Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that Reforged’s melee multiplayer is being added into the Frozen Throne ladder? Reforged isn’t coming out with its own thing.
Totally a granted and a given though that it’s a strange, not-like Blizzard thing to do in regards to Reign of Chaos’ multiplayer. Although I will say that the specific phrasing and diction at least leaves a teensy little sliver of hope (although I’ve never gone back to RoC multiplayer myself):
The use of ‘disabled’ rather than ‘removed’ or ‘deleted’. Again, the most I can muster is thinking that - again - something’s gone really askew while they’re working on all the programming and coding and online systems.
They haven’t removed the ability to make non-Lord of Destruction characters in Diablo 2, I can still hop onto not-Brood War BattleNet for Starcraft. They recently rereleased Diablo 1, Warcraft 1, and Warcraft 2 on GOG. It’s the optimist in me, but I don’t think they’re permanently axing Reign of Chaos’ online.
Not splitting the community.
Why would cross compatibility ever be a bad thing? There’s a healthy amount of games that do it across entire platforms even.