With Legacy of the Void's great changes from the matchmaking system, to the automated tournaments, we have yet to see much talk on the Arcade section of the game.



Free to play, the Arcade system has been one of the more controversial parts of the game, as many of the casual-players of Brood War and WarCraft 3 did not find much solace in the popularity system of Wings of Liberty. While on the outside, it appeared the popularity system was removed in Heart of the Swarm to become what is now the arcade, the most popular maps still reign supreme.



Some maps, such as Probes vs Zealots, have already implemented a cache-based ranking system, which can unfortunately be modified on your machine, ruining the purpose of the system in the first place. And as we saw with Legacy's early beta testing, many players don't have much reason to play without a competitive ladder.



So, with a proposal of removing the popularity system, and adding optional ranked ladders for arcade maps, the casual playerbase of the free-to-play Arcade would ideally become larger than before. With some custom mods like Carbot Animation's StarCrafts mod being easily accessible to casual players, the popularity of SC2 would skyrocket past the previous RTS' installments, and make for a better Battle.Net 2.0



Removing the popularity system would ideally be replaced by the public/private named lobby system from previous installments. If you (Blizzard) are worried about derogatory or copyrighted titles, you already have a censor on title uploads for maps, ideally you could use the same censor for titles.



For mapmakers, we have a limit of how many maps we can upload the Battle.Net, with a limit of 20 maps. We are also forced to upload our maps to Battle.Net, meaning we are forced to completely re-upload maps when we are only changing the thumbnail, the descriptions, how-to-play sections, etc. which can make constantly updating maps quite frustrating. Removing the upload system would ease some of the bugs of Arcade (such as having your download get stuck, having incorrectly updating descriptions, etc) as well as stress from mapmakers uploading their map, as some may have upload/download caps.



Signing this petition would mean you agree to the following proposals to Blizzard Entertainment's StarCraft II Development team:



* Remove the popularity system from the Arcade.

* Add a module into the editor for dedicated ladders for arcade maps.

-This includes modifiable MMR, rank logos, number of leagues, divisions, etc, as well as a matchmaking-like queue.

* Recreate the Battle.Net 1.0 (WarCraft III, Brood War, etc.) hosting concept, with named lobbies.

* With hosted lobbies, allow mapmakers to keep their maps locally, and remove the upload system, or instead remove the map limit and make the upload optional (perhaps to help with download speeds, similar to a p2p upload)

* Allow for thumbnails, screenshots, descriptions, etc of arcade and custom maps to be updated from the Battle.Net interface, having to reupload a map for simple image changes is not efficient. This would make updates easier, especially with locale changes.