I left the community when patch v1.24 was released and came back with Reforged, and it seems many things happen in the meantime making people start to refuse some patches, not just 1.32, anyone can tell me why ?
Yes. I played on and off since 1.24. I can tell you why.
As you probably know, Patch 1.23/1.24 were thrown together hastily to fix a major security flaw in the game. Patch 1.25 and Patch 1.26 changed almost nothing besides a few unit health values and obscure programming regarding what happens when Hex is cast on a unit who is already affected by Metamorphosis. These patches were releasing in roughly 2009 and between that 2008 era of modding up to and including the first 2016 patch from the new team, I used the same game installation on my computer and just copied it when I got a new computer. It was a 20GB Warcraft III installation because of all the maps and user files, some of which were copies of files going back to 2004 for me.
So if you can imagine there was a time of tremendous stability in what I expected from the game due to a complete lack of changes. To me, personally, Patch 1.27 did not appear to change much. It was released because the discovery was made that the fatal security flaw 1.24 meant to fix was at its core not fixed. So, this patch was pushed out I assume mostly to deal with the security problem. In hindsight, some players said the first version of 1.27 corrupted the game's order ID list, so that any trigger that fires when a unit is told to use a specific item ability like Build Tiny Altar of Kings now would not fire the trigger. Also, any trigger that commanded a unit to use that kind of item ability would no longer function. So, for a few rare and obscure custom maps, important custom game behaviors quit working. But I think this issue was addressed either in 1.27b or 1.28.
Then Patch 1.28 released and this would be when people started really questioning what they were being given. There was a tool called the Jass NewGen Pack (JNGP) that ran on a hacked version of the 1.21 World Editor files to add tons of custom behaviors to the World Editor such as syntax highlighting, the vJASS language extension, customizable unit IDs, expanded tileset editing, batch importing of many files in a sane way superior to the Import Manager, and an object editor text colorizer. This was the bread and butter of World Editor for some users.
But Blizzard developers moved the location of the encrypted installation keys on Patch 1.28. As a result, the Patch 1.21 World Editor files can no longer function with Patch 1.28 because they look for the game license keys and the keys are not found.
Along with this, Patch 1.28 added a new launcher application to the game that felt like weird DRM without a particularly good explained purpose. Supposedly it was to help them with releasing updates. When Patch 1.28 launched, it did a horrible thing and tried to copy my 10 GB of custom map files into the My Documents folder and I was informed in advanced by other users it does this without asking. I was concerned about losing my files to their weird, new system so I think I copied them all out of the game during update so that it would update quickly.
Then Patch 1.29 came out and required players to redownload the entire 1.5 GB of the game all over again. Apparently their smoother update system was actually worse. This also had the side problem that it did not always work correctly. I was never able to successfully patch any of my computers to 1.29. It would destroy the installation and then I would just reinstall the game. Patch 1.29 wanted to add good things. The game now had support for 16:9 resolution with 6 Console UI tiles instead of 4. Artistically this was the beginning of a much better 16:9 gameplay experience. At the same time, 1.29 changed the format of files inside of the game further. Naga Buildings had the location of their linked "birth animation model" moved to a new location, so all Custom Naga Building Assets in custom maps would no longer have a birth animation and were just invisible. Other assets moved around like this. A new MPQ was made called Deprecated.mpq to indicate which files Blizzard planned to remove from the game.
New functions were added to the map scripting API. This included improved ways to interact with the cooldown and tooltips on abilities, as well as the function to reposition special effects so that maps could make unitless missile systems with better performance. However, communication between World Editor users and developers was slow and limited. There was a new function added called BlzGetLocalUnitZ around this time because players were hoping for a way to access all of the height information on a unit, even the occlusion offset of a flying unit over trees, which is a number that still cannot be accessed even in Reforged. This was too confusing to the developers so in a later patch they added a second function BlzGetUnitZ that returns the same value as BlzGetLocalUnitZ, which also doesn't help solve the problem of determining flying unit visual ingame height.
The new Special Effect APIs had similar problems. The function called BlzSetSpecialEffectX modified the Y value as well, resetting it to weird default values. The functions for Pitch, Yaw, and Roll confused the axes so that you had to do matrix multiplications in userspace to correct the math and show a simple projectile with both pitch and facing angle. This wasn't fixed until two patches later in Patch 1.31, by which time users complained to me that the fixed version broke their maps because they had worked backwards to do the userspace matrix multiplications.
[Edit: Patch 1.29 also added the option for maps to have up to 24 players, but this changed the integer constant for "Neutral Hostile" player to be the 25th player instead of the 13th player. This broke every single custom map that had been touched by "Vexorian's optimizer" (which was a 3rd party tool that players referred to as "protecting maps" because it corrupted the map enough that the World Editor would crash from it, but not the game). I forgot to mention this because I almost never was in a game of Warcraft 3 with more than 12 players at a time to date, and so I think I forgot about this while I was writing this up.]
Then after this, Patch 1.30 was released which killed any remaining modding tools for the game. To get World Editor syntax highlighting in the Trigger Editor, a player named MindWorX had made a hack tool called World Editor EXtended (WEX) that supported Patch 1.28 and 1.29 similar to the old JNGP modding tools. Now for Patch 1.30, Blizzard hired him so that he stopped making his tool. He added some of the features of the hack into the game using the sourcecode access he now had, but he never added back syntax highlighing in the code editor. So it was never the same after 1.30.
Also in 1.30, Game data was now stored in the newer system, not in MPQs, and the Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne were merged so that all Reign of Chaos specific assets were lost from the game database. Reign of Chaos now was only strictly a separate ruleset for unit statistics. However, there was a new in-game option added back on 1.29 that allowed the user to play with the Reign of Chaos menu and unit stats, so it was still very much meant to be available as far as player experience. But people noticed things such as, "the Priest icon changed" and related issues because internally there was no longer a distinction between War3.mpq and War3X.mpq game databases. It might be for the better; merging these two removed a lot of redundant files inside the game.
I complained on 1.30 because the change to the game data to no longer use MPQs meant that it was the end for modeling tools whose developers were gone. This includes tools such as Magos War3ModelEditor, Mdlvis, and my own tool at the time:
Other big point of contention in the community at the time was that Patch 1.30 completely changed the Battle.net infrastructure under the hood. Now all the internet traffic was an encrypted channel and games were hosted on Blizzard servers. So, the "port forwarding problem" that prevented nontechnical users from hosting custom games became a thing of the past.
In its place there were a lot of bugs that the players just had to wait for another patch to resolve. Blizzard made a new system for sending the map to other players under the hood in how Custom Games played. So you would sometimes try to join a custom game, see a blue download bar, get a warning the download failed, join the game anyway, and then download the map from within the lobby using the older code. There was also a bug where selecting a game and pressing enter wouldn't join anymore, but pressing the Join Game button would join. Or maybe I have that backwards. Everything always felt untested, like the developers had two teams and this was the less important one. So we always joked amongst ourselves that this was the B team, and surely the A team was working on Reforged.
This encryption added to the network traffic also removed the "hostbots" so that all games in the games list had to be hosted by another player from inside the game. Some people complained and didn't like this because it took away their competitive stat keepers for custom games and took away their ability to have their game host bot offering the game both on Battle.net and also on their other illegal third party services, or so I'm told. There may also have been a financial incentive for complaints, since some people were undoubtedly making money off of third party custom map servers.
It was about this time the insiders started promising us there would be a Patch 1.31 that resolved all user requests. It went live to PTR and added customizable UI and additional map scripting APIs for dynamically changing unit and ability editor data, as well as the option to code maps in lua which was faster and better than the JASS VM because Blizzard did not want to invest resources updating JASS to be competitive as far as peformance.
In my opinion Patch 1.31 was a mixed bag. I tried to use the UI apis to make a map where all heroes had up to 9 inventory slots instead of up to 6. It was literally impossible and I gave up. After the PTR, when Patch 1.31 went live it had changes that were not on the PTR, including a change that would do irreversible damage to any custom map that you opened and saved with the editor. There was a hotfix after the first week, but it still felt a little bit like a kick in the nuts to anybody who lost their custom maps. Also, it would only destroy maps with over 1000 custom strings, so you could use the editor on small teat maps and it seemed fine until you opened your real maps that you really care about.
At the same time, 1.31 gave players the ability to reach new heights in modding. I got to play Minecraft as a War3 map on 1.31 that someone created, and it was even able to load and save the block worlds.
This would've been literally impossible on older patches for a long list of reasons.
And that, I hope, answers your question how we split the community and why some players pick and choose older patches.
