Did Blizzard Hunt Down Old Clients And Delete Them?

General Discussion
1

I kept a client for WC3 pre-reforged patch separate from the retail client. I haven’t really touched WC3 since reforged dropped, but I wanted to play through the campaign again, went to play the old client, and it is nowhere on my hard drive, I never connected this client to b-net and it was never updated. The new client is still there, but my backup old one is gone. Did Blizzard make b-net comb through your stuff and auto-delete/update any old clients? That’s extremely low if they did.

2

Uh no, the game doesn’t delete itself and bnet searching for old game installs and deleting them would be a huge privacy violation that would get them sued, especially in europe.

Nothing happened. You reset your PC or uninstalled it without realizing it, or forgot where you installed it, or accidentally updated.

Seriously though, just update. The crashing is gone (if not for the right reasons), the framerate has been fixed, and all the missing features have been restored. And if you’re still having problems, you can easily find old versions on the internet.

3

lol. lmao even.

4

hey maybe i just have the perfect combination of hardware and software on here to never crash but I don’t. :stuck_out_tongue:

and the biggest crashes that like everyone was complaining about, i.e. the campaign crashes were technically fixed, although more accurately simply removed by reverting the campaign instead of fixing it…

5

If you wish to receive accurate technical help then please be more specific about the accurate technical details of your situation.

The patch progression went like this:

  • Patch 1.26 - was live from around 2011 to 2017, only had 4:3 resolution graphics. This patch was made by Activision shortly following the 2009 Activision merger to fix a security vulnerability, then from 2009 to 2011 along with the fix they did light balance patches (not major changes, some stuff about bugs with Hex and things)
  • Patch 1.27 - changed almost nothing from the 2011 patch, but it went live in 2017 with very small changes to the internal game systems, preparing for Windows 7 and 10 as the target instead of XP or whatever, largely no one noticed. We know now in hindsight that the guys who made this 1.27 were the “Reforged team” prior to the name Reforged being invented. This patch was like a no-change patch functionally for the most part, where they simply published a new release to get their feet wet
  • Patch 1.28 - This patch in later 2017 or maybe earlier 2018 changed the way license keys were stored in the game, and moved all user maps from inside the self-contained game installation directory to instead be in Documents\Warcraft III\Maps during part of the upgrade process. The game experience was basically the same as 1.27 but they were beginning these migrations that we now know were preparations for “Reforged” done by the Reforged team, despite that name not being known publicly at the time. So, the upgrade to this patch was more of a “Battle.net 2.0” copy program – a new thing, out of game – instead of strictly upgrading from inside the game client when attempting to connect to the old Battle.net like how it was from the old pre-Activision team.
  • Patch 1.29 - this patch was released in 2018 and was the beginning of the roll-out of what we now know to have been Reforged-oriented features despite still retaining the classic client menus and logos. Namely this patch added 16:9 resolution, and added up to 24 players in a map instead of 12. Structurally, this patch removed the War3Patch.mpq archive portion of the game entirely, changing the download system to entirely redownload the game from Activision’s “Battle.net 2.0” servers in each patch instead of updating only a small part of the game, so that the patch upgrade download was about 1 GB instead of about 12 MB. The entire game began to organizationally change (preparation for Reforged), so the Frozen Throne.exe and Warcraft III.exe as wrappers to war3.exe / game.dll / storm.dll client engine were all replaced with one large game binary called Warcraft III.exe that had all the stuff in it, and a new menu button next to “Single Player” that would toggle between Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne menus. Also, a new binary program was added to the game install folder called Warcraft III Launcher.exe that would check for updates.
  • Patch 1.30 - This patch in later 2018 changed the internal game storage to modern Activision format (the “Battle.net 2.0” format) so that War3.mpq and War3x.mpq and similarly formatted game data storage files were gone. Now, instead, files were stored in a folder called Data instead of large archives with the .mpq format (this is sometimes referred to as the CASC system). It’s like changing from ZIP to RAR; the same files were there, but now they were in different storage containers. But also, inside those containers, many things were reorganized. There were folders inside the new storage where the name of the folder was something like War3.mpq similar to the old archives that had existed in the past. So, it was an incremental step forward but the way resources were organized remained somewhat similar. However, War3x.mpq – the Frozen Throne expansion – was removed in favor of one universal storage. About 6 icon assets and some other random stuff was essentially lost in this version, overwritten always by their Frozen Throne expansion counterparts even when emulating Reign of Chaos. But, for the most part, this version still was quite capable of changing to Reign of Chaos mode by clicking the button on the menu screen; it simply re-organized to have one set of assets for both modes, in the war3.mpq folder, instead of having a War3.mpq archive and a War3x.mpq archive as the old 2003 game literally had done.
  • Patch 1.31 - This 2019 patch used the Reforged format inside how it was stored, and including new Reforged map editor features and such as a free upgrade to Frozen Throne. It renamed the embedded/hidden folders inside the Data folder (game archives) described above to war3.w3mod instead of war3.mpq, which is a Reforged-invented naming convention (perhaps the developers hoped to one day expose a concept for modding called w3mod files, although this never happened and appears to only be an internal naming convention). Note that despite all of these changes, this patch was a patch to Frozen Throne and did not include ANY branding of the Reforged logos, nor Reforged art, nor Reforged menu. Also, users who pre-ordered Reforged were able to log into this patch without a CD key, by entering their Battle.net credentials in a popup before the game would launch

Then, on January 28, 2020, the “Reforged” game was “released” and attempted to provide the promised feature of “cross play” with the “original Frozen Throne game” and to achieve this, the past 3 game version (the 1.29, 1.30 and 1.31) all had their Warcraft III Launcher.exe (a program that was created, as described above, by the Reforged team despite not using Reforged branding) changed so that when launched, this updater would automatically download the “Reforged” branding client and its entire 30 GB to replace the user game install even if the user did not purchase Reforged and could not use the 30 GB. Also, if the player opens Battle.net 2.0 on the computer with Automatic Updates enabled, it would detect these Activision versions of Frozen Throne – these ones made by the Reforged team despite using Frozen Throne menus and branding – and would erase the previous game version and redownload the 30 GB combined Reforged+Frozen Throne client called Patch 1.32, in place of what the user had previously.

So, to answer your question:
If your computer actually had a version of Frozen Throne installed from the CD, or created before “the Reforged guys” were hired on and making changes to the game, that version would never be erased by Battle.net as far as I know, or at least I hope not because it would have contained custom user maps. But if your computer contained a version of Frozen Throne that “the Reforged guys” had felt they had taken ownership over with their newer patches by pushing your Custom Maps and other user files out into “Documents” folder, then Battle.net 2.0 automatic updates may have destroyed that installation and replaced it with the Reforged.

This creates a sort of vacuum for players who want 16:9 menus but also the Frozen Throne menu visuals and branding; a lot of rebellious players on modding websites share around copies of that intermediary legacy version, despite it being something LITERALLY CREATED by “the Reforged guys,” because it does not have Reforged branding, is not “Reforged” in the eyes of rebellious users, and does not have features removed (or broken) like the Reforged web page menu game does that paying customers receive.

What this means is that if you backed up a personal copy of Warcraft III Patch 1.31 you can get a version of the game that has:

  • The benefits of Reforged, like new modding APIs, the 16:9 resolution support with new art files to support that, 24 player custom map support, new game storage architecture, etc
  • The menu systems of Frozen Throne, with that true classic experience in the way that “Reforged” doesn’t offer it to paying customers, although “Reforged” tries hard to emulate the classic game using the “Classic Graphics Slider” for the paying customers when a map play session actually begins

This intermediary version, then, for a certain kind of user is actually better than both Warcraft III from the CD, and also better than Warcraft III from the store page on Battle.net if you buy it today. And, you might have had this version on your computer in the past, although it might have been automatically deleted by Battle.net 2.0 if you opened that thing to play a game like World of Warcraft or Hearthstone, at which point the “Frozen Throne” would have been automatically upgraded to the “Reforged” in an automatic way.

But, if you were not an active player during the transitional period, and did not make some personal backup of these “intermediary” versions in an offline way in a backup format that Battle.net 2.0 could not find, then you will probably have no official means to obtain them again. There is (or was) a way to download the Patch 1.27 game client (it basically matches what you get from a Frozen Throne CD) available from a Blizzard FTP link to anyone with a valid CD-key. It is not publicly advertised in any Activision marketing, but is available to angry/nostalgic users who dig through this forum – downloadable from an official Battle.net URL. But it will only have 4:3 resolution and would not look good on most 16:9 monitors in the present day. There is also the option to enter your CD key to redeem a free copy of the Reforged engine that limits itself to only “Classic Graphics Mode” in the graphics slider, allowing you to cross-play with the Reforged.

But if your goal is to play the “intermediary” patches from 2018-2019, which were a hybrid of these two currently offered possibilities (essentially sort of like a Warcraft III remaster instead of a Warcraft III reforge) then the only way for you to get them is to obtain them from some kind of backup, and then never ever run the Warcraft III Launcher.exe that would replace them with the Reforged.

And, of course, there will never be updates to those patches because they are seen as unfinished works and not as something worth maintaining in the eyes of Activision corporate. Additionally, they are known to have Campaign mission bugs in some cases that were not present on the Frozen Throne CD version of the game’s campaign, introduced by “the Reforged guys” (but without any Reforged branding) as part of the 2017-2019 patch cycle. One often-cited example of this are cases where Heroes in some of the Campaign missions have no inventory and cannot get items, because of a World Editor bug affecting maps that were opened and saved from a very old version to a very new version. Conceptually, “the Reforged guys” during this transitional period (despite not using any “Reforged” branding) opened some of the Campaign missions in the World Editor and pressed the Save File button without an understanding of the World Editor bug(s) that affect maps created on or before 2002, damaging their map data contents, and then they published this as the official game release during the transitional period.

Thank you for your time, and I hope this helps you to understand the technological landscape and how Reforged probably did not delete your Frozen Throne installation, but it might have automatically upgraded your transitional Reforged-ready Warcraft III installations from 2017-2019.

1 Like
6

This is false, as that data could be used for the editor and with it maps created that used the reforged assets, even if the user didn’t buy reforged.

It’s also a useless ancedote unless you’re trying to play on some ancient computer for which 30GB might be a lot of space. In today’s times it is not, as games are routinely far larger and I’m not going to debate the whole disk space thing again.

And I’m pretty sure this was the plan all along, not cross play with an entirely different version that was changed in too many ways to likely be truly compatible.

This isn’t really an unusual practice. Many projects don’t keep the intermediate builds from every revision because that would require massive amounts of disk space for larger projects.

The user themselves claims they never updated the game but they clearly did, because files don’t just magically delete themselves.

7

I have never heard this before anywhere, that someone who does not buy Reforged can play on the Reforged graphics by launching from the World Editor. Were I a betting man, I would bet that this were false, but as a Reforged purchaser whose game allows the Reforged graphics unlock, I do not have a means to easily test this, I suppose.

Maybe you simply mean that the Editor doesn’t enforce the “Classic Graphics Only” rule to people who do not buy Reforged, until the player clicks “Test Map”? Basically that anybody can edit a Reforged map, but only a paying customer can play a Reforged map? That was my previous understanding of how the Patch 1.32+ actually work, but it was unclear to me when reading your message if this was also your understanding.

I have two kinds of computers. Computers that I built myself, and computers that I bought at best buy. The ones bought at best buy, even if they cost multiple thousands of dollars, are often trash with a 500 GB hard drive if I’m not careful. A lot of computers these days want to believe that the average person doesn’t need more than 500 GB, which is stupid on Windows. In that situation, Reforged is almost a 10th of the available storage. I guess technically it’s a 17th. So, it’s like saying that my Microsoft Surface can only have 17 games installed, if each game is 30 GB. That’s really annoying. I have literally been on vacations where I deleted my Reforged install to make room for other games. But I never had to delete my 1 GB install of Warcraft III.

Are you arguing that the difference is useless because that is the stance you decided to take, or do you have data/research indicating that no one has ever encountered a physical issue with the 30 GB size? My personal experiences are literally contrary to what you are saying.

Have you ever used git ? I was not advocating the idea that Activision does not have a change history, or that they do not have the technological capability/history to jump back and make patches to a previous game build. I would imagine surely they do. I simply mean to say that despite having the technological capability, they have no incentive and will not do it. I.e, I chose the words, “not as something worth maintaining in the eyes of Activision corporate.”

I have not done experiments to verify if a computer having only a 1.27 or 1.28 install would auto-update to Reforged if it had no other Warcraft III install, but I think the auto-update might be a possibility. Certainly 1.31 will be recognized and automatically update on a computer that loads Battle.net with an account who has Reforged, in my experience.

In the case of the automatic update feature of the Battle.net client, the files do magically delete themselves. This is called automatic updates, and it is a standard feature to keep game clients up to date, available for many of the Activision games. For many of their games, anything to the contrary would be annoying to the user. An always online game, such as World of Warcraft, will not function properly if the user has last month’s version instead of this month’s version, and so for that kind of game it is right and necessary [in the eyes of the games’ developers] that the files on the hard drive will magically delete themselves and replace with the newer ones.

8

it’s not necesarily a technical incapability. But as an example, the developers of Final Fantasy XI Online (i.e. the mmo one before 14) when asked if they could create a “classic” version, said they could not because they did not retain past builds.

A computer can’t believe that it needs a particular amount of storage, because computers are not sentient (yet). And 500GB storage devices are so trivially cheap these days that this would probably be in a minimum requirement desktop PC. Laptops and other similar devices, the water is a bit muddier. But I have a total of 4 SSDs with around 2.5TB of storage. War3 Reforged is one of the smaller games I regularly play. Monster Hunter World with the high res textures is over 100GB, and that isn’t even that unusual today. FFXIV will certainly top that when the graphics update comes out this summer. Many other AAAAAAAA games chew up this much space. I"m just tired of people complaining about this. Could it have been made optional? Probably. But it really isn’t a big deal. If you’re just playing the campaign, play it, delete the game, get your 30GB back. I install and uninstall games all the time, not just when i need more space.

9

Okay, well, if Activision did not retain past builds of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne on their computers, then they are losers who will be fighting against bootleg for a very long time, because the bootleg version will run better than their official version and they will have left themselves powerless to resolve the issue.

I mean, it shouldn’t be that way, and I understand maybe they didn’t want it to be that way, but I think that’s a very possible way for it to be. A ton of technical work has been done on Reforged, but, as long as people feel Frozen Throne was something different (and not a subset of Reforged) then users will continue to want to jump back to old builds – and I think those feelings are based on “death by a thousand cuts,” so to speak, like a ton of micro-bugs that in many cases are low priority to fix but are fixed on the Frozen Throne by its original pre-reforged design.

10

I agree. But it does happen a lot. You’d think with the advent of cloud storage that companies would just rent/buy as much space as they made. But given how companies seem to care so little for game preservation they probably don’t want to take this expense.

1 Like
11

What’s the point of that, though? You have games that can be over 100 GB. Original Warcraft 3 is 1 GB. So, Activision could make the Reforged installer load the last 100 versions of Frozen Throne (pre-Reforging) on your computer, and you wouldn’t even notice. Would be totally standard. [“But it really isn’t a big deal,” you would tell me.] Maybe they could make a patch that loads the last 100 versions of Frozen Throne for each user, just in case they might use it, similar to how Reforged loads the Reforged assets in case they might be used.

I thought the argument was that physical space doesn’t matter. Why would you suggest Microsoft Activision would need to rent/buy any additional space?

12

Google Gemini says:
Are you giving away the plot of the next Terminator movie? In all seriousness, how do you define sentience? Is it all about emotions or can a mind that can process information in ways we can’t even conceive of qualify? Maybe computers are already sentient, just on a level we can’t understand, like trying to explain the internet to a houseplant.

13

I think you didn’t read the whole post. I’m talking about storing old versions of a game.

A game like this typically has tens of thousands of builds made. Thats a lot of disk space.

The argument is it doesn’t matter for the end user. It’s different if a company needs to store thousands of builds of the game.

I was not advocating the idea that Activision does not have a change history, or that they do not have the technological capability/history to jump back and make patches to a previous game build.

In order to patch a previous build, you need to actually have those previous builds. While they obviously retained at least the latest one prior to Reforged in order to begin development on it, they probably didn’t retain all or even many past builds. This isn’t a common practice because the storage needs are prohibiitve, as I explained.

But for the end user, in the days of multi-terabyte drives and smaller ones being absurdly cheap, 30GB is not that much and it really annoys me that so many people complain about this. It’s not a big deal- even if you’re short on space, just uninstall some other game, and reinstall it when you want to play it again.