I love you old dusty MacBook <3 :’) back to solitaire for this guy

in early 2003 magicyang quit starcraft. he'd been to wcg 2002, watched the top korean players, and decided the gap wasn't something he could train his way out of. so he switched to warcraft 3 and put sixteen hours a day into the asian battle.net ladder. in under a year he was ranked first on it. his night elf ancients play worked well enough that blizzard eventually weakened the ancients' attributes in a patch.

before wcg 2003 he and suho went through the whole map pool. on dragon spa they found something small: at a few of the creep camps, if you quietly had a wisp do a little damage to the enemy hero first, that hero wouldn't heal back to full at the fountain. and if the opponent wasn't careful with it, the hero would die in the middle of clearing the camp. that was the prep. not a build order. a wisp poke.

at the world final he drew ex_bifrost and lost game one. game two he refused to town portal out of a fight so he could kill as many units as possible, and by the time he left his hero had one point of health. he healed it back to full in an instant and swept the base. game three was dragon spa. the wisp went in early. ex_bifrost was managing two places at once and the hero died at the camp. magicyang killed everything he had in one run. when it was over, ex_bifrost, a mild guy by every account, smashed his own keyboard. he was certain he had thrown it himself.

he beat another korean at that same tournament, an orc player, and chinese forums started calling him the korean killer. what knocked him out of the bracket wasn't a korean.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how chinese esports actually got built, this chapter is free, link in the comments)

Rumors, speculation and huffing copium to follow;

A leaked photo purportedly from an internal Blizzard meeting showed an RTS listing for "Warcraft Chronicles", nominally launching in 2028. Beyond the name, no other information is known.

https://thenerdstash.com/massive-blizzard-roadmap-leak-points-to-new-warcraft-rts-arthas-rpg-and-more/

However, the case for a Warcraft RTS title is surprisingly strong. Either way, we'll find out at Blizzcon, so here are my arguments, handcrafted without any AI slop:

^^A Gap In The Market^^

LoL and DOTA famously ate Blizzard's lunch, and they've been cursing themselves ever since. Heroes of the Storm was a modest attempt to reclaim the new genre space, but came too late and competed too directly. However, traditional RTS has also seen metamorphosis in recent years, as the trend towards single-player defensive, city builder and 4X strategy games has left no real successors to WC3 or StarCraft.

Multiple kickstarter projects have tried to fill the apparent niche, only to be dashed on the rocks; Stormgate and Battle Aces, projects of ex-Blizzard devs, prime among them. However, many of these projects fail because they strive to teach the heights set by StarCraft 2, which had functionally unshakable funding due to Blizzard's WoW coffers. Given that same stability, a potential Warcraft RTS could easily survive development.

^^A League of Their Own^^

In terms of competitors, League of Legends deserves special attention. In addition to an insanely deep bench of characters, it's sustained itself well on skins and other cosmetics. The game and its world have succeeded well enough to warrant a Netflix animated series that's received wide acclaim and feverish fan art. Blizzard, despite their success with World of Warcraft, have never quite broken that barrier, having tried and failed to start a cinema franchise. The envy is still there, and for good reason.

^^The Lore Problem^^

The most widely acknowledged reason for the lack of a Warcraft 4 so far is the immensity of World of Warcraft's lore - Blizzard can't compete with themselves, after all, and WoW has been the seat of the lore for longer than WC1-3 were at this point.

However, the name Warcraft Chronicles may signal a brute force solution to this age old problem - just don't make Warcraft 4, but something else entirely.

^^Cutting the Gordian Knot^^

So with all these issues - the stasis of the RTS scene, the looming shadow of competitors, and the tangle of WoW's lore - what could Warcraft Chronicles look like?

The answer, surprisingly, may come from Blizzard's other prize RTS: Starcraft II.

Co-op campaigns, introduced late in the Legacy of the Void dev cycle, became a home run hit for SC2. Players who had exhausted or skipped off both the campaign and cutthroat ladder could play with friends in a non-toxic environmen, exploring not only the different races but different heroic commanders that swapped and altered their armies to almost become new factions in themselves. This new scene proved wildly successful, driving DLC purchases on par with competitors like LoL.

With that in mind, the solution for Warcraft Chronicles is simple;

- Timeline-agnostic SP/co-op content that revisits major lore events covered in WoW, ranging from mini campaigns to one-off giant battle missions

- A deep bench of heroes, offering replayability and DLC/roster expansion potential

- Baseline factions which are modified by chosen heroes on the field and via unique or altered units/upgrades

- Potential 1v1 ladder or bigger skirmish matches using some or all of the hero roster

Imagine the possibilities! Playing with a hero like Varian Wrynn or old-school Uther for the traditional WC3 experience, or swapping in a Gnomish hero for access to new mechanical units. Night Elf Sentinels and Druids being subfactions helmed by different heroes, or Scourge and Forsaken.

In any event... time will tell. Here's hoping it's not another mobile game.

Edit: Welp. Unless they make a secret change to the Blizzcon schedule, it looks like we're SOL.

Dear everyone,

I am Lê Thu Hiền (ThuHien Le), Vietnamese, male, office worker.

Just like you guys, I have been a Warcraft fan for over two decades.

We all know there are massive narrative flaws and unanswered questions that the community has spent years digging through. Here is my definitive patch note to fix the lore. I want to share this architectural blueprint with you and the entire global community because let’s face it: whatever Blizzard writes isn't always the absolute truth.

What if Prince Arthas operated with absolute active sovereignty instead of blind manipulation? Suppose that through some temporal distortion, Arthas foresaw the entire timeline. He knew he was destined to become the Lich King, and he knew the Lich King was destined to eventually fall. Yet, he computed that his descent into darkness was the only optimal path. By assuming the mantle of the Scourge, he created a supreme, universal threat designed to forcibly unify all mortal races on Azeroth. This built the mandatory hardware foundation and structural alliance required to stand against the Burning Legion later on. Faced with the Legion, where the cosmic outcome is binary—either "Survival" or "Absolute Annihilation"—all other mortal conflicts are merely child's play. Arthas knew the universal matrix: "There must always be a Lich King," and him filling that slot was the optimal solution. Thus, he proactively chose to sacrifice his honor, soul, and ego to become the ultimate biological firewall.

Furthermore, let us recalibrate the legendary 1v1 showdown between Arthas and Illidan under the Frozen Throne.

At that specific space-time coordinate, Illidan possessed absolute raw power and scaled way above a severely weakened Arthas. However, mid-combat, the cosmic source code and visions of the impending apocalyptic timeline were directly injected into Illidan's mind. This event is exclusive and restricted to the Night Elf race due to their innate resonance with the planet’s world-soul and temporal baseline. If Arthas had faced any other mortal warrior, he would have been flat-out assassinated on the spot. But Illidan decoded the true system parameter: "There must always be a Lich King." He realized that the true end-game threat was the Burning Legion, and executing Arthas right there would trigger a total planetary system melt-down leading to absolute erasure. Therefore, despite his supreme dominance, Illidan made a calculated, rational move—he threw the match and faked his defeat. I strongly believe that these two axioms serve as the master key to flawlessly synthesize and unify the entire Warcraft timeline. No communications, no words exchanged between the two outcasts, just pure, silent cosmic sync.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

Best regards from Vietnam, Lê Thu Hiền (ThuHien Le)

[META NOTE: I originally intended to post this directly in r/Asmongold, but as a new account, I was restricted by the automated spam filters. If anyone reads this and finds my logic solid, please share or cross-post this to his Subreddit, or tag him so it reaches him. Thank you!]

what do you guys play? campaign or custom games? offline or online?