Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne - Development

Development

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was originally announced on January 22, 2003. On February 14, 2003, Blizzard announced the first beta test for the game, which offered 10,000 players to sample the game. On March 10, 2003, 10,000 more players were selected to participate in the beta test. On May 29, 2003, Blizzard announced that the expansion set had "gone gold". There have been many patches, including patch 1.21b which allowed the game to be played without the official CD. On April 4, 2008 Blizzard released a new test version of Warcraft III patch 1.22. The patch was available for testing on the "Westfall" beta server. The Westfall server was recently taken down and a message by Blizzard was given stating that a live release of patch 1.22 to all realms would be forthcoming. On July 1, 2008 patch 1.22 was released. Due to the latest patch, version 1.23, many third-party programs have been rendered unusable. Several third-party programs that reveal the entire map, commonly known as maphacks, have been released for the update. It also disabled collided maps, which would make modified custom maps appear to be the same as the original. Another effect of the patch, which is not included in the release notes, is that custom maps with large filenames will not appear in the game. The limit is believed to be 20 characters, but this has not yet been tested. The 1.23 patch included no actual changes to gameplay, and the 1.24a to 1.24e patches followed suit. in 2011 blizzard released various updates for Warcraft 3 TFT, including patch 1.25a, 1.25b and the latest one, 1.26a.