This feature would allow players to resume a game from the replay file after one of the players’ games crashed or caused a desync.
The community is asking for it since the Dreamhack Anaheim desaster between Moon & Thorzain in 2020. Since we had desyncs / game crashes at our $10,000 LAN tournament last week and now also at the $5,000 Tyler1 tournament, as well as during Lyn vs. eer0 in the $16,000 WAL Summer Finals.
Can we FINALLY get a modern reconnect / resume feature?!
A W3Champions developer commented:
Collaborate with W3Champions by providing them access to the source code, enabling them to implement a true ‘reconnect’ feature and allow resuming from a replay within two weeks.
Let me quote a recent post by our member CaptainJack:
I want a real reconnect as much as anyone else, but aside from the unlikelyhood of any major new feature ( as above) ever being implemented, this methodology doesn’t make sense. Why do you need a replay file to reconnect? Replays are also only generated at the end of a match, and even if one was generated, the game state is going to change by the time you get back, so it’s useless information. The only real way to reconnect to a game is to have the game state sent to you upon actually reconnecting, which is what any game does.
I think the issue that makes it more challenging is normally this is done by a server, but War3 doesn’t use a server in a direct manner. Classic War3 didn’t use servers at all except for matchmaking. Reforged does use servers, but via a proxy system for compatibility with the engine, where each player is connected to a proxy server that basically pretends to be a player, for the other players to connect to. The reason they had to do something like this is War3’s engine uses a peer-to-peer networking structure rather than a client-server structure.
Having said that, perhaps the idea here isn’t really to reconnect, per se, but rather to start a new game from the state of a replay like it was a save file. That’s not a terrible idea if that’s what you mean, but wouldn’t it just make more sense to use an actaul save file instead? Multiplayer save games are already a thing. And especially with W3C since they’re really technically custom games, I would think that could already be done without any work on Blizzard’s part.
2 Likes
absolutely, hope blizzard puts some thought into it.