Hey guys,

We're happy to wish you all holiday greetings and a happy new year! The time has come for us to write something nice and feel-good about the ending of the year.

This year has been a very interesting one, for both the site and the Warcraft 3 community. Here is a summary of the highlights that happened during the past year:

• Blizzard started working on Warcraft 3 again:
  • Members Kam and PurgeandFire have visited Blizzard headquarters back in March regarding the Future of WC3.
    
  • Multiple Hive staff members have been in direct contact with Blizzard’s classic game team since.
    
  • Blizzard put up more and more classic game job listings.
    
  • Added the new Patch Discussion sub-forum.
  • Patch 1.27b raised the 8mb multiplayer limit to 128mb.
  • MindWorX, the official maintainer of JNGP, started working on JNGP for the updated versions of WC3 while in contact with Blizzard.
• The long awaited Hive 2 was released and updated rapidly throughout the year.
  
• Partnerships and collaborations with multiple dedicated WC3 communities, persons, and websites:
  • Our newest affiliate, Back2Warcraft, live-casted the biggest WC3 tournaments in the world and supported The Hive.
    
  • Map hosting and arranged gaming became more accessible by collaboration with MakeMeHost and ENT.
    
  • Showcased custom map inspired games such as Legion TD 2 and Element TD mobile.
• Added a new community live-streaming feature, with over 50 unique Twitch channels participating.
  
• Revived our Twitter, created our official Facebook page, and launched our YouTube channel.
  
• Made our first Hive Hoodie & T-Shirt merchandise.
  
• Hosted two new projects, World Domination and Warden, while current projects managed to keep pumping out great updates.
  
• Introduced resource reviewers to help out the resource moderation.
• The Art and Graphic Design section has been revitalized with amazing artwork and useful threads.
• Abelhawk created an amazing WC3 campaign easter egg series and interviewed campaign designer David Fried.
• Completed a total of 20 contests in The Arena, the most since 2011.
• Continuation of the community providing thousands of newly released resources, many with fantastic quality and creativity. Highest rated resources that were released in 2016:
  • n00b's Monter2 was the best rated multiplayer map.
  • Rufus' Warden was the best rated singleplayer campaign.
  • Tauer's Anduin Lothar was the best rated model.
  • Blood Raven's Soul Harvester Scythe was the best rated attachment.
  • Heinvers' Fel Lord was the best rated skin.
  • Sin'dorei300's Mirjana was the best rated icon.
  • KILLCIDE's Arcane Bomb was the best rated spell.
  • Flux's Dummy Recycler was the best rated system.
  • Quilnez's Warcraft 3 Shell Extension Register was the best rated tool.

It was a very good year for The Hive Workshop, but we can say that it still feels like this is just the beginning. The new site has been lacking in some areas compared to the old one, but is rapidly improving and in many cases far superior now. We're excited about being able to add new features that have been planned for years, and that we're sure you will love.
Keep on the lookout for current maps expanding past 8mb, and new maps being created to use the limit raise to its full potential. The hosted project Gaias Retaliation has even been ready for a while with their awesome 50 mb version.

Bring on 2017!

This news post has been updated frequently due to live coverage of the patch. You will see replies in reaction to earlier statements.

Can't access the patch through Battle.net? You can download the patch here: Patching Classic Games

Despite Blizzard's patch notes not mentioning it, we have confirmation that the 8mb multiplayer limit for maps has been removed on Battle.net, with the new limit being 128mb! Various Hive Workshop users have tested out maps over 8mb, including a specialized version Gaias Retalliation ORPG which is around 50mb. Map maker @Zwiebelchen succeeded to host and play that map online in Battle.net. Other map makers and testers reported the same.

What does this mean? This means one of the biggest limits of WC3 modding has been taken off. There is so much more map makers and other types of modders can do now! This makes room for more creativity, complexity, and higher quality content, along with more things to experience and improve in custom games online. The top RPGs can finally be expanded. Epic strategy maps can now have more room for upping the quality without sacrificing quantity. Horror, first person shooter, anime, Sci-Fi, and more types of maps can be taken to a whole another level. We can also see more hi-res imports from models, textures, etc.

There are also some World Editor and file changes (including bug fixes) reported by some users, and you can discuss some of the specifics in this thread or throughout the Patch Discussion forum. We'll hope to have some sort of list of the changes and bug fixes.

Here you can find our thread from may regarding our meeting with Blizzard about The Future of Warcraft. You can find the PDF document Blizzard seems to be following attached to the bottom of the mini-article's first post. We know there haven't been any melee / ladder changes, but those things plus more emphasized in the document we sent Blizzard.

UPDATE: Blizzard confirms everything! Added screenshot to the top. https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20752625996
Blizzard calls this a small patch, more to come in the future: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20752465862#post-17


The older, announcement news for this patch is below.​

Old News

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20752496109
[/center]

Battle.net players could be experiencing some downtime today.

@Ralle and I are betting it's just a compatibility patch that continues off of 1.27a. This should not be the 'big patch' we are expecting with our talks with Blizzard. However, with any patch, we'll keep everyone updated with details on this thread if anything notable happens!

UPDATE1: Patch notes. So far, unspecified bug fixes and maintenance.
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20752625996

UPDATE2: There are reports that the Northrend (Europe) realm is down or bugged at the moment. Azeroth (US East) seems to work, though.
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20752465862?page=1

UPDATE3: The Battle.net realms appear to be working now. Reported quick fix: Patch on a different server than Northrend, then Northrend should be able to work.

UPDATE4: Northrend is undergoing official maintenance / downtime.

UPDATE5: Maintenance appears to be over.

Two days ago, PC gamer put together an amazing article for anyone who's played a Blizzard game. It details the complete history of Blizzard and its games, including everything from The Lost Vikings (1992), Diablo 2 (2000), Overwatch (2016), and everything between. PC Gamer: The Complete History of Blizzard Games on PC

Here's a thorough excerpt from Scott Mercer's part of the Warcraft 3 section. It's actually filled with a load of great, uplifting things regarding the modding community (that's us!) and the world editor. If you want to skip to that, feel free to scroll down to the texts highlighted in gold.​

Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (2002)
Today, the Horde. Tomorrow, the World.

Scott Mercer, 20 year Blizzard veteran, Principal Designer on Overwatch and game designer on Warcraft 3:

"Early on during Warcraft 3 development, there was even more focus on the lower unit counts and the heroes. The concept was running around in that party, where here's your hero and here's your footmen along with it. The gameplay was even more of that. And then we actually took it back to sort of this in-between state, where there was absolutely base building, this normal RTS sense of you start small, build up, go through a tech tree. But it was the heroes, and the fact that the heroes leveled and had items, there were all these RPG elements that got added to the RTS genre through Warcraft 3. That concept alone is what I think inspired DotA to do what they did.

"The level editor that the players ended up having was the exact same level editor we needed to create the campaign. When you talk about the Warcraft 3 level editor, you have to go back to the Warcraft 2 level editor. We made the campaign for Warcraft 2 with that editor. It was very limited in what you could do. I think most all of the maps ended with 'destroy all the enemy buildings.' Going forward with Starcraft, we improved the editor, added more ways for you to win, more things we could do. You saw that in the Starcraft campaign where there was a bit more variety in the types of missions that we had there, and that was due to the editor becoming more robust.

“And then going forward into War 3, in early development, we knew we needed to create an even better editor because Warcraft 2I was our first 3D game. We wanted to do all the in-game cinematics and storytelling within the game, so the editor had to be even more robust...We had to create the camera system. There were the in-game cinematics we had, usually at the beginnings and ends of missions, where there was a character interaction. We actually had to be able to place those cameras inside the game world. What the editor allowed us to do was move the map around, the view of what the player would see, and take snapshots and sort of create cameras out of that. It was that kind of camera control that I think a lot of people used in the mod community to create these modes of 'oh, here's these crazy RPGs that are like third-person over a character.' There were a lot of things we could do with that. But that was all going back to needing to make these in-game cinematics.

“A lot of the very important features that the Warcraft 3 editor got over time were things that we needed, that made our lives easier, making the game. Things like being able to create new units with, choosing a piece of art, assigning a bunch of stats to that, if we could do that in the editor, then designers could do that without having to go bug programmers to put in the game. The editor allowed us to be very nimble with our designs in the campaign and really allowed our programmers to work on bigger issues. The mod community basically took all that and ran with it."

"The scale [of the mod scene] absolutely took us by surprise… We couldn't have imagined those kinds of mods would end up existing. We were very excited about it. It jazzed us up. A lot of the ideas that came from the mod community were things that, when we worked on Frozen Throne, we integrated some of those. Like the very last mission of the Orc campaign in the expansion took a lot of its gameplay cues from the Aeon of Strife, Dota type games with waves crashing into each other.

“It was a super exciting time. We just tried to go in and play them occasionally and see what people wanted. And all through this we were getting feedback from these mapmakers saying 'Hey, could you fix this?' There were actually some bugs to fix, and new features they wanted. A lot of those features were things we were like 'yeah totally, if we give you those features, we get those features in our own work.' It was this wonderful time of the community feeding on our creativity, we were feeding on their creativity. And the Warcraft 3 editor was allowing all this to take place."

This might be a bit technical, but it's very important. If you remember the old site, we had states for every resource (now called bundles) and those were pending, awaiting update, approved and rejected.
Until today we have had a different system. Pending bundles were submitted in a sub repository called "Submissions" and when approved moved into the main repository. If rejected, they were moved into "Substandard" unless they were stolen/inappropriate/broken in which case they got deleted.
With this system, bundles did not have a state, instead they were put in a place named after the state. This is inferior because when looking at the bundle you would have to look where it is located instead of what state it has. Also, pending bundles would only be visible when looking specifically inside of "Submissions".

We have received a lot of feedback about the fact that pending submissions are less visible in the new system. Turns out it's very helpful to interleave submissions with approved bundles to get feedback to the authors and feedback for the moderators/reviewers to make better and faster decisions. It also means that even if we have a big backlog of pending bundles, it's not as serious because they are still visible and as accessible as the approved ones.

Because of this, today we are re-introducing bundle state. It is not 100% as you know it, but it will feel similar enough. Here are the new states:

	Pending	When you have submitted a bundle.
	Awaiting Update	A moderator/reviewer has requested that you make some changes.
	Approved	Your bundle is approved.
	Substandard	Your bundle is low quality / buggy (and never fixed) / a very simple edit.
	Restricted	Your bundle is stolen / ripped / broken (and never fixed) / inappropriate.

Bundles will have these icons wherever they are displayed. You will be able to filter between the states in repositories and the search page. This also means that the "Submissions" and "Substandard" sections are going away.

With this new system also comes a new "Moderate" button for moderators/reviewers to simplify the process of going through bundles.

Enjoy.

SpasMaster is proud to give you
VERSION 2.3.0

After over 2 months of hard work, Sunken City brings one of its biggest updates ever! This version contains an array of features, over some of which I will briefly touch upon in this post.

• Features
• Discord
• Download & Links

• 
  INSPECT
  Your Backpack will now have the Inspect ability which allows your hero to indicated areas and objects in the search for clues or lore! Hundreds of lines of text containing story and secrets await! The addition of this feature has caused major changes to existing areas, the additions of new ones, including new puzzles and secrets.
  
  
  A few glimpses at the new Inspect System
  
  
  
  SHOP CHANGES
  Improvements to items, new additions, replacements and more await you in the shop. This includes the rework of Elixirs and changes to Legendary items and the way they are acquired.
  
  CLASS CHANGES
  Adjustments for the Death Knight, New model for the Berserker, Reworks for the Druid, Mage, Rogue and Windmaster and many more changes and bugfixes await!
  
  MORE!
  Changes to Glyphs, Altars of Atal'ai, Difficulty Adjustments... The new version holds many other surprises for you. I hope you can all experience everything that I have worked on in the past months and I sincerely hope you will enjoy it!
  
• 
  DISCORD
  With the release of 2.3.0, I'd like to announce to Hiveworkshop that we have just recently created our own Discord server where we can all gather parties and play together. Regardless if you can use BattleNet or not, we will help you setup yourself for games with us! Join us now by clicking the image below!
  
  
  
• 
  

  Forum

  Changelog Discord Server Facebook Page