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| Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos Battle.net Background Screenshot by Kacpa. |
Previously I talked about certain topics related to Alpha and Beta versions of Warcraft 3. Now, the time has come to visit Reign of Chaos in its finalized form and dedicate our attention to it. This time it's going to be slightly different though, as the point of my interest is more global. Original game kept me curious for some time now: ladder, differences from the expansion & "re-release/remaster" and just how it kept going after those updates for all these years.
Perhaps it didn't hold on most of community's attention after The Frozen Throne was released. but there're still players who plays and prefers the original Warcraft 3's gameplay over expansion and current version. That's just one of the reasons why I decided to talk about Reign of Chaos, but let's stop extending this introduction and move on to exploring this chapter of game's life.
Reigning Supreme.
One of the key points I would likely be going back to throughout this article is scarcity of public information available about the days of Reign of Chaos. As we move forward, I'll elaborate more on that, but let's start from the beginning. Obviously, at first there was just one Warcraft 3. The pure one, the original one. Everyone played on Battle.net by competing against each other in various game types of ladder or just casually hanging out in custom games, having fun and spending their time in favorite game. Overall, it was the same old Battle.net many people got used to later on with channels, friends lists and such.
Balance changes were pretty regular and, from my understanding, meta was varied. There was a certain degree of freedom when it came to the way you wanted to play, which is something you can kind of confirm even nowadays (more on that later). Although there're some key points to be made, and I'll go over those really soon. Reign of Chaos is slower, maybe less balanced... In other words, original Warcraft 3 was very chaotic. But there's an undeniable charm that captured quite a few players: just enough to keep the torch lit.
Cooling Differences.
Let's take a moment to actually point out some stuff. Sometimes games can undergo through a lot of changes in its expansion pack with Warcraft 3 not being an exception to that. Even though it might appear that both Reign of Chaos & The Frozen Throne play fairly similar to each other, there's actually a lot of pretty huge differences between them that contributed to popularity of each one.
Although it is pretty interesting on itself, I had a rather hard time figuring out all key features of original game's structure and I'm still not sure I got everything right. Despite this, I would still like to list everything I've managed to look up in order to present to you a glimpse into the chaotic wildlands:
- Obviously, The Frozen Throne introduced many new units, heroes, upgrates and such that are absent in Reign of Chaos.
- Costs for many units and other things were also changed.
- Maximum amount of food was increased from 90 to 100 with unkeep system being adjusted: no upkeep at 0-40/0-50, low upkeep at 41-70/51-80 and high upkeep at 71-90/81-100 in RoC & TFT accordingly.
- Attack & armor types were overhauled by adding in more of them and rebalancing the whole package. From 4 attack and 5 armor types in Reign of Chaos to 6 attack and armor types in The Frozen Throne.
- Experience gain and creeping specifically were tuned down in The Frozen Throne decreased the amount of gold you got from killing creeps and limiting the XP you got from them after level 5. Tower creeping was also made less reliable.
- Reign of Chaos doesn't had cooldown on items, which was changed with the expansion. You also couldn't see enemy hero's inventory before The Frozen Throne.
- Ultimate Abilities were much more popular and powerful in Reign of Chaos with many people describing playing the original as "first level 6 hero wins the game".
- There's a general lack of dispel in Reign of Chaos, as opposed to The Frozen Throne.
- Original Warcraft 3 is even slower and, to some, easier than its current iteration.
- Tournaments were introduced in The Frozen Throne.
Perhaps this list isn't as in-depth as I wanted it to be, but I think it provide enough content to illustrate the differences between two versions of the game. I haven't really mentioned current Reforged balance simply because it's nothing more than glorified "The Frozen Throne Plus": while I do acknowledge it as its own thing, in reality there's no major differences between the two that you could talk about.
After The Foreword.
It may come as no surprise that the vast majority of Warcraft 3 community moved over to The Frozen Throne after its official release. Eventually Blizzard as well left Reign of Chaos to itself with last patch that contained dedicated notes for both versions of the game was 1.20 that came out on October 3, 2005. Player population on Battle.net reduced significantly, but there were still enough players that formed a dedicated community. They had their own versions of maps with some groups even recreating certain The Frozen Throne maps for Reign of Chaos.
There're two sides of Reign of Chaos' story in that time period I managed to get, both of which are valid and should be talked about. Starting with documented recap from "The Rise of Chaos: A Compendium" article from Warcraft3.Info, its author talks about the grim times of map hackers, sold & fake accounts with matchmaking abuse. As the number of players decreased, it actually made it easier for newcomers to explore the Reign of Chaos, but ladder itself was pretty hard to get into due to big search times. On the bright side, however, many tournaments and cups were still going strong.
Another side is more brighter as it talks about latter stages of original Warcraft 3's Northrend Gateway on Battle.net. Luckily for me, my friend Kacpa was a Reign of Chaos player, so he offered some insides about his experience. A very pleasant one, which might come as a surprise after the first story. From his perspective, this version of Warcraft 3 was healthy enough to provide decent game experience. Finding a game in ladder wasn't all that difficult (depending on the game type): not really a lot of players, but just enough to not wait for too long. Many custom games were played until it was hit badly by the lack of native hosting support that stayed alive only for The Frozen Throne.
Sad Outcome.
To put it simply, Reign of Chaos was abandoned and left alone by everyone: Blizzard, community... Its Battle.net remained out there as a sacred corner for a niche community of players all over the world for many years in silence. As time moved on, so did Blizzard and eventually they came back to their classic games like Warcraft 3. Various patches to the game & Starcraft: Remastered were a signs of things to come. We all know where that path has ended, but it's worth remembering that this route on itself wasn't perfect either and Reign of Chaos enthusiats will be one of the first to point this out.
Pre-Reforged period was devastating for them. Starting with the patch 1.28.3, both Reign of Chaos & The Frozen Throne were fused into one client with a toggle that allows to switch between the two without closing the game. Although this feature is awesome for those who likes to jump between original game and expansion, it caused a lot of issues for players: switch itself caused a crash sometimes at first, but more persisting issue was player matching when disconnects were caused by attempting to push RoC & TFT opponents. Blizzard attempted to deal with this significant problem in respectable way for their audience with final and definitive solution coming in after the release of 1.31.0 with the deactivation of Battle.net for Reign of Chaos and giving away full access to The Frozen Throne for the owners of original game... Wait.
I mentioned this somewhat briefly back in "True Tragedy of Warcraft 3: Reforged", but I would like to repeat that portion of an "article" here. As I've mentioned back then, Blizzard explained their decision by the "very low usage of tournaments and of the Reign of Chaos ruleset" with officially mentioning that automated tournament from The Frozen Throne shared the same fate for the first time. To further add insult to injury, they brushed it off as "underused elements" that would allow to help them streamline lacking support for the overall game and "we do anticipate that players who prefer Reign of Chaos will find custom games with similar ruleset, which we hope will help satisfy that concern".
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| LoveStruck's reaction to Reign of Chaos removal. |
Custom games wouldn't be able to replace true ladder (for most people, at least), so the fact that Blizzard and everyone were just so eager to throw Reign of Chaos community under the bus just breaks my heart. What I think didn't make the situation any better was the overhaul of players icons in Reforged where value and prestige of many ladder rewards was tarnished by redirecting them to the campaigns, which is something Blizzard shouldn't have done at all: not only Reign of Chaos players weren't able to carry over their achievements from the past to Reforged (unlike The Frozen Throne, but even that wasn't perfect), they had to "enjoy" watching how easily others can access high level rewards (such as Medivh, Thrall & Furion) of the past by spamming cheat codes. Not to mention the simple fact of it being a cut content as the ladder itself and some of the icons are absent.
Conclusion.
For more than a year, that was it. No Reign of Chaos ladder out there and no proper care for it from others. When I'm looking at it from such perspective, the way how Warcraft 3's community got treated by overall industry after Reforged's release seems rather ironic as (in my eyes) the fate of original game's Battle.net mirrored it in much smaller scale. Situation was pretty grim, and it doesn't help already small and scattered group of players.
However, all hope wasn't lost and the beacon of light risen on the horizon with W3Champions. Their grove and contribution to Warcraft 3 has been undeniable. So much so that they added the support for Reign of Chaos ruleset in early May 2021. I do have some nitpicks that are likely very minor in high scheme of things (like the ladder system itself and their approach to icons), so I'll leave them to myself this time. Either way, Grubby even played a few games in there sometime after this release, which only reinforced my own interest in Reign of Chaos and introduced many other people to it. Ever since that particular point of time, I wanted to write post like this, and I'm glad I finally managed to do this. As for the other, let's say, "alternative platforms", I don't think there's really any other option for original game's ladder out there, sadly.
That's where Reign of Chaos is right now. I can't say what future hold for it as the fog surrounding is even thicker than the one around current Warcraft 3. If not for the combination of certain factors in my today's routine, I would've probably tried my luck with that W3Champions or just install 1.29.2 client to properly beat Reign of Chaos... Maybe I'll do the latter at some point, who knows. Instead, I would like to encourage all readers here to do the first thing for me, in case you're Warcraft 3 players: just go and try out the ladder in its original form with all its weirdness, chaos and charm.
Thanks to JediMaster & Kacpa for sharding a bit of their knowledge on the subject.
Excellent post. I am currently learning to play Warcraft III in its 1.00 iteration, the first release of RoC. I got tired of playing 'n cheating in TFT, the biggest difference for me are the changes in armor and attack types.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Hope you're having fun with Warcraft 3 1.0 without cheating. That actually might be a neat way to play the game with topic of "What patches you can choose from" being an interesting subject to tackle on eventually.
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