 Welcome, welcome everybody. Welcome to Classic Cast. We are here with Tips Out Baby, we're here with Stay Safe TV, and we're here with Chrom, our friend Chrom. We all just got back from BlizzCon, and there's really a lot that's happened over the course of the last few weeks, whether it's the demo, whether it's the news we got at BlizzCon, and really there's just a lot to talk about. So Chrom, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Chrom. I'm sure you guys have seen me hanging around the Classic Cast boys a lot. I play WoW, pretty much only WoW. Seeing me around, I'm the loud, angry bearded dude with the weird voice. And Chrom was to actually have BlizzCon with us, and we were hanging out a ton at during BlizzCon. Yeah. He's a very meaty human being. That was top comment when I met everybody. You were a lot bigger than I thought. Yeah, dude, I don't know why. I thought you were going to be like five foot eight, five foot nine tops. Here he is six foot one, six foot two, taller than me. I don't know. I was mind blowing anyway. Yeah, so it was a really good time. We had a really good time at BlizzCon and hanging out with Chrom and hanging out with everybody there. We got a lot of news. We got a lot of news at BlizzCon. Some good, some not quite so good, but the good thing is I think a lot of the stuff that wasn't quite so good isn't particularly set in stone yet, which is good. So I know I know I came out of that classic panel a little bit hot. So you guys know that, but yeah, I know we've we've we've kind of talked about it a little bit since then on all of our streams. But what was your guys favorite part of BlizzCon? Chrom, do the honors, man. Yeah, Chrom, go ahead. Gosh, I don't know. I mean, it's stuff is between two things. Like I got to meet a lot of people I was expecting to meet. But like going in the BlizzCon and seeing like the classic loud demo set up and watching all my friends go from business mode to just straight children and the snap of a finger was my absolute favorite moment. Everyone running to computers and sitting down and logging in and looking at me like, dude, dude, dude, it's the coolest. That was for me. That was the top tier moment for BlizzCon. Yeah, it was really awesome. What are your tips? Yeah, that's that was a big one, definitely. Because I honestly didn't think we were going to be able to test the demo until after the opening ceremony, but then it was available right there on the floor as soon as we got in. But but I think but I think more than that is just meeting you guys, meeting the people out there, fishy lawn gnome, DJ Love Drop, Zavage, meeting the classic WoW devs, meeting Chrom, obviously, and everybody else there, just putting faces behind this community that that we've known for the past year now and just getting to meet everybody, hang out with everybody as that's the thing I'll remember the most, I think. Yeah. Yeah, as well. What's up, Mr. Jamies and Shet? But yeah, I've got to copy you guys. I mean, over the weekend, down at BlizzCon, I had maybe 40 or 50 people come up and introduce themselves and shake hands and hug it out and take photos. It was awesome. I like tips. I'd putting a face behind the behind a face to the community, I guess it was pretty cool. Yeah, I think yeah. I mean, it's kind of hard to top that. Like, I think the I think that's the most important thing, right? Because like everybody's sitting here like we're we're nerds. We're sitting here behind our computers all day. So to finally get a to finally get a chance to like, you know, meet people and talk to people, whether it's go outside. Yeah, go outside. Yeah. Whether whether it's people who watch our stuff, whether it's people who, you know, we do stuff with, I don't know. I think all that's really cool. I think all that's really, really cool. So very, very special experience like BlizzCon going going to, you know, all of us actually was the first time all three of us had had been in the same spot. And all four of us really have been in the same spot and got to meet together. That's right, true. And that was really cool. But BlizzCon itself is just kind of that's what's going on. But the main thing is, is I think just getting to meet everybody and see everybody. And I think that's really cool. I got to say like when I so during at BlizzCon, I met Crom and tips for the first time. That's one of the I've hung out a lot, but Crom and tips the first time meeting. And when I met you guys, it wasn't even it's like we had already met and already hung out before. Yeah, it's like not weird. There was no ice to break or anything like that. It was just already jumping right into it. So true. Yeah, absolutely. So true. Like I just like, yeah, you just jumped right into it. Like it didn't feel like you were meeting somebody for the first time, for sure. Mm hmm. Yeah, I thought that was really cool. So, you know, lovey-dovey stuff aside. OK, let's get down to business. Let's talk about some of the classic stuff. Right. Let's let's talk about the classic stuff. We did get a lot of news at BlizzCon. I almost said it, classic ass at BlizzCon about classic at the opening ceremony. They said summer 2019 is the release, which I don't think shocked, maybe not quite shocked, but definitely surprised is how I felt. I was surprised that it was going to be that soon. I thought that was about as early as they could do it. And to commit to that at BlizzCon was surprising. I thought they would more I thought they would they would say like when they're going into testing or something like that. But to give us a release time frame, I think was about as much as we could expect. Or as we could expect, rather, I'm surprised they gave a time frame. But as far as the time frame goes, I mean, I've been calling that time frame since since classic was announced, you know, for a year ago. That's what I always thought. So it was like, you know, everyone else was like, wow, they thought they'd drop it on the 15th anniversary next BlizzCon. So I was like, yeah, I got it. So that was pretty cool. But I like you said, man, I'm very surprised that they committed to a time frame. Yeah, like, I think, again, like that was the window that that that I saw as well. I just think the interesting thing about it was I thought they would announce maybe some kind of playable alpha or maybe tell us, oh, you've got the classic on the floor today, but in a couple of months, you'll have classic wow on the beta or the alpha or something like that. For them to announce the actual release date was incredibly surprising. But I do want to say summer sounds close. But I went and did some research the two other times that Blizzard has said only two other times they've said an expansion is coming in the summer was Missa, Pandaria and Legion. And both of those happened in the last week of August. So if I'm not mistaken, summer can technically go into like the first two weeks of September, so it's close and it could be close. It could be seven months away, but it could also be 10 months away, depending. So it's it's one of those things that's kind of bittersweet in my eyes. Yeah, yeah, I'm not a I'm not a meteorologist, so I guess I am. Technically, when the sun is about, you know, six inches. Yeah, so for me, summer is when it's hot and I live in Texas. So I guess it's a pretty big summer now in Texas. It's already out in Texas. So yeah, I yeah, I think either way, I think it'll be good. I think this kind of puts them in a high gear as far as like a beta testing period goes an alpha testing period. I think they're going to have to rush through a lot of that stuff. I mean, if it's early summer, even if it's late summer, it kind of I think that stuff is going to kind of be coming soon. But we'll talk about that a little bit later. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, like as far as waiting for classic, we've already waited, what, 13 months or almost 13 months now. We've been very, very patient. And what we have in front of us, like the next six or seven months, right, we're going to have an alpha very likely a beta time is going to fly. By we're going to have a lot of updates, a lot of news. So I think the brunt of the waiting and not knowing and what's going to happen. That's behind us. I think the next six months is going to fly by. I think it's going to be really fast. I think it's going to be really, really fast. Blizzard has a lot of traction with classic right now, a lot of traction. The media exposure, the excitement for it is at an all time. Yeah, well, I mean, just look at the demo, like the demo was crazy. Now, there was obviously a lot of problems with the demo. And again, we'll go into that a little bit more. But the excitement for the demo, people were hyped about it. People were having fun. Like streamers were willingly playing. Like it wasn't just like stream content for a lot of people. Like obviously, like we're classic guys, we like classic more. But like I'm looking at some of these other streamers and they're playing the level 19 demo off stream. It's just like so it's not it's not just like us. It's like even the retail guys, like I know Bajira. Bajira was like, I can't stop playing this classic demo and I don't know what's wrong with me. It's basically like almost, almost, almost two classic YouTube videos. I'm on my day at one point. Each video starts off. I can't I just can't stop playing this. I'm going to keep playing this. It speaks volumes. Comments are filled with the two. Like, oh, man, I haven't seen you smile this hard playing while in a long time, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've even even that get shit on voice was coming up. The classic Bajira is like, get rich. You're like, whoa, I know that voice. I haven't heard that voice in years. Yeah. Well, it's funny. It's kind of like what I was talking about. Like I get like my old, like natural, like I'm a troll. I play a ret palette and of course I'm a troll. But like I'm my natural, like trolly, like mannerisms and characteristics just come out whenever I'm playing classic. And I like I was noticing that too. It's like it's like I'm being I'm being a kid again, which is a good and bad. But yeah, let's talk about a lot of the good stuff. A lot of the good stuff with the panel. They came out and we actually I think we talked about this. We might have talked about this on class cast before BlizzCon, but we thought that it would come out and really verify a lot of things that we already we already kind of assumed, right? Like we thought there was not going to be flying. Like we knew, right? There was going to be flying. They had said there's not going to be achievements trans. Like they already come out and said this kind of stuff. Were you guys surprised by anything that they said in terms of like the good news or like was it exciting to you guys? I don't know. Definitely exciting. I went in with zero expectations. That was the thing is I really went in with zero expectations of any information or release dates. So like everything to me was a surprise. The release date was a shock. Like how much detail they were willing to give on the inner workings was just as much of a surprise as a release term for me. Because they divulged a lot, you know, like the real inner workings. And I haven't seen stuff like that since like old school Wisconsin panels on like YouTube, you know, like the nitty gritty, like really talking technical details with fans, which is like normally a no-go. Right. Well, that I mean, and you're in that industry. Like you you understand that you're working on your game right now. So like usually you don't talk about anything with anybody, that sort of stuff. Like unless unless you have something on the table to deliver, you won't even mention certain things, right? So like if they're if they're discussing things, they have a ton already to go. It's just a matter of gauging personal opinion. I think they wanted to see how you guys react, how people reacted. I mean, that's what these are for. That was it was I saw them sticking their toe on the water and just, you know, smiling back because they were getting a lot of good feedback. There's a lot of negative feedback, too. But the feedback, it wasn't presented in the horrible way. Everybody was just asking their concerns and they gave you legitimate answers. Rare from a multi-billion dollar company nowadays. And they're really listening. It was exciting. Yeah, absolutely. Like I think the craziest thing obviously we got the panel, but we also got to do that interview, of course. And just kind of the accessibility of the devs. Just they answered a lot of questions. There's a lot of stuff that didn't get answered to but looking back on it now more objectively, unless like what I wanted to see exactly they did actually go into a lot of stuff. Like said, Cromney, Gritty, they answered like a lot of philosophy stuff. They told us the subscription model. They gave us the release time frame. Like they hit a lot like they hit a lot. And in a very short period of time, like 45 minute panel, we have like a 20 minute Q&A with them. And I feel like I'm a lot more at peace and relaxed with the project than I was going to BlizzCon. Like I no longer have worries about whether or not they'll deliver the authentic vanilla experience. Now it's just a matter of I'm just excited to play it. Oh, yeah. Like my biggest takeaway from talking to them on several occasions, listening to the panels and playing the demo and getting like everything. The entire BlizzCon experience, I guess, was the message that they tried to hammer home. And I really feel like they tried to hammer this home that they want to provide as and and and as authentic vanilla experiences they possibly can. They don't want to change anything. They just want things to run well. And other than that, they want everything to be pretty much as vanilla as it possibly can be. Yeah. Well, another confirmation you guys got that was another company thing is that like every you guys did ask questions about certain changes you saw and the reaction or the response of if you're seeing something that's not supposed to be there, it's just something we most likely haven't gotten to yet. That was the most relieving answer for me out of all of them was, oh, I notice this is in the game. What's the deal with that? And the response was, oh, that's just something we haven't pulled out of that client yet. It's just things that are currently being replaced. Those those that that's the stuff I take the hardest release states, whatever it's exciting, saying we just haven't pulled that out yet means we're it's painstaking and we're line by line of code pulling this out and replacing with older models, older textures, older. Well, yeah, that's important. That was important to hear. And it's great because, you know, for the last 11 months or so or 12 months now, people have been wanting updates and progress. You know, what are they working on? What's your status on classic? Wow. And so they gave us as much as they I mean, for God's sake, they gave us a play at home demo that we can give feedback on and see their actual progress we can play. We can tinker with it. We can fiddle with it. We can we can and you know, they're taking that feedback and doing stuff with it. Like, yeah, you have to ask yourself the question with this demo. Are they trying to learn things from our experiences and take feedback or are they not trying to learn things from our feedback? And and like, of course, there, that's one of the goals of the demo. I'm sure there's that big there's that big reddit thread with like hundreds of lists, hundreds of items that are wrong with the demo. I'm sure they're taking all that and shipping away at it already. I'm positive. Yeah. And shout out to everybody who contributed to that list. I guarantee no other company, no other game that's ever been tested was tested as thoroughly as as you guys tested it. Anybody that contributed to that thread discovered anything in the demo. You guys are the real MVPs, dude, straight up. Honestly, I mean, this this this should be the status quo for every game that comes out a demo like this, where they can get feedback. This is I mean, this is what they should have done with BFA. Like they should have done this with BFA. They should have done this. They should do this with every game, I think one of the big problems I think is whenever whenever a game goes into beta testing or any sort of testing period, right? Because the demo, in a sense, was a testing period. It wasn't it was, but it wasn't right. It was like it was basically like a progress update. Again, that's something we've talked about before. But it was it was a progress update. But in a sense for us as the player base, like that was a testing period for us. That was a chance for us to say like, OK, like what's going on with the game? And let's see where you guys are and to get feedback on that. And at least as far as like any sort of interaction or any sort of information that we got a chance to get from the devs or really anybody from Blizzard is they said that like they're they're actively looking at feedback. And I mean, like so whenever whenever I was streaming, right, whenever I was streaming, I got off my stream, I went and I walked over to a couple of employees and I told them like, hey, like, have you guys seen all the concerns about sharding? Like, what's the deal with this? This is something that, you know, a lot of people, including myself, like don't really like this. We don't think this is something that's good for the game. And they said, yeah, like actually we've been following up on it. Like we've been, you know, we've been right on it and we know, you know, people are concerned and like we're like the sharding idea was something specific to the demo because they said they said that basically if you take the entire population of the server and you put them all in Westfall and all in the Barons, then they thought sharding was just the best, the best option for being able to like fix that and to at least get people to be able to play the demo, especially given that it initially was going to have a time limit. So that's why they did sharding there. But they said sharding was not the final answer. Like they're still actively looking for a better solution for the actual game. The launch of the actual game is specifically what they said. So like that's, I don't know what that means. You know, they might have just been talking, but who knows. Yeah, right now it sounds like the sharding is something that they're considering for specifically the launch period of Classic WoW. I am not really for that. I mean, there are a couple of events that can happen in Classic WoW that are as stressful as a launch event, in my opinion, I mean, it's like World Bosses, for example, or the obviously the first thing is the is the on-carriage thing, right, opening of the gates. So I think there could be a slippery slope with that. So I would prefer them not to use it at all. But honestly, I don't think they will. I don't think they want to. I think they're trying to find a way around it. I don't think that they want to. Yeah, I don't think that they want to either. And those are the things that come up that those are kind of the arguments that come up whenever it's like, well, what about this? Like the sharding this, that's going to kind of suck. Right. And that's true. I think that's 100% true. I don't think they can. It's not just like it would kind of suck for us as an experience, because like we want to see everybody there. And it'll be fun. It'll be exciting. But if you have sharding at the AQ 40 event, if you have sharding at the World Bosses, well, like it doesn't work because then all of a sudden you have multiple World Bosses spawn, you have multiple gongs to ring. Like I like that's what everybody talks about. But like if they decide to do that, then it's like that's stupid, you know what I mean? So hopefully, hopefully like not just from like a experience standpoint, but from like a like design standpoint, they don't do that. It's two fold, you know? Yeah. So that's kind of that's kind of how I feel about that. Tips, crown. Do you guys have anything? Oh, I agree. I agree. I saw I saw on the demo people kind of using it as in an abusive way, you know, sharding into where a rare mob was to get a piece of loot, you know, and just kept doing it over and over again, even at low levels, it could change things, it can change the economy, it can change anything, you know, you find the same rare boss six times and it's like, oh, it's only the starting zone. Well, I mean, it's pretty early on, everybody's going to want these things. The first person to get five blue items and throw them on the auction house, they'll be rolling pretty fat, you don't have to work for it, except have your friend on, you know, Shard A, B and C invite you as soon as they found the mob, right? So, right. I don't like it in any sense. I mean, you know, I get the I can understand why they do it, blah, blah, blah, blah, but they really don't need to. I mean, as we've said before, part of the classic experience was waiting for that mob to spawn for, you know, 20, 30 minutes. You know, if you're not, if you're not nice enough to invite somebody into a group, you know, to kill Samuel Phipps in the beginning of the undead zone, like if you're not there to like, you know, standing in line like everybody else, just wait and get over it. That's your experience. It's not going to be like that forever. Like everybody's worried about being stuck in the starting zone or worried about it taking forever. Everybody waits there. Everybody takes that moment. You go out, you can go explore, grind to level up, do anything, make a new friend, do something else besides like, well, I can't play and they say, you know, unless I get my mob straight away, if that's your attitude, you're never going to survive classic out in the long run. Yeah, it's not going to matter anyway. It's all a grind in the waiting game, either like suck it up and deal with the classic experience or you're never going to enjoy the actual classic experience because you can take shouting away a month from a month later or once you get to like level 10 to have it like it's deactivated or however different system they want to work on. But the experience, that negative experience they were trying to avoid the sharding is going to hit them again. You know, yeah, it's going to happen again eventually. You're like, oh, all these people are going to rush like those those 10 people who are going to try hard. Yeah, they're going to blow past you. You're never going to see them. They'll hit 60 before you. That's not the guy you worry about. It's the other 1500 people in your area all moving to the next zone with you. It's going to keep happening, right? There are escort quests. There's a million things. You can't shard that shit out like you get out the way. You know, it was those moments that made you make friends at level one. Why did you make a friend at level five? Well, it was either group up with this guy or wait four hours. Yeah, exactly. That classic experience, you take that experience away like I know it sounds silly to some, but I like making that level five friend. I like meeting that guy and getting in a group with them. Change that experience and the essence of classic. Yeah, the beginning to the end. You can't do it for sure. I agree 100 percent. Well, very well said. I think I think another thing and this is something that like I started playing wow week one, right? I started playing six days after launch, but I didn't play on launch day. So I don't have the like retail vanilla wow launch day experience to really call back on. I know even six days later, like I have a bunch of one day credits on my account because like the service kept going down. But at least I'm like how private servers went, right? And I do think the private server experience and the class experience are two different things. Just like the meta is different because of different changes that they make on private servers. But that's something that I really wish I did. That's like one of the one of our thing on like things that I really wish that I could call back to is having a real experience of I don't write because I remember when I started playing like a week after launch or six days after launch. I didn't like I don't remember being that bad. I really don't remember being that bad. But maybe launch day was crazy. I know launch day on private server is crazy. On stage crazy anywhere. I mean, from private service, you get a million people log into the you know, on retail version. Of course it's going to be crazy. But that's the essence of the experience. You can't like every game, multi billion dollar company or an indie company on launch, if there's some traction behind their game, has trouble. You can't avoid. There's not enough money. It's like you could be you can have a billion dollar machine. It's going to get overwork. It's not like they have something is going to happen. Oh, you know, we're billionaires. Why don't we just invent a new machine to run the server on this one won't crash. If they had that, like they would they'd be pioneering the industry in every way. They're using everything they're using what's at their hands. Like we have our own server technology for our game. That's the same thing. You open up the server for 30 more players on a 60 player server. Suddenly that server is crashing hard. You're like, Oh, what the hell are we doing wrong? What do we have to upgrade? Like even if even the million dollars will still have those crashes, no matter how big you are. They're not going to supplement it with with sharding. They had sharding on on BFA launch. My server was down for three days. What were you playing on again? Ticonderous. That's what I thought. Both of them. Both of the horde servers, the number one horde servers in the world, they were down. You can play. I paid character transferred over to Kelthuzad just because I knew it had some streamer privileges and that stuff was back up first day. Of course. My other character is at Area 50 to see it. Area 52 was down to there was like four the four horde servers. No dice. They considered they considered BFA a pretty good launch compared to like the other expansions, too, which is funny. You know, it's like it is. It was it was a good launch in comparison. You look at their other launches. It was a good launch. It's just it proves that even a good launch is riddled with with problems you can't avoid. Blizzard has proven time and time again. You can never guess that the amount of people that are going to rush your servers, you never can never truly gauge the interest in your game because not everybody's on Twitter. Not everybody cares about Twitch. Not everybody cares about YouTube, but they're still current in the news. They still read things in gaming magazines like there's a whole other demographic of millions of people who don't even aren't even plugged into this world. That'll that'll jump into the game and was is going to go. Holy crap. I had no idea. Same thing that happened to when they released the demo on the BlizzCon ticket. How many more tickets to sold if people were interested? You know, people got people give people hard time. I can't believe you're spending 50 bucks for this. Doesn't matter. It's 50 bucks in an opportunity to make sure the thing you love works right. People did that. No shame, whatever. But Blizzard didn't expect that. Like that demo that demo extension came from a massive jolt numbers as well as a peak in interest on social media. People saw that. Blizzard said, oh my God, we have to we have to extend this. We didn't think people are going to keep buying the ticket once it was over. Yeah, yeah, it's true. That is true. I think so when it comes to when it comes to shorting, I mean, they're they're definitely they've got to find a they've got to find a solution, right? Whether that solution is just like let it roll, see what happens and just you have a certain population cap and there's a queue or whatever. Dynamic response is another thing. I was talking to I was talking to Nano. Actually, I was talking to Nano from Nostalrius and this is actually going on my stream. We were doing it live and he was saying that he thinks dynamic response is actually something that's it could be worse even because how people take advantage of dynamic response. I think it is. I agree with him. I think in some ways it could be worse in other ways. It's like it's a given take, right? In other ways, it is better. But in some ways, it's worse, right? And it's like you have people playing the game in a way that wasn't necessarily intended, which I think it's fine, right? You can't pigeonhole. It's an RPG, right? And I think in an RPG, you shouldn't necessarily pigeonhole players into playing the game a certain way. But at the same time, and by the way, I think that's one of the big problems with Retail Why right now, but at the same time, when you're playing the game in a certain way and it ends up being in a kind of it's like exploitable, right? Where people are leveling up to level 60 in like three and a half days, you know, play time, which is like, I think Joanna's record was like four days, like four and a half days or something back in the 20 hours. Yeah, 20 hours. World record. There you go. You shouldn't be able. But yeah, I was just going to say you shouldn't be able to get to 60 literally by killing six different mobs. Like that's it. And you just grind up a few levels in a spot and then you move on. Yeah. That's like, like for those that were there on June 23rd with me, like, you know what I'm talking about? Like it's terrible. It's terrible. Like it takes away from the world of Warcraft, right? It's like you said the game is not meant to be played that way. My my starting zone experience with with a with dynamic response was terrible. I created it was my fifth or no, my sixth rogue. I was going to level. I wanted to get to 60. I think I got the 40 before I gave up on the entire experience. But my first one to 10 experience was I went and from the undead starting zone went down into the neighborhood of the town in the main town. First mobs you fight. The the rotting zombies are just in the mindless ones and I stood in the house and I fought the same mob for an hour and grind it out. Four of those levels went and turned in the quest which was done a while ago and then there was a quest to go collect the boxes in town. And I just stood next to the same box. Even the boxes were dynamically spawning. Everything was just spawning. I didn't have to leave the house. I accomplished three quests in one spot, but they're not ever moving. They've ruined it for me. It really did ruin it for me. You know, like nobody was waiting in line for the Samuel quest. Nobody was waiting in line for the commander over by the you know the the scarlet commander that's over the like the final quest before you leave the zone. Like no one had to go into the spider cave and fight the spiders. They just stood there at the entrance shooting the one red spider that kept responding over and over again. Yeah, I'm gonna be honest. Like I didn't play under those circumstances, but to me that sounds like less true that to the core of vanilla gameplay experience than than having a little bit of sharding. Obviously I don't want either. Like I think there's probably a third solution. But what you just described seems less true to vanilla wow than sharding does. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I mean it's just so hard to say. Yeah, like it's both like both of those things are like there's pros and cons to both of them. And I mean, this is a decision they've got to make. Another option is like stuff that other people have said. I'm not I'm not a fan of server merges. I'm not like I know a lot of people say like well what if they like they release all the servers and they merge the servers. It's like server merging is not good for the community or server either. I mean we can look at the past like I mean let's let's just like real talk for a second right. It's it's not BS but like look at there were a lot of people who whenever like Zethkor merged into Lightbringer. It was just one of those things. It was like a lot of people from Zethkor just kind of felt like yeah I mean this kind of killed our community too. But it's like they felt like they had to do it for the life of the server and I don't know. I I I think merges aren't something that's particularly good for me. Like I think losing your character's name. You lose guild names and people have to go like reconnect and refind each other and it just ends up being another problem. I think what you have to do what you'd have to do is a shared guild name or a shared character named database like amongst the connected servers right to prevent that problem. And you have like I mean that was one solution that came up where it was like I don't know Illidan one two three and I guess talking about that and those are the three servers and then all of a sudden you're put together after like however much time. I don't know I mean I think there's pros and cons. I think there's pros and cons to every solution. Another solution and this is something so whenever we had that interview kind of we were sitting on the press conference interview session with John Hight and Brian Birmingham he said that you could dynamically change you could easily just dynamically change the server population cap and they could dial it down and dial it up like you could have a smaller population cap for the servers at launch and then increase the population cap as time goes on as people filter out of the starting zone. Well he didn't say that he didn't say that directly I don't think but that's immediately what I thought of whenever he said that you could dynamically change it. Yeah I don't think I don't think he exactly said that but that's just what triggered in my head. No so yeah just to clarify we asked him in vanilla wow what was the population cap and what do you want the population cap to be for Classical and he said so it doesn't work exactly like that. Population caps can actually be dynamic and change depending on what the necessary on what is required of them. So yeah exactly right. I mean that's that's seems like a pretty good solution to me of course there are shortcomings but I think it's better than sharding or dynamic response where you know on launch day when people are shoved into six zones you might have a two or two and a half thousand population cap. And then you know twenty four hours later once people have kind of spread out a bit you bump it up to three thousand or three and a half thousand whatever whatever it is right just random number. That seems like a pretty reasonable solution to me. That's it is definitely reasonable as far as far as like releasing servers for a game that's that's honestly that's the basic template for releasing servers. You release a server with a certain amount of population you test the infrastructure see where people are at you get tons of data like Blizzard has said like verbatim we track every single individual detail to every keystroke you make. We know everything you're doing how many times you push that button to spam that attack how many times you've opened the door how many times you've eaten a certain type of food like they literally track every detail but they're going to be able to track all these details and find out how like how rough it is for the community. I think the solution you guys keep saying is the best one. Have a have a cap on the population so people spread out it won't take long for people to get out of the starting zone it really won't like it won't take long at all. It's the only servers that are going to have trouble are massive streamer servers that are being flooded constantly with new players. You know once once once big streamer A and B say this is a server I'm on those are the ones that will be suffering the most but a limit on the cap people work their way through it. Then increase the population no sharding. No dynamic response won't ruin the essence of classic and then as far as as far as like a server that dies later. Blizzard can stick the old tried and true free character transfers off a dead server and then over populated servers free character transfers over to a less populated server. You know that's going to happen. Think about how many people are going to join your guys server when they find out you're on and they're going to get frustrated they're going to want to move somewhere right. Their characters only level 40 Blizzard could offer them a free transfer to a low a different realm. Suddenly more realms are getting populated like that tried and true system they have in place for a reason. They may talk about trying to make differences and stuff like oh we want to change it we want to change that experience but that system is trying to true for a reason. I think it's the best solution. Server merging is like kills you. You don't want to lose your your names like you said that's too much infrastructure even to even have say like you do the same name on a server like the back end log work for that to make it so you can both have the same name and then interact with each other without like accidentally talking to the wrong person or separating your like that sounds horrible and I don't think Blizzard would ever do that. Who would get the resources to that you know man and it's like you said that's right and true there's there's actually president going back to early 2005 of them doing that and allowing that I think I think it was probably a pretty good solution and a good work around to just oh they were making new servers all through vanilla well right as they make a new server and offer who do you think they'll have to do that with classic WoW they'll be making new servers as class WoW goes on. That's a possibility if if I just picks up and continues on very definitely a possibility but yeah so they were allowing a server transfers from high pop servers to low pop servers not you couldn't transfer from a low pop server to a high pop server but you could go high pop to low pop. So I think on that topic where like the potential of creating new servers as time goes on if you look at the WoW like subscription chart it's it starts out like this or I guess like this and goes and it keeps going up it keeps going up until wrath it kind of levels out and then it starts to dip a little bit and then it goes to to whatever we're at now eventually. I think that and when we talk about this before there's a hot chance that it's like boom real high spike and then it starts to dwindling pretty fast like a spike tank and then it's kind of starts to dwindle and then it will eventually maybe pick back up if it follows that trend I don't think they'll make new servers but if it grows if it goes like this and it goes like that who knows like I mean I mean that that's something that's a lot more realistic for them to create and more servers. Bear in mind OSRS just reached their concurrent player a record of a 17 year old game just hit its concurrent player record. I'm not saying obviously there's there's differences right. OSRS has additional content but hey you know who knows who knows it's the it's the age of bringing back your old game load of the rings online just did the same thing they've released their legendary servers which is a throwback with all their original content they're releasing it progressively there are changes like there are a lot of changes some people weren't happy about but I mean I mean that's the thing nobody wants changes everyone's it's literally the same rhetoric over on the load of the rings online website as it is over in the Blizzard website it's people didn't want changes didn't want this didn't want that but most like they did put in a lot of like quality life changes for load of the rings are different I won't even get into that subject but their population is increased like people you have to have a paid subscription to play the new classic server load of the rings they made it so you can play load of the rings free you want to try out this one once in a lifetime rehash of old content you must buy a paid subscription and their subscriptions are jumping up I'm seeing a lot of big streamers playing it's getting tons of traction even though it's not huge on the viewer list of Twitch people are playing at my discord it's full of messages come play this come play this still classic comes out everybody's so excited to play old school load of the rings it's it's all there it's it's pretty beautiful yeah no nobody's playing their their new content no one cares about they have two other expansions people have stopped buying because they just realized I don't have to you anymore when is the industry gonna wake up and just realize the old tried and true that was the way to go I yeah I just it boggles my mind that they still don't get it like so many of the even indie devs like I see a lot of indie devs working on MMOs I see a lot of these triple A companies pumping out MMOs like nobody gets it like they keep trying to reinvent a wheel that that just is flawless you know to begin with it drives me insane I'm gonna be honest and this is like probably and it's it's bitter it's a bitter pill to take but I think this is probably very true and it's uncomfortable for people like us but I think probably wow and a lot of games these days with these new micro transactions like in game shops I bet they're making more money than ever even though there are maybe fewer concurrent players fewer active subscribers I bet they're making more money than ever I think our demographic of sort of like old school hardcore gamer kind of people I think we are not the primary demographic worth targeting I think there's less money from targeting us then there are the new age people who do anything by accident okay like I think that they are just targeting a different demographic and now I think they're trying to target us retroactively as well with the old game that they know that we love I think they're trying to do both at the same time yeah I mean there's there are a lot of younger people though that are that are interested in classic wow and games like this because it's like well all these old people all these old people these 25 year old just decrepit just withering away people 25 years old oh no but I I think there's there's you know there are there's a younger demographic that's interested in playing these games too but um I just and I said this after the classic announcement I said that I I really really do think this we might be kind of like on the cusp of a renaissance in gaming and people are going to start realizing I mean look like you said Lord of the Rings classic just came out or whatever Lord of the Rings online classic the I think developers are going to start being like okay what is going on what like like like why why do people like this like we made this like 15 years ago and we made this however many years ago why are people still playing it why do people want it so bad and I I think they need to take along a hard look at a lot of the design principles and sure it might have been an accident like we were talking to Kevin and we were talking to John and Mark and there was a lot of things that were calculated but there were some things that just kind of just throw it in there see what happens and it ended up being good it ended up being good and I think stuff like that is what you have to go back and you have to study it and I mean it's not going to be an easy job but I think people do have opportunities to make really good really well designed games for an audience of people that are just they're waiting there's an audience of people out there waiting to to play these games I mean I mean I mean I I looked at my demographics on YouTube the other day like 80% of my channel is people I think I think it's people over the age 18 is 80% of my channel and the majority is like 25 to 34 is something like that but I you know there's still a population there of younger people but there's a big population older people they just they want to play classic they want to play these older type of games I mean you look at Brian Birmingham the the guy who's going to be the lead for classic he went on stage and he said I love retro gaming and I think somebody that says they love retro gaming I think that's a good thing for the game for the development of the game I really like the team at least everybody that we met so far because we met Brian we met Omar and then John's involved because he's the executive producer of Wow and then Ian's involved of course I mean he's he's a hardcore guy and Nano told us how supportive he was yeah everybody's saying how old they are yeah we're we're all we're all withering away guys it's not good yeah I I definitely think you're you're right I think that with modern game design like it has pushed this demographic of players like I would consider us to be a part of it this sort of retro gamer demographic or or not retro gamer but people that like the old school game design of the early 2000s or maybe late 90s it's pushed them so far that people like us have just come become completely disinterested in in modern games and I think that the demographic our demographic is big enough that they have realized okay they're not happy with the current game design we should sort of re-release or like you said a renaissance maybe just make new games of of similar design I think you're probably right well it's it's happening it's happening in the industry when you say like I hope developers are listening like one of the things we talk about in our meetings all the time is that like I've said this to you guys before every developer I know has Blizzard's success like under a microscope we're watching classic wow like a hawk everybody's watching classic wow right now specifically because the success of classic wow like determines a mass does determine a massive shift in the industry if classic wow is the success it'll show that like a game without microtransactions a game without like cell phone features can be as successful as a game that pulls in billions of dollars from only having a one button click to buy something right like for the free to play game success does not does not come from you know massive exposure right like Ninja didn't make billions of dollars for Fortnite right Fortnite made billions of dollars for themselves and pick and picked people to help promote that stuff but they wouldn't have been able to get a quarter of what they got if it wasn't for the microtransactions sales and stuff like that the free to play model is is it's a hard to beat model but yeah it's very popular right now every gaming company is interested in reeling back their old players right there's millions of people from the ages ages you know 18 to 40 that are still playing games right millions of people and to like cut they cut that demographic out to cut the demographic that played classic wow and say like they're they're dying Bree no one cares about this anyway that's so wrong I think what I've learned in the gaming industry and what other developers are learning in the gaming industry is that like if we continue to treat our customers like idiots and and treat them as if they don't want to challenge we're going to keep losing them right it just feels empty it's an empty gaming experience it is an empty gaming experience most games I've played I get an opportunity in my position to try out a lot of games I get a lot of a game like new new small indie developers that come to me and want me to publish their game and are like here come test my game out and I'll sit there and I'll play their game and I'll and I'll I could tell them if it's hollow for just easy I could tell what their true agenda is within the first five minutes of picking up a controller or sitting on my keyboard and playing their game all of them are like that and then you get some of these newer like indie developers I even noticed like the award winning games are always these weird small indie games that are insanely challenging they're like oh game of the year game of the year some random Xbox game that was on the marketplace wasn't even a PC game just went on the radar but somehow got game of the year four times in a row on Xbox Live like what does that what does that say to you you know why is this hard why is this hard platformer game you know why was Cuphead so popular why was these like random old school games popular because there was a demographic of millions of people out there that are willing to throw money at a game that will consume their time nobody nobody wants to play a game for five minutes and then hit a paywall and say I don't want I don't know what to do anymore I don't want to play this anymore you know free to play games how long do they keep your interest you know Path of Exile so great was like oh Path of Exile how many of you were playing it right now none of you yeah they're watching classic gas they're watching classic gas yeah you know but but their game has a massive following why did everybody go from Diablo to them forget the announcement in the goofy controversy and stuff like that it is a challenging game it's fun to play they also have a free to play model they have kind of like the best of both worlds right and then they just announced with their new expansion we're going to make our game more difficult and we're removing all of these horrible Diablo type features these these these pay to win features we're removing that and we're just going to have you play the game hardcore people are flipping out yeah people people are people are going to or POE is going to get a big a big audience of people black playing it probably from that they could people respond very positively to companies treating them as human beings and they might not respond like I'm never going to spend I'm never going to pay for micro transactions like in classic wow or like it's just we're not like that right we come from a different generation where that was actually like deemed to be like pretty weird right I believe me I bought a wow token just like anybody else but just the idea of spending money on on the in-game shop was always controversial from the celestial steed till now and we still view it that way and and while we might not respond in terms of purchasing you know things from the store I'll tell you how we'll respond if you if a developer makes good games challenging games without a pay a cash shop I'll buy their next game like holy like rock star there's a reason why rock star sells every single game like through the roof because they treat their audience well they make great games Bioware once upon a time not anymore but once upon a time same thing anything that Bioware would make I would buy and a lot of people would buy there are certain companies there's two things right and while they might not you know make up for in the short term with this like short term you know micro transaction pump and dub scheme they make up for in the long term like there's never gonna be a rock store game I don't buy you know yeah but I also think like on the topic of micro transactions I think it really depends on the game and the model in general right so if you look at a game like League of Legends like I don't know if I've I don't know if I've done a wow like micro transaction I maybe have done like a server I don't know if I actually did a server transfer anything like that I probably have at some point like an author or whatever but but again like League of Legends like I've bought skins for League of Legends before right I was like well this game is free to play I mean I'll buy skin whatever I like doing that like the flex on people with my kale but I suck now so but but yeah no I think it just kind of depends on the game and what's going on right I do think that for for the genre yeah go ahead and go ahead say one of the big differences with League of Legends is one there's like there's not that MMO immersion right exactly this is where it's gonna go this stuff doesn't stand out as much too with League of Legends you can actually grind in-game currency and just buy it legitimately through in-game currency rather than right not for skins though not for skins yeah not for skins okay okay fair enough yeah yeah I I think that immersion thing is a big is a big differential yeah it's not like it's not like a pay to win thing because it's just like it's just cosmetic stuff but like again like it's it's different it's it depends on the genre of the game and how things are presented well pay to win no not pay to win features but like whether it's whether it's a cosmetic thing or like even it was going to like Blizzard stuff back to Blizzard like Transbog and other things like that like all of these systems even though they they do generate interest what it shows is that Blizzard's is one not confident enough in their content that it's going to keep keep keep people interested that they just keep adding all these little things like Blizzard is a is a is a massive open world mobile game right now BFA is like a mobile game right there's there you can you can go farm if you want to by yourself you can do all these little things by yourself you don't need anybody like Warlords of Draenor was a perfect example that was Farmville Simulator right that's what you yeah it was a Farmville Simulator what Blizzard did is they showed that they have zero confidence in their lore they had zero confidence they couldn't stand up on its own so like here you guys could be by yourself here's your single-player experience we cannot figure out how to to do this again we can't figure out how to do this again here's here's a whole list of random shit you don't need we can't figure out how to make our dungeons viable again and the gear viable again here's Transmog you know wear whatever you want our artists aren't confident in their in their in their sets just Transmog whatever you want don't we're not even going to put effort in our sets how all playwares same set all clothwares same set just different colors there you go that's that's lack of confidence that's that's they're not they're not delivering when they have no incentive to anymore because the rest of the community says oh well you know just Transmog my favorite tier two sits good I don't care you know it's classic while is going to give them a reason to rethink all of those systems you know like like Stacey said it's that immersion classic while was so good that you don't need any of that extra stuff to enjoy it you don't need any of that extra stuff but if you say it was the same way it need Transmog to enjoy the game the next time it's gonna look yeah that you knew the content was gonna be good you knew the gear was gonna be bad as yeah some people still preferred it but like you give people the option and they're just gonna they're just gonna go to that other option not gonna try hard anymore but yeah I I think a big portion of people that are still keeping BFA and retail while float are a collectionist I mean there's a reason they've out of the mount tab the pet journal the toy box the heirloom tab the appearance the appearance achievements people I I really genuinely think the majority of people playing BFA don't raid they they very rarely do dungeons I think they're just farming old content for appearances and mounts and transmog and pets like I really I really think that because they've catered to those people so much with all these with all these with all this different functionality yeah and our archaeology adventure yeah and just to clarify real quick I guess I didn't know this because I I haven't really actively been playing League of Legends recently but supposedly you can make you can get skins from the points you get like you can get points in game currency and then and then you can like get skins through that like random random skins and loot boxes and stuff through the in game currency so yeah that's the formula yeah so that's something that does exist too I I didn't know that um but yeah I think um you know we've talked about shorting quite a bit uh we've talked about the demo a little bit just to kind of go in on the demo you know there was like that big long thread and you know we're hoping that Blizzard looks at a lot of stuff like that looks at kind of the resources that are available to them and by resources like I mean really the community right use the community as a resource and I get the feeling that they're doing that they say they're doing that so at least like all all signs point to them doing that I guess but um it'd be stupid if they didn't it's it's so much free data they had people pay $50 to become free testers you know what I mean yeah um in a sense yeah that's a like there's so much there's so much data lying around to not use it would be would be ludicrous they have enough they have they have data that will help them figure out their next move for servers population everything like just from that small bit the events the events also showed them like whether how detrimental sharding can be there's there was enough data to like they could walk away from this and have everything they need to launch an alpha just from the data test from there oh yeah and I remember when the when the demo first came out like people's initial reaction was they've been working on classic well for a year or over a year now and this is all they have to show for it like this is it with all these bugs and discrepancies I think I really think a big like the biggest hurdle they've had to overcome is just getting this game up and running like structurally I'm getting the game to run I I think you know changing regen rates changing auto attack distance changing you know whatever whatever I think that stuff is going to be just they can just power that stuff out really fast now that the game is actually functional and can be played yeah yeah I think that's that's the impression I got as well um that now there's a lot of problems right there's a lot of problems like I know one thing spell crits we're doing double damage in the demo and they're supposed to do uh they're not supposed to do 200% they're supposed to do 150% in classic um just like just little stuff like that an ability not working quite the right way uh I was noticing like little like they just just they seem minor but like okay for example if you're in your attack animation in classic if you jump your character static and he moves like this right like it's just like ch ch right or no he's doing this but if you're in your attack animation uh just like you're 100% behind your camera I don't I don't know if I'm if I'm doing a good job of explaining this but if you jumped and turned while attacking which is something that a lot of melee players often do whenever they're trying to kite stuff back then you notice this little thing and stuff like that sticks out um that's the kind of stuff I I hope they really go back and fix and they talked about like how how just meticulously they were working on the lighting in the game and that's another thing a lot of people noticing the character selection screen the shading looked a little bit off and how often it's funny how not how often but how something so small is something that actually ends up being so noticeable and they said they were working on stuff like that so hopefully we can yeah yeah I'm sorry guys my explanation maybe wasn't very good there but uh but uh but yeah so that's that's one of the things that I want I hope to see the fixed yeah well the way I see it is like they have a template laid out now and you can see like how I mean there was some blurring issues and things like that but like you can look at it look at it from I mean I mean I know not everybody's a developer not everybody stares at lines of code not everybody knows like this infrastructure like Blizzard said it wasn't a matter of just like plugging in the old code from that Nestorius gave him shoving it into the new system and be like there you go enjoy and play it which is like I think the mentality most people have is that that's all Blizzard had to do was just take this plug it into their system like and flip a switch and like there you go boys right where Nestorius left off like it's wasn't that simple it's it's they said we're going to recreate it in our our system we're going to go to our current system and slowly piece by piece add in all the old classics that add in the old world add in the old grass which is why they even said certain grass textures pop it up that won't be there when classic is launched don't worry about that like all that lighting that you're seeing there that's not going to be there at launch don't worry about that it's just a matter of actually not worrying about it that's the problem is the community such they they've got their porches and their pitchforks that oh I'm fucking worried about it like oh I'm still worried like till it's gone I'm on a freak out man and the forums are filled with people not listening to anything Dems are saying like oh we got this covered like da da da till I see it so there's a lot of I'll believe it when I see it type of people out there that are making making waves for people but like I I saw things in there like oh that's a simple thing like when I develop video games and like like I can tell you every day like okay we're working on an open world Western game and every day someone's like I've made a new cacti it's like okay but what do you what do you guys like I mean a new model for us the world cactus it's like oh great now I got to go through a replace every frickin Saguaro cactus because this one looks better right and then then then it's me going through a massive map you know like some of it's just laid out like we have terrain editors and generators now right but imagine having to go through that map and go okay I have to just target this one specific plant regenerate it through the whole map and hope I don't fuck it up right but but theirs isn't as simple as that theirs is okay now I got to go into this Noss client this old one point 12 client set it up line my character up and make sure all the lighting looks the same all these plants are replaced perfectly every rocks in the right place nothing's floating that wasn't floating back then that's suddenly floating now that is not an easy process that takes so much time you'll see guys go in with full heads of normal color hair come out gray hair like it's a stressful stressful situation coders have the hardest job they're the lowest paid in the industry the lowest paid and like and not even to add a dark note the highest suicide rate in any job next to guidance counselors is video game coders right it's a brutal job you're locked in a room you don't get to talk to people and the only time people come in to talk to you goes hey you broke that you broke that fix that you broke it and you're like oh my god I got to go back and fix it it's a so people are hard on these guys that coders it's okay yes it's okay like does I pay my coders well because I know what they go through it's it's terrifying you know imagine being the one coder that broke the lighting in classic wow imagine the pressure on that dude's back to make sure he got it right there's gonna be that one guy that goes there's one pixel on the flag just outside of under city that's slightly different than it was back then and I swear to God I'm on a boycott and then everybody else is making videos did you hear big news big leak guys the one pixel those changes confirmed changes confirmed next stop looking for Ray to the cash shop guys a pixel pop like that guy is gonna get ridiculed and they already are army of people with shields uprated to bash that guy in the dirt that pixel yeah so you gotta be people gotta become more patient and understanding like if you're not a developer and you're not on the inside who's got billions of dollars is the other argument it doesn't matter as I said before you can have a billion dollars you'll never gonna be prepared for the inflection never prepared for like what people are gonna say you don't know what critics are gonna say Blizzard has more riding on this than an indie company an indie company so here's my game for the first time right what do you think Blizzard's like here's my game from 15 years ago ffff did we fuck it up? yeah that's a scary process it's like I know we have everything laid out for you yeah do you can't possibly scare this up do you guys remember that mentioning the purple lamp post light in uh in west I hope I hope with full release classic wow this summer that they leave one lamp post that's purple I think that would be like a really cool Easter egg yeah that would be that would be just that one guy that one video I found it I found it yeah you're coming out with a game uh I mean this whole situation it's obviously like OSRS classic all this stuff but the the the I think it's a very special experience to have so many people that know so much about your game that are already out there that can basically help you right going back to using the community as a resource so many people can help you like hey this was supposed to be this way this is supposed to be like that I think that's I think that's a very very very unique special situation really that they can take advantage of and I mean you know like it's the pixel thing whatever it's like sure like at the end of the day like that kind of stuff will get sorted out hopefully the the big issues I think that a lot of people the big issues that a lot of people have are stuff like sharding and another one is loot trading and I kind of want to talk about that a little bit because we all have our have our gripes with loot trading and in different ways that it's exploitable it's not entirely vanilla it's and not even not entirely it's not vanilla at all right to have loot trading I think it's something that was added in wrath and I think they refined it and cataclysm then later on with personally like I'm not sure because I kind of I kind of fell off after that point but I don't know what are your I've talked about loot trading before Crom what's your thoughts on loot trading it shouldn't exist I mean there's no argument I've heard that's made it sound good I've heard I've heard plenty of like you know calm positive arguments in its favor the thing about classic WoW was that it was unforgiving and it taught you valuable lessons if you got ninja'd you knew who to blacklist if you if you screwed up a loot drop in a raid and you accidentally took it and you had the contact that she had and that was a lesson for you like be careful don't screw this up like to like oh we don't want to take away the resources this is what you know what I say well Blizzard may have billions of dollars but this this is another time where I can turn the opposite and say I have billions of dollars shut up like there's no there's literally no excuse not to have a GM available and ready on every single one of these servers but she knows the number of the servers but I imagine it's going to be small at first they should have enough GM resources to fix those sorts of issues you know like GM interaction in classic is just as important to having people not make mistakes as important giving people these safety nets this loot trading stuff like let's forget about like the obvious exploitation which I know I mean there's people like in a scholar said like publicly on stream if they had this and I'm absolutely exploiting the shit out of this I will exploit it like that's there's people I know personally it's too easy to do it yeah it's too easy not to do it this is this is a race to get to the end of the content you got three of your friends in a group with you and one random and he needs your stuff all your friends are going to roll on it and screw that guy over yeah even though you four friends like high five good job you just fuck that guy out of a real experience a real piece of gear who genuinely needed it that's not cool I just even that one small example is toxicity on a level classic doesn't need and it's going to happen day in that example in particular like even though it's just one example it's something that's going to happen every single day hundreds if not thousands of times per day and I think Blizzard they might be a little misguided here the reason why they're implementing loot trading and they alluded to this at BlizzCon is because they want to save costs more or less on customer support they want to save money on customer support probably back in vanilla million tickets raised every day oh my god I accidentally you know gave somebody the wrong piece I meant to click on this guy gave it to that guy or something along those lines but what they've inadvertently done is they've actually just you know put money it took money out of one pocket put it in the other now you're going to have customer support tickets every single day about the guy that got scammed by the four other guys in the group and he's going to be complaining oh my god I just got ninja looted these guys are rolling on on gear that doesn't belong to them or that they don't even qualify to use and he's going to raise a fit and you're going to see a fit on forums your CMs are going to have to be more active on the forums putting out fires it's it's almost like you've just exchanged one problem and you know why not just keep it as it was keep the fans happy at the same time if anything I think it would be less expensive to keep it as it was yeah well yeah because people are still going to report they're still going to report and each I mean whenever you report and you you have interactions you have to pay those people that are handling all this stuff it costs them money right sorry stay safe you want to go ahead and go before I but yeah what I was going to say is I think crumb touched on a very positive on a very good note I mean one of the highlights of vanilla is player agency decision making thinking ahead ramifications for positive actions as well as negative actions I would rather them like if if it has to be either or if they are really really concerned and dead set on not spending more money on hiring more GMs to deal with you know this sort of stuff I'd prefer a tough shit policy where if you if you screw up and give someone the wrong item or whatever whatever happens too bad just deal with it and I'd rather them just come out and say hey in a blue post we're using a tough shit policy it's too bad I would 100% prefer that to to loot trading of any sort dude so so to that point I 100% agree I think that look it's classic okay let's it's a little bit different now people don't want to take responsibility for their actions but we're playing classic we're gonna we're gonna take some responsibility and I'll tell you guys straight up especially because I saw him here in the chat I mean I'll tell you the first time I master looted and I think I master looted and everybody's yelling everybody's yelling at freaking deputy because deputies popping off and it's like stop stop deputy calm down and then I accidentally click deputies name and I give him the the mage tier two shoulders and he's playing a hunter so yeah I mean I I've screwed up too and that's my fault right and everybody's screaming a freaking deputy and I'm like God so here it goes so I give him the mage tier two shoulders and I felt like a freaking moron and this happened on stream and I just was like a hunter item of course yeah every yeah of course so I mean I I think that I I personally my own personal opinion is hey that's my fault and I you know that that's what we have to deal with now I think that when it comes to a cost thing I think that if this is the issue I mean it's not really it's not going to be a thing right people put in tickets sorry we don't handle that it is what it is but if they absolutely have to have some form of system in there 100% they're like no we're not we're not budging on having some system in place to to to fix some of that stuff I think having a situation where it only works whenever you're like master looting in raids like master loot is enabled in raids and master looter screws up yeah master looter screws up and it goes the wrong person now the issue with that there's still an issue with that and that's if you're running like a pug group right let's say you're running a pug raid and somebody wins something but they're actually just like a surrogate for the loot like there's still ways to exploit this like there's still ways to screw people over just don't don't get a lot of easy pipeline now you know if you can do it you can do it but just give them an easier way to do it yeah imagine this imagine imagine your master looter of a guild and a piece drops and you give it to tips and I wanted the piece and I say tips listen I whisper I must say tips listen I'll give you 300g for that piece yeah and tip is like oh you know like that's pretty good okay and so we we do a little backdoor trade I mean that's not good for the guild that's not that undermines your authority as master looter or GM or officer yeah there are problems with that as well right there's still problems with that I think I think it alleviates like the the process of kind of clicking up I it fixes the five man dungeon problem right so the five man dungeon problem is you you end up a lot of people say well well this is good because it promotes you excuse me promotes you playing with friends and doing all this stuff it's like not really it promotes you kind of developing a click and you just hang out with your little pockets of people and little groups of people oh well I'm not doing that if I if I don't have two people with me I'm not I'm not going to I'm not going to run barren without two people I know you know that's a common thing I I read like four times in a chat I won't I won't play with people I don't know if this system goes through like they're they're ruins the entire essence of classic wow the social experience even if it's even if it's a small majority of people that that say I won't play with anybody unless it's this like you're still killing a huge part of what classic wow is like if I I've got you I do pugs all the time I don't care how big my guild is some how many how many times you've been in a guild with friends you're really close friends are like no I'm not helping you with this dungeon I got my own shit to do right people will do what they want to do people have their own agenda and they're in your guild you can't always get a group of your friends and then if you're stuck with a fear of grouping with people you don't know you're just you're just stuck like you're creating you're creating toxic systems that exist in current wow today like right my my stance will always be if it wasn't in classic wow it shouldn't be in classic wow classic wow was successful because of the formula that it had the changes made throughout the expansions after or what made wow what it is today yeah oh we just who released through the tips okay tips yeah he's back he's back yeah when it comes to when it comes to when it comes to systems specifically right it's like we say no changes specifically like you know just just getting more specific than no changes it's the systems that are added like loot trading and stuff like this later on and wow that are the biggest problems right so yeah I mean it's it's obviously no changes everything like you know everybody says that it's a very big blanket statement but whenever you want to dive right in I think that's like the number one biggest thing on the no changes list is adding in these new systems I think that now now kind of going back to your your example stay safe like so when when you know from from the perspective of me like as a guild leader if I find out somebody in my now I don't even want to deal with that right I don't I don't want to have to deal with that but if I notice something like that does happen that's somebody that like look you're not you're not going to be in the guild very long like that's not going to be an issue like it's not not going to be an issue but that's not going to be an issue going forward because I'm not going to I don't want to mess with that like that's just something like I'm not having any of that like you screw up once then you're done and then other people will hear about it I don't know and some guilds might care some guilds might not care because you aren't playing in a world where your reputation matters and everybody understands that but that's kind of how I feel about that and another thing just to clarify because we talk about player agency a lot and just to kind of define what agency is like whenever we talk about player agency that's basically the concept of like so so your decisions matter you have the ability to make decisions your decisions matter and that as a player you can kind of see like there are like you can see the consequences of your actions you see the consequences of your decisions like you can you can assume like hey this is if I do this this is going to happen and I have I have the free will to do that whenever we talk about player agency well it's it's not it's not only the capacity to foresee consequences or positive effects but it's also actually having to deal with them right and that's that's really what it comes down to I think and retail wow and BFA I mean how many what how many things can you do in BFA how many mistakes can you make that actually have long lasting negative ramifications on your gameplay very few like really very few I could I could barely find the only mistakes the only thing that has a lifetime or a permanent ramification is if you just don't if you don't go get that item that's getting taken out of the game at this point in time that's really the only thing you suffer from now on well I can't clear mythic I'll just do regular you know I can't clear heroics I'll just you know I'll just roll into regular dungeons there's always something there's a fail safe for everything you can't really suffer in and I mean I guess you can you don't you know the as a right thing everything you can go down all those other flawed systems but at the end of the day as far as like mistakes you make personally there's not very many you can make it's freedom to make our own mistakes is all we ever wanted man what happens when what happens when you take away when you take away punishment for your actions like it just turns it to a cess pool right yeah like why why is the internet so toxic I'll tell you exactly people turn into a bunch of whiny spoiled brats that just want gimme gimme gimme and that's exactly where we're at with BFA and retail well yeah that's exactly where we're at well wasn't that movie wasn't there a movie the purge or something where it was like there was 24 hours where like there was no law enforcement or something and just yeah I haven't seen it but that was like the premise of the movie right where it's like if people can just do whatever they want with no repercussions they're just gonna go ham and it's not gonna be good yeah yeah yeah well it's it's rich kid syndrome there's there's an actual like medical term for these people now but when you're when you're when you're when you're handed everything your whole life and then you're suddenly shoved into a situation where you have to take care of yourself people shut down and become insanely toxic like there's I've met a few people that are like this where it's just you've lived your whole life without any affluenza there you go there's right affluenza someone check got affluenza is the actual is the actual term medically for for this condition and it's just people who have gone their whole life without any any sort of like repercussions for their actions they've never had to be financially responsible for themselves they've had they've been handheld the entire time through the life and the medical condition is that they they cannot be punished for their actions in the real world because they've never had a punishment their whole life therefore they don't know what what right from wrong is and so mentally they have this safety blanket that protects them it's almost like they're neutral from your your laws because because yeah I know I know Mo Megalome yeah it is spoiled trust me I'm not saying affluenza is great right now right to sound like oh shit I'm out of this I have a mental condition that I don't know better you know but it's like literally giving people an out as to why they are this way when you create these systems that's not good and yeah not everybody should have it it's it's the as I said it's all entitlement at every it started back in Blizzard's Blizzard's downfall came from Diablo 3 was the age of entitlement from Blizzard like when they started doing Diablo 3 they started giving everybody everything I watched people on forums literally boycotting making youtube videos screaming I saw I there was pictures of people like marching outside of Blizzard headquarters because they weren't getting a Diablo 3 pennant that said they were part of the closed alpha for family and friends on you imagine that having people protesting your game because they didn't get into the family and friends alpha exclusive banner that you got I got a little flag called one of the chosen from playing in the friends and family alpha for Diablo I proudly display it every time I come in game because I know there's going to be some spur from back in 2015 that was a good day you and as soon as I'm in a random group with like a level farming group for the new season I drop the flag and you'll usually see a guy leave fuck this it's so funny it's yeah it's ridiculous he's still mad to this day that he didn't get something everyone else got well I'm sorry he weren't there but that's not how it worked but if Blizzard keeps catering to that mentality and then trying to introduce those systems in the classic classic ends up like every other game they've made since then and ends up being a hand-holding game where everybody gets what they want because if Blizzard's main gets it oh we gotta add in these graphics because we don't want to upset this new demographic that demographic it's not for them and if they don't enjoy the game as is and then true classic experience and they'll never really like classic wow because there's a whole lot more visually or than visuals that are going to affect them there are systems that they're just never going to get the grasp of you think any random player is going to understand like how the pvp ranking system goes I watch I watch stay saves video breaking down the the ranking system and my head was still whatever dude just I was going to grind until I get it because this but like but there was logic and there was effort put into it and like you know a person who can really really cares about it could sit there and understand the mathematics behind it but the average player is going to look at what he says and go that's retarded I'm not doing that right right right I'm trying for 14 days every day for the next you know or for several months for the next couple months until I get ranked 14 hope I get there right and I think that like kind of to that point like and going back to what you said about like this this game is for certain people I don't think that you should necessarily like shut the game out to a certain group of players but at the same time that certain group we lost tips again but I don't think you should necessarily shut the shut like a certain group of players out but at the same time like different games are for different people and if you don't like a game that's fine like don't try and change it and and essentially ruin it for the other people that do like it right yeah and that's that just at the end of the day like that's that's just what it is well I I think it's also possible that within the same game you can have different systems to cater to different crowds so for example the Reikin system like you brought up caters to an extreme no life probably unemployed gamer base and that's fine that's fine that is in the game but I don't think that the more casual people should feel entitled to that at the same time I feel like vanilla wow is also very very appealing and rewarding for casual players nothing nothing should change about that I think you can cater to both audiences very well within the same game the problem was when you start bending over backwards to try to make the experience the same for everyone that's that's where these problems arise that's that's impossible that is making games is all about balance you cannot balance that period yeah trying to have the whole having the whole world like in one big melting pot like I don't know look at it from any any any aspect it doesn't work it doesn't work you can't do that like it's it's you know hey separating your player base seems like a bad idea to a certain extent but like he said that rank 14 group of people those are diehards those people who are clearing raids like day like you know the day of release like that's well not you know obviously four days later everyone is already running at level 58 clearing molten core stuff like that like that's their own personal hardcore yeah hundreds of people in one area still doing the same quest that were like you know two days ago that guy's already in a raid no one cares there's thousands of people still playing millions of people still playing that are not progressing that far not doing rank 14 and there's also proven the pudding that you could go get you could go grind all like every single month for rank 14 and still get your ass kicked by a guy in pre-rate BIS like yeah it doesn't matter you know like these people like oh I'll never get ranked 14 you gotta make the system easier it's like you trust me that guy's getting ranked 14 probably not gonna be that good yeah I mean there are people that are just gonna just grind it out just like meticulously just like just push through push through push through and just play all day and get ranked 14 and that's fine I think it's still impressive it's just like it's just a different type of thing so I was talking to some of the I was talking to some friends and salad bakers in progress the other day about how like there's some things that like whenever like you have people like more in the high end community like people talk about certain things like oh well it would it would technically it would be better if this was this it would be better if that was that and it's like yeah it would be better for for you maybe right it would be better for this this one percent but the game the game is designed to fit like a a wide variety of people and that's why that kind of goes back to what I was saying like the game is already designed to fit for casual players it's designed to fit for hardcore players there's different like playing methods but if you don't fit into one of those things and you don't like the game that's totally fine but whenever you start changing stuff to kind of fit like your personal agenda more this is what I told them like you know sure like you could make classic a little bit more hardcore at the high end and do this and do that you could take out world buff but that's not good for everybody right that that's good just for you and it's not good for the entirety of the game and the the same goes on the other end of the spectrum for for maybe the more casual side right like if you do that then you then you're negating like this group of people and you're you're negating the massive massive I guess like middle like I guess middle middle class of the game right but um but yeah let's let's kind of move on let's kind of move on from this we we kind of we were well on the topic of like loot trading and all this stuff and we kind of got off topic a little bit but uh let's talk about the the concept of phased content phased content release it's something that you know I this is this is my personal opinion on phased content release and I talked about this a little bit before blizzcon I said that there's a chance that it kind of hinges on the concept of progressive itemization and if you have phased content release then they more than likely won't be doing a true they won't be doing true progressive itemization patch by patch right because if they're not okay this is the 1.1 this is the 1.2 this is 1.3 just to clarify you're not talking about like phasing you're talking about about progressive content release progressive content release yeah so when we say phased we're talking about in chunks right because they talked about phased content release and what phased what they meant by phased content release is putting the the patches out in chunks they proposed for but kind of going back to what I was saying if there's less patches essentially if there's less content chunks that means there's there's probably less they're they're not going to get as specific with progressive itemization and progressive itemization is something that really has hasn't been done perfectly on any sort of private server or anything in the past some of the like nostalgia is like they kind of started the whole thing with like hey let's try and make it as true to Blizzard as possible and they did some things early that they did some things that like whenever they they shouldn't have been done and I think there's different parts to progressive itemization a lot of times people talk about progressive itemization as you know one specific thing like one specific concept but there's different parts to it where when do you release an item when do you like when do items get taken out of the game and when do items change like statistically so I think that and this is something that some people say like well this this really caters to the higher end player base right because they know all this stuff and they might do certain things in different patches but I think it actually it's just better for everybody all together right whenever they update certain items at certain times you don't want to have a situation where titanic leggings are you know they drop in the 1.10 patch there's all kinds of 1.11 or I think 1.10 patch that was 1.10 patch where they changed a lot of the dungeon loot they added in items like Heart of Warmthalic and stuff like that into the earlier dungeons well these are like the nax blues some people call them nax blues that kind of stuff's not good for the game right because if you're putting that in the game from the very beginning then you have a situation where people lose that sense of progression and developing your character throughout the throughout the scope of vanilla right I proposed like a two-year like face content release they said this is what Blizzard said they said four different phases and in the first phase they wanted to put out Montcourt, Anaxia, Dire Maul, Azragos and Kazak the second phase they said they wanted to do Blackwing Lair and the Honor System and ZG I believe in the third phase they wanted to do AK-40 Tier 0.5 or Dungeonset 2 whatever you want to call it the Emerald Dragons and I mean that kind of scenario and whole that that whole thing kind of goes along with AK-40 and then the then the last phase would just be like the next patch essentially with the Scourge Invasion and all that this is something that I didn't think was good I did not like that I thought that's not nearly enough patches and I think that they should spread it out a little bit more for a few reasons but what do you guys think tips what do you think absolutely I think the general consensus and I agree with that 100% is that you really want at least six stages bare minimum and the way you would phase it out is you would remove the world bosses and Dire Maul from launch you'd have that after Molten Core and Ani and then you would separate ZG from BWL we're talking about raids here more specifically but you would separate ZG from BWL maybe a couple months after and kind of have that more or less on its own with a couple of other things but yeah I think it's problematic obviously with Dire Maul at launch you have World Buffset launch which with Dire Maul at launch you have a lot of gear that was especially a lot of castor gear that's much better than or very equivalent to some of the stuff that drops in like Molten Core it ruins the progression curve on top of that it makes raids easier and then obviously ZG just it brings a lot of consumables to the game and it brings a lot of ketchup geared to the game doesn't have an attunement or anything like that so it's like it would be ideal to split it up in at least six phases and we're not even talking about the atomization here I mean we I'm guessing you know when I heard them say stages and not patches I'm guessing that means we are not going to get any kind of progressive atomization maybe the only thing they give is you know the next blues except Scourge Invasion blues maybe those come in later on with their respective patches or their respective stages but it sounds like all of the items will probably be changed in their 112 state at launch that kind of stuff you know it's it's pretty destructive what do you think stays safe I was going to say if I had to bet I think that probably new items will be introduced with each stage but we will not see any atomization updates on previous items I don't think we'll see items change throughout the impression I got was that you know they have this old backup of 1.12 they found in the box whatever I don't even know if they have atomization prior to that I would speculate probably not they have a replica of 1.12 I don't know if they have anything before that I think they said that the earliest patch they had maybe I heard it wrong but they said the earliest patch they had was like 1.8 or something does that mean they don't have like the 1.1 to 1.7 data I don't know I think whenever they said something about that I think they meant like just from like a full on like what they had standpoint because we've heard this multiple times Blizzard was a different company back then and it was a lot more like now it's a lot more professional right and in some ways that's good in some ways that's bad right but you know there's pros and cons to everything but they didn't really do a good job of like keeping their notes and stuff and that's why like I mean John John said that like that was the big thing with John doing the wild diary is like yeah like they didn't really have a lot of records like he had a lot of what they had you know like in terms of keeping notes and stuff yeah so it's for that reason I think we probably not see itemization per other 1.12 or 1.8 I don't remember the 1.8 comment I think probably 1.12 on top of that they've said that they're looking for a formula that they can replicate over and over and over again to relaunch and re-release classic wow for over a decade the timeline they gave us was like the year quantity that they floated in our conversation with them was 15 years they're thinking 15 years in advance with classic wow they want to release it over and over and over again yeah I think they're I do kind of think like if they have crazy and drastic itemization changes you know every couple months like I do think we are concerned about it because we're in the upper percent of players knowledge wise but I think that can be very very confusing for your average future classic wow player don't you think if every couple months they're doing huge itemization overhauls they'll eventually get it I mean that's the thing though as I mean like like those these old school MMOs were daunting as is I mean no one's going to come in a classic wow just get it right like these itemization changes like it comes with it not only does it come with it but it's also part of like the lifespan of these servers right like these little mini micro patches that happen every couple of weeks and every couple of months that just add a few changes here and there that were within classic obviously like they're little milestones you knew what to do they gave you different goals like the private server community when you talk about a formula a tried and true formula like the the slow item itemization and slow like content progression was was so important to the lifespan of those servers right any server any server that added rush content any server that bundled content together fell off right hard right like for a reason because you know like like you said the economy gets the economy can get ruined with diremall and release as well as certain gear just becoming like three months worth of gear just becoming useless right who want who wants that like I mean a counterpoint what we've seen on private services people pooling resources months in advance because they know they'll be valuable six months down the road they'll get items in molten core knowing they're bad right now but in a couple months they'll be very very good we're talking huge stockpiles of like elemental earth for example or materials to make hide of the wild stuff like that it definitely does go both ways mm-hmm so goes both ways but like once again like that's that's a single private server with like a single population you know comprised of people from all over the world you know working together after years and years of being on these single servers with each other now we're opening it up to a massive population of course there gonna be some of that stuff going on but that's the essence of classic right that's the essence of these that these people know how to farm that stuff they'll know how to farm it but the the average player won't know that difference yeah really know that difference they're not gonna understand it so like there's no point in changing it for those who who won't even understand what's going on they'll just see like oh wow maybe I should go farm these things like these guys are doing right you know just to do that make the effort it just it just you know to make that change to release this content early like it's here's what you say you sacrifice a couple people pooling stuff early to like blow up the economy later something we've all worked through on private servers multiple times or make three months worth of content feel absolutely useless so here's the thing with itemization like we have to decide on the interval frequency with which they're changing because literally all through vanilla wow there were itemization changes there were no there were itemization changes every Tuesday so do you do you want itemization changes every Tuesday or every month or every two months or four times as they suggest like so there will be a change the change that the contingency is how frequent do you want the changes to take place well so and this is this is kind of where like my thought on the face content release comes in and how I like I I propose like a a six seven step step stage content release where during certain points during certain phases of content release during certain stages of content release they make certain changes that are like really the big changes right where we're talking about like the maybe the tier two updates the pvp gear updates stuff like that that kind of plays a big role the dungeon gear updates like savage gladiator chain for example is a chess piece from the BRD right blackrock depths arena event is an epic chess piece that is a male chest with defense on it early on and then it changes it changes by the 1.10 patch I think to be arguably the best chess for plate dps for melee for well for physical dps it's I mean I think it's really good for hunters too but I know for for warriors and for paladins like you know you have the avengers chest for paladins but for warriors specifically they have the I think it's breastplate of annihilation is is what it's called from achy 40 and that chess ends up being the second best chest to that so if you have that in from the beginning of the game that's just like one more thing that I think in a later phase is one of what they need to update some of this stuff like that to to fix that well look at it from a small scale then if you have like because you have these lists of these items like it's not a big list right like it's not like it's millions of items that are going to change and become drastic and ruin the game there's it's I mean it could be a couple of hundred items here or there but if these if there's 10 years worth of data showing which items drastically change the game all buzzers got to do is look at that list and and tweak those items specifically just look at these items say yeah when this item changed it changed the game this actually becomes best in slot I mean if it's 10 items 20 items or even just 1,000 items in that database of millions and millions of items they could they could easily just look at that say okay which just phase these items and slowly phase these changes and slowly this these specific ones so this isn't completely game break so these items in molten core are actually worthwhile now the counter argument is that how many people are actually going to get to those items it's not like you know it's not like you just walk in and and I got the best in slot item you know now I don't have to find this thing in molten core not everyone's going to get it right and some people aren't going to level yeah like I was thinking about the dire malting like some people won't even hit level 60 in three months you know like realistically like over time most people will not yeah well so so this is the argument uh so I got a chance to to talk to Ian had to cost us like I got like lucky and ran into him at the hotel lobby and and I talked to him for a little bit and I brought up some of my concerns to him and one of the things was like face content release and you know we just we just talked about a bunch of random stuff and for example dire mal dire mal it released like you know less than a month after launch on EU servers and then way back then you know a lot of people didn't hit level 60 before dire mal came out and that's kind of like why I think I think that's why they kind of think that well if we put dire mal in on launch it's not going to be that bad but the issue is players have just gotten better I think so there's a difference here way back then nobody had any clue what the frick was going on and then you have the private server kind of crew which I think private server players as a general population are players that are a little bit more in the cut like they kind of know a little bit more they're they're a little bit more involved they know what's going on and then you're going to have the the big wow classic release audience which is going to be a mix of both right because there are more resources available to you that people have kind of learned and everything that people have figured out in the last 14 years being applied to the people that had no idea what the crap's going on so I think you're going to have this issue where there there is kind of like a happy medium there and there are going to be people that the average level of time to 60 is going to be much faster than it was in retail vanilla wow but it's not going to be quite as fast as it was on private servers on private servers like the the last two like most popular ones the average leveling time was between like 10 and 12 days played time I don't think it's going to be quite that fast but if you have people who you have this 1% again you don't want to necessarily cater to the 1% if you have dire mullin on launch this 1% is just going to get a massive lead over the casual players and I think you know somebody said earlier you know all this talk about itemization and these little like you know micro developments right these little small changes that happened throughout the course of vanilla has given me a headache right somebody said that and this is something that I do think if you're blizzard you might look at that and think that's a concern right that oh well like the average player isn't going to understand everything that's going into this and everything that's changing and it might be off-putting but I would actually argue the opposite right because sometimes you don't really know what's going on you don't really know what's going to change and what's happening here but something changes and it keeps you involved in the game I think a lot of times blizzard ends up like they try and artificially do this this sense of progression in the sense of just constant small wins that are happening throughout the course of vanilla they do it artificially by adding in like the concept of like time gating content and stuff like this to where it ends up like like I said before in an RPG you don't necessarily want to make people have to play a certain way that's not good right and that's a little bit of what happens with BFA and I know I felt that on launch because I messed up and then everybody was way ahead of me it was like a huge mess and I couldn't out grind it I couldn't just like stay up all night and out grind it I didn't have that agency right so that's that's basically like how I how I feel about that I think that you just I mean just kind of do it that way what do you guys think I will point out a very interesting note they're releasing their content in four stages that's actually almost identical to retail out in terms of retail out typically has four major content you have the launch then you have the point one patch point two patch point three patch that's more or less been their formula for the past two or three expansion and I think I think the reason why they've chosen four stages think about how seamlessly you can weave those stages now into retail while content patches I think it was a legion I believe where every single content patch was almost formulaically released every 77 days exactly imagine now you have a situation where you can kind of weave classic while content patches within that predefined interval and all of a sudden you've basically given your players double the content for the same price nobody's going to quit World of Warcraft at that point because you're always going to have content to do whether it be in retail or in classic right well and the problem with that though is is you're banking on not you but but as Blizzard like they would be banking on people wanting to play both versions of the game and well sure you you want to have that available to them and that's why they're making the subscription link to where you don't have to pay anything extra you just pay the same exact amount of money to play classic and BFA together which I think was cool I thought it was a really good move by them but you need to keep people engaged and you need to keep people subbed right because the way it is now like it doesn't have to be like just just talking about it realistically like if they're not doing true progressive itemization it doesn't have to be exactly like okay on this day this happens this day this happens but where you're going 1.1 to 1.12 but if they're dead set on doing the phased content release then they need to have the big events spaced out properly like you know I said like one and a half months for Dire Maul and Azzerghost and Kazek and you could go even longer you can go like two months with that right but I kind of I personally just kind of gave like a rough idea in my last video where I kind of give the full story of BlizzCon and my own personal thoughts a little bit more in depth but I think going on a two year cycle and you can go with like you know zero months is MC six months is BWL the next you know the next six months is AQ40 and then the six months after that is Nax and that's very similar to the to the retail vanilla wild timeline I think it was like seven months and five like so so BWL I think was eight months after launch I think AQ to Nax was like five months but it was it was very similar to that and that gives you plenty of time you you go six months you go six months after Nax and then the six month mark is whenever they release maybe a set of fresh servers they release classic burning crusade and then at that point maybe they make a set of servers that are like 1.12 like a holding servers right for people who just want to play 1.12 vanilla forever somebody actually commented about this my youtube video on the they showed me a clip of Swiftie saying like he's like I didn't want vanilla and I just wanted to play vanilla forever and I think there are people like that and there's an audience for people who are going to want to do that and that's a scenario where you could copy your character over to like a 1.12 it's just going to be like this forever people can make new characters there and and just play 1.12 vanilla wow with everything in from the beginning and everybody it kind of goes in and all the people that want to play like that have a community people that want to play like that and the server doesn't just like get torn apart to like down to 100 people and survival rate of those servers are going to be 10 times that of what private servers have yeah and and you're going to and you're going to have people from other sides come in too so it's going to be even better exactly because private server private server like fresh servers like kill off the old server just because because the population is so small it's you know everybody from this one community is moving over to that one new server and it's all it's only 10,000 active players right you know so when half of that population goes then you leave the other server half empty but you got millions of people in the mix it's a completely different thing you know not everybody cares about continuing the same storyline over and over and over again those that you you're not wrong I know people who will happily live in post next vanilla forever you know role play communities just content creators in general who just make a machinima whatever you name it like this lots of I mean just because you've cleared next one so you're you're fucking far from done in my opinion yeah like just because just because you think you're done like if that if that's your game your end game is just to say I did it and I'm done that guy's gone let them let them move on but there are lots of people who are still going to be grinding out but I know I want a full set of tier three like I want to head to oh I want it I want to say I have it I want the ring I want the full set nothing missing I want it all just to say finally finally did it I've done I've gone through Naxx Clear two times on private servers and still never got a full set of gear right right and when the new server came out everybody moved on I was like ah I'm not done yet like let me let me get one full set let me do one battleground with a full set of gear let me see how I do like let me just try this fantasy I never got so let me let me ask you guys this we've talked about what you guys want for content release timeline for like progressive content release what do you expect them to do what do you actually think that they'll do um I think that if we can give good feedback if assuming they're listening I think that they'll they'll increase the phases if we can continue to give good feedback like if we if we use the proper channels and I don't know I've kind of tossed this around to different people I showed I showed kind of like my schedule on stream and I think people like I mean I think you can obviously tweak the numbers and I don't think that my my way is 100% the best way necessarily I think it's just a way to do it that would be better than the way Blizzard kind of has proposed so far and they said it's on the table right um now this is going to cost them more money it's going to make uh it's it's going to make the testing period a little bit more meticulous so like are they going to do it maybe I would hope so right because it's worth it it's worth it to make their game good like I think a four-stage content release is going to be boring honestly it could be I don't know people need to understand like this isn't about just being a dick saying no changes for no changes I want progression just because like this is about preserving the lifespan of the server like anytime like I make my arguments about these changes is because it's not because I'm just some personal nostalgia thing that I want you to go through all the hardships I went through because that's not what I want I don't want you have to experience all the horrible bugs and having a patch every week that changes your entire class I hated that experience like the 1.12 private server experience I enjoyed was how long it lasted you know I logged into a fresh server and I didn't think to myself well a couple months from now the server is going to be dead you know that whole this will be dead in two months mean come mean comes from rushed content on shitty servers right that that's a perfect example like what was what's the downfall of almost every TBC server that came out what was two times four times experience gain content becoming obsolete before you even finish it the server was dead content there was rage released before they were supposed to and dead right that's all it took it just it just killed it this is about lifespan not about like you know trying to have memories like I I argue all the time this is this is how I'm not trying to go back and date my old girlfriend from 10 years ago wear the same t-shirt eat all the same snacks and like play on my old monitor like I'm not doing that like those those nostalgic memories wore off after my fourth road to 60 right like that wore off a long time ago for me it was just about enjoying the time of my friends I like spending months on these servers I don't want it to die quickly I don't want people to quit because the economy's trash because of a dungeon being released too soon you know I want people to log in and see like on the blizzard on blizzard news the dire mall patched like artwork it's coming out you know but the ogres are rising up this is happening like those little events those milestones that those were the import those are important patches we don't have to go back and do every single individual item change just the ones that are detrimental right that's a that's a small list there's a small list of items that could destroy the game just like negate content ruin it you can take that small list as long as you're positive about it in your represent like people people that like are that are super spurgy about their their argument they're never gonna get listened to they're never gonna listen blizzard flips through trash all day long you'd be surprised how often they'll see I'm actually read your post and how often they just skim by it because they're horrible comments you know but I could tell they're listening you just have to keep pushing this when we say no changes don't say just no changes explain explain why explain why explain why and make sure it's a better answer than just like because I just want to remember it that way they're not gonna rebuild your memories this is about preserving the server's life making it last as long as possible without making people bored some private service figured out that method you know there is even when it comes to small things like having the original mount system so when when they bring in the new epic models you have the option can I keep my ivory raptor or should I upgrade and get the armored orange raptor you know do I actually want to do this that that that little moment is so great you see that guy riding around on this white raptor you're like oh my god where did you get that especially came in late and that's your little trophy oh I was here from the beginning this is the original mount you know then the event happened and then you know these became you know now they're extinct whatever whatever reason you want to come up with these little milestones are something for people to look forward to they're they're extra they're extra trophies that you can hold on to they're things that you remember from classic wow that like that changed the way you played games forever it gives people it's different things to be competitive about you know if there's no pvp system implemented right away what are people doing they're doing they're just world pvp for funsies and the rest of them we're just trying to get things that are about to get taken out of the game you know if you know about that you know I want those milestones for everybody because it extends the server life it gives you something to talk about it gives you goals that are that are weren't designed by the game creators originally you know this isn't go get 10 items bring it back to farmer john because he wants them this is this mounts going to get taken out of the game within a few months I have this much time to grind my my troll rep to get this to get this raptor I have this much time to grind out this much gold to get that training you know it's gone forever you know and you'll remember when you get that that moment is so freaking important you know just like everyone's first time getting their first epic you never forget that right imagine getting to relive that over and over again and it never gets old that's kind of that's kind of amazing that they were able to do that that system exists and it feels good you know every time I get my raptor it's amazing I've never gotten I've never gotten a Thunderfury before right right never gotten it before and you have a certain amount of time to get that Thunderfury you know you know your lifespan of your private servers you know when Max is eventually going to come out you know when you need to get this and still have it be viable right right like and then of course like all the work that goes into that first time you get that it'll change it changes your gaming life right uh-huh yeah how many I I'm still playing retail out to this day along with the private servers still don't have a freaking Thunderfury still don't have that you know I may never get it but I what I was able to do was I was able to get that Ivy Raptor on those private servers and relive those moments I never had and they were glorious and they were I felt triumphant and amazing and it kept me coming back every day to that server and I was missing I was either missing work or skipping out on streams to play on Nost every day and I wanted to play on to play on to play on even to play on Lights Hope and Elysium afterwards to play on Chronos and Phoenix Wow like those servers the way they did it those that content progression and the lifespan of their servers what killed Lights Hope and Elysium all them when they said we're going to start rushing content out do quick merges change the change the they're like we got 20 people who are bored let's make sure they're happy and those 20 people ruined private servers what's ad sharding let's add dynamic respawn let's rush the content out faster and these servers are dying really really quick guilds are finishing it and then nobody cares as long as big guild number one defeats it no one no one cares anymore it just seems it doesn't it doesn't exist to them anymore right I don't know I don't know any other way to put it rushing out the contents going to kill it you can't you can't do it you know you don't need to go through every individual item change and be absolutely ridiculous I don't expect them to go from 1.1 to 1.12 and do every individual change but there was little milestones that these private servers did that were that were great they held back on certain item changes to not so they wouldn't destroy endgame raid items and destroy the timeline and then they released little things like the gear changes from tier two you know the appearances of tier two the appearance of mount changes like those are those are just great little things you know like back in a day like oh man my tier two looks like crap when you were actually playing back in 2000 and 5006 it's like well my tier two looks terrible but like now when you play and you get that tier two it's a whole different thing like I had it before it changed like that like I have this trophy like oh my god what gear is that oh this is actually actually blood fang no it's not like yeah it is this is how it used to like I got it before you don't take away those moments from people like those little things like those non right well I was just going to say like I think some things like and it might just be the way it is like I think they might put in the like the new tier two from the beginning right like I don't I don't think like stuff like that's going to change but like it's not a big deal of course right but like you know stuff like that originally did contribute to a lot of that let's kind of move on let's kind of move on alpha and beta projections I think that's kind of the big question now after the demo is yeah I think I think we should go into Q and A after we touch on this yeah I think so too yeah but after the after the demo everybody kind of is like well one's alpha one's beta and I hope that we get it soon I think that so so whenever whenever we were a part of that exclusive like press conference interview session where we got a chance to be in there as a you know they picked out some people and allowed them to go in there I asked John Hyatt afterward or I said to him I was like one of the most exciting things about a summer release means that hopefully we're going to be getting an alpha or beta soon and he said yeah blizzard soon you know just kind of making a joke about it but I do I do really think that I mean that basically confirms that they yes they are going to have an alpha beta testing period and I do think it's going to be very important that's kind of you know we've talked about that throughout the entire of the podcast but um I personally think that we could get it around the end of the year maybe a little bit before the end of the year maybe a little bit in January that's that's that's personally what I would expect no doubt I 100% agree I think we'll have it by January 1st I think it's super super important a lot of people are like why do you need an alpha or beta that the game has already been made I mean you can see from the demo they need feedback like there's a lot of work to do feedback is very very important in my opinion this is my opinion I think that they are very clearly listening to feedback I think an alpha and beta is very very important and the sooner the sooner we can get our hands on it and start playing it and giving it giving feedback the better it is going to be for classic wow we've also talked about you know the the the summer time frame for release I honestly think like the later the better you said the last week of August or first two weeks of September good great that in my for my point of view that means a more polished game I think along long beta long alpha later release everything's good my opinion I mean you're already playing you're already contributing you just got away for the final product there's nothing better than contributing to the completion of that product like you it's a pretty big thing I think you're right release date like in a month two months seems for alpha of course that's what I mean is completely feasible I think I think alpha I mean I think considering the holidays and stuff like that it might be more towards mid to end January maybe the sooner the better the the only thing that concerns me about an alpha release date I don't want to say concerns but kind of perked up my years is when they told us that the demo is actually a pretty recent build that they had up and running and what kind of scares me and we talked about this a little at the start Krom you mentioned this specifically how much manual work goes into what they're doing they're not just flipping a switch and putting up NOS they're having to go back into each individual zone check the environments put water backwards supposed to be they have to make sure that you know everything's functioning properly the lighting the quests everything when you consider that much manual work for every individual zone and the fact they had been working on classic for two years two years and we only had two zones recently that's the one thing that kind of scares me I don't know well I mean I would say I mean there was a lot of people like looking at like they opened up a sandbox client and Aladar had had that video from one of his viewers who he like got past the wall by I guess like bugging it out like a DC while running through or something and I think that was kind of what the point of the classic panel was the the beginning of it where Omar went up there and he talked about how they spent so much of the time and then Brian came in at the end of that I think where they spent so much of the time actually just making the map match like like fleshing out the entire world and I think that was so much of the work that they had to put in you know we've heard the story we've heard the story about how the classic project started it was because there was somebody in the company right there was somebody in the company who with all this oh legacy server is this and that all this stuff was going on somebody in the company said you know what I'm going to do this as a side project on my own free time I'm going to try and make vanilla while 1.12 patch the client I'm going to try and make it run on our servers and like they they spent their time I think it was you know a couple people maybe one people or one person this was kind of the story how classic got started they finally made it work and then they kind of presented it to the team they were like hey guys look I got it I got it up I got it running and everybody was like wait what like because it's like yeah sure the blizzard servers aren't quite like you know OVH or whatever whatever so like the fact that they could actually get it to match up and they could stitch it together I think was something that was really big and that was really how classic started the that's how the yeah one people I know sorry but that's how that's how the whole classic project started that's one of it first became like a potential for for reality right for us to get classic wow and I think that's really cool I think that you know and Crom you have your your background your development background you said like there was so much work that probably went into just this part but from here on it's it might not be you can get a lot more progression with a lot less time as far as what we can see from the player base from the player perspective as opposed to on the back end yeah I mean I I went and studied those videos like the breaking through the barrier videos and seeing like the the comparisons of like the zones they have so much done already like they really do like the whole world itself is completely restored to the non cataclasm version now it's just a matter of replacing textures replacing lighting in certain zones that just might not be right you know like I noticed little side by side things like the skybox looks slightly different in certain zones right it's not a little toggle switch you could fix fix that they're just going back and trying to fix that like it's that's that's that's going to take time but they have a lot done like it really is just fixing little lines here changing some grass textures here adding in the old ones most of that stuff automatically generates on its own like they have the technology to do so now it's yeah now it's got to match it I'm sure the abilities work right yeah they have they everything everything's there so it's just a matter of now they're just cross cross referencing you saw on those panels they kept showing the side by side photos here was our reference photo here's what we have so far and you can see that they were just slightly off right you stare at those photos like the lighting is slightly off like take a new picture of tips out and then try to add some patina make it look like he's from the 1800s going to take you some time right it's going to take time to do that it's not an instant process down in down in California during Blizzcon when we met with Omar that evening I asked him so are you confident about the summer release time frame and he said yeah we wouldn't have announced it if we weren't confident with it so like tips you know they've been working on classic for a year and a half for two years I really really think and this is the impression I've got remember the first water cooler talk where they were talking about restructuring database information and getting with like their different prototypes making sure the game can run on modern hardware and software I think that has been like 90% of their time just getting the game to run and now that it's up I would speculate based off their time frame and sort of where we are right now that everything else that they have to do like these sort of like cosmetic and just like small sort of you know like regenerates you know auto-attectors stuff like that I think those are pretty just they can just hammer those out I would speculate yeah that's what I would guess that yeah I I think I think that they feel that they are very close yeah no 100% they wouldn't have made an announcement like that if they weren't close because to give to give could give people which most people would guess what six to nine month release time schedule right like that's not a lot of time to release a product if you weren't ready they definitely have a marketable product already as far as what they even said like at the devil this is as far as we got I would flip I would put that up to fluff I think that's fluff because no company and there's even of their caliber no matter how big of a streamer we are what we what we're asking are ever going to give you 100% direct answers or the real answer because like they're they're still a competitive market whether they're working on their old game or not like there are other games out there right now releasing classic servers in the way in the wake of what these guys are doing if they give up any trade secret these other guys can go through like other other like Lord Lord of the Rings release the server with changes because they probably believe that Blizzard's going to stick to that like that formula and I bet Blizzard's looking at Lord of the Rings sales right now and going okay we'll see how well their change server did and what the population thinks there's people who are happy about it but there's a massive volume of people like fuck this I'm not playing because you changed so Blizzard's going to look at that too every time a game is released you look at every competitor of your genre see what they're doing and then try to do better than that's why my as a company my companies is always don't reinvent the wheel find the guy who made the best one and see if you can make his better right there you go don't reinvent the wheel there's absolutely no reason to do so because you're going to you're going to fuck it up you can't you're not get the if there's somebody who's over to the best perfect what he's done right blizzard's mistake was not perfecting on the systems they already have they started implementing new systems that that completely negated their original right and now they've gone too far into their new systems with the original systems and are non-existent right so they're completely non-existent right so and now they're slowly trying to implement those things back into the into the modern game and they already have the things laid out for the original game so classic is a road map they're going to look at the failures of other developers doing the classic server releases plug that data into their system and then hopefully create the best version blizzard is the top tier quality they are the go to when it comes to mmo's why are they the longest lasting because they are the best regardless of negative complaints they have the survivability longevity and the financial backing to show that nobody does it better than blizzard nobody so they're looking at everything happening right now and they are going to hammer out all of the mistakes everyone else is making right I'm sure they looked at runescape and said oh look at what they did right here's what they did wrong we'll never do that right that's why I think that's why they stood firm if it wasn't in classic it won't be in classic right no post no post next content no new content no content that didn't exist you know because that's a lot of people like don't realize like some people aren't asking for like just burning crusades some people are asking for new stuff that never existed just so they can stay in the world like oh maybe they'll add some new quest like no no no no no no no runescape did that didn't work piss people off it just pisses people off blizzard's not going to make that mistake and that's why they stuck to the guns on that where do you think they got that idea they didn't just pull it out of the air they watched runescape and said oof that could have been something special but the fan base wasn't happy about this so we can't do that they're gonna look at Lord of the Rings online said the same thing well they've made all brought in all of their quality of life changes as well as even said in their thing we're going to bring in our cash shop eventually which wasn't originally in Lord of the Rings online right like eventually it's gonna be in our classic model that's people are like fuck off no you can't be serious right well I think that I think with OSRS I think with OSRS they they actually grew after this they got to the end they got to the end they actually grew after like post whatever patch content so that's whenever OSRS started to grow is whenever they had they had new content put in but like in the same vein as like old school as opposed to like the patches and stuff that's what you're talking about right you're talking about more like the patches and expansions and stuff like that versus like like progressive content yeah so I think I think for me the big thing with the the big thing with me for the beta alpha I think that they should kind of like they should segment it right like hey this week we're going to test but they said it's still I guess the devos slots think they're still on the table we kind of prepared ourselves to like accept 16 devos slots I think 16 devos slots can work but I think it has to I think it opens the door for tuning of some of the early content with 16 devos slots like if people are doing more damage between that between 1.12 talents I think I think that it does open the door for like hey we might like tune the health values here and there in order to make it not like a total cakewalk and I don't think it's going to be a total cakewalk don't get me wrong but that's how a lot of people view it and I think the best way for them to test it is like hey if we have like segmented testing periods where okay guys this week we're going to put some vendors and iron forge or wherever and you can go and you can pick out all your loot this is the this is the loot that's available to you go off and do the raids and maybe you they have it with eight devos slots and they look at the kill times the next week they do 16 to you slots look at the kill times look at the data and that way they can see is like well look I mean they killed the boss this much faster whenever you had 16 devos slots or they might say wow look at this we we tested it with eight and then we tested with 16 and there wasn't that big of a difference and and like people were just wrong because there's a chance of that too right because that's an inference that that we're making and the inference that a lot of people are making is that well if you have more devos slots debuff slots the damage could be way higher but it might just be a little bit higher so I mean if no one knows though true Blizzard values would be even bosses and stuff like most of that stuff is just right my private servers anyways right so right it's it's up the Blizzard to say this is actually what it is and their word is final here right so like that's why I think that's why I think the the beta period is very very important I think it's crucial or like the testing period alpha beta whatever you want to call it I think it's crucial to find out like the the right things like kind of the the right way to approach all those little little progressions within the game another thing is like the pvp gear update having the honor system in or not having the honor system in do you guys do you guys have any more thoughts on the on the alpha or beta before we move on to q and a oh not really let's get to q and a man let's get to the good stuff yeah and to clarify too one thing I say because I stop people in chat I I'm not saying old school runescape wasn't a success because it was a massive success right it was what I'm talking about was the eventual negative comments that came in when they started releasing like like post content content that wasn't originally there I didn't yeah like I I I'll let you finish yeah I'm just saying that's that's that's why I don't think it's like I understand it was an absolutely great success and it still played to this day still still holds great viewership on twitch but I can tell you that a lot of people went back to private old school runescape servers because runescape stopped delivering the original experience people that's all I was saying was that like once you start adding and changes you will lose a chunk of your community that's all yeah OSRS is great RuneScape and WoW vanilla WoW old school runescape vanilla are very very different they will experience very very different problems problems that old school runescape experience with population decline are unique to RuneScape and will not necessarily be present in in World of Warcraft post change content and the way it bolsters old school runescape will not necessarily bolster or bolster or serve to benefit vanilla WoW like it is not a one-to-one I think that conflation is a very incorrect when I see it all the time and having spent a lot of time playing both of those games like at it a lot of time playing those games they are very very different games I think from a casual glance oh yeah this is the old version of a game that's the old version of a game oh yeah one-to-one same thing very very different games with very very unique problems that have to be addressed very very differently very well said so guys we're going to go ahead and move on into Q&A if you guys want to tweet at us hashtag classic cast in the tweets tips out baby Chrome official S-fan TV stay safe TV I have a question here from Viget we'll start on we'll start on Twitter and then we we might take some questions from the chat as well but this question is from Viget do you think the reason for them bundling is easy with BWL is that they want every stage to have content for different audiences 20 man raids in both stage two and stage three I'll go ahead and start I don't know I don't think that's necessarily I don't think that's necessarily a point I think if that's the reason why they're doing it it I don't think that's the reason they're doing it because in vanilla the content wasn't necessarily for two different audiences it was but it wasn't so vanilla did a really good job and vanilla while they did a really good job of making the content that was released matter for everybody in some capacity right so ZG was introduced to the game and it was basically like a it was a catch up mechanic for people doing five man content for people doing for people going from five man content without a big rating guilt to go into MC and and maybe into BWL there's certain things in there like I talk about the the two-handed acts that increases attack power against dragonkin I mean that's literally in there only for BWL if you're like a two-handed fury or quarry or something but I think that there is like a lower tier or lower lower end gear available in those dungeons and those raids and the same thing with a Q 20 but they also have ways of keeping the the higher end players coming to ZG and that's getting the rep getting getting the rep for the shoulder enchant specifically there's off pieces in there that are really really good there is the I forgot what the name of the item is there's a spell hit trinket in there that is really good for tanks on four horsemen right because because taunt is based off of spell hit there's a lot of stuff in ZG that the higher end players want as well all the spell hit gear that's put in with the blood vine sets and all that different recipes so ZG is something that sure it was introduced as a catch-up mechanic but the best way to introduce a catch-up mechanic is not necessarily to put content in there that is just an easier version it's just it's not just easy and 20 man and able to get you better gear with less effort in order to do MC in order to do BWL it's something that you have both sides or you have many sides of the player base coming together to do the same thing and it kind of helps the lower end players out by playing with the higher end players and it kind of promotes these guys up and it gets these guys what they want because they want their shoulder enchants and they want all that stuff it's the same thing in MC right it's the same thing in MC with like onslaught girdle is the example I use a lot of times it's the it's the second best plate DPS belt in the game and you get that in molten core after the 1.5 patch the next best plate belt is girdle the mentor off of rezuvius and necks so stuff like this I think I think in vanilla wow they did a really good job really good job at doing it like this I think it would be very they'd be very misguided if that was the reason that they did it in order to to have content for different types of people if they thought that the reason to put in a 20 man and a 40 man in phase two and three would be to have content for different types of people because really the content is for everybody so what what do you guys think about that I kind of rambled on for a little bit but about the concept of having in phase two and three ZG release with BWL AQ AQ 20 and AQ 40 are obviously going to be together but maybe we're just really more specifically it's about ZG and BWL coming out together I agree I agree without you saying I really nothing more I could say that you did that you didn't you know mm hmm kind of covers that I don't see I don't see a reason to do that yeah me too it was very well said rambled or not here's my thing with the content release timeline like I actually really understand why they're thinking of doing it this way of course it's not one to one with vanilla wow of course it'll upset up around private server players but I actually really really understand why they're considering doing it I actually fully expect them to do a four a four patch content release timeline I fully expect them to do that I think that's what they will probably stick with just for the sake of simplicity re-releaseability and understandability for your average player I really think they will do is it what I is it what I prefer no I think maybe a six or seven point release timeline would be better but I actually really understand why they're thinking of doing it yeah I mean it's good to understand it though but you know from your understanding from private servers and your understanding of like survivability and longevity like like you said if it's a hard job for feedback it's gotta make sure that you keep pushing that subject yeah they make a four point they make a four point release that's that's fine for them and I get it's great to understand them because I understand them too from a from a technical standpoint I understand them but I can also see like the financial gain I'm taking it slower yeah and I mean too yeah like I was just gonna say like just because like something is like four is like a nice number or something it's a nice pretty number I mean it doesn't mean like once you come up with a formula once you do it once you can just do it over and over again right and I don't I really think this I think that just because they release a fresh server a certain or like the they release classic a certain way doesn't mean that nothing will change from the first set to the the second set of fresh servers again like it's not 100% confirmed but it's an inference we're making based on what we heard and they're they're having they want to have something that works for like 15 years I mean that's how private servers did it like you know what whenever we we did this this this didn't actually work out right so let's change the timeline a little bit here now obviously they do want something formulaic they want something that's going to work every time but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get the answer 100% right the first time I don't know I mean that's that's just something I would keep an eye on maybe like but I think as far as like phases and stuff like that goes I think they're going to want to get the right number of phases the first time that's what I that's kind of how I feel about it I definitely feel that whatever they decide to go with that is what they will go with for every new iteration of classic wow every fresh server every path moving forward it's going to be a template it's going to be frozen in time and they're going to apply it I attend to I think that's their goal that's their goal is to get that template and to get it right the first time I'm sure that that's a big effort of theirs yeah I think that would like to I think I really think they would like to but whatever they figure out it's it's got to be something that just like works right for them to do every time so I don't know I think I think in a perfect world there they would just get it right the first time but we'll see how that goes let's see this one's from curl have you been lucky enough to experience the project 60 event yesterday what are your thoughts on it even more packed starting zone and classic drops don't you think it will explode and the start and ruin the experience no not necessarily I mean we like we did project 60 yesterday and after this I know stay safe it's going to continue a stream I'm going to continue the stream and we're both going to be doing project 60 stuff but I don't think that it's necessarily just going to like blow up the server is there anything I mean it it mean it could if you know if there's just so many people logging in but I think if there's like Q times and the difference between project 60 the difference between project 60 and what would happen on classic release is there there's guaranteed no mob no shared mob tags um well I guess not guaranteed but but they didn't talk anything about it I would really hope not because that's something that's not vanilla and then the the concept of project 60 that the sharding is there for sure and they don't know for sure if they're going to have sharding in in retail right so sharding and stuff like that's that's a stability thing in retail wow in classic the reason for sharding would basically be so people could like actually kill stuff and get out of it what do you guys think about that so on asm gold stream I think it was just yesterday afternoon we saw when he tried to log into project 60 character on moon guard everything was it was like like there was like over a minute of delay it was terrible it was rough I think there was another group event like 150 people couple raid groups like weaker was it so to pop in the did it and the GMs actually told them you need to disperse because for service ability you guys have to break break this up I'm not sure exactly what that event was but I heard about it sort of briefly I think that every sort of server setting they have and I'm not an expert on this but this is sort of my understanding every sort of server setting they have right now for BFA is set that way with in conjunction with charting it is what I've been told is that they can sort of change settings to help alleviate the problem that we saw on asm gold stream yesterday I don't think it'll be exactly the same I think that assuming that oh this is how it is in BFA this is exactly how it will be in the classic while I think that's sort of a false assumption and sort of a bad premise yeah yeah I definitely hope so I mean obviously I when they know and a game is coming out when they're anticipating you know the millions of players hopefully they do adjust things because I was there for that launch yesterday I think you guys were there too that project 60 launch yikes if classic is like that you know I think the only we're gonna suffer with that you're good they have the capacity to spawn a bunch of like NPC players and try to move around and do stuff they know exactly the sort of problems they will face they probably watched the Asmongold stream the other day where he had these problems they know exactly how these problems they know exactly what the problems are and how they're going to manifest you can imagine like they don't want that for launch day they don't want this for aq gates they don't want this for old bus lights they don't want this for all truck valley they don't want these problems I am 99.9% sure that they know that they are a problem like there's no way they don't there's no way that they're just that you know head burn to the sand I'm I'm sure that they are changing things like it will not be exactly how it is in BFA that's that's my assumption yeah I really yeah that's not good and like we like we've said like repeatedly over and over again the preference is no sharding they said they're they're looking at the best option they're trying to figure out what they want to do they're trying to figure out what they want to do that's going to be the best so it's like whether that's dynamic response or sharding or some other system and we talked about that all earlier yeah we talked about all of that earlier but that's one thing that I think like all of us here and the overwhelming majority of the community does not is not a huge fan of the sharding so I mean I saw I saw two 40 man raid groups like organize on the classic demo everyone casting mass amount of spells at once and I never didn't experience even a slightest bit of lag like I do when I do like the brawler stuff when you're doing South Shore versus Torrey Mill or whatever you literally have to turn your settings down to zero on a super computer to play on that that was it was already a night and day compared to BFA in classic like if you can have 80 people in the same area as each other and you're not lagging and it's in classic wow then they're already doing right but like BFA's version I think it's a graphical thing mainly too I think it's taxing you know there's way more like there's so much more going on visually in BFA that demands PC power that doesn't really it's not really an issue in classic I think the only people who are going to be having that issue the guys if Blizzard leaves in the the graphic sliders the guy who maxes everything out he's gonna be the other one going oh frick this is really difficult I can't play my eight graphics cards are still burning out like you know whether people could argue Blizzard should have the technology or not but I don't know any game that can hold 80 people in the same area as each other and not lag I don't know any game there's not one that I've played where they could all be in the same spot and we're not lagging especially since every other game it's graphically more demanding than any Blizzard game in existence oh yeah I mean you raise a great point on the classic demo we had between tips turn in my turn I think we both at points people in the same spot all spamming abilities spamming text whatever that that would leg out of server and BFA there's already difference they've already adjusted something that's actually a great point something has already been changed to accommodate for those extra player burns yeah I think and like I really wish I knew more about like the the backend development side of things to really be able to speak to that more but yeah I mean it's it's really all just inference at this point yeah so do we uh let's see let's let's go and move on guys we'll take a few more questions from Twitch chat if you guys have any more questions for us yeah we because because we want to what we're going to be doing here is we're going to take a few more questions sorry I got semi-distracted do you want to do you want to go ahead and talk about project 60 for a second and what we're going to do with that so so basically we we've talked about this before guys a project 60 is going on right now it's it's like a fun community event this is what project 60 is it's a fun community event where for people who happen to be playing retail wow what we're doing is we're leveling up to 60 on moon guard we have a couple guilds classic alpha is one guild the other guild is classic chads so you can you can you can whisper us for invites and it's just a way for people that go up we're going to go to level 60 we're going to group up together we're going to do dungeons do the raids at 60 and it's it's like a fun community event maybe like a week or so maybe maybe a couple weeks but at a certain point what we want to do is we want to go beyond project 60 and we want to turn our project 60 into a project 70 and the basically in order to get into project 70 what the requirement is going to be is you're going to have to get the achievement for killing nefarion cthun and rag on that character so basically the idea is and you have to start with a brand new character the idea is you go through level 60 and you do all the bosses obviously there's no you know nax was nax was wrath right guys so yeah we want to we want to do this and then we want to move on and and continue our guild into project 70 and who knows we might we might even move into an 80 we're not sure yet we don't we haven't looked that far ahead but the idea would be to start now to go through it and it's just a way for people to make friends people to make friends get involved with one another we can we can group with people we can raid with people we haven't 100% decided like how how everything's gonna work out but there'll be multiple raid groups there'll be multiple just constant dungeon groups running the whole time so I think it could be I think it could be something that's really fun to do you know yeah so so this is to say if you want to do project 70 a couple weeks or however long down the road you should be doing project 60 on moon guard alliance side right now join one of the two guilds probably as funds guild classic chats I'll try to join that guild and I can help give out invites to people and get people involved I'll be streaming at tips of doing it everyone's doing it but yeah like I was gonna say if you want to participate in project 70 or wherever else that leads you need to be doing project 60 level up play within the rules do ragnaros after the ragnaros progress on the blacking layer blacking layer you progress on a cthune and from there you'll chill until we until we announce a project 70 date so once you're 60 lock your xp and then we're gonna take care of business yeah and there's certain rules I was gonna say certain rules like no no boas basically the idea is to play it as vanilla as possible that's that's basically the idea behind it yeah no mount till 40 just just try and play the game as vanilla as possible so no heirloom items or anything like that now some things because of balance they said specifically for 60 we got to look at this for 70 like it kind of sucks but like no engineering because of the engineering items or two and completely bonkers for level 60 but um but yeah I'll get you guys a link to the rules in the chat right now but um but yeah so so we'll go on we're still we're taking a few more questions if there's any more questions if not we'll call it a day let's see um I just want to say one quick thing about the projects to incentivize you guys a little bit more in patch 7.3.5 in case you guys didn't know this Blizzard changed the leveling so it actually takes a lot longer to level now it's a lot more fun and some of the quests in the world are decently challenging you know a little bit closer to what they were back in the day on top of that the raids were tuned as well they were changed a little bit too so if you guys are thinking back to like Cungan's old project 60s where they literally like did them naked it's it's a little bit more challenging than that and p70 gets even harder p80 even harder so it is fun even at the end game but yeah go ahead us man so here's a question from toxin I have a question on behalf of the two guys from before give us your insights as well as chrome states and tips you guys are interested in saying something about it on how you'd feel with blizzard taking classic into burning crusade and eventually into wrath or just making separate service for burning crusade wrath or burning wait burning crusade wrath and then having wrath release on the same burning crusade servers you don't see it happening so yeah basically we this is something that comes up kind of often I think that it does make sense it all depends on how much money that classic makes if you're blizzard like if if classic does well which I think it will do very well I think we could see burning crusade servers I would like to see burning crusade servers put on I would like to see burning crusade servers put on a new server fresh server that you have the ability to to copy your character too that's what I that's what I think they should do I think you should have the ability to copy your character there I think if you start from level one on burning crusade server almost always there's a massive horde population imbalance just massive massive massive good yeah so that's god intended it's really bad it's actually really really bad it's really bad that that is what's killed literally every single burning crusade private servers so they've got to do something to prevent that from happening I think probably having the og classic servers turn into tbc servers is the best option that if you want to keep your character your og level 60 full tier 3 character at level 60 they can have like a stasis server where you can right you copy your level 60 character over there if that's what people want do I think those servers those stasis servers will be very active long term no but I understand some people might have like an attachment to those characters so yeah I think that's probably a good option but yeah I think the best way is to have each each vanilla server turn into a tbc server and then tbc server turns into wrath whatever whatever whatever I think that's the best way to do it which is actually just how the game happened originally now I think that once the first wave of vanilla servers turn into tbc servers at that exact time they should offer fresh classic servers because if they don't they're back on the situation where if you want to replay let's say you missed classic well let's say you missed vanilla wow and the first iteration of classic wow you're where we are right now like if you're on the options to play a private server so I think that they should re-offer a new classic service for people that might want to yeah fresh that people want to replay or play for the first time if they missed the first two times force transition is a bad idea that's actually the most no changes that you can possibly be that's how it is of course I mean I mean that's no changes and everything like that but force trend I mean the negative sides of force transition are definitely rough you know I think if a person wants to keep I think they release a fresh classic server roll everybody over to a post Naxarama server you have the option of copying your character over and playing on TPC as well as keeping your character over on that that Nax server just think forcing you to like say goodbye to that character forever like it may be a note maybe no changes but like I mean a lot of a lot of people didn't like that and like I said earlier yeah it was that swifty clip yeah like if I want to play if I want to play TPC but also keep my you know my next here guy over there he'll stay over there like he's just there like he has no effect on my TPC character like my TPC character is on his own he's moved on I'm playing him you mean like the idea of a Stasis server yeah exactly yeah that's exactly that's exactly what they should do yeah they shouldn't they shouldn't force people I just don't want people I just don't want it to like oh as soon as like okay so now I want to take my 60 character moving to TPC I don't want the the 60 character to just be gone off for that vanilla server forever I just want a copy of them there I can leave them there I can log in the class like anytime I want go back to that old school post next content anytime I want even if the server's dead like don't force anybody over to to to delete their character well not you know what I mean not deleted but remove him from class I can push him into TPC and then you can never go back to that guy again you never go back to your class yeah stuck around I don't like that idea yeah you shouldn't no push no bully yeah basically I agree like you shouldn't you shouldn't have that situation where basically people are people are forced into not being able to play their vanilla character anymore because like and you know Crom you said it specifically yourself you want to get everything you want to go and you know you want to go back and you might be full tier three and you want to get your Thunder Fury like there's a lot you don't want to accomplish on that one character so which is which is the service that the stasis servers would would serve right right exactly exactly yeah um yeah let's take let's take one maybe two more questions Saren asked something in the chat it's very interesting because my opinion on this has kind of changed lately really asks yeah Sarendipity's asks Cross Realm BGs or no could be really really bad queue times considering some servers will have 70-30 faction balance what do you guys think about it so I said no well well this is something that we we talked about this in the past we talked about this in a really early classic cast and I said no as well and state that you said no then too I believe but but playing devil's advocate you also brought up a really good point it's like look Cross Realm Battlegrounds were added in 1.12 and they were added at the end of vanilla because it was kind of like a necessary evil for some of these people sitting in like 40 minute queues to try and get into a battleground so then that's one of the concept of battle groups first came in now it was it was like you know that eventually led to you know what we have now with the Cross Realm stuff and people really don't like that in the the census of our community but it'll be interesting to see how they approach that I uh they specifically said in the panel that they don't foresee people they don't they don't want to have people grouping with people from other servers didn't they specifically say that phrase like grouping with people from other servers won't be a thing so if that goes into well battlegrounds you're grouping with other people from other servers yeah I don't I don't think they'll do it but really I don't think they're planning on doing it but who knows I mean it might end up being a big issue because that's what happened in vanilla is there were some servers with like a 70 30 faction balance and people were sitting in queue for like 40 minutes so hopefully not hopefully that doesn't end up being a problem but uh because I don't want to see it that was brought out like the the cross cross realm pvp was brought in like afterdacks correct yeah it was it was the patch afterdacks yeah yeah that mean because that's yeah and I I think that they probably added that in because they knew that with tbc with patch 2.0 which followed like four or five months after they they were going to be adding that for for a renown stuff like that I'm not sure how much like after like researching it more I'm not sure how much they really wanted that in vanilla wow as much as they were getting ready for tbc that seems to be it makes sense it really does make sense I mean if you look at the way the patches were laid out it's that's how I'll tell you though like as far as like having intra server battlegrounds so everyone in your battlegrounds you actually are actually on your server there's nothing more badass than leveling up your level 27 and you know you're fighting a horde player in whatever zone and you know his name you remember his name he gangs you you gank him and you're level 53 now you see him again you kill him again and then you're now you're level 60 you're rank 7 you're farming honor you see that same guy in the battleground you remember that guy like having that name recognition is in my opinion one in one to vanilla wow that's what vanilla wow is all about and so I think definitely having cross server battlegrounds definitely undermines that that aspect of vanilla well those rivalries those in game rivalries are part of it it's really it's part of and as far as farming honor with long battleground queues it doesn't mean you can't farm honor it just means you have to farm honor in a different way so you let's say you're on the faction that is super long queues or a half hour 45 minute long queue you're queuing up for battleground and rather than you know getting an instant queue now you're flying to searing gorge you're flying to wherever else and you're farming honor in open what you're actually incentivized to do open world pvp to rank which I don't even think is necessarily a bad thing either you just have to rank differently I like that no that's how I feel to put it because I mean there's a couple there's a couple I won't you know just because it's private server stuff I won't promote the streets but there's a couple like you know ranking streamers out there that are doing like push rank 14 on a regular basis and I see them do that very same thing like they'll they'll queue up for a bg takes a while they get like they get the five man group with their buddies and they're just out world pvp until it pops like all day that's what they're doing they're laughing they're enjoying themselves the world pvp they're sniping world buffs off of other raids they're just just enjoying their time out in the world farming honor the only way they can and then the bgposs they have a blast they the wind they lose and they go right back to it just keep doing it over and over and over again and it's actually really fun to watch and it's really fun to do is I've been there too those long queue times you can't avoid well guys I think that's it for us today I know stay safe is gonna is gonna keep streaming after I'm gonna keep streaming after guys if you haven't followed crom yet twitch.tv slash crom twitter crom official if you guys haven't followed myself stay safe tips out stay safe tv and tips out baby also check out our youtube channels twitter's everything's below our names do appreciate you guys joining us today we'll be back we'll be back next week and we'll see you guys soon ladies and boys thanks for watching everyone bye see you in project 60 man yeah thanks for having me guys thank you for having me yeah of course dude all right see you guys you