SC2Mapster

Update For those who are interested, the Diablo 3 Release date has been officially announced. You'll be able to get your hands on the game on May 15th of 2012! Join the discussion here!

Arcade System Inbound!

Many of you probably remember our coverage of Blizzcon 2011- it was a lot of fun, but the biggest announcement was the huge changes coming to the editor and, more importantly, the custom games system. You can read our article on the subject here if you missed it the first time around.

We previously believed that these changes would not appear until at or around the time of the Heart of the Swarm expansion pack- however, we now know will be coming soon^(TM), in the next patch for Starcraft 2! Patch 1.5 will include the brand new arcade system, which supports improved custom game visibility, ratings, reviews, game instructions, screenshot support, and more. Not only that, but patch 1.5 will also introduce the art-tools and editor upgrades. A open-games system will also be added that shows active lobbies, although not all lobbies will be shown at once (the algorithm used to sort them is unknown at the moment). Blizzard has also made a statement about their stance on the custom games system.

Quote from Blizzard:

The challenge we face with the interface is how much to orient the space towards the player, versus how much we focus the interface on the needs of the mod maker. Mod makers want a very egalitarian society where no single map has any type of “advantage” in the interface. On the other hand, most players just want to see the best maps and they don’t want to have to sort through hundreds of maps to find the ones that are good. We think what we have now doesn’t do enough to surface new maps that are good. While we tried to make things better with “Fun or Not,” the system alone isn’t doing enough for many of our mod developers so we wanted to try something different.

Source

If you are interested, you can read the full article here, or join the discussion here.