In the Warcraft 3 Classic lobbies (I hope I’m using the right word) the WHOLE SCREEN was esentially a chat-box and it greatly encouraged people to be sociable and to discuss and to make friends and to play together and…
Meanwhile, in Warcraft 3 Reforged the lobby (chat box) is a itsy bitsy box in the bottom corner and guess what… it doesn’t encourage people to socialise, on the contrary.
The social aspect of the game was put not on 2nd place, but I feel, on the last place, on the list of priorities.
On top of that, in Reforged you can no longer /w people without being their friends which is absurd (friend requests are hard to notice and many people simply don’t want to clog up their lists with random people in random ways, thus throwing to the trash the chance of a friendship).
I know this was probably made so toxicity would be reduced but I feel that the price to pay for that is too big and… come on, it’s an online almost-20-year-old-game with a very trolly and meme-ish nature, being a bit trolly (toxic according to a cynnical viewer) is part of it and a fun part. It brings emotion and activity and…
Reforged is anti-social and if something doesn’t change soon, this will seriously impact the player-numbers in the long-run.
The aim of reforged has never been to create or recover a community.
50% of the success of WC3 was due to the creation of a community inside the game.
But that’s not just a problem of Blizzard. It is a common nonsense.
If you think for example of the transition between Dota TFT and Dota 2, one of the main concern was that people moved from a screen with huge chat and human interaction to an useless microchat in the bottom of the screen with 90% covering of advertises.
Fact is, they got millions of users just by adding a button for starting a flaming game where each casual could claim to be pro.
On battlenet this could not happen. Well… it’s happening now, but, fact is Blizzard is just following the same route.
They don’t need players retention, they just need you to give those $30, join the game, flame a bit, get annoyed, move on.
That’s all.
Yes, but Actiblizz will do nothing, so we as a community need to do something. I thought about writing a guide to new/returning players on w3champions, so players can get various sources of information (discords, twitch channels, reddit, etc)
Even that 10% post-game microchat allows for more social interaction than Reforged, because unlike Reforged you can actually talk to people who you’ve played with and it’s being used quite frequently.
I did a post about the same. Most friends people made in tft and roc long ago was with /w after game or even in chat room. Hell, chat system was almost as fun as the game itself.
Fun fact is IMO the biggest trolling, insulting and bullying that may be a problem specially for new players happens in team matches rt 3v3 4v4 etc,where try hards get frustrated for losing and start blame on someone even if its not justified (most of the times it isn´t) gameplay-wise. Chat cant be avoided there unless you mute manually your own allies. lol.
So what does actually solves quitting the /w feature? you can get bullied in team games and you will get bullied in general chat after game, removing it just quited an essential feature for actually achieving nothing.
Is some guy /w at you with some anger and insults?
-You can mute him
-You can troll him
-You can laugh at him and his anger
-You can insult him back
-Or you can even be mentally healthy and mature and get the fact that its just a game. lol.
-etc
Tbh, anyone who has play this game since long time 100% has have a hater that would leave games instantly when ally / or enemy vs you, etc,/w at you etc and i dont think it was any major issue to dramatize so much.
Ye the ingame system is nice, mostly taken from LoL, but the outside is just Elo Hell.
And funny thing is from all the good stuff blizzard could take from that they just got the… Elo Hell^^
Team responsible for reforged had no clue about Warcraft 3 to begin with…
Its a joke company the was not able tocapture the old spirit of warcraft 3 nor do the necessary fixes that would have made the game even better, an absolute joke.
It’s a consequence of the modern internet where Actiblizz believes that they either have to excessively monitor every chat (which costs money) or they’re sooner or later gonna face a ****storm on twitter (which costs money), so they’re shutting it down altogether.
When people used to deal with trolls and toxic (before the term was even coined), they were called “elitarists”.
Client: “Now I ******* feed and ruin your ******* game you ** * * **** ****”
Host: “rm same name” - cross domain ban applied - client squelched - happiness spreading all over battlnet
now such client just goes ruining another game, then another, then another, then it multiplies like a plague.
External comment: “This community is so toxic.”
It’s either you allow every **** to play for temporary monetary gain (remember that once they have ruined enough games they’ll just go buy something else) or you rely on a clean, devoted and “elitarist” community that loves the game and accepts everyone else of the same kind.
…but you need that big chat and so on in order to do so.^^
Wc3 has never been a social game while I agree that the original chat client was better this is a stretch. This isn’t overwatch half the RT players don’t even type in chat all game maybe “gg” at the end.
Anyway, ye, that’s why everyone used to gather in a channel after the game.
Oh and they used to wait in channel too while creating games.
There was no Alt-Tab, just WC3.
Yea I have played since launch and I have never in over a decade of playing this game seen this ever. Maybe you play dota or something but this never happened to me. The game has never beena social game at all. In fact of all the games I’ve played over the years its one of the single least social games of them all. If you want to socialize play a MMO or team based fps RTS players game they don’t socialize RTS is for sweating over your keyboard spamming clicking not chatting it up. Like I said the original chat interface was better however lets not pretend this was ever a social game.
People is social or a-social, the game can only provide the tools, its up to you to use them.
Long ago i was (like most ppl) a member of clan, i knew all members (mostly), we played ats, custom games,clan wars, we hang chit chating from time to time, comment games, strategies, pro scene etc,watch games as observers, we had each other emails for hotmails messenger etc etc…
Speak for yourself, there used to be 12 German channels with 40 players in each and in every channel there were spontaneous custom melee games created with all observer slots filled and observers commenting on the performance and strategies. I know because I used to host a lot of those games since I had a good connection for the time.
Man we travelled across europe to meet in real life.
Ye I was playing Dota on Northrend since the good old times (RoC), but even before that I could find quite nice people to talk with in other channels.
But I agree with you that 90% of the chat happened before and after game. That’s why the big chat was needed. Now you don’t even have the chance to organize anything.
Sure you can use “other channels”, but other channels are not “bnet chat”. You cannot say “we built this community in wc3”, the community is just gameless and ready to move to something else if more fun or barely playable (since it’s the main reason now to leave reforged).
hahahaha remember the /join spamming for getting a place in numbered channels?^^
Yeah but following the same route is a mistake. Warcraft 3 is not Dota or Dota 2, it’s its own game with it’s own identity. Dota is just a fan-made subset of Warcraft 3, and Dota 2 is just another company’s version of that subset. That doesn’t mean you should copy what they did and change your parent game (especially not if you’re mainly copying bad parts).
Also Activision may very well favor short term profits over long term for most games, but if you’re going to give that treatment to a classic game then at least don’t ruin it in the process. It would have been much cheaper for them to mainly just do a graphics update, some quality of life improvements and basically leave the rest of the game alone. They would’ve gotten far less criticism and probably more sales.
Yeah this restriction is ridiculous. Trolling or toxicity was already more likely to happen when both players were in the same game or channel, where they don’t need to whisper. But for any that does happen through whispering, you could easily put a stop to it the same way you mute players who are in your presence. You might even find it to be funny or entertaining. It was a small price to pay for otherwise being able to talk to anyone on the server.
I don’t see why trolling or toxicity being possible through whispering should cause complaining any more than trolling or toxicity already being possible for people in the same game or channel. Even if people do complain, Blizzard could simply remind people how to mute and report other players.