There are a lot of people with nostalgia like you and they split into enjoying the Warcraft 3 technology in many different ways. So, the vision of the Reforged developer team at Blizzard Entertainment who created the Warcraft 3 Reforged was that they would make one big super version of the game that supported all the maps for everyone and played both the old graphics and the new graphics or crossplay multiplayer where some players had the old graphics and some players had the new graphics.
Unfortunately, because they wanted to do all that but their budgets got cut by the high level Activision management after Mike Morhaime left Blizzard Entertainment, Reforged was stuck getting created by a skeleton crew who pushed it to production, but on Release Day (Jan 28, 2022) the Reforged game install deleted the old Frozen Throne install from the computers of the people most loyal to the company who had been using the newest version, and it replaced that with a 30 GB installation instead of a 2 GB installation even if they did not pay for Reforged. If they did not have 30 GB of hard drive space, it deleted Warcraft 3 from their computers automatically with no way to get it back until they cleared hard drive space and installed the Reforged. And this was because in theory installating Reforged and disabling the new graphics IS the latest patch of Frozen Throne, and therefore crossplay between new and old is achieved as promised. But because of the funding cuts, the Reforged developers did not have time to learn to understand the old 2002 game's menu data, which was in a custom menu format invented by Blizzard in 2002 that was not well documented. Without the available time/money to learn to understand the existing system on Warcraft III, the developers had to make the choice to replace Warcraft III menus with a React Native HTML Web Page. On this new Web UI menu, many features like clans and custom campaigns were not available on Warcraft III even though the underlying game system would have probably still supported them since it was a web page on top of the Frozen Throne and everything had to be remade in a hurry. But the Web Page wasn't interconnected with buttons to launch Custom Campaigns how they once were in 2003, so that feature got lost, for example. And so did several others.
So people were upset about all these "missing features" and about their feeling that their game got deleted, and it created a lot of rebellious Warcraft 3 fans who still really like the old 2003 game but don't want to feel that feeling of powerlessness when things are taken away from them. More recently, probably to fulfill their legal obligations, Activision told someone to publish the unfinished works like hooking the new web page's "Custom Campaign" button to the old game engine. They also added Ranked Play in the multiplayer on the August 17, 2022 patch (fairly recently). But these features were developed by the old team of Reforged developers in 2019 or 2020 and were sitting in the office in the coffers at Activision until the new person/people of Activision in the past few months published the old unfinished features. And so, they are unfinished. The patch that they pushed out then in August 17, 2022 initially dramatically reduced the stability of the game (worse than even Reforged historically had been, despite some people complaining that Reforged was unstable) because the new people pushing out the patch were new and were releasing stuff that they did not themselves create and so they did not have time/money to fix enough to even maintain Reforged stuff as it had been.
But, my sense or description of "less stability" in these recent months is somewhat emotional. And because of those feelings, I played the official game less. It is possible that if you play the game casually, you might never encounter the technical issues that trouble people like me. Examples of non-subjective, publicly known problems in their current game are:
- The game caches all files that are loaded, so if you play a custom map that replaces Footman with a gold armor guy then play some other custom map with normal Footmen, the other custom map might load a gold armor footman. Because of file loading edge cases where it caches too much
- The unfinished cache system supposedly causes the game to infinitely load more and more RAM on the computer, so if you don't restart Warcraft 3 Reforged after playing maybe it will eventually crash (this is a rumor and didn't happen to me yet)
- The concept of animated textures in the old Frozen Throne graphics mode was corrupted, so if you play a map with Naga for example and build a Naga building with water art on there, it will glitch and show dirt colors or solid black over top of the animated water
- The caching mechanism breaks how campaign saves work, so the rumor on the forums for people who play campaign is that Rexxar campaign jumping between maps in an RPG mode jumps to wrong places from badly cached files or something and breaks and corrupts when people try to play it.
- There are other rumors about the campaign crashing constantly on certain missions for certain users on these newer patches
- Players who use the new Ranked Play multiplayer that came out in the past few months will be awarded wins or losses to their record that are sometimes opposite the outcome of the game (such as a player who wins, then loses points for it or has a "Loss" added to their record)
- Some features in World Editor such as the "Gameplay Constants > Damage Tables" will crash the World Editor by opening and closing the feature, resulting in loss of any unsaved custom map data
All of the issues noted above, as far as I know, are new since August. Despite these issues reported on the forums, any fixes for them are going to come incredibly, incredibly slowly. I heard a rumor that the caching thing that was crashing the campaign a bunch and messing up certain situations in custom maps might be fixed on the Public Test Realm that publishes next week. I have confirmed the issue to exist on my local computer in the live client, but I have not personally confirmed that the upcoming patch fixes it yet.
So, I'm sorry to bore you with all this history but I think that when you come from zero knowledge about where Warcraft III is today, having this kind of history might help you to understand your options. There are players who resent the Reforged, and so they use backups of the old game and bootleg servers to try to play together on something that they know will not change out from under them, for example if they try to make a custom map. If you decide to jump backwards like this, you have to either get the game install from a jank link that might or might not still work from Blizzard (hard to find, there is 1 URL that still points to a downloadable installer for the old patch 1.27) or you can download the game backups from a third party like Hive Workshop. If you get the Frozen Throne game from the third party like Hive Workshop, for legal reasons it will only run on your computer if you still have a CD Key, which is something that Blizzard no longer sells. So, if you already have a CD Key saved somewhere -- even if it is on your Battle.net account -- then you are the true winner. Because in that case, you can tell Blizzard to download the Reforged (but with new art disabled) and try the new thing using only your CD Key and not buying anything new. But at the same time, you could also download the old backup of the old game from Hive Workshop and then put your CD Key into it and play the old version too.
But if you do not have a CD Key and your only option in your head is to pay Blizzard again for the game, then the only product that they offer is the Reforged game installation (which can crossplay to "classic graphics" and emulate the old Frozen Throne game and play its custom maps directly, often with a high degree of accuracy and feature support other than the bugs I listed above).
In all this social confusion and disagreement between players about which game version to use, there have become even more options for which World Editor version to use. Some people make maps on the old Frozen Throne game's World Editor then play those maps on Reforged. However, if you make maps on Reforged World Editor you cannot play them on the old version, and if you open and save a map with that Reforged World Editor then it will lock to only open on the Reforged game version without telling you. There are some
third party options to undo this but it always sounded like a headache (in my opinion, having not tried it). The patch 1.31 that released for Frozen Throne leading up to Reforged (and therefore Reforged itself) added support for maps to use Lua Scripts instead of the old Jass code that was previously produced by the Trigger Editor, and the Lua scripts run faster. So, some people make maps hardly using the World Editor at all and invoking code and scripting from third party programs like VSCode. I saw a guy making a cool map using TypeScript to Lua conversion so that he wrote fairly modern looking TypeScript code for the triggers and systems in his map. But, you're not going to be able to do something like that directly from within the World Editor.
Meanwhile, people who have the old UMSWE and an old backup of the old timey game like you mentioned are able to still use that to develop maps that they can play multiplayer on the live Reforged client that connects with Battle.net. There are really a ton of possibilities, and so anybody who tells you what World Editor to use amidst the complexity is going to be influenced by their own biases and opinions.
Personally, I have been trying to reach for the stars and ended up going where other people cannot easily follow, because I was trying to rewrite an emulator of the entire Warcraft III game so that I could go off and do my own thing in my own way. And it's really unfinished and wouldn't help you. But maybe that's an example of how a diaspora of disenfranchised hobbyists like me can each end up fighting their own battles for control over their little piece of the Warcraft 3 experience. And it makes it hard to know what World Editor to use. Maybe someone else will give you better advice.
