Hello to all the readers. I’d like to ask a question to the community and, if I’m lucky, maybe the Blizzard team will see this as well. I’ve been disconnected from the game’s base for a while and haven’t been following the updates much. Even after researching recently, I didn’t find much related to improvements to the game’s actual content itself.
I can see that most of the forum posts are about disconnection problems and other bugs, along with a funny variety of other issues and requests to “return the game to its original state.” But I’d like to ask: Is there any statement from the current developers of Warcraft 3 Reforged about the future of the game, any kind of roadmap or something similar for possible improvements? Or is there no recent news about this topic, apart from updates to the map editor and multiplayer or competitive modes?
If there is any news, I would love and honestly beg to be enlightened, since after about 2 hours searching the internet and YouTube, I couldn’t find anything.
The closest thing we’ve received to any sort of future to the game is that Blizzard is out to “make things right.” Seeing where things have been going, Blizzard has indeed been making repairs over the years to what used to be an actual unplayable, incomplete game.
There are still too many bugs to live up to the old Blizzard seal of quality, but it’s not all bad right now. The game’s balance is quite good right now and there’s a good variety of builds and playstyles for all races right now, even if Undead is a little undertuned.
Blizzard’s communication with Reforged is Very Bad right now. Custom Games have (were?) down for days due to DDoS attacks and Blizzard hasn’t even given us a “we’re looking into it” post.
Ultimately, the bright side is that Warcraft 3 plays great, balance is strong, and the playerbase is relatively healthy. We’ll also be likely seeing new maps in rotation and balance patches are a given to keep the game fresh.
All Blizzard patches do is change the balance for the online game, they don’t really plan anything else. At least they’re not planning anything really necessary.
Thank you very much for sharing your opinion on the subject, may I ask you a direct question? Is anyone in the community trying to improve communication in any way between the company—or at least the Warcraft 3 Reforged development team—and the community? Are there any YouTubers like Grubby, WTII, or similar who make the company see the large community that could be worth investing money into? A few months ago, I saw that Grubby himself organized a WoW Streamer tournament with a large budget supposedly provided by Blizzard, although I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think such an amount of money would be given randomly to a game. It seemed like a kind of incentive to attract players or something similar, but then why don’t they communicate with us and at least try to establish some contact or give us future reassurance for the progress of the game? Most of their social media, like Twitter, have been dead since 2023 or even 2020, and the forums seem to be kept alive only by the community itself and by patch notes from the developers.
Communication is largely a one-way thing right now, but following how the latest patch notes changed, it’s clear that Blizzard is at least listening on some level. It is my assumption that Blizzard wants to do more but there is a lack of appropriate man power to handle the legacy code Warcraft 3 and Reforged has to make larger changes.
The best option for Blizzard is to keep communication at a minimum because they cannot promise deliverables. If they said, “we will provide a new patch in the future,” people will be upset that it hasn’t arrived in the time frame and quality they expected. I feel Blizzard is (should) focus on bug fixes and then maybe in the future incentivize new sales with new features.
The developers are not particularly keen on dialogue with the players. Well, unless they only listen to fans of online games who constantly whine about the wrong balance. And technical errors are either rarely corrected or completely ignored.
Development was being outsourced for a while but is now being handled internally by the “Warcraft RTS Team”. Beyond the announcements of version 2.0 and the remasters of the first two Warcraft games, they didn’t have anything to say about future plans. They shared a kind of mission statement of “When something is broken, you fix it. When something is wrong, you make it right. And if things aren’t good enough, you make them better.” Nothing specific at all and the team and their lead Brad Chan never did any interviews or further statements.
Since then, WC3R has gotten further balance changes and a new map pool. WC2R also surprisingly got some balance changes as well. Bug fixes came fairly rapidly after the WC3R 2.0 release which is a step up from what players have become used to.
As far as community feedback, the team seems to be listening and basing a lot of their balance changes on community suggestions but they don’t seem to be giving anyone insight on what to expect. Grubby was surprised when Blizzard reached out to give one of his streaming tournaments some prize pool money he wasn’t expecting while him and others like Back2Warcraft apparently knew about Patch 2.0 a little before the announcement.
Evidence points to the release Patch 2.0 and the other remasters being pushed ahead to be ready for the 30th anniversary event. So there’s likely some other updates that have been worked on for a while. But we likely won’t hear anything at all until they’re about to be released or maybe put on PTR.
Long term, authentic plans to satisfy everyone and sunset the game in a polished and finished state, take care of online issues, mapmaker issues, world editor issues and melee issues ? no. total pipedream.
we just get leftover scraps when they decide to turn their head once every 6 months to see whats up and throw some chewed up bone our way.
We still wait, my friends. But as I look at Orcs and Humans living in friendship, harmony and at peace now, some 600 years after Caesar’s death, at least we wait with hope for the future.
And a small Night Elf then asked: “Lawgiver, who knows about the future?"
The Lawgiver responds: “Perhaps only the Undead !"
(adapted from the ending of Battle for the Planet of the Apes - 1973)
Other than balance updates / map rotation changes, the answer is no. We got some new stuff with the 2.0 update but now it’s basically just darts-at-a-dartboard balance changes, changes to map rotation and maybe some bug fixes / new bugs.
The current ecology of this game is very strange
Professional competitions are now entirely organized by the public, with only a few professional players coming and going
The server used for the competition is not even the official Battle.net, so I suspect that whenever a player says that Battle.net cannot enter the game, Blizzard may think that professional matches are going on normally, and my server is fine
The authors of folk maps have split
Some authors, especially in my country, insist on resisting the new version and staying at 1.27a because this version can still decompile into the game’s kernel, access resources to implement more features that are not officially released, and even embed platform APIs to enable paid functions such as membership recharge and map levels. These functions are usually provided by third-party editors, which are very user-friendly for authors who do not know how to code, making them increasingly resistant to the new version
The authors of the new version have been struggling with Blizzard’s updates. They rarely provide feedback on issues, and even if they do, they are not given much attention. They are just busy dealing with new problems that may arise with each update
I suspect they would want Blizzard not to update
The biggest pain of this game is that it cannot be unified in version. The future has already forked, and it seems that the future of the Battle.net version will not change due to player discussions. The official has its own plan, but this plan has not yet announced a grand future
Blizzard is entirely aware of the pro gamer situation, because Blizzard themselves pushed the pro community to do it themselves after they stopped sponsoring/endorsing competitive events years ago.
Blizzard abandoned the game a long time ago. All the upcoming patches only change the balance for fans of online matches, no more. The last time the developers did a good job was in patch 1.35. Then it only gets worse, both visually and technically. Especially with the 2.0 release.
