This patch sat in the office storage from 2020 until 2022. On August 17th of 2022, new people at Activision published a derivative work of the Patch 1.33 project, overwriting the Warcraft 3 Reforged game with the experimental and unfinished version. Their goal is not your custom mapping hobby; their goal is likely to check off the box of "Ranked Ladder play" legally (an incomplete ladder had existed in the Patch 1.33 reported to have existed in 2020, based on a blog post you can find on Blizzard's official site that showed a Reforged ladder back then despite the ladder never releasing until 2022).
Originally there were severe game breaking issues with the patch that they pushed out. We knew this in advance; earlier in 2022 there had been a Public Test Realm for the Patch 1.33 and this made it obvious the patch would break a lot of things and reduce game stability and reduce World Editor stability. The solution from Activision, to avoid all the bugs reports from the Public Test Realm, was apparently to switch to a Private Test Realm and turn off the public one. From my standpoint, it felt like this was a move to avoid receiving bug reports that there was no incentive to fix because they didn't want to bother to actually keep the full scope of Reforged running.
I was sharing my understanding of these events as best I could gather it to be, and painting a pretty negative picture of Activision's handling of Reforged after they released this thing on August 17th, 2022. But this spring after the holidays, the fixed one of the most game breaking file cache system issues that was wrecking everything. So, they are not totally against fixing the major problems. But there is probably not a financial motivator for this company to fix your issue. You could try to be vocal about it online, and hope for the best. That might work.
But more likely is the future where you have to make do with what you got. And that means that in order to open or update your map, you can either:
1. Use a backup of the Reforged World Editor that you saved in advance prior to August 17th, 2022 by knowing from the Public Test Realm that Activision would break the game. Personally, this is the solution that I have been using.
2. Ask someone who has #1 set up, or use some other program, and rip out of your map whichever files cause it to fail to load. Determining which files cause it to fail is probably a matter of guess-and-check, but since the problem is Activision and not you, your original map files from before the patch are still 100% intact, and it is simply the new patched game system that fails to open them properly.
Finally, I would mention that after 20 years I am losing motivation to use the Latest Patch, and I have not personally used Patch 1.35 much, and it may be better than I am giving it credit for. In other words, my knowledge has its limits, and maybe everything I said is wrong.
Good luck, and happy mapping!
