WC3 - Frozen Throne - Custom Game Problems

Playing WC-3 Custom Games on Battlenet now is not working. I create a game, host it, let’s say I create an easy game name like CHEESE. I leave it open to the public, or I make it private. I tell my friend the name and he searches for the game in Custom Games but he finds nothing of that name. We try this many times but nothing.

The response is as follows: “The Game you attempted to join could not be Found. You may have entered the name in incorrectly or the game creator may have canceled the game.”

This happens even as we keep the game open to the public and it remains the same forever. I have searched Google for an answer and it seems this problem has been around since 2014. There is a lot of discussion of PORTS and Firewalls, but me and my friend have all firewalls turned off on our computers. Also, it seems a lot to ask for a player to set up PORTS to utilize an offered portion of the game especially when players may not be intelligent enough to mess with PORTS…

What can be done about this as Blizzards current Support Teams have no idea how to help this? It is suggested that it is a bug of some sort. This same issue was very annoying back in 2015 when me and my brother wanted to play then too. Seems no one really cares for the Classics anymore…even though you want to give them HD graphics…

They have indeed fixed a lot of those stuff lately and you don’t need to open the ports anymore. Have you contacted Blizzard directly or have you just read other discussions over the internet?

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/

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I contacted them directly but they were unable to help me. They suggested I post to the forum.

I believe this is the new problem since the last two patches. I can’t join many custom games too (without a friend, just solo), that was not such a problem in the past. Along with the desyncs.

The game’s networking layer was specifically rewritten in Patch 1.30 to fix the very issue described here. The original game from 2002-2017 would connect to Battlenet only as a game list, and when people joined your computer then your computer acted as a true host server at the networking layer.

Then many people like you found this to be troublesome and bad, because it puts the job on the players to control their internet ports at that base internet layer. So the developers at Classic Games spent a really long time for Patch 1.30 rewriting the engine game internal system so that when you “host a game” now what actually happens is your computer tells a Blizzard server computer to host the game. So all of the games on the list are hosted by Blizzard server computers now, and only the Blizzard Entertainment company has to open their ports. This process took them a very long time and they did it specifically because they do care. However, during the process of rewriting and rewiring all of the fundamentals of how the Warcraft III game is played over a network, they made a few mistakes. These mistakes manifest themselves as uninformative “You were disconnected!” messages, unfortunately. So its up to anyone who cares about the game to find and research any specific instances of bugs in their rewritten networking layer and to report them.

So when you are trying to join Custom Games on Patch 1.30, your open ports do not matter. If you cannot join a game, then it is probably due to a programming error on the part of the Blizzard engineer who did the rewriting of the network stack. In such a case, there is nothing you can do other than try to continue to research what is wrong and then submit a technical description of the problem.

However, joining games has worked for me after the rewrite. Since there are no more server ports involved on your side, and I am able to join the game, then the most likely difference is probably your internet provider and country of residence. I have a friend who I met online who said that around the time Patch 1.30 was released, he was only able to open the Warcraft 3 game client while connected to a VPN that would use a United States location. Have you attempted this fix? Even though my friend told me the VPN is no longer necessary for starting the game, it might affect which servers your computer is permitted to contact. You should also check your outgoing firewall settings. Keep in mind that you do not need to open ports anymore. Instead, you need to be able to make an outgoing connection, the same as what your computer does when you download a webpage. Applications on your computer other than Chrome and Firefox might not be allowed to download information from the web, or something.

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Thanks for explanation, Retera. These changes are of course beneficial, but there were unexpected bugs in return. All we can do is do nothing then (and report errors as you said).