Hello. I’ve been playing Warcraft 3 since 2004. I see a lot of people complaining about new graphics looking bad, lack of content, unfulfilled promises, post-launch bugs/crashes. However, I do not care about new graphics, campaigns, cinematics or Reforged as a whole. I just want to keep playing the game I played my entire life, the game that was already perfect for me.
But that is no longer possible. With the latest update, the old classic client is gone, it forces you to download the new Reforged client and play it using classic graphics, which cuts a lot of features that existed in previous versions.
Features that were available yesterday and have been cut 12 hours ago:
- Cross-region play (the custom game list is no longer global and you can’t play with players from other realms, meaning it’s much harder to find players and fill game lobbies)
- Custom campaigns
- Clans
- Player profiles
- Ladder (ranked matchmaking, stats, automated tournaments)
- Good, [battle.net](http://battle.net) 1.0 chat system (you can no longer use commands such as /f l, /join; information on how many players are currently playing; list of communal channels; [battle.net](http://battle.net) news section; overall the chat system lost its’ soul)
- Beautiful UI/menus (in reforged client the menus feel sluggish and less optimised; the chat box overlaps the menus, atmospheric 3D campaign backgrounds are gone, etc.)
- Creative freedom in custom games (the WE EULA has been changed, adding a lot of limitations - everything you create now fully belongs to Blizzard, read more in other topics; censorship in maps and game names, for example a lobby called “booty bay” can not be hosted, even though it’s the name of an offical WC3 map, etc.)
- Classic graphics in Reforged client look worse (shadows are missing, saturation is off, some spells/effects are missing)
- RoC campaign is now using TFT balancing
Features that were available before 2018 and have been cut during the latest updates:
- Arranged teams
- Reconnection via GProxy
- Overall game stability (desyncs or crashes would almost never happen, now custom games are plagued with both)
Bot features (only going to list some of them):
- Online lobby list and in-game chat, available from a browser (what games are hosted right now, how many players are in a lobby, etc.)
- Competitive custom games (auto-balance and matchmaking based on ELO or empirical algorithms specialized for each custom map)
- Ability to kick/ban trolls (after the removal of bots they added the ban functionality, but you would have to re-ban the person every session)
- Better ping/latency
- Protection against hacks and maphacks
- Anti-spam protection
- Automatic replay saving and archiving with easy search from a website
- Game/replay archive
- Probably many more things that I can’t recall at this moment
I know this wall of text is not going to achieve anything, this is more for myself - I had to get it off my chest and let people know what ActivisionBlizzard has truly done to our game.
I just want to play the game I love.
— magic_hero@USEast