Starting off:
I dont know how would you back up the claim that a fixed Reforged without additional new content is going to interest the hungry people in charge to do anything about it, which is why you see many people say we need some subsidary skin system to appease their hunger just so they fix something that should’ve never been broken to begin with.
Doesn’t mean i agree with those people either way, i just have a hard time convincing them that fixing war3 without dangling new content is worth it (it is), a more completed warcraft 3 game is what we deserve, and part of that is this feature, the reason i support it is because the people who say they should spend the effort to make an older version of the game (say on 1.26) available for people to download dont actually care about the audience that likes to play the game without what is basically DLC fluff.
The people who object to this feature but say that blizzard should’ve never never taken down TFT are mostly resentful people that would rather have a portion of the games loyal and dedicated audience be split off and be left alone in a corner abandoned on an old patch instead of being merged and being a part of a completed game with all the quality of life features.
China has 1.27 and 1.32 support, the difference is that 1.27 audience is larger and they actually support it fully instead of just dumping it as “its available” than abandoning it. we dont really need to copy them though we just need to make 1.32 as equally accessible and fixed.
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I Shouldn't have to repeat this:
Everything that Reforged is to its very last bones is the original game, its not a remake, this was said before, the argument that this feature is tied to the “past” is not true, War3 in 2003 being 1.5GB is most likely a big deal for people back than, no, this feature request seeks to take advantage of the fact that a 2-4GB light weight version of the game is nothing for people today as opposed to 33GB, and keep in mind Reforged’s requirements should be appropriate to when the project was set in stone in terms of its visual hardware requirements, that’s 2018 and like any game ever released the requirements obviously allow people with hardware much earlier than 2018 (say 2015 or 2014) to be able to stomach the game. no amount of years you keep piling up by saying 2022 2023 2069 is going to excuse the fact that Reforged is still not properly optimized for its era of release. You can probably shred off HD models with optimization to be lighter, custom model makers for HD projects of Reforged already do the optimization that Blizzard never bothered to do.
The majority of the audience of this game use classic graphics and would love nothing but to rid themselves of something they dont use, just because they stomach to deal with it because this is the only official option has no baring on your random assumptions about some nonexistent silent majority, you are proven in a literal way that you have a minority opinion, but you continue to use logics that simply doesn’t work for the case of this specific game to claim otherwise. No one ever complained that “A” game that they downloaded is of XYZ size, its the context that matters. Warcraft 3 is FULLY playable without the existence of a SINGLE HD model, no one ever tells a company they should take apart a standalone game even though DLC or skin packs for it is optionally downloadable still.
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A complex playerbase
The 3rd party community of Warcraft 3 is large, equal if not somewhat larger than retail in certain weeks/days. and there isn’t “one” community, there are many, and they roughly mount up to 3 to 4k people grouped up in one, making retail such a product that would make some of the most loyal people to war3 to transition is nothing short of a miracle and a blessing for the game.
The only reason retail can claim its larger than 3rd party communities isn’t because of its custom games scene, its because W3Champions has kept the entire melee community and both of the games largest influencers from leaving the game.
Every person that actually opts to go through the trouble of using war3 on a 3rd party platform is worth twice if not three times as much as a dedicated individuals who simply refuse tp leave the game compared to the average person.
People who use War3 on older patches are not our enemies, they are some of THE MOST dedicated people that our game is privileged to have, they dont ask for marketing or new content or cutscenes to move their decently sized audiences to the official platform, they only ask for a game that is fixed and has accessibility features to compensate for several factors that have been repeated in this thread many many times by me or others.
Who is the priority of Reforged ? WoW players looking around for cutscenes or broader blizzard audience ? or proper RTS game players, Reforged competition is other RTS games in the market, old or new.
We will never get the same hype marketing we did before, that chance is lost, and our best option is to keep people who still love war3 regardless of if they’re on the latest patch or not to remain with the game and to transition from the older patches to the new one.
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In Closing.
On an ending note, your claim that if Reforged was finished as it was original intended, the ideas of which were extremely split and many classic developers advised against taking Reforged to the direction that was advertised in 2018 and that people would somehow not “complain” is false.
If Reforged actually went on to finish the many many videos, and thousands of animations for models to make cutscenes similar to the never released culling ones, the game would be far larger than 33GB it would be 50GB if not more, so your ideal Reforged that you keep boasting about that everyone i suppose to not complain about would be larger and you somehow think people that already dont accept the current size would accept an even larger size ? your argument on this front is missing alot of thought process’s that you might not have wondered of before. especially considering that if the classic team was never fired we would’ve actually gotten this feature and the fact that you think the visual direction of Reforged was in any way shape or form practical or reasonable for the majority of the audience to “accept” the size.
If you were to argue from a position where most custom games players and a decent chunk of melee players just willingly accepted and transitioned to the new visuals MAYBE, just MAYBE you can argue that having a game remaster going from 2GB to 50GB would’ve been accepted by people, but the direction was screwed and it wasn’t only bobby sitting there twirling its non existent mustache that caused this game to fail, the developers who truly knew our community and what we needed were most likely outnumbered in the company 10 to 1.
Only part i felt like including out of hidden status is the fact that your excuse to defend your merit doesn’t really hold up, anyone here who is talking about anything other than the core topic is derailing in service of their own self centered motives, you are just the person who denied doing so previously while further derailing down the line to the point of making it about yourself almost entirely.