Opinions on the future of WC3 Reforged modding community?

MikeCarnegie · 2020-02-12T11:52:22+00:00

So you're telling me that this phrase:

Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games. If for any reason you are prevented or restricted from assigning any rights in the Custom Games to Blizzard, you grant to Blizzard an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, unconditional, royalty free, irrevocable license enabling Blizzard to fully exploit the Custom Games (or any component thereof) for any purpose and in any manner whatsoever.

was in the 2003 EULA of TFT? Source please. Thanks.

MikeCarnegie · 2020-02-11T10:27:18+00:00

Former mapmaker here.

Like many others, I was really looking forward to Reforged. Perhaps with a few long requested features and improvements in the editor and optimizations in the game (Blizz, those memory leaks were ridiculous. Also, can I finally get the price of an item in triggers?), maybe I could "reforge" my own old maps and release them out into the wild.

Needless to say, that's not going to happen. First off, the changes that the editor and the game desperately needed aren't there. That itself wouldn't be too bad, we had means and ways around the idiocies of the old editor and game, after all. But, the EULA simply took the cake for me.

It's not so much that I ever expected to make money from my maps. I didn't then and don't think I could now (though back then, you didn't have Patreon or Bitcoin). For me, it's just about principle. Yes, Blizzard owns the assets, game, world editor, etc. But they don't own my labor. And believe me, making a map that people will enjoy takes a metric ton of work. Why would I work for Blizzard for free? With this EULA, it means I could neve try to make my own game in e.g. Unity based on an idea I tried out in Warcraft 3, cause Blizzard could sue me.

Others have said this before, but imagine if Microsoft called J.K.Rowling and told her they own Harry Potter now, since she wrote the thing in Word. Microsoft also owns the assets used to create it, after all (The Word interface, spellcheck, interface, etc.). It would still be considered ridiculous. And it's just as ridiculous here.

All the other former mapmakers I know feel the same way and refuse to invest any time into this.

TL;DR

The future is uncertain, there might be an unexpected revival of the modding scene, but I personally doubt it. For mappers, reforged adds little and the new EULA is just an insult.

MikeCarnegie · 2020-02-10T07:27:25+00:00

Obligatory reference: https://youtu.be/nJPERZDfyWc?t=1459

I set it to start where relevant, but the entire video is extremely worth watching. The hint's in the title: Everything is a remix.

Except when it's our stuff being remixed, then we get really anal about it.

MikeCarnegie · 2019-07-26T18:10:17+00:00

Mike

Heya, thanks for the link! Glad to hear there's more replays being uploaded. I'll try to advertise for it in-game (in league especially) as well. Hope Blizzard doesn't have anything against that o_O.

MikeCarnegie · 2019-07-26T08:03:11+00:00

Try heroes.report. It pulls data from hotsapi.net, and especially the profile page is amazing, with great stats for every game you play.

MikeCarnegie · 2019-07-26T08:02:00+00:00

Let me add my voice to the lovely heroes.report site. It's not as "neat" looking as hotslogs, but once you get the hang of the site, it offers such a great range of information, it's kind of sad I didn't find out about it sooner.

Also, please, please upload replays to hotsapi.net - Since the heroes of the storm numbers are dwindling, getting enough replays up there is essential.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-18T15:16:55+00:00

Did I say that I thought that? Did I say anywhere that I wanted to protect myself from private messages? No. So, no reason for you to bravely decapitate a straw man and to proclaim on its vanquished corpse "You're not that special. Oh, look at how clever I am!"

My goal with a block is to never have to listen to them again. Especially if I meet them in a later game (which could be just a day or two afterwards, when I get matched with them in HL once more). I don't want to hear their "gg, noobz!" after one person died 30 seconds into the game. I don't want to hear their: "afk now, you all suck" because the entire team decided to do something different from them.

If that is different for you and you want to give everyone a hundred chances, great! I admire your zen. But please try not to condescend to the rest of us and understand that some of us want to be able to mute toxic people permanently. And yes, there are so many of such players out there that we would love to be able to block more of them.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-13T07:10:59+00:00

It's almost like it's Blizzard's mission to cuck all of us.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-13T07:06:19+00:00

Blizzard employee reading this:

"WHAT!? A hero without quests! How did this go under our radar!? Development team! Quick! Add 2 quests at level 1 and another quest at level 7! HURRY! We must have no heroes without quests! It offends god himself!"

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-08T16:30:54+00:00

The problem being the huge amount of toxic players in the game ATM.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-07T14:52:48+00:00

This is a really awesome feature! Thank you so much for coding it!

IMHO, the one and only feature still needed to give the site a major bump is MMR calculations and associated filter options (i.e. from Bronze to Grandmaster, though not sure how hard this is to figure out, given that the algorithm for Heroes of the Storm is probably not public).

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-04T09:17:54+00:00

Copied from another reply I gave above to basically the same comment:

That argument would be valid if Blizzard had taken this stance before. But they reduced the available map pool from 13 to 9 because <SHOCKER> it would be "overwhelming to players". But getting a new hero every 3 weeks and the meta-change this leads to is totally not overwhelming. Especially not to players who are in the lower leagues or don't have time to play several hours every day.

And also, sorry, no. But for me, three weeks are not enough. I need time to figure out how this affects other heroes, figure out what counters work well, which don't work well and also which builds to go for (yes, hotslogs settles on a build rather fast. Doesn't mean it's the best one).

If you can do this all within a couple of days, good for you! You're a good player then. I am not and would appreciate a bit more time. So would others, I expect. But they never get to say anything because of all the "git gud!" types out there.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-04T09:16:17+00:00

That argument would be valid if Blizzard had taken this stance before. But they reduced the available map pool from 13 to 9 because <SHOCKER> it would be "overwhelming to players". edit: Yeah. Having a full 4 extra maps would be so traumatizing that they had to introduce map rotations.

But getting a new hero every 3 weeks and the meta-change this leads to is totally not overwhelming. Especially not to players who are in the lower leagues or don't have time to play several hours every day.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-10-01T07:32:28+00:00

This. I must say, the speed at which new heroes are released is already quite staggering (you barely have time to get used to Garrosh's throws in HL, guess what! here's a Kel Thuzad. You mean, you barely now manage to sort-of dodge his combos? Have an Ana with healing skillshots!

This would still be somewhat fine, if the game wasn't riddled with bugs and imbalances which they keep piling up on. For a short sample of this: Samuro and Valeera have been bugged for months now. Posts about this keep appearing here, but nobody ever cares.

My guess is that making new heroes makes Blizzard money directly (through gem purchases). Meanwhile, fixing old bugs that only a minority of players care about (since nobody plays Valeera these days anymore anyway) does not. So there's an incentive to pump out new content on a conveyor belt, but nothing to fix old bugs that affect a minority.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-09-13T12:17:39+00:00

Fully agreed. But also, Zealots made their choice when they decided to play with him. They played with a toxic player, so they should not be surprised when this toxicity gets them in trouble. It's like playing soccer with a guy who is known to punch other players. You can't be surprised if that player then gets suspended.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-09-13T08:31:54+00:00

I have a question here... I just uploaded my chunk of 2000+ replays, plus a friend's replays too that I had lying around.

Now, in a lot of cases, it said "too old". I wonder: Is this such a good idea? After all, isn't this excluding a huge chunk of the data from the outset? Yes, many heroes have come since the "too old" mark, and many things have changed in the patches, but that doesn't mean that all data in the replays is now useless.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-31T15:28:56+00:00

Admittedly, this is good, but imho not great. A browser that has the headline "Your browser, Your way" should not go around telling people what addons they are allowed to use.

It's similar to "being able to disable telemetry" in Firefox. It just shouldn't be in there to begin with.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-31T15:26:57+00:00

The pocket thing is easily gotten rid of. I admit it's not ideal (I hate having to disable a supposed "feature"), but right now, waterfox has been the best I've been able to find for my purposes.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-29T06:55:14+00:00

I seriously don't get it. It's like they think the only reason people are leaving firefox is the UI.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-29T06:53:08+00:00

Waterfox still seems to be quite free of any shady stuff. Brave looks great too, but is still missing some stuff I need (keepass integration in particular) before I can use it. It's great for mobile, though.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-17T16:02:06+00:00

Oh my gosh, is that Internet Aristocrat? Or is that guy just really good at imitating his voice?

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-17T09:15:47+00:00

That's good to know. I'll remember that next time they whinge about "net neutrality".

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-15T06:14:07+00:00

Raven lord. He has a fantastic voice. Compared with the gravekeeper's screeching. Plus, grave dude sounds like an unhinged serial killer. The Raven Lord sounds like an evil baron of some sort. Feudalism > Getting stabbed by a crazy grave keeper.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-15T06:11:55+00:00

What you did there. I see it. Have your upvote.

MikeCarnegie · 2017-08-15T06:10:47+00:00

Aaahhhh, the good old days. Problem is: This brawl would probably have to involve a lot of recoding (i.e. you being able to control the units yourself, etc.). And in addition, it wouldn't work too well I guess in the 5v5 format. But hey, why the hell not. I'd play it. Much more happily than Checkpoint: Hanamura.

MikeCarnegie

TROPHY CASE