The "rocPortraits" Mystery

Hidden Reign of Chaos portraits from Patch 1.33 PTR.

Blizzard's sudden return to Warcraft 3 with Patch 1.33 on PTR has been very interesting, to say the least. As I observed these events from afar, it did seem like we're heading in the same circle and repeating the same mistakes that paved the way for current Reforged. My initial plan was to go over all of this after the patch gets proper release, but things have changed for the better. Besides, I'm not really excited to revisit the negative side of things.

Instead, I would rather focus my attention on something great. Something that can be good for this game, its community and developers. I've mentioned the secret Classic+ (as we seem to currently call them now) portraits for 25 wins in The Frozen Throne before. Now, the last PTR update brought in all Reign of Chaos ladder icons and community loves these with Grubby & Wtii highlighting them on their YouTube/Twitch channels. It looks like Blizzard started to get it and we're in for a treat... However, I started to have my doubts because it is current Blizzard.

Hence why I decided to write this "article" and also mirror some key points on official forums & Reddit. I would talk about the portraits themselves, how they might be implemented and how I think they should be introduced into current version of Warcraft 3. As other members of the community, I'll try to help them avoid upsetting pretty much everyone.

Portrait Talk.

I would like to start with a small talk about the icons themselves. While the previous five ones were in 256x256 resolution just like any other icon in Reforged, these were added to the game files as 1024x1024. I wouldn't deny that it's always nice to get art assets in highest resolution, this seems like any case of impracticality when it comes to Warcraft 3 currently handles its storage space. These icons are still look good in 256x256, as you can  see on the thumbnail (except for Peon in 512x512; Had to stick with 1920x1080). Hopefully, Blizzard keeps the consistency of portrait resolution on live game.

Secondly, let's begin to address our good old friend named "accuracy". Yes, current player profiles and main menu as a whole is different from what Warcraft 3 used to have. Back in a day, you would see a glorious 3D unit portrait on player profile with his level and whatnot. Blizzard decided to be faithful to the ladder icons as they're shown in old Battle.net User Icon Selection and game's Strategy Guide that's still alive somehow. While these portraits are perfect, there're a few mistakes Blizzard should fix:

• Fix background glow for Farseer, Lich & Priestess of the Moon.

• Give Thrall his blue pupils back.

• Add Peasant, Acolyte & Wisp to the party.

Battle.net User Icon Selection in The Frozen Throne. Taken from Reddit.

Besides Archmage and Red Dragon, other 500 win portraits don't have accurate background glow that Blizzard decided to add for these Classic+ icons. It's all blue for some reason. Not red, teal and purple for Farseer, Lich & Priestess respectively. Nobody seem to have noticed this, so I'm taking it upon myself to point this out. The lack of blue pupils on Thrall's portraits is likely a combination of two factors: they're hard to notice on original in-game icon and the one in Selection is a part of four exceptions that created used his model. As for the other workers, they were in the game files of older versions of Warcraft 3. You already brought them in with Reforged. Just do it again. And maybe you should work a bit more on Red Dragon's beard?

Blue Dragon portrait is also based on its regular version, not ladder one. This is weird, considering that Green Whelp is true to its ladder iteration. Perhaps that could the sign of Blizzard approaching the creation of these "Classic+" portraits overly quick.

Option №1.

Let's begin with the one that encouraged me address this situation. With the release of Reforged, players were able to connect their Classic account from Battle.net 1.0 to the current one in order to preserve their stats. Although this option is still present in the settings, the accounts themselves should no longer exist as you had to log in every 90 days to keep them alive. So you really should've had that 3 month period for saving your older statistics. Not to mention that we just don't know how or if it actually worked: I believe that you get to use your Battle.net 1.0 name instead of BattleTag and that's pretty much it so far.

According to BogdanW3, they are called "rocPortraits" in game files (they're defined in WebUI) and there're also some references to "Classic" portraits (at least for the TFT Random ladder icons) in main UI files that's pretty messy to read. These evidence led me to believe that Blizzard might've chosen the bad option of simply respecting veterans of the game who connected their older accounts. Battle.net 1.0 accounts covered both Reign of Chaos & The Frozen Throne, so that should covered the whole veteran community... Unless you forget about the fact that Reign of Chaos multiplayer was disabled in Patch 1.31, which is 8 months before Reforged's release. We know that many fans of the original game weren't really fans of expansion's gameplay balance. Who knows how many of them moved over to official TFT servers instead of the likes of GameRanger.

As if that wasn't enough, there's also this positive response from the community. People love these portraits and want to get them instead of recycled Reforged ones. If Blizzard gives these only to Classic account owners, people would be pissed for many different reasons. Because they can't get them. Maybe because something went wrong with the connection of their 1.0 account. Perhaps some of them are ex-RoC players who rightfully felt backstabbed by Blizzard and their accounts were left to disappear. People would just have another reason to be sad, upset and angry at the company and current Warcraft 3 team.

Option №2.

As some of you may know, there're two types of Warcraft 3 players: Classic & Reforged. The first group has access to the game via Reign of Chaos CD-key only The Frozen Throne keys are no longer required since Patch 1.31. Another group consists of unfortunate souls that purchased Reforged. Key difference between these group are access to Reforged graphics. If I recall correctly, Classic players can't get Campaign portraits as they're granted exclussively for Reforged version. No idea about ladder icons.

If current ladder icons are available for Classic players, Blizzard might change that as it just doesn't make any sense. Classic+ portraits might become their only authentic reward for participating in ladder while also being available for Reforged players as that would be awkward otherwise. You can give access to Classic+ icons only to CD-key owners, but why would you do that? I mean, if Blizzard decides to copy Diablo 2 approach... Fine! You can download 1.27a installers of RoC & TFT from Blizzard still (thanks, Hive archive). Even without bringing back Battle.net 1.0 for it, that would be a nice move. Nice-ish.

But how they would be rewarded? Each iteration of ladder has different amount of portraits and amount of wins needed to get each one of them:

• Reign of Chaos: 25, 250, 500, 1500.

• The Frozen Throne: 25, 150, 350, 750, 1500.
  Tournament: 10, 75, 150, 250, 500.

• Reforged: 5, 20, 75, 200, 500, 1000.

How they're planning to address Reign of Chaos & TFT's tournament portraits? Bring them back? That would be awesome, but it sounds too good to be true. You can just give each icon based on current requirements, so that 25 wins give both players RoC & TFT icons and 500th victory rewards Reforged players with two portraits. You can use Reforged's lack to authenticity for your advantage since its HD icons are nothing like original ones and leaving everything as is. But that doesn't solve the issue with tournament portraits. Only way to deal with that would be the return of automated tournaments or just not add tournaments portraits in the first place.

Option №3.

Ranked ladder will have seasons and these usually have some kind of reward for its players. Let's look up at Developer Update from July 22, 2020 and what Blizzard has mentioned there about rewards:

"Speaking of seasonal rewards—we plan to award a portrait for each division and players will earn new portraits as they rank up. Portraits will unlock for all divisions earned at and below a player’s rank. With each new Season, players can expect fresh new portraits to showcase their achievements for that season."

It does mention portraits. Rank badges and the place on leaderboards wouldn't be enough, so that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is how Blizzard would incorporate these Classic+ portraits. You would have a total of 51 ladder icons and that doesn't match well with 7 Ranks for Ranked Play as they were listed in initial 1.33 patch notes. Besides, they would've probably mentioned portrait rewards being granted at the end of each season.

League Ranks in StarCraft: Remastered. Taken from Blizzard.

It does match StarCraft: Remastered system though. At least, on the surface. Seven ranks in each season is exactly what Warcraft 3 is about to get, so let's look further how that game handles portraits. Each rank there gets a portrait and specific color border with highest three ranks getting a cooler version of said portrait with S rank being an animated one. And they have your traditional win portraits on top of that. By the way, I'm pretty sure that Remastered's menus were also built on Chromium. Just a little trivia. Anyway, how Classic+ icons would fit in? Blizzard would just hold on to them for who knows how long?

If anything, Reforged icons being repurposed as ranked rewards in this format makes more sense. That would be more in line with how they handled menu backgrounds. Maybe discouraging for players, but I think it's safe to say that Blizzard created ranked ladder for Reforged just for the sake of it. The game simply needs an official option, so that nobody complains or makes jokes about it on their break before another match on W3Champions.

Conclusion.

I had one ambitious idea in my Just an Idea "article", but let's be more grounded here. Kind of, because I'll rumble about Reign of Chaos ruleset. Bring it back with Automated Tournaments that would rotate between Classic (RoC) and Reforged (TFT) rulesets. Keep  Classic to Unranked if necessarily, but people will play both at the very least for portraits. Blizzard can promote this feature similarly to Classic format in Hearthstone that was added in Patch 20.0 where you can play with original carts as they were in June 2014 patch. Reset players progress and delete all current Reforged portraits or let them be for more quantity.

Either way, Option №2 seems more fair and likely here. This post is about looking at realistic scenarios and pointing out which one is the best. I can go on about how Blizzard is free to go back to Warcraft 3's original multiplayer system and/or revive original main menu through World of Warcraft systems (there are some nuances), but maybe that's the story for another time.