7 ms·

I still can't believe they butchered WC3:reforged so badly. It could have been a massive boon for them were it not for the hideously greedy ToS along with all t

I still can't believe they butchered WC3:reforged so badly. It could have been a massive boon for them were it not for the hideously greedy ToS along with all the technical issues and straight up downgrades from the original in terms of multiplayer. There have to be some epic stories of mismanagement or hubris, if only someone would tell them.

david422 5y ago
WC3 was my favorite game ever, so much so that I bought multiple copies. I calculated that I probably played so much that my price per hour was a couple of cents. But I didn't buy reforged after how bad it was - and still is. It should have been easy money for them, and instead it was just a half finished money grab.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  Ironically, having been a huge WC3 fan; I felt like reforged was great. I bought it, loved it, and am still routinely playing it (in fact, I've picked it up as a semi-regular routine, whereas I'd kinda mostly stopped playing the original). I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant (complaining about the game being heavier when it runs really fast on my not-very-good gaming rig), or was not a regression against the prior version of the game (not delivering the promised cutscene overhauls didn't make the existing game worse). The community complaints about the mod license changes were like - yeah, I sympathize, but it's not relevant to my enjoyment of the game. I get that blizzard doesn't want to have its lunch stolen a second time by LoL/Dota, but it's not a change that had any negative impact on me as a player. If I'm angry about anything with blizzard, it's that they've stiffed a bunch of these existing communities by not giving long-term support+content updates. Like, reforged had pretty much the same level of bugs or unfinished stuff practically every game has on release, but after a couple months of the devs fixing a bunch of these, blizzard's management got cold feet and laid the whole team off. We might have gotten the promised cutscene upgrades. But now - now we'll never get them. SC2 has this wicked game mode, "co-op commanders", that supposedly is one of their most popular things (and directly sells DLC), and what do they do? They stop making more content for it - all they'd have to do is make more DLC, and it'd print money. I've been playing a bunch of it lately, and I'm just plain mad, knowing that what I'm playing is truly all I'll ever get. I genuinely don't get Blizzard, these days. I could understand them diverting their investment towards a far more lucrative pot (much like how Valve has doubled down on their real moneymakers like Dota/CS:GO, at the expense of i.e. Portal), but ... what is Blizzard even investing in? I thought Overwatch and Hearthstone were the new hotness, but if even those are getting stiffed, and blizzard's making money hand-over-fist, then... ... ? Like, what's even left?
  - totony 5y ago
    >I get that blizzard doesn't want to have its lunch stolen a second time by LoL/Dota But it's not stolen -- they didn't invent the genre, someone did off of their platform. >I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant [...] or was not a regression against the prior version of the game I have played the game a lot since it came out, and that is not true. There were multiple network-related issues that might have been in the original game, but were fixed by custom hosting bots long ago (GHost++), which cannot be used anymore (so you're stuck with high-latency). Some were not though, you could wait ~45 seconds for someone to fix their network issues, whereas now they get kicked at the first lag from online games. There were also gameplay-related changes which have somewhat been fixed, although custom game development has become a huge pain, with crashes and desyncs way more common then they used to be (even before the custom hosting bots). Arguably they didn't break the normal games AFAIK (but they did break the ladder, especially 2v2, 3v3, etc), although there are no more tournaments, but the main fun in wc3 were the custom games and they: 1) Made user-hostile ToS changes (why? map makers are working for free to make your game better) 2) Broke the netcode making desyncs way more likely and removed custom bots making latency way higher (playing USA + EU is now a huge pain because of where their servers are hosted) 3) Broke an important part of the community (clans, channel bots, etc) 4) Made the client way laggier and heavier
    - mattnewton 5y ago
      Blizzard should have just hired the dota guy / bought out the team’s idea. It would have been worth it in retrospect and it would have established a precedent that would motivate other people to make truly great content on their level editors, selling more copies..
  - david422 5y ago
    I basically only ever played 4v4 RT. So my use case was fairly niche. But after reading about the network issues and watching people play on twitch that only used a custom ladder overlay and didn't even use the updated graphics ... why bother? I was hoping for resurgence in the game and player base, but at this point it's just the original game but worse.
pradn 5y ago
It's incredible that a "remaster" could destroy a game like that. I can't even go play a game that I love, a game from my childhood, with an art style and gameplay that still holds up unless I torrent the old client and connect to third-party multiplayer servers. For artists, there's a concept of "moral rights". Art may not be destroyed senselessly, no matter who owns it, because it goes against the human creative spirit - rights like that. We need similar rights for old games. You can sell a new remaster or even turn down the servers, but you can't remake it into a monstrosity that you can't opt out of.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  It's like they were trying to destroy any evidence that Warcraft 3 was ever anything special. I guess that's one way to dissuade people from making obvious comparisons.
  - Covzire 5y ago
    Let's say WC3 had been a smashing technical success and it delivered everything everyone wanted in terms of the remastered graphics etc, it still wouldn't have been very successful. Their legal team forced the ToS to include a clause where they claim any and all player-made content, stories or intellectual property belonged to Activision-Blizzard and not to the modders who made them. They did this because they believed they "lost" DOTA to Valve, instead of realizing that DoTA originally helped them sell a lot of copies of WC3 and they had no moral right to the IP anyway, something the courts recognized, thankfully. I have a wild theory that no honorable veteran Blizzard dev actually wanted to work on Reforged because they knew about Legal's position and therefore knew Reforged had no chance of actually matching it's former glory days. The chance that a lot of modders would want to create content for it were effectively zero.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  Once of the concepts I'm working on from a technical angle is making stable compute super cheap from an operational perspective and zero maintenance perspective. I can understand companies turning off games because costs grow beyond revenue, so it only makes sense to clean house. http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-keeping-things-stable http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-keeping-things-stable
frozenlettuce 5y ago
I used my first salary to buy WC3 on 2003, so I may have an "exaggerated" emotional connection with that game. Two months before the release it was clear that they could not polish the (many) rough edges that the remaster had. Removing features like ladder and tournaments was something so unprofessional and unreal that even today I can't digest it. Looking at the screens for the Diablo 2 remaster, it looks like that they are using the same outsourced art company to create the new models, as its style is way too similar to the WC3 remaster - I believe that it will flop too.
- blibble 5y ago
  diablo 2 has been entirely outsourced as Blizzard aren't working on it: it's possible it might actually be good
  - shmageggy 5y ago
    If you watch this dev interview, you can see they actually love the game and put an incredible amount of thought and care into it. It looks really promising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dL7ZeIAsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dL7ZeIAsE
- totony 5y ago
  As much as I agree with you about issues with wc3 (and poor art style that didn't fit the old cartoonish-look), I have seen some people play the d2 remaster alpha on twitch and the changes look way more reasonable. We'll have to see

david422 5y ago

WC3 was my favorite game ever, so much so that I bought multiple copies. I calculated that I probably played so much that my price per hour was a couple of cents. But I didn't buy reforged after how bad it was - and still is. It should have been easy money for them, and instead it was just a half finished money grab.

Jetrel 5y ago
Ironically, having been a huge WC3 fan; I felt like reforged was great. I bought it, loved it, and am still routinely playing it (in fact, I've picked it up as a semi-regular routine, whereas I'd kinda mostly stopped playing the original). I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant (complaining about the game being heavier when it runs really fast on my not-very-good gaming rig), or was not a regression against the prior version of the game (not delivering the promised cutscene overhauls didn't make the existing game worse). The community complaints about the mod license changes were like - yeah, I sympathize, but it's not relevant to my enjoyment of the game. I get that blizzard doesn't want to have its lunch stolen a second time by LoL/Dota, but it's not a change that had any negative impact on me as a player. If I'm angry about anything with blizzard, it's that they've stiffed a bunch of these existing communities by not giving long-term support+content updates. Like, reforged had pretty much the same level of bugs or unfinished stuff practically every game has on release, but after a couple months of the devs fixing a bunch of these, blizzard's management got cold feet and laid the whole team off. We might have gotten the promised cutscene upgrades. But now - now we'll never get them. SC2 has this wicked game mode, "co-op commanders", that supposedly is one of their most popular things (and directly sells DLC), and what do they do? They stop making more content for it - all they'd have to do is make more DLC, and it'd print money. I've been playing a bunch of it lately, and I'm just plain mad, knowing that what I'm playing is truly all I'll ever get. I genuinely don't get Blizzard, these days. I could understand them diverting their investment towards a far more lucrative pot (much like how Valve has doubled down on their real moneymakers like Dota/CS:GO, at the expense of i.e. Portal), but ... what is Blizzard even investing in? I thought Overwatch and Hearthstone were the new hotness, but if even those are getting stiffed, and blizzard's making money hand-over-fist, then... ... ? Like, what's even left?
- totony 5y ago
  >I get that blizzard doesn't want to have its lunch stolen a second time by LoL/Dota But it's not stolen -- they didn't invent the genre, someone did off of their platform. >I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant [...] or was not a regression against the prior version of the game I have played the game a lot since it came out, and that is not true. There were multiple network-related issues that might have been in the original game, but were fixed by custom hosting bots long ago (GHost++), which cannot be used anymore (so you're stuck with high-latency). Some were not though, you could wait ~45 seconds for someone to fix their network issues, whereas now they get kicked at the first lag from online games. There were also gameplay-related changes which have somewhat been fixed, although custom game development has become a huge pain, with crashes and desyncs way more common then they used to be (even before the custom hosting bots). Arguably they didn't break the normal games AFAIK (but they did break the ladder, especially 2v2, 3v3, etc), although there are no more tournaments, but the main fun in wc3 were the custom games and they: 1) Made user-hostile ToS changes (why? map makers are working for free to make your game better) 2) Broke the netcode making desyncs way more likely and removed custom bots making latency way higher (playing USA + EU is now a huge pain because of where their servers are hosted) 3) Broke an important part of the community (clans, channel bots, etc) 4) Made the client way laggier and heavier
  - mattnewton 5y ago
    Blizzard should have just hired the dota guy / bought out the team’s idea. It would have been worth it in retrospect and it would have established a precedent that would motivate other people to make truly great content on their level editors, selling more copies..
- david422 5y ago
  I basically only ever played 4v4 RT. So my use case was fairly niche. But after reading about the network issues and watching people play on twitch that only used a custom ladder overlay and didn't even use the updated graphics ... why bother? I was hoping for resurgence in the game and player base, but at this point it's just the original game but worse.

pradn 5y ago

It's incredible that a "remaster" could destroy a game like that. I can't even go play a game that I love, a game from my childhood, with an art style and gameplay that still holds up unless I torrent the old client and connect to third-party multiplayer servers. For artists, there's a concept of "moral rights". Art may not be destroyed senselessly, no matter who owns it, because it goes against the human creative spirit - rights like that. We need similar rights for old games. You can sell a new remaster or even turn down the servers, but you can't remake it into a monstrosity that you can't opt out of.

AlexandrB 5y ago
It's like they were trying to destroy any evidence that Warcraft 3 was ever anything special. I guess that's one way to dissuade people from making obvious comparisons.
- Covzire 5y ago
  Let's say WC3 had been a smashing technical success and it delivered everything everyone wanted in terms of the remastered graphics etc, it still wouldn't have been very successful. Their legal team forced the ToS to include a clause where they claim any and all player-made content, stories or intellectual property belonged to Activision-Blizzard and not to the modders who made them. They did this because they believed they "lost" DOTA to Valve, instead of realizing that DoTA originally helped them sell a lot of copies of WC3 and they had no moral right to the IP anyway, something the courts recognized, thankfully. I have a wild theory that no honorable veteran Blizzard dev actually wanted to work on Reforged because they knew about Legal's position and therefore knew Reforged had no chance of actually matching it's former glory days. The chance that a lot of modders would want to create content for it were effectively zero.
mathgladiator 5y ago
Once of the concepts I'm working on from a technical angle is making stable compute super cheap from an operational perspective and zero maintenance perspective. I can understand companies turning off games because costs grow beyond revenue, so it only makes sense to clean house. http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-keeping-things-stable http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-keeping-things-stable

frozenlettuce 5y ago

I used my first salary to buy WC3 on 2003, so I may have an "exaggerated" emotional connection with that game. Two months before the release it was clear that they could not polish the (many) rough edges that the remaster had. Removing features like ladder and tournaments was something so unprofessional and unreal that even today I can't digest it. Looking at the screens for the Diablo 2 remaster, it looks like that they are using the same outsourced art company to create the new models, as its style is way too similar to the WC3 remaster - I believe that it will flop too.

blibble 5y ago
diablo 2 has been entirely outsourced as Blizzard aren't working on it: it's possible it might actually be good
- shmageggy 5y ago
  If you watch this dev interview, you can see they actually love the game and put an incredible amount of thought and care into it. It looks really promising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dL7ZeIAsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dL7ZeIAsE
totony 5y ago
As much as I agree with you about issues with wc3 (and poor art style that didn't fit the old cartoonish-look), I have seen some people play the d2 remaster alpha on twitch and the changes look way more reasonable. We'll have to see