They are all quite down in the popularity list. Runecraft got to stay in the first page of the tug of war game list, but yet again it's on the second page, which means it's only being played about 4 hours / day. I also got my map to stay in the first page during the first week after the patch was released, but one week later it was removed from the list because nobody was playing it. Then I played it against the AI for only 2 hours and I bumped it to the second page of the tug of war list, which means games under page 1 aren't being played at all. All the games I listed above are lost on the 10th-15th pages of the global popularity list. If you try to play them, you won't be able to fill the lobby, since the game will fall down in the recently hosted games list before you get enough people to play the game.
On a side note, I intended to make my map different from any other tug of war game by adding the artillery system. I think that's something which makes it quite different from any Nexus Wars clone.
The main problem is how the maps in the spotlight are chosen.
I always see the same 20 rotating, leaving no space to other maps.
When my map was in the spotlight it got 250 ratings in a couple of days, then I barely see new reviews (I think they come from fun or not)
Still I'm not able to understand how the spotlight works, I published Hive Keeper single player as 2 separate maps in EU and US, only MP EU went spotlight once and I don't know why.
Now I'm trying to host games and making the SP version MP to test if I can get the spotlight on them.
I hope this issue gets resolved... Anyone know what the spotlight page is about? There seem to be a lot of random good games that come up on it. That's how I discovered magecraft... which is awesome.
The lobby definitely needs changing. Firstly it needs to show oldest lobbies first so people don't sit around with half a lobby for 20 minutes waiting for someone to join because they fell off the list.
Secondly the "open games" button needs to be more prominent. Most people are still going straight to the most played list, nullifying the point of even having open games. I think the fact that the top rated and top played lists rarely change is proof enough they don't really know about the open games button.
Honestly whoever is in charge of these decisions does need to be fired or demoted. They're incompetent. It took more than two years to get this and it still isn't done right, even though the community has made it plenty clear that live game lobbies were the most important aspect missing from battle.net 2.0. There's no excuse for these problems at this point.
I don't agree that these small changes are the root of the problem, I think that people are always going to whine and complain because a lot of the people who play Starcraft are really stupid. Honestly, everyone is playing Starcraft for instant gratification, Blizzard made a really big and awesome change but they forgot to idiotproof it, which means that most of the community is stupid and won't try new things. Another big problem is what I call the Big Hyprocicy, there are idiots out there who hate the system and still won't spend 10 minutes of their time to wait for games. I think that if people start seeing that waiting is helpful, then they will wait longer. When the arcade was released, people were waiting a long time for games, the wait times are very similar to WC3 and honestly if your map is niche and no one wants to play then don't expect popularity, expect a niche community.
I don't agree that these small changes are the root of the problem, I think that people are always going to whine and complain because a lot of the people who play Starcraft are really stupid. Honestly, everyone is playing Starcraft for instant gratification, Blizzard made a really big and awesome change but they forgot to idiotproof it, which means that most of the community is stupid and won't try new things. Another big problem is what I call the Big Hyprocicy, there are idiots out there who hate the system and still won't spend 10 minutes of their time to wait for games. I think that if people start seeing that waiting is helpful, then they will wait longer. When the arcade was released, people were waiting a long time for games, the wait times are very similar to WC3 and honestly if your map is niche and no one wants to play then don't expect popularity, expect a niche community.
In Warcraft III if your room wasn't filled in about two minutes you generally weren't going to fill it because your map wasn't on the game list anymore. I don't think people are stupid for not sitting around doing nothing for 10 minutes. Who wants to do that in a videogame?
You can't blame an entire community for simply using the interface the way it was designed.
@Lucavious: Go I agree older lobbies should stay on top of the new ones, but I don't think it will do wonders for unpopular maps. We've been bashing blizzard all this time saying the popularity system was broken. Now we have open lobbies and some people insist to say its broken. Some wont be satisfied until their maps get popular somehow, THAT line of thought is broken.
I know my map will never be a popular map, so if I want a popular map I'd better start working on a new map that suits what the majority of players want to play. It's simple like that.
no actually, the solution is to remove the spotlight list completely . Have it all based of the open lobby list and fix many of the issues.
1) fix the custom game search filters ( such as filtering by genre or words)
2) add a refresh button so games that fall to far down the open lobby list can be refreshed. Put a timer on it so it cant be spammed. In warcraft 3, when you wanted to refresh your game to the top of the list, you had to close all the slots and reopen them . ( this is all before the host bots took over warcraft 3, now its gone to shit, There are way to many host bots for the amount of people that actively play)
3) when you create a lobby of any map , enable a custom name of choice to go along with the map. ( to make it easier to get Specific game modes going such as (AR, AP etc)
4) PROFIT. All this garbage about reviews and ratings and top played and top rated and fun or not.. All are fucking flawed/terrible/rubbish ideas .
There is absolutely no question in my mind that Open Lobby game list should be The only way to find custom games in starcraft 2. If it stays the same, i see sc2 custom game scene completely dead within 1 year after legacy of the void.
Right now, hardly anybody uses open game lobby list, most auto default to either their bookmarks or go straight to the top played list and click 1 of the 10 maps displayed. I'd say the situation is no different now than what it was before the arcade patch, cept fancier UI
@Lucavious: Go I agree older lobbies should stay on top of the new ones, but I don't think it will do wonders for unpopular maps. We've been bashing blizzard all this time saying the popularity system was broken. Now we have open lobbies and some people insist to say its broken. Some wont be satisfied until their maps get popular somehow, THAT line of thought is broken.
I know my map will never be a popular map, so if I want a popular map I'd better start working on a new map that suits what the majority of players want to play. It's simple like that.
Indeed, I'm seeing a bit of that too. No matter what Blizzard does, I do think people need to remember that it's always been very difficult to get your map played by people.
Right now Blizzard is closer, but I just wish they'd talk to someone who really has their finger on the community's pulse instead of trying to make guesses at what we want or how we want it. Like just sit down and have a long, detailed conversation.
actually you are completely wrong in your second paragraph :D Blizzard devs are talking to the community RAPIDY everyday now since patch 1.5 came out:D
They are working on improving the editor mostly atm. but the Open lobby has been brought up and they know :D they are doing great.
I agree older lobbies should stay on top of the new ones, but I don't think it will do wonders for unpopular maps. We've been bashing blizzard all this time saying the popularity system was broken. Now we have open lobbies and some people insist to say its broken. Some wont be satisfied until their maps get popular somehow, THAT line of thought is broken.
I know my map will never be a popular map, so if I want a popular map I'd better start working on a new map that suits what the majority of players want to play. It's simple like that.
Agreed. There is still some work to be done with Open Lobbies, but people need to realize that they can't just expect their map to be Page 1 all of a sudden, and in fact maps on the 3rd+ page are even very played. Wait times on page 3+ maps are just more comparable to WC3 but people often forget that.
I think there is an air of unwarranted hate and jealousy towards page 1/2 maps because they are low-brow; yet most of these maps have up to thousands of hours+ poured into their creation which is a lot more than most maps that I've seen that people want to become popular. All of them are appealing and well-done for the most part. Keeping gameplay simple and easy to pick up can go along way and doesn't mean it's bad.
3) when you create a lobby of any map , enable a custom name of choice to go along with the map. ( to make it easier to get Specific game modes going such as (AR, AP etc)
4) PROFIT. All this garbage about reviews and ratings and top played and top rated and fun or not.. All are fucking flawed/terrible/rubbish ideas .
There is absolutely no question in my mind that Open Lobby game list should be The only way to find custom games in starcraft 2. If it stays the same, i see sc2 custom game scene completely dead within 1 year after legacy of the void.
Right now, hardly anybody uses open game lobby list, most auto default to either their bookmarks or go straight to the top played list and click 1 of the 10 maps displayed. I'd say the situation is no different now than what it was before the arcade patch, cept fancier UI
3) This is what Game Variants are for. It's very cool you can now select variants before you click "Play" which completely makes naming unnecessarily. There is no reason to have to name a lobby now and it's better this way. The only thing that should change is having a [+] option to expand showing all the different open lobbys for the map, preferably also listed on the Arcade page for the map at the bottom.
4) This is just silly. Top Rated/Played provides a very useful metric for new people to find maps that they may enjoy without having to wade through tons of terrible maps (WC3 had a TON of terrible maps, yet people also forget that). Sure, they do often self-reinforce to some extent but that is what spotlight/up-and-coming is for. Blizzard just hasn't spotlighted any maps (on NA anyways) yet, but I'm sure it'll be utilized in the future.
You are being extremely hyperbolic, the mapping scene isn't going to be dead by Legacy of the Void just because timmy2002 doesn't click the open games list to play your map. There is no reason for Open Games to be the only way to find maps, and it doesn't even need to be the default. I'd wager that the people that don't use it aren't going to like an underplayed complex map to begin with and probably aren't people that you're appealing to. When Blizzard used to reset the list, all the popular maps at the time still bubbled back up just fine so people clearly were able to Search and play their favorite maps all over again, and that's fine.
There are some improvements to be had to Open Lobbies and the front page could utilize Spotlighting better, sure, but the way it's setup mostly works and I think people should just focus on making better maps instead of QQing.
Indeed, I'm seeing a bit of that too. No matter what Blizzard does, I do think people need to remember that it's always been very difficult to get your map played by people.
Right now Blizzard is closer, but I just wish they'd talk to someone who really has their finger on the community's pulse instead of trying to make guesses at what we want or how we want it. Like just sit down and have a long, detailed conversation.
They do that.
Something I do have to add in response to that first quoted sentence though; I'm going to have to disagree. I made my own DOTA/AOS map for WarCraft 3 which in retrospect was.... alrightish. Not terrible, but definitely not good either - it had some creative heroes but it was imbalanced and I never quite got the terrain to work out well. Though a lot of people left halfway through the map, I never had to wait for more than 10 minutes to get it filled up and actually get a game rolling.
They pretend to do that. Where have they been the last two years? And now a sudden interest? Happy to see them, don't get me wrong. But this screams to me feigned interest because management is making them. I'll be happy when I see results. Talking to people in an IRC does not erase two years of a garbage interface.
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I'm not only talking about my map, but also about most sc2 games i like:
- Fleet Assault.
- Hero Attack.
- RuneCraft.
- Galaxy Vampirism.
- Catalyst.
- Magicide.
They are all quite down in the popularity list. Runecraft got to stay in the first page of the tug of war game list, but yet again it's on the second page, which means it's only being played about 4 hours / day. I also got my map to stay in the first page during the first week after the patch was released, but one week later it was removed from the list because nobody was playing it. Then I played it against the AI for only 2 hours and I bumped it to the second page of the tug of war list, which means games under page 1 aren't being played at all. All the games I listed above are lost on the 10th-15th pages of the global popularity list. If you try to play them, you won't be able to fill the lobby, since the game will fall down in the recently hosted games list before you get enough people to play the game.
On a side note, I intended to make my map different from any other tug of war game by adding the artillery system. I think that's something which makes it quite different from any Nexus Wars clone.
The main problem is how the maps in the spotlight are chosen.
I always see the same 20 rotating, leaving no space to other maps.
When my map was in the spotlight it got 250 ratings in a couple of days, then I barely see new reviews (I think they come from fun or not)
Still I'm not able to understand how the spotlight works, I published Hive Keeper single player as 2 separate maps in EU and US, only MP EU went spotlight once and I don't know why.
Now I'm trying to host games and making the SP version MP to test if I can get the spotlight on them.
EU must be radically different than NA. Hero Attack is #4 globally for us.
consder that not all the same maps are published both on US and EU, that makes a big difference!
random troll post^
I hope this issue gets resolved... Anyone know what the spotlight page is about? There seem to be a lot of random good games that come up on it. That's how I discovered magecraft... which is awesome.
The lobby definitely needs changing. Firstly it needs to show oldest lobbies first so people don't sit around with half a lobby for 20 minutes waiting for someone to join because they fell off the list.
Secondly the "open games" button needs to be more prominent. Most people are still going straight to the most played list, nullifying the point of even having open games. I think the fact that the top rated and top played lists rarely change is proof enough they don't really know about the open games button.
Honestly whoever is in charge of these decisions does need to be fired or demoted. They're incompetent. It took more than two years to get this and it still isn't done right, even though the community has made it plenty clear that live game lobbies were the most important aspect missing from battle.net 2.0. There's no excuse for these problems at this point.
@Lucavious: Go
I don't agree that these small changes are the root of the problem, I think that people are always going to whine and complain because a lot of the people who play Starcraft are really stupid. Honestly, everyone is playing Starcraft for instant gratification, Blizzard made a really big and awesome change but they forgot to idiotproof it, which means that most of the community is stupid and won't try new things. Another big problem is what I call the Big Hyprocicy, there are idiots out there who hate the system and still won't spend 10 minutes of their time to wait for games. I think that if people start seeing that waiting is helpful, then they will wait longer. When the arcade was released, people were waiting a long time for games, the wait times are very similar to WC3 and honestly if your map is niche and no one wants to play then don't expect popularity, expect a niche community.
In Warcraft III if your room wasn't filled in about two minutes you generally weren't going to fill it because your map wasn't on the game list anymore. I don't think people are stupid for not sitting around doing nothing for 10 minutes. Who wants to do that in a videogame?
You can't blame an entire community for simply using the interface the way it was designed.
@Lucavious: Go I agree older lobbies should stay on top of the new ones, but I don't think it will do wonders for unpopular maps. We've been bashing blizzard all this time saying the popularity system was broken. Now we have open lobbies and some people insist to say its broken. Some wont be satisfied until their maps get popular somehow, THAT line of thought is broken.
I know my map will never be a popular map, so if I want a popular map I'd better start working on a new map that suits what the majority of players want to play. It's simple like that.
@SoulFilcher: Go
no actually, the solution is to remove the spotlight list completely . Have it all based of the open lobby list and fix many of the issues.
1) fix the custom game search filters ( such as filtering by genre or words)
2) add a refresh button so games that fall to far down the open lobby list can be refreshed. Put a timer on it so it cant be spammed. In warcraft 3, when you wanted to refresh your game to the top of the list, you had to close all the slots and reopen them . ( this is all before the host bots took over warcraft 3, now its gone to shit, There are way to many host bots for the amount of people that actively play)
3) when you create a lobby of any map , enable a custom name of choice to go along with the map. ( to make it easier to get Specific game modes going such as (AR, AP etc)
4) PROFIT. All this garbage about reviews and ratings and top played and top rated and fun or not.. All are fucking flawed/terrible/rubbish ideas .
There is absolutely no question in my mind that Open Lobby game list should be The only way to find custom games in starcraft 2. If it stays the same, i see sc2 custom game scene completely dead within 1 year after legacy of the void.
Right now, hardly anybody uses open game lobby list, most auto default to either their bookmarks or go straight to the top played list and click 1 of the 10 maps displayed. I'd say the situation is no different now than what it was before the arcade patch, cept fancier UI
Indeed, I'm seeing a bit of that too. No matter what Blizzard does, I do think people need to remember that it's always been very difficult to get your map played by people.
Right now Blizzard is closer, but I just wish they'd talk to someone who really has their finger on the community's pulse instead of trying to make guesses at what we want or how we want it. Like just sit down and have a long, detailed conversation.
@Lucavious: Go
actually you are completely wrong in your second paragraph :D Blizzard devs are talking to the community RAPIDY everyday now since patch 1.5 came out:D They are working on improving the editor mostly atm. but the Open lobby has been brought up and they know :D they are doing great.
Agreed. There is still some work to be done with Open Lobbies, but people need to realize that they can't just expect their map to be Page 1 all of a sudden, and in fact maps on the 3rd+ page are even very played. Wait times on page 3+ maps are just more comparable to WC3 but people often forget that.
I think there is an air of unwarranted hate and jealousy towards page 1/2 maps because they are low-brow; yet most of these maps have up to thousands of hours+ poured into their creation which is a lot more than most maps that I've seen that people want to become popular. All of them are appealing and well-done for the most part. Keeping gameplay simple and easy to pick up can go along way and doesn't mean it's bad.
3) This is what Game Variants are for. It's very cool you can now select variants before you click "Play" which completely makes naming unnecessarily. There is no reason to have to name a lobby now and it's better this way. The only thing that should change is having a [+] option to expand showing all the different open lobbys for the map, preferably also listed on the Arcade page for the map at the bottom.
4) This is just silly. Top Rated/Played provides a very useful metric for new people to find maps that they may enjoy without having to wade through tons of terrible maps (WC3 had a TON of terrible maps, yet people also forget that). Sure, they do often self-reinforce to some extent but that is what spotlight/up-and-coming is for. Blizzard just hasn't spotlighted any maps (on NA anyways) yet, but I'm sure it'll be utilized in the future.
You are being extremely hyperbolic, the mapping scene isn't going to be dead by Legacy of the Void just because timmy2002 doesn't click the open games list to play your map. There is no reason for Open Games to be the only way to find maps, and it doesn't even need to be the default. I'd wager that the people that don't use it aren't going to like an underplayed complex map to begin with and probably aren't people that you're appealing to. When Blizzard used to reset the list, all the popular maps at the time still bubbled back up just fine so people clearly were able to Search and play their favorite maps all over again, and that's fine.
There are some improvements to be had to Open Lobbies and the front page could utilize Spotlighting better, sure, but the way it's setup mostly works and I think people should just focus on making better maps instead of QQing.
They do that.
Something I do have to add in response to that first quoted sentence though; I'm going to have to disagree. I made my own DOTA/AOS map for WarCraft 3 which in retrospect was.... alrightish. Not terrible, but definitely not good either - it had some creative heroes but it was imbalanced and I never quite got the terrain to work out well. Though a lot of people left halfway through the map, I never had to wait for more than 10 minutes to get it filled up and actually get a game rolling.
They pretend to do that. Where have they been the last two years? And now a sudden interest? Happy to see them, don't get me wrong. But this screams to me feigned interest because management is making them. I'll be happy when I see results. Talking to people in an IRC does not erase two years of a garbage interface.