I have made custom maps for this game for well over a decade now and it absolutely horrifies me to think that now they are all gone. I have always stored all my Icons, Models, AI Data, and most importantly Maps in the War3 directory in program files for obvious reasons, but it seems that the recent update deleted all of the files and folders including those made by myself.
Through World Editor I can still access the Blizzard map files, but none of my own.
On the custom maps button its one empty folder referencing to this,
C:/Program Files (x86)/Warcraft III/Maps/Scenario/
which doesn’t even exist anymore. The only non Blizzard Maps in the game still are in the downloads folder, since it does not reside in the program files but in the Documents/Warcraft III/Maps/Download/
I have about 3-4 maps I have made saved up and uploaded to the internet, all past versions of what I currently had. 3-4 maps out of hundreds. Many hours, many months spent on making those maps and to make them disappear like that. I have spent well over a year on making one campaign, and this latest map has taken well over three months to make on and off.
Please for the love of God Blizzard tell me you didn’t just wipe everything and they’re somewhere hidden away
EDIT
Now since everything is gone also the blizzards war3 demo campaign in frozen throne custom campaigns is gone too, since there is no folder for it.
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Did this happen just from patching, or did you fresh install?
Where were your working files located before?
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Patching.
C:/Program Files (x86)/Warcraft III/Maps/Test/ or /GoodOldMaps/ or /OldMapsDDrive/, basically all maps under the /Maps/ folder
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Unfortunately it is no longer 1990 or early 2000. Since about 2010 no proper application developer writes applications that store user data in the program files folder for security reasons. Applications that modify program file data should need to be signed and approved to do so, or granted temporary administrator permission while the changes happen.
Maps were moved to the user folder as they are technically user data. This is to be consistent with modern security practices. All maps and sub folders should have been moved to the documents folder. If this did not happen then some bug must have occurred.
The demo campaign is built into the game data now. It can be found in the CASC local storage.
Yeah only the ”downloads” folder is in the user data. Nothing ever moved there, just some patch created a new folder for downloads into there, and stopped using the old one.
This change won’t affect 90% of the playerbase since they don’t make their own maps, and I doubt many of them have even noticed the change. It just sucks that every map I made and every icon I drew and every AI code I wrote is gone without any warning beforehand.
I for sure won’t be making any new maps atleast until reforgeds release since it’s a colossal waste of time if they just get deleted…
But why not back up things? What if your HDD failed? Things that are yet somehow precious to you have to be copied and scattered!
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I have backups of some of my maps on my older drives
I tried to update the game on my different computer to see the results, and this time it did not delete my folders, but I have to move them to the Documents War3 directory from Program files if I want to access them ingame, meaning the Program files Maps folder does no longer work.
It seems that it was just a bug that those files got deleted. I still have (half) of my campaign on the old drive so all is not lost.
I’ll just backup my current files from now on from time to time.
Nice to hear that some things have prevailed. Time eats all.