Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard

[Homor]

Yeah. I just mean that now I realize blizzard filed a DMCA lawsuit against bnetd and won. So, what Blizzard would do is not use bnetd. Even if just for social/political reasons and to retain the public image of their win in court.

They won't use it, but bnetd at least proves it's totally possible, even practical.

 

[Retera]

but bnetd at least proves it's totally possible, even practical.

I mean, sure, I guess, if you think that losing a lawsuit against a major corporation is an example of being practical.

 

[Homor]

I mean, sure, I guess, if you think that losing a lawsuit against a major corporation is an example of being practical.

Well, to clarify: practical if you don't get sued. Lol.

 

[Napoqe]

Now that Microsoft has bought it. Could Hive Workshop use all of the company's gaming assets? Since Bethesda games, Minecraft, etc?
This would make the Warcraft 3 mod more feature rich.

 

[Homor]

Now that Microsoft has bought it. Could Hive Workshop use all of the company's gaming assets? Since Bethesda games, Minecraft, etc?
This would make the Warcraft 3 mod more feature rich.

I don't know if I'd except them to do that, but it sure would be awesome. Warcraft 3 modding is already so robust, adding more assets and features would be even better.

 

[Homor]

Alright, here's a little thought experiment: what would you want Microsoft to do to fix the game? Not what you "expect" or even what you think is "practical." I'm talking more like what Microsoft could do to convince you this acquisition was good and saved Warcraft 3. I've been pretty vocal, so I'll try to keep this brief.

Phase One: Tolerable.
This is the bare minimum they'd have to do to win me over. Restore a classic client, either by building off an older patch or creating a new version so indistinguishable from whatever previous version they're trying to emulate that you can't even tell. Allow people to play the game they loved and remember the way it was. If MS can't do this, we have nothing else to discuss. You might as well release the game for free as abandonware and release an apologize telling your fanbase you failed, and that you're so sorry Kotick FUBAR'd this classic game.

Phase Two: Acceptable.
In addition to the above, repair Warcraft Reforged to have all the bugs and glitches fixed, online connectivity optimized, and restore every lost feature. Return the main game back to a functional state that's actually somewhat worth paying money for. Also, cut the price down by at least half. Sounds like a lot just to reach "acceptable" right? Well, however badly you insulted your playerbase, you should work at least just as hard to make it up to them.

Phase Three: Good.
This is where we get really crazy. We have to get to "crazy" to make up for the damage done. Resume development on Warcraft: Reforged right where you left off before Kotick cut the budget. Rehire as much as the original team as possible and even expand it, devout the level of money and resources to it you were going to before Kotick decided to defraud his customers. Create the game you originally advertised. We'll call this the "No Man's Sky Turnaround" effect. Impractical? Hell yes. But Activision dug themselves into a hole when they cut the project off at the knees at the first place and made the game a disappointing flop. Being forced to develop it again at a potential loss is appropriate penance. Do what Designer Dave said the team originally wanted to: meet and even exceed expectations.

That's a lot of work and money just to get to "good", huh? Yeah, well, that's how badly Kotick fucked everything up. I don't think a company that was devalued and absorbed after a massively devastating sex scandal has any right to object to "unfair expectations" considering they couldn't even achieve minimum expectations of their own leadership and workforce.

 

[Spacebuns]

^Somehow I feel like you'd be a very poor project leader. All demands and few specific directions.
Anyway to do the "bare minimum" that you mentioned, Microsoft would probably have to do the thing in the "good" part, which is rehire the original team (and how original are we talking here? Reforged development original or Samwise, Metzen original, the whole shebang?)

 

[Homor]

^Somehow I feel like you'd be a very poor project leader. All demands and few specific directions.
Anyway to do the "bare minimum" that you mentioned, Microsoft would probably have to do the thing in the "good" part, which is rehire the original team (and how original are we talking here? Reforged development original or Samwise, Metzen original, the whole shebang?)

I was specifically talking about the Reforged team. Kam and all them. Getting Samwise, Metzen and all those other devs back together is such a Herculean feat even I'm not demanding enough to suggest it.

Yeah, I'd make a poor project lead because I have no experience. I'm not here to lead a project. I'm just a slighted fan, upset at how badly his favorite game and community have been damaged by Kotick's reign of chaos. Stating what my standards are for trusting Blizzard ever again and putting any faith in their company moving forward. That's what these are: not demands, certainly not expectations either. They're standards. Every consumer has a right to set the standards of their patronage.

But I'm rambling at this point, What about you, Spacebuns? What would you like to see from updates to WC3?

 

[Spacebuns]

They should just begin recruiting people for the Classic Games Team (again) and we'll start from there.

 

[Retera]

what would you want Microsoft to do to fix the game?

this weekend i learned that while we worry about how Reforged should or should not be, you can actually watch the President of Blizzard Entertainment twitch stream himself playing call of duty. it was amazing

Every time he gets a headshot, it's like, "Bam! Take that Reforged!"

It made me realize the truth of my life. On his weekend he streams the call of duty, and on my weekend I try desperately to reinvent a game server so that i'll be able to play the game in my future after the server was gone away.

These are the truths of the world. The winner and the owner of the Warcraft III intellectual property is the one who doesn't deign to try to play or upgrade it. What's WRONG with you to even ask this question about what Microsoft should do to fix it? Isn't the problem society? It's like a case when software governance and finance intersect to create a giant problem that disincentivises anyone from fixing it.

But maybe you're right. Even if society is the problem, not Warcraft III, I can still think about how I want Microsoft to fix it. I wrote down about 10 paragraphs of what I wanted them to do, but I deleted it just now actually. I've come to realize that even when I started out trying to be serious, I unintentionally end up as a parody of myself. I'm not able to foresee how someone would make this game profitable enough to secure enough funding to "fix" it. The overarching vision of Reforged was too grandiose, and it promised too much, and I don't know how to make it go away.

I think that maybe financially what they could do would be to make a new Warcraft III product using a derivative of the same code, but that was not very different. Suppose we call it Warcraft III: Definitive Edition. The idea would be that Warcraft III: Definitive Edition seeks to offer a sense of healing for the incredibly dedicated Warcraft III players but we no longer cater to the casual WoW players who want to have Reforged because doing so would cost too much money. We also might not be able to cater too much to the incredibly hardcore melee players, because game balance is too difficult.

So, where Warcraft III: Definitive Edition could shine is by being a 1-2 gigabyte game experience that comes cheap or free on most or all Windows systems, leverages the Reforged engine for added Warcraft III features, but removes the HD graphics from Warcraft III due to the technological constraints of trying to put these assets into the engine being too much and introducing too many challenges. Rather than to declare itself as being a reset "back to classic" which may be hard or impossible to achieve, Definitive Edition moves "forward" from the Reforged engine but in a somewhat perpendicular direction. We don't add replacement art in the manner Reforged tried to do, but only new art and new experiences. The code gets simpler to manage because it's all using the 1.31 emulation side of things basically, so it feels like 1.31 and uses that old Warcraft III menu, but connects to newer servers. This will already be a lot of work to get it to this point, but the leyman wouldn't pay for it because he doesn't respect any of that work. So what we do from here is to meet up with Ralle, get Ralle and the Hive to sign a cheap deal to allow Definitive Edition to use fanmade assets from the Hive Workshop for cheaper than fair market price for 3d assets (it's basically like a steal, but Ralle and all the model authors aren't supposed to notice) and then using all these assets we add to Definitive Edition so that it has 3 game rulesets that can be played: Reign of Chaos, Frozen Throne (using Reforged balance to try to honor that progress, but again it's not HD), and a third ruleset for DE that has 8 races instead of 4 races. In this case, the third ruleset might need a cool name, such as Forge's Fire or something. It would be key to acknowledge this technology and where we've come and how we have these unsolvable problems in a way that players who were trained to hate Reforged can feel like they relate to, like they're being respected somehow.

So, in the Forge's Fire balance the additional 4 races might be Naga, Demon, High Elves, and Lost Ones because these were probably some of the races that are the closest to being able to be created using assets already available inside Warcraft III as it is. At this point it doesn't make any lore sense to have a High Elves race, but rather than to address this because Warcraft III: DE would be a fairly low-budget product it would simply contain inside jokes about the High Elves not being blood elves for some reason.

For Warcraft III tournaments and these other things, because the Demon race would be incredibly broken and overpowered due to having the wrong types of combat damage, and the Naga race would be overpowered due to having unreasonably high hit point regeneration, essentially it would be absolutely paramount that the Frozen Throne balance was still available for players who wanted to host Frozen Throne tournaments on Warcraft III: DE. Most of the point of the new four races would be for World Editor users to lose themselves digging through what was and was not included in the World Editor and changing the ability stats on new skills programmed into the Ability Editor for fun to see what World Editor madness they could create using the new abilities for the 16 new hero characters. Some of the new abilities added for DE units and heroes would be hacked together in a hurry and wouldn't be properly customizable in the Ability Editor, but it generally wouldn't matter as long as the Reforged "Ability Skin" system was deleted along with all of the custom map bugs that it introduced in 1.32+ and never fixed.

So, the main goal of these new races would be to have something to sell and monetize within the DE game that makes it feel "different" while at the same time having this thing that is for sale not break the existing Warcraft III "classic game" idea in the manner that trying to include asset swapping HD stuff kind of breaks the Reforged technology due to its over-complexity. It's actually largely about putting in relatively little effort for a relatively high gain in terms of sales in this case.
Using the money gained from DE sales, assuming that goes well but that managers still hate War3 with a passion and want to defund it unless it can stand on its own, we take that money and build a campaign for Warcraft III: DE that uses these new Forge's Fire ruleset races. It would probably be called Forge's Fire campaign. It wouldn't break existing campaigns for Warcraft III, and it wouldn't claim to be better than the old classics (nudge, nudge, Reforged). It would just be an entirely new campaign that players could opt into by paying an extra $5 or something like that.

Anyway, I'm not totally certain this is what I want. Because when you do anything, you can do it wrong. Same as how Reforged would simply be better if it had more money behind it, regardless of whether we agree on whether stuff in Reforged was a good or bad idea. So obviously I'd also want for Microsoft to just shovel money at Reforged until it felt good as a product rather than doing all this stuff I just said, but I personally just struggle to imagine that happening. I just don't know how to see that happening in the future. When I think about asset flipping stuff on the old Frozen Throne experience, like these 4 new races that I suggested, it's much cheaper to do and I feel like it could get a revenue stream going for Warcraft III as a brand that would bring it closer to being able to continue to get fixed and developed. So it's not that I necessarily want exactly these races, but rather that I want a future where Microsoft's Blizzard would be pragmatic about what they create and not put themselves in a position where they sort of "give up" halfway through except for that one guy trying to hold the line with only minimal funding who eventually publishes something (nudge, nudge, Reforged).

 

[Homor]

These are the truths of the world. The winner and the owner of the Warcraft III intellectual property is the one who doesn't deign to try to play or upgrade it. What's WRONG with you to even ask this question about what Microsoft should do to fix it? Isn't the problem society? It's like a case when software governance and finance intersect to create a giant problem that disincentivises anyone from fixing it.
But maybe you're right. Even if society is the problem, not Warcraft III,

Uhhh, what? I never said "society" was the problem. Where the heck did you get that idea? I put 100% of the responsibility for the state of this game on the people who own and control the IP. I don't even know how you came up with that?

Anyway, the rest of the post was pretty good. It's this part that bugged me.

 

[Retera]

I never said "society" was the problem.

Sorry, maybe my wording fo that part was confusing. I meant that you were right about the sentiment of having us declare what we wished Microsoft would do. I did not meant to say I thought you had already said the same thing I did about society.

I also noticed that I said "call of duty" in my post instead of "halo". Seems nobody caught it, so maybe there isn't much of a difference.

 

[Bitterman]

well, there wont be CoD for a while, that is confirmed.