I went from 'let's take this place over!' to 'screw it' in about two days: the days after popularity sort was implemented. The only way you can emerge from the sea of thousands of maps is by spamvertising on the forums and even then a lot depends on dumb luck.
I'm not too lazy to learn the editor. The harder the better, it keeps competition down. Diablo 2 is very hard to mod and I'm the king, getting into the top 10 mods of the year at ModDB in 2009. However, Diablo 2 has a significant single player community which enables people to recommend the mod to each other and get the snowball rolling, whereas if a multiplayer SC2 map is dead you won't sit there in the lobby and wait for some other lost soul to join it.
I will not invest months of my time into a map that is dead by default unless I get lucky. I'm not retarded;
......
Also, SC2 was a bit of a commercial failure. It appears Dota-like games (League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth) have taken over from old school strategy games, just like RPGs displaced adventure games.
I worked hard on making a map. Gave it nice terrain, some interesting
gameplay, etc. and now when I go to advertise it, almost *no one* is
interested in playing it. The 3 threads I've started on various
Starcraft sites got me like 2 replies of people interested in it, and
I've gotten no sign of feedback from Map Night or JMan's video review
channel. Why? Should I have made a video? Do I need to publish it on EU
servers as well? There's got to be SOMETHING i can do :/
So, how do we optimise a map for the new Fun Or Not function?
- It needs to have a lot of players.
- Players should not be able to die or lose in the first few minutes or they might ragequit.
- If a player is sufficiently angry, he'd choose 'broken' and your map disappears. (In fact I can see griefers that simply join games and mark every map as broken)
- Chances are if the map is competitive, people that lose will downvote it.
The large player count is unfortunately the opposite of what you want to do to keep a map popular...
With the announcement of a new feature that will allow us to publish our maps so other people can play them, I'm considering coming back after abandoning two beta maps for the same reason everyone else quit I suppose.
So, instead of reading through almost a year of old posts, can someone bring me up to speed with the important "issues"?
I recall after beta, an issue was that if you loaded all four ...data sources?... to include all assets in the game, it was impossible to translate or port the map. You had to import additional languages manually. Also, if your map info settings were wrong, you were unable to upload the map. Are there any other of these things any expert mapper knows about and I'd blindly run into after wasting two months again?
3 months after uninstalling SC2 in disgust a friend told me the custom map system was 'totally revamped'. I was happy to be able to work on Roadkill (which I believe to be the logical step ahead from Dota) again.
But alas, nothing has actually changed.
This is looking grimbleak. :(
This is pretty much the perfect game to mod - huge player base that is competitively multiplayer oriented, easy and powerful editor, wide variety of assets - and it's ruined unless you want to roll the dice with your project or spend more time worrying about popularity tricks than about gameplay. Noticably if it's 6v6 it'll never be popular unless it is called Dota.
I never released anything - I failed to beat the popularity system and the current player count/length restrictions/no WASD controls online make it not worth doing for me.
Still I spent a long time on several maps and here are my findings:
- Core mechanics first.
- If you need a lot of triggers, use functions and split them up as much as possible. You want to be able to reuse them down the road and make quick and easy modifications. Large triggers end up turning into copypasta and spaghetti code.
- If the player has access to multiple units, implement exactly two of them so you can test whether the unit selection code works. If there are several enemies, implement one of them. Etc. Leave the creative work for the very last - unless you have everything flawlessly planned in advance, you'll have to modify or scrap things and it's much easier to adapt two units instead of 20. Not to mention placing doodads before you are 100% convinced about the map layout.
- User friendly! User friendly! Use unit and UI tooltips. If a building does something, make a tooltip that tells the player what it does. Don't make them click on everything and see if it does something (ahem SotIS). Another little convenience is colour coded upgrades: upgrades that go together have the same icon colour. If you think your upgrades are logical and make sense, play some HoN and look at the shop. They thought their item layout made sense, too.
- Polish. Missing wireframe tooltips, units that shoot missiles from the ground, ugly UI, ...
- The terrain. It doesn't have to be crammed with graphics but at least it should have more than basic cliffs and a handful of doodads. At least use texture blending.
I noticed that the outrage at this system has dropped off significantly since release. I suspect people are just 'dealing with it' by doing exactly what vjeux suggested.
Which means all you can create is short minigames...
Tip: automate the create/leave process. Make it so if only one player is in the game, anything that could cause an afk to lose before the time is up is disabled and the game automatically ends after 5 minutes and 1 second. This allows you to go afk and just remake every 5 minutes instead of being forced to replay the first 5 minutes for 12 hours like groundhog day.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that Blizzard invests funds into scouring maps for inappropriate content, while ignoring the fact that 95% of the maps won't actually be played by anyone?
They should have hired one person, told him to try the first 5 pages of maps, then given him another job, knowing the top 100 would never significantly change anyway.
Edit: good thing I never uploaded my offense/defense map, because when the zerg break through after the main terran objective is fulfilled, the terrans can use a cyanide pill to force a draw. OMG SUICIDE.
In the previewer I make a preview that is just a sound, but how do I export the sound? All it lets me do is export model, export camera and export sound list. :(
0
I went from 'let's take this place over!' to 'screw it' in about two days: the days after popularity sort was implemented. The only way you can emerge from the sea of thousands of maps is by spamvertising on the forums and even then a lot depends on dumb luck.
I'm not too lazy to learn the editor. The harder the better, it keeps competition down. Diablo 2 is very hard to mod and I'm the king, getting into the top 10 mods of the year at ModDB in 2009. However, Diablo 2 has a significant single player community which enables people to recommend the mod to each other and get the snowball rolling, whereas if a multiplayer SC2 map is dead you won't sit there in the lobby and wait for some other lost soul to join it.
I will not invest months of my time into a map that is dead by default unless I get lucky. I'm not retarded;
......
Also, SC2 was a bit of a commercial failure. It appears Dota-like games (League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth) have taken over from old school strategy games, just like RPGs displaced adventure games.
0
Good for you, though 'just promote your maps in your HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL other map' is not a viable strategy for most people.
And if you intend to make a competitive team-based map, forget it, you'll never get enough people together to get off the ground.
There are so many maps it is unlikely it'll be played more than once in a blue moon...
0
And that's why the SC2 mapping scene is dying.
0
@hotpinkmullet: Go
That's what everyone has been asking for since day 1. Without this, custom maps are broken.
0
So, how do we optimise a map for the new Fun Or Not function?
- It needs to have a lot of players.
- Players should not be able to die or lose in the first few minutes or they might ragequit.
- If a player is sufficiently angry, he'd choose 'broken' and your map disappears. (In fact I can see griefers that simply join games and mark every map as broken)
- Chances are if the map is competitive, people that lose will downvote it.
The large player count is unfortunately the opposite of what you want to do to keep a map popular...
0
With the announcement of a new feature that will allow us to publish our maps so other people can play them, I'm considering coming back after abandoning two beta maps for the same reason everyone else quit I suppose.
So, instead of reading through almost a year of old posts, can someone bring me up to speed with the important "issues"?
I recall after beta, an issue was that if you loaded all four ...data sources?... to include all assets in the game, it was impossible to translate or port the map. You had to import additional languages manually. Also, if your map info settings were wrong, you were unable to upload the map. Are there any other of these things any expert mapper knows about and I'd blindly run into after wasting two months again?
Thanks!
0
3 months after uninstalling SC2 in disgust a friend told me the custom map system was 'totally revamped'. I was happy to be able to work on Roadkill (which I believe to be the logical step ahead from Dota) again.
But alas, nothing has actually changed.
This is looking grimbleak. :(
This is pretty much the perfect game to mod - huge player base that is competitively multiplayer oriented, easy and powerful editor, wide variety of assets - and it's ruined unless you want to roll the dice with your project or spend more time worrying about popularity tricks than about gameplay. Noticably if it's 6v6 it'll never be popular unless it is called Dota.
0
I never released anything - I failed to beat the popularity system and the current player count/length restrictions/no WASD controls online make it not worth doing for me.
Still I spent a long time on several maps and here are my findings:
- Core mechanics first.
- If you need a lot of triggers, use functions and split them up as much as possible. You want to be able to reuse them down the road and make quick and easy modifications. Large triggers end up turning into copypasta and spaghetti code.
- If the player has access to multiple units, implement exactly two of them so you can test whether the unit selection code works. If there are several enemies, implement one of them. Etc. Leave the creative work for the very last - unless you have everything flawlessly planned in advance, you'll have to modify or scrap things and it's much easier to adapt two units instead of 20. Not to mention placing doodads before you are 100% convinced about the map layout.
- User friendly! User friendly! Use unit and UI tooltips. If a building does something, make a tooltip that tells the player what it does. Don't make them click on everything and see if it does something (ahem SotIS). Another little convenience is colour coded upgrades: upgrades that go together have the same icon colour. If you think your upgrades are logical and make sense, play some HoN and look at the shop. They thought their item layout made sense, too.
- Polish. Missing wireframe tooltips, units that shoot missiles from the ground, ugly UI, ...
- The terrain. It doesn't have to be crammed with graphics but at least it should have more than basic cliffs and a handful of doodads. At least use texture blending.
0
I noticed that the outrage at this system has dropped off significantly since release. I suspect people are just 'dealing with it' by doing exactly what vjeux suggested.
Which means all you can create is short minigames...
Tip: automate the create/leave process. Make it so if only one player is in the game, anything that could cause an afk to lose before the time is up is disabled and the game automatically ends after 5 minutes and 1 second. This allows you to go afk and just remake every 5 minutes instead of being forced to replay the first 5 minutes for 12 hours like groundhog day.
0
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that Blizzard invests funds into scouring maps for inappropriate content, while ignoring the fact that 95% of the maps won't actually be played by anyone?
They should have hired one person, told him to try the first 5 pages of maps, then given him another job, knowing the top 100 would never significantly change anyway.
Edit: good thing I never uploaded my offense/defense map, because when the zerg break through after the main terran objective is fulfilled, the terrans can use a cyanide pill to force a draw. OMG SUICIDE.
0
Looks cool, but how about Europe? :(
0
In the previewer I make a preview that is just a sound, but how do I export the sound? All it lets me do is export model, export camera and export sound list. :(
0
Go figure, you enjoy this '80s minigame more than the actual game. :P
0
I quit, leaving 4 months of work behind. This game can suck it.
0
Blizzard thinks your map is bad.