An open letter to Blizzard

General Discussion
1

Hey Blizz team, would you send it to your boss please?

Hey boss, I want to give you an argument for a rollback to Classic until Reforged is finished. We all make mistakes, sometimes our multibilionaire company is just having a bad year and things get delayed. I know you think the pressure is being to heavy but I swear, when you asked for a month to release a better game I accepted because if you guys asked for it it’s because the game needed it. Now that you launched the game we all see that you should’ve asked for more, and I swear people would’ve given without 1/10 of the refunds nor the QQs.

Now to take a decision to rollback or not takes some big maturity, but I ask you to trust the fidelity of your players, if they are complaining so much is because they love the game and wanna see it in their final form. Let’s be honest, the game was downgraded in some regards, we can see it from the Menu. To take a rollback path would mean a lot, would show that you are listening and care about us, it would paint a totaly different picture from what the people are saying “custumer unfrendly company”. So maybe a rollback is not bad of a decision in the end since the players and the company benefits, I would benefit getting classic WE back and get back on my 6 month project, because trusting on PTR is never safe.

I hope you read and consider this. Wish you only the best.

21 Likes
2

It’s too late for a roll back. The game is out, it’s not going anywhere.

All Blizzard can do right now is fix the issues the game has, and deliver on the content they said was coming. Which means that in the first major patch for the game, folks get ladder and clan functionality restored at a minimum.

This game will improve with time, as all games do.

2 Likes
3

We have classic it is called use the PTR server, really the PTR is not a beta dump or patch dump for reforged it is the last snapshot of the Old Bnet + warcraft 3 TFT…

4

How can it be “too late” for a roll back, because “the game is out”? Should they have rolled back before they released the game? How would that even work??

PTR is not a solution considering its playerbase is no more than 1% of what we had before reforged came out. Maybe if you play singleplayer only, but then 1.29 would probably be better for custom campaigns.

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5

Everytime I see the words “an open letter to x” I facepalm

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6

It’s a completely different client, it’s not a ‘patch’ in the traditional sense. Additionally not everyone is having a bad experience with the game in its current state.

Essentially you’re in favour of Blizzard rolling back a good 27gb of data on everyone’s computers, regardless of their own experiences, just so that issues can be fixed for the folks who are having issues.

How do you think the folks that aren’t having issues are going to feel about that? Especially when you consider that your issues can be patched out.

7

they aren’t going to read this

2 Likes
8

Whoa dude slow down with the assumptions and putting words in my mouth. Only thing I’m in favour of is classic players being able to play the game like they used to again, without all the instability and missing features. People who bought reforged can keep their client, if they’re having fun with it, good for them.

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9

Yeah but, it’s one client.

There isn’t a second client anymore. If they ‘roll back’ the client (assuming that’s possible) everyone will be affected, including those who specifically bought reforged for the upgrade and are having a good time with it.

10

Of course it’s possible, if Blizzard tells you otherwise they’re just lazy or they simply don’t want to roll back.
IMO they shouldn’t have overwritten the old client in the first place, and put the new game in Program Files\Warcraft III Reforged

1 Like
11

It’s crazy that games sucking on release and improving with time is now the status quo we’ve seemingly come to accept.

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12

Every single game releases with bugs. Warcraft II had them, Diablo 2 had them, Warcraft III had them…

They got patched out and the game was improved. The standard hasn’t changed. It’s always been this way.

13

If you consider a game having some bugs the same thing as games being released in a nearly unplayable beta state with the promise of ‘don’t worry we’ll fix it later’ then yes it was always the same.

But it’s not always been like this and it wasn’t this bad. I’m from 1991 so you can’t fool me about this.

Case in point: when in 2013 Rome II was released, people were SHOCKED that a game was released in this state. It was not considered normal at the time. And this isn’t even as long ago as the time I’m comparing it to ('90’s, 2000’s…).

You want to know why this is? Back then studios weren’t big enough to be able to afford such failures yet!

Having to wait, sometimes for a YEAR, for a game to reach an acceptable state is NOT something consumers should continue to accept!

2 Likes
14

It is a solution, I do not know many game companies that gave you 17 years of infinite server access. Battle Net was always an addition to not a forever end all be all.

Battle Net 1.0 is dead Blizzard is trying to kill the last of it. Yes there is less players on PTR because the bots are now gone. The thing is PTR could be used to test releases of Reforged, however Blizzard was nice enough to keep the old Bnet 1.0 up and just move the classic wc3 tft over to that server. They could have killed it off but they didn’t.

15

Yeah I kinda can, since I’ve been gaming around the same time. For example, did you know that in Diablo 2, there was a bug which caused your game to hang if you picked up gold while fleeing from a Gargantuan Beast during Act I? Not a specific beast, any of them, so your game could hang early and often if you saw some gold and wanted to loot it.

What about the bug in Act II where Sand Leaper corpses created a blockage that you had to move around? Not that bad in the open world, but slap a few Sand Leapers in a key dungeon you needed to clear and suddenly you can’t progress because those corpses are blocking the hallway.

And while we’re at it, what about the bug in Act IV, where your game would crash during the countdown that occured between when you killed Diablo and the game ending? Because that would mean you’d have to fight your way back to Diablo and kill him again, and hope that this time your game didn’t crash so you could actually finish it.

And then there’s the Warcraft II bugs, which include gems like…

A massive fog of war bug in multiplayer which didn’t show your buildings, but it did show where you cut down trees and where you placed walls, which made your base and expansion locations visible to the enemy team.

A misfire bug where if you changed targets with a ranged unit at the wrong time, they’d play the animation to attack, but no projectile would fire and you’d do no damage, which was devastating, especially in naval skirmishes.

A bug with sappers where, if you told a group of them to target a building, like the town hall, and the building was destroyed before all of the sappers detonated, they’d all spontaneously explode, causing you to have wasted all those resources that you used to get the sappers in the first place.

Bugs were always there. Always. Hell one of the most amusing features in the Civilization series, the ‘Nuclear Gandhi’ came about as a result of a bug in the very first Civilization game.

The difference between then and now is that now you have a bunch of folks on YouTube who profit off of outrage and act as megaphones as they broadcast every little thing companies do wrong for clicks. You also have easy access to multiple forms of social media, such as Twitter, Reddit and these forums which also act as megaphones to broadcast these issues and blow them up significantly.

Back then you didn’t have that, so the impact these bugs had wasn’t so widely noticed.

2 Likes
16

Your “blizz team” isn’t working on the project. They practically never have - a 3rd party company was contracted to make models and better terrain design while blizzard themselves did only micro editing such as cutting out voice lines and some words out of cinematics, some unit balance too. Blizz has mostly been publishers for Reforged - not developers, so just because they were responsible in making some PR talks doesn’t mean they lifted a finger for it.
(You should’ve been able to tell who has worked on the game the second you noticed lady vashj have human ears and such)

p.s. I’m not satisfied about saying or knowing any of this

1 Like
17

To be fair, removing Reforged is what you’re suggesting by using “rollback”. Maybe you didn’t mean it that way, but that’s what people are going to think if you use that word.

Now, what you said in the reply I quoted, that doesn’t require a rollback. All that’s essentially needed is for Bliz to 1) reactivate Battlenet 1.0, and 2) allow players the choice to update to Reforged when connecting on an older client

18

Yes Leviathan, that is the right step.

I ve played WC3 TFT in the last month and last 18 years since 2001. Why shut down the very active battlenet community, when releasing a new reforged version. I think we all know the reason. Without the traditional players, Reforged would not be successful, simply not enough players.
But the actual situation is a slap to the face of all traditional online players.
The online function downgrade and the menu style and contents. It is a real joke.

Blizzard, please re-open battleNet and provide installation package for WC3 TFT
widescreen version. It is possible: Reforged Beta was tested and I played WC TFT on battlenet in parallel. Then we have the choice to migrate to Reforged or not. Are you afraid of giving us this choice? Currently, it seems you are.
But it would certainly calm the current sh*tstorm and allows you to convince us
during the next months of your final Reforged release. …and you would avoid that a part of the traditional community is migrating to alternative online games while you are working on your reforged ideas.

I honestly think that WC3 TFT stayed alive during the last 20 years due the chess like game concept, its online game functionality and the vivid community. No one played it because of its high end graphics. that will not be different in a remastered version. Blizzard, you are wrong, if you think that adding new skins in parallel to reducing the battle.net function is a successful strategy.

In summary, Blizzard please re-activate battleNet for online players together with TFT version from the last months for download.

1 Like
19

They are actually…

Yes, because the Classic team is very small (it is not even close to being the same team size as other teams at Blizzard) and what members they have are split and working on multiple games. To give you an idea, the Classic team that is responsible for working on Warcraft 3: Reforged at Blizzard HQ consists of 90 staff members (excluding testers). 18 of those individuals were artists.

By comparison, Warcraft III when it launched in 2002 had a full Blizzard team dedicated to it and had 183 people working on it (excluding testers). There were a lot more artists on that team, and they were able to do a lot more with the team that was there.

20

Bethesda CEO Robert A. Altman once said on an interview regarding Fallout 76
“It is not about how the game is when it was released, it is all about what the game become”.

So you think it is acceptable to release a broken product, get paid, and then fix it later?