It is kind of humorous to me to see anti-host bot sentiments nowadays. Host bots are probably the best thing to happen to Wc3 custom games, at least from a feature perspective. In particular, the host bot GHost++ basically encompasses most of the important hosting tools released over the years. Instead of running some combination of PLC/DR, Banlist, Autorefresher, VCK, and perhaps still more, you can just run GHost++ and get all of those features and many more.
Do people want to go back to vanilla hosting? 250ms delay, not being able to see your ping, manually refreshing slots, hosting only on a single server, and so on? I highly doubt it, as all of those tools gained traction for a reason. I remember being asked frequently if I was running PLC back in those days, or DR when that became popular.
Though in regards to hosting custom games, there is some evidence they changed the 250ms delay to 100ms lately.
Regarding the decline of Wc3, I think of things like:
- the old custom games lists where like 50-80% (and sometimes more) of the game list was DotA
- the game has not received any sort of content or balance update in a long time
- the game is just old
These are the sorts of things that I think significantly contributed to Wc3 declining. In particular, the DotA players will have mostly moved on. The ladder players will have left, maybe some of them to alternative Wc3 ladders. And some portion will just move on to newer games, like SC2.
Host bot code has existed since at least 2008, and I remember hosting and playing games in the time between 2008-2011. I am not a fan of autohosted games, but I do remember when they frequently filled. To me, autohosted games serve to exacerbate the problem of a dying user base, but I doubt they were the cause. Hosting on multiple servers served to unite the user base and speed up games filling, but I would not doubt the user base was already in decline by then.
I do think with a small user base, all these autohosted games are a negative influence on the random user. I do not think host bots themselves are a negative influence, though, as they are straight up superior hosting to vanilla Wc3 in basically every regard. There are two downsides I can think of right now to host bots, one of which is the initial difficulty in setting one up. The other is that host migration most likely will not work, since the base GHost++ does not report player IPs to each other upon them joining, if I recall correctly.
I would not be opposed to autohosted games going away. I do not support getting rid of standalone dedicated hosting software that can run on Linux and Windows, though. Simply having hosting software allows for great flexibility.
I would be surprised if SC2's custom game user base was only four to six times greater than Wc3's. It is hard to remember, but the last times I remember being able to /users, the entire player base across all classic games was probably less than 150k. With some portion less than half of that logged in to TFT. And as the trend was for that total number to drop rapidly, I imagine it is much smaller now.
Though who knows, maybe the recent stuff with D2 and SC (and eventually Wc3) has/will bump up the numbers.
Anyway, this is mostly speculation on my part. I only have mostly anecdotal information after all. It would be pretty cool if someone had /users data across all the years up to now, though.
Regarding some other specific things...
Regarding GProxy:
GProxy++, if I recall, was something originally by the same guy that wrote GHost++. The original exists in .exe form. It works by basically acting as a proxy between a Wc3 client and the host. If the user disconnects from the host (but remains on the lag screen), GProxy++ allows for reestablishing the connection. By default it is setup to allow for three minutes for the reconnection to happen. There are other technical details in regards to how it does that, but that is the essence of the design. The source to GProxy++ is available and you can probably easily compile it yourself.
The DLL being brought up is, I think, a modification to the original that is auto-loaded by Wc3 by placing it as a .mix file in the Wc3 directory.
It was such a long time ago, but from what I remember, something like plug pulling would 100% disconnect you from a Wc3 game. GProxy++ is designed to work in that kind of scenario, though.
Regarding download speeds in game:
From what I remember browsing the GHost++ source, it was mentioned that Wc3's default map download mechanism involves basically acking small chunks of the map. So basically your download speed will be constrained by your ping, because chunks will not be sent until you request the next part. GHost++ tries to mitigate this by preemptively sending additional parts.
If this all works as expected, then in theory, GHost++ will allow for superior download speeds simply by design. If you have slow download speeds, it most likely is because they configured their host bot to limit the upload speed. And they probably do that to avoid people in game suffering lag spikes or some such, from having many people downloading max out the upload of the host the bot is on.
I am not sure how the big public hosts (like ENT) setup their bot network, but I imagine they will have numerous (perhaps many) Wc3 games hosted on a single VPS or some such.
Regarding rejoining a game you have completely left already:
From what I know, there is no public GHost++ distribution that has this feature... but there is reason to believe it is doable. As GHost++ bots already are capable of building replay files, I imagine it would be just a bit of work to make rejoining games a possibility.
I think there is a Wc3 client that allows rejoining through this sort of method. I think I was watching a NetEase Wc3 stream once and saw a "rejoin" take place when someone disconnected.
Regarding empty lobbies:
It would be a welcome change to the custom games list if they showed how many players are in a game, I think. D2 shows the players in a game. SC and Wc3 LAN show how many slots are taken up, from what I remember. Not sure why the developers opted for Wc3 Battle.net to not show something.
To the guy having problems with his host bots:
Blizzard seems to have added some spam filtering stuff on the server side. If I type
www.google.com into chat, for example, I get muted. When I am muted, normal chat looks like it is going through (but it is not), and my whispers (/w and /f m) do not show on my screen (ie, they are not going through). Easy way to check if you are muted is to try to whisper yourself. You can switch accounts if you get muted this way.
Next, your bots might be muted. This does not mean they are not working, just that you will not see their chat responses. Provided you, yourself, are not muted, you may still be able to go through the typical steps to host. Like loading up a map config or map, sending the host game command, then joining that game and spoof checking. Once in the game it should work like normal. Though not being able to see responses might present challenges in the case of errors occurring.
Finally, it might even be possible that specific messages are filtered without actually muting you. I am not sure about this case.
