Valve you're killing custom games with the Top 10 list. PLEASE FIX - I beg you

I've been playing and loving custom games since starcraft 1. I've always played them far more than the standard game. Played them for pretty much the entire duration they remained populated. That is, of course, until Starcraft2's custom games iteration.

The top10 list made finding a game not on it take an absurd amount of time, if not completely impossible. Most of the games on the list weren't very fun I only found a couple interesting and could play those only so much before I tired of them. Where previous custom games were fun for literally years, blizzard's implementation in starcraft2 got boring in mere months and I moved on.

I've been playing customs in dota2 since the start of reborn beta, and actually for the past ~2 months completely stopped playing dota in favor of customs. Most unpopular but very fun games enjoyed a population surge both at reborn beta launch and official launch, but they are starting to run thin. They will die out completely very soon.

Your current implementation with both a Top10 list and a lobby list is certainly better than Blizzard's in Starcraft2, but only just barely, and both are clearly vastly inferior to SC1/WC3 b.net. To illustrate very clearly just how much of an impact the Top10 list has, just look at the Naval Warfare daily users. Was at a steady 2k-4k for a couple weeks. It dropped off top10, and overnight it went down to 200-700; it's all downhill from here.

It's still early for custom games, but there are still several very good, well made, fun games that wouldn't be struggling nearly as much as they are now if 95% of the custom game playerbase wasn't playing a Top10 game. Warlock Brawl(20 playing now), The Predator(9 playing), Dota Strikers(17 playing) just to name a few. Developing custom games can take quite some dedication. It really must be crushing to pour your soul into these projects for no incentives and soon find your game at a constant ~0 users because it can't compete with super casual/pve games that always have a larger playerbase.

So here are my suggestions:

* Remove Top10 list completely. You tried your experiment with implementing both a Top10 list and lobby list, it didn't work. Please do not delay before it does serious damage to the custom game community.
* Make the lobby list the first thing you see once you've clicked on the Custom Games tab. There is a significant part of the playerbase that doesn't even know the lobby list exists(I'm serious)! This has several detrimental effects which I'll go further into a little bit further down.
* Keep the other sections of the current overview tab but rename it to suggested games. I never really see any games consistently on the suggested games section so I don't think this can become another Top10 list.

And finally just a couple quality of life changes that aren't super-important but definitely worth mentioning.

* Make lobby leader always the in-game host. The way it works right now(assuming there's zero lobbies with slots open) is if I don't click the "create custom lobby" button and instead click "Play Warlocks Brawl" I will make a lobby and be assigned lobby leader but once the game actually starts whoever loads the game the fastest will be given the host slot of the game. So for instance I'm a USWest host, I click "Play Warlocks Brawl". 8 other USWest players go to lobby list, see my USWest game and join. 1 SEA player with a $10000 machine doesn't know about the lobby list clicks "Play Warlocks Brawl" and gets put in my lobby. Game starts, he loads first, and now everyone has 300 ping(except him of course). I'm not certain how this affects games with dedicated servers, but really as long as there's any customs without them there's no reason for this sloppy host-assigning. Also if you create a custom lobby manually the proper way and you leave, this breaks the lobby and in-game host will no longer be assigned to lobby leader, whoever loads first gets it.

* Related to my prior point, there's no indication of the server location in the lobby rooms. So if you enter a lobby either through direct invitation, clicking on a channel invite button "join my lobby - click here", or through clicking "Play XXX custom game" there is absolutely no way to tell what region you're going to be playing in(the little connection indicator bars are not enough). Many people think custom games will be taking server settings from the dota 2 matchmaking component and will often leave once they see their high ping which can ruin the game for other players. The fix is clear, include this information at the top of the lobby popup.