Blizzard owns your custom map.

[Vegas]

CUSTOM MAP OWNERSHIP
Blizzard clearly isn't risking another DOTA getting away from them. Buried away in Warcraft 3: Reforged's Terms of Service is a clause that gives them total ownership of any custom maps created by users, including moral rights*.

Code: Select all

Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games. […] To the extent you are prohibited from transferring or assigning your moral rights to Blizzard by applicable laws, to the utmost extent legally permitted, you waive any moral rights or similar rights you may have in all such Custom Games, without any remuneration.
*'Moral rights' are your rights as a creator - of anything - to enforce your attribution as the creator of the work, along with other rights. By demanding your moral rights to any custom maps, Blizzard is able to decide how, when, or if they attribute you as the creator.

[devoltz]

They will ban you (digital copy ban, like loosing your cd-keys) for explicit content too, like porn maps or school shooting maps (yeah there's some of it)
Some maps like "run gay run" and "escape gay space" might get banned too, since they offer hate speech.
Not sure if they will start banning cheated maps too, since it is just a edited version, not a 3rd party tool.

Reforged is just a joke, since map makers will just give they ideas and blizzard will decide what to do with it.

There was a discussion about it on wc3edit discord server Vegas, u should join us.

[Arakunido]

As I already said in our discord - it's an overreaction. SC2 had something similar for at least 9 years already(even warcraft 3 had something like that before reforged, just not to this extent). Barely anyone screamed about it, people still make maps for it too. Don't remember map makers leaving SC2, neither arcade being dead, like prophets from the internet say about Reforged.

There's even a thread on Hive from almost 10 years ago that is literally the same as current threads about ToS in Reforged: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/bl ... ps.170065/

Blizzard clearly isn't risking another DOTA getting away from them

I really like how someone makes this situation even more absurd to other people by using "Dota" in this context. I only remember... 3(?) maps that got their standalone versions. 2 of them are not really popular, if you ask me. Especially if we compare them to Dota. It is: Element TD, Legion TD & Dota. Around 18 years of warcraft 3 and only 3 maps. I never heard about other examples. Maybe I'm mistaken, feel free to tell me other examples.

Buried away in Warcraft 3: Reforged's Terms of Service

Literally 2 clicks on their website to reach Custom Game Acceptable Use Policy.
Exaggeration is the most useful tool in the hands of people who want to make someone look bad.

I'm not defending Reforged, there's a lot of reasons to hate it. Like how they removed a lot of functions from the Battle.net, or people with only classic CD-KEYs not being able to play campaign, not to mention custom games, etc. But exaggerating & spreading lies about Reforged(like being unable to play offline at all) - doesn't make you better than them. Nor it's the right thing to do.

[Bartimaeus]

Yeah, I remember that something like this was already in the WC3 online or World Editor terms of agreement. Believe people agreed that its enforceability would be suspect at best, but of course, Blizzard has an army of lawyers that you don't want to test. I do think that it would make it easier for them to take possession of something like DotA before it ever got to the point where it could become a standalone game. If years before Valve had started working on DOTA 2, Blizzard had just taken it and turned it into an official WC3 map, maybe started updating the map themselves and started hosting tournaments for it, I think Valve would've been incredibly leery of trying to take it and run with it. I'm not sure why Blizzard hadn't done that to begin with given how much DotA was clearly driving WC3 for so long - maybe they didn't like their legal standing, maybe they were just stupid and wanted the game to die at the time thinking WoW was always going to be the future (ignoring that they're completely different genres and the same group of people weren't playing them), I'm not really sure. Regardless, they had an opportunity and didn't take it and maybe this is their way of making sure they're better prepared to do so in the future...ignoring that the heyday of mapmakers/modders making interesting/unique/original maps is long, long over with Blizzard having nothing to show for it all the while. It was very unlikely there'd ever be something as big as DotA happening again, especially with Blizzard's extremely "hands-off" (i.e. ignoring) approach to the WC3 mapping community...since, well, basically WC3 released, probably also contributed to nothing ever gaining even a sliver of as much popularity as DotA. There were a number of unique ideas original to WC3 maps that...just stayed WC3 maps and never became their own thing. Many of those maps and ideas are lost to virtual obscurity now. It was a great era for multiplayer modding. I hope we see something like it again, but due to some combination of companies wanting to own everything made with their games + games not offering nearly the modularity/customization as they used to + serializing and/or "service"-izing game series, it's probably not likely to happen. At least we got to be a part of it.