I have SC BW downloaded for free from Battle.net, but I have not purchased the remaster. Recently I’ve become inspired to try my hand at playing SC1 multiplayer and I was wondering, if I plugged my old SC:BW discs into my computer, would I be able to ladder on there, or is that client totally dead with 5 players on it, does it even work nowadays?
TLDR can I ladder on the Brood War client or do I have to buy remaster?
You can try both vanilla and BW multiplayer with your free download. It has cross play with the Remastered version.
If you want to play 1.16.1 outside Battle.net there are other options that we can’t discuss in the official forum
Thanks, I saw that I can play online, but there didn’t seem to be a big green “play” button that I could just click to get into a match, am I blind or is there just no mmr based multiplayer matchmaking in the free version?
At the Main screen, select Multiplayer. It’s the satellite. A new window will open. Select Original, Expansion or Cancel. If you select Original or Broodwar, you get a new screen. You have two options: Battle.net or LAN. If you choose Battle.net you need to select a Gateway: US West, US East and so on. You click OK and you get a new screen, where you can create or join multiplayer games
I got that far, but this is where I got lost, I saw I could create a match and such, but if there is a way to play without somebody manually connecting to a lobby you already made, I dont see it. I see that the “ranked” tab is inaccessible in the free version.
So I’m asking not if I could set up a multiplayer match, but if I can play against random people of equal skill. Sorta like a non-Ranked ladder. I’m pretty sure you can ladder in SC2 even in the free client at least, but that doesnt seem to be the case here.
According to this page
https : slashslash liquipedia net slash starcraft slash StarCraft_Remastered_Ladder
‘Blizzard initial plan was to make Matchmaking and Ladder a feature for both StarCraft: Remastered and the StarCraft Anthology but ended up being exclusive to Remastered.’
The legacy version (pre-remasterd) never had a ladder. Also, you can no longer connect to the legacy Battlenet anymore. If you try, it will update your copy of the game to the current version.
Lalo beat me to it, but they are correct. Ladder (which is the “Ranked” tab) is a Remastered only feature.
Unfortunately even if you’ve bought the vanilla SC v1.16 and went to online multiplayer, Blizzard will force you to upgrade to SCR, unless you apply a certain registry key to change the default gateway to ICCUP (ICCUP died August-2021).
A mini ver of SC1.16 can still be downloaded from ICCUP here:
http://files.theabyss.ru/sc/starcraft.zip,
or a full version here:
http://www.staredit.net/topic/17625/
Note SC1 v16 can still be played online multiplayer even after ICCUP server shutdown, I’ve a channel in my CoachAI discord called #lfg-in-iccup, so if you’ve any issue with SC 1.16 or want to play it online with some1, please join me there.
I was confused because I didn’t have internet back when I played the original so I have no idea how the multiplayer used to work.
Thank you for the replies fellas!
Pre remaster did have ladder.
Had a giant button called ladder and had unique icons.
It was 100000x times better.
There wasn’t an MMR based matchmaking system before Remastered.