It’s been a few days now, and Super Mario Maker 2‘s array of courses is staggering, perhaps more so than Nintendo was prepared for.
Anyone who has put a course up sometime over the past three days can attest that getting plays is hard. Really hard. Probably too hard. No one likes to put a course up and have it sit there for days with absolutely no plays, but that’s what’s happening: Courses with 0 plays, are staying at 0 plays.
There are two things to know about the course system as a creator in Super Mario Maker 2 that isn’t gone over at all in the game but affects all of us just the same.
0 Plays Means You’ll Get No Plays
Courses with 0 plays are to the pool for Endless Challenge, but they are incredibly rare.
Most of the courses you’re going to play in Endless are those that have been played at least once already, meaning you can’t rely on it to get you your first plays.
The ‘New Courses’ Section Is Days Behind
At the time of writing, the New Courses category is displaying stages from release day, which was three days ago.
That’s right: the New Courses section needs to be sifted through to play catch up. Most players seem to be focused on making courses rather than playing them.
It can be days before your courses hit the New Courses section because of the huge amount of backlog. This means you can’t rely on the New Courses section to net your courses their first plays right now, either.
Sharing Is Caring
So what do you do? What do you do to get your courses those first crucial plays to be entered into the Endless Pool? The answer is sharing.
If you’ve got some confidence in your course-making skills or just want some plays, you should make good use the community and share your creations with other Super Mario Maker 2 players, who are more than happy to play other creators’ courses to get some plays on their own.
The least stressful option is to wander over the Mario Maker community subreddit, which hosts daily course sharing threads. You have to make a Reddit account, but the threads are bustling and I myself have netted a fair amount of plays from them.
To increase the likelihood of other creators playing your course in these threads, provide some extra information about it such as the difficulty, style and theme, and a short description. The more pertinent information you present, the better your chances are of people playing your course.
You can also take to Twitter using the #MarioMaker2 and #スーパーマリオメーカー2 hashtags (just copy that second one). Use an image with your tweet to make it stand out more.
Having both the English and Japanese hashtags will greatly increase your chances of having someone notice your tweet as the Japanese SMM community has always been heavily Twitter-centric and is incredibly active.
Sharing courses on Twitter in the first game was actually incredibly easy thanks to the Super Mario Maker Bookmark website, which currently is not compatible with Super Mario Maker 2. Hopefully, this changes soon.
Of course, you can go to any online community that has an SMM2 forum or thread and ask for people to give your courses their first play or even just ask for feedback.
Course makers at large are starting to open their eyes to the New Courses bottleneck and understand that the wait to get your first plays can be stressful. There’s no harm or shame in asking other plays to try your courses to get them the jump start they need to be relevant to the Endless Challenge pool, believe you me.
Moving Forward
It’s going to take a while for the New Courses section to catch up if it even will at all, but it will surely get better with time, and perhaps Nintendo will alter the Endless algorithm even further.
For now, don’t get discouraged if your courses aren’t getting any plays. Either you wait for your courses to finally hit the New Courses section, or you get proactive and share them with the community. That second option is worth the extra steps, even if posting online isn’t exactly your cup of tea.
If nothing else, be sure to go through the New Courses section sometime and give those courses the plays they need to get off the listing. The queue is never going to go down if people don’t actually play the new courses. Why not pay it forward?
Published: Jul 1, 2019 01:05 pm