Blizzard response for WCR

Community General Discussion
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Apologies if already posted. Sourced from icy veins. Please flag/delete if required.

"Hail War3 Players,

We’ve been following the discussions the past couple days and want to thank you for your feedback as well as your support. First off, we want to say we’re sorry to those of you who didn’t have the experience you wanted, and we’d like to share our plans for what’s coming next.

There were a few hours during launch day where we experienced server-load issues that impacted players’ ability to jump right in, but we were able to resolve those later in the day. Separate from that, we’ve seen community feedback about different aspects of Reforged that we wanted to take some time to address.

Before we go on: the team is excited that Warcraft III: Reforged is finally upon us and we’re fully committed to supporting the game for a long time to come. The next few patches and updates we’ll discuss below are just part of our ongoing plans. This game is an integral part of the Blizzard DNA, with a team that loves Warcraft III, and we’re looking forward to pouring our hearts into Reforged and the Warcraft III community for the long term.

One of the concerns with Reforged that we’ve seen are the visuals when selecting Classic Mode. We’ve identified the bug causing the colors and shading to look different from the original Warcraft III, and we’re testing a fix that will be incorporated in a larger patch addressing this issue and others. We expect to release that late this week. The patch will also address many other known issues, such as fixing some portrait animations and audio bugs, implementing some UI fixes, and more. Please keep an eye out for the patch notes for a detailed list of all the bug fixes.

Another area of concern we’re seeing is regarding online features such as leaderboards and clans, which applies to all Warcraft III players, including those who haven’t purchased Reforged. At BlizzCon we talked a lot about how the team is actively working on standing up the back-end to ensure a smooth transition to this new MMR system, much like we did with StarCraft: Remastered. As with Remastered, these and other features will be included in a major patch for Reforged, which will also address the issue for players of the original game. We’ll share release plans as work progresses in the coming weeks—please be assured that the team is hard at work on standing these features up.

There are some individual concerns we’ve seen that we’re not currently planning to address and we wanted to give the community a heads-up. As of Version 1.30 of the original game, we saw very low usage of tournaments and of the Reign of Chaos ruleset, so we removed both in mid-2019 (in Version 1.31). Eliminating the maintenance for underused elements has helped us streamline our overall support of the game and focus on areas impacting the most players. That said, we do anticipate that players who prefer Reign of Chaos will find custom games with similar rulesets, which we hope will help satisfy that concern.

Related to that, as we talked about last year at BlizzCon, we did not want the in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game. We went a little deeper into the thought process behind that at the show, but the main takeaway is that the campaigns tell one of the classic stories in Warcraft history, and we want to preserve the true spirit of Warcraft III and allow players to relive these unforgettable moments as they were (albeit rebuilt with new animations and the higher fidelity art).

We know this update doesn’t address all questions, but we’re committed to the development and support of this game. We hope you’ll keep an eye out for this week’s patch and future updates and let us know what you think as we continue fine-tuning things. Until then, thank you as always for your support and passion for Warcraft III. We appreciate all your feedback and will continue to keep the Warcraft III community updated on everything we’re working on.

Sincerely,

The Warcraft III: Reforged Team"

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This is already on the WC3 forum tho. Which got piled up on like crazy, unsurprisingly.

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If they’d released a more finished product they wouldn’t have this catastrophe on their hands, but who am I to judge?

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Honestly, it came off as people looking for reasons to complain as far as I saw it. Like someone linked me a list of things that complained about “No clans, no profiles, no friends list, no crosschat with d2” as if people actively engaged in these things. The most populated chat channel when I was playing WC3 a year before Reforged had like 30 people in it largely arguing politics. The people actively playing D2 are usually laddering types who are more invested in playing the game and ladder climbing than they are sitting in chat.

The only thing I saw that was an actual problem was the MMR system, but few people even played the game for the 1v1s or XvXs so much as played the custom games. Same case with SC2, a number of people play the actual game, more than half are screwing around on the Arcade. Really telling when you’re in Master ELO and it’s taking you upwards of 10 minutes to find a match.

As for the Map Editor dilemma, it’s because Blizzard lost a court case to the rights of DOTA. A game that came from Aeon of Strife on Starcraft but got more popular under Defense of the Ancients and popularized MOBAs and birthed League of Legends and DOTA 2. When Blizzard tried to launch Heroes of the Storm as “Blizzard DOTA” they got hit with copyright, or maybe they tried to hit Valve with copyright, memory a bit fuzzy there and their court defense was “Well it was made in our map editor so that means we own it.” The court ruled against Blizzard saying that just because their software was used to make something didn’t give them the ownership.

Amusingly enough, Auto Chess began as a Pokemon game on WC3 as well but got popular when it was remade on DOTA 2 as Auto Chess.