Problem: Hard to fill lobbies of unpopular / new / low rated maps; Find players to test our maps
Possible Solutions:
- Lobbies with a name
- Reworked popularity system
- New category for test maps
- No rating for test maps
- Do not kick AFK-Players, only take host status away
Problem: Lobby can be blocked
Possible Solutions:
- Lower duration of pending players
- Prevent reinvites
Problem: Lack of feedback for mapmakers
Possible Solutions:
- Add some statistics
- Allow more reviews
- Add a bug report function
- Show updated reviews (mark as unread or something)
- Let reviews/ratings expire
- Unhelpful button for reviews
- Let us answer to reviews similiar to Google Play
- Show us as uploading and not as online while uploading a map (missing chat)
Problem: Maps cannot easily be found
Possible Solutions:
- Show uploaded maps in profile
- Add tags for maps
- Better search (similiar to)
- More categories
Problem: No efficient organisation of clans
Possible solutions:
- Let them expire
- Connect clan to a map
- Need minimum number of players to create a clan / not letting it expire
- Allow clantags more than once
- Leader should be demoted after a long offline period
- It should be possible to set up the same chat for map / group / clan
- Give us more options to filter groups (online, added last, officiers, etc)
Problem: Visual improvements
Possible improvements:
- Rating colours
- Do not use the localisation of the map within the arcade (Info screen titles)
- Credits section to credit people who helped in making the map (with and without link to profile)
- No extra chat window for laggers (it's annoying to use them)
I have created Problem-Categories to show which problem shall be addressed with a suggestion
Old List below
they still update sc2 so i thought they might read this one day:
let us name our lobbies
map information titles are shown in a different language (depends on the map localization, no need for that)
don't kick afk ppl, just take the host status away
let me see the maps someone has created in his/her profile
let us disable ratings for alpha testing or even add a modus for maps (development stage, no rating possible yet)
give us a bug report function similiar to reviews just unlimited, only creator is able to see to prevent spamming, flamming etc
remove the extra chat window when someone is lagging!!!
make all your models available for modding, (create mods with wow models, diablo models etc), move these mods to all new games with an editor
let us filter group members finally, not only officiers, "online" would be helpful to filter
make the launcher faster than starting the editor, press test document, leave game, login
give me TRD clan tag for europe :( ( i might understand if they would decline this one)
-update-
let us kick pending players (or greatly lower the duration to decline if some1 is not responding)
rating colours (not highest prio :D)
fix latency of bnet 2.0 in general
allow more than 1 review after lots of patches or a fixed time
do not show the same reviews for the whole life time of a map first
give us more options to search through the arcade
-update2-
give us unhelpful buttons for reviews
give us a tag system for maps, so we can search for them (and actually find them)
a credits section is a nice thing
let us connect a map to a clan or group
collections for maps (nice to have)
finally fix "show profile", often says this player doesnt have a profile
showing profile of a "real friend" shows only wrong profile
more categories ( also counts towards better search)
fix the banks in ext mod
-update3-
let us save multiplayer games and also let us disable this feature in triggers
let us specify options for observers (show world tooltips)
let us see which map some1 is currently playing
give us some statistics about our maps
allow the launcher to download arcade maps
let map owner, group owner specify the chat ( for example: all chats for a custom map (the map, the group and the clan chat) shall link to the same chat, if wanted, instead of having 3 different ones)
do not show us as online (show us a uploading) while uploading a map
let clans expire if the leader was offline for a certain amount of time +
give us an option to change leader of a clan (if all/some officiers agree for example)
everyone allowed to post their ideas regarding bnet 2.0 and arcade. i will add them to the list
to be continued...
Making arcade games easier to find and play would be my main one, because I believe above all, discover-ability is very low in the arcade.
-Correct the latency of scrolling though the arcade pages.
-Make a pool of games that you know are good and call it "map of the week" or "map of the day"
-Make number of players required to play a search option, or number of hours to finish, in general more search
options than general genre so it is physically possible to find a game that is not on the first 15 pages and find something that you actually want to play.
-Allow arrow keys for easy page to page navigation, too many clicks!
-Fix some odd bugs that occur when attempting to join a game, players get stuck in a loading screen,and the counter of players never seems correct, and then people need to either re-log or close Starcraft altogether to fix the issue.
-players pending for a long period of time should be able to be kicked after a certain period of time, it is annoying to wait for a pending player to drop or not.
-navigation from bookmarks, recently played, and other sections is slow and bogged down.
In short, make it easier for a new player to discover a new game, and easy for arcade veterans to navigate with ease, making a much more pleasant experience than sitting in your chair for 10 minutes trying to find something that looks remotely interesting in order to find a new game while scrolling through painfully slow to load screens once you start to get down the list. It takes a surprising amount of work to find a new game that you would want to play. Increasing the stagnation of the first 3 pages and dramatically decreasing the number of hours played after page 4-5.
That should do for a wish list, all things that I do believe are quite possible :)
Also to make a comment, I think it is possible to remove the chat window with the UI editor, but not many people know how to use the UI editor effectively and have used xml (I for example do not know the xml language), so it would be nice to have a clickable option for chat window or no chat window instead of removing it all-together.
Abandon the star rating system. Any popular map is going to have 4.5 to 5 stars. The star system only serves to knee-cap new maps.
Reviews should decay over time, like youtube comments. It's extremely common for a map to have the same top review for it's entire life. If the first person to review your map gives you a grating score, your map is going to have that nailed to it's front page for all eternity, even if you fix/change the things mentioned in it.
Sometimes, battle.net will forget to download the map of the lobby you just joined, leaving you perpetually stuck on the "entering lobby" screen. The only escape from this is to exit the game. It also happens pretty frequently.
Sometimes, when you open the arcade, the maps just won't load. 12-14 of the 16 maps will remain black and unselectable. This happens less frequently than above, but it happens.
You gave us the ability to link our maps in web browsers. This is awesome. Please take it one step further and remove the limitation of having to select the proper region. Right now, a map link looks like this;
starcraft://map/1/223329
starcraft://map/2/155029
starcraft://map/3/77289
starcraft://map/6/20540
starcraft://map/5/29241
That "/1" number is your region, and you must select the right region for the map to open. Let us combine the above into;
starcraft://map/1/223329/2/155029/3/77289/5/29241/6/20540
Our starcraft client would then pick the region that it is currently set to, and open the appropriate map. This would let us make big "PLAY NOW" buttons, without having to list every region afterwards.
There is a "Launch editor" button on the StarCraft II client button in the battle.net client. How about a "Launch Arcade" button that takes you straight to the arcade menu? I know it's only skipping one screen, but it advertises the arcade so much more.
oh i thought only i have latency issues in the arcade (very slow internet). switching pages also often loads the "wrong" picture for a map. i think this could be handled if some information would be stored local and not loaded again and again. lower the damn refresh rate and/or give us a refresh button.
joecap, i know about UI-editor i think you cannot hide this extra chat window, it's also needed to kick ppl, but is just annoying. you always type into 2 different chats if a player is lagging and not disconnected.
tya is right about reviews, first one stays there forever, in good and bad ways. just show the ones with most likes of the last two month, others should move to an archieve or something. it should also be possible to write a nd review after a long time or lot's of patches.
btw tya, what should replace the star rating then? it's true it is a killer for new maps or to test some, but that's why i wanted the feature to disable ratings while being development.
- Either giving maps a separate comments section or allowing the author to respond to reviews (and the reviewer to the author), it'd allow for more direct interaction between modders and players
- Adding an "Unhelpful" button for reviews, for example, I think a review with 25 Helpfuls and 50 Unhlepfuls should be below a review with 20 Helpfuls and 15 Unhelpfuls
- A calendar for maps/mods similar to groups, so that authors can mark pages (ie, patch days, major playing sessions, tournament days, etc)
- Allow us to filter maps as Alpha, Beta or Complete/Stable, like in Civilization 5, so that players can search for what category(/ies) they're looking for
- Perhaps add a "tags" system for maps, like, "Dungeon Crawler", "Zombies", "Zerg", "Micro", "Hard", "AI", and when players search for maps, if one contains some of these tags then it'll pop up higher on the search rank (Say, I search for "hard dungeon crawler", I should get such RPG maps show up first instead of TD or melee)
- Perhaps a "Credits" section in the map's arcade info box thingy, would help people who worked on or helped with the map get more recognition than just being in the loadscreen and/or somewhere you'll probably never click in the map. Maybe linking to their profiles via the credits section too?
- Allow people to make "collections" of maps, like, create a new collection, and when you go to a map, an "Add To Collection" button appears. Would help to organize map in categories that you want, like "Zombie Survivals I Really Like", or "Friends' Maps", or "Solo Maps", or "I Should Finish These Someday", etc
I had some more wishes/ideas, but they've already been said. I hope they implement some of these listed in the future, especially the crucial/important ones!
Colours in the ratings system? We can come up with better things than that. How about just fixing what they currently have.
Banks are still broken on extension maps (as in, they don't work AT ALL).
edit boxes are still limited to 255 characters, a ridiculously small limit. (I think Blizz might have attempted to fix this in the past but the fix didn't work)
After that, getting proper pointers back in the trigger editor would make me happy but I can understand taking a long time to implement new things. Fix broken features first, THEN create new ones.
turtle thats all editor related, not directly arcade and bnet. we could also open a new thread with editor things collected in one post. i want it all in one post for easy access, arguments are in the single posts.
i could give you thousand things i want to have in editor but the chances are even lower than sc2 and bnet2.0 itself. i think bnet 2.0 will be used for more games and therefore they HAVE to work on it. the editor will most likely stay bugged forever and i will fill those crash reports again and again.
turtle thats all editor related, not directly arcade and bnet. we could also open a new thread with editor things collected in one post. i want it all in one post for easy access, arguments are in the single posts.
i could give you thousand things i want to have in editor but the chances are even lower than sc2 and bnet2.0 itself. i think bnet 2.0 will be used for more games and therefore they HAVE to work on it. the editor will most likely stay bugged forever and i will fill those crash reports again and again.
That banks break when trying to play extension mods is a bug that happens on Bnet. It's not an editor bug.
Wow you guys have hit the nail on the head with these lists! I wholeheartedly agree with revamping (or removing) the ratings section. I'd love to see it replaced with a quick little "suggestions" tab where the gamemaker could respond to posts and create some interaction.
One other thing is I would love to see a page where updates were posted, ie. anytime one of your bookmarked games is updated, some sort of notification with the details could be shown. That way you'd very clearly be shown when new content is released or bugs are fixed, etc.
Great ideas, I'll chime in with more if I can come up with any!
1. Let map makers have an option to put multiple maps in a collection and let that collection have it's own lobby. That way the maker can advertise maps based on other successful maps they've made- and it would be gold for campaign makers.
2, Let us have a save option for arcade maps. For singleplayer campaigns the lack of this is a headache and the reason why I prefer people to just open the mission in editor and press "test map". Perhaps they could also add a way to save maps with several players. Save the player ID to the savegame so that all the players have to rejoin to continue the game.
3. Enable us to use checkpoint saving in our custom made maps. Would be very useful for singleplayer missions, but I think it could also be useful in many multiplayer maps, like cooperation RPGs.
During the blizzard campaign the mission saves itself in key positions, usually right before or after especially hard encounters (like boss fights or scripted attacks), and after one of the objectives is completed. If you lose the mission you can just select a checkpoint save and continue from there.
This is useful as we map makers know better then the player when the difficulty spikes during the map.
There would have to be a limit though, and I think blizzard only uses two checkpoints. After a few checkpoints new checkpoints would have to overwrite the old one to prevent some devious map maker to fill up the players hard drive with an autosave every 0.1 seconds.
Add detailed map stats and management for the map owner like:
Hours played x day with graph
Medium play time
Average map abandon ratio
Map replay ratio (how many times a the map is played more then once, something like game played / players)
Allow to comment other player ratings on your map (like tripadvisor)
Add a bug report separated from the rating system
etc.
Even steam could use some improvements ;) , but yes, there are a-lot of good systems and ideas that steam uses that blizzard could use to improve their arcade set up, it (the arcade) looks more inspired by the app store some have said.
Problem: Hard to fill lobbies of unpopular / new / low rated maps; Find players to test our maps
Possible Solutions:
- Lobbies with a name
- Reworked popularity system
- New category for test maps
- No rating for test maps
- Do not kick AFK-Players, only take host status away
Problem: Lobby can be blocked
Possible Solutions:
- Lower duration of pending players
- Prevent reinvites
Problem: Lack of feedback for mapmakers
Possible Solutions:
- Add some statistics
- Allow more reviews
- Add a bug report function
- Show updated reviews (mark as unread or something)
- Let reviews/ratings expire
- Unhelpful button for reviews
- Let us answer to reviews similiar to Google Play
- Show us as uploading and not as online while uploading a map (missing chat)
Problem: Maps cannot easily be found
Possible Solutions:
- Show uploaded maps in profile
- Add tags for maps
- Better search (similiar to)
- More categories
Problem: No efficient organisation of clans
Possible solutions:
- Let them expire
- Connect clan to a map
- Need minimum number of players to create a clan / not letting it expire
- Allow clantags more than once
- Leader should be demoted after a long offline period
- It should be possible to set up the same chat for map / group / clan
- Give us more options to filter groups (online, added last, officiers, etc)
Problem: Visual improvements
Possible improvements:
- Rating colours
- Do not use the localisation of the map within the arcade (Info screen titles)
- Credits section to credit people who helped in making the map (with and without link to profile)
- No extra chat window for laggers (it's annoying to use them)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I have created Problem-Categories to show which problem shall be addressed with a suggestion
Old List below
they still update sc2 so i thought they might read this one day:
-update-
-update2-
-update3-
everyone allowed to post their ideas regarding bnet 2.0 and arcade. i will add them to the list
to be continued...
@FunkyUserName: Go
I want rating colors!
Making arcade games easier to find and play would be my main one, because I believe above all, discover-ability is very low in the arcade.
-Correct the latency of scrolling though the arcade pages.
-Make a pool of games that you know are good and call it "map of the week" or "map of the day"
-Make number of players required to play a search option, or number of hours to finish, in general more search options than general genre so it is physically possible to find a game that is not on the first 15 pages and find something that you actually want to play.
-Allow arrow keys for easy page to page navigation, too many clicks!
-Fix some odd bugs that occur when attempting to join a game, players get stuck in a loading screen,and the counter of players never seems correct, and then people need to either re-log or close Starcraft altogether to fix the issue.
-players pending for a long period of time should be able to be kicked after a certain period of time, it is annoying to wait for a pending player to drop or not.
-navigation from bookmarks, recently played, and other sections is slow and bogged down.
In short, make it easier for a new player to discover a new game, and easy for arcade veterans to navigate with ease, making a much more pleasant experience than sitting in your chair for 10 minutes trying to find something that looks remotely interesting in order to find a new game while scrolling through painfully slow to load screens once you start to get down the list. It takes a surprising amount of work to find a new game that you would want to play. Increasing the stagnation of the first 3 pages and dramatically decreasing the number of hours played after page 4-5.
That should do for a wish list, all things that I do believe are quite possible :)
Also to make a comment, I think it is possible to remove the chat window with the UI editor, but not many people know how to use the UI editor effectively and have used xml (I for example do not know the xml language), so it would be nice to have a clickable option for chat window or no chat window instead of removing it all-together.
Abandon the star rating system. Any popular map is going to have 4.5 to 5 stars. The star system only serves to knee-cap new maps.
Reviews should decay over time, like youtube comments. It's extremely common for a map to have the same top review for it's entire life. If the first person to review your map gives you a grating score, your map is going to have that nailed to it's front page for all eternity, even if you fix/change the things mentioned in it.
Sometimes, battle.net will forget to download the map of the lobby you just joined, leaving you perpetually stuck on the "entering lobby" screen. The only escape from this is to exit the game. It also happens pretty frequently.
Sometimes, when you open the arcade, the maps just won't load. 12-14 of the 16 maps will remain black and unselectable. This happens less frequently than above, but it happens.
You gave us the ability to link our maps in web browsers. This is awesome. Please take it one step further and remove the limitation of having to select the proper region. Right now, a map link looks like this;
starcraft://map/1/223329
starcraft://map/2/155029
starcraft://map/3/77289
starcraft://map/6/20540
starcraft://map/5/29241
That "/1" number is your region, and you must select the right region for the map to open. Let us combine the above into;
starcraft://map/1/223329/2/155029/3/77289/5/29241/6/20540
Our starcraft client would then pick the region that it is currently set to, and open the appropriate map. This would let us make big "PLAY NOW" buttons, without having to list every region afterwards.
There is a "Launch editor" button on the StarCraft II client button in the battle.net client. How about a "Launch Arcade" button that takes you straight to the arcade menu? I know it's only skipping one screen, but it advertises the arcade so much more.
oh i thought only i have latency issues in the arcade (very slow internet). switching pages also often loads the "wrong" picture for a map. i think this could be handled if some information would be stored local and not loaded again and again. lower the damn refresh rate and/or give us a refresh button.
joecap, i know about UI-editor i think you cannot hide this extra chat window, it's also needed to kick ppl, but is just annoying. you always type into 2 different chats if a player is lagging and not disconnected.
tya is right about reviews, first one stays there forever, in good and bad ways. just show the ones with most likes of the last two month, others should move to an archieve or something. it should also be possible to write a nd review after a long time or lot's of patches.
btw tya, what should replace the star rating then? it's true it is a killer for new maps or to test some, but that's why i wanted the feature to disable ratings while being development.
@FunkyUserName: Go
oh yea i forgot about the showing of the wrong map image issue that happens sometimes
-always show the correct image for the corresponding map, the arcade does not sync with itself at times.
- Either giving maps a separate comments section or allowing the author to respond to reviews (and the reviewer to the author), it'd allow for more direct interaction between modders and players
- Adding an "Unhelpful" button for reviews, for example, I think a review with 25 Helpfuls and 50 Unhlepfuls should be below a review with 20 Helpfuls and 15 Unhelpfuls
- A calendar for maps/mods similar to groups, so that authors can mark pages (ie, patch days, major playing sessions, tournament days, etc)
- Allow us to filter maps as Alpha, Beta or Complete/Stable, like in Civilization 5, so that players can search for what category(/ies) they're looking for
- Perhaps add a "tags" system for maps, like, "Dungeon Crawler", "Zombies", "Zerg", "Micro", "Hard", "AI", and when players search for maps, if one contains some of these tags then it'll pop up higher on the search rank (Say, I search for "hard dungeon crawler", I should get such RPG maps show up first instead of TD or melee)
- Perhaps a "Credits" section in the map's arcade info box thingy, would help people who worked on or helped with the map get more recognition than just being in the loadscreen and/or somewhere you'll probably never click in the map. Maybe linking to their profiles via the credits section too?
- Allow people to make "collections" of maps, like, create a new collection, and when you go to a map, an "Add To Collection" button appears. Would help to organize map in categories that you want, like "Zombie Survivals I Really Like", or "Friends' Maps", or "Solo Maps", or "I Should Finish These Someday", etc
I had some more wishes/ideas, but they've already been said. I hope they implement some of these listed in the future, especially the crucial/important ones!
Colours in the ratings system? We can come up with better things than that. How about just fixing what they currently have.
Banks are still broken on extension maps (as in, they don't work AT ALL).
edit boxes are still limited to 255 characters, a ridiculously small limit. (I think Blizz might have attempted to fix this in the past but the fix didn't work)
After that, getting proper pointers back in the trigger editor would make me happy but I can understand taking a long time to implement new things. Fix broken features first, THEN create new ones.
@finiteturtles: Go
turtle thats all editor related, not directly arcade and bnet. we could also open a new thread with editor things collected in one post. i want it all in one post for easy access, arguments are in the single posts.
i could give you thousand things i want to have in editor but the chances are even lower than sc2 and bnet2.0 itself. i think bnet 2.0 will be used for more games and therefore they HAVE to work on it. the editor will most likely stay bugged forever and i will fill those crash reports again and again.
I want better campaign support. Make it a new category and allow multiplayer with campaigns.
That's an amazing idea, and so simple too. The functionality is already present within the "groups" feature.
That banks break when trying to play extension mods is a bug that happens on Bnet. It's not an editor bug.
Wow you guys have hit the nail on the head with these lists! I wholeheartedly agree with revamping (or removing) the ratings section. I'd love to see it replaced with a quick little "suggestions" tab where the gamemaker could respond to posts and create some interaction.
One other thing is I would love to see a page where updates were posted, ie. anytime one of your bookmarked games is updated, some sort of notification with the details could be shown. That way you'd very clearly be shown when new content is released or bugs are fixed, etc.
Great ideas, I'll chime in with more if I can come up with any!
rut
1. Let map makers have an option to put multiple maps in a collection and let that collection have it's own lobby. That way the maker can advertise maps based on other successful maps they've made- and it would be gold for campaign makers.
2, Let us have a save option for arcade maps. For singleplayer campaigns the lack of this is a headache and the reason why I prefer people to just open the mission in editor and press "test map". Perhaps they could also add a way to save maps with several players. Save the player ID to the savegame so that all the players have to rejoin to continue the game.
3. Enable us to use checkpoint saving in our custom made maps. Would be very useful for singleplayer missions, but I think it could also be useful in many multiplayer maps, like cooperation RPGs.
@njordys: Go
what is checkpoint saving?
During the blizzard campaign the mission saves itself in key positions, usually right before or after especially hard encounters (like boss fights or scripted attacks), and after one of the objectives is completed. If you lose the mission you can just select a checkpoint save and continue from there.
This is useful as we map makers know better then the player when the difficulty spikes during the map.
There would have to be a limit though, and I think blizzard only uses two checkpoints. After a few checkpoints new checkpoints would have to overwrite the old one to prevent some devious map maker to fill up the players hard drive with an autosave every 0.1 seconds.
Hmm, I can't think of any way the arcade could possibly be improved.
Add detailed map stats and management for the map owner like:
Hours played x day with graph Medium play time Average map abandon ratio Map replay ratio (how many times a the map is played more then once, something like game played / players) Allow to comment other player ratings on your map (like tripadvisor) Add a bug report separated from the rating system etc.
I do like the suggestions so don't take this the wrong way, but the entire thread can be summarized as
Copy Steam
@ArcaneDurandel: Go
Even steam could use some improvements ;) , but yes, there are a-lot of good systems and ideas that steam uses that blizzard could use to improve their arcade set up, it (the arcade) looks more inspired by the app store some have said.