SC2Mapster

Quote from Xelaran: If someone wants to know how I did something in a map, that person just has to ASK ME. Not crack open my map. Pros of that apprach: It's much easier for that other person since he/she desn't have to bother with unlocking he/she can get an explaination how it works and even a variation that suits his/her purposes better It gives me the confidence that my work is appriciated It formed more than one friendship ... Cons of that apprach: ... I suppose you have to communicate ... very difficult ...

That con is a really big con when you consider you can't be online 24/7. If you can provide me with an answer at any point in the day faster than I can look up how to unlock the map and look at how you did something, fine. But I don't know anybody that can do that. Another con:

• It's not guaranteed to work.

When you open a working map and look at the working code, you are able to see all the little steps that are necessary to make sure it works exactly right. You don't really get this by asking, "How do I do this?" Sure, you'll get help (when other people come online and decide to tell you), but there's not guarantee it'll work. And when it doesn't work, what will be asked of you? "Can you post your code so we can take a look at it?" How about that irony, eh? What would you rather do? Would you rather open a map you know does what you need, and see how it's done, or go on a forum and ask people how to do it, and sit there for however long constantly refreshing the page until someone replies? You'd rather get it done and go on to the next thing, right? Of course, you and I are alike in that we can figure it out on our own. We wouldn't bother with either of these approaches. But try to think back to the time when you were learning by example, and how much of a hassle it would have been to try to make it yourself with simple aide from others when you had next to no idea what you were doing. In a lot of programming languages, people can't even type a full Hello World program without resorting to seeing an example of a completed version.

Quote from Xelaran: Instead we speed up the unlock developement process. Think about it: Can you help hospitals develop a vaccine by spreading the virus?

The "virus" you speak of is a powerful tool for educating newbies. Seriously. Try to remember what it was like when you knew virtually nothing.

Quote from ChromiumBoy: When I publish a map I'm presented with two options: to have it locked or have it unlocked. [...] If I want to have it locked, that means I've made the decision to not allow people to have open access to it's inner workings.

You really don't have that decision. Sure, it can be frustrating sometimes to not have that decision, but that is the cold, hard, truth.

Quote from SouLCarveRR: I put more stock in Blizzard's EULA's then I do the bible though.... one holds up in a court of law.... the other doesnt.....

The Bible holds up in a court of law?

Quote from s3rius: I say my coding is so precious that I don't want anyone else to open my map, put his name in instead of mine and republish it under a slightly different name.

Locking isn't the solution to that, though. The publishing system is the solution to that. Locking is entirely irrelevant to that.

Quote from s3rius: I'd also say that it's so precious that I don't want people to be able to cheat my storage system to gain an unfair advantage over others (level hacking in rpgs and stuff).

Honestly, if someone wants to cheat in my map, who cares? The legitimate players can play legitimately and the cheaters can cheat. Everybody wins.

Quote from NewHydrolisk: Open-sourcing your map means: [...] -knowledge that you've shared can come back to you in the form of better maps

You, sir, have just made my list... ...Of awesome people. If I can help and inspire just one person to make a fun map, I'd feel awesome. That's way more worthy in my view than making a good map.

If you have an editor that open a map with non critical file missing, then its the current shitty protection.(which is not my point) With a better system that is protected client and/or server side this should happen. If you managed to make a third party program that can emulate sc2 and open a map that only sc2 can load to play, it might break some moral grounds. And blizzard might talk to you on this matter

Yes, but as I said, that'd require supreme re-engineering of Battle.net. If they were to make map solely server-side coding, the would have to ensure their servers can run arbitrary code without being compromised. It'd also put a massive strain on the servers. And like you said, if they closed up the system like this, all they would end up doing is encouraging hackers everywhere to make a better server-to-client layer. I don't think Blizzard wants to go up against an army of coders so blatantly like that. The purely client-side format of maps is really the best possible market they can maintain.

Unlocked map can be found and play under guest account, while locked map couldn't. [...] Even if its not like this currently, I would love to have this feature.

You'd like your perfectly functioning SC2 map client to not allow you to play a map? Or let me put this in market form: If someone were to make a perfectly functioning SC2 client, that had all the features of the official client, and also had more features than the official client, which would you prefer using? In actuality, people just make hacks that add functionality to the regular client. Personally, when playing a map, I don't care if the author locked it. If I want to play it on the guest account, who is anyone to say I can't? You'd like to be restricted from playing a map as guest simply because the author doesn't want you opening it with the Galaxy Editor?

What I mean is that map with the same name as yours keep showing up every where, with slightly edited unit and such, taking gullible player to play it instead of your map.

They could get those same gullible users with a completely different knock-off too. Of course, once they start the game they'll notice that it is a knock-off, but who wants to bet they keep playing anyway? :P

Prevent a locked map from being found/downloadable in the editor.

Logically impossible. Because: The map must be downloaded to be played by the game. (Technically you could get around this with a massive change in how Battle.net works, which would massively increase bandwidth for Battle.net, and overall put more of a massive strain on the developers.)

Prevent a locked map from being opened by the editor.

Distributing a playable map that cannot be opened for hacking purpose.

Since all the data to play the game is stored in the map, someone could make an entirely new map editor that wouldn't care if non-critical files were missing. Someone could make an editor that doesn't load a map if the file "LolzMapIsLocked" exists in the map, but the Galaxy Editor would open it just fine. "Locking" in this manner can only be per-application.

Prevent a locked map from being played locally by guest account (which directly means you need to pay for a valid sc2 account to play).

This is a feature of the publishing system, not map locking. This feature applies to unlocked maps equally as it does to locked maps.

Make sure hacked map/stolen map does not spam their upload server

This cannot be helped. Anyone could spam their upload server with anything, because they have an upload server. They have an upload server so that they can control things like map name and author. Map locking has no bearing on this.

and not competing with your own maps.

Competition will exist anyway. If you make a tag map and I map a tag map and neither of us copied from each other, it stands to reason that one of our maps will be more popular than the other. Map locking does not "kill the competition."

(and now that you can pay $10 to have the exact name as the author, a slightly modified map name will pretty sure catch me playing from time to time)

Yeah. They really should make it so author names are completely unique. Otherwise they're just going to end up frustrating people.

In WC3 you can't tell an official new version of a map from a fake. Even now I could make a fake update to DotA and catch hundreds of suckers who don't download from the official site. There is no other way to verify the author in WC3. In SC2, this is built into Battle.net. The only way you get your map "stolen" is if everyone who plays your map decides the other author makes your map better. Like, say, the switch from DotA to DotA Allstars. You know why Blizzard added "map locking" to SC2? Because massive amounts of people bawww'd and wouldn't shut up until it was added. The "problem" that map locking is supposed to solve was solved already by the publishing system built into Battle.net. For the sake of every SC2 player and modder, don't spam Blizzard to make a better locking feature. Please spam them with bug reports and feature requests that will actually make the game better. Although you probably ought not to plot to spam Blizzard forums from this site at all. :V