hello all I am I have Warcraft 3 of chaos and frozen throne installed on my computer but not of bnet
I got the key a while back and saw a reddit post saying that 1.28 version keeps the cd key on the phisical computer somewhere
if so does anyone know where to find it and how to view it so I can get reforged?
thanks in advance
From the beginning of time to Patch 1.27, the CD key was hidden. They hid it inside of War3.mpq in a folder called font, because fonts are boring, and nobody would ever look there! Duh! [Note: the folder named “Fonts” is where actual TTF text glyph files are stored. CD keys are in the singular name, “font” in an encrypted form]
Then, the new people were hired for Activision Blizzard’s Classic Games. These were the folks who eventually made Reforged. They thought that encrypted files named “font” to confuse hackers were funny and stupid, so after they made Patch 1.27 as a test of the release cycle, they started making Patch 1.28 when they really started busting up all the stuff.
On that patch, they were trying to integrate the new Battle.net spyware to the game and make it download a different way, so it was very useful if all the game data was the same on every user computer. That meant formulating one consistent War3.mpq for everybody, so as a step in that direction, the patch process ripped out the old “font” folders embedded in War3.mpq (RoC) and War3x.mpq (TFT expansion) and during the patch process it placed the unencrypted CD keys into a file called roc.key and tft.key inside the install folder. Now, these files had the user CD keys in plain sight, where the user could just find them!
So then, around the time of Patch 1.29 and Patch 1.30, the developers went back on this a little bit. Putting the CD keys in plain sight is too easy! Instead, they began to think they should put them somewhere else. Now, one idea would be that these could go in the hidden AppData folder inside of C:\Users\<name>\AppData that is often used for Windows settings.
But, then, the point of moving them was so users wouldn’t find them, and a lot of users know about AppData these days. Instead, they decided they would move the keys to the hidden folder C:\ProgramData\Blizzard Entertainment\Battle.net\Warcraft III or something close to that, since that’s a pretty long file path, and it’s less likely anybody is going to look in there!
But I kind of stopped paying attention after that point in time, since I bought the Reforged and then the login took care of the access.
As a note, I am not affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment in any way, and the observations described above are the result of being a Warcraft 3 player in the years leading up to the release of Reforged, so I might be completely misinformed.