StarCraft 2 to Support Priced Maps, Mods

if it you take the paid for map possibility out of it, it makes finding maps much easier, part of the goal is to just allow players to have the ability to find the stuff that is played a lot and furthermore prevent people from ripping people's maps off from the start.

I suppose this couldn't be too bad if it had a) Creator profiles so you could search by the maker of a map you liked, including maybe an info button ingame, so if I'm playing a good map I don't recognize online I can easily find its name, author, more stuff he's done, and maybe even give it a rating ingame, b) Search by price so you can get the free maps easily, and c) User ratings and reviews, again, with search by rating. Worthless, overpriced maps just won't get played, won't get reviewed, and won't clutter up the place when you look for free content, while the best stuff will get reviewed, and their creators will get recognized so their more in depth, payed stuff would get a chance.

Of course, I think the biggest hurdle for the payed maps is I'm pretty sure, at least anecdotally from my experience, most people playing online games get custom maps through automatic server downloads when they're playing a server running a map they don't have. That's not an option for the non-free maps (probably).

I would like to highlight that I am not saying this is how it is or how it will be, but just an idea around the feature.

well even more so one of the concerns I have is what happens when you have a map that was free, they update it and now it cost something ? do you get grandfathered into having the free map or do you have to pay? I think with either solution you piss people off. I think the goal is to drive people to using the feature and not make them feel like they need to buy maps or they can't play the game. One of the big issues behind pay for custom content, and mainly the reason I think we do not find a lot of companies doing it in the mod/map space is most people would want to get money for their stuff right ?! I mean even the guys who make crap wants something for their time, but you soon find out most people playing this stuff are not willing to pay for it. So we have often looked away from charging for player created content in this space because you end up creating a necessity around having to pay in order to play; so then no one ends up playing it. This also leads to shit like we see in DOTA or Dust where you have 50 version of the same fucking map, and in this case it would because people do not want to play the premium version of the map.

Well then how do you fix this issue? well you allow the players to drive the pay for content and then allow the map maker to make a choice and not feel as if they are locked into having people pay for the map, but if they make that choice they may be committed to it. An example of this would be, say I make a map called "Lost Temple Zerg PWNS YOU BITCHES", this map gets played by a lot of people and eventually ends up somewhere in the top 10 of most played maps. As the author of this map I am notified through some system that my map has gained enough popularity and that I now have the option of making it a premium map, at which point I do and then my map now cost something in order for a person to play it. And as a premium map I may get featured on some main page, etc...

I think a change between free to payed without an actual content change for the map, just a popularity benchmark, would piss users off even more. They'd end up favoring the stock maps since they know there won't be a point down the line where suddenly they have to shell out to keep playing that same map they've had on their hard drive for a couple months.

That's what I was thinking how you go from free to premium maps, but wasn't as fleshed out as you say now, during BlizzCon, leaving many people scared that a map is flagged either Free or Premium when available and that's written in stone. Would suck to cough up some money for a map, to find out it sucks balls. And I bet there will be many of those due to fortune-seeking "I used the editor for 2 minutes!"-people.

Instead on jumping on the "This sucks!"-bandwagon, I look at the possibilities of this new system, whatever it might end up as.

Maybe I should start sketching down ideas...

Quote from Crayfish

Tools are looking nice:

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Holy crap, that's good enough for me. Day one purchase for sure.

Yeah this editor kicks ass. I laughed out loud when I saw the Lost Viking thing, so amazing.

I'm gonna spend hours and hours doing stuff in this editor.

Nice v nice, starcraft editor got me into level design I suppose ;P

what i find funny is they did not even show any of the actual editor LOL they just showed what you could do with it LOL

It can't look too different from the Starcraft 1 editor, right? I mean, UT3's UnealEd, while all the buttons and UI elements have been drawn, and some shit has been moved around, and new features added, still basically looks just like Unreal 1's UnrealEd after four iterations, with three simplified views, one 3d preview view, and buttons all aligned on one side of the editor. I suspect most of us are just picturing the original editor except fancified.

I think the general idea is the same but its pretty different. You could do like 4 things in the SC editor, there is just so much shit you can do in the SC2 editor its not even funny.

There's a video with Dustin showing Samwise's office and then some SC 2 level designers working on some missions, it's here:

yes, I know i was there i saw the presentation LIVE!!!! and work with that editor everyday and there is so much more to show

I am just wondering wacko, is sc2 still using a tile system like its predecessor, or will we be forced to flesh out the landscape in a heightmap editor?

From the gameplay footage (I can't view the editor footage atm) it looks like it uses the same system as WC3 only with smaller tiles. So your pathing and gameplay is all tiles but you can then distort this with a height map in the editor for sexy.

You basically depress clearings, raise "trees" and add noise at tile changes. Anything complicated looks silly in practice.

well as the panel mentioned, it uses "Tile Sets" in that you have a set of textures, but you essentially paint your terrain on, which was not the case for wc3, its supports alpha blended terrain like many other terrain editors, you can also raise and lower the height like a normal terrain editor, as well as use cliffs like you could in wc3

Starcraft II will probably be a e-sport game for many people just like it's prequel. This pretty much leaves out people charging money for maps designed for competitive play, no matter how well designed or polished they are. Because I doubt any league or tournament will force their player community with a map pool where they have to pay for half of the maps.

Quote from Nurb

Starcraft II will probably be a e-sport game for many people just like it's prequel. This pretty much leaves out people charging money for maps designed for competitive play, no matter how well designed or polished they are. Because I doubt any league or tournament will force their player community with a map pool where they have to pay for half of the maps.

yeah, makes sense. I think the priced maps is especially for the "mods" that take a while to create (and requiring a large team).

It would be nice to make a single player campaign on my own and spend a while on it and be able to charge like 5$ for it.

What is this I hear about B.NET costing 8$ a month?

I heard this rumour from a friend, but cant find an article...