn't be for nothing.
Again its a flaw in the design of the system that was never fixed. And the responsibility for that rests solely in the hands of Blizzard.
StarCraft 2 saw the merging of all of the Blizzard mod communities into a single game. A single community.
You know a lot about Arcade, now let me tell you about esports. WoL was starting to get boring in the last year with the stale TvTs, insta win of Zerg with Fungal, PvP was boring in general. This drove lots of people away from even watching tournaments, yet alone playing it. This plus, we are talking about the last year - way before GLOBAL play, Clans were introduced (in the first Q of 2013) - this killed lots of the activity of the game. You are right, the viewers and audience would be the return of all investments made into hiring a hall for gaming, computers ,decoration, etc.
And yet - I am not sure how much you follow the scene, cause I do it to some extent - esports in SC2 are like they have never been even during war3 - so much money and so many sponsors come, who cares about the names you mention? There are newer and newer sponsors coming, esports is still developing, I don't see the decrease you're talking about.
When the Stats, the Global Play and the Clans were finally released, this brought a lot of people back - but lots have already made up their mind and it's like 'Too late Blizzard, you could have done it in 2010, now I am with another game/company'. - This is a serious mistake by Blizz I agree and that's why the playerbase is not like war3. The initial strike on the expectations of all - all the features that were missing in Bnet 2.0 was a serious hit below the belt for the scene. And it is now too late to pull people back.
The new units added with HotS made the games interesting - people who were mostly Broodwar die hards said 'Wow, now that's more like broodwar games - dynamic!'. But yes, people have already been repulsed from coming back and instead looked for Dota or other communities.
Also face it - the game itself has been made easier, so new players can adapt.
But in a world where people use Iphones, smart phones, like they say - people get dumber with too much automation, I won't be surprised if people just feel too lazy to learn an RTS and expect it to be baby easy and instead prefer moving to games that are easier to play. If the game has to be made easier - I can much disagree, even though you are right, it may bring more people back. But it looks like it's from the process of people getting dumber and having to use their brain less and less.
Either way, it's absurd to claim lack of activity in Esports because of people not coming to SC2 due to Arcade issues - those who play the non-Melee Arcade are never interested in esports, in like 90% of the cases, so was in war3, it's the same here.
Plus, I certainly don't see esports falling for SC2, it's in fact growing.
@FockeWulf: Go
Let me ask you a simple question: were you even a part of the WarCraft 3 or otherwise the StarCraft custom map community? Your argument is shaky on all sides when you look more closely at it.
For starters, at not a single point in time was the scene as vibrant as it was in WC3. It's hard to provide any good numbers for this, but I'm basing that claim here on my experience playing since launch. Whereas in WarCraft 3 there were always 30+ open lobbies on the EU server playing at least 10 different maps, the entire first year of SC2 custom mapping was Nexus Wars. There may have been a similar amount of players at some points in time, but there was never much in terms of maps to begin with. And it wasn't even that other maps simply weren't played 'because of the popularity system'; it fits multiple maps on the frontpage and you'd expect at least half of those to be original content if the mapping scene were then as it was in WC3.
Then there's this:
If that point is true in any way, then why are there absolutely no indications that this is how it happened? There was never a huge outrage on these forums about 1.3.5 specifically. Searching for "1.3.5" brings up one thread by Rodrigo, who (as awesome as he was) spent most of his time here complaining. There wasn't a huge outrage on TeamLiquid. The patch was released in July 2011: Google Trends shows that the search terms StarCraft 2, StarCraft 2 maps, StarCraft 2 mods, StarCraft 2 galaxy and Galaxy editor were all on massive declines way before that date, which had no real impact on any of those searches.
I may suffer in part from nostalgia, but I'm pretty confident in saying that SC2 was never even close to what WarCraft 3 was (and that's just WC3, I was never into SC1). Back during those days I was an active member on www.wc3campaigns.net, which, as a site, was more active than Sc2Mapster ever was. And that was just ONE of the many mapping hubs - there aren't really any others than Mapster when it comes to SC2.
All in all, I don't buy your "1.3.5 made everyone leave" argument, if only for the reason that there's absolutely no indication that this is what happened. Which brings me back to originality: there are plenty of indications that show a lack of it when comparing SC2 to the WarCraft 3 mapping scene.
Stop spreading lies!
It's not possible to add new units to SCBW. Even when you create a mod (= alteration of the game exe and a new patch mpq), you can't add units, just edit the 227 unit slots that are existing.
SC1's editor didn't let you do everything you could possibly do. So, editors like scmdraft2 expanded the possibilities: editing terrain on a tile basis, a few more data things like upgrade#60 that alters worker, turret, and psi storm damage and a few other things like a way better editor UI, string recycling, color code generation via text tags, extended player units (-> altering things like the game speed or altering player supply limits via writing into other areas in the editor using these too high player numbers), extended player colors, inverted locations, trigger conditions that check other memory locations, text based trigger editor, ...
But "new" data wasn't added. 3rd party editors were created because these unnecessary limitations and horrible default UI [thaaaat tiny trigger editor back then...]. SC2's editor has no limitations we can't overcome with a text editor editing xml. At least this is how it seems right now, after 3 years.
I 100% agree with this.
I'd like to add, if Blizzard had actually done a decent job with the Arcade system from the get go, with NO popularity system, just an opens games list. I'm convinced the mapping community today would be 10x more vibrant and active.
@Mozared: Go
Let me ask you this:
Why in the hell was StarCraft 1 able to produce so many "classics"?
The thing you fail to realize is that is not always about what the game itself can and cannot do. Almost every format of custom mod in WarCraft 3 started life in StarCraft 1.
It not almost about how flashy or realistic you can make a unit. People kept enjoying games because of gameplay, not about what was possible or not in the game.
I mean there was of course many, many popular grand strategy maps. There were also many, many RPG's, one of my favorites, every today, being Space Pirate War.
Heck I'm sure you've heard what game the inspiration for DotA right? AoS.
So what if StarCraft 1's editor couldn't do as much as WarCraft 3 or StarCraft 1? People still made plenty of very good mods and plenty of people played them. Heck I went beck a little before StarCraft 2 Beta came out just so I could brush up on melee play. There were still a few new custom maps coming out even after a decade. Heck I checked back into WarCraft 2 and they still had one or two custom mods going.
Just because you have primitive mechanics doesn't mean you can't have creative and fun gameplay. For crying out lead even today one of the most popular games is Tetris. Pray tell me what is extremely complicated about that? Or what about Super Mario? Or the old Mortal Combat? Heck I still have a working N64. My favorite racing game of all time was Star Wars Episode 1: Podracer.
You cannot go around claiming that a gaming scene can't be active just because mechanics are out of date. I mean try these guys: Forged Alliance Forever.
Its a similar story to ours. They kept the old game alive because the new game, Supreme Commander 2, was seen as crap. Who's fault is that? The developing company.
Now about how active the early StarCraft 2 scene really was. I agree plenty of people were leaving. Even then maps were still racking upwards of 30,000 hours. People started quitting from square one because of the popularity system. They couldn't play the maps they wanted to play. Its a design failure and the responsibility for creating and fixing it is Blizzard's.
People wanted StarCraft 2 to succeed. Many of them still do. Most have given up hope. And after nearly 3 years of neglect, who can rightly blame them? But for a short time. A very short time, there were a lot of players. Google trends for SC2mapster supports this (hey, you wanted numbers right?). And then Google Trends shows another spike for SC2mapster around 1.3.5.
Don't believe me? See for yourself: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=sc2mapster#q=sc2mapster&cmpt=q
The second peak, around 1.3.5, would probably have been close to the sustainable level had the system been made well in the first place. You can clearly see from the numbers (now you've seen some accurate ones) What happened to the activity of the mod scene. This is what I base my argument on and you cannot say it isn't a credible and concrete source. In fact, its probably the most accurate data outside of Blizzard's own internal data. It's the best anyone can go on.
And here is the story of the WarCraft 3 mod scene: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=sc2mapster#q=%22hive+workshop%22&cmpt=q
Oh ya and about the StarCraft 1 scene: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=sc2mapster#q=star%20edit&cmpt=q
And while we are at it how about the diplomacy scene that some of have claimed doesn't exist: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=sc2mapster#q=diplomunion&cmpt=q
Very little of what you say here is true. First of all, SC2 also has "all-purpose" models, (whatever thats supposed to mean). We have those villagers, too, you know. Also, there are just as many variations of maps in SC2 as there were in WC3 - probably even more in SC2, because the editor is more powerfull. We also have maps themed on different games, ripped models and all that jazz as well, you just do not bother to take a look at them. And are you seriously saying you miss "porn maps"? Im glad those dont exist anymore.