Wow this discussion went in flames.
I can share my copy of warcraft 3, since I haven't downloaded or installed any patches
in 15+ years. Also has version switcher.
Around this time and as they went to Patch 1.30, they added the ability to press ALT+ENTER to switch between Windowed and Fullscreen while the game is running.
To me this is the only convenience.
I have old pc's that can run wc3 way better in window mode
but they can't play because GameRanger only uses fullscreen.
So I can't play on those even when I have people for lan parties.
Generally, LAN is bad for corporate economics because you can't easily record data analytics on LAN games, and they weren't validating CD keys. So, making it irritating to use gradually eliminates the issues as people forget it even exists, and in the phone addict culture people don't keep friends face to face anymore to go to LAN parties anyway.
Game Ranger is still very much alive. I've never used Garena or ENT.
And it runs the game in LAN. Proxy LAN as I understand it.
I agree that LAN is outdated tech at this point, as much as a Walkman on cassettes.
I use it because of the increased convenience that you can play online with others without port forwarding, on days went the desync issues aren't bad an the Join Game button is working in custom games (some days it isn't).
Desyncs are sometimes a horror with game ranger or warcraft. Not even port forwarding.
I'd have to turn off every firewall on all pc's to get it to work. And sometimes it doesn't.
That might be another convenience in today's "online-age"
1.26 is outdated and only a minority work with it, memhack and whatnot.
So is warcraft 3. Which is why Reforged... and I pray to all gods they
don't make it like starcraft 2. Because it doesn't feel cool to me to
download 30 gigs to play a "warcraft" recreation of a map when I can
play a starcraft recreation on any pc with a 2 gigabyte portable non-install
that works with game ranger.
Oh and I don't know how much of Blizzard's body is alive within Activision's stomach
and both of them within EA's claws... so I'd brace for impact if Reforged isn't good...
or it has loot-boxes in it... j/k. It might have micro-transactions.