Can't use World Editor without Frozen Throne and with only Reign of Chaos

[Lumberjohn]

I bought only Reign of Chaos on the blizzard shop and it's supposed to have a Reign of Chaos world editor. But when people try to launch it there's an error message 'Cannot find appropriate CD keys'

The only fix is getting a key for Frozen Throne but how do you access Reign of Chaos world editor? There has always been one and it always worked for windows.

• Consolidated Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne into one game executable and one World Editor

is a new patch "improvement" but i think this is the problem

 

[Lumberjohn]

I put in a ticket to blizzard and they said that you must purchase The Frozen Throne to get world editor now.

 

[MasterBlaster]

Or just buy TFT. It's not like it's that expensive, especially if you get it from other source than Blizzard shop

 

[andreasaspenberg]

you could buy the cd-rom version and not patch it all the way.

 

[Dr Super Good]

You need to login to update.

The TFT editor can still make RoC maps, but no one does seeing how WC3 TFT is already highly limited, let alone with more limits added to comply with RoC.

 

[pyf]

Hmm... One should imho not have to pay an extra fee (i.e. buy a game extension) in order to still be able to do what he / she could already do from the very beginning (read: 2002). I personally see Blizzard's decision as being a regression, and also as being detrimental to the average consumer and to the loyal fan.

Fun fact / reminder: according to Wikipedia, the World Editor is not officially supported as a product.


That being said, I also understand that the RoC version of the World Editor indeed has severe limitations, as DSG already said. But it is imho not for Blizzard to decide what one should keep using or not to create maps.

@Dr Super Good : did Blizzard update their ToU to reflect this change?

 

[Dr Super Good]

That being said, I also understand that the RoC version of the World Editor indeed has severe limitations, as DSG already said. But it is imho not for Blizzard to decide what one should keep using or not to create maps.

The problem is this licencing model conflicts with Blizzards newer licencing models and development processes. It is extremely difficult to maintain 2 or more versions of the game, one original and an expansion, hence their newer licencing models is to give everyone the expansion and then licence lock out expansion only content. This way only 1 version of the game exists, the latest version, and one still needs the expansion for access to expansion features. World of Warcraft, Diablo III, StarCraft II, etc all use this model.

In the case of WC3 this migration may only be partly done at the moment, as is a lot of things. In the future they might remove RoC completely. This has already happened with StarCraft, which also had an expansion, where now the entire game is available for free and only available at Broodwars expansion level to everyone.

 

[andreasaspenberg]

starcraft used a different game model where there were only 1 executable with both campaigs accessable from within. warcraft 3 used separate executables with separate meny graphics. even the beta had separate menu graphics. starcraft had only one version of the menus.