Warcraft 3's First Patch in a Long Time Is Now Live

Warcraft 3’s first patch in a long time is now live, with 1.33.0 adding – well – mostly things that already existed in the game prior to the Great Reforging, as well as a neat new feature that’s been a long, long time coming.

You can read the official patch notes here, and we’ve summed up its contents below:

Ranked Play is in. You can now queue for Ranked or Unranked games.
Seasons are now defined. When a season ends, the ladder is reset. Your seasonal history is preserved in your profile and public leaderboards.
Ranked placement is as follows: Play 5 matches per race to get placed, or 3 in Random mode.
Ladder ranks (last to first): Unranked, Combatant, Challenger, Rival, Duelist, Elite, Gladiator, Champion.
Added the “!Stats” functionality. The command displays the win/loss record and MMR for each player in the current match. “!Stats + Username” will display a specific player’s stats.
Leaderboards can be accessed from the Versus screen. You can sort between race, friends and mode.
Player profiles can be accessed by right-clicking on the player icon on the bottom right corner of the screen. For other players, right-clicking on their name produces the same result.
Classic portraits are back. These are awarded for total lifetime wins in each mode.
Custom Games are now global (not tied to region).
The campaign has received a tuning and balance pass.
A new proxy server has been added in Chicago.
Menu buttons have hotkeys again.
A bunch of bug fixes.
Zooming is now much better (more in the next section)

Behold, Zooming For Modern Screens!

One aspect of Warcraft 3 that hadn’t aged well was how you couldn’t zoom out as much as you’d like. Most custom maps had some sort of command system implemented that would let you zoom out farther than the game would normally let you (“-zoom 2000”).

There’s new sliders that let you toy around with camera zooming, which can be found in the Gameplay section of the Options menu. You can also use the Page Up and Page Down keys to adjust it, alongside the usual mouse wheel. Pressing F5 snaps your camera back to the default zoom the game’s had for 21 years.

To showcase how lovely this new functionality is, here’s a picture of the default zoom:

Here’s a picture with the new, awesome, enhanced zoom at it maximum ‘zoom out’ value:

This is, for me at least, the best thing to come out of Reforged yet. Now, the game still has a long way to go before it gets back all the features it used to have (custom campaigns, where you at?), but perhaps this patch shows there is still at least one person working on the game.

Do you have any hope for Reforged getting continued support? Have you checked out the cool new zoom feature? Let us know in the comments below!