I was feeling a bit of nostalgia and wanted to play some WCIII ladder again for old time's sake. I distinctly remember at some point in the past I added my original WCIII: ROC and WCIII: TFT keys to my Bnet account.

On the Bnet launcher, Warcraft III reforged had no options to download or install anything. It just had a large button to buy Reforged, and wanted something like $30 US dollars.

Miffed, I decided to reinstall fresh from my old discs. Which works fine if I wanted to play original campaigns, but internet play was disabled. Trying to connect to battle.net resulted in a failed connection message.

Curious I came here and found the introduction guide stickied to this subreddit. Thankfully it does say there that if you have your old keys, you can Reforged but with classic graphics, which made me keep looking around to see what's up. I followed the key enter link, it yep, I can't add my keys because I already claimed them.

I had to go to my Bnet account page and look at my Games and Subscriptions to see classic WCIII content that I already owned. From there I could download the game client which finally updated the Bnet launcher to say "Oh yeah, you own this, you can play it".

It's obvious to me that Activision purposefully excluded the install link on the Bnet launcher to make me think I had to buy Reforged in order to play it. So just a warning to any other players who have original disks and keys that you CAN play Reforged without having to buy it, but the Launcher works hard to make sure you don't know that. I think maybe the introduction guide could include one extra little bullet to explain that if you want to play with an old key you already own, you will need to manually install the game from your Bnet account page, NOT the Bnet launcher. The Bnet launcher will update and allow you play the game after you manually install it.