Custom Game List - Improvement Ideas

Hello,
I would like present some suggestions regarding the Custom Game List. I believe it to be a very integral, if not the most important, part of the game. This is where the magic happens. After all people can’t play maps if they don’t see the lobbies.

Patch 1.31 already made some very welcome changes to the ingame Game List like showing lobbies from all realms, making it possible to filter by game and map name and being able to see all games at once.

There are however some more desperately needed features missing in my opinion:

  1. Show us the dedicated server location. I have seen a lot of people being confused by the difference between realm and dedicated server. The realm the host is playing on really doesn’t matter at all for custom games, so there is really no need to display it in the list. However, the dedicated server determines your ping, which is tremendously relevant for some maps. This is why it should clearly show in the Game List where the server is located (even USWest/East, EU, Asia is fine, but optimally it should show the exact city like Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Chicago, New York etc.). On that note: It should also be absolutely possible to select the server you are hosting on instead of having it chosen for you automatically based on your IP/location.

  2. Show the actual number of players in the lobby, not the amount of occupied slots. No one cares if the host closed 10 of 12 slots or if there are 5 AIs in the lobby. If you want to go the extra mile you could even make it possible to see player names already in the lobby without joining it (this was after all a feature we had back when bots were still a thing and in small communities like this it can affect your decision to join a game if you see friends already in it).

  3. Give us more filter options and details. Let me sort the list by all kinds of things, be it time created, number of players in the lobby, or just alphabetically by name. Most importantly though show map size in megabyte and let us sort by that as well. This should also void any concerns about raising max map size to unlimited or at least ~5gb.

  4. Change the layout/look of the Game List. on a 1920x1080p resolution the actual List take up around 600x500p. That’s an user interface designers nightmare. It makes it so you have to scroll for an inflated amount of time for not even that many games.

  5. Remove already started game from the List without having to refresh.

  6. It would be incredibly helpful to have an external Game List on a web browser page (another feature we used to have with bots). I used to check the Game List dozens of times per day because I just needed to click on a tab in my Browser between surfing Youtube, Reddit etc.
    Now that I need to start up the whole game, log in, press on custom games just to check what is being hosted I do it way less frequently. I believe this might be the no.1 thing that would improve traffic.

Thanks for reading. Feedback is appreciated.

7 Likes

Yeah I agree

A real post about real issues?!

IM MAD NOW

As a valued Blizzard customer for well over 16 years I support his claims and demand action.

In my opinion, the most important is the ability to delete or rename map files directly from the game client. Restoring order in the “cards” folder in the original game is a big headache.

Didn’t you see they re chaning all the layouts of the menus? Just wait till custom games are implemented in the beta then feedback on that.

Don’t worry I will give feedback after they release custom games in Reforged as well. However I doubt that any point beside no. 4 will be addressed in the next beta patch.