Hello,
I would like to suggest a small networking improvement for Warcraft III: Reforged that could significantly improve the multiplayer experience, especially in custom games and long matches.
Right now, if a player briefly loses connection, they are often dropped from the game almost immediately. In many real-world situations the connection would actually recover within a few seconds, but the player is already removed from the match.
Short interruptions can happen for many normal reasons:
Because Warcraft III matches can last a long time, especially in custom maps, losing a player to a 3â5 second connection issue can be very frustrating.
Suggestion
Introduce a short reconnect grace period when a client temporarily stops responding.
For example:
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If a player stops sending packets, they are temporarily marked as reconnecting instead of being dropped immediately.
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Their slot is reserved for a short period.
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If the connection resumes within the allowed window, the player continues normally.
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If the timeout expires, the player is dropped as usual.
Even a maximum grace period of around 10-30 seconds would already solve many cases where players disconnect due to short network interruptions.
This would not need to allow unlimited reconnects or long pauses. The goal would simply be to tolerate short network hiccups that currently result in an immediate drop.
Warcraft III is especially sensitive to packet loss and short spikes, so a small recovery window could greatly improve stability for:
Thank you for continuing to support Warcraft III: Reforged, and for considering this suggestion.
8 Likes
We have been waiting for reconnect feature since the first release of this game (not res**ted version only) and we can still only dream about it⌠
24 yearsâŚ
2 Likes
Would be a great feature to have. However, I remember seeing a response that due to the original War3 engine architecture, a reconnect feature is very difficult to implement.
Unlike newer games like SC2, this War3 was not designed with reconnect support, so adding it would likely require major engine changes.
It existed in warcraft 3 original with Gproxy, it also exists in warcraft 3 champions, and it also exists in chinese plateforms. So itâs doable, it requires wanting to do it and AI can even provide the implementation for the most part.
2 Likes
iâm not suggesting they shouldnât or canât add this but need to point out hosting LAN games in gproxy is a different networking setup
w3champions uses flo
The game has never previously had a reconnect feature. External programs can effectively cover for you if you have an iffy connection but they cannot save you if your game crashes etc.
A real reconnect feature would let you rejoin the game if you crashed or completely lost your connection.
You canât reconnect in W3C either unless something has changed recently. It will bring up the âwaiting for playersâ box but thatâs not a reconnect feature, it only keeps you from being booted for a short time if you experience some packet loss or instability. And it also completely brings the game to a halt during this time. Because of this most people will hit the âdrop playersâ button as soon as it becomes available- so it really doesnât serve this purpose well.
They only use lan network because this is the only way as a third party you can have reforged servers that arenât depending on Bnet. If anything this is more challenging to warcraft 3 champions and trickier to provide such a reconnect feature, that if you had access to Bnet like Blizzard.
donât really know what point youâre trying to make here. you have no idea what challenge it is or isnât its blizzards closed source game
gproxy wasnât complicated.. all it did was not send the disconnected packet right away. but it PROXIED your connection to do this
Blatantly, if Blizzard ever cared, they wouldâve found a way to fix this⌠again, ekhm, 24 yearsâŚ
or yall could just fix your internet connections 
@jeef First, not all third-party solutions even relied on LAN at all. Some implemented reconnect through direct proxying or protocol-level handling without needing to fake a LAN environment. So using âLAN vs non-LANâ as the dividing line here just isnât accurate.
Second, the important part is constraints. Third parties had to build this without access to Blizzardâs code or infrastructure. That means reverse engineering, proxies, and a lot of ugly workarounds just to approximate reconnect behavior.
Blizzard doesnât have those limitations. They control both ends of the connection and the actual protocol. They wouldnât need to simulate anything or âproxy aroundâ the problem, they could implement it directly where it belongs.
So if anything, third-party implementations prove the opposite of your point: if itâs doable from the outside with limited access, itâs not inherently harder for Blizzard on the inside.
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@CaptainJack
Stop misrepresenting the situation to make basic feature requests look unreasonable. We are not discussing crash reconnect feature here, you are bringing it up yourself to make it look impossible.
Claiming the W3Champions reconnect tool doesnât serve its purpose is a straight-up lie; itâs a staple of the platform and functions without the âinstant dropâ issues youâve invented. This looks like a pattern, considering you spent weeks defending broken map performance before the recent fix.
There is no need to debate the necessity of a reconnect feature in 2026, it is a baseline standard in every modern multiplayer title and is already handled better by every third-party dev in the wc3 scene, before and after reforged came out.
1 Like
Thatâs the thing, this is not necessary to debate. It should be made.
But Blizzard will not do so. And they will not use a third-party tool for that either. And despite what Blizzard will tell you, Warcraft 3 is not a modern multiplayer title.
2 Likes
I never said anything was impossible. Itâs you who is misrepresenting the situation.
What I donât understand is why you guys are setting such a low standard for yourselves. We deserve and should have full reconnection capability- i.e. including if the game crashes or your connection is completely lost. I donât think itâs impossible, and it was even considered early in Reforgedâs development before the original teamâs staff was cut and ghosted by Activision.
The reason for my criticism is youâre asking for an existing and badly designed system that isnât very helpful to be implemented/restored. The âreconnect featureâ as you guys are calling it, that we had before Reforged completely interrupted gameplay and rarely resulted in a player being able to stay in the game (you know everyone was mashing that âDrop Playersâ button and yelling at the countdown timer to hurry up). So I donât understand why youâre asking for ineffective systems to be restored or implemented when you could be asking for something that would actually work and help more people- not just people who crash or error out, but people who experience joinbugs or similar, who with a proper system would still be able to get into the game.
But what people have been asking for here is either not actually a reconnect feature (the old system the game used prior to Reforged) or a third party solution that would never be considered by Blizzard or any reasonable developer.
Thereâs no need to be condescending. People are just sharing their experiences and suggestions.
You may disagree with the proposed solution, but dismissing othersâ ideas as âlow standardâ or misrepresentation doesnât really help the discussion.
If you have a better approach, it would be more productive to explain it clearly instead of talking down to others.
1 Like
Iâm not being condescending. And Iâm sharing my own experiences and suggestions.
It absolutely does help the discussion. We should be coming up with the most h elpful solutions we can, not simply lean on an old system that didnât really serve the purpose well in the first place.
The solutions we had available in the past were ineffective at best, and suggesting we add them back is what isnât productive.
If you have a better approach, it would be more productive to explain it clearly instead of talking down to others.
Iâm not talking down to anyone.
1 Like
You keep shifting this into âfull crash reconnectâ when that was never the topic. Thatâs a completely different feature and youâre using it to make a smaller, realistic fix sound unreasonable.
The actual issue is short interruptions causing instant drops, and W3Champions already handles that kind of reconnect well in practice. Thatâs all people are asking for here, not full crash recovery.
Nobody expects a perfect system, but preventing drops from brief spikes would already be a huge improvement. Calling it âineffectiveâ is just not reality, people have been perfectly fine playing with exactly that kind of solution for years. It solves the problem that actually matters in 99% of case.
Youâre not addressing the suggestion, youâre replacing it with a harder problem and arguing against that instead.
Iâm âshiftingâ it to that, because thatâs what it should be. You should be able to reconnect from ANY situation, not just a few lost packets.
And the reason is simple and Iâve already explained it. The âfeatureâ we had before, (i.e. the one(s) being asked for) was terrible and served very few people. Playing with someone who was constantly lagging or having packet loss or whatever was an absolute nightmare with the game constantly freezing and that âwaiting for playersâ box coming up. Like most people I was ready to click that âDrop Playersâ button as soon as possible, and I canât blame anyone else for it- Itâs better not having that player in the game than having the game run at 10% speed and stopping so often you can barely do anything. Itâs bette rthat they just drop completely, so they can fix their connection and then if they do, they can come back and we all have a good experience again.
Why would you put an extremely limited and barely useful âhiccupâ shield in the game when you could just let people actually reconnect?
Back then, it was because they legitimately didnât have a better solution for the time the way the gameâs networking was designed. Today, thereâs no excuse.
1 Like
This isnât even a technical argument anymore, youâre just stuck on an all-or-nothing mindset.
Youâve decided that unless itâs perfect full reconnect, everything else is âbarely useful,â so you just dismiss it. Thatâs not how this works.
Partial reconnect solves the most common case which is short disconnects. That alone saves games, which is why people actually used those systems and still do. Calling that useless just doesnât line up with reality.
And your alternative still doesnât make sense. In a lockstep game you canât just let people drop and come back later without pausing or buffering, or you break sync.
Youâre basically rejecting real solutions because theyâre not your ideal version. Thatâs the issue here, that and your main character syndrome where you feel like you have to hijack every thread with your nonsense.
1 Like
Itâs not about being all or nothing, and it is still a technical argument. You donât get to just decide things like that. Propose a system that you think is more reailistic to implement but is better than the old system and I 'd be happy to hear it.
The code for the old system is still in the game, itâs simply disabled which is why W3C was able to use it. But in my opinion, that system is worse than nothing, because it stops play- and if someone was having problems but not bad enough to drop completely, the game would constantly stop and go and stop and go and itâs no fun for anybody.
I get that youâd rather have a limited feature than nothing, but⌠no, the old system is worse than nothing. It only very rarely resulted in a player being able to stay in the game and most of the time it just made the experience worse for everyone else. This is a problem that needs a proper fix, not a bandaid that basically has salt stuck to it.
1 Like