1.29 seems to be the ideal "classic" version for many due to a number of factors, which is why it was chosen for community edition.
Do you have a citation for this? To be honest, I half expected that 1.29 was the ideal version for community edition only because it is the exact version that one of the main contributors of community edition -- MindWorX -- was reading through
the source code for when he was
working in the Activision office on that version around the time he was probably first hired. I have a hunch that if we polled people who don't play Reforged what version they see as more the classic, they might more likely pick 1.26 or 1.27 (or perhaps a version from slightly before them).
As for the Retera drama, I'm gonna stay out of it and wait for him to give his side of the story before I make any calls.
In the interest of staying on topic, I have no objection to the summaries and opinions expressed by
@Shar Dundred -- at least none worthy of inclusion to be on-topic. Feel free to reach out to me outside this thread if you want more detailed opinions or a history of my life's events from my perspective in some way, but I think he gave a reasonable summary.
But seeing Shar's post and thinking how I largely agree with it gave me a moment of clarity remembering a YouTube video skit I did years ago, where I explained one reason why I think Reforged is how it is and why me working at that company would've either created the same results or created similar issues to some of people's largest gripes with Reforged.
The question shouldn't be "What does the majority of the playerbase and fandom want?" as if it were an election. Instead, we should ask ourselves "what's the best way to make the maximum number of people happy and restore good faith in the game from those who lost it?"
I do not ask myself what's the best way to make the maximum number of people happy in our Hive Workshop modding community. Instead, I wake up each day and ask myself what's the best way to make
myself happy. And the reason historically that Warcraft III was the answer to that question was because it was a very efficient and easy-to-use methodology for creating a certain kind of game "map" experience
and then taking credit for making it. I can think to myself, "I created that map! So awesome!" and revel in my own imaginary worlds and dreams, and how great I am.
But if I went on a mission to Mars to help set up a colony there, and after some time we saw in our telescopes that the Earth was hit by a dinosaur-ending world-class meteor and then we lost contact with the Earth civilization, if I later decided that i wanted to create and play a version of Warcraft III Classic without the materials from the original game -- just as an idea to play with the survivors on the Mars colony in honor of the lost Earth civilization -- it turns out that building the Warcraft III Classic is most likely an exceedingly involved technology process that involves a large amount of technical knowledge. Similar to what
@Drake53 was describing with "vibe coding a Warcraft III," one time I asked one of the ChatGPT style systems (maybe it was Claude) to make me an open source implementation of Warcraft III or something like that. It responded that the task was too difficult, and I would not be able to do it, and so I should not pursue it.
So it's reasonable for me to think that creative fans of Warcraft III would be people that like to invent an oversimplified form of their game and then take credit for still making it anyway, glossing over the technical details. And when we put that kind of person, the "passionate fan" in charge of updating Warcraft III, we are giving the power over the system to a very different kind of human being
than the ones who created Warcraft III. The experiences and training of the people in the two cases is different, almost assuredly. In the words of
Grubby the streamer:
CHAT: "They could work together with Hive Workshoppers"
GRUBBY: "They could work together with Hive Workshoppers... They did for 2020 and even though they worked together with Hive Workshoppers, we still got what we got. Um, and also, uh, I've seen how many Hive Workshoppers talk. Many of them are out of touch with corporate reality and so the way that some of them give feedback... is not good."
His point is that us -- like, collectively the kind of people who gather here together to chat on this thread -- created the Reforged and as a result the negative media reaction to it.
(To be more specific, Bobby Kotick probably fired everyone except one or two guys hired off of Hive to help with Reforged and probably told them, "If you're so passionate, you don't need money, make Reforged anyway!") And if we think about why people us would be makers of Reforged, we don't have to look very hard. My YouTube skit on the topic compared this to how humans enjoy playing the game "dominoes." It's incredibly enjoyable to the human experience to be the person who flicks the first domino and watches something immensely complex and elaborate all tumble down and break apart in an organized way, and we feel like we're the cause of the whole event. Being an author of a Warcraft III map is in some ways similar. We hardly know what goes on under the hood, or whether it's the Classic game engine or Reforged game engine that interprets our map data and makes that into a playable experience -- or what the difference even means -- and yet we would still say to ourselves, "I made that map." We say, "I did this." And so, if you train someone to be passionate about doing that for a long time, and then hire them to make Reforged, the goal of making the Reforged becomes no longer to serve the common man's needs to service his desire to play his Frozen Throne CD, but rather to be the one who gets to say, "I did this." Why is the menu a webpage instead of the original fully-working technology? Because web pages are the only thing the guy working on that game at that time knew how to make in any reasonable amount of time! He
did it and he is the one who made the Warcraft III! He
made something! Why did the new guy add a third tier of graphics that are AI generated textures slapped on the same graphics? Because now he can say, "I did this." Or, for a more direct quote as he said on stream, he lives by the philosophy, "When something is broken, you fix it. When something is wrong, you make it right. And if things aren't good enough you make them better." And for him, the way to accomplish that philosophy with Reforged wasn't a "classic client." It was to add AI upscale textures third graphics option to the game, and the ability to play as Illidan as your Demon Hunter instead of just a generic hero in versus mode, and a new picture of Frozen Throne for the menu instead of the original Reforged menu.
And now he can say, "I fixed it."
That would mean that, in my opinion, the only people truly capable of fixing the games are fans like the Community Project team and Retera. Dedicated, passionate fans who aren't constrained by profit motifs, budgets or burrearcracy. People who are free to follow their passions and free to do what they think is best to help the game and community, regardless of monetary gain.
The perfect version of "Classic" for me would be if the guys at the Microsoft Activision office gave me the code so that I could do whatever I want without constraints of profit like you say. But the reason I want to be able to do that is to break and modulate the game for fun, which would ruin it for some people, and I want my broken version to not affect them and only be on my computer but with maybe an option maybe they could play it if they want. And I want the option to permanently jump it back to previous versions if I decide I don't like my changes.
I'm not convinced that it's possible to hire a fan and have them "save the day" in that company. I think it's probably worse than that. For example on Hive, often our contributions to community come not from our intention to benefit others but from our willingness to share what we create. I didn't make Retera Model Studio so that you could use it. I made it because I wanted it. And I didn't finish it so for years I didn't publish it. Eventually I published the crappy unfinished one anyway. But that's been super useful to folks! We can benefit each other by sharing when it's of no cost to us.
And I wish the owners of the game would share me the ability to hack the game, and have 9 item inventory, and recompile the game from source to play on my little Raspberry Pi for fun.
Though, to their credit, they patched those out. I doubt we're gonna see much more than moderate big fixes and stability updates, since that's probably all the team has the budget and scope for. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
But I guess that's the power of passion vs business.
