I really was almost going to DM you earlier, Barade, and clicked on create conversation and give it the title "A Man of Sound Principle" or something like that based on your earlier post that you wished you could contribute C++ code to WC3 itself. That thought really resonated with me.
But this... Why would you troll me like this? Do you want to hurt me?
I do not know how to make Warcraft III profitable or to make a salary from modding Warcraft III. I would not go to a respectable company like Blizzard and propose that I had experience nor knew how, because I do not have experience making a game profitable. Nor would I probably enjoy learning how to make a game become profitable. Because the means to make games become profitable is already evident. You have to use social manipulation to make people play them, then use the social manipulation to make those people pay you.
Anyone who applies to Blizzard is making a public statement that every purchase of Reforged, or every purchase of the future "Reforged Expansion" idea that supposedly would be the point of working there starting now, should partly go to this new applicant because of how good their ideas are. Imagine if I asked everyone who purchased Reforged to send me $0.60 right now because of how great I am and how I could make an expansion. That is hysterical. None of you would do it. So, what right have I to convince them to let me don the Blizzard moniker to make that same claim?
Or, if you're telling me to go work for my former WoW dealership, I am just not interested. WoW already exists so I would not get to have the fun of making it. The area for improvement now is in manipulation, and I don't feel like I would particularly enjoy using video games to manipulate people any better than any other job -- but there is a risk I might hate using video games in that way.
There is just no reason for Blizzard to hire me. If I had wanted to be that kind of person, I could have been trying to greenlight my own game IP on Steam and get "into the industry". But I did not do that and I am not doing that. The MDX/BLP/MPQ technology entertains me. So I created Retera Model Studio and now I am making a toy game engine to let me mod Warcraft III with no rules (i.e. I can do 3x5 command card, 3x3 item inventory, etc with incredibly minimal effort). What I am doing is the opposite of what their company will do. The Warcraft brand's value is now in manipulation. If I was a good employee, surely they would pressure me to switch over and make a Clash of Clans replica called Clash of Durotar Guilds or something. The fact that they would pressure for that is not the problem. The problem is that they would be measurably right to do so (financially).
There aren't people that want to buy Warcraft III. I preordered Reforged 50+ times, but when people saw I was doing that and just buying it on smurf accounts they got me to gift it to others instead. Then, at least one of the people I gifted to refunded. I wasn't buying it for them, I was buying it for the game. To me that's disgusting to see my effort to support the game be thwarted. But I was nice to them and didn't really say it that way to the guy at the time. But that's how it is. People really hate Warcraft III that much. I can't fix that. Family who played Warcraft 3 with me in my childhood called me on Discord and when I told them I was playing Reforged custom games they commanded me to stop playing and I gave in to the pressure and quit out of my game where I was a healer in an RPG and left the group to die. People really hate Warcraft III that much.
I am making the ability for me to keep modding Warcraft III because I am alone in what I want, and quirky, and just having fun. I will probably add a Lightning Editor to the Object Editor. I will probably add Weather Effect Editor tab, too. I will probably add a native to detect right clicks on "framehandle" instances in map scripts. I will probably add "Stats - Gold Cost" and "Stats - Lumber Cost" to every ability in the ability editor, and make "Order String Use/Turn On" in the ability editor (or some similar new flag if necessary) actually change the OrderID used for each ability so that two abilities that are both copied from the same in-game ability do not stack and bug in-game (maybe we would have to add a column in AbilityData.slk that finally exposes to the user what the default value is... some item abilities do not currently have a string mapped to their ID... so this one might take a while, maybe it's idealistic, etc). For now, on Warsmash, ability commands send both OrderID and HandleID and so there is no ambiguity and you just have perfect alignment between what the user wanted to command the unit to use, and what it uses. But supporting Issue*Order natives will require me to implement the "best guess" at HandleID and re-introduce the problematic conflicts we experience on Blizzard's engine.
There is not a Blizzard or a thing to apply to in order to do improvements to Warcraft III. That ship already sailed. Kam told me to apply in 2017 over and over, but I did not. The careers page never had a job description open for "guy who wants to hack away at making Warcraft III more moddable as a hobby with no motivation to make any profits from it for the next ten years." There was never a position open like that. When I asked about it, Kam said some of his friends had to apply 50 times to get jobs at Blizzard. So then I got slightly "offended" privately in a certain kind of way. I was nice about it, but in my head I was thinking that I didn't want to work at Blizzard, I wanted to mod Warcraft 3. So, I said to Kam, maybe I can be the guy who gives you suggestions from the outside, and that can be how I contribute.
I said to him at this time, and this is a direct quote from the chat log in 2017:
But what I really meant at the time is that obviously it was super predictable that since they had 15 years of radio silence on War3 -- not really silence, since there was nobody to do any talking -- it was pretty evident that people working at Blizzard do not work without purpose. So, if I was supposed to be a War3 related worker, then that would mean there was decided to be a financial opportunity on War3. Once that opportunity was met, predictably, there would be "the end", the point in time when I would have to decide whether to work somewhere else at Blizzard. In short, I foresaw where we are now.
I'm not interested in a "the end" to modding War3. I do not want to be the guy who does the server support for the Call of Duty ads on Blizzard Launcher. Why end up moving to work somewhere else in their company and climb their corporate ladder of nonsense only to ultimately be laid off or forced to work on mobile games or rapacious WoW in-game purchase systems if I could instead go and code Warsmash as a hobby while sustaining myself with some other job and some other means of contributing to society? And if Blizzard does a C&D on Warsmash then I could go back to modding Patch 1.26, I guess, and just make a conscious decision to accept the government enforced suffering.
I only suggest that Blizzard gives me the source code to War3 sometimes as a form of internet trolling in the hopes of maybe some day achieving social change towards a world where something like that could happen. They are not going to actually do it. Have any of you guys played WoW?
