Ways to a Successful Submission?
polycounter lvl 6
There are many threads here and other sites about making items, but not many about what is becoming as important: marketing and good tips for a successful submission. In fact, I can find none. Therefore, I was hoping people in the know would chime in here to help those still pondering the beast of the Dota 2 Workshop.
Having read, worked, and thought about this for a long time making items, I think there are many people trying to crack the nut of the finer points in a successful Workshop submission, but with little or no guides for that.
So, one, of several things I always was wondering was: are there good, and bad days, to post an item? I don't mean if there's heavy competition, or similar items - which should make one pause to begin with, but plain out good or bad days - like Saturdays, or Sundays. For instance Sunday: I can image there are a lot of people looking, but also a lot of items going up, so it isn't that obvious - at least not to me.
Secondly: how important are actual in-game shots for votes cast? I see many that have none, and some with no marketing what-so-ever, but can't tell if it makes a difference.
Thirdly: can you recover from a slow start, and how?
And Forth: where can good places to post the mere existence of your items? The Workshop itself won't cut it if you don't have a name, which is a big minus for the Workshop itself.
Fifth: Are you screwed if you don't have a network of people backing you from the start? I don't have one. I am solo, and finding it rather difficult without a cheering squad. I am not asking for one, but that seems to be the reality for me.
I'm sure many more questions could be added, and by all means; these are what pops in my head to start - if this is something people would like to talk about, or share. I'm hoping it is.
Thanks,
H
Having read, worked, and thought about this for a long time making items, I think there are many people trying to crack the nut of the finer points in a successful Workshop submission, but with little or no guides for that.
So, one, of several things I always was wondering was: are there good, and bad days, to post an item? I don't mean if there's heavy competition, or similar items - which should make one pause to begin with, but plain out good or bad days - like Saturdays, or Sundays. For instance Sunday: I can image there are a lot of people looking, but also a lot of items going up, so it isn't that obvious - at least not to me.
Secondly: how important are actual in-game shots for votes cast? I see many that have none, and some with no marketing what-so-ever, but can't tell if it makes a difference.
Thirdly: can you recover from a slow start, and how?
And Forth: where can good places to post the mere existence of your items? The Workshop itself won't cut it if you don't have a name, which is a big minus for the Workshop itself.
Fifth: Are you screwed if you don't have a network of people backing you from the start? I don't have one. I am solo, and finding it rather difficult without a cheering squad. I am not asking for one, but that seems to be the reality for me.
I'm sure many more questions could be added, and by all means; these are what pops in my head to start - if this is something people would like to talk about, or share. I'm hoping it is.
Thanks,
H
Replies
Just make cool items and post screenshots which accurately depict them.
If you want a place to start, I personally just picked my favourite hero and tried to make him look cooler.
Don't bother trying to pinpoint when a good time to upload is, there really isn't a 'good time' to post. I've run experiments myself to guague this, its pretty much the same across the board. In game shots are important, they're baseline. You don't need marketing, its nice and all to have, and tends to grab lots of votes, but it isn't required. Usally its the result of people doing it full time and having much more time on their hands to present it professionally. Your item stands the same chance as getting in as anyone else, well, almost anyone else.
You can always recover from a slow start, a slow start simply means you didn't crack the userbase yet, just keep at it, I've seen your work too, quality isn't the issue here. If you want to gather more steam, try posting on reddit, facepunch, here, playdota, most dota hubs have a workshop section, you can use those to your advantage if you don't have the entire community screaming your name. Get clever too, the workshop is very new, no one really has any idea how to approach it and we're merely all experimenting.
Success is difficult in the workshop, it's not given out to everyone, and as I anticapted, over time, only becomes much more difficult for new 'players' to get involved. The two most important things about workshop success is this, ambition and persistance. If you're ambitious to keep trying new things, and persistant enough, success will find you.
Keep at it dude, can't wait to see your next item. Cheers! :thumbup:
This. Don't be concerned about a magic formula of popularity. Do your stuff, enjoy the progress you are making, fail, get better, succeed.
A good way to start in my opinion is isntead of doing random items, pick a hero and put him in a little lore, try to match the concept with the situation~ I guess it's a fun way to get motivated.
100% this.
I don't believe that there's a better time of the week to post, though after big events like the Spring event where all the other workshoppers are resting might have been an example of a good time. In these lulls the workshop isn't flooded with quality items and sets, so that makes things easier. But time of the week? Not really.
Unfortunately in-game shots seem to have little meaning towards the votes cast on those extremely high-vote items if there's a good marketing piece. I get the feeling that there is a mass of people who would vote looking solely at marketing and not at in-game shots, so long as there are in-game shots present. I personally would never vote on an item without in-game shots though, and I think that'd be likewise for any one of us.
For non-high-vote items (which an item doesn't necessarily need to be to get in) I feel it's balanced more towards in-game views. I'd say the in-game views form the foundation for the votes needed to get in, and the marketing then lets you achieve sky high votes numbers assuming the item is good and the community likes it. Since there's a different set of people voting at times and days the community can be quite fickle too.
If you want your items to get more visiblity you can try reddit/r/dota2/, building followings on twitter/facebook/twitch, or the forums out there etc. Reddit however tends to be quite hit or miss, if they love an item it'll get massive upvotes. If they hate it it'll probably be the opposite, and I personally feel that reddit doesn't bring much positive visibility to my items. Instead I've been relying solely on polycount visibility and workshop views - it works for me, and I'm not exactly a big name on the workshop. So I don't really agree when you say the workshop won't cut it, if the quality is there the votes will come. Alternatively you could try the new /r/Dota2Workshop/
Thing is though, like the others have said, the ultimate factor in non-tournament and non-player related items seems to be the quality of the submission. A lot of good quality submissions don't get in, so yours would need to be not only good, but you'd need to have a little bit of luck. In the end the best way to get in, is like the others said, to keep working at it until one day you get a submission accepted.