In September, Blizzard Entertainment returned to Warcraft III: Reforged. A premium DLC campaign, Forsaken Kingdom, was released for the real-time strategy game, and an update with improvements was also introduced.
One of the patch notes caught the special attention of players: the developers decided to implement online DRM protection in Warcraft III: Reforged:
The Reforged client now requires players to be constantly online (offline mode is still available through the classic client).
It was also reported that LAN mode was removed (however, players can still play LAN through the classic client).
Players were very unhappy with this decision by the developers. For example, Aranoor commented:
[Blizzard] doesn't care about us. I honestly can't understand why they decided to make such a change now. Maybe so that no one can access the new campaign without paying for it? I'm grasping at any straw that could explain the logic of this change [...].
thedentist64: "one step forward and three steps back"..
DostWhenNoWood: "are you ***** kidding me".
It is assumed that this update with DRM is related to Blizzard Entertainment's desire to protect Warcraft III: Reforged and the Forsaken Kingdom campaign from pirates.
HalLundy believes that hackers will still find a way to bypass the system: "As is often the case, hackers will find a way to get the new campaign running offline and with higher performance by removing resource-intensive DRM mechanisms."