Dear Microsoft,
If you are a Microsoft employee reading this message and considering the state of Warcraft III Reforged technology, I would like to share with you my experiences as a user in the hopes that this helps you to make a better product or products in the future.
I was a fan of Warcraft III and particularly its custom map editor ever since the year 2002, when my family obtained our first copy of the game during my childhood. I used the World Editor on Windows on and off from the year 2002 until the present day as one of my most-used computer applications in my life. I am not a well-renowned game developer of any kind, and simply used the World Editor as a drafting system for fun ideas of all different kinds. Sometimes I made content to laugh at. Sometimes I made content to be series and try to make a serious game. Sometimes I made content with the express intention of playing it multiplayer with friends. And sometimes I made content that I knew would never play, so that I could publish that content on the internet or for online friends in order to help them create the experiences that they desired to create in the World Editor.
Twenty one years have gone by much too fast. I recall maybe about ten years ago, when someone close to me was recounting their struggles building web technologies and how anything they constructed seemed to simply break due to a browser upgrade shortly after, that at the time I poked fun at their situation because Warcraft III’s World Editor was a platform that never received any upgrades, and therefore never broke. And so it easily became evident to me that the problem they were facing was a manufactured one, and one that did not exist in my personal escapist paradise.
Through all the upgrades to Microsoft Windows during this time, the underlying Windows platform has retained support for the x86 32-bit binary programs. A year or two ago, I connected my Windows 10 PC to a usb CD drive and played the Warcraft III Patch 1.00 – the earliest version I ever had the honor of personally owning a CD for – and the product still played beautifully on my Windows 10 PC.
More beautifully, in fact, than the Reforged work-in-progress version available at that time. After I commented on it in a YouTube social media post, someone reached out to me on Discord claiming to be an Activision “Classic Games” Quality Assurance employee and asked for more information about the binary that was executing on my computer, because they said that at the Activision corporation they did not have these old CDs and were not able to play the original Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos game there in the Quality Assurance department.
You can choose whether to believe in the story of my personal experience or not, but I am inclined to believe that the person who contacted me on Discord was being genuine, because our discussions were reflected in one of the early patches to Reforged that added back some legacy features (what amounted to visual flare) to the game graphics render system.
To be honest, which features I discussed with that fellow that are not particularly important to me. What I wanted to discuss with you today is a matter of technology. Even among the user base today, there are people who come to this very forum and ask something akin to, “What is so wrong about Reforged? I played it and it was OK!” Here again, I am inclined to believe that the people asking this question are being genuine. Within a certain limited scope of features, the Reforged product does function.
But for those veteran creators of custom content, the “Classic Games” team and the work that they undertook often ends up providing the same general feeling expressed to me a dozen years ago by that fellow I knew who was attempting to build web technologies. Reforged is Battle.net integrated and Battle.net is generally designed to be an always-online technology that periodically updates itself, and then accordingly periodically updates Reforged. There is an offline button on Battle.net, and there is an offline button on Reforged, but these are more of a temporary excuse for when the power is out. In the year 2002, when the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was created, it was probably expected that some of the users would not even own the internet. They might purchase the game CD, put that CD in their computer, and then it would be a complete experience and that would be their only transaction with Blizzard Entertainment. And so the resulting technology was robust in that way – and it is thus that I can put the same CD that my family bought in 2002 into my Windows 10 PC in the year 2023, and play the same game. In this way, the Reign of Chaos and the Frozen Throne are and shall forever be a generally stable technology in a world where Reforged does not feel as technologically stable. Anyone who creates custom content for Reforged by necessity must live in fear of possible future upgrades to the game doing damage to the work that they were doing.
A user interested in modding Diablo 2 Resurrected reached out to me on Discord one time and consulted me for my game modding knowledge and the possibility of an overlap between some of the Reforged modding technology, and a goal that this person was trying to achieve on their Diablo 2 Resurrected mod. At the time when they contacted me, in late 2021 or early 2022, I told this person that it had recently been announced that despite firing the original Reforged developers, Activision was going to do more work on Reforged for the people who kept complaining. But the way that I expressed this sentiment to someone I did not know well at the time was this:
I don’t know if you heard, but ABK is going to change something on Reforged again soon, which translates to meaning they are going to hurt us more.
So, I apologize if this makes me sound like someone that you do not wish to communicate with because you believe that skepticism should be eliminated from the world around you. But the reason I am relating this is that now that Microsoft owns both Windows and Warcraft, your power is increasing. And at some point, you are going to have to make a choice. Do you believe that there is something special about the Warcraft III technology that causes it to hold a special place in peoples’ hearts, or do you believe that the public responses to Reforged are the result of inevitable social media negativity and that your best option is to try to block as much of the pre-Reforged technology as possible and to unite the player base on the one Reforged client?
I am asking because, although I realize that I am an exceedingly biased individual on this matter, I believe that there is something special about the Warcraft III technology that causes it to hold a special place in peoples’ hearts.
But now that you have the power over both Windows and Warcraft, the full stack is in your hands. At some point, you could decide to embed something inside of Windows so that it could no longer play Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. It would seem that there is an incentive to you to do this – indeed, if you take the perspective of casual players, it may be logical to believe that you personally cannot find anything wrong with Reforged if you play it for 10 minutes, and that therefore everyone else on this planet should get over themselves and accept your opinion as the only one that matters. Legally, technologically, you will hold the keys to that power and the ability to make that decision. In addition, the World of Warcraft game’s technology is the polar opposite of this situation and has been always changing since it was invented, so due to corporate management’s tendency to lump both technologies together as “Warcraft brand,” whoever you are that reads this post and has the ability to make this kind of decision, I can assure you that you will be surrounded by “Yes” men, who have a tendency to agree with you that you should eliminate The Frozen Throne game and its technology from the Earth, because Reforged was meant to replace it.
But I am writing here today to tell you that I wish you would not do that, even when you find yourself able to do so. Reforged is a technology problem that you are not going to be allowed to solve. It is a derivative of the Frozen Throne that was meant to be a superset of Frozen Throne functions, and so the technologists at your company are going to say that there is no Warcraft III other than the Reforged super-client.
And yet, Android is a derivative of the Linux kernel but society does not pretend that these two technologies are the same. In this world, it is possible for a change to something to make it more specific, causing some people to prefer only the original version in whatever way or for whatever reason. And the world is made better by the option for technologists to download each one independently, for whatever their reasons.
At times, people like me have even tried to document specific technological grievances with the Reforged client that make it inferior to The Frozen Throne in terms of functionality. I will link them below – but would I be wrong to presume that you do not have the time to fix these types of issues, nor even to watch videos where I attempt to document them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDf_fxDXFwQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMCsxNOfiP4
Right, if you are like me and got this far in my post, you probably skipped past these videos without watching them. Time is valuable. Maybe you can watch them at some point later for entertainment. But probably not.
The fact of the matter is that although Reforged ambitiously attempted to be a superset of the functionalities of The Frozen Throne, at the lowest technological level it is not entirely. And it is probably not going to be. And that means that there are 17 years of custom maps and game worlds and creations that represent the inspiration and the dreams of fans of this game, and they will not work properly on the Reforged system.
As is perhaps the human nature, as you gather your power into one singular entity there are always the humans who rebel. The greatest custom mod developers and maybe even at least one former Classic Games employee who worked on Reforged have a channel online where they are reverse engineering the original Frozen Throne client to add any and all features from the Reforged system that users might want, while also configuring it so that it would run perfectly on Linux, so that they can escape you. This is predictable, and perhaps it is human nature.
But can’t you see that they don’t want to hate you? The Warcraft III players don’t want to be the people who you treat like the bottom feeders and the least valuable part of your company, spending less time on the technology than the users of the technology itself.
So, please, in summary I would as that:
- Don’t use your power over Windows to block the Warcraft III game that isn’t Reforged
- Consider supporting the original Warcraft III game better, although it is probably beyond your attention span to do so and thus I understand if you don’t
Thanks, and have a nice day.
“Captain on the bridge. Stop rocking the boat!” 