Hi Advy. I’m probably on probation from getting kicked off of this forum, because in recent years they often see me almost like a troll.
But I can honestly tell you, I started making maps on Warcraft III in the year 2002 for my own entertainment, but I did not ever make any maps that others actually enjoyed playing in all of my 20 years. Instead, my entertainment was generally oddly self-serving. I created things for the enjoyment of creating things, and being entertained by the edge cases and the bugs in Warcraft III. Why does modifying Resurrection to target living units, then killing those units, put their corpses into a special state that can still auto-attack even though the unit is dead? Why does a custom “Engineering Upgrade” ability that changes one skill into another allow us to learn a new custom hero skill if we never had one before, but an “Engineering Upgrade” skill that changes an existing ability into a new ability cause weird non-functional behaviors? How, really, do I make one of those jump skills where my character flies through the air momentarily in an arc?
The problem is the age old problem of bad governance. The people at Microsoft’s Activision, or at least the people they contracted with overseas called PlaySide Studios to manage this game for them, are all people who don’t care about the technology as much as you or I. It does not affect them – they just want a paycheck. The problem is not the technology – it’s not as if computer’s can’t do what you want, or can’t play your custom map – but these people now who are in power are not capable of affording your issue the time of day to get to the bottom of it.
Or at least, that’s what I would say, but lately on a few rare occasions, they actually deigned to prove me wrong. Maybe all that Microsoft money caused someone to look at this product and say, “Whoa, wait, actually, it’s better if we didn’t continue beating customer’s souls with a stick until they make posts like the one by Ymiron the other day where he literally said that this game’s management makes him feel like there is no God. Maybe it’s better, on occasion, if we don’t treat people that way! Maybe instead, we should try to have customer loyalty so that our billion dollar investment in Warcraft brand wasn’t for nothing!”
So it’s up to you. You can try to hope. You can try to pray to that one new man brought in by the Microsoft money who thinks that brand loyalty might have value, instead of having Activision Blizzard be synonymous with internet memes about “frat culture” employees doing horrible things to their female counterparts that I can’t even write on these forums without violating the guidelines, because the rumors are too awful to repeat.
You can try to hope that one, new, employee believes that this company could be synonymous with pretending to be an elf or an orc, or a faction of elves or orcs engaging in glorious combat.
But making you grovel to another man in this way is bad governance. You shouldn’t have to hope for the power to display tooltip text onscreen. Frozen Throne was working fine fifteen or twenty years depending on how you measure and whether you count the work of the Activision Classic Games Team as “working” in the years leading up to Reforged.
So we know that functional engine stability is possible. The problem isn’t the technology. It’s the people and the governance. And those people, who are the problem, are the Activision (and maybe now Microsoft) money types, and/or the off-shore studio that they farm their work out to.
As someone who used to be passionate about modding Warcraft III, I identified this governance problem as far back as 2018. I could feel it. Maybe it was social media, or maybe it’s just who I am. I wanted the pretense of their authority, despite their ignorance on the subject matter compared to myself, to end. I wanted freedom. I wanted the source code.
So I did the only thing that makes sense. I cobbled together the Warcraft III modding technologies – the best model previewer I could find, the best Warcraft III format parsers I had ever found in my particular favorite programming language, and so many other things.
And as it came to be – after years, and years of fighting myself and trying to actually make technology progress when I honestly found it more fun to be a warped person and brag about what I was doing online instead of actually doing it – when it came to pass that I could play the original WarChasers map entirely in my simulation, entirely in my recreation, entirely using my own code that came from nothing and just the map file and the art assets… and I got maybe a third of the way through the WarChasers map before getting stuck or hitting a crash… and yet on the same code, I played a melee battle against my old modding friend in the multiplayer, because it was an emulator of the Frozen Throne to the best of my ability, aspiring to be an ark for future generations that they might be able to maintain this technology without bad governance.
What I created is not complete. Compared to the original, some might say it is not even good. Maybe I’m not a good person, or you feel you cannot trust me.
But one year from today, when you still cannot display tooltips because of the sharp, torturous apathy of the bad governance that you decided to live under in this case, please remember me.
Seek me out. By the time you decide to remember and believe me, maybe I’ll be gone from the Earth. But the technology I created is uploaded to the internet. Once it goes out in the public, it never really goes away. And there’s only really one of me. One person who was stupid or dedicated enough to make what I have been trying to make. So, I think that when you find it, you’ll know. [Edit: That isn’t to say I wasn’t standing on the feet of giants – and I’d love to be proven wrong about this idea that I am alone in a certain manner of thinking – but where are the other replica Frozen Thrones for me to play WarChasers map on in its exact form without porting the map? Where is the ambition of my fellow man?]
But unlike Warcraft 3, that always plays in the very same way and hides its code from the user, what I created can be yours. You could fork it and make your own client for your map, or do anything. Activision owns what Activision owns in the art, but because I recreated my own version of the code based on my experiences and not based on the original code, I think it’s fair for me to say that unlike the properties of Activision those things that I created are yours for the taking.
It’s true that the humans might have evolved from bacteria and might operate by eating each other, and maybe I’m some evil creature that has bad motives. But that doesn’t stop you from likewise being a creature that takes from the world, and takes my code, and figures it out, and then uses that knowledge to build something way better, and then sets yourself free.
Unlike those mean people at Activision, even if my game code is much worse and therefore less fun, I offer you the opportunity to fix it. After twenty years, this is what it means to me.