Read all this and tell me its still a good system but at least once sites start uploading there custom maps to websites i can publish them my self and play with irl freinds but since noobs go around and tell people that theres no need for that like on this forum it will be hard to find maps but at least sc2mapster is uploading there custom maps.
By luxx on teamliquid:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=139745
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:
1. The map is one of the top 50 most popular maps
2. You recently joined someone else’s game who had the map
3. 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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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).
6. 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.
