Where Did It Go Wrong?

Note: This thread is not about the bait-and-switch cinematics but about the process of patching WC3 starting from 1.29 till the cluster… thing we have today:

Two years ago, end of February 2018, Blizzard announced the major 1.29 patch and held an invitational tournaments with names like Happy, Grubby Hawk, MadFrog, Foggy… etc. It was all fun and all excited that this game is getting attention after getting two major patches (1.27 and 1.28) after 7 years and reducing latency on Bnet from the fixed value of 250ms to nearly 100ms. It was really great days. What also made it special patch is that it contained balance changes. Something that was considered final is now changing which means we will receive even more patches in the future.

Next thing is 1.29 was released and it was a between unstable to disastrous in terms of bugs specially for custom games. Most of bugs that were introduced in 1.29 were worked on in the following patches 1.29.1 and 1.29.2

Now we arrive to August 2018 where we are about to see the 1.30 patch which again had a lot of bugs and crashes…

After a month, on September 2018, we received the last patch before the announcement at Blizzcon which is 1.30.1. Which also was the last patch that allowed bots in BNet, again the patch fixed some bugs of its predecessor while also introducing few of its own…

Now on Blizzcon, we received the announcement and all excited and the pre-orders are left and right. All want to see the upcoming reforged which was the flagship of the 2018 Blizzcon. At end of November, we receive the terrific patch 1.30.2. which should allow hosting and creating arranged teams without port forwarding and as a result free custom games from bots. Also, this awesome patch that allowed those who pre-ordered to have immediate access to Classic, and how ironic - just like this specific release - that patch release was an absolute sh*t storm that required 4 consecutive hot fixes during December to mitigate the damage, boy that sure was a cluster **** patch release:

As a result of this, Arranged Team were failed and still required port forwarding and starting to bug - which seems to have led to the low tournament usage last dev update talked about. They basically screwed the process patches before and then saw that no one playing - rather they cannot - and decided to remove it all together.

Then comes the patches 1.30.3 and 1.30.4 which were still trying to fix desync issues that came with 1.30.2.

Patch 1.31.0 which disabled both tournaments and RoC

And Patch 1.31.1 which was the last before reforged which we had last week:

And finally… Here we are. So where did it go wrong during this whole process that we ended with this broken client that is filled with all sorts of bugs?

AFAIK they laid off a ton of the team and cut their budget.

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