There is no answer to this question that will be all three of the following important aspects: good, objective, complete.
As the shortest possible answer, which I will very explicitly say is subjective, yes.
For a (not even near) complete explanation for why my answer is yes, we would probably already be testing the limits of how many words a readable post can have:
- "What counts as fixed?", then an opinion on that question.
- a confusing cascade of things 1.32 fixed from older patches even at-release
- an answer to include some aspects of the current 1.32 patch that are much improved over Reforged at-release (which is the state that has been the most "documented" by media and hearsay)
- what is still broken compared to 1.31 (and possibly 1.28; neither of these lists are small)
- what "could've" (reasonably, and again subjectively) been fixed from even earlier patches but isn't
As a middle ground, I'll present the facts I can come up with at this very moment, distinct merely by being the moment of seeing this post.
"Singleplayer" is fully back, replays work again, saving works again (for some gametypes), HD graphics' shader has been changed to look better, certain abilities' readability got improved in HD, rally point exploit got fixed (niche one, but it was important due to its widespread use in melee), game data size got decreased by about 3-5GB, some missing assets got reincluded in the game data, the World Editor is more stable than at release, ability skins had been getting bug-fixed for the first 4 patches, and MUCH more...
As you can see, even bunched together instead of in neatly separated lines, the list of fixes that the current 1.32 patch has over the 1.32.0 is large, and these are only the fixes I recall now rather than a comprehensive list. (And believe me all the lists get much longer and nicer if you compare to an old patch, Blizzard did actually do quite a few things right even in 1.32.0)
Now comes the part that will probably decide your opinion on this topic as well, while being absolutely not the answer to the question: what is still wrong.
Average game latency is still bad (don't expect it to get better, because Blizzard's servers now have a crucial role in game hosting), game servers are merged in melee while separated in custom games, some HD assets are not very readable for RTS purposes, there are still issues with uploading maps larger than 256MB, all "skin" systems are relatively prone to bugs and direly undocumented (the latter not being entirely Blizzard's role in the weird relationship that the communities had made with it), map preview images still do not work correctly, "engineering upgrade is bugged" (this is something I have only heard of in passing as well, and it might be related to the skin systems too), there are still notable old assets missing (mostly ROC versions of things), custom campaigns are missing, ladder still isn't properly ranked.
At a sight of two large non-stylised paragraphs, most people are left with a choice, read it and try understanding it, or just look at how large it is.
The first would require you to know a lot about the engine's intricacies to know whether the fixes or the issues remaining are larger. The second provides us with an obvious (but possibly incorrect) answer that there is more still wrong than corrected.
This is, again, not something that can be objectively stated: there are giant things still wrong, and there are enormous things fixed. Not even comparing to any other version will provide us with much better answers, and including 3rd party modification of the game only adds more complexity to this tangle.
What is left is a question to leave with, maybe the only question whose answer will make it simpler to decide for yourself: "But which part of it all affects
me?
"
Now this question is simpler to answer, even if the answer is not favourable and even a counter-question: "why not try it yourself and find out?"
Every person owning the game legally should also have complete access to 1.32.latest (except the HD assets in-game, for which I can only inch closer towards covering by recommending that you watch videos or livestreams and see how they look and read to you; and yes, I mean claiming
your CD-keys on the Battle.net site to link them to your Blizzard account).
Do not think I am agreeing with Blizzard's decision to only allow HD-including purchases now, far from it - allowing us to buy only the part we know we want is the smartest move for making a good and happy playerbase.
Now, before this text becomes exactly what I didn't want it to become: the game is still
worth it to me but that doesn't mean I want to urge you all to jump in as well. I want to urge you all to jump to latest for better reasons: it is the version that Battle.net is on (always only the latest), and thus the version to target unless you already have a community. New tools and projects are most likely to be on 1.32 as well, provided they even need to choose (many things will still work for older versions, but full maps saved with any new patch of WE won't be playable on older patches). New documentations of both features and exploits is centred around the latest version (as older versions are harder to test and less fruitful), they provide many more features than old ones, after 1.31 there are also infinitely many more options for interacting with the map itself (Lua was added, so other languages can be transpiled to Lua for War3 without having to write transpilers from scratch; also side-note, a transpiler is a program that converts from one script to another [you probably heard of Typescript to lua if you're around War3 map coding enough]; Folder mode capabilities were exposed, allowing maps to be treated like any other project folder while still remaining openable in WE and in game, and yes, this includes Git Version Control as well [
shameless plug for a tool to make it even more powerful]).
Again going against myself, I will say that it is not worth even trying to go to 1.32 if you only want to play through "Custom campaigns" (Actual custom campaigns, w3n archives) as custom campaigns are still not back in, which I did also mention above. Otherwise absolutely give it a try if you still have your CD keys. I won't actively advocate for giving money to Blizzard, even if it would've meant having a more active battle.net community.
Thank you for the time it took to read this jumble and remember that your choices are best left being your own.
P.S. if you're reading this around the time of posting, merry Christmas!
