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Warcraft 3 patch 1.21b

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Dr Super Good

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Today a new Warcraft 3 patch (1.21b) was released and is now required to play on battlenet. This patch has no melee changes or engine changes that are apparent currently but has done one very important thing.

Warcraft 3 no longer needs a TFT/RoC disk in your machine to be started up.
Support News (Battle.net) said:
war3.jpg
Warcraft III patch 1.21b has been released!

The Warcraft III patch v1.21b has been released! With this patch, players are no longer required to have the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos or Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne CD in the CD-rom drive to play the game. Simply connect to Battle.net to update to the latest version, or visit the patch page for standalone patches. Once you have the patch installed, launch the game as you normally would but now you won't need the CD.
 
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Dr Super Good

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Patch.txt said:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patch 1.21b
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

FEATURES

- The game no longer requires the CD to play.

Update to Warcraft III 1.21b by. . .
  • logging onto battlenet, which will start the auto update system.
  • going to their offical Warcraft 3 patch page and downloading the patch you need as separate .exe file and then running that file after the download is complete.

Upon immediate testing, the most noticeable thing is that Warcraft 3 (both TFT and RoC) now start up near instantly (under 2-3 seconds). This is obvious as they no longer have to check that your CD is valid. WorldEditor is also starting up a lot faster as well which will make all you mappers happy but still note that it overall still has map loading delays.

However it is too early to tell if this was the only performance boost or if this patch brings any nasty side affects.

Finally, I strongly advise that you carefully remove your Warcraft 3 disk from your CD drive and gently place it back in its holder for use in a distant future period of time. As for now both the disk and your CD drive can take a long deserved rest.
 
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Horray for the crackers, no more creating 'no-cd cracks'!

Sorry, this patch is useless in my opinion.
One patch, with only that feature?
Come on, they could have done a lot more!
(at least released much more in one patch)

I admit it is much easyer to start the game without cd, but the no-cd patch gives me the feeling: "warcraft 3 is now freeware", thank you.

~- Heero
 
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Horray for the crackers, no more creating 'no-cd cracks'!

Sorry, this patch is useless in my opinion.
One patch, with only that feature?
Come on, they could have done a lot more!
(at least released much more in one patch)

I admit it is much easyer to start the game without cd, but the no-cd patch gives me the feeling: "warcraft 3 is now freeware", thank you.

~- Heero
They're still working on a patch with more content. They simply released the no-cd patch on its own as it was ready much sooner. And really, complaining that they remove copy protection? It makes it easyer to play the game, with less of a hassle in having to have a disk or mini-image. And just because the game no longer requires a CD doesn't mean its freeware... is GalCiv2 freeware? (it shiped not needing the CD to play.)

Dial-up for one.
A better reason is so you don't need to download it each time if you reinstall.
I, for one, am waiting for the .exe.
Or you could update over bnet, wait for the next patch, and grab the modern full patch including all patches WC3 will see for years or ever.
 
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W00000t!! I've been waiting for it for weeks since they announced it weeks ago!

So far I was using a mounted image of my CD, which loaded faster than a CD and safer (my TFT CD kinda broke into pieces - the DVD laser of destruction). But now this may be even faster, yeee so cool! But why so late to do it! oO

Besides whats ur prob Heero, this makes everyone happier. The game is dying and people care to play Bnet, so it doesn't matter you can enter Single like that.
 

Dr Super Good

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Change of management probably, they have also done this for SC1 a while ago and will probably do it for Diablo II next.

Still waiting for them to offically host the patch for download outside of battlenet so a quick link can be put up for everyone who can not download it off battlenet.

The next patch comming in approximatly a month (1.22) should be more major regarding game play and heavily influence melee (and thus interfear with custom games a bit). Until then atleast our CD drives can now rest a bit.
 
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The next patch comming in approximatly a month (1.22) should be more major regarding game play and heavily influence melee (and thus interfear with custom games a bit). Until then atleast our CD drives can now rest a bit.

As you can see I'm more of a player than a mapper, it really matters for me. Such changes may screw up the races for melee. Our CDs can rest for life. And how do you know about a 1.22 patch? There was a post by Blizzard about the no-cd patch but no news about a patch with such changes.
 

Dr Super Good

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They mentioned it here.

Karune (Blizzard Poster) said:
January 29th, 2008 - Today, the eSports Team is meeting with Rob Pardo, (Senior Vice President of Game Design), and Chris Sigaty, (Lead Producer of StarCraft II), Dustin Browder (Lead Designer of StarCraft II),and David Kim (Balance Designer of StarCraft II) for the second round of discussions on the balance changes that will happen for Patch 1.22. Many of the balance changes mentioned by both professional eSports players and the community alike, such as 'nerfs' to Human Guard Tower repair rates are on the top of the balance list for these rounds of discussion.

When balance changes are more solidified, I will give you an update on what these may be, and a better approximate release time. Furthermore, there is the possibility of additional Battle.net features to be added in Patch 1.22 that would further add to the longevity of the game online.

Patch 1.21b, the 'no CD' patch for Warcraft III is being signed off as we speak, and is aiming at a release for next week.

We try and keep uptodate with what is happening over at blizzard as far as Warcraft 3 goes and so what we tend to say mostly is accurate.

However, wether they keep their promises we can not predict.
 
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You mean the nerf of hu towers? Only all newb uds!

Thx for the info Dr Super Good. Also even if now a burnt CD can also make it work, the most important for Blizzard and I agree is not the access to the game but the access to BNet. And cd-keys are like 80% of the game's price. As who will stay with single player and campaigns for long?? People are looking for BNet, no one cares if you can play single or not. Vs PCs lol... or Dota alone.
 
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I get mixed feelings from this. The No-CD option can mean one of two things: that Blizzard is bringing the game back to life, or that Blizzard expects very few new purchases of the game so it makes it no-cd for the playerbase.

However, this news of a gameplay patch gives me hope. The last gameplay patches were just fixing exploits and things like that for melee games, remember how long ago it was when the Firelord and Goblin Alchemist were released? That was the last major patch.
 

Dr Super Good

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They have finally offically release the patch as a separate downloadable file for all you users that are having trouble getting it from logging into battlenet. The links to where to get them are on the starting post of this thread under how to update to the latest patch.
 
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