Since Activision hates their costumers and has been trashing years of tremendous hard work of fan-made projects from the talented people in the Call of Duty community by sending 2 C&D letters in less than a span of a week, how likely is it that they will start caring about Warcraft 3 all of a sudden and notice the popularity of one community project that is W3Champions only to crush it down and spit in the face of the players just like they did for CoD? Or any pre-Reforged private PvPGN clients for that matter.
Keep in mind that Activision has its older Call of Duty products on steam available for purchase at FULL price (60$+) while these games have major security issues and hackers that allow your computer to be fully controlled and put at major risk, especially if you have sensitive data on it. This is illegal
For context: due to these issues, the CoD community has made dedicated private clients for people who still enjoy the older games to play safely and without any risk. While it is indeed in Activision’s rights to take action since their assets are being used, does not mean it is morally correct to do so. These clients have been up and running since about 2016-2017, that’s years and all of the sudden they have decided to shut down those services.
Warcraft 3 also has issues which made its own players take action. W3Champions basically tampers with game files which I think it is against policy and if they deem fit, they could order W3C servers to shutdown, just like they did for CoD.
Blizzard games are separate from Activision’s CoD so I doubt wc3 champions will see any impact since blizzard is probably fine with allowing it to continue.
As much as I really don’t care for W3C and, with the latest patch, I really don’t feel like it’s necessary anymore, they are absolutely not doing anything wrong. They’re not selling it for money, it isn’t a cheating tool, and WC3 has always been quite friendly to modding in general. I really don’t see Activision Blizzard going after them.
The biggest issues with ranked play on bnet (aside from not enough server locations) have been more or less resolved in this patch. Matches actually get recorded properly now across all game modes (And true to what the end game screen says, if you don’t see the results right away, the game is still in progress), at least in my experience. And hotfixes seem to have addressed the main bugs with tournaments.
W3C filled a very necessary purpose when the game had been seemingly abandoned with most of its key features missing. But while it has taken 2+ years, they [Activision Blizzard] did finally and eventually restore most of the lost functionality to the game (plus a few nice improvements like the expanded zoom and chat controls), and generally speaking a game should just work when you play it and modding should not be expected or required just to be able to play.
This is exactly a parallel to the CoD community, it fills a purpose of fixing issues that Activision won’t let their developer studios do. Both projects are non-profit, you said they are doing nothing wrong; I’m not sure if this is right but they are technically tempering with game files, just like the parallel I mentioned. I’m not sure if this is against the rules or not but probably is plus W3C has its own servers dedicated to matchmaking separate from official ones. Morally there’s absolutely no reason to do such things to ruin experiences but, from the corporate, business side they absolutely can if they want to.
I have not seen official confirmation but it was clearly a decision from THAT side of Activision to make Blizzard prematurely release Reforged in that state.
Blizzard was in direct contact with Pad during the creation of Reforged. In fact, BNet uses the same bot system that was used for W3Arena in the first place, they just severely screwed up implementing it. They won’t do anything about W3C until they have a platform that the community is satisfied with at the very least.
It would be financially irresponsible of them to stab the game in the foot immediately after deciding to dedicate resources to it again.
The thread title seems kind of like clickbait. I suggest not doing anything that could even possibly insinuate that a Cease and Desist already happened, just in case. Can you reword the title to include one or two words that indicate that W3Champions did not already receive a Cease and Desist?
W3Champions does not “tamper with game files”. They use local file support, and custom games to do what they do.
The CoD issue is related to severe security vulnerabilities that allowed those third parties to execute arbitrary code on your machine, a vulnerability that existed in War3 until patch 1.27 via what is known as “memhack”. On 1.26 and prior it was possible to hide an executable in a map file that allowed an external party to do anything on your machine.