Dear allegedly predatory Blizzard management,
On Warcraft III: Reforged, you paid your employees a lot of money to develop a better version of the Warcraft III game engine including new script APIs, optionally an entirely new language for ingame scripting (LUA), more simultaneous players supported, support for sale of ingame character skins, support for dynamically changing character statistics needed to build more interesting RPG missions, and support for fully customizable custom-map-specific User Interface (UI) components. You upgraded the internal “Blizzard.j” melee game script backend to support “You will be revealed to your opponents” messages for any custom faction instead of how it had been locked to only the original 4 game factions for 18 years.
I am bringing this up to remind you of the legitimate technology that you paid your own employees to develop because of a key difference between what you have created now and how these technologies were developed in Warcraft III in the 2000s – back then, after developing these technologies, your company chose to profit off of them. In fact, I believe that in those days the technologies were developed specifically to achieve existing goals needed for the game to be fun, functional, and profitable, and offering the technologies as modding APIs to players was only a fun after-thought. For example, almost all biomes of Warcraft III custom map can make use of the nice green Shrub doodad, but in the data files it shows that the Shrub was actually added in the Frozen Throne only and specifically for the Tomb of Sargeras missions, and offering it as a general case Shrub for custom games was a happy accident and an afterthought.
On Reforged, this was done backwards. Tons of features were added to the system without creating new content that made use of these features. Now that all the deeply technical engine upgrades are done, it is fascinating to me that your company does not pay some gamers or uneducated folk to make one or more new campaigns on this greatly expanded and improved Warcraft III engine, as a showcase for the new features. You could easily make this without spending substantial money on any engine-level C++ programmers, because all of the engine level work is already done.
As an example, look at the Warchasers map on Reign of Chaos. Warchasers probably had the same kind of reversed design that you ought to do now to profit off of the work you already completed. When the Reign of Chaos game engine and campaign was already finished, I presume, then WarChasers was created to enjoy and showcase that existing system. You ought to create and sell DLC content to showcase the Reforged engine in the same way, but without upgrading the engine itself in any way. By doing this, you could proft greatly off of relatively little work.
So, in summary, I know publicly it looks like you no longer wish to support the Warcraft brand, and so because you are in the process of giving up you also don’t want to make any content on this new Reforged engine that you paid your own employees probably a lot of money to develop. I am not in a position to get to tell you what to do. But I think that myself and others would actually be excited to see you make money in this case. At the moment it looks like your company is giving up on profiting from the Warcraft brand and from the technologies you have developed.
So, instead of giving up, I am asking if you could please make money. Please make an excuse for me to pay you for improvements to this game and franchise. I know that this is a difficult topic, but I am willing to tell you this truth right now. You should try to make more money instead of less money.
Thanks. And, as always, I don’t actually believe anyone at your company is reading this except for “forum moderator” employees who are explicitly forbid from making any content or enjoying the game (such as with the new Reforged World Editor). But if you could please even let those guys make some custom maps on the Reforged that showcase what it is capable of, and sell these maps as “Mad Moderator Map Pack”, it would be so much better than making yourself look bad publicly by not profiting off of this vastly improved Warcraft III engine you developed between 2017-2020.
So, please, for the love of Pete, make big money from Reforged. Thanks guys… until next time. Unless there isn’t a next time, because I was typing a message in a vacuum in a forum devoid of anyone in a position of authority (other than, allegedly, predators and their enablers).
