Hosted Project: WME
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2008
- Messages
- 2,562
Hi guys. I wanted to post an apology to Hive and everyone about my behavior.
Since about 2017 I hit a dark place in my personal life and personal relationships and lived completely in denial about it and pretended it wasn't so or that it did not matter. That is probably why I was writing Retera Model Studio at night after work in my apartment back then, because it was like an escapism to feel valuable in a very complex technological way. During that time I got further away from spending face to face time with real humans and became a YouTube addict instead. But as an egotistical person I was never admitting to myself that I had any real problem.
A lot of the stuff YouTube selected for me would be videos of 30-year-old balding World of Warcraft player(s) and nightcore music videos themed after insane perseverence in the face of any adversity. This was like its training program to make me into someone who keeps doing Warcraft 3 modding no matter what.
It was about that same time that -- not on the basis of who I was becoming, but who I had been -- a then Blizzard employee working on Reforged in 2017 messaged me online and told me I should apply to Blizzard. After some back and forth I just got annoyed with it all and never applied. I believed I was better than them.
After that, I descended into kind of like years of trolling. During the 2017 and 2018 patch cycles I was very anti-Blizzard in my sentiment because I felt like they did not afford this game the same level of care that I did when I worked on the Retera Model Studio. I had this vision that if the game itself was at my fingertips just like the Retera Model Studio codebase, then maybe it wouldn't be this way. Maybe I could do anything or fix anything, just like Retera Model Studio, and be free of ridiculous bugs. That was the pipe dream, and the joke I began to descend into.
And that was why, when the opportunity presented itself, I happily copied the code from Ghostwolf's viewer to make what became known as Warsmash. The model viewer... with game logic! Surely this would be that pipe dream that could set me free!
But because of the base level of living in denial, this meant that in the end I put my Warcraft 3 modding efforts and social connections into a twisted form oriented towards going where no one else can follow, and to show off about it. That's not the way. If you were going to fix what is happening with Warcraft 3 by actually making an open source engine, you would need a team of like-minded people and public information about how to understand how the engine is built.
But Reforged release kind of shook me out of denial for a bit. I saw that all the other people's brains were also lead down rabbit holes to be anti-Blizzard, but for each their own different reasons. I had thought everybody was just going to accept Reforged and play it, and rebelling and trying to rewrite the game would be my own personal thing that probably wouldn't resonate with other people.
I am quite convinced that Warsmash was an eventuality that only came to be because of Reforged. It was like the culmination of how I began to feel about the Classic Games Team in 2019 to try to begin this personal rebellion to "rewrite the game." At first when I was copying all the graphics math from Hive's viewer it was hellish and not very enjoyable, but I wanted to see it through for the sake of ideology. I had that kind of brain-zombified feeling from overdone nightcore music on YouTube. Someone showed me the John Wick movie at some point in 2018-2019, and I didnt like the way it glorified the violence. It kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Somehow that became our thing, between YouTube and I, leading up to Reforged release. It was like, even though I didn't like the violence, YouTube wanted me to like it. They wanted to glorify the idea of a guy who was just living alone to himself trying to mod a little Warcraft 3, but then some newbie kid with the supposed blessing from above (like Classic Games Team LOL) comes and beats up Retera's game and leaves him to die, without knowing Retera is the one special guy who can sink your existence.
And that's not true; that's the delusion that produces Warsmash. I am not better than other Warcraft 3 modders or other people. I am another person, like how other people are people.
So, after Reforged release and I was just getting started on Warsmash -- and it was so immensely complicated, more than almost any Warcraft 3 modding not because it was more breadth of content (Warcraft 3 mods have vast expanses of "more of the same") but because it was more "depth" of having to mod. Like having to learn linear algebra just to draw a Footman, instead of just clicking the Footman button.
And the more, and the more, and the more... as I got deeper into trying to do the thing, I began to alienate myself. I began to feel like, "this is the craziest thing I've ever done, snd it probably glorifies me and makes me better than any other Warcraft 3 modder who came before me." And yet this is not a healthy nor correct way to think. Other people (who don't have a job or whatever standing in their way) have, at times, messaged me privately about their own Warsmash replica style inventions that came together better and faster than mine.
And so it was that I began to see the extraordinary complexity and care that must be taken that plagues efforts to update the real Warcraft 3 even for the brightest of people.
And maybe that's partly why I did it. I realized how complex and how error-prone the changes on Patch 1.33 PTR were and would be, and I realized it was the 20th birthday of Warcraft 3, and so I thought it would be funny to create like a satirical excuse for myself to disappear from this space. Whatever it was that brought me here originally, to online communities surrounding Warcraft 3 modding, seems long since corrupted within me. And I don't understand how to win against it, or how to turn back to the simpler time when I wasn't as negative.
Warsmash opened my eyes to the truth, that all the theories and the ranting about how a modding specific design could lead to a future where modding was easier.... were right. Those possibilities do exist technologically. But they do not exist governmentally.
Anyway, I was able to see them and briefly see that light, like reaching out and touching a force that is beyond ourselves. And yet, I never finished it. To finish it would require an extraordinary amount of additional time. Instead, I continue to taint it again and again with "the original." I got to a point where I was implementing my own equivalent of the Battlenet server protocols for use with my game engine, but the UI to connect with it was loading Warcraft 3's UI files by name and I was just guessing at their function.
And, to do that and use their UI and use their buttons instead of drawing my own, it feels kind of sick. I was so close, maybe just hours away (if I could ever sit down and convince myself to actually focus) from letting people go onto the "Battlenet" button of the main menu, connect to warsmash.net, and host and join Custom Games.
But it became less and less of a mimic and more and more an attempt to just directly load the UI and assets and maps of the original. Given the power to do anything, do that seems sick and twisted. And yet it was still fascinating enough that it was hard to stop.
So then it was Warcraft 3's birthday. And I had too much to drink and thought I would break away from this habbit and make a funny excuse to entertain people on my YouTube.
It was a terrible idea. I made the same mistake as when I first created Warsmash. I forgot the thoughts and opinions of those people truly beyond myself.
This video is a grotesque outcome of my actions. Even though I took my satire video down within 2 days, it doesn't matter. It does not change how people use this stuff to bolster their personal narratives against Blizzard.
Blizzard did not take down Warsmash, I did. Blizzard did not send me a Cease & Desist email to Warsmash. That was a humorous background for my video made by a Cease and Desist generator from one of the top hits on Google when searching for a Cease and Desist generator.
I'm like... the bad guy. And people think I'm the good guy. I was helping feed hatred towards Blizzard for years leading up to the Reforged release. I made all kinds of accounts everywhere and messed with everyone. I made a YouTube video claiming the World Editor would have an integrated model editor, because I knee it wouldn't and I wanted to stick it to them. I made an account named Kantarion on Reforged forums and posted nonsense, and did the same on Warcraft3United discord server. And if memory serves, that was even before Reforged released. It was all like a game to me. I am not responsible for the Kantarion account on Hive, but maybe it doesn't matter. That's probably just someone else playing the same game. I have no idea who the original user Kantarion even was, exactly, other than that he was the kind of extremist it would be funny to pretend to be. The current users by that name on these systems, even though they aren't me, might be other people just trolling. Maybe it is in all of us.
And so I became this terrible visage, something with login access to Retera and yet having little to no faith in the ladder system offered by Patch 1.33 and just kind of... exhausted by Warcraft 3's existence in my life. I wanted to push it all away and blame it all on a silly fake video hinting at a Warsmash C&D, and yet the world took that all too seriously plus I kept pretending to be another discord account with an anime girl avatar in the Discord server made by the "real" Kantarion so that I could feed them some "purist" Reforged HD models (which to me is a stupid idea, although I am capable of fulfilling their modeling requests in some cases). I think originally I wanted to keep an eye on people I see as dangerous trolls, but they really have a way of succeeding at getting ya to come back for more and make more 3d stuff for them.
And, continuing to use that discord account, "animepurism2023" it was called, eventually eroded my willpower until I was back logging in as Retera again even when the overreacting of the world meant it would have been better if I kept pretending like Warsmash really did get a C&D instead of spreading the truth that my video was a fake satire thing around to people to open their eyes.
This is all crazy, but that is my point. I was starting to want to troll on Patch 1.33. To resent it, for no particular reason. To accept the narrative that Blizzard was hurting us by releasing this in an unfinished state worse than 1.32.
And that was when I had an idea. Even when I was this far gone, probably like Jonah from that story with the whale -- who needs to be thrown overboard to save everyone else -- even if I'm like that, I had this idea:
Here, in the face of it all, I can prove that I am better than Blizzard Entertainment's employees one last time by apologizing for everything I did as a part of this modding community and the negative consequences my actions have had. You know why that makes me better? Because unlike me, Blizzard Entertainment will never apologize.
So, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I was egotistical and pretended to rewrite the game better than them, even though mine is actually worse and unfinished. I'm sorry I took down the Warsmash repo on github and was not really planning on putting it back up until the "Battlenet" menu button allows us to play together.
I'm sorry for everything. I don't know what will happen to me. I'm currently in active violation of Hive Workshop site rules by using two different accounts intermittently. I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for not wanting to be Retera anymore and hoping to just be a gamer who plays some War3 on rare occasions. I'm sorry I led you guys to believe rewriting Warcraft 3 was easy and Blizzard sucks. It's not easy, and the company that produced Warcraft 3 in 2002 gave me a ton of memories in my life that I'll always remember that don't suck. I'm sorry for being attracted to female night elves if the rumor is true that the artist Roman actually modelled them after his favorite porn stars back in the 2000s. I'm sorry for all that.
To try to benefit others in contrast to these dark times, I did some recent updates to Retera Model Studio so that it could load ingame models again on Patch 1.33. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if the community version 0.05 will eventually supercede everything I did and end up a better and more stable extension of the same design goals and ideas. I'm sorry I didn't help more with that.
So, that is my apology to Warcraft 3. Maybe I will disappear, like I suggested in my Bilbo Baggins video. But if I do, it will be my own fault/decision. It may be because now is the time when Warcraft 3 official modding is becoming too hard, and the time when we all lose our way and finally see Kam was right when he said Reforged was almost going to be far worse than it is, if he and his coworkers had not objected to management decisions back then.
All things considered maybe 1.33 is not so bad, because what I refer to here is also the worse case of what worse things may follow after it (more than the patch itself).
So, again, my sincerest apologies for egotistically deriving a sense of superiority off of War3 and not really caring about others. On my other Hive account where I played the Custom Games, I came to realize you guys make things that are REALLY fun even if it's just somebody's first map and he just draw in a ton of units battling forever while the player helps. To use the Hive in that profoundly different way of trying to play and enjoy War3 custom games was amazing to me. It was elegantly simple, and yet so fun.
I'm sorry I didn't do that more often.
I'm sorry if I contributed to the downfall of Warcraft 3 and drove my War3 modding online personality nuts.
Since about 2017 I hit a dark place in my personal life and personal relationships and lived completely in denial about it and pretended it wasn't so or that it did not matter. That is probably why I was writing Retera Model Studio at night after work in my apartment back then, because it was like an escapism to feel valuable in a very complex technological way. During that time I got further away from spending face to face time with real humans and became a YouTube addict instead. But as an egotistical person I was never admitting to myself that I had any real problem.
A lot of the stuff YouTube selected for me would be videos of 30-year-old balding World of Warcraft player(s) and nightcore music videos themed after insane perseverence in the face of any adversity. This was like its training program to make me into someone who keeps doing Warcraft 3 modding no matter what.
It was about that same time that -- not on the basis of who I was becoming, but who I had been -- a then Blizzard employee working on Reforged in 2017 messaged me online and told me I should apply to Blizzard. After some back and forth I just got annoyed with it all and never applied. I believed I was better than them.
After that, I descended into kind of like years of trolling. During the 2017 and 2018 patch cycles I was very anti-Blizzard in my sentiment because I felt like they did not afford this game the same level of care that I did when I worked on the Retera Model Studio. I had this vision that if the game itself was at my fingertips just like the Retera Model Studio codebase, then maybe it wouldn't be this way. Maybe I could do anything or fix anything, just like Retera Model Studio, and be free of ridiculous bugs. That was the pipe dream, and the joke I began to descend into.
And that was why, when the opportunity presented itself, I happily copied the code from Ghostwolf's viewer to make what became known as Warsmash. The model viewer... with game logic! Surely this would be that pipe dream that could set me free!
But because of the base level of living in denial, this meant that in the end I put my Warcraft 3 modding efforts and social connections into a twisted form oriented towards going where no one else can follow, and to show off about it. That's not the way. If you were going to fix what is happening with Warcraft 3 by actually making an open source engine, you would need a team of like-minded people and public information about how to understand how the engine is built.
But Reforged release kind of shook me out of denial for a bit. I saw that all the other people's brains were also lead down rabbit holes to be anti-Blizzard, but for each their own different reasons. I had thought everybody was just going to accept Reforged and play it, and rebelling and trying to rewrite the game would be my own personal thing that probably wouldn't resonate with other people.
I am quite convinced that Warsmash was an eventuality that only came to be because of Reforged. It was like the culmination of how I began to feel about the Classic Games Team in 2019 to try to begin this personal rebellion to "rewrite the game." At first when I was copying all the graphics math from Hive's viewer it was hellish and not very enjoyable, but I wanted to see it through for the sake of ideology. I had that kind of brain-zombified feeling from overdone nightcore music on YouTube. Someone showed me the John Wick movie at some point in 2018-2019, and I didnt like the way it glorified the violence. It kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Somehow that became our thing, between YouTube and I, leading up to Reforged release. It was like, even though I didn't like the violence, YouTube wanted me to like it. They wanted to glorify the idea of a guy who was just living alone to himself trying to mod a little Warcraft 3, but then some newbie kid with the supposed blessing from above (like Classic Games Team LOL) comes and beats up Retera's game and leaves him to die, without knowing Retera is the one special guy who can sink your existence.
And that's not true; that's the delusion that produces Warsmash. I am not better than other Warcraft 3 modders or other people. I am another person, like how other people are people.
So, after Reforged release and I was just getting started on Warsmash -- and it was so immensely complicated, more than almost any Warcraft 3 modding not because it was more breadth of content (Warcraft 3 mods have vast expanses of "more of the same") but because it was more "depth" of having to mod. Like having to learn linear algebra just to draw a Footman, instead of just clicking the Footman button.
And the more, and the more, and the more... as I got deeper into trying to do the thing, I began to alienate myself. I began to feel like, "this is the craziest thing I've ever done, snd it probably glorifies me and makes me better than any other Warcraft 3 modder who came before me." And yet this is not a healthy nor correct way to think. Other people (who don't have a job or whatever standing in their way) have, at times, messaged me privately about their own Warsmash replica style inventions that came together better and faster than mine.
And so it was that I began to see the extraordinary complexity and care that must be taken that plagues efforts to update the real Warcraft 3 even for the brightest of people.
And maybe that's partly why I did it. I realized how complex and how error-prone the changes on Patch 1.33 PTR were and would be, and I realized it was the 20th birthday of Warcraft 3, and so I thought it would be funny to create like a satirical excuse for myself to disappear from this space. Whatever it was that brought me here originally, to online communities surrounding Warcraft 3 modding, seems long since corrupted within me. And I don't understand how to win against it, or how to turn back to the simpler time when I wasn't as negative.
Warsmash opened my eyes to the truth, that all the theories and the ranting about how a modding specific design could lead to a future where modding was easier.... were right. Those possibilities do exist technologically. But they do not exist governmentally.
Anyway, I was able to see them and briefly see that light, like reaching out and touching a force that is beyond ourselves. And yet, I never finished it. To finish it would require an extraordinary amount of additional time. Instead, I continue to taint it again and again with "the original." I got to a point where I was implementing my own equivalent of the Battlenet server protocols for use with my game engine, but the UI to connect with it was loading Warcraft 3's UI files by name and I was just guessing at their function.
And, to do that and use their UI and use their buttons instead of drawing my own, it feels kind of sick. I was so close, maybe just hours away (if I could ever sit down and convince myself to actually focus) from letting people go onto the "Battlenet" button of the main menu, connect to warsmash.net, and host and join Custom Games.
But it became less and less of a mimic and more and more an attempt to just directly load the UI and assets and maps of the original. Given the power to do anything, do that seems sick and twisted. And yet it was still fascinating enough that it was hard to stop.
So then it was Warcraft 3's birthday. And I had too much to drink and thought I would break away from this habbit and make a funny excuse to entertain people on my YouTube.
It was a terrible idea. I made the same mistake as when I first created Warsmash. I forgot the thoughts and opinions of those people truly beyond myself.
This video is a grotesque outcome of my actions. Even though I took my satire video down within 2 days, it doesn't matter. It does not change how people use this stuff to bolster their personal narratives against Blizzard.
Blizzard did not take down Warsmash, I did. Blizzard did not send me a Cease & Desist email to Warsmash. That was a humorous background for my video made by a Cease and Desist generator from one of the top hits on Google when searching for a Cease and Desist generator.
I'm like... the bad guy. And people think I'm the good guy. I was helping feed hatred towards Blizzard for years leading up to the Reforged release. I made all kinds of accounts everywhere and messed with everyone. I made a YouTube video claiming the World Editor would have an integrated model editor, because I knee it wouldn't and I wanted to stick it to them. I made an account named Kantarion on Reforged forums and posted nonsense, and did the same on Warcraft3United discord server. And if memory serves, that was even before Reforged released. It was all like a game to me. I am not responsible for the Kantarion account on Hive, but maybe it doesn't matter. That's probably just someone else playing the same game. I have no idea who the original user Kantarion even was, exactly, other than that he was the kind of extremist it would be funny to pretend to be. The current users by that name on these systems, even though they aren't me, might be other people just trolling. Maybe it is in all of us.
And so I became this terrible visage, something with login access to Retera and yet having little to no faith in the ladder system offered by Patch 1.33 and just kind of... exhausted by Warcraft 3's existence in my life. I wanted to push it all away and blame it all on a silly fake video hinting at a Warsmash C&D, and yet the world took that all too seriously plus I kept pretending to be another discord account with an anime girl avatar in the Discord server made by the "real" Kantarion so that I could feed them some "purist" Reforged HD models (which to me is a stupid idea, although I am capable of fulfilling their modeling requests in some cases). I think originally I wanted to keep an eye on people I see as dangerous trolls, but they really have a way of succeeding at getting ya to come back for more and make more 3d stuff for them.
And, continuing to use that discord account, "animepurism2023" it was called, eventually eroded my willpower until I was back logging in as Retera again even when the overreacting of the world meant it would have been better if I kept pretending like Warsmash really did get a C&D instead of spreading the truth that my video was a fake satire thing around to people to open their eyes.
This is all crazy, but that is my point. I was starting to want to troll on Patch 1.33. To resent it, for no particular reason. To accept the narrative that Blizzard was hurting us by releasing this in an unfinished state worse than 1.32.
And that was when I had an idea. Even when I was this far gone, probably like Jonah from that story with the whale -- who needs to be thrown overboard to save everyone else -- even if I'm like that, I had this idea:
Here, in the face of it all, I can prove that I am better than Blizzard Entertainment's employees one last time by apologizing for everything I did as a part of this modding community and the negative consequences my actions have had. You know why that makes me better? Because unlike me, Blizzard Entertainment will never apologize.
So, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I was egotistical and pretended to rewrite the game better than them, even though mine is actually worse and unfinished. I'm sorry I took down the Warsmash repo on github and was not really planning on putting it back up until the "Battlenet" menu button allows us to play together.
I'm sorry for everything. I don't know what will happen to me. I'm currently in active violation of Hive Workshop site rules by using two different accounts intermittently. I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for not wanting to be Retera anymore and hoping to just be a gamer who plays some War3 on rare occasions. I'm sorry I led you guys to believe rewriting Warcraft 3 was easy and Blizzard sucks. It's not easy, and the company that produced Warcraft 3 in 2002 gave me a ton of memories in my life that I'll always remember that don't suck. I'm sorry for being attracted to female night elves if the rumor is true that the artist Roman actually modelled them after his favorite porn stars back in the 2000s. I'm sorry for all that.
To try to benefit others in contrast to these dark times, I did some recent updates to Retera Model Studio so that it could load ingame models again on Patch 1.33. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if the community version 0.05 will eventually supercede everything I did and end up a better and more stable extension of the same design goals and ideas. I'm sorry I didn't help more with that.
So, that is my apology to Warcraft 3. Maybe I will disappear, like I suggested in my Bilbo Baggins video. But if I do, it will be my own fault/decision. It may be because now is the time when Warcraft 3 official modding is becoming too hard, and the time when we all lose our way and finally see Kam was right when he said Reforged was almost going to be far worse than it is, if he and his coworkers had not objected to management decisions back then.
All things considered maybe 1.33 is not so bad, because what I refer to here is also the worse case of what worse things may follow after it (more than the patch itself).
So, again, my sincerest apologies for egotistically deriving a sense of superiority off of War3 and not really caring about others. On my other Hive account where I played the Custom Games, I came to realize you guys make things that are REALLY fun even if it's just somebody's first map and he just draw in a ton of units battling forever while the player helps. To use the Hive in that profoundly different way of trying to play and enjoy War3 custom games was amazing to me. It was elegantly simple, and yet so fun.
I'm sorry I didn't do that more often.
I'm sorry if I contributed to the downfall of Warcraft 3 and drove my War3 modding online personality nuts.
Last edited:
![A]mun](/data/avatars/m/140/140771.jpg?1674379729){kind=avatar}
