Hi everyone!
Just would like to let everyone know the status of WC3 right now. in the wake of Reforged's release and 1 year anniversary, despite Blizzard's lackadaisical approach to it, we the community are still enjoying WarCraft 3 in 2021. Thanks to content creators and the W3Champions mod team that has been ramping up efforts for WC3's continued survival, our passion for the game continues strongly.
The bad: 1) Blizzard lost most if not all of their classic development team that was administering updates to Warcraft: Reforged and they left the project in an incomplete state. We haven't gotten updates from them in over half a year. Key features that were part of original WC3 are still missing, such as a ranked system, profiles, clans, automated tournaments, and Battle.net features like /stats, /friend add, and more. 2) At Blizzconline, Blizzard didn't mention the word Reforged at all. They did mention "WC3" in reference to the esports that dreamhack/ESL are doing, but they didn't mention WC3 Reforged development at all.
The good: 1) Nearly all of the games you see here on YouTube are made possible thanks to W3C, with them offering better servers, better ping for most players especially from South Korea, Brazil and Peru and other South American countries, Russia and many more. The 4on4 RT games on W3C have almost no griefing (backstabbing or afk'ing etc.). The MMR and matchmaking are better. The game quality in 1on1 is better and more competitive. 2) W3C team has already re-introduced profiles, icons, ranked ladder, stats, stats analysis, an improved battle.net UI interface, and all you have to do is download the launcher and use it, essentially using a modded version of the game. You can still play on regular BNet even if you get this app, it's just all around an improvement. 3) Now there's even automated tournaments coming (currently on the W3Champions PTR, a test server). Just like we used to have back in early WC3! It's pretty awesome.
The future: There is still a chance that Blizzard restores some of the lost features that WC3 suffered after the horrible (and deserved) release of Reforged with its Metacritic score of 0.5/10. Whether they'd be as good as the W3Champions features remains to be seen, of course. Although it seemed like Reforged is totally abandoned by Blizzard, they *MAY* still come back to it. Vicarious Visions is development studio within Activision that got moved into Blizzard entirely to work on remasters. “According to Bloomberg, issues with the development of Warcraft III: Reforged made Blizzard reconsider the teams it had developing games moving forward, with its classic games “Team 1” being pulled off the project and replaced by a division that is also handling Diablo 4. Among the developers also working on that project includes the Vicarious Visions team.”