FFA Masters League

Please refrain from breaking host bots. It's literally what kept the game alive for so many years. I can only talk for the FML community, but similar things apply to ENT, wc3melee (which also hosts our FFA ladder) and all the others.

The Bnet FFA ladder is not really an option for us, as it is separated by realms, only allows 4-ways and you never know how many players queued up already. Furthermore, the maintenance (having 3 month seasons, banning pre-teamers, banning hackers, having a custom game list and regularly exchanging maps) is nothing that currently functions on the Bnet ladder. Your plans would ruin the Wc3 experience for most of the currently active FFA ladder players and we'd run at risk of losing them entirely.

All our FFA leagues and inhouse matches rely on host bots currently. Thanks to niels, we have a very carefully developed bot environment (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Moscow, Miami, Dallas, etc) that allows us to get an adequate ping for almost any match. Our community has active players from all continents. Furthermore, we have an automatic replay archive and can easily load or replace maps via Dropbox.

Of course it is cool to see that new and very casual players will not have to deal with port forwarding anymore and the custom game list being not as messy, but by no means is this worth to basically ruin entire communities and their infrastructures.

On behalf of the entire FML community, I kindly ask you to reconsider your plans. Don't do this to us! If you do, you either don't care or don't understand and I'm not sure what's worse