I am a developer of a fairly popular custom game that has been around for over 15 years. We previously had partnerships with large hosting platforms such as BGN, ENT, and MakeMeHost, as well as our own bots that we used for ranks, automatic replay uploads, in-game moderation, and stomping out hacked versions of our maps. We even had our own anti-cheat which detected map hacks that were undetected from base WC3’s Warden.
In September/October of 2018, various members of the custom game community were added to a Discord server with Blizzard staff to discuss PTR 1.30.2 and the planned removal of host bots. We were not given any promises or much information at all, but were told that there may be discussions on adding key features provided by host bots at a future time.
Now that there is more developer time spent on WC3, I’m curious if there are any plans to revisit these discussions five years later. The competitive custom game community has been generally negatively affected by the removal of host bots and we’d like some viable, official solutions to get our communities and maps back to their healthy state pre-removal of host bots.
I’d like to state explicitly that I’m not asking for host bots to be re-implemented as they were before (e.g. a crowded custom game search full of empty lobbies). I think hosting on official Blizzard servers is excellent from a security and accessibility standpoint. I’d even be happy if we had to pay some monthly rental fee to have our own dedicated servers and if there were APIs added to World Editor that allowed maps to interact directly with the server in order to provide key functionality such as banning problematic players, saving/uploading replays, and saving statistics for ranked games and competitive leagues.
There are pros and cons to adding more granular hosting functionality, but I think that with the renewed interest and activity in the game we should at least re-open these discussions.