If you ever want to play your custom maps again that is. My friend and I tried to play today, it turns out that due to some World Editor “fixes” games using certain types of triggers (and this is most games) can’t be played*. A few maps were spared, and DotA was fixed simply because the devs are so on the ball, but many unsupported maps are going to have to be hacked and fixed by fans or by their (presumably disinterested) creators (and of course, you’ll have to find the map again before you can play it).
Just a word of warning, if you want to play custom maps with friends don’t go on Battle.net, get Hamachi or something and play over virtual LAN.
Actually it seems to be unsafe type casting was the only change, they added hash table stuff to save/load assets so presumably all one would need to do is get a deprotect utility, find the offenders and change them, but in larger maps that you didn’t code yourself that could be an immense pain.
I found DoTA to be unbalanced and lacking an amount of cool factor. Though I’ll admit I last played it back around Allstars 5.4 or whatever it was a couple months after the big TFT patch that added the extra mercs. I prefer Age of Myths and certain versions of Battleships for my Aeon of Strife type maps.
It’s probably better nowadays, but there’s no point in trying it anymore because there’s no chance in hell I’ll be able to do anything worthwhile since I’m a complete newb at it, Aeon of Strife type maps are not things where you just learn the mechanics and you’re good, each one is so distinctly different you really have to know what you’re doing on that specific map. Maybe if we got a doper room together…
Okay, I’ll admit it this time, I absolutely suck at Warcraft 3. I can usually even get through most RTS campaigns without cheating or even checking guides but I didn’t do it on WC3 until recently, and by that I mean months ago (and on hard at that, I was proud of myself). By the time I tried online months after release people were already making rank 1 socks just to get automatched with and curbstomp noobs for lulz and every team match I tried someone on my team was maphacking so I quit out of honor (cheating in multi is waaaay over the line for me) making it so I never could learn how to play it properly, it doesn’t help that I like turtling too much to be a good player (I like seeing tier 3 units and all that). It also doesn’t help that I used to not be able to take trash talking, if someone made fun of me in game I’d tell them they were right, bite myself in real life, and start attacking my own base. Oddly enough I didn’t feel bad like this at all during custom maps because I felt like the “not real game” wasn’t “serious business” like the random maps so I had fun with those and became really good at some.
That said, I find your view odd. Even most people I’ve known that were high on the ladder (top few hundred, won a couple tournaments) liked custom maps a lot as well, and didn’t consider the two sides of the game related at all. Do you hold it against all people who play custom maps for being noobs, or just personally find them poorly made in comparison?
Blizzard supports their games really well, Starcraft and Diablo 2 still get patched, though they seem to abandon games after sequels (AFAIK neither Diablo nor the other 2 Warcraft games have had patches since about the release of their sequels)