I searched about this on Google, but the only info regarding this is either not Reforged or only has 1 person that replied, so I have to make a new topic.
Are all custom games on Warcraft 3 Reforged on Battle.net safe to download and play?
yes, there’s no currently known ACE exploit like there was back in 1.24-1.26 days, so no one is putting viruses in custom maps
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My question is are your ideas safe if you make them into a custom game.
Officially, no, the EULA has claimed ownership of custom map content since the game was released. However, I can’t speak to the likelihood of that actually being enforced, but I will say that several maps have gone standalone now, and to my knowledge, no legal action has been taken.
So, I find the bugs and stuff on Reforged’s attempt at legacy support for custom games to be annoying, even though I know a lot of technical work has been done on the Activision Microsoft Blizzard side to try to maintain the “classic” support in the Reforged engine.
As a result, I rewrote a playable mockup of Warcraft III using my own ideas and code, but the original game art and a loose attempt at mimicking the original game’s combat mathematics based on some notes that the original devs left on their classic.battle.net site back in the day. And what I find is that using my rewrite of the game, to then play the maps made on Frozen Throne or on Reforged map editor, works fine and has been going okay. Because I’m not making any money and nobody else is doing what I do because it’s too technologically complicated so they don’t bother, as a result, it doesn’t have any attention and so Activision Blizzard Microsoft never took any steps against it.
And what that means for me is that if I want to go and play Warcraft 3 but with six races, maybe with Naga or the Draenei Lost ones in there, or whatever pops into my head, I can usually do that by recompiling the game with a different race techtree list or whatever. And that’s totally, totally ridiculous, right.
But when a company like Activision Blizzard Microsoft comes together to protect their IP and work together to turn a profit, they don’t really care except about the things that affect those profits. From a top-down decision making standpoint, it’s really all about the money. As a result, even if you make a new game that never started on World Editor, it is quite likely that if your game became extremely wealthy and profitable, then that Activision Blizzard Microsoft would sue you anyway in the hopes of proving in court that your game concept was similar to an Activision Blizzard Microsoft game anyway. For example, now that their single unified conglomerate owns Minecraft, Warcraft, Starcraft, and also Age of Empires, they might try to establish a legal precedent that they own all games with “craft” in the game, or that they own all RTS style of games, or something like this. What the courts do doesn’t always really make any sense.
And as a result, I think it’s pretty likely that if you’re doing something really stupid like what I’m doing – and I even got the attention of one of the guys who helped make Warcraft III on the original team back in 2002 for a few seconds on Discord, to have him look at a video of the game I created in LibGDX game engine, and his response was something akin to the 4 word statement, “that is Warcraft III” when he saw it – and even despite that, Activision Blizzard Microsoft is not taking action against me. Because I’m not making any money, so they don’t care.
Once you make a thing that makes money, then they do care. Regardless of whether it was inspired by your World Editor creations. So we live in this kind of two-tiered society, with the rich people suing each other all the time (even when ideologically the lawsuits should have been thrown out as baseless) and the non-rich people probably not suing either way.
And that’s when you realize that if you want to make stuff on World Editor, then just do it. If you don’t, then don’t. When social media tells you that the new EULA exists to steal your soul, what’s happening is that social media wants you to consume more social media instead of using World Editor. These are AI-driven clicks optimizing for the end goal, without caring about you or how they get there.
If you were debating between using Unity and World Editor, and the EULA concern makes you choose Unity instead of World Editor, then you probably should have already been using Unity to begin with. Same thing for other game engines. If you were debating between using LibGDX game engine and World Editor, and the EULA makes you pick LibGDX, then you probably should have been using LibGDX game engine to begin with.
If you’re like me, and you wire up LibGDX to play maps that you make in World Editor (and play the original Warcraft III campaign) but on the LibGDX game engine, and then you start making YouTube videos where you run around as Grom Hellscream and drink the blood of Reforged, with AI-modified dialogue so that in the cut-scene in the campaign Grom says, “If I must read from these OpenGL tutorials to defeat Reforged, THEN I WILL!” only to then have your hero’s model actually shift from classic to Reforged after drinking from the dark water, until he starts rendering with PBR shading that it took you a week to write in glsl, and then you run around with Grom Reforged on an otherwise Classic game emulator and start killing Reforged cenarius…
… that’s called being stupid. And it’s stupid regardless of the EULA. Grom Hellscream and Cenarius are properties of Activision Blizzard Microsoft.
EDIT:
On the topic of ACE exploits, the people who like to do ACE exploits say that it’s still possible in newer patches, but they don’t publish how to do it anymore because they want that sheer, raw power it gives them over the game. When a guy like Brad Chan takes the reigns to maintain the game, he’s not even going to know how to tell if a claim like that is true or not, since you would first have to find a sample malware to analyze to understand how the issue was triggered before you could tell if the bad maps existed or not.
This is why, now when I play Warcraft III, I like to play a rewrite of the game made with Java. It runs a little bit slower, but I don’t care, and having the game run inside of the Java Virtual Machine means that maps cannot do ACE, at all, ever, and ACE can go and die in a fire.