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Comment by crazypyro | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, DotA was a custom map made on a Blizzard game. Its a bit unfair to say it slipped through their fingers. Valve had a good enough reputation to secure the lead developer where other companies failed to. (S2 games and Riot games both tried to get Icefrog, the sole designer of DotA for the past few years, but they both failed to keep him around or even get him into the studios for talks). I think it took a special company, like Valve, to be able to recruit Icefrog and keep him happy.

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That's exactly what I mean by slip through their fingers. It would be like Valve not picking CS. With Blizzard's considerable resources and, as they claim, freedom, they should have gone after hiring Icefrog and getting DOTA. If it's not in their DNA to make such a play work, well I think that factors into the larger point of them living in another age.

I want to also clarify that a lot of this rant is in the context of them trying to build out stuff like the UMS maps store for SC2 (or even putting in development time on their version of DOTA). To me, these are a fool's errand; pursuing them demonstrates that Blizzard doesn't understand _why_ UMS was so successful on their platform 15 years ago, and how the landscape has changed such that it no longer makes sense.

UMS was still successful 9 years ago, when the original DotA (not Allstars) first appeared. And it wasn't until 2005-6 that Allstars really took off, so that's only 6-7 years ago that there was still a vibrant UMS scene for WC3.

SC2 could've had a successful modding scene as well; Blizzard just doesn't understand what modders want or how to build tools for them. SC2's editor and the Galaxy scripting language were both underwhelming in their own right and significantly less powerful than the community-developed tools available for WC3. As a result, the competent WC3 modders abandoned Blizzard en masse.

Blizzard Allstars is also a fantastic idea and exactly the right move from a strategic standpoint. Unfortunately, Blizzard has absolutely bungled the execution. They should have had it ready to release with SC2, long before LoL had really caught on or DotA 2 was a thing. Instead it's been more than two years, and there's still no release date for it or HotS.

Lots of people agree that SC2's editor was good enough to do a lot of neat things. Someone made a 3rd person, mmo/arena type game. There was some issues with the fact that sc2 netcode is no good for mmo/shooters, but I think the true killer was the fact that it was impossible to get your map to become popular if you weren't already popular. The popular maps stayed popular because they were always on the front page.

This is completely different from wc3's system where whatever games were hosted by people showed up, so you would have to wait to find a game you wanted, but it also provided new maps much more exposure.

It doesn't matter that you can do neat things when the workflows are hideously overwrought, though[1]. As if Blizzard's insistence on GUI-ifying everything weren't bad enough, they then proceeded to add a ridiculous Data Editor that only partially exposes objects to code and doesn't allow you to do much programmatically. As a result, you end up having to cobble effects together through a combination of kludgy GUI editing and hackish[2] scripts. Examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hGV1eJEGx0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bgxel9g-ms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu7E7Ds2V6g

The middle one is a particularly good example because you can't dynamically set the miss chance. Or rather you can, but that change will affect all units, so in practical terms you can't do it that way. Instead you have a single 1% miss buff and layer it on until you hit your target value. The problem there, of course, is that each 1% suffers from diminishing returns, so you end up having to use a logarithmic approximation instead. By contrast, completely dynamic evasion in WC3 was a breeze.

Anyway, even when Andromeda[3] was actively being worked on SC2 modding was barely tolerable. But you're also right about the mechanisms for advertising maps to players: They suck.

1. People were making third- and first-person mods in the WC3 days too, by the way.

2. Hackish because, by design, there are many things you simply cannot do with scripting.

3. http://www.sc2mod.com/board/index.php?page=Thread&thread...

Absolutely. Having previously grabbed Counter-Strike (Half-life mod) and Team Fortress (Quake mod), and treating them nicely, most definitely should garner a good reputation.

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