WarCraft III Megathread

[Adamas102]

Indeed. It's sad to see people remain blindly loyal to a brand name.

Blizzard entertainment is dead folks. The people who made up its soul are long gone. They have been replaced by a corporate ideology that doesn't care about making great experiences anymore, an ideology that doesn't have standards, an ideology that only cares about making as much money for as little effort as possible. The Blizzard of today gives lip service to the idea of "quality", but their actions certainly don't demonstrate it. We have gone from a studio of a few guys who wanted to make great games for fun, to a corporation that shovels out half assed products and commits human rights violations.

You kids really need to get over yourselves.

It’s a goddamn game. There have been plenty of passion projects that have produced absolute shit, and large studios are certainly capable of releasing quality products. Quality is not mutually exclusive to either one.

So you don’t enjoy the games Blizzard makes now. Ok, no problem. You just have to realize that they don’t have any obligation to cater to you and your particular gaming tastes (which are 100% subjective). Just because you don’t enjoy a particular game or expansion doesn’t mean that it was a failure because it’s almost guaranteed that other players do enjoy it.

You can bitch all you want about whether WC3R is worth the price tag, but that’s a personal decision for you to make. I myself paid for it with tokens so the cost was irrelevant to me. While I do think there were some missed opportunities here, I still can enjoy it as a minor update of a game I enjoyed immensely back in the day. If you feel that the end product was not what you expected then get a refund and move on.

If you’re an adult, you really should learn some perspective and not get so upset about a leisure activity.

[Vintersol]

It's WarCraft 3 with more modern graphics. That's what I paid for, that's what I got.

Take a look at Resident Evil 2. THAT'S a remake. WC3 is a bland copy of the old one with less features and performance trouble. It's simply a shame.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If you’re an adult, you really should learn some perspective and not get so upset about a leisure activity.

What a deplorable lack of standards.

Let's recount, shall we?

• World of Warcraft is a MMORPG with a monthly $15 subscription. On top of paying the monthly sub fee, you are also required to drop $60 on the latest expansion every two years in order to play the latest content, effectively making the game $210 a year to play. The expectation is, ofcourse, that you are constantly giving Blizzard money for the right to play a game that is being constantly updated. You should have access to everything in the game, right? Well, starting in 2010, Blizzard implemented a cash shop, with the first ever mount you bought for IRL money: the Celestial Steed. Rather than being able to earn this mount ingame (a game you are paying $210 a year for), you had to drop another $15 to buy this mount. Blizzard then implemented more cash shop items, with mounts costing $15, pets costing $10, and helmets costing $10. To add insult to injury, the cash shop items have far more work put into them any of the items you can earn ingame.

• In 2014's WoD expansion, the player interacted with creatures such as Fey Dragons, Iron Sky Reavers, and Grinning Reavers as a part of the questing experience. These mounts were even riden as flight path mounts, and were heavily associated in lore with specific WoD factions. It was expected that they would be earned ingame by reaching exalted with their associated reputation. Lo and behold, Blizzard dangled those mounts in your face, only for them to end up being exclusive to the cash shop! Imagine if a faction iconic mount like the Horde's Wyverns or the Alliance's Griffins were ridden by faction NPCs all the time in WoW, and you even rode on them on flight paths, but you could only acquire one through the cash shop.

• In 2015, Blizzard introduced the WoW token. Players could spend $20 on a WoW Token, and trade it to other players in game. Other players could then consume the WoW Token to obtain $20 of Blizzard store balance, which they could spend to buy other Blizzard games, more subscription time, mounts and pets, etc. This effectively legitimized gold selling. This by itself isn't really the problem. Prior to this, gold selling was illegal but nonetheless rampant, and constantly led to player's accounts being hacked. The WoW token created a safe alternative, and also allowed players who spent a lot of time in WoW to use their surplus gold to play for free. Crafted gear wasn't anywhere near as powerful as top end raid gear, so you couldn't really buy power anyway.

• The problems came later, when Blizzard began designing the game around incentivizing people to buy the WoW token for real money. In 2018's BFA expansion, a Brutosaur mount was added to the game, was extremely prestiegeous (it's the largest mount, it's a freaking dinosaur, can carry multiple players, and is the only mount in the game with an auction house you can access anywhere). It costed 5,000,000 gold. The real scummy part came the next year, in 2019, when Blizzard announced that they would be removing the ability to obtain the mount soon. Blizzard had never done something like this before. Why? To drive up WoW Token prices ofcourse! Gotta create artificial scarcity and squeeze as much money out of their customers as possible!

• In 2012, Blizzard released the fourth WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria. It was derrided at first ("muh Pandas"), but later came to be tied with WotLK as the game's best expansion. The story was excellently written, and was to lead into the next expansion, Legion. However, the Warcraft movie was in production, and Blizzard wanted to capitalize on the public attention it would garner. Rather than heading into Legion, Blizzard pulled the Warlords of Draenor expansion out of thin air. The players would timetravel to alternate universe Draenor in the past and interact with characters from the Warcraft movie. The story made absolutely no sense and shitted over the Warcraft saga as a whole. Blizzard stopped updating the game to work on the expansion, with no content update for 14 months, or 429 days after Siege of Orgrimmar was released in September 2013, to when WoD was released in November 2014. Worse, the expansion was rushed. Once players completed the initial leveling questlines, there was no content to do. No reputation questlines at all. Worse, Blizzard axed WoD's post launch support, with the game receiving no content update for 252 days, with June 2015's Hellfire Citadel being the one and only post launch content update for the expansion. Even WORSE, Blizzard AGAIN ceased updating the game to work on the expansion, with no content update for ANOTHER 14 months (434 days) between Hellfire Citadel and the release of Legion in August 2016. Oh, and you still had to pay $180 a year in subscription fees to play the game, despite no new content coming out for years. Fortunately, once Legion hit, we were back to regular patch content, with a new content update every 77 days.

• After Legion, Blizzard began development on the seventh WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth. As usual, public beta testing began early, with players being able to test the game for five whole months. During this time, the playerbase gave feedback to Blizzard, telling the devs that the newly introduced Azerite system was not fun, and in fact very detrimental to the player's enjoyment of the game. Rather than heed the playerbase's warnings, Blizzard did nothing and released BFA with the Azerite system anyway. Predictably, the backlash was immense, and the game began bleeding players at a record rate. While Blizzard began scrambling to revamp the system (which they should have done during the five month long beta testing), they tried to incentivize players to continue paying their subscription fee for shitty gameplay by selling six month subscriptions that included an exclusive mount. Like the store mounts, the six month sub mount had far more effort poured into it than any of the mounts players could earn ingame, and if you missed the offer, you could not get it ever again.

• Current World of Warcraft is not fun. Fun and interesting reputation questlines like managing your farm at halfhill, raising your Cloud Serpent mount, or learning the ways of the Shado-Pan have been replaced by bland world quests. The game has layers upon layers of RNG, where obtaining loot no longer feels rewarding, as you always feel like RNG has prevented from getting the best possible loot you could have gotten for your time invested. The story after MoP is a trainwreck.

• There has been a very large and vocal part of the fanbase that has been asking Blizzard for a release of vanilla WoW for years. Each time the community asked about it, Blizzard shouted them down. "You think you do, but you don't" - J Allen Brack. When the community created private vanilla WoW servers, Blizzard sent them cease and desist notices. It wasn't until retail WoW's subscriber count reached record lows in over a decade that Blizzard decided to give their customers what they had been asking for for years.

• Diablo 3 was rushed out in a poor state. In addition, it also had an auction house in which players could sell items to each other. It was two years before the game's core gameplay was fixed and the auction house was removed.

• Every single game released by Blizzard since 2010 has had mandatory always online DRM, even to play singleplayer campaigns.

• Overwatch launched missing core features such as ranked mode, custom games, and clans. On top of the $50 box price, Blizzard piled an additional monetization model on top of the box price: lootboxes. Rather than being able to simply use any skin in the game, you instead had to obtain skins from lootboxes. At the end of every match, you gained EXP. When you leveled up, you got a lootbox, which contained random stuff. You obtained skins from lootboxes, and the lootboxes were padded with crap like sprays and icons in order to dilute the chance of getting a skin. Ofcourse... you could drop IRL money to buy a bunch of lootboxes, upping your chances of getting a skin! It was an insidious monetization model that Blizzard implemented in HotS, and plagued the AAA industry as EA implemented it in singleplayer games like Shadow of Mordor, and even Star Wars Battlefront II.

• The health of Overwatch began to decline in 2017, when updates became sparser (maybe two heroes and a map released a year), and the game became unbalanced to the point it was no longer fun. Overwatch updates are few and far between, and Blizzard hardly ever communicates what they are thinking to their playerbase. It took over two years for custom games to be implemented, and over three years for a role queue system to be implemented.

• Blizzard tried to control the Overwatch eSports scene, dictating which teams could compete in the Overwatch League, rather than allowing the compettive community to organize itself. Blizzard restricted self organized tournaments from having prize pools larger than $10,000, and had prevented traditional eSports organizations from sponsoring OWL teams. Furthermore, the OWL is notorious for taking upwards of half a year to payout prize money. This has resulted in a sharp decline of interest in competitive Overwatch.

• Heroes of the Storm began open beta in May 2015. The game simplified DOTA's and LoL's convoluted mechanics, removing last hitting, jungling, items, leveling up abilities, etc, and just focusing on team coordination during a match. It was extremely fun to play and had a really good monetization system. Players who spent a lot of time on a hero and mastered that hero could unlock an exclusive Master Skin, which was a badge of prestige. Players could also drop real money for whacky skins. However, in 2017, Blizzard introduced the 2.0 update, which convoluted the core gameplay and wrecked the progression system. Imitating Overwatch's success, Blizzard implemented lootboxes. Upon completing a match, you gained EXP. When you gained enough EXP to level up, you got a lootbox. In the lootbox, you could get any skin in the game... including master skins. The prestige status of master skins was gone, as now anyone could get a lucky roll and get a master skin, or a paid for skin. Worse, just like Overwatch, the loot boxes were padded with crap no one cared for like sprays and icons, in order to dilute the chances of getting a skin. Naturally, this killed the game's playerbase. Rather than making more money off of HotS, Blizzard ended up killing its revenue. One year later, in 2018, Blizzard axed support of the game, ceasing development of the game and putting it into maintenance mode.

• To make matters worse, Blizzard had been hosting a yearly competitive HotS tournament, with the finals being played at Blizzcon. Professional eSports teams organized themselves around the tourney, which had been hosted for four years in a row. As Blizzard axed support to HotS, they did not notify the eSports scene that there would be no 2019 tournament. Blizzard lead the eSports scene on, leading many to believe that they would still have a job playing HotS in 2019.

• During a post match interview at a Taiwanese Hearthstone tournament, the winning player named Blitzchung gave a shoutout to the Free Hong Kong movement (earlier that year, Chinese police crossed the border into the Hong Kong special territory, and began arresting people they identified as dissidents. People began protesting the government's infringement of their rights). Blizzard then revoked Blitzchung's winnings and banned him from the tournament. Blizzard also banned the two tournament casters who had interviewed Blitzchung. Blizzard did this because they did not want to risk being banned from what would soon become the largest revenue source for video games, China. At Blizzcon 2019, Blizzard gave an insincere apology and did not reverse the bans or return the winnings.

• In early 2012, despite making billions of dollars a year, the upper management decided to cut corners, and laid off about 600 employees, only to then try to hire them back.

• In early 2019, despite making billions of dollars a year, the upper management decided to cut corners, and laid off 800 employees, which amounted to around 200 people on Blizzard's part. The customer support, community management, who the playerbase trusted), and quality assurance teams were hit particularly hard. The playerbase lost their bridge to Blizzard through the popular community manager, Ythisens. WoW patch 8.3 launched disasterously due to an understaffed QA team. A year after the layoffs, Blizzard then relisted the cut positions with more responsibilities and a lower salary. Blizzard is already notorious for their below industry average salaries, and the company is located in Irivine, California, where living expenses are very high. Many Blizzard employees have to rent share and carpool together to work.

[Verdugo]

Take a look at Resident Evil 2. THAT'S a remake. WC3 is a bland copy of the old one with less features and performance trouble. It's simply a shame.

Why not just keep it in the RTS genre. Look at Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition.

[Arrashi]

Why not just keep it in the RTS genre. Look at Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition.

Clearly blizzard was inspired by HoMM3 HD.

[mvaliz]

You kids really need to get over yourselves.

Calling people "kids" is infractable and against the TOS

It’s a goddamn game. There have been plenty of passion projects that have produced absolute shit, and large studios are certainly capable of releasing quality products. Quality is not mutually exclusive to either one.

It was for Blizzard. Many many MANY decades of it. In fact - that's also the reason they can pay their employees garbage wages because they get the "privileged" to work there and get Blizzard's name on their resume's.

So you don’t enjoy the games Blizzard makes now. Ok, no problem. You just have to realize that they don’t have any obligation to cater to you and your particular gaming tastes (which are 100% subjective). Just because you don’t enjoy a particular game or expansion doesn’t mean that it was a failure because it’s almost guaranteed that other players do enjoy it.

It's not guaranteed the majority did enjoy it, as evidence by WoD, by BfA, and now - by WC3:R

Also, yes, it is kinda is their obligation when creating a sequel/update to an existing franchise. Who the hell are they designing it for if not the fans of the original?

It reminds me of when the Executive Producer of Pixar commented how he went from writing Toy Story 1 to Toy Story 2. He said what changed his opinion on writing TS2 was when he saw a child at an airport run up to his parents and showed them his Sheriff Woody Doll. He said right there that his characters didn't belong to him anymore, and he was now instead writing lines for that Child's best friend, and had to remember that when writing TS2.

You can bitch all you want about whether WC3R is worth the price tag, but that’s a personal decision for you to make.

Had they been told that the advertised features would be cut and all the mods made henceforth were of Blizzard's property, they probably would've made a decision indeed. That's kinda the point really - they were shown to be given more, and weren't. That's why they're complaining, and have that legitimate right to do so. The changes weren't detailed out, and thus they couldn't do what you said. They only had the trailer videos and Blizzards reputation of (used to) doing stellar games, particularly WC3.

If you’re an adult, you really should learn some perspective and not get so upset about a leisure activity.

If you’re an adult, you really should learn some perspective and not get so upset when customers complain about something being not up to the advertised standards they were told it to be.

Weither that be cars, food, movies, games, football teams, whatever... they have that right. To use your quote above, they don't have to have any obligation to follow YOUR views on what should be complained about or not.

[Daymanmb]

You kids really need to get over yourselves.

Kettle, meet pot.

[letssee]

what the actual fuk is this warcraft 3???????

[Redroniksre]

You should and on top of that you should use a free texture pack, instead of paying $30 for Blizz's: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wa...reforged/11149

Theres also: https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...-(Image-Heavy)

That first one you link looks pretty terrible imo. Way worse than what we got. Hell half the models look like they just got ripped from WoW.

What a deplorable lack of standards.

Let's recount, shall we?

I feel kinda bad responding so lightly to that wall, but some of the stuff in that is all speculation with no basis, like the Brutosaur peddling the Token, when it is most likely to combat the Legion/WoD Inflation, just like the spider mount in Legion. Secondly, i don't think someone with a FFXIV avatar can complain about a cash shop, given the FFXIV cash shop is 100x worse with way more put into it.

[mvaliz]

what the actual fuk is this warcraft 3???????

An outdated RTS game World of Warcraft was based upon.

... just answering the question! ;P

[Jotaux]

It's WarCraft 3 with more modern graphics. That's what I paid for, that's what I got.

The only complaint I have is how buggy it is. I did not find sc1 remastered this buggy.

[Gamevizier]

After trying out the reforged for a little bit. I can only say that I'm really saddened to see how the end project turned out to be. It's as if the blizzcon demo and teaser were knowingly faked to create hype among the player base.

- we were promised a remake of the cinematics. they didn't deliver.

- we were promised cross-game compatibility. they KILLED the old game to make sure everyone is switching to the new one.

- we were told the campaign is going to be remade and there will be in-game cinematics. they cut that too.

- the game does not have polish, the animations are a bit bugged and there are serious connection issues with alot of players. I had to repair the game several times to get some campaign missions to load properly.

- I can to some point understand why they wanted to claim ownership of all custom games so bad. but to be honest that is so not the way.

This is NOT a Blizzard product. I cannot really call it that. This does not feel like it's been made by an AAA company. this feels more like an indie game.

[Justpassing]

That first one you link looks pretty terrible imo. Way worse than what we got. Hell half the models look like they just got ripped from WoW.



I feel kinda bad responding so lightly to that wall, but some of the stuff in that is all speculation with no basis, like the Brutosaur peddling the Token, when it is most likely to combat the Legion/WoD Inflation, just like the spider mount in Legion. Secondly, i don't think someone with a FFXIV avatar can complain about a cash shop, given the FFXIV cash shop is 100x worse with way more put into it.

FF cash shop is ok beacuse you can buy panties for your catgirl

[Easo]

So in the end I decided to screw it and requested a refund. I guess there was a limit of how much I do trust Blizzard.

Remake? Look at Resident Evil 2...

[letssee]

An outdated RTS game World of Warcraft was based upon.

... just answering the question! ;P

haha u know what i mean :P

[niztheundead87]

So in the end I decided to screw it and requested a refund. I guess there was a limit of how much I do trust Blizzard.

Remake? Look at Resident Evil 2...

Remaster doesn't mean remake

[Adamas102]

What a deplorable lack of standards.

We can stop right there. It isn’t about standards. It’s about your gaming tastes.

I’m sure we can agree that there are classic games out there that are objectively worse in terms of graphs or engines, but are still very enjoyable and replayable because the story or gameplay resonates with you. On a basic level, video games are just another form of artistic expression, and so the enjoyment that is derived from them is purely subjective.

I found the farm extremely boring and never completed those reputation grinds on any characters. My opinion doesn’t change your experience.

As for Blizzard corporate tactics, again I remind you that this is a leisure activity (one of thousands). If you don’t like how they Conduct themselves or make their money then don’t give them any of yours.

[KrayZ33]

Remaster doesn't mean remake

it was not advertised as a remaster either, they specifically said it's "reforged" and not "remaster" because it's supposedly not just a texture pack. People actually asked why they call it "reforged" and that was their answer.

People seem to forget that...
So anyone who wants to argue like "what did people expect - it's a remaster" - no, it never was supposed to be just a remaster until way, way after pre-orders started and changed into one after a year of silence and 3 months before release.

[Daymanmb]

That first one you link looks pretty terrible imo. Way worse than what we got. Hell half the models look like they just got ripped from WoW.

Free is free. At least youre not getting ripped off.

- - - Updated - - -

We can stop right there. It isn’t about standards. It’s about your gaming tastes.

Its 100% about standards, when a product is not as advertised. Taste has nothing to do with it. It was advertised as more than a texture pack and all you got for $30, was a texture pack (even Bethesda gives those away for free). AND Blizzard is STILL misleading people, right now, as we speak..

[mvaliz]

Its 100% about standards, when a product is not as advertised. Taste has nothing to do with it. It was advertised as more than a texture pack and all you got for $30, was a texture pack (even Bethesda gives those away for free). AND Blizzard is STILL misleading people, right now, as we speak..

Not to mention apparently banning people as well for showing how they can refund their games online.