Aside from Diablo 2, for a while I dabbled in the Trackmania community. This game is about the easy to use track editor, which resulted in tens of thousands of tracks of which about 1% was actually played by anyone. I've had a number of tracks that weren't hits, and getting 2 downloads after a day of work sucked. And that's coming from someone who did have success with other tracks; the fate of the vast majority is that they make a few tracks, get a total of like 4 downloads between them and just give up.
SC2 doesn't look like it will be different in this regard. You spend a long time making a map, and if you're lucky, very lucky, it might succeed in a big way. Most likely it will just flounder and nobody will play it other than your own friends and clanmembers and a handful of forum members. I don't want to turn this into another popularity sort rant, but it isn't helping because only so many maps can be on the front pages, providing a hard cap to the number of successful maps.
Maybe I'm prejudiced by my Diablo 2 mod with an estimated reach of fifty thousand people, but considering these odds, it's hard keeping motivated for SC2...
How do you cope with the work needed to make a good map knowing that it's more likely to fail than to succeed? Do you gamble that your popularity enhancing measures will work? Or is it all just about the fun of making the map and could you care less about downloads?
I mainly care about the fun of creating. If someone downloads my stuff I'll be happy, but if they don't, I'll be too busy working on my next project to even care :)
For me and my friend it's now fun, but also not because of dl's. We are making it because we want to make something. We want to achieve our personal goal - to make a creation. When I had my TF2 map done I was happy - because all that work and effort that I put in creation of it wasn't for nothing. I was happy for 2 posts, where they said the map is good.
It just a feeling that makes us complete it. As far as we work with it, we LIKE what we make. It really makes us somewhat happy. ;)
You've got to make sure you'll have fun playing whatever you're making. You've got to be aware of your tastes too. In my case, I love popular games like diablo 2, war3, WoW, CS, TF2, sc2, etc... so any map I make is likely going to contain those traits. But if you came from flight simulator or something like that and that was your taste... good luck getting a map on page 1. It's also completely random too... you never know what the public will like. I personally only liked (and would replay) maybe 1 or 2 maps on the first page of phase 1's popularity list.
Being mappers gives us a luxury; albeit no paycheck, but the luxury of doing whatever we want... doing it our way... and having the freedom to break off if we want.
My first sc2 "true" release was Infection. It was on page 1 on map-publishing day, and it was there for a while... but eventually it died.
Was it because the publishing system heavily favored short-duration/4-player maps? (my map was 12 players & long-lasting map)
Was it because it wasn't good enough?
Was it because it wasn't easy enough to use?
I don't know... but I had a lot of fun playing on full 12 player games, and it seemed like the people I played it with enjoyed it. I spent weeks keeping it updated too, and got it very refined compared to the original. Yet, during the last part of phase 1, I could bump it up but it would quickly fall to page XX again. So it remains a mystery, but at least I have some knowledge that people enjoyed it... and myself too.
I think the publishing system will even out compared to War3. SC2 we have 10 maps on front page or whatever... only one would be DOTA. In war3 you have 10 maps on the list but 8 would be DOTA.
I set out to make my map perfect. I am a pretty strong believer that as long as your map is good enough, it won't fail. You need to enter it and IMMEDIATLY be grabbed by that feeling saying "Damn, this is awesome!". I have the luxury of being a pretty objective person, allowing quite carefully to judge whether my own creations have this factor. If they don't, it means something in my map is flawed - whether it's the concept, the terrain or a simple bug.
The shame really is when you make a map that isn't perfect, but just pretty damn good - and that doesn't get played.
I liken it to Legos. I had a ton of them. They were awesome. You could make one awesome lego creation and upload one pic up to a site and very few people might see it. Perhaps it is awesome enough to generate some comments, but it may not be awesome enough for people to tell their friends, and only people who visit the site end up finding out about it.
I think three basic, good points that affect success are 1) What you do with your map, 2) Where/How much you distribute, 3) What people end up thinking of it. 1 & 2 are easier than 3, though I think some would argue that you have some control over 3 if you are observant, but it doesn't take much to turn someone off to your map, since the industry customers are known for being fickle.
For most of us, I think it's learning the tools, because we've been exposed to content creation in the past, or want to get in on it now with this amazing editor. Those that were in the WC3 community are forming teams early, getting ideas thrown around and some early content put together. I couldn't rightly say what most people use their completed projects for, but I do know Blizzard asks for example maps for resumes, along with your own critique and explanation. Maybe it's just portfolio building to break into the industry for some, in which, popularity can carry a greater importance.
I believe there's a pretty big difference between the popularity of this fangled thing called "Trackmania" and Starcraft 2.
And having an editor that makes it easy to make maps isn't necessarily a good thing. Starcraft 2's editor takes a lot of patience from my experience, (Yet it can create some pretty amazing things) and this will weed out those who are weak in their determination.
Failure is only random if you do not understand the variables at play. It's easy to bury your head in the sand, to simply make the mod you want to make and ignore the world around you that you ultimately want to play your mod.
Is your game easily accessible? Will someone who's never played hop in and enjoy it? Will they keep coming back for more or is the gameplay thin?
Does it hit you in the face with production value right off the bat? Well made custom load screen, high quality voice acting, music? Do these all fit together to create a coherent product?
You may say, "User made mods don't have all these things". Well, maybe that's why you guys think success is so random.
All that said, at the heart of your mod needs to be a great game, you need that at the core, but it's the small touches modders often neglect that often make the difference of getting on the front page.
I believe there's a pretty big difference between the popularity of this fangled thing called "Trackmania" and Starcraft 2.
Trackmania has only been the biggest PC racing game for the last few years. :P Also, number of players and number of builders should both scale up equally.
Quote:
And having an editor that makes it easy to make maps isn't necessarily a good thing. Starcraft 2's editor takes a lot of patience from my experience, (Yet it can create some pretty amazing things) and this will weed out those who are weak in their determination.
I like this attitude. :) It was almost impossible to make a Diablo 2 mod unless you were determined, so there were few mods but they all had a lot of work put into them. People who qq on the b.net forum that 'the editor is too hard to use' would never have produced anything worth playing anyway.
......
Quote:
Failure is only random if you do not understand the variables at play. It's easy to bury your head in the sand, to simply make the mod you want to make and ignore the world around you that you ultimately want to play your mod. (...) Is your game easily accessible? (...) Does it hit you in the face with production value right off the bat? Well made custom load screen, high quality voice acting, music? Do these all fit together to create a coherent product? (...) it's the small touches modders often neglect that often make the difference of getting on the front page.
+1.
This is exactly what I've been saying about Diablo 2 mods for years. <3 My mod, Median XL is the biggest because I care about these things: many people have attempted to install Eastern Sun and blew it, others tried Zy-El and got stomped in the first area. Several people were turned off Blackened because the UI is so ugly. Even the item names: I made sure every item name actually fits in the lore.
It worked, but then D2 was so hard to mod that there was very little supply in terms of mods and therefore a large demand to get things started. With the glut of maps for SC2 nowadays it seems likely that some will just get completely overlooked for no reason at all.
I operate with one principle: Make a map my friends and I could play for hours and enjoy. If other people find it as enjoyable and it becomes popular, fantastic. The best part of this philosophy is that if not a single person downloads it other than me and my friends, it's still a success :)
To my standard i consider a map fail only if you cannot finish your original idea because of limitation in editor/resources/skill. Otherwise, if its done completely then it succeeded. Popularity is a whole different problem though.
What is the nature of this post? Is it whining? bragging? both? It starts off with a complaint about the difficulty of custom map accesibility then stops making sense shortly after.
The trackmania example is given to evidence OP's initial claims. Next OP essentially equates 'a whole day's work of trackmania editing' comparable to the potential year+ scope of work capacity available to the sc2 editor, saying that it was virtually impossible for custom 'tracks' to be popular, ,then suggesting that sc2 is headed in the same direction with maps. uhh... okay?
Next he says that most maps won't be played, which is simply stating the obvious - but it's stated as if it's almost completely a matter of luck.
With all this lament over being underappreciated OP then appropriately mentions his '50k user reached' D2 mod he worked on. Is he suggesting that his game was fluke? If anyone were to take this post seriously, it could only be taken as a confession of how much of a hack OP is, and that he just didn't really know wtf he was doing while working on his mod.
I think closer to the truth, you just had a rough day of editing and wanted an ego boost for 'motivation' since clearly
the joy of creating in and of itself isn't enough for you anymore. Judging by how you put it I'm assuming you think 50k users is a lot. I think that INITIALLY you might have had the right mindset and knew how to approach making mods. Intellectually you appreciate the logic behind gems being created through love and unspoiled intention; but the moment you began to appreciate the praise more than the creating you started to burn out. You aren't gonna succeed if you value the extrinsic rewards more than the intrinsic rewards. Not only are you going to burn yourself out, but the quality of your mods and experience will be far worse. This entire post is only doing the same.
No matter what I do in life.. I might fail.
The question is: Do I try or not?
I started making maps to turn my ideas into reality - and it was fun.
Much much later there were people starting to gather around my maps and playing them with enthusiasm. Seeing that made it even more fun.
It might not be as popular as DotA or Battleships (talking about WC3 here), but everytime someone approaches me with the words "Hey, aren't you the guy who made that map? It's awesome!" it casts a huge grin on my face :D
Even though I don't approve of 7's term 'ego boost', it's true that I believe spending x months making something for no benefit is a waste of time:
Quote:
I think that INITIALLY you might have had the right mindset and knew how to approach making mods. Intellectually you appreciate the logic behind gems being created through love and unspoiled intention; but the moment you began to appreciate the praise more than the creating you started to burn out.
And this happened when it became clear that most players of my D2 mod cared less about challenge and adventure than about three questions: what's the best class, what are the best items, what kind of cheese can I use to avoid any semblance of challenge and content and obtain those items with no effort?
There's no satisfaction in making a game for people to enjoy if they don't actually want to enjoy it and instead care only about how to efficiently skip most of the game and proceed to grind for items in one area using exclusively the best character build. So might as well get satisfaction from the number of players then.
Quote:
You aren't gonna succeed if you value the extrinsic rewards more than the intrinsic rewards. Not only are you going to burn yourself out, but the quality of your mods and experience will be far worse.
I wanted to make a hero-based point capture 6v6 with keyboard controls. I can't because neither keyboard controls nor 6v6 are viable. So, since I have to make whatever wasn't my first choice, it had better be popular instead. I'll let the intrinsic reward people happily sit in the back of the list with 0 games per hour.
This doesn't mean I don't care about the quality of the product. The best way to retain players is by making a product that meets customer demand better than the competition, driven by the desire to become bigger than the competition. Isn't that the foundation of our economic system? Just the luck factor, of course, sucks.
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Aside from Diablo 2, for a while I dabbled in the Trackmania community. This game is about the easy to use track editor, which resulted in tens of thousands of tracks of which about 1% was actually played by anyone. I've had a number of tracks that weren't hits, and getting 2 downloads after a day of work sucked. And that's coming from someone who did have success with other tracks; the fate of the vast majority is that they make a few tracks, get a total of like 4 downloads between them and just give up.
SC2 doesn't look like it will be different in this regard. You spend a long time making a map, and if you're lucky, very lucky, it might succeed in a big way. Most likely it will just flounder and nobody will play it other than your own friends and clanmembers and a handful of forum members. I don't want to turn this into another popularity sort rant, but it isn't helping because only so many maps can be on the front pages, providing a hard cap to the number of successful maps.
Maybe I'm prejudiced by my Diablo 2 mod with an estimated reach of fifty thousand people, but considering these odds, it's hard keeping motivated for SC2...
How do you cope with the work needed to make a good map knowing that it's more likely to fail than to succeed? Do you gamble that your popularity enhancing measures will work? Or is it all just about the fun of making the map and could you care less about downloads?
I mainly care about the fun of creating. If someone downloads my stuff I'll be happy, but if they don't, I'll be too busy working on my next project to even care :)
For me and my friend it's now fun, but also not because of dl's. We are making it because we want to make something. We want to achieve our personal goal - to make a creation. When I had my TF2 map done I was happy - because all that work and effort that I put in creation of it wasn't for nothing. I was happy for 2 posts, where they said the map is good.
It just a feeling that makes us complete it. As far as we work with it, we LIKE what we make. It really makes us somewhat happy. ;)
You've got to make sure you'll have fun playing whatever you're making. You've got to be aware of your tastes too. In my case, I love popular games like diablo 2, war3, WoW, CS, TF2, sc2, etc... so any map I make is likely going to contain those traits. But if you came from flight simulator or something like that and that was your taste... good luck getting a map on page 1. It's also completely random too... you never know what the public will like. I personally only liked (and would replay) maybe 1 or 2 maps on the first page of phase 1's popularity list.
Being mappers gives us a luxury; albeit no paycheck, but the luxury of doing whatever we want... doing it our way... and having the freedom to break off if we want.
My first sc2 "true" release was Infection. It was on page 1 on map-publishing day, and it was there for a while... but eventually it died.
Was it because the publishing system heavily favored short-duration/4-player maps? (my map was 12 players & long-lasting map)
Was it because it wasn't good enough?
Was it because it wasn't easy enough to use?
I don't know... but I had a lot of fun playing on full 12 player games, and it seemed like the people I played it with enjoyed it. I spent weeks keeping it updated too, and got it very refined compared to the original. Yet, during the last part of phase 1, I could bump it up but it would quickly fall to page XX again. So it remains a mystery, but at least I have some knowledge that people enjoyed it... and myself too.
I think the publishing system will even out compared to War3. SC2 we have 10 maps on front page or whatever... only one would be DOTA. In war3 you have 10 maps on the list but 8 would be DOTA.
I set out to make my map perfect. I am a pretty strong believer that as long as your map is good enough, it won't fail. You need to enter it and IMMEDIATLY be grabbed by that feeling saying "Damn, this is awesome!". I have the luxury of being a pretty objective person, allowing quite carefully to judge whether my own creations have this factor. If they don't, it means something in my map is flawed - whether it's the concept, the terrain or a simple bug.
The shame really is when you make a map that isn't perfect, but just pretty damn good - and that doesn't get played.
I liken it to Legos. I had a ton of them. They were awesome. You could make one awesome lego creation and upload one pic up to a site and very few people might see it. Perhaps it is awesome enough to generate some comments, but it may not be awesome enough for people to tell their friends, and only people who visit the site end up finding out about it.
I think three basic, good points that affect success are 1) What you do with your map, 2) Where/How much you distribute, 3) What people end up thinking of it. 1 & 2 are easier than 3, though I think some would argue that you have some control over 3 if you are observant, but it doesn't take much to turn someone off to your map, since the industry customers are known for being fickle.
For most of us, I think it's learning the tools, because we've been exposed to content creation in the past, or want to get in on it now with this amazing editor. Those that were in the WC3 community are forming teams early, getting ideas thrown around and some early content put together. I couldn't rightly say what most people use their completed projects for, but I do know Blizzard asks for example maps for resumes, along with your own critique and explanation. Maybe it's just portfolio building to break into the industry for some, in which, popularity can carry a greater importance.
@BrotherLaz: Go
I believe there's a pretty big difference between the popularity of this fangled thing called "Trackmania" and Starcraft 2.
And having an editor that makes it easy to make maps isn't necessarily a good thing. Starcraft 2's editor takes a lot of patience from my experience, (Yet it can create some pretty amazing things) and this will weed out those who are weak in their determination.
Failure is only random if you do not understand the variables at play. It's easy to bury your head in the sand, to simply make the mod you want to make and ignore the world around you that you ultimately want to play your mod.
Is your game easily accessible? Will someone who's never played hop in and enjoy it? Will they keep coming back for more or is the gameplay thin?
Does it hit you in the face with production value right off the bat? Well made custom load screen, high quality voice acting, music? Do these all fit together to create a coherent product?
You may say, "User made mods don't have all these things". Well, maybe that's why you guys think success is so random.
All that said, at the heart of your mod needs to be a great game, you need that at the core, but it's the small touches modders often neglect that often make the difference of getting on the front page.
Several posts here I can only '+1' with.
......
Trackmania has only been the biggest PC racing game for the last few years. :P Also, number of players and number of builders should both scale up equally.
I like this attitude. :) It was almost impossible to make a Diablo 2 mod unless you were determined, so there were few mods but they all had a lot of work put into them. People who qq on the b.net forum that 'the editor is too hard to use' would never have produced anything worth playing anyway.
......
+1.
This is exactly what I've been saying about Diablo 2 mods for years. <3 My mod, Median XL is the biggest because I care about these things: many people have attempted to install Eastern Sun and blew it, others tried Zy-El and got stomped in the first area. Several people were turned off Blackened because the UI is so ugly. Even the item names: I made sure every item name actually fits in the lore.
It worked, but then D2 was so hard to mod that there was very little supply in terms of mods and therefore a large demand to get things started. With the glut of maps for SC2 nowadays it seems likely that some will just get completely overlooked for no reason at all.
I operate with one principle: Make a map my friends and I could play for hours and enjoy. If other people find it as enjoyable and it becomes popular, fantastic. The best part of this philosophy is that if not a single person downloads it other than me and my friends, it's still a success :)
To my standard i consider a map fail only if you cannot finish your original idea because of limitation in editor/resources/skill. Otherwise, if its done completely then it succeeded. Popularity is a whole different problem though.
What is the nature of this post? Is it whining? bragging? both? It starts off with a complaint about the difficulty of custom map accesibility then stops making sense shortly after.
The trackmania example is given to evidence OP's initial claims. Next OP essentially equates 'a whole day's work of trackmania editing' comparable to the potential year+ scope of work capacity available to the sc2 editor, saying that it was virtually impossible for custom 'tracks' to be popular, ,then suggesting that sc2 is headed in the same direction with maps. uhh... okay?
Next he says that most maps won't be played, which is simply stating the obvious - but it's stated as if it's almost completely a matter of luck.
With all this lament over being underappreciated OP then appropriately mentions his '50k user reached' D2 mod he worked on. Is he suggesting that his game was fluke? If anyone were to take this post seriously, it could only be taken as a confession of how much of a hack OP is, and that he just didn't really know wtf he was doing while working on his mod.
I think closer to the truth, you just had a rough day of editing and wanted an ego boost for 'motivation' since clearly the joy of creating in and of itself isn't enough for you anymore. Judging by how you put it I'm assuming you think 50k users is a lot. I think that INITIALLY you might have had the right mindset and knew how to approach making mods. Intellectually you appreciate the logic behind gems being created through love and unspoiled intention; but the moment you began to appreciate the praise more than the creating you started to burn out. You aren't gonna succeed if you value the extrinsic rewards more than the intrinsic rewards. Not only are you going to burn yourself out, but the quality of your mods and experience will be far worse. This entire post is only doing the same.
Daimon7, i like you. you should post more-
No matter what I do in life.. I might fail.
The question is: Do I try or not?
I started making maps to turn my ideas into reality - and it was fun.
Much much later there were people starting to gather around my maps and playing them with enthusiasm. Seeing that made it even more fun.
It might not be as popular as DotA or Battleships (talking about WC3 here), but everytime someone approaches me with the words "Hey, aren't you the guy who made that map? It's awesome!" it casts a huge grin on my face :D
PS
+1, even "noobs" can make a good map if they have determination, patience and good ideas.
Even though I don't approve of 7's term 'ego boost', it's true that I believe spending x months making something for no benefit is a waste of time:
And this happened when it became clear that most players of my D2 mod cared less about challenge and adventure than about three questions: what's the best class, what are the best items, what kind of cheese can I use to avoid any semblance of challenge and content and obtain those items with no effort?
There's no satisfaction in making a game for people to enjoy if they don't actually want to enjoy it and instead care only about how to efficiently skip most of the game and proceed to grind for items in one area using exclusively the best character build. So might as well get satisfaction from the number of players then.
I wanted to make a hero-based point capture 6v6 with keyboard controls. I can't because neither keyboard controls nor 6v6 are viable. So, since I have to make whatever wasn't my first choice, it had better be popular instead. I'll let the intrinsic reward people happily sit in the back of the list with 0 games per hour.
This doesn't mean I don't care about the quality of the product. The best way to retain players is by making a product that meets customer demand better than the competition, driven by the desire to become bigger than the competition. Isn't that the foundation of our economic system? Just the luck factor, of course, sucks.