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I get asked all the time how to create a custom game. Most people find it hard to understand there is no simple solution. The ONLY way you can host a custom game is if one of the following is true:
- The map is one of the top 50 most popular maps
- You recently joined someone else’s game who had the map
- You published the map yourself
There is no other way to host a custom game. The maps in the top 50 are played plenty, and undoubtedly they will end up in your recently played list where you can host them. That is fine. The problem is the only way to get new maps that are not on the popular list is to publish them yourself.
To publish a map, you must exit the game, open the desired map in the map editor and click file -> publish and set any last settings (more on that later). Now the map will be uploaded to Blizzard’s server, and if there are no errors, you can exit the map editor and restart your game, then create the game from ‘Your Published Maps’ list. Unlike Warcraft 3, or SC1, when people join your game lobby, they will be downloading the file you uploaded to Blizzard's server, not directly from your computer.
There are a few problems with publishing:
- On the last step of map publishing settings that I mentioned earlier, you can rename the map to whatever you want. This makes it very easy to steal someone else’s work. Or you could just turn their map name into an advertisement. Also, when you publish that map, everyone on battlenet will see your name as the author, not the person who actually made it. If you don’t believe me go try it.
- You can only publish 5 maps at a time, which means for someone like me, who had over 4,000 custom maps in Warcraft 3, I have to plan out what I am going to play before I play it, and then keep my friends waiting while I waste a lot of time exiting the game, publishing each one, and re-entering the game.
- Because there is no way to locally host maps from your computer, it means the publishing system will be used for temporary map hosting. Let’s say I wanted to try out 25 cool-looking new maps in a given night with my friends, I would need to exit the game, publish 5 at a time, play them and then remove them, repeating the process until I ran out of maps to try. This is not what the publishing system was designed for, but this is the only way I try out maps that are not yet on the popular list.
- Due to the common practice of renaming other people's maps that I mentioned earlier, and the use of the publishing system for temporary map hosting, many duplicate copies of a map will be republished. Each time someone republishes a map, it will be under their name, and slightly different from every other version out there! The reason Blizzard claims to have removed the ability to create named-custom games was to prevent 100 different DOTA games – well they succeeded, except now there will be 100 different DOTA maps, each with a different author or map name. You can already see duplicates in the popular list, but this will get much worse once as soon as publishing abuse starts (more on that later).
- Compared to the rest of the game, publishing a map quite difficult ad is not is not intuitive. The typical user has no idea what the map editor even is, much less how to publish a map. Past Blizzard games have trained people that if they download a map and put it in the right folder, they can host it – nowhere in Starcraft 2 is the user told this is no longer the case (or why the decision was made).
- There are other problems with publishing, like the 10mb map limit. I will not go into those here, but I would encourage checking out the threads by IskatuMesk, and SCLegacy, both of which are excellent in-depth write-ups.
These issues taken all together bring us to a larger problem: because it is so difficult to host custom maps that are not already popular, most people simply will not bother hosting new maps at all. This leaves us with only the popularity system, which, as Blizzard poster Xordiah explains, it should work fine for discovering new maps:
I saw some concerns in this thread that you guys are afraid that a map that is published maybe five months after release but is really good will never get any attention. I don't really share this concern, because of the awesome sites out there that will start promoting good content. I mean, even today, when map publishing is still doing its first steps and while there is still quite a bit of work ahead of us, I have seen so many great maps that are featured on sc2mapster, on TL.net and many other community websites. There will always be a map making community like the Hiveworkshop were map makers will find support. And though all these sites, through the forums, through casters like Husky and especially through word of mouth good maps will be spotlighted and players will find them and make them popular. If a map is good, make a youtube video of it and it will spread if players think it is cool. 
By this line of reasoning it is up to the map download sites to promote maps. While Xordiah is correct that sites have thousands of custom maps, he fails to understand that users have no way to play the maps they download, except by publishing. As if the limitations and difficulties of publishing were not bad enough, there is a good chance that by publishing you would be creating a duplicate and just adding to the popularity system’s problems, since any map author lucky enough to be featured on a site has probably already published. Further, without a good way to host unpopular maps, popular maps stay popular. With fewer people publishing, it easy to game the system, making maps popular that should not be or simply injecting fake maps in the popular list.
This is a nightmare for custom maps, but what can we do?
There has been much uproar over the lack of chat, lack of cross-region play, and lack of LAN support. Blizzard acknowledged all of these, but has remained quiet on custom maps. As SCLegacy points out, Blizzard knows the game-finding experience is not what was promised at BlizzCon 2009. Unfortunately the interface won't change the fundamental fact that you cannot host a downloaded map without jumping through ridiculous hoops.
![[image loading]](http://sclegacy.com/features/sc2beta/b.netconcerns/Join-Custom-Game.jpg)
Prototype Map Search Interface as shown at BlizzCon 2009.
Many of the people who are complaining about the custom maps are mistakenly focused on naming games or the popularity and filtering systems – none of that matters if you can’t easily play and host the maps you download.
Blizzard has some of the best modification tools and community of any game out there, and I am confident they can fix this. Please join me in helping to make Blizzard aware of the problem in whatever way you can.
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EDIT:
I posted this on Bnet, like it and bump it over there so Blizzard responds!
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/248295191
Dude i was about to do a writeup on this, but yeah, we need to make a petition for blizzard to answer on custom maps. If blizzard lets activision pull their strings THIS much, I'm sorry but this is my last blizzard product. If all of these things were blizzard's idea, than lol, they are way out of touch.
How does the 10 mb limit and 20 mb overall limit make ANY sense? Sure it makes sense to the masses making maps "for fun," but not to ACTUAL MAP MAKERS. I dunno, make people pay $5 to have a "map maker" status and give them a 50 mb limit per map.
I am sure they are already "aware" of this problem, its just that we have to be sure not to let them get away with making a huge money grab, where any map worth half a sh** needs to be bought. If we get mad enough we can, if we don't, I can see custom maps dying, and it will be everyone's loss.
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Their custom game features is the one thing that I'm most annoying with so I hope they'll improve it.
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Can't you just search for the map you want to host it? For example, when I want to play on destination I just search destination and lo and behold, I'm playing on destination.
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expanding or further underlining one issue:
The barrier for new maps to gain traction needs to be lowered.
Xordiah's post misses the point. Most players won't bother to go to a maps website to find out what maps to play. Players are lazy.
To throw in an analogy, Starcraft 2 is the restaurant, the players are the customers, and the meals are the maps. At the moment, they have 501982038181 pro chefs cooking in the kitchen, but only 50 items on the menu. If you want more, you have to request for more menus. Most people walking into the restaurant will only look for something to satisfy their belly, therefore they will pick from the top10 popular dishes, and look no further. Extremely few people will bother to look online, check reviews, and then specifically request by name an obscure chef's dish, which is what Xordiah imagines customers doing. The menu needs to have a different way to sort it, so that new and special dishes can be uncovered easily and spread about.
Solutions I would consider are modeled after the existing review systems on the internet. Going from simple models to complex structures,
- Something incredibly simple like the thumbs up/down system on facebook. An option to organize maps by what is "liked" the most as well as played the most.
- Something more complex like a 5 star system and perhaps user review comments for the benefit of the map maker.
- A point system, granting users power in their reviews. Maps will be sorted by number of points. Points are gathered through both by 5star reviews, as well as who is doing the reviewing. Players who write long comprehensive reviews of maps will have more "point power" to boost the map popularity. People can gain more "point power" by writing good reviews, publishing popular maps, or playing a lot.
Sure, each of these systems can be abused, but they have all be done before on websites (amazon, ebay, newgrounds, ect.) and those websites have turned out strongly, so I am sure there will be ways to stop abuse from happening.
The key is to have something that is simple in structure, but user moderated and user driven. Any rules that directly interfere too much with map publishing will choke the creativity and fun out of custom maps, and the longevity of sc2.
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And after you publish the map and create a game, no one can join because its not one of the most popular maps. Also, recently joined game of someone else publishing a map means that it must have been in the top 50 for you to join in the first place.
Meaning, you can only play the map if its in the top 50.
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In addition to what is suggested above maybe only display games that already have a host, as in you hit create game and end up at the list rather than the now popular section where you have no idea if the map you desire to play is empty or full.
Especially a problem on maps that require multiple users.
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FIlters please!
And a more interactive interface, not just "show more -> show more -> show more" when I could easily rule out 95% of the maps i'm not looking for by 1-3 filters.
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God why isn't there a search bar in there. I HATE this custom game interface, its so horrid... And on the filters idea, even a categories filter would be sooo welcome.
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I'm sorry guys. Maybe I don't understand the inquriery but my understanding is that all you can see is the popular maps top 50 right? But why not just use the show new maps only toggle?
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Popular map listing is terrible. Listing by newest game room and genre categories would be a million times better.
Blizzard doesn't seem to want local hosting so that they can control things for whatever reason. Problem is that they don't give us anything that is remotely as good local hosting. Local hosting needs to be in sc2 unless blizz wants to allow unlimited map hosting and vastly improve being able to get the map.
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Why don't they have a filter like Wii Shop Channel so you can browse maps by newest, name, tileset, size, type, creator, etc?
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On July 30 2010 07:31 ReketSomething wrote:
And after you publish the map and create a game, no one can join because its not one of the most popular maps. Also, recently joined game of someone else publishing a map means that it must have been in the top 50 for you to join in the first place.
Meaning, you can only play the map if its in the top 50.
Yup - this is a great point. The only way to get around this is to have a full party that can join you, and for people that don't always have 10 close friends on-call to play with, it is a huge problem.
In warcraft 3 it was not a problem, the game list just showed the most recently created game, but even that is problematic.
On July 30 2010 08:32 CagedMind wrote:
Popular map listing is terrible. Listing by newest game room and genre categories would be a million times better.
You need a way to see all maps that are uploaded, otherwise people are going to have a very hard time finding the map they want to play, especially if they know the specific map and have it downloaded already
If they did show all the maps, more dynamic filters would be necessary, but it would work
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That prototype match interface looks awesome!
...where is it? FUUUUUU BLIZZ
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This issue is worse than anything else. Lack of lan, lack of any god damn thing, or all those anti-piracy measures... they don't mean a damn next to this.
This is completely killing custom games. Heck I won't even be able to simply play custom games with my friend like I thought I would unless I seek the most popular, published one.
This is the worse thing I have ever seen.
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I say two seperate maplist should help out. One list is a "popular maps" list and the other is our classic battle.net 1.0 style "recently created room/maps" list
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Maybe they could just copy Bnet 1.0 system and it get it over with.
It can't be that hard.
I'll take a tried and true method over a new method that doesn't offer anything good any day.
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On July 30 2010 07:12 Belegorm wrote:
Can't you just search for the map you want to host it? For example, when I want to play on destination I just search destination and lo and behold, I'm playing on destination.
This ^^
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and this is one of the reasons I did not buy sc2.
The custom map implementation is horrid...beyond horrid. I don't know how blizzard thought this was a good idea
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EPT
