playing games

On the most basic level, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne is a game of economy and warfare, requiring players to exert control over two major aspects of their play: the gathering of resources, and the direction of a mobile army. At higher echelons of play, however, the number of viable strategies quickly dwindles, and games between professionals can be commonly expressed in terms of game theory. The value of precise control of specific units (player-controlled characters/objects) also increases, and often can decide matches.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne also includes a world editor which enables a plethora of custom, community-created games from which the players can play cooperatively online, or in single player. After clicking on the Custom Games button located on the Home Page, users are brought to a screen which has a list of games currently being hosted and a picture and short description that provides more details about the game such as the number of suggested players, the map size, and the creators of the game. Many custom games are hosted by automated bots that continually host (auto-host)a map designated to a specific by independent bot owners or gaming networks. The games that these communities host are usually the most popular games that users are always seeking to play, and the list includes well-known games such as Defense of the Ancients, Island Defense, Footmen Frenzy, Trolls and Elves, Role-Playing Maps, and many different variations of tower defense games, which are extremely popular and administrated by bot administrators designated by the bot owner. In addition, all users also have the option of hosting custom normal games, which are often called Observer games. In these types of games, the experienced players will play a normal game while many other users will simply observe and watch these more experienced players play. Many more amateur and novice players utilize these observer games to watch what the experienced players do and learn from their different tactical strategies. These observer games are also often used to determine individual skill level and qualifying so to speak.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was originally announced on January 22, 2003.^[5] On February 14, 2003, Blizzard announced the first beta test for the game, which offered 10,000 players to sample the game.^[6] On March 10, 2003, 10,000 more players were selected to participate in the beta test.^[7] 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. With update 1.23, many third-party programs were rendered unusable. Several third-party programs that reveal the entire map, commonly known as maphacks, were released for this 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.^[8] The 1.23 patch included no actual changes to gameplay, and the 1.24a to 1.24d patches soon followed suit. Starting with patch 1.24e, Blizzard eliminated the need to have the CD to boot up the game, so gamers can play the game without needing to monitor the condition of their disc. Any patch released after 1.24d will include the feature. In 2011, Blizzard released several updates for Warcraft 3 TFT, including patch 1.25a, 1.25b and the latest one, 1.26a.

The Mac OS X version of Warcraft III was originally written for PowerPC processors. The game itself was later recompiled as a universal binary, but the installer and updater were not. Since Rosetta support for executing PowerPC binaries was removed in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the game is supported, but must be copied to the new system after being installed and updated on a Mac running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or an earlier version.