I'm more annoyed about losing touch w/so many people tho
Sir, mister IronBladeClan, let me tell you my personal opinion.
I was
active and
online at the time of the Reddit post you have linked. I maintained the same Battle.net account from maybe 2004 to 2020 at the time of the 90 day account merge you are referring to.
Unfortunately, the incompetent human beings at Activision
took longer than 90 days to build the software to migrate accounts and so by the time it was available, the window was already over. Reforged lacked so many features there was nothing to migrate. If you buy Reforged and play it now, they have updated the ingame-webpage-menu so that it pretends to be the old game. Maybe it pretends to let you thumbs or thumbs down maps, or to have a ranking in your versus play, or whatever.
At the launch in the year 2020 there was not ranking, there were not clans, there was not any way to vote on maps for versus, and the only "friends list" was the Battle.net one that's mostly Real ID and that would most likely not have migrated over anyway.
In other words, you missed nothing because the button in the Reforged UI to link accounts didn't do anything. That's how buggy Reforged was at launch. It was essentially a deletion of the game you are trying to get back to. This is also why people who support recent Microsoft actions to paste over that product with pictures of the old game that more closely resemble the old game... create divisiveness. Because there are people like me who might sometimes think, "Hey you know I wish I could just play the old game," and in response the people at Microsoft changed the menu to be a picture of the old menu, and to move around in a format that sometimes resembles the old client a little more than it did before.
But at no point have they just made the old client available, so painting over their new client to make it look like the old one feels patronizing, and some people like me have this unpopular opinion that Microsoft's moves to "make it better" that everyone is supposed to accept as better are not only too little too late but also not... the original menu.
I'm really biased about this though. With Frozen Throne, when that thing was live, it was a lifelong part of my life I kept using across the years. With Reforged, it's fading, like I don't want to log into that thing anymore. This could be a personal problem. It's possible people would tell me that for 16 years from circa 2004 until 2020 personally I stayed the same, and from 2020 to now I changed and I'm the problem not the game (which they say Microsoft fixed).
Regardless of whether that is the case, this is still where I'm at. I don't want Microsoft patronizing me with a picture of what I wanted painted over what I don't want telling me it's fine. Sometimes I just want what I want as a consumer. And that's why switching to Linux instead of Windows for my operating system, even if it means Reforged doesn't work on my computer and I'm severed from the community, has been very pleasant. Because at least now I'm deciding what to do, or what changes.
Might be some personal problems there but the moral of the story is that you didn't miss anything. If you had been online, you would have still lost what you lost. There was no alternative. This is what Activision has done to you. I would perhaps tell you horrible things about the former leader of Activision, and about the texts between him and Miss GM in the files of Mister JE dumped by the US government, but when I have spoken badly of him in this way on this website my posts have largely been removed. You are always free to make your own decisions, but I find that I don't like Activision leadership. Even now that they are gone, my game experience is worse because of them having been there, and I assume some of their associates are still at Microsoft now.
Edit:
I'm not very interested in calling them Blizzard because they're BINO: Blizzard In Name Only. They are not the people who built the games in 2002-2003. They are the people who were so rich they could buyout the people who bought out the people who bought out the people who built the games in 2002-2003.
(Microsoft bought Activision, Activision bought Vivendi, Vivendi bought Blizzard)
The United States rebellion against the authority of kings was a good idea and in the same way I believe it might possibly be morally right for me to rebel against the authority of the BINO.
Because, yes... BINO charges you money to take your things away from you, and then taunt you that they might give them back 4 years later in a patch [which you can't even pay them to give you sooner].
I'm guessing you gave BINO money in order to try to play "the game" of the Warcraft III now that you're interested in it again? Do you feel any guilt?
EDIT 2:
If you go online and download older versions of the game and play them on 3rd party servers, due to a bug in the game code those servers gain "Run as Administrator" level access to your computer, bypassing all computer security. They also provide the host of any game session to have this level of control over your computer. There are very few reports of it being used in the wild but it's pretty terrifying. With my rant above, I'm not really trying to endorse bad computer security such as playing on old game versions on some pirate-y client. It's just actually sad what Activision / Microsoft did and continue to do with this game, and it's actually so bad that if I worked for them it's quite possible I couldn't make it better -- because of what Activision did. Most maps on Hive Workshop custom game sections fundamentally require the new game version so they're locked-in to no going back. The community is completely onboard with this lock-in and kind of has to be, because the old versions have the computer security issues. So I don't have some magic bullet solution for you to this problem, but I believe I should be allowed to say it like it is and tell you that it's a problem and it's not your fault.
![A]mun](https://cdn.hiveworkshop.com/data/avatars/m/140/140771.jpg?1674379729){kind=avatar}
