Hello.
I would like to provide a few nitpicks and address my personal concern I have in regards to “rocPortraits” icons. In case you don’t know, I refer to new Classic+ (as we now call it) style of icons that were in last 1.33 update on PTR before its closure. These portraits gained some traction and people generally loved them, so I want to do slightly more than nothing by pointing out a few things:
-
Include Peasant, Acolyte and Wisp portraits into the mix.
Original game didn’t had those (although they were signs¹ of them being considered) and Reforged added default portrait to each race, so it doesn’t make any sense to make an exception here. -
Fix background glow for Farseer, Lich & Priestess of the Moon portraits.
For some reason, they share the blue glow with Archmage. Other Orc icons have red background, Undead share teal color and Night Elves — purple. Only Human & Random portraits have consistent background glow. -
Thrall portrait should have his blue pupils.
Similarly to Footman icon, Thrall’s have hardly noticeable² blue pupils looking to the right side. An oversign is likely a result of that + Thrall’s original chat icon was based on in-game modeland it doesn’t have blue pupils. Although Blizzard stayed true to Green Whelp, which is a unique icon in chat/selection menu form³.
Note: there’s 64x64 versions of unique ladder icons created by Xetanth87 on Hive Workshop⁴. -
Keep consistent resoltuion.
I’ll address older Classic+ portraits later, but let’s just point out one thing about them. Similarly to other portraits and icons in Reforged, their resolution is 256x256. As for “rocPortraits”, they were added in 1024x1024. There’s a good album on Hive Workshop that showcases⁵ that. While it is always great to get art assets in high resolutions, keeping this resolution for full release would be inconstent with other icons and serve as other example of how impractical Warcraft 3 has become when it comes to its storage space.
Lastly, I wanna give Blizzard a “warning”: don’t add these portraits as an exclusive gift to players with linked Battle.net 1.0. Many people would like to get them and this decision will most likely upset them. Nobody wants that as it would cause more headache to both sides. The easiest and most realistic way you can implement them is by focusing on Classic/Reforged distinction and adding them as is. By “Classic” I mean players who haven’t bought Reforged and instead have linked Reign of Chaos CD-key. In other words:
- Make Classic+ portraits available to both Classic & Reforged players.
- Make Reforged portraits available only to Reforged players (if that’s not the case already).
- Give Classic+ portraits to players with linked Battle.net 1.0 account based on their progress from good old days.
While this doesn’t count in potential errors in the connection itself and I’m not sure how many Reign of Chaos players actually jumped over to TFT’s Battle.net with the release of Patch 1.31, that’s probably the best way you can handle it.
I know that there’re only TFT’s 25 win portraits, so what about them? Return of RoC ruleset as an option in Versus is just a dream, so I suggest to just provide them together with Reign of Chaos & Reforged portraits. That way, 25 wins give both players RoC & TFT icons and 500th victory leaves Reforged players with two new portraits.
P.S: You can’t include links? Well, that’s unfortunate.
P.S.S: Okay, I’ll use Leviathan’s suggestion. Thanks.
P.S.S.S: As Xetanth87 pointed out, Blue Dragon is actually based on its in-game icon instead of the ladder one.
Links:
1. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Warcraft_III_chat_icons#Unused
2. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/wowpedia/images/6/6d/BTNThrall.png
3. http://classic.battle.net/war3/ladder/war3-ladder-info-laddericons.aspx
4. https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/unused-ladder-icons.337363/
5. https://www.hiveworkshop.com/media/albums/classic-hd-icons.10207/
