Warcraft 3: Reforged is still not in a great state. It’s much better now than it was on launch, but:
-performance is still noticeably bad in menus and HD graphics mode
-HD campaigns have been reverted back to their state of broken AI and embarrassing lack of difficulty resulting from said broken AI
-The game is still riddled with bugs in vanilla functionality (e.g. Firelord incinerate often deals 0 damage, MMR system is wildly incorrect in most cases) and in the modding scene (e.g. SetXXXField jass functions that do nothing, world editor sometimes crashes when resizing maps)
-Melee balance is not in a good place
-There’s absolutely room for more expansions, campaigns, and editor functionality
As we all know, the classic team was axed and blizzard has taken to outsourcing development to studios that have previously never touched the warcraft 3 codebase, and have seemingly never played the game either. While we’ve seen some improvements under this business model, it still leaves much to be desired.
In comes The Hive Workshop.
The Hive community has proven time and time again that we’re more than capable of working around/fixing most of blizzard’s missteps. This community contains 20~ years of knowledge and documentation, and fosters many talented programmers, mapmakers, artists, composers, etc. that all have the desire to see Warcraft 3 shine. So, why not let them?
Instead of hiring another random outsource studio to work on the game for a few months, leaving the Warcraft 3 player base still unsatisfied, why not bring in people from the community that know what they’re doing, what the game’s issues are, and what players actually want/need? Not only would this most likely be the best way to restore the game to its former glory, but it’d also be a pretty great PR move that would almost definitely restore trust between blizzard and its customers after all the damage caused by previous leadership.
Note: for those of you who are probably going to come and tell me that this is never going to happen, I have considered that possibility, of course, but why should I let that stop me from putting this out there?
-War3 has no multiplayer functionality for campaigns
-Plenty of multiplayer maps are available on hive
-Plenty of people, myself included, submit original (and high quality) resources all the time
-All resource posts require an image to go with them, and the forums support at least [img] tags for screenshots, but that issue isn’t really relevant to anything I said in the original post so not sure why it was brought up
-There are incredibly useful modding tools available on hive (retera’s modeling studio, HiveWE, ladik’s mpq editor/casc viewer)
-There’s an insane amount of documentation maintained by hive (like the ability insight document)
-There’s literally a project by one hive user to rebuild the entire game client from scratch in java (and it’s coming along quite nicely, I played a game in it with the dev myself last year)
-War3 itself is dated design wise and has plenty of stolen content from other games in the custom map scene
I am Retera. From 2017 until 2019, three or six Activision employees reached out to me on Discord for tips on how they could improve the Warcraft 3 improvement project that they were working on, although I did not know its name was Reforged any sooner than the rest of the public. They were looking for technical knowledge that “community” people like myself might have that would save them time.
And it is from that personal experience… that I believe you are absolutely wrong. I know that in life, when we encounter information contrary to what we currently believe, it can be hard to accept. But this is not a troll. I am simply recording what I actually believe.
It seems the forum will not stop you from posting here. As they do not stop me likewise. But the problem is not that what you are asking will never happen. The problem is that it already happened, and that is what got us here. Please allow that to sink in.
The word “community” for the people doing this modding only showed up in the public vernacular that I was seeing online around the same time that certain Activision employees needed an excuse to their boss to guide what became Reforged in a different direction. They were trying to find a way to explain us – to explain how people enjoy Warcraft III.
I get why the folks pushing back – trying to argue in favor, for example, that Reforged should still have Custom Games feature upon release – wanted for things to end up this way. They did not want to lose Frozen Throne.
But, even now that Microsoft has purchased Activision, the outcome of their metrics regarding this game will not change. That sense you have that there is a governance problem where the people in charge don’t care isn’t going to go away anytime soon, because it is necessity from the nature of the money reality. The custom games freeing nature of Frozen Throne is bad for business. Arclight Rumble Mobile is good for business. The financial imbalance there is really strong. People follow their incentives; they have to, or else management/leadership will replace them.
In order to make progress in making the game better in the way you describe, you have to start with empathy for the people on the other side. To be honest, it’s probably morally wrong to actually even try to force or compel someone else to play Warcraft III. People who build a career working in the video game industry have to be folks who know how get work done to meet objectives and achieve what is agreed upon in their meetings. Playing a game, like what it is to post on Hive workshop or build moddiing software, has no place in that lifestyle. I asked one of the people with access to the Warcraft III source code – not anyone you know, by the way – if they could tell me the formatting of the SNDS and SNEM chunks so that we could finally make Warcraft III model files with arbitrary custom audio included in their animation timelines.
The Activision employee that I asked about this on Discord replied that “It’s complicated,” then sent a picture of the Warcraft III source code (in particular a C++ class constructor for one of the classes used in parsing the proprietary Warcraft III model format) as though this was something cryptic that no human on Earth could understand, and kind of shooed me away without answering.
If you look at the world from a Hive Workshop mentality, evil social media would encourage you to have no empathy for this person or encourage you to think that they failed in their duties to human society in some way by not telling me the structure and unlocking a key for modding that has been kept behind closed doors for 20 years. But if you actually have empathy, you would know that within the confines of what his job allows, this person did the right thing. They were already out on too much of a limb to even send me a screenshot of what – I assume – might have been the actual source code of Warcraft III.
Their job is not to foster creative types. Their job is to keep the doors open on a large corporation. Warcraft III isn’t how to do that. When you hassle them with some post like this, making some appeal to the void as if you could call out to some greater power to put things right, you overlook the fact that the place where things aren’t right is in you. That concern, and that desire for something greater is part of your experience, and not the experience of employees at a successful video game company producing games like Arclight Rumble Mobile.
One of the Activision employees told me that contrary to what people think, Reforged met financial targets.
And so you see, you started off your post from an assumption that your subjective experience is right, that this game is “not in a great state.” But actually, it met targets.
What you want is a dream. A wish that certain things were better. Why post on these forums asking for someone else to give you that dream, when they have absolutely no incentive to do so? To do that is to become like me… like who I was in 2017-2019 talking to those Activision employees on Discord. I wanted to tell them that it should be better, or that they could be better. Maybe sometimes to even simply subconsciously exude that feeling to them where possible.
But when doing that, I missed the big picture. Every second they spent on some obscure, fine-tune detail trying to keep subsystems of Frozen Throne running or to improve on those systems, in the eyes of the average WoW player who played Reforged and decided that it sucked because it was simply Frozen Throne with a new menu and no work put into it… Every moment they spent in the maintenance of the old system like that, in the end, is a loss for them.
The rational thing that Microsoft is likely to do next – if they want to see change in the outputs of the social media subsystems that make folks like you begin their post by saying the game is “still not in a great state” – is going to be for Microsoft to simply make a new game. And, similar to Stormgate, that game will probably be made on an existing engine like Unreal, and accordingly upon its release you would most likely discover its editor is not quite as powerful as what you desire – or else it is too complicated.
And so I come to believe that no one can save us from ourselves. We cannot appeal to Microsoft to fix Reforged, in much the same way that you would not appeal to Bill Gates to fix your bank account. The creative drive to make the custom games for Warcraft III has exceeded its original designs. We have days where we want to make things that they cannot support. Supporting what we are making cannot be a part of what they must do. The more that they would support us, the more that we would probably only bring them down with us.
And yet you chose to post your thoughts about how to improve Reforged, which will be acted on by no one, instead of posting an equally long post elsewhere on the forums of my rewrite/emulation game client about how I could improve it.
So in some weird way, you chose this future. You continue to choose to use their stale client instead of my evolving one. And so, I suppose, I was likewise unreasonable by using these forums here instead of working on my software. But why try to get in their head instead of mine? Why tell them that the state of their game is bad, instead of telling me that the state of my rewrite is bad? They’re professionals. They know enough to make sure not to read your words – to have your words simply bounce off them and lead to no action. I, on the other hand, might be a whole lot crazier. As you said, I am “one hive user” but then again the GitHub page for my emulation engine already has more than half a dozen contributors listed, because I have accepted small patches and fixes from interested people despite them eventually losing interest… because my rewrite “is still not in a great state” compared to the old but gold Frozen Throne from 2003.
All I really mean to say, is that I have seen the other side. When I felt a similar sense of tension that things were “not in a great state” I decided to actually try to do something about it. And it is for that reason that I had indescribable experiences these past few years, playing Warcraft III “but not really.”
But like you said, we played a multiplayer game on my emulated client. The unfortunate part is that I don’t know how to express or share with other humans the experience of the evolving client, where something was made from nothing. A lot of those experiences were not recorded. The closest thing we have to that story, generally, is the resulting source code. For a lot of folks, that’s a fairly difficult and dense story to read.
And so… I know that I was right. I saw that I was right. Something better can exist. Bugs can be fixed.
It doesn’t change anything. Knowing the truth doesn’t free Activision or Microsoft employees from their suffering… their duty to be professionals. The problem was never whether the technology could be fixed – it was that no one is allowed to profit from fixing it. A governance problem, I’m afraid. And Microsoft, like Activision, is a publicly traded corporation.
Retera darling, you know very well that community outreach is not the reason that we are where we are, and it’s wildly unhelpful to pretend that it is, even as a joke.
Why do I know that? Suppose I was ignorant and did not know how to be an informed consumer. Where would I go or what would I look at to convince myself that Patch 1.27-1.31 didn’t come at the expense of Reforged?
Last time I played a game of Reforged, I played a melee match versus AI. This versus match encountered a technical bug that was not present in Frozen Throne.
The cause of the bug was from me making a mistake in 2019. I reported a suggestion through the same secret back channels we used to actually fix bugs.
The suggestion was only helpful for custom games. I provided them advice on how to reprogram the “You will be revealed to your opponents!” warning so that it would work on custom games for custom bases by default, including Corrupted Tree of Life, for example. This would mean that a bunch of bugged-by-default customs no longer revealed players when they still had a town hall.
They tried to do what I asked but rather than use the solution where I did it for them, they tried to follow my advice to keep the JASS running at optimal high performance by doing work on the C++ engine side, so that Melee would in theory not have fraction-of-a-second-slower JASS processing times on every building death. And they didn’t totally follow through. Now I got revealed to my AI opponents still 4 years later, even when I don’t think I should have (my allied player still had a town hall). My suggestion violated the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule, and the game is worse because of it. They would have been better off to ignore me.
Hello Grapes. I hope you are having a wonderful day.
In order to help me determine if I am the one whose mind has truly lost its way – because you’re not the first gamer on Warcraft to tell me that – can I ask you to elaborate on how the stance that 1.27-1.31 coming at the expense of Reforged itself is a different stance from believing that Reforged was financially hindered by having community involvement and support?
The corporate mob bosses who believed that they could asset flip Frozen Throne and make money on it have been proven largely correct. I think D2 Resurrected is a decent example of this; they disabled TCPIP multiplayer making it probably infernally hard to do meaningful multiplayer modding, but why should they care? People still pay to play the base game, and they ensured that part is fully working.
There isn’t some fan-friendly prepatch to D2R that gives old Lord of Destruction players 16:9 gameplay and a bunch of D2R features. That kind of giveaway and the way that it makes people become spoiled and spit on Reforged all happened precisely because of Activision’s interaction with the modding community. We have leaks to back it up, I saw it listed by name whose idea it was to release prepatches with Reforged features – and it was a Hive Workshop modder-turned-Activision employee!
The same person also leaked elsewhere that Reforged developers had an evacuation day at work because of the credible death threats.
We, like, we collectively the people who want the game to be “good” are the problem. And Arclight Rumble is the solution – you see, unlike us, corporate mob bosses have no trouble giving up when it is rational to do so.
How is this a flipped or inconsistent stance? It may not be popular, sure! But at what point am I inconsistent (other than which account I happened to log in to)?
are why we are where we are
we’ve all heard what happened
we all know this isn’t because blizzard listened to players, it’s because the powers that be pulled the plug on the people that were listening to the players
on the death threat part, do you find that to be representative of the war3 community as a whole or is it more likely to represent 1 or 2 people that haven’t seen sunlight since 2002
Yeah but they have to. They can’t sell the consumers the product that the consumers want. The purpose of the corporation is to turn the highest profit, and this is achieved by selling the consumer – not by selling to the consumer.
Microsoft gets this. They literally put ads on the Windows start menu. They also bought all of us.
Maybe I don’t want to be bought and sold, and instead simply want to play Frozen Throne – a video game technology from 2003 – with an extreme disregard for Microsoft or their goals.
Wouldn’t that make me an enemy of Blizzard, and Activision, and Microsoft? I want something that – as it happens – offers them no clear path to profits.
Uh, aside from adjustments for widescreen monitors, there’s nothing particularly different about the game UI?
If you’re talking about the menus, the only problem with them is the performance impact of the chromium system. The menu UI is otherwise designed efficiently, and it’s nice that the chat is always accessible regardless of what screen you’re on. So I respectfully disagree if that’s what this is about.
Where are the ads?
Sure, you’ll see sponsored links if you do a websearch. But it’s not like you don’t get those when you search from the search engine website.
The advertisments aren’t even a new feature: it’s been a prominent thing since windows 8. Disabling the ads and “personalized reccomendations” replaces them with Windows tips and, as shown here, recent files.
