Tip #9:  Play others’ maps and they’ll play yours

There’s nothing more frustrating than spending 8 hours on a map and having nobody to show it off to or test it with.  Play a few hours across several different POPULAR user map sessions, and you should have enough people in your friends list and recent players list to round up a game whenever you want.  FC2 is never going to be Halo or CoD4 so don’t expect to have a stable of players waiting to drop everything and play your “Cage Fight” map.  Browsing the friends lists of your friends and recent FC2 players is a GOLDMINE for finding new players.

Tip #10:  Run a dedicated server

If you would really like to see your maps make it into regular circulation, run a dedicated server with all of your different maps in rotation.  Each time someone logs into it and downloads your map, it counts that download on the Ubisoft server and also affords that player the opportunity to rate your map.  If you do a good job your map may propel you to Internet Far Cry 2 Mapping Fame.  Which sadly doesn’t translate into anything tangible… It just makes you want to create more maps.

I’ll get into specific map-making techniques and tricks, in subsequent posts.  This is, more or less, just a way to help people who might be intimidated by the mapmaking experience, or who can’t understand why nobody wants to play their “Spikes and Inescapable Pits” map.

User-generated content gets a bad rap in my opinion.  There’s a lot of really awful stuff out there, but if those of us making it take the care and time to use the awesome tools that developers put at our disposal, we can create a ton of fun for thousands of people and have fun doing it.

Thanks for reading.

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