[crazypyro]

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.

[FreakLegion]

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.

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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...