This is not a new thread to discuss how or guess why Blizzard wants to rollback campaign updates since 1.33 in 1.36.1. This is to give Blizzard a last chance to revert the decision they made. It seems that they love to revert, then why not just revert what they reverted?
The reason they want to rollback is now obvious - from the perspective of the uncapable legacy devs: Warcraft is crashing? Unacceptable! => What causes crash? Campaign changes! (which is not true actually) => What should we do? Just rollback (, because that’s easy to do)! => What about campaign players? That’s not our KPI and they should thank us because campaigns now can be gone through without crashes. As for bugs and regressed game content, who cares! => Then the game is good, so we can continue to tweak balance BS for melee players, taking ZERO effort, pretending that the game is still under maintenance. => Our stock price’s going up. Hurray!!
It seems that they are spiting. I remember years ago I complained about the inconsistency in “level” parameters of newly added Blz functions - some of them are 1-indexed and some are 0-index. They saw this but somehow aligned all to 0-indexed, which makes no sense because all existing functions are 1-indexed. And this time, when we are complaining about crashes. They are like - oh, reporting crashes, huh? What about going back to 1.32? Among all the solutions, they intentionally choose the last thing we want to see and use it as revenge against our kind advice.
You’re not qualified to be part of Microsoft, to be honest, Warcraft team. Microsoft is technique driven and customer obsessed. But you are neither. I hope that one day, you all could be exported to talent market, and stay away from this game forever.
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To be more precise the reason is whoever is working on it does not know how or does not have the capability to fix the problems, so in the interest of stopping game crashes which is a massive pain point for regular players, they felt like the lowest cost and easiest solution is to remove the thing causing the crashes.
While i’m not a fan of that solution, it is a rather logical one. I’ve seen one person in the other thread state that weather effects are causing the crashes (which doesn’t seem quite right to me as some workarounds for crashes have involved things like not loading from a save or not hotkeying certain units/buildings). But removing those just to keep other changes is not really a great solution either, because then the relevant campaign missions aren’t being presented at their best.
No change to warcraft 3 is going to have a meaningful impact on Microsoft’s stock price. (Almost?) no one is investing in the company because they love Warcraft III. If anything, this is simply about (pre-MS, since they haven’t really taken over decision making or anything related to operations yet) not wanting to spend money on something that is currently a very small slice of the Blizzard pie.
There are two crashes. Save files and weather effects.
The save file issue they claim to have solved independently:
Fixed an issue where subfolders in the campaign folder would cause a crash
Weather effects, too, they pointed out the underlying issue:
Fixed a crash that would primarily happen on the Fall of Silvermoon where a VFX would try playing on a different game thread
The problem with “hotkeys” is not the hotkey itself. It’s rapidly moving the camera. Basically, by clicking the map, or double clicking your hero, or double clicking your unit groups, your camera teleports to another location.
Because of HD weather effects, and this bug, it causes the game to crash when it tries to display a VFX loading in a different thread. It’s not the hotkeys that’s the problem–it’s the camera movement. Game doesn’t crash so long as you don’t teleport your camera and don’t move your camera TOO quickly. Basically give the game time to load the VFX before your camera reaches it.
Either way, reverting the campaign would only really “solve” the VFX crash by getting rid of HD weather effects–which they claim to have directly fixed.
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That’s quite insightful. It makes it rather even more bizzare that they would revert changes to fix a problem that seems to already be fixed.
That being said, the reversion note mentions AI issues, which no one has really discussed here.
I’m confused. Weren’t these effects introduced with the launch of reforged, not a subsequent patch?
Banning me from battle.net doesn’t change the fact that you’re incapable.
You’re right, and it’s total BS. There are some AI issues but they’re far less than before–the only example I’ve run into myself was how Sylvanas refused to leave her base in the second Quel’thalas mission. I have never heard anyone complaining about 1.33 as far as AI goes. AI was improved in 1.33 but introduced a couple of new bugs.
The 1.33 patch fixed numerous bugs. Reforged was launched in a rushed, incomplete state, and 1.33 fixed bugs–such as those HD effects not appearing AFAIK.
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To be absolutely clear: the 1.33 updates fixed many dozens of legacy campaign AI bugs. There are maps that don’t have Hard difficulty, AIs did not rebuild, or even use some units or heroes. As far as I am aware there are two specific new bugs which are easily fixed: Sylvanas not re-appearing after her first death, and the secondary quest on Dalaran counting raised mages. Both of those are easily fixed. For the new Hard AI there are several missions that are over-tuned, but again this is a matter of making small adjustments. There’s not more than a weeks work end-to-end here for a single designer.
You can read through the AI change log, which also includes some of the bug fixes, but is not at all comprehensive on bugs.
https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/1-33-campaign-balance-update.340191/
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you’d think that having actually worked on this stuff that someone somewhere up the ladder would go “hm, maybe we should listen to this guy”
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This is the version of the campaign they’re about to bring back: Warcraft III Version 1.32.1 Patch Notes - #295 by Frosthowler-1403
I will definitely never touch the campaign again if this update goes through. Only hope we have at this point is the WC3 Re-Reforged project and the possibility of turning the 1.33 campaign into a custom campaign.
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