MakeMeHost's final message. Taken from Reddit.
I'm reaching the final destination on this improvised Warcraft 3 journey I started back in August. From Alpha to The Frozen Throne, time has come to "pre-Reforged" stage of Warcraft 3 when the game started to receive a few updates in the midst of its huge "upgrade/remaster". While there's been some great additions for a classic game, it also had its fair share of rough decisions that caused some negative reaction from the playerbase. In hindsight, I guess you can say it was a "calm before the storm" for many members of this game's community.
To be fair, technically I touched upon similar subject in "Saddening Tribute to Reign of Chaos", but this time I wanted to be more specific and different from other post in this "unofficial" series. Which means I wouldn't mention balance shenanigans, brief camera zoom change and things like that. Instead, I wanted to recap a community feature that saw most usage within Custom Games of Warcraft 3 that was basically disabled by Blizzard in one of the patches: what it is, why that's a big deal and who was right & wrong.
Connection Matters.
Similarly to most other developers, Blizzard is keen on shifting away their focus from older releases to their modern titles by slowly reducing their support to a point where they just keep game's servers running. While that's still a level of dedication that's not as common as it could've been, there're some drawbacks from what essentially is called a "maintaince mode". No matter what issue your favorite aged game has, waiting for its creators to suddenly come back for one more patch is pointless.
One of the issues that Warcraft 3 had in its Multiplayer side of things was hosting games and just how terrible its been for veteran players due to issues like the lack of reconnection options. While Blizzard "looked forward", Warcraft 3 community had to take care of itself and come up with best possible solution to make their live easier. That's how "hostbots" came to be: your typical Battle.net "player" whose hosting capability exceeded anything than the actual game had to offer... At least that's how I understand it since I "wasn't there" and I had a hard time to come up or figure out more comprehensible description.
Either way, hostbots were an important part of Multiplayer placescape of Warcraft 3. From casual skirmishes to amateur tournaments and custom game parties, all hailed that magical software and its creators for doing all the work that allowed them to enjoy this classic game. As time went on and tools matured, most of the game's hardcore audience couldn't imagine the world without such a fantastic service. However, as it was mentioned here before many times, Blizzard's therteenth abandoned child would reunite with its changed parent...
Hosting Nature.
But before glacing over the ensued circus show, I think it would be appropriate to actually go over some good and bad stuff that came with hostbots. Even though I clearly don't understand this topic, I tried to ask a couple of my friends more familiar with this subject and I'll go over a few notes I ended up gathering and hopefully that would be enough to properly describe what was the actual deal with all this stuff.
Anyway, at first I need to make a small correction. While isn't technically wrong to call hostbots a software, I was told that for the majority of time those were more of a "community service" type of thing. Just open up a browser, host or find a desired map and then good old Warcraft 3 opens up and leads you all straight to the action. Now defunct MakeMeHost was especially praised by StormKnight for what it was: comfortable browsing, improved connection quality for playing on official Battle.net servers. Another highlight of community's genius is GProxy++ that brought reconnection to Warcraft 3.
However, the most common downside of the hostbots I've seen thrown around during the discussion/debates on this topic are related to the side effect they had on Battle.net's in-game map list as it just got overwhelmed by hostbots and that made it difficult to browse it for those who are unaware of this community feature or simply didn't really want to bother. There's more to that as you'll see, but for now let's just mark it as "double-edged sword".
Disrupted Calm.
Where were we? Right, the calm. Warcraft 3's path to Reforged was pretty messy, even before its official announcement. In spite of a few pretty good additions to the game, new patches usually ended up bringing a lot of problems that Blizzard had to deal with via additional updates that were... well, more-or-less successful. While that's the topic I touched upon due to Reign of Chaos, hostbots also suffered in pretty similar way. Again, its not that bad and things like proper widescreen and in-game switch from base game to expansion on itself are wonderful. It wasn't that terrible, but that's still worth noting.
Earlier signs of a problem could be traced to Patch 1.29 since I've seen a few quotes about bots getting broken after its release. Fixes followed shortly after, but players started to get concerned since pre-Reforged era of patching was plagued with issues in other aspects of the game. And then Patch 1.30.2 was announced, when hostbots would stop functioning alltogether due to the changes made to how online play works in the game. While some players hoped that Blizzard listens to the community and does the right thing (which did eventually lead to disappointment), there was... different responce to this ongoing story.
Another huge platform that actively utilized hostbots was ENT Gaming and they were "very sad" after learning about upcoming changes to Battle.net hosting and how it affected now natural order of things for the community. There was nothing they could do to keep bots running in new environment. As some members of the community tried to properly voice their concerns and kept asking for fitting alternative, ENT were simply upset.
Is there anything they could do? Yes, and they sure did. At first multiple platforms have united for a 2 day showdown of the hosts as a protest to Blizzard's decisions. Forums posts and even petitions followed shortly after. As time went on and the end was getting closed, many services (like aforementioned MakeMeHost) just gave up and stopped their activity. In the wake of a disaster, WC3Connect appeared to offer an authentic hostbots experience outside of official Battle.net servers. And on October 26th, 2018 they went on to encourage fellow members of Warcraft 3 community to move over... by all-in spam of Battle.net's game list. This very smart and totally right move that didn't annoy any players resulted in many strikes from good old ban hammer. And it doesn't stop there, as some genius from ENT's leadership decided that encouraging spam & harassment towards Blizzard representative was a good thing to do, apparently... Yup. That's very self-explanatory, really.
Conclusion.
While ENT's actions were just stupid, the lack of replacement from Blizzard doesn't do them any favors as well. In other words, everyone is at fault here. They were some members of Classic Games Team that did the best they could for both Reign of Chaos and hostbots, but the latter ones were even less lucky than the fans of the original game. If not for ENT's gambit, perhaps hostbots would've been able to survive for a bit longer like game's original ruleset. Which leaves us with another grim chapter in this sad tale of current Warcraft 3.
Except it's not all that bad. Remember, people are still playing on older versions and they can handle hostbots just fine. Which means that you can still very well make use of IrInA bot, for example. Not sure if there're other... Oh yeah. I guess its appropriate to mention W3Champions yet again, even though it doesn't really involve any hostbots for obvious reasons. Like, I guess in a way it is a spiritual successor of MakeMeHost... I think?
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