Who is more incompetent? Blizzard or Microsoft?

[Antares]

When it was announced that Microsoft will acquire ActivisionBlizzard, some people had hopes that Microsoft would pull Reforged out of the dumpster, since they are treating their legacy titles well, including the beloved Age of Empires 2.

But despite all the love it's getting, it's probably in a worse state right now than Reforged.

For about a year or so, the pathing was so bad that it became a meme among AoE2 players, with entire Youtube channels dedicated to nothing but clips showcasing how ridiculous the pathing is. Regularly, units would move in the opposite direction you command them to. It was so bad that, during one tournament, we saw basically no archer play, and as the reason the pros stated that you just couldn't risk your fragile archer group running directly into your opponent.

This went on for several patches and every patch the devs would proclaim that they've made improvements to the pathing and every time it got worse until we've got to the point where units were sometimes just randomly teleporting.

Then, in the latest patch, it was finally fixed. All was well again? No, because instead we got this:

This bug is so unbelievable... I'm just so flabbergasted that this would make it into a patch and wasn't caught by a professional studio. Imagine Blizzard introducing at any point a bug in Warcraft 3 that made you able to gather gold from trees or in Starcraft that made you harvest gas from mineral fields. It's just unthinkable. Some AoE2 players are defending this, saying "YoU cAn'T tEsT fOr EvErY sInGlE pOsSiBiLiTy." But these are literally some of the first cornercases that I would test!?!

I don't know as much about what's going on internally there; the developer Forgotten Empires is not directly owned by Microsoft, but Microsoft Game Studios is the publisher. Giving the developers the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they're not completely incompetent, the most reasonable explanation would be that they're being forced to push out content on an unreasonable time table while being severely understaffed. Maybe someone has better info, but probably not much different from Blizzard? And of course I don't know what the breastmilk situation is over there...

Anyway, let's hope that this is not the route that Warcraft 3 will take now that the acquisition has gone through.

 

[FeelMyRash]

They're both equally as greedy.

I'd say Microsoft is the most incompetent one though, since, as you said, harvesting trees is one of the earliest moves.

 

[deepstrasz]

Good thing we still got the first/old games, eh?

 

[Antares]

Good thing we still got the first/old games, eh?

Lost Vikings modding? Let's go!

 

[Retera]

I don't know as much about what's going on internally there

I have been periodically reading the Warcraft 3 official forums since around the time Reforged was announced in 2018, and I have been a Hive user since 2008 (although mostly active only since 2012).

And, starting in 2018, I decided to try to and make an open source clone of Warcraft 3 so I don't have to deal with these big companies anymore, and don't have to live in fear of the Warcraft-3-equivalent of harvesting food from trees.

Giving the developers the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they're not completely incompetent

This way of thinking sounds very similar to what social media induces for Warcraft 3. If you're going to throw around the word incompetent at people, let me try to express something to you. I have been making my Warcraft 3 open source engine on weekends and holidays only because I have a non-video-game job and career. And, what I think happens, is that it would be unreasonable for me to quit the non-video-game job to go and make an RTS full time because the RTS is a misuse of talent financially. That's true in my job, where I can make good money for the people who hire me, and that sounded like it was also true at Activision. The brand of "Age of Empires" or of "Warcraft 3" are brands known for their name value in society. The ability to use that name recognition value with people to make those people fork over cash, from a corporation standpoint, is the sole reason to be corporate owners of the game titles. When Reforged released in 2020 with a new patch that made it so that any unit with an "ability" that requires techtree items such as buildings no longer properly applied the requirements, Activision did not respond by releasing a patch so that the concept of techtree would work again in this game. Instead, they proceeded as normal, ended development on Reforged, and created the Arclight Rumble mobile game so that people could buy their favorite Warcraft III characters on the phone like "Arthas," or "Jaina" or "Abomination" or "Grom Hellscream."

It's objectively more profitable for these companies to sell people Arthas for $5 on the phone and call it Warcraft 3 rather than to sell a patch to Warcraft 3 that re-introduces the "concept of working Techtree Requirements" for $5, because there are more people who buy Arthas than who buy an RTS DLC because of some legitimate technological understanding of its merits.

So when you talk about developers being incompetent who work on your favorite RTS, you have to keep in mind that from a corporate leadership standpoint the decision to work on an RTS is itself incompetent. So, why would someone do it? The answer is that probably the employees of these companies that actually work on Reforged or on Age of Empires 2 are themselves people who want to do that. No matter how they do it, and no matter what they do in that capacity, the opportunity cost for not nuking the game and convincing everyone to buy a mobile game of the same thing, is a really high opportunity cost for them. They're operating, with regards to opportunity cost, at some ridiculous personal loss to themselves simply for the opportunity to work on something that they enjoy. Thus, there would be logically no way for a manager to measure who is successful and who is not -- which employee is incompetent and which is not -- by the finances of how well the game sells. Because all sales are bad, comparatively small sales, no matter what.

In this subjective field where right and wrong have been destroyed, and incompetence is required in order to get anything done, you jump on social media and it tells you to erode any human empathy you might have for the people trying to maintain the technology that you enjoy. I know that feeling. Social media told me to hate the Reforged developer(s)... a lot. What good hath that wrought?

What I find is that if I want technology progress, I need to rely probably on myself and on leaving myself a system where I can maintain the game -- that is to say, an open source clone of the game.

And if you want to talk about incompetence, what about this? When I punch in "Open Source Age of Empires 2" into my internet search, I quickly land on this page talking about the terrain rendering the buildings in some mad spaghetti code:

But, when I punch in "Open Source Warcraft 3" into my internet search, it leads me to my own project:

And it seems to me that the difference here is that one of us is playing a game where we go and destroy enemy buildings, and one of us is not. So, if we were to measure incompetence among the fan communities of these games -- especially considering that Age of Empires 2 was originally a 2D game rather than 3D and is thus likely to be easier to simulate -- it would seem that the Age of Empires 2 fans are the ones who are incompetent by comparison.


Edit:
I apologize if I come off as offensive. But, almost everyone that I talk to agrees that social media is getting really powerful at what it does. They do not all agree what it does; it would not want them to. But there seems to be popular census about the fact that it does indeed do something.

Among those things that it does, as you pointed out, a large number of people on Warcraft 3 have tried to convince themselves that Microsoft might improve the situation for Warcraft 3. Generally what I find is that social media seems to have a tendency to convince people of what folks with the most money want them to believe, rather than to convince them what is true. Surely Microsoft understands this.

As for me, I generally am done with hoping. Especially for Microsoft. Microsoft bought Skype and messed it up, and now I don't feel at liberty to use it. Microsoft bought Minecraft and messed it up, and then messed up the account system so that I couldn't log in anymore. Microsoft bought ChatGPT, and when OpenAI tried to sound the alarm that they were making AI that was too smart and going to destroy the world, Microsoft messed it up and forced them to keep going for profit for themselves instead of focusing on the benefit of humanity. I can hardly imagine, of all possible things, a future where Microsoft makes me feel good about their stewardship of Warcraft 3. Perhaps they will shut down the servers and end it once and for all, creating a future where only the enthusiasts can survive and we finally rid ourselves of the casuals who simply buy the game and try to play it and then complain to the enthusiasts that they need modding help because the World Editor is crashing, or whatever.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Then, in the latest patch, it was finally fixed. All was well again? No, because instead we got this:

I think this is what happens when you try to update a 25 year old game with modern concepts and features piece wise rather than starting with a brand new engine.

Path finding in Age of Empires 2 sucked. A lot of the time it might as well have been "walk straight in X direction". This is from personal experience playing it ~25 years ago.

Imagine Blizzard introducing at any point a bug in Warcraft 3 that made you able to gather gold from trees or in Starcraft that made you harvest gas from mineral fields. It's just unthinkable

Not really. Considering Warcraft III had a bug that could let you crash a multiplayer game by queueing up thousands of orders. Or had a bug that could let orcs build invulnerable towers. Or that pretty much every update Warcraft III makes breaks something in a custom map badly.

This sort of thing is very common in the industry. It really should not exist, but it does...

 

[Retera]

rather than starting with a brand new engine.

I am actually quite curious on this topic because I am ignorant:
Is the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires 2 written on a new engine? If so, is that new engine also the one with this "hunting trees for food" bug, rather than the original 25 year old engine?

I might be misinformed about this, but I played Age of Empires 2 HD with family and that game was clearly an upscaled remaster on the same code. Then the Age of Empires 2 DE was released and I didn't play it much. But it looked like a remake and not a remaster. Am I incorrect about this? I looked online and it appeared that folks were claiming DE is not the 3D remake that I thought it was, but actually some exceedingly remodeled game with a new UI that runs on the same old code? I guess maybe the AoE2DE devs really were as crazy as Reforged devs, if that's true.

 

[Antares]

So when you talk about developers being incompetent who work on your favorite RTS, you have to keep in mind that from a corporate leadership standpoint the decision to work on an RTS is itself incompetent.

I don't know why you would take offense in me supposedly calling the developers incompetent, when I specifically said the opposite and I'm assuming that they aren't because I find it a more reasonable explanation that they're working with ancient code and are not given enough time and resources to test the updates they're doing properly.

So, why would someone do it? The answer is that probably the employees of these companies that actually work on Reforged or on Age of Empires 2 are themselves people who want to do that. No matter how they do it, and no matter what they do in that capacity, the opportunity cost for not nuking the game and convincing everyone to buy a mobile game of the same thing, is a really high opportunity cost for them. They're operating, with regards to opportunity cost, at some ridiculous personal loss to themselves simply for the opportunity to work on something that they enjoy.

I don't know what you're on about. Age of Empires 2: DE is profitable for Microsoft. They're constantly releasing new DLCs with new campaigns and civilizations and because they have, at least until recently, done a good job, people are happy to support them and buy them. The player base might not be as big as for the average AAA title, but they're also developing the game at a fraction of the cost.

I can only speak for me of course, but I don't think a lot of people thought Microsoft would rescue Warcraft III out of the goodness of their heart. Rather, I hoped that Microsoft would be more competent and less short-sighted when it comes to the possible monetization of Warcraft III.

What I read from your text is that you think that, if you just view Blizzard's actions from the perspective of their financial self-interest and disregard ethics or whatever you want to call it, Blizzard has been acting completely rationally, and I think that's preposterous. Many of the decisions Blizzard has made lately have been disastrous for them financially, and funnily enough, one of their best financial successes was Classic WoW, where they managed to gain ~500k subscribers by simply re-releasing an old game and not messing it up completely.

Yes, there was Diablo Immortal, which, admittedly was a financial success, and here the fault lies with the people who spent 10,000$ on it and the impotent American congress who are doing nothing to stop them from basically marketing gambling to children.

But Reforged has certainly been a net loss for them and it didn't have to be if the Activision CEOs weren't hellbent on simply cashing out and ruining Blizzard's long-term financial viability. But that's the only game some people know to play - especially psychopaths, which tend to be overrepresented in those positions.

Granted, after the disaster that was the Reforged launch, it was probably rational from Blizzard's perspective to cut their losses and give up on it, because no reasonable amount of effort would have made a significant part of the player base reconsider buying Reforged and the money they'd had spent on it would have been wasted. Microsoft might have an advantage and an opportunity here. If Blizzard released Warcraft III: DE now, no one would buy it, but Microsoft has less ill will and might be able to make themselves seen as the savior of Warcraft III.

I am actually quite curious on this topic because I am ignorant:
Is the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires 2 written on a new engine? If so, is that new engine also the one with this "hunting trees for food" bug, rather than the original 25 year old engine?

I might be misinformed about this, but I played Age of Empires 2 HD with family and that game was clearly an upscaled remaster on the same code. Then the Age of Empires 2 DE was released and I didn't play it much. But it looked like a remake and not a remaster. Am I incorrect about this? I looked online and it appeared that folks were claiming DE is not the 3D remake that I thought it was, but actually some exceedingly remodeled game with a new UI that runs on the same old code? I guess maybe the AoE2DE devs really were as crazy as Reforged devs, if that's true.

Definite Edition is not written in a new engine, but all sprites are completely redone, unlike in HD, where they were just upscaled afaik. DE is generally very well received, while HD was not.

 

[Retera]

But Reforged has certainly been a net loss for them and it didn't have to be if the Activision CEOs weren't hellbent on simply cashing out and ruining Blizzard's long-term financial viability. But that's the only game some people know to play - especially psychopaths, which tend to be overrepresented in those positions.

Where are you getting this information? During Reforged development, I was in contact with a bunch of people on Discord claiming to be Activision employees working on Reforged. I think it got as high as like 6 or 7 of them. Their interest was not on cashing out, but on preserving the functionalities of Frozen Throne in a remaster. Then, after it released and they were laid off, one of the people who tended to leak information the most claimed that "Reforged met financial targets" and essentially that they were still profiting.

What I read from your text is that you think that, if you just view Blizzard's actions from the perspective of their financial self-interest and disregard ethics or whatever you want to call it, Blizzard has been acting completely rationally, and I think that's preposterous.

Sometimes the truth is the preposterous thing, and what we are told to believe online is the lie.

Age of Empires 2: DE is profitable for Microsoft.

Yes, there was Diablo Immortal, which, admittedly was a financial success,

Have you reviewed the relative orders of magnitude of AoE2DE versus Diablo Immortal? Isn't it possible that Diablo Immortal is so much more profitable, that cannibalizing these PC franchises for mobile games might actually be by far the best path to revenue? I don't have the exact numbers, but I have an impression from those types of folks who were closer to it all than I am. So, I could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. But I don't think I am likely to be wrong.

Accordingly, my position on Warcraft 3 technology is extreme. It's ridiculous, and it makes me ridiculous. I labeled myself as Advocate of Warsmash. And why is my position on these matters ridiculous? Because I like the Warcraft III technology more than I like to simp for Jaina. Because I like MDX, BLP, MPQ, Jass, and how it all comes together, and I wish that I could keep these systems running on my personal computers in perpetuity. I preordered Reforged 50 or maybe 60 times. The money means very little to me compared to the technology. I want the source code of World Editor so I can recompile it for my mobile handset, or add new features beyond peoples' wildest dreams. I want to be able to do source code edits of Warcraft III that are ill-advised and based on bad ideas, then roll the back and play the original. I want to be able to mod the game without strings attached and without the obligation for my creations to serve anyone but myself, and when I'm done I want the original game technology still running that I can fall back on so that I can do it all over again.

That makes me a danger to these people. A monster that wants to gobble up their livelihoods. Activision would hope surely that I, and everyone like me, stop enjoying the Warcraft III technology and instead simp for Jaina because that's easier to monetize. Instead of having nostalgia for a custom map I made in 2007, they would ask me to accept the melee versus mode as the definitive concept of the game.

I really tried to be reasonable with Reforged. I tried to help them. They asked me questions like, "uhhh, how do we add a new Standard Unit to this game and its editor?" or like, "Uhh, how do we add a new Standard Ability to this game and its editor?" and I tried to muster the energy and answer them and be a good contributor to society. But, in the end, sometimes it took me a day to reply instead of an hour. Sometimes I made fun of them for asking these questions, and told them that by being a Reforged developer who did not know this surely they were being actively trolled by the engineers around them.

The pathway to the salvation and freedom for me, where I can put things right, is if I rewrite the entire game in a new technology that has no dependency on this company and no incentive to profit. Right now it's incomplete. It's like an incomplete death star, sitting outside their planet waiting to blow them away. And I keep on not having time to finish it, or not allocating my time responsibly such that I could finish it. Maybe that's part of social media's evil plan for me, that I would forget to manage time.

But once my death star is fully operational, I can put things right. I can give everyone on earth the power to add New Standard Unit instead of just Bobby Kotick's henchmen, who tried to use my tutorial to add Drag Queen Arthas and in the end didn't even do what I said and instead hacked the game and added some multi-ID skinning system that breaks the technology.

Spoiler: Real, Actual 3D File Added to Reforged

So, I'm sorry about Reforged, and that I wasn't better able to help those people who were suffering by being Activision employees. But once my technology system becomes fully operational, we won't need to worry about them anymore. We can rewrite Warcraft III, to then proceed to rewrite World of Warcraft as a common ancestor of the same codebase. Teach humans how the technology works, alleviating them from their suffering. And then maybe some day we can have freedom, liberty, and justice for all.

And Microsoft is not how we do any of that.

 

[Dr Super Good]

It is very likely the graphic part of AoE 2 was rewritten, since it used not very sane JIT compiled software render code. A modern GPU can do better, faster and in a more sane way.

As for the gameplay logic part, given they were trying to stay true to the original it would not make sense for them to rewrite that beyond porting and bug fixes. Nothing wrong with doing this, as long as you stay faithful to the original game.

What did AoE 2 DE not do after release? Stay faithful to the original game... Improvement this, new DLC that, new feature here and there. Sure in theory these make the game better, but each such change is non-trivial and likely being applied to a code base that never intended to see such major changes. Result? Warcraft III Reforged severity problems, such as warping around workers, or hunting trees.

Sure it is all fixable, but they are likely severely underestimating the work needed, in development, QA and even time, to pull off such changes. Eventually if they keep making such changes, they might as well have started with a brand new engine as very little of the original engine will remain and they will have effectively written a brand new engine, which was my point in the previous post.

 

[Retera]

Warcraft III Reforged severity problems

So, I'm curious, does Age of Empires 2 DE have mods like Chronicles of the Second War with tons of custom assets and game behaviors?

I think that one of the biggest severity problems with Reforged is that it overwrote its predecessor. If I want to play Warcraft 3, I can pick:

• CD version (very old, 4:3 monitor, etc)
• Backups of the lost patches 1.29 - 1.31 that have no more online play (new 16:9 resolution on a mostly functional build of the same source code as CD version)
• Reforged (tons of changes, live updates, bugs, etc)

But if I want to play AoE 2, I have basically the same choices:

• CD version (very old, low resolution graphics)
• HD version (same code as CD but ported to fit modern desktop PC monitor sizes and such, and some slight visual improvements)
• DE version (tons of changes, new art, live updates, bugs, etc)

So, in my experience, I tend to most enjoy the middle tier of both of these products and have had the most fun on Age of Empires 2 HD and on Warcraft 3 Patch 1.31 in the past few years. Obviously this situation is not the same for everyone! There are people on Hive who love the Reforged, and it sounds like @Antares A likes the DE version of AoE2 and wouldn't want to play the HD one like what I would probably tend towards.

With this in mind, I feel it is kind of not how I see things to say that DE has the Reforged severity of problems, because the biggest problem is that it deleted its predecessor remaster version "the 1.31 patch" and shut down the servers for that version and replaced them with the less stable client with new art. It would be like if Age of Empires 2 DE was a patch to Age of Empires 2 HD that erased the HD one completely from any computer that touched the internet play button ingame. That is the Reforged severity problem. Were it not for that problem, I reckon we would see less complaints. But that's just my personal opinion.

Edit: And, this opinion mentioned above, is a really unfortunate opinion because it's not how Reforged wanted to be. Reforged's own developers would say im wrong and that 1.31 is entirely inside of the Reforged, which is entirely better than 1.31. I understand that this was their intention, but I find that their intention does not align with the interpretations of people i find online. Lots of folks think that 1.31 is Warcraft 3, but that 1.32 is Reforged. A lot of this is due to bugs introduced in the Reforged art mod code, and the duplex engine skin code, which made everything less stable. Truly, if someone fixed all of those bugs and made the 1.32 menu a smooth user experience that entirely superseded the 1.31 menu experience, more folks would agree with the developer's intention. But as it stands currently, I don't find everyone to be in agreement. There have been a lot of 1.31 users on this modding site in the past few years, despite the live patch being nuked in January 2020.

Maybe I have a disinformational bias in my head because after the pandemic I had some major life changes that reduced the amount of online War3 that I play, and this coincided with the death of Patch 1.31 servers. So that could be my personal bias speaking. But I find that sometimes I would go back to 1.31 because I like to have the menu load faster, and the World Editor test button interoperate with the launching of the custom map more smoothly. Essentially my work flow in the technology is like this:

Patch 1.32:

1. Open Battle.net app
2. Log in
3. Press "World Editor"
4. Open Map
5. Press "Test Map"
6. Warcraft 3 Reforged binary launches
7. Warcraft 3 webmenu Chrome app launches inside itself (menu flickers to higher resolution image)
8. See ingame login screen with login failed
9. Enter Battle.net login credentials
10. Map loading screen
11. Map fails to launch because credentials were missing when game started
12. I press ALT+F4 to kill game
13. Press Test Map in World Editor again
14. Warcraft 3 Reforged binary launches
15. Warcraft 3 webmenu Chrome app launches inside itself (menu flickers to higher resolution image)
16. Map loads (press any key to continue)
17. Now I am playing my custom map!

Patch 1.31:

1. Open game folder
2. Double click World Editor.exe
3. Open Map
4. Press "Test Map"
5. Warcraft 3 binary launches
6. Map loads (press any key to continue)
7. Now I am playing my custom map!

The second one of these is a much shorter user experience to get the same result, and it also works without internet in case of internet issues!
And so, sometimes 1.31 is nice in that way whereas the Reforged is not being nice.

 

[deepstrasz]

@Retera from my experience, most people who don't use Reforged either don't have the original game or claim it won't work on their older machines.

 

[Dr Super Good]

So, I'm curious, does Age of Empires 2 DE have mods like Chronicles of the Second War with tons of custom assets and game behaviors?

I do not know of many/any mods for AoE 2 DE. I do not own the game. I own the original AoE 2 and expansion. I also read that the original, HD and DE do not have mod compatibility with each other, and I doubt AoE 2 DE is being made with mod compatibility in mind, it would be up to the mod authors to update their mods after every patch.

This did help with making the refreshes a reasonable quality as drastic changes could be made where necessary without risk of some modder ranting. At release apparently they were comparatively bug free, with DE getting quite a bit of praise.

CD version (very old, low resolution graphics)

Likely not able to run on modern operating systems. At least without third party patches and no-CD.

HD version (same code as CD but ported to fit modern desktop PC monitor sizes and such, and some slight visual improvements)

My understanding that this also has issues running on modern operating systems. It functioned as a stop gap to make AoE 2 more accessible after running the CD version became an issue.

DE version (tons of changes, new art, live updates, bugs, etc)

This is meant to be the version people wanting the AoE 2 experience on modern machines get. However, instead of leaving it as that they continued to develop it with new DLCs, features, e.t.c. The result is new bugs, and new people not actually being able to experience the "classic" experience of AoE 2. I do not even think DE has the original aztec/inca campaign in it.

That said, AoE 2 has always had bugs. Same goes for Warcraft III. The main issue being raised here is that how such severe bugs could be added to a game that has effectively been developed for well over 10 years. It almost certainly reeks of the development being pushed to make content and changes without being given appropriate resources to do them. I doubt many, if any, of the original AoE 2 programmers are the people making the changes, and given the time that AoE 2 comes from I doubt the code is easy to maintain.

1. Open Battle.net app
2. Log in
3. Press "World Editor"
4. Open Map
5. Press "Test Map"
6. Warcraft 3 Reforged binary launches
7. Warcraft 3 webmenu Chrome app launches inside itself (menu flickers to higher resolution image)
8. See ingame login screen with login failed
9. Enter Battle.net login credentials
10. Map loading screen
11. Map fails to launch because credentials were missing when game started
12. I press ALT+F4 to kill game
13. Press Test Map in World Editor again
14. Warcraft 3 Reforged binary launches
15. Warcraft 3 webmenu Chrome app launches inside itself (menu flickers to higher resolution image)
16. Map loads (press any key to continue)
17. Now I am playing my custom map!

This is usually the result of the offline play token having expired. Warcraft III does support offline play but requires you login to Warcraft III every 7 or 14 days to refresh the token. Worldedit does not check the token, but the Warcraft III application does and starting Worldedit does not refresh the token. As such you can load Worldedit, go to test a map and then be shown the login screen as Warcraft III needs to authenticate.

To work around this, if you plan to test Warcraft III maps you need to launch Warcraft III while logged into the BattleNet application. This will automatically log you into Warcraft III and refresh the offline token. Once at menu you can immediately exit, start Worldedit and the test map feature will work as expected, similar to Patch 1.31.

StarCraft II has a similar issue but it is caught at the editor stage. If the offline play token has expired then the editor forces you to login to refresh the offline play token. Since the offline play token has been refreshed by the editor, the test map feature works as expected, using the refreshed offline play token.

 

[Retera]

This is usually the result of the offline play token having expired.

I understand that this was the design rationale behind why I have an issue, but I still have an issue. Something that I did for 18 years that worked easily all the time -- even after 7 or 14 day gaps -- suddenly became twice as many steps on the "official" version.