Retera

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Retera (real name: Unknown, for various reasons) is a Hive Workshop member who joined the website in 2008 to ask for a solution to a bug that has still never been fixed even in Warcraft III Reforged. Until this time, his use of the internet to communicate about Warcraft III consisted solely of his own model download website created in 2004, called "Summons of the Void," which offered users a variety of Warcraft III custom models that were mostly reskins. Creating "Summons of the Void" had been an enjoyable effort to document Warcraft III MDL editing that Retera had already been doing prior to 2004. The models available on the site were not created specifically for the site. However, the project was the second in a series of Warcraft III-related 4-H projects that Retera had submitted to his local county fair, and unlike Retera's 2003 project depicting how creating a custom campaign on Warcraft III was an educational experience for kids like himself that taught the use of terms like "Variables" and "Integers" and "Booleans," the "Summons of the Void" website was not a hit with the judges because of the red text on a black background that evoked a certain sense of angst.

### History

For Retera, the World Editor became his home during his formative years, so that when he came home from school every day he would open the World Editor even when he had no plan for what to do with it or what he was going to make. Retera created dozens of maps that were tiny and unfinished. These served more or less as a way to sate the desire for bringing daydreams into reality more than anything.

As the youngest in a real-life social group of five people who would come together to play Warcraft III on a roughly annual basis, Retera became fascinated by the Warcraft III game because of its socialist way for handling human interaction. In almost every map, all of the players would start on an equal footing, whereas in the real life Retera was smaller than the other people in this social group and started off on an unequal, inferior footing. When his social group took a walk in the part, the other kids would walk ahead in a group away from Retera so that they could avoid the nuisance of Retera, and Retera would attempt to annoy them to get attention. These attempts to deliberately be annoying were probably driven by instinct and a lack of self-understanding for the impact on others of what he was doing.

So, Warcraft III became a place where Retera was able to play an RPG and be an equal sort of hero to the others in his social group. Typically this led to the other, older kids in the group learning how to outsmart Retera and be the more powerful or better characters in a way that Retera would believe was his own fault and not the fault of game design. This served to re-establish the sense of order that the other kids knew and loved from their real life experiences.

Again with a subconscious drive to upend this natural order of things and become someone who mattered, Retera took to the World Editor to make ridiculous over-powered hero characters in a series of maps that were not enjoyable for his social group, but that he often tried to force them to play anyway, because of Retera's hope that he would for a short time get to enjoy being *that much better* than the others.

The most infamously unfun map of this kind created by Retera, which Retera returned to as a sort World Editor shrine to enjoy and relax even when he was just by himself, was the map that was known as the Sheep Attack. It was based on Retera's first map, which was a map called "The well of death" [sic] that allowed players to train campaign characters like Mannoroth and Archimonde from an oversized Undead Sacrificial Pit. The "Sheep Attack" aimed to expand "The well of death" to provide a custom racial techtree for the Sheep Race, however the main guiding design principle of the Sheep Race was Retera's enjoyment of characters that were entertaining because of how they were either overpowered or oversized graphically in-game. This race contained buildings such as a modified Demon Gate named the "Gate of Ahhhhhhh!" that could train double-sized, modified ghost Archimonde heroes who were permanently invisible and had their hero name changed to ½ƒe¿Ñº and their attack damage stat changed to 1000 damage. The replacement for the Town Hall of the Sheep Race was a gigantic flying sheep that flapped with its wings and body clipping into the ground mesh, called Town Sheep. The name "Town Sheep" was apparently the only part of the Sheep Race that followed any standard set by the original Warcraft III game's techtrees. This was not intentional, but rather the result of Retera's lack of any knowledge or analysis of the standards of the original Warcraft III racial techtrees, which were irrelevant to Retera at the time.

During the development of the Sheep Attack, Retera would frequently add characters with new modifications to make them unreasonably powerful in different ways. At one point, one of the older members of his Warcraft III playing social group went onto the internet (which was something Retera did not use at the time) and downloaded some Warcraft III SLK editor tool, then used this tool to create a modified Warcraft III World Editor with abnormal Unit Editor settings and limits. Some of the fields intended to offer the option to modify the Unit ID directly (which did not work since the Unit ID system was not well understood by Retera or those around him at the time) but a lot of the changes in this modified World Editor aimed to remove the limits to numeric values usually imposed by the Unit Editor. So, most notably, the SHIFT+ENTER technique for ignoring limits in the Unit Editor did not exist at the time, and so instead this modified editor was the way to make the most powerful Warcraft III unit imaginable given the skillset of these kids at the time. As a test, this unlimited editor was applied to stats of one of the recently created overpowered heroes in the Sheep Attack -- a new hero named "Retera" that was a black-tinted hero inheriting stats from Anub'arak but with the model of the Lich. Using this editor to modify the "Retera" hero stats resulted in the creation of a game-breaking abomination with 1000000000 of all hero attributes and the capacity to attack any unit on the current map being played at any time. Although such heroes become quite common in later years in the "God's Land" series of maps when Blizzard released the SHIFT+ENTER method for modifying hero stats, this "Retera" hero left an impression on the kids in our story because the user now known as Retera, even though he did not understand the SLK methods used to create this abomination (and they were quickly taken away from him), got to keep the "Retera hero" as his own inside of his map, the Sheep Attack.

So it was only natural in the years that followed that he began to refer to himself as "Retera," a name that refers to the aspiration to create the most powerful unit that can be processed by the Warcraft III game engine. Over time, the black-tinted Lich hero was given one of the first custom skins made by the social group, and became an icon of the Sheep Attack map.

In Retera's never ending quest for love and affection, he created a series of RPG maps and forced the others in his social group to play them, all while the group's game of choice shifted from Warcraft III to Diablo II which was actually a better and more sophisticated way to experience the RPG style of gameplay. On Diablo II, Retera managed to use the U.D.I.E. II (Ultimate Diablo Item Editor 2) to create a series of Diablo 2 characters that took after the Retera unit in terms of trying to break the game and be ridiculously powerful, but in the end, they were defeated by a superior level 100 Diablo 2 character named ColdFire's Avatar. So, in the quest for either (1) ridiculously large characters or (2) ridiculous high-stat value characters, Retera could only be sated on Diablo 2 by adding custom morphing item states into the game that would transform his Diablo 2 character into the gigantic graphical likeness of Diablo himself as long as the player character was wearing particular magic rings. That way, since Retera did not have the best Diablo 2 stats, he at least got to enjoy being the coolest and biggest monster in the game.

However, while the focus of Retera's social group began to pivot, he was hardly inclined to give up on the World Editor and continued to use it to try to make RPG maps similar to Diablo 2. The two most notable RPGs that Retera created were Ice Moons and Titancraft, although both of them were not actually particularly engaging to play and were moreso aspirational projects where Retera enjoyed making them and trying to fulfill his daydreams of making something awe-inspiring -- when in reality the actual gameplay was flat and imbalanced with a lack of much character content progression, usually focused more on killing a mostly linear set of pre-placed enemies, followed by a preplaced "Boss" enemy. Titancraft in 2006 was the first map that Retera ever felt passionate enough about to try to use a Map Protector. However, after playing the map with his social group, the hard drive of his computer died and he was left having only the "protected" version of the map, protected even from himself. The tremendous suffering that this caused resulted in Retera never using a Map Protector again for at least a decade, until a much different time in his life.

Faced with the inability to fix critical bugs in his own self-proclaimed greatest work, Retera was at a loss for what he could create in the World Editor that his social group would enjoy. Because of this, he used a map file that he had in a backup folder called "5 New Races" that three of the other five members of his social group had created, and Retera researched how to turn this map into an EXE mod that could be played on any melee map by using WinMPQ to change the contents of the WEU Game Patch program. (This again highlights how Retera obtained Warcraft 3 editing tools from other members of his social group, not online websites, and did not know how to put in any research to know, for example, that this kind of mod and even the WEU Game Patch itself were best made with a technology called MPQDraft.)

The "5 New Races" EXE mod that Retera created, when he showed it to one of the map authors, caused the map author to feel what was probably a sense of jealousy. The map author remotely deleted "the Sheep Attack" map and all of Retera's other maps off of the computer that Retera had been using, initially causing Retera to feel something horrible. However, Retera was soon after told that all of his maps actually still existed, and that he could have them back if he totally eliminated from his computer all traces of the "5 New Races" project. For the Sheep Attack, and for the others, Retera was obliged to follow through on this request without question, and subsequently "5 New Races" was deleted from his computer entirely, and his custom map directory was reinstated.

However, this secretly provided Retera's subconscious mind with the key piece of information that it had been looking for: what Warcraft III content the other members of his social group might still care about. So, as time began to pass, Retera obtained permission gradually to work as a steward of the "5 New Races" content -- fixing tooltips and Object Editor typos. The other member of the real life social group who had held Retera's maps folder for ransom in exchange for the removal of the "5 New Races" content from Retera's computer was pleased with Retera's work as a steward of tooltips, and after much time passed Retera was allowed to add his own custom race, the sixth race, into the "5 New Races" project.

Retera now had years of Warcraft III modding experience behind him and wanted to make this race right. It needed to be something he could play with the others that would have their respect, while still being something that he could be deeply passionate about. For this reason, Retera chose to recreate one of the custom races from "the Sheep Attack," but in name only, because everything else had to be redone. Given the art style of the "Retera" hero and the custom texture file that was eventually created for it, the kid Retera enjoyed imagining that this hero was the leader of a faction of Undead forces called the Freezing Legion. In contrast the Burning Legion and the Scourge from Blizzard's lore, who were evil, Retera's Freezing Legion were a team of Undead who were good people. Years before in the first grade, kid Retera had a school friend visit and play Warcraft III World Editor with him, but the school friend said the next morning that his mother banned him from visiting kid Retera ever again because playing a video game with evil Undead characters went against God. It had never occurred to kid Retera that having this much fun might go against the will of God (and kid Retera had heard a lot about God in church), so it was only natural for kid Retera to be a mixture of hurt and confused by this. As a result, having the "good Undead" in the form of the Freezing Legion race also meant that kid Retera would be free to play characters who looked really cool, but were also good guys, as much as he wanted.

So, Retera set out to passionately create a custom race. With the skills gained by making all of the MDL edits available for download on the website "Summons of the Void" at his back, he tried also to make a custom model file or at least a custom skin for each unit of the race in any way that felt fitting. Downloading models from the internet websites was basically irrelevant and out of the question, because using the internet was somewhat taboo for kids, especially for Retera as the youngest. When the Freezing Legion was created, the other member of the social group closest to Retera who had given him permission to be a steward of the Race Mod was again slightly jealous, perhaps, and invited Retera to try to remaster the other races in the mod with the same level of care -- custom skins or models created in a goal-oriented way on a case-by-case basis for the units instead of simply using in-game Warcraft III assets.

This cycle of reworking the custom content repeated itself on and off for a couple of years. Retera turned the custom mod content back into an EXE again, and learned that although he did not know much jass he could convert all of the triggers in the "New Race Mod" map into jass with "Convert to Custom Text", and then paste them into the game script file "Blizzard.j" to have these triggers run on every melee map while the mod was active.

So, the removal of the return bug in the 2009 patch cycle hit Retera quite hard. The "5 New Races" map had originally contained Vexorian's Caster System, copied by one of the original map authors into the map to allow for special abilities on a certain custom hero. Retera, working as a steward preserving and improving the existing system, had continued to use this Caster System that was already available to the map despite not ever looking for any kind of new or better system. So, by 2009, the Race Mod was heavily dependent on Caster System functionalities -- in particular because of the Spell Template system which had been used rather extensively for custom jump spells, nova spells, and spells that involved dummy caster units. This Spell Template system was basically usable without any solid understanding of jass -- it operated on the same principles as the Ability Editor, that any of its custom spell "templates" could be copied and given new stats without affecting the original.

Without the return bug, Vexorian's Caster System did not work. About this time Retera was forced to do a little online research and try to find whether Vexorian had published a fix for the Caster System, but what he found was the new versions of the Caster System required something called JassHelper that Vexorian said was in violation of the Battle.net License Agreement. So, Retera did not use it. Even when Retera tried to research how to use it, there was not any clear way to copy it into Blizzard.j because it was not something in a trigger. Instead, it would make the map script very complicated and difficult to copy out.

So Retera was constrained to the past, and to live on Patch 1.22 for all time, or so he believed. Finally in 2011, Retera became frustrated with this update that had ruined his Warcraft III modding experience and decided to research online how to do the JassHelper on a script file that was not for a map. He spent a long day of many hours working on what he called CSDeathBlizzard.j. By this time he was using Patch 1.26 as the target, and hoping to force his way past the death of the old systems by hacking them into submission to let "The Race Mod" be played on Patch 1.26.

At the end of one almost full day of work, the CSDeathBlizzard project was a success. Retera created a tangled spaghetti monster code file, a new Blizzard.j, that he could input into a Patch 1.26 game client that would run old Caster System systems that Vexorian himself had deprecated and declared were not worth supporting any further. All of the old Vexorian Spell Templates were running again. And it was about this time that Retera began to grow in his usage of the internet.

Retera took a school class in game programming and drifted away from Warcraft III for a while, instead learning to make a series of simple 2D Java games. "Look at that, you don't need Warcraft anymore!" one of the older members of his social group said at one point, encouraging Retera to celebrate his newfound power. And so Retera did. Free to doodle his own video games into existence as their own applications, Retera began trying to write little computer programs for everything. He made a program to take attendance for an extra-curricular team at school. He made a program to do his chemistry homework. He even made a game called Tommy Land in the 30 minutes following a physics examination, based on the premise that someone named Tommy once said, "Why don't you make a game that's just entirely based on rectangles!"

After years tinkering with the mad remains of the code written by Vexorian, this creative freedom of making Retera's own Java games put Retera in a position of envy for his classmates in the game programming course, so he alternated between trying to help them and trying to force them to play "The Race Mod" on school computers after class. The began to fill the desire Retera had had for so many years to try to use his creative powers to obtain love and affection. People played "The Race Mod" with him every afternoon for an entire week one week. All of the units and models and systems began to align into something meaningful. There were brief, fleeting moments in Retera's life where the custom characters of "The Race Mod" felt as real as the Night Elf Archer or the Human Footman. They were the units. And for a brief time, others agreed to share in imagining that they were the elements of the game.

Faced with this turning point, Retera really did not seem to feel like he had to care about anything anymore, because he had won the long-haul. Years of work on "The Race Mod" had paid off. Now he just played it with other people at every opportunity, and wrote simple 2D games to show-off and have fun. He lost the ability to emphasize with his high school girlfriend who was not a programmer, and they broke up, leaving Retera to follow his passions to the utmost. Without her to use up any of his time, he spent his last free summer before his Senior year of High School creating "The Matrix Eater", the culmination and combination of 2D programming and Warcraft III model editing. Retera had not used the Magos application more than perhaps seeing it once like in a painting, and was averse to change that was outside of his control (Retera preferred the Prophet's War3 Previewer and Oinkerwinkle Vertex Modifier). So, Retera tried to create a tool with a simple replica of the interface of Oinkerwinkle Vertex Modifier, but with the ability to do geomerges like Oinkerwinkle's Geoset Merger through a menu. However, Retera wanted better control over the merging of models, so he created an elaborate Import menu with a button for everything Retera could possibly think of.

The Matrix Eater technology completely changed the experience of modifying MDL files to make custom content for Retera. Everything that Retera knew how to do in Notepad++ he could now do faster with automation. Retera posted the tool on the Hive Workshop for attention. This was a success. Between the mixed reviews of people saying "We don't need another Magos" (causing Retera to ask, what was a Magos, anyway?) there was also excitement. There were other people who could see Retera for how awesome Retera and his works really were.

So, two weeks later, Retera took the bold step of posting the "Race Mod" under the name "Heaven's Fall" to the Hive Workshop as well. Seeking the love and affection of others was really quite enjoyable, and it was working!

Retera's first Direct Message on the Hive was sent around this same time in 2012 to the user Kam, the creator of a mod compendium. Retera was boldly hoping to get his work on the race mod that was now titled "Heaven's Fall" included in Kam's compendium, thus furthering Retera's efforts towards obtaining love and affection to feel good about himself. Of course, Retera did not word it in this manner.

There were good times and there were bad times. Retera was approached by a UI artist who created custom UIs for Retera in return for Retera converting the artist's own mod, Four Empires, into an EXE as well. After Retera later voice called the UI artist on Skype help show the UI artist how Retera could make a 3D model in the Matrix Eater, they became Skype friends.
Then came the year 2013 when Retera went to live alone in college with his random roommate who was a Blizzard games fan who was ranked in one of those ranks in Starcraft 2 that is so high on the list of kinds of ranks that you forget its name, like Diamond or Platinum. Retera's college roommate seemed to think that because Retera had already had all this fun of making The Matrix Eater that Retera was simply better. It began to take a toll on Retera's roommate's mind. So, Retera sat out to try to prove to his roommate that becoming awesome was "just so" easy. "I'm going to make a game," said Retera from his lofted dormitory bed one night. And so Retera set out to make a strategy game of his own using his knowledge of 2D game programming, to show his roommate that it was this possible to be this kind of game creator person (while also possibly showing off). But Retera knew that to make his point, it was best to make some kind of Starcraftian game, so Retera tried to make this new game a spaceship game even though Retera had not played much Starcraft at all prior to meeting his newfound friend and roommate.

However, as time went on in college Retera began to realize that you could not get through everything by showing off. There came a point where there was a sort of reckoning. After showing off to everyone he met, Retera was suddenly faced with a series of real-life people who had no concern for Retera's well-being as a human but who wanted Retera's talents to serve them. This was true both in college coursework, where Retera began finding himself bombared with questions from less motivated students, as well as when Retera would log into the Hive Workshop and find himself bombared with Inbox requests of people demanding new Warcraft III models.
Between the real-life humans encouraging Retera to sleep deprive himself in order to keep answering homework help questions to help them finish their procrastinated, unfinished projects, and the DMs on the Hive included such gems as:

* So?! When i will have models + my friend's model?

...and...

* will today my birth model?

One user actually sent Retera a DM almost every day in a row for a period of about two weeks asking for content. Of course, this all happened because Retera had been sort of floating in the directionless free-fall of making content without purpose, except to simply feel good about himself. To this day there are more MDX model files created by Retera upon request than what are actually available on his Hive profile, most likely.

And it was in the face of this that Retera began to disappear again from the Hive from the depths from which he had came. Real life, and true college studies, take time. Studying Computer Science requires more than playing video games. And so Retera began to drift away from Warcraft III, and into his own creative space, playing his spaceship game with other people and sometimes playing Heaven's Fall, but not going out of his way to give himself more work to do when instead he had the option of simply enjoying all of the things that he had created and trying to focus on his studies.

But in the limbo that comes along with the summer, Retera created a countdown clock for Heaven's Fall announcing the release of some new, magnificent, yet-to-be-created content. Retera believed this would motivate himself to work again, having not yet achieved full understanding of himself, and in what remained of his tired greed for more from himself he wanted what he declared as "Heaven's Fall Version 2", or "HFv2" for short. Of course, this was an act of ridiculous hubris, because Retera put the countdown clock for 6 months in the future, whereas he had been working on Heaven's Fall for at least about 8 years at that point. At the back of his mind, Retera believed that HFv2 would either force him to prove he was serious about his passion for Warcraft III, or force him to prove that what he really wanted was the love and affection of other face-to-face humans in his college life when he got back to it after the summer.

When the bell tolled, and the winter holiday arrived, and the end of Retera's announcement countdown clock came, he had finished nothing of what he wanted to finish. The reputation he felt he had sought to build in the internet Warcraft III virtual space to feel good about himself became tarnished. Worse yet, what little content Retera did try to release was broken in a way that defied Retera's understanding of the Warcraft III game engine. The bugs Retera was seeing should have been impossible. It was as though the FDF files in the game that defined the game UI had become corrupted, even though Retera had not intentionally modified them.

Retera faded from Warcraft into obscurity. He tried to make some updates to his spaceship game, and enjoy his studies. But then there were still people who found access to his mind, like his UI artist Skype friend from Warcraft. And so, in the summer of 2015, Retera decided to make his last great Warcraft III RPG. This time, it was titled "Wallum Gung," possibly influenced by the name of a guild on a World of Warcraft server Retera had played on years before. But this meaningless phrase was meant to sound more like "Wallow in Dung." The purpose of this single-player RPG was to show Retera's internet Warcraft III friend that if a human were to pursue endless development of their skills as a Warcraft III enthusiast, it would not save them from the harsh realities of our real human world, which in the end destroy them. The RPG featured a bearded dwarf character named Jur Rundlegruff, the Brotastic Master, and used as in-game background music the kind of weird crap that YouTube began recommending to Retera based on how he felt. Retera tried to use his Matrix Eater powers to formulate the contents of this map as skillfully as he would other projects, even though this project was weird and themed as a depiction of this form of suffering. Even Jur Rundlegruff had a custom skin, for no particular reason. The map has not and will not ever be published publicly because of R-rated themes such as nude Jaina statues, ghouls with two heads and arms coming from their back, Undead abominations with additional arms, and the Iron Maiden doodad combined with the Goblin Tinker treads to form weird conveyor belts with chopped up villager bodies. Retera had never made any Warcraft III map like this before. It was somewhat tantalizing. In the worlds of his internet friend after playing the map, "I half expected to find a suicide note in there or something."

Retera spent the summer of 2016 watching television which he had not had when we was growing up. Retera became increasingly prone to sleep deprived, goofy ideas. At one point in the fall of 2016 he went on a three-day stand with no sleep trying to compress Warcraft III's installation files down to a 100 MB MPQ file that was still playable, just to prove to himself he was this much better than anybody else, that he could make a 100 MB download of the Warcraft III game that would allow him to play it anywhere he went regardless of bandwidth or whether he forgot to bring his installation, as long as he had enough space or bandwidth to download 100 MB.

After graduation in 2017, Retera took a two month break during which he watched Netflix videos of a nonviolent kids show containing 16-year-old Australian girls on a beach dealing with their emotional problems, and he continued trying to "finish" the Matrix Eater technology or to change it into what he desired for it to be. In the fall, his Hiveworkshop acquaintance Kam who he had messaged in the past now became a Discord friend, and began to encourage Retera to apply to Blizzard then in the fall of 2017.

But Retera had too much respect for Blizzard's desire for money based on how it had felt to play World of Warcraft. Retera couldn't imagine Blizzard doing anything with Warcraft III, and Retera didn't imagine having fun at Blizzard doing anything other than Warcraft III. So, after blabbering on to Kam trying to say, "I've struggled with the best posting to apply for," this back and forth on Discord reached a point when Kam said:

* I'd say you're qualified for something at Blizzard
* My coworker applied 50 times before being hired, most to different openings

And for Retera, this was the turning point. It showed that Kam, too, served the will of the thing that stopped World of Warcraft from being fun. So, Retera sought to hide his anger, and gave what he hoped were a series of nice replies, eventually saying,

* You know, after you said, `I'd say you're qualified for something at Blizzard` , it gradually gave me this weird feeling, and I learned something about myself. When I think about applying to Blizzard, it's a bit like I'm offering to give something -- the life I've had thus far, and the times I've spent with Warcraft III -- for their usefulness. But, I am not sure I believed full-heartedly that those times and experiences are unique/necessary for the game's development. I only thought that if they were, for the very specific reason that they could help Warcraft III, then I was interested in paying the opportunity cost of my current lifestyle to give them.
* But then I got the feeling that they really aren't needed, more that you are simply looking to find more people whose sole life goal is to obtain a job at Blizzard. It's not impossible that I would apply in a few years regardless, but when I started thinking it was this way, I think I am less apt to apply right now

And this put Retera on a path towards being very frustrated with the new patches released for the Warcraft III game, perhaps because of a desire to prove to himself that he could have done better than even *these* people. Like a last bought of the drive to prove his superiority and value. Even then in 2017, with no respect for authority and having signed no NDAs, Retera released a video referring to "God" as the source of his knowledge that Warcraft III would see a remaster in the coming years, even though this knowledge was actually quite common in the Warcraft III community at the time because of people like Kam who had been hired. In the video, Retera almost incoherently refers to the remastering of Warcraft III as a negative or evil force, suggesting that, "they want you to feel inferior to the graphics" and saying this is "because they hate you."

The patches seemed to be buggy. By the summer of 2018, prior to the announcement of Reforged, Retera released a slightly more tame video still of the same general demeanor titled "Please Save Warcraft III" that refers to what is happening in the patches as some form of downfall that could by stopped by a little love towards the modding community from the developers. Then, in the fall of 2018, Reforged was announced, and it looked way cooler than Retera had anticipated was possible from the group of people making the patches he had been complaining about. He sent a Discord message to Kam, reading:

* Kam. Everything your team is doing is the most amazing thing that I could have dreamed of. I am almost ashamed that they feel it necessary to keep the old maps running. Many of the old maps, the *really* [old] ones, when I got [a friend] to play them, did not hold up. And the new ones have (now outdated) custom models. Don't let our old memories hold your team back from making new ones. That's what I think when I see this magnificence.
* I was ready to port Heaven's Fall to Starcraft 2 in 2009. Incompatibility did not stop me. I obtained a license to 3DS Max as an 8th grader and began trying to transition my Warcraft 3 models into the Starcraft 2 engine. I got at least 1 building and 1 unit. Incompatibility did not stop me. What stopped me was complexity: the data editor. What stopped me was change. What stopped me was me. I... I think your team is doing amazing work, and I should not be holding them back.

Retera here appears to be referring to previous comments when he most likely told Kam that supporting legacy content was very important for Warcraft III.

But it was about this same time that Retera was sitting being a YouTube addict in his throne, listening to a diss track made by the most popular user on YouTube, and it occurred to Retera that he wished there would be a way he could make the same sort of diss track about Blizzard Entertainment, but to have this diss track be meaningful. So, almost as a joke, Retera wrote a document describing the pathway to how he would use the same technology that enabled him to create his 2D spaceship game, but this time to create a Warcraft III replica game. Most likely the primary motivating factor in creating such a game would be to prove that Retera was indeed more capable than the Classic Games Team, to continue to serve his drive for love and affection. And, because it was possible to make a YouTube video of a technology without actually sharing it, the need for the technology to actually work outside of an isolated test case was fairly low, which would make it much easier to produce.

As the patches following Reforged's announcement seemed to get further and further from the bright future anyone hoped for, instead releasing patches such as 1.31.0 which would originally destroy any large map with its editor only by saving, Retera began to fall further down the rabbit hole. He wanted to take his technological idea to earn his freedom and superiority and prove he was capable of rewriting the entire game to gain control over it. The first Beta of Warcraft III Reforged came out in a leak, apparently due to server mismanagement, and so there were Russians profiting off of it, making thousands for the views on their YouTube videos while Blizzard tried to figure out what to do about the leaked Reforged client, and Retera complained to Kam about it on Discord.

Then the public Reforged Beta went live and Retera got access to play it, and realized that it did not fully support custom maps like Warchasers or pre-existing custom models made in the old format prior to Reforged. Although many players like Retera complained and got support for these items added back into Reforged, Retera found himself face to face with a wall of code trying desperately to follow through on his mad visions of superiority to escape from Reforged. On Jan 27, the day before Reforged released, Retera released a video of something that even he himself could hardly believe (although it was mostly code copied from Ghostwolf's viewer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRoKzNR4ftM

The above video was recorded after night after night listening to some grim, pounding music on YouTube that Retera used to try to encourage himself to believe he was that one guy who could actually do this. The one and most superior.

This began the start of Retera's wild and crazy adventure to create Warsmash, the Warcraft III modding engine.