 Welcome everybody. Welcome to Classic Cast 15. We're here with Nano, we're here with TIPS, we're here with Stay Safe. And today we're going to talk about a lot of stuff, namely the secret meeting that was had with Nostalrius and Blizzard a few years ago, whenever Nostalrius got shut down. Of course, real quick, Nano, for those of you guys who don't know, Nano is the head of quality assurance for Nostalrius. And Nano, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit and tell us exactly what you did for Nostalrius? Yeah, excited to be here on Classic Cast. So my name is Nano. I worked as a part of the Nostalrius core team. My responsibility was leading the quality assurance team and helping to fix issues, bugs, confirm them, verify them, and work on the new content that we were producing. All right. That's awesome. So could you tell us real quick like a bit about Nostalrius, what it was, this was it shut down almost two and a half years ago, we were just talking about. So yeah, what was Nostalrius? So Nostalrius was a group of people who came together and spent effort to make a make available the option of playing Vanilla Wood of Warcraft for people who didn't have the opportunity to do that. So when we started or the server started all the way back like February of 15, which is like crazy how long ago it was and shut down about two and a half years ago. And then a bunch of stuff has happened since then. There we go. Real quick before we get two ahead, guys, last time on the last Classic Cast, we did our very first Classic Cast giveaway, which is actually for three BlizzCon virtual tickets, the Classic Cat, or not the Classic Cast, but the Wild Classic demo is attached to that. And to announce the winners, let's go ahead and do this, our winners are EthugD, MistyCow711, and Mr. Ghost Lore. So I will be emailing you guys and make sure to check the emails that you guys registered with so that we can get in touch as soon as possible so we can gift you guys those tickets. We will be doing another giveaway for three more virtual tickets and the link to that will be in the comments on YouTube and we'll post that a little bit later towards the end of the Classic Cast. So it's not rigged, guys. Come on. Okay. So yeah, we'll be doing another one. Don't worry, don't worry. We'll be doing a couple more, actually. So, I mean, let's get into it, I guess. When exactly did you guys go meet with Blizzard? This was about two years ago, if not also shut down two and a half years ago. How soon after the shutdown did you guys go meet with Blizzard? So we shut down in April of 2018 in our meeting at Blizzard headquarters towards the end of June of 2018. So I think like a 26th, if memory serves right. So one thing that differentiates you guys from other private servers is that you guys were sent a shutdown letter and you actually complied. You shut down willingly. You let everyone know you give them notice and then you seized. Yeah, pretty much. So we'll probably talk a lot more about the meeting, but one thing that was said during the meeting was we were trying to figure out like how Blizzard is going to make Classic Well happen. And one of the options that was on the table at that time was could Blizzard license the name of World of Warcraft and let somebody else run the server in the same way that EverQuest and Sony did with the P99 private server where they were officially licensed as like the original EverQuest place to play. So one of the options was available was maybe Blizzard would do that with Nostalgia. And basically their lawyers and they did the research and they said no we can't do that. And so one thing I said at the meeting was hey guys, people want to play this content. They want to play it and they were given the opportunity to play it at the place of Nostalgia where we were in it for no profit. We were in it just for the love of the game and for providing a place for the community to play. But there's other servers that do exist that are for profit that only exist to use your copyright and your IP to make money for themselves. So if you shut us down then people have no legitimate options to go and play the game. And one thing that Jay Allen said in response to that was well you never seen any other private server come and sit here in the Blizzard and you guys were invited. So Jay Allen said that you said yeah? Yeah. Brax said that. Yeah. How supportive would you say he was of classic wow seeing as he's now the president of Blizzard now? I think people want to hear how much he likes the idea you know? Right. So like the public's interaction with Jay Allen Brax is this limited basically to when they see him show up in videos or at BlizzCon. And the clip that they've seen of Jay Allen Brax saying you think you do but you don't at BlizzCon is like something that he regrets at this point and not just because of the reaction that he's received but he generally thinks that he was passive of people and their opinions. The Jay Allen that I met at the Blizzard meeting and again I don't know the guy personally outside of like the five hour meeting that we had but he was genuine and attentive and cared about what we had to say and a true he loves World of Warcraft. And yeah I'm not scared that classic is going to be canceled because Jay Allen Brax is now the president of Blizzard Entertainment. First of all he has much more important things to care about at this point than the development for classic wow but also I think that he has fully embraced classic wow and you know he was the one that announced it at BlizzCon last year so and I think that was probably really important for him to do. There's a lot of people who could have announced it could have been like Morheim it could have been Ian but Jay Allen was the one that announced it and I think it was he really wanted to embrace that and be the one that announced it to the community. That's awesome yeah that's great. Who would you say who would you say was probably the most supportive of the prospect of legacy servers in that meeting? Probably Ian actually so Ian Housecoast is the game director for World of Warcraft. I say that because he was the most engaged through the whole process he was leaning forward in his chair asking good questions giving feedback for things that we were saying. He was the one that really was the most attentive to what we were saying and giving us the most feedback and it makes sense so Ian if people don't know his history with World of Warcraft is that he was a hard core raider in Vanilla. Even some of the work on Cthun that we did was based on comments that he had back in 2005 talking about health pools for tentacles and and basically doing the math how pre-nerf Cthun was mathematically impossible which I don't think it actually is because players are much more capable of DPS these days than they were back then but we actually use some of his comments in our research for developing Cthun at the time so that's pretty interesting. That's awesome and I totally believe that. I was going to say you and I we sat there and we watched Ian give an hour-long speech talking about you know his how he got into gaming and how he ended up working for Blizzard and he spent about 15 or 20 minutes of his hour-long speech talking about Vanilla WoW and how rate leading Vanilla WoW and working through these encounters actually helped him with his professional career. You could tell watching listening to him speak about Vanilla WoW he genuinely loves it. Yeah absolutely so that and so he was a hardcore raider in Vanilla and joins the team in Burning Crusade so like one memorable moment was I was presenting about our server quality and talking about the raid specifically and got to the point where we talked about Anaxia and talked about the deep breath ability from Anaxia which is famously nobody knows exactly how deep breath for Anaxia and so they actually asked us the question Ian asked us a question by the way how did you guys you know script deep breath to work on Anaxia because he was curious at how we were going to reproduce that. So the short answer basically is like every time Anaxia flies and changes positions in phase two it rolls a number if it rolls a certain number then she deep breaths and if not then she doesn't that's the long and short of it um and so then I asked like is that how it's supposed to work uh to which they said no that's not how it works um and uh then I asked well are you gonna tell us how it works then and they said no we're not gonna tell you how it works um but Ian said the first thing that he did when he got the job was look up exactly how Anaxia's deep breath work really wow see I think that's so interesting because that brings up the we talk about this all the time with like how private servers are scripted and and stuff like this like for you guys one of you guys did in Nostalrius um your your main goal your main goal was basically to show that there was support for uh for classic right the the prospect of doing legacy servers um you guys went back and did you guys just go through and basically use a bunch of research to kind of try and mix and match stuff and just from from what people's knowledge was and like thinking back then what uh what it would be yeah there's a number of parts to our presentation and one of those parts was um basically like call it market research um so we had a number of statistics about players how much they played what their average play time was how many that would percentage of the population like if you reached level 10 how likely were you to reach level 60 those kind of things um and we also had done a pretty large survey which we've got a lot of feedback for uh after it came down and after we announced we were going to Blizzard in order to receive even more specific feedback for certain things and we presented the survey responses uh to Blizzard as as part of that that area of the presentation so what is that number what is that number if you're if you if you reach level 10 I don't know I'm sorry okay okay do you remember what the biggest level drop off was uh I think ethylene was the one that presented all that and I don't I I haven't looked at the numbers since he presented them so I I'm sorry I don't know no problem you don't remember like which is like the biggest level range where there's the biggest drop off or anything like that well the biggest drop off is like level one to ten but that's just because there's a billion level one alts that are made for banking characters and stuff like that um if you remove like the outlier of level one most players reached like level 25 so like people are playing to to about the mid-level time um but again that can account for a ton of people's alts where they just like hey I feel like leveling a hunter because I want to make another profession or something like that and they you know give up halfway through so yeah it's hard to to nail down exactly like the unique number of players um because we don't have full control over all of that um but we we have some idea right you get wrecked and nails brad and you're just like gg dude I'm done dude yeah these yeddies will not drop their heights and then I'm just done yeah I think I think that's happened I think that's happened all of us at some point where we go to level another character and then just kind of like I'm gonna work on my own guy um I do I do want to talk a little bit more about uh about the meeting how how did the meeting exactly kind of happen I mean you guys were kind of kind of the timeline of events and and just kind of like how how things went from even before the shutdown to the meeting I'm still really curious about that exactly how everything went down and what your guys thoughts were on the entire thing like how how did you guys feel and all that yeah um so shortly after we shut down we watched the change that work petition uh which at this point is is pretty famous um got hundreds of thousands of signatures on that and that was a letter to Mike Morheim um basically advocating for classic WoW to be available players to play um through that process number you know people got together and generating a buzz about it and we were also trying to reach out personally to a number of different people at Blizzard so Mike Morheim and Jay Allen and Ian and Tom Chilton and trying to like get in contact with them and eventually we're reached out to by their international PR director to set up a time for all of us to fly out to Blizzard to to do the meeting so the actual um initiation for the meeting uh came from their side were you guys worried that the meeting was a trap or that you were in trouble or something was that a thought that crossed your mind um no because they bought our plane tickets so okay it'd be a pretty big uh investment on their part to to honey part us in that way I guess um but I know that was a popular refrain on some people that are gonna walk and walk into a red wedding situation so I mean what was that like I mean you you you're here you're working on this this game right that was you know made by Blizzard you're working on this game it was made by Blizzard uh you're basically providing a service in order to the end goal being like to show that there's support for this and then they finally fly you out there and you get to step into Blizzard headquarters for the first time you're talking to Mike Moerheim, Jay Allen Brack, Ian Hazakostas, Tom Chilton and who else? So in the room Mike Moerheim uh a couple of their community managers uh Tom Chilton uh Ian Hazakostas a couple PR people uh Jay Allen and Marco who is their technical director and just what was that like I mean you're obviously you're a big fan of the game yes uh it was it was surreal uh it's crazy because you know I've been playing Blizzard games since I was like I don't know when did Warcraft II orcs and humans come out uh Starcraft come out um of the original Diablo so I played like basically every Blizzard game since Warcraft II and so the the legacy of of Blizzard Blizzard being one my favorite video game production company uh to be able to be on their headquarters and like nerd out during like the tour of the whole facility that that was really cool and then to to sit in their board room and overlook the quad with the the orc statue and you know that was crazy and then but you have to like put your your game face on pretty quickly because you're going to be talking to a bunch of people who are really important um like Mike more Mike more high might he just retired um but like he is a staple in the video game production world and even in the business world like Activision Blizzard is a so multi multi-billion dollar international company so like and he's a large part of that so uh you have to like put that aside because we're there to do a job uh to you know really you know do our best to put the best foot forward for for classic well and so it was cool being there and then I really felt the weight of it after we left because while we were even doing the tour it's like okay we have this really important thing that's coming up that that you have to stay focused on yeah so so you actually you sent me a bunch of pictures let's go ahead and look at those actually now that we're now that we're on the topic but um some of these were really cool I thought this was really cool a lot of these pictures here um yeah so I kind of have the pictures in two sections one is kind of like the arts and statues around Blizzard headquarters and then the other one's like a little personal that that mural right there is just incredible yeah a care again a care again one is my favorite by the way yeah it looks so good so detailed yeah the care again one's great um my favorite was that that witch king mural because it it spans an entire like hallway like that is like floor to ceiling a whole hallway of the witch king and ice crown that's incredible yeah yeah that one here is really cool a mixture of starry night and the dark portal that's awesome that looks so good so the level of detail in these is just incredible to me yeah it's pretty sweet and that one obviously you have to the original yes the original did that's awesome it's not that impressive but oh that's the original really yeah the well the original uh load screen like the default screen yeah but is that the original rendition of it was it a painting because I mean I don't know um but that's the load screen you get where the game doesn't realize where you're supposed to be right or if you're ported to GM island or something like that that's the that's the load screen yeah but maybe some people in the chat are really familiar with that and these are the uh kind of the more personal pictures these are the attendees uh and I guess you could guess which one I am at this point and yeah that's great look it's just so interesting I mean before Ian has a coast this was game director um it was brach more high this is so cool to me there's azman gold next to the lady on the right I think the craziest thing is that tom shilton who was the game director for the largest MMO in the world it comes to work with a t-shirt and shorts and flip flops it's like quite the culture wish I could do that yeah this is great this is you guys as the team this is the gnostin the gnostcore team correct there you go there's the guys dude there's our guys the iconic statue in the background there uh this is um a side of the goodies that we walked away with uh from our meeting so uh a quick aside on that um overwatch glass um overwatch had just been released in 2016 and at blizzard they celebrate every game release with a champagne toast where everybody at the company comes out during lunch and does a toast on the quad to the new game and we happen to be there during the overwatch toast so we all walked away with uh champagne glasses uh that were branded with overwatch stuff we're probably the only five people in the world in the world that aren't plus employees that have them yeah and this this is on your wall right now isn't it yeah it when we get back to me we'll uh we'll uh you'll see it behind me but signed by the the attendees of the meeting top chilton you can see there and uh mike morheim's at the bottom right and ian and jay on brack is right next to the the night out on the edge we're coming out of the dwarf's gun I should say oh yeah right there that's great that's so cool all this is so like just it blows my mind this is the board a good picture of the board room yeah so this is where it happened this was this is where the magic happened yes that's right this is pre-meeting when we were still super worried and setting up and eating lunch all different time zone clocks there yeah all right here oh so the fourth fourth of june sorry not the 26th uh fourth of june 2016 that's all so cool so i have a question for you what do you think like how effective was nastarious what do you think nastarious's role was in instigating classic wow or convincing them what do you think your effect was so nastarious was by far the largest server of its kind at that time and with an international team that was successful with tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of players consistently playing on it i think that was kind of an uh an awakening moment for those who aren't familiar with that scene because previously you had private servers that were like fun servers with high rate leveling or high rate drops and or even just like a thousand players or a hundred players going on concurrently but when you start approaching 12,000 players concurrently it's hard to ignore that from a game perspective there's probably mmo's out there that are live right now that would wish that they had 12,000 players concurrently playing their game that are like names have been on those that we would know these days so the fact that we had that level of population consistently playing and it grew over time it kind of proved that wasn't just a like a put on your rose tinted glasses and enjoy something for a little bit but people were investing the time in what we were doing so it was really kind of putting a flag in the grounds like hey we exist and we matter and you should pay attention to us so speaking of rose tinted glasses do you i don't know if you have any idea of this or any metric do you know if you had to guess how many people were playing on the stories that had never played vanilla wow retail back in the day it was their first time they heard about it they wanted to see the origins do you have any idea the best idea i could really give was my player experience and having communication with people within my guild there's no way for us to know if people played vanilla i believe in the survey was something like 30 percent of players had never played vanilla wow before like this is their first experience if i remember the numbers right that's a big number but most of the people in my guild and i was in the in a raiding guild which you know pushed content so most likely you're going to attract people who had some experience to the game before but there was still a handful of people who had never played vanilla well before that were a part of my guild so it wasn't it wasn't like one or two percent it was a significant portion of the population do you think that'll extend to retail classic i mean how if you were to take a guess what would be the distribution between old-time vanilla players and brand new players that have never played vanilla after like three months of classic launch some of it will probably depend on how what the business model is for classic well if they include classic with the regular retail wow sub that people have now that's going to encourage a lot of people to at least try it the better question might be like how many people who have never played vanilla wow will get to level 60 and are participating in the end game content and it's hard to guess what that will be but i would ask me it's probably going to be similar to the solaris i know a number of people who i played with back in vanilla who never touched any the solaris or any other server that's ever existed because of the you know the questionable nature of it which is fair but they're really excited for classic wow to come out there's some people that didn't touch it because they were they wouldn't be assured that their character would stay forever because the other thing with private services that they come and go pretty frequently and they didn't want to invest the time into a in a place where their progress wouldn't be saved in some way absolutely they've been waiting for for blizzard to do this right in order to go back into the content that they've they've loved definitely i think you raise a good point i mean the people that are playing on private servers like the star is or other ones these are people that are that they've accepted the fact that their server that their player their their their character could be deleted at any moment you know they've reconciled the fact that this is a sort of a bootleg version of vanilla wow i think that and as such only the most hardcore you know fans are willing to play the game under the circumstances i think with classic wow the accessibility will be so much more it'll be opened up so much you'll have a ton of new blood coming in and playing the game and that's great yeah i think that those players who are have been playing retail um for a while and haven't thought about going back to the old game they really are like two different games at this point like the current version of of wow and classic wow they are called the same thing that by title only really at this point like people are gonna go back and find just so much slower pace to progress like obviously leveling leveling is much much slower the way that you gear up your character is much much slower the way even like getting to dungeons to do a dungeon and getting the group together is so much slower but that slowness is a like for me i personally like that i like the slow progression of earning your gear i like that we have a 40 man raid uh and if you're lucky you'll walk away with a piece of loot like a like a good piece of loot like every four weeks where the expectation is you go into a raid now and you get upset if you haven't seen a personally drop in like three bosses um so that kind of pace is really going to throw a lot of people off um but i'm convinced that what i think i think bfa is an excellent game and i've enjoyed playing it personally um and legion before that but when people go and play classic wow if they put the real effort into it and not just dismiss it out of hands they're going to find that the the slow down pace of the game causes you the option and the ability to build deep relationships with people that you get invested in a guild that you really require them to do any real progression in the game and that sense of bond the community that comes from for no while is unlike what you can experience in the game today at least in my personal experience yeah for sure and you said you were we were talking before the show for a little bit you said you're currently playing bfa yep currently playing bfa playing it playing a demon hunter um in a relatively casual guild we're pushing a road progression right now see that's why you're having fun because you're playing a demon hunter it's it's a fun class uh i enjoy it yeah that's amazing yeah so so what you said a moment ago sort of hits on something i this is the reason i think vanilla wow is so successful but i want to know in your words why do you think this 15 year old game has had so much longevity and desire and a constant never ending community backing it up and making content and promoting it why do you think it's stuck around out of all the games from that era that have come and gone why vanilla wow do you think why why is that one so popular great that's a great question so really it's it's an engaging game and it is time consuming so you do have to spend effort on making progression happen for your character and that time investment causes emotional investment as well so every moment that you spend on a specific character causes you to emotionally tie to it all the more and when you have to like if you want to make real progression at the end game you need a 40 man raiding guild and every raid every opportunity you do a dungeon with that group of people gives you even more like gives you an emotional tie-in to that community that you've built so by the pure fact that the game is how it is it requires you to build deep relationships with people like i still have deep relationships and playing i'm playing bfa today and the core of our our group is the core of our vanilla raiding guilds from 2005 that's so cool and so that sense of community that was developed is really the driving force i think because people play this game and you know the the difficulty of your dps rotations and i'll use quotes because unless you're like uh i don't know even even a warrior or a rogue have some sense of rotations but if you're a frost mage you don't have a rotation you press frost bolt um so like people don't play vanilla allow for the difficulty of the dps rotation but they play it for the difficulty and the character progression and the difficulty in keeping the 40 people that you've made emotional ties with together and that skill that combination of things has um made the game cemented in people's hearts and minds and in our culture as a whole so i i think those those kind of things have have helped it outlive a number of other games that have that have come out since that time for sure absolutely and like the thing that like rings so true like or something that you didn't say i guess i should say none of what you said has to do with actual content or actual you know like the combat system or anything like that it's funny you know a lot of i see a lot of companies especially a lot of mmo developers today market their games on the basis of oh we're introducing like an action combat system or oh we have all of this great you know outdoor content and stuff like that it seems like content is actually you know it serves more as a supplement to the actual game system and the philosophies of the game and really if the philosophies aren't right it doesn't matter what content you add into the game doesn't matter what combat system you add into the game if you don't have the fundamentals correct it just it doesn't matter the game doesn't go anywhere yeah um so like if you take for example like the current uh main complaints about bfa it's not about the raid content it's not about the pvp content it's not about like the core like part of the gameplay but it's the systems that are around it that give you the progression so the azerai power stuff for instance is the number one biggest complaint that people have with bfa um and that is a stumbling block to people enjoying the content that they do enjoy in the game um and i there are stumbling blocks that happen if and it'll allow for different people um some of it is just that it's takes forever to get to level 60 um and it just ends you can't pull six mobs at a time unless you're like i don't unless you're a frost mage and you're blistering everything down but if you're a warrior and you pull two mobs that are plus two levels from you you're most likely gonna die and that's gonna that's just the difference in in the game between uh finnella and bfa are our way of this um but but you're right like the systems of finnella encourage people to be in community that there's really no options for you to progress uh you can't really collect tier two gear unless you're in a group of community even like the pug groups that happen it's like the same group of people who are running on their alts in the pug group every week uh to get tier two so that kind of stuff is uh is important and built into finnella right yeah i think you guys are both very right i think content a lot of times has or almost every time has a very limited replayability like imagine trying to do and torus for the next 10 years you would hate it you know within a couple months maybe um but finnella wow it incentivizes and encourages and fosters so much involvement with community and interaction and that sort of stuff has limitless replayability because it's always different every time you do it there's always new people to talk to and chat with i think you're both are very right says okay so sorry just to kind of continue um a little bit earlier a little bit earlier you mentioned how 30 percent of the player base uh or sorry 30 percent of the people who put in signatures for the prospect of legacy servers that that was sent into blizzard um they they hadn't even played vanilla before i think uh something we had talked about we've actually i think we've brought this up a couple times before on classic cast but so many of the people uh 30 percent of a fairly significant number i would say of people that have never even touched vanilla still interested in playing and i think it's because they want to go back and uh get the opportunity to experience what they missed or there's there's even a percentage of people who want to go back and finish what they missed what what do you really think about that um yeah i think that there's a big pull for not a lot of people ended up killing kt when they played uh vanilla and and that was a big pull for me playing on the solris was you know i had a a hole in completing quote unquote vanilla wow um and i wanted to experience that content which i never did originally i my guild broke up when we were moving towards gothic so never got gothic down never got for horseman town never got um never got saffron or kt down so that i wanted to do though i wanted to do that and um that was something that was a pull for me and a number of people in my guild but my guild is just a subset of the people who enjoy vanilla there's a ton of people who play the game just for the leveling content who just want to you know go in the world and do quests and experience it and go explore and some people want to just do a guild building where they like become a guild leader and they just get the biggest community that they can and encourage people to do dungeons with one another and some of the most fun that i have in the game is like leveling dungeons with a group of five people we just you know let's just go out of our way and go to shadowfan keep when we're alliance we're gonna make the our trek all the way over there and we're gonna do the instance and it's gonna be fun uh and some of that content is the most fun they have it's like we're on an adventure together we're gonna go do this the content is challenging even at a low level uh those low level dungeons are sometimes more challenging than molten core is at max level like how many people here have died more in nomergan at level 30 than they have in core level 60 that last hallway man yeah that last hallway dude yeah so those kind of content uh where it's difficult and it um from level one all the way to level 60 they don't need to get to level 60 and max level and like push for rank 14 to enjoy the game so um there's there's a lot of people that enjoy vanilla wow and it's a large enough sandbox that you can have all kinds of different people enjoy it for what it is for sure for sure so obviously you guys whenever you guys flew out to blizzard you guys were talking to them you're having a uh you're you're basically presenting everything that you guys had learned that you thought would be uh i guess beneficial to them and maybe you know pushing like the the prospect of doing legacy servers in the future of we we talked a little about this beforehand and stacy have actually brought this up but uh actually stacy do you want to go ahead and ask a question uh you can take it dude okay so basically stacy was talking about um how like like how instrumental do you think it was uh what you guys did and what you guys showed uh in order to kind of give that give them kind of a sense of confidence about the potential of doing legacy servers yeah so doing legacy content like this is obviously was not a new idea even when we went to blizzard headquarters um there'd been a frequent question at every blizzcon uh culminating in the you think you do but you don't famous quote and that originated from somebody asking like have you ever thought about making content for the different expansions as they were at the time they were released um so it wasn't a new idea at the blizzard and surely they've had some conversations about it before we had the meeting like which does this make sense from a business perspective what effort will we need to put in to make this happen i will give them the benefit doubt that they've had those conversations just because they are a business and they're always looking for different ways to diversify and have different revenue streams um and i think that there was a a community turning point that um at the time as well when you have to consider the context of where we're at legion was in beta well warlords adrena was on its last leg most people would agree that warlords was one of the weakest if not the weakest wow expansion that existed yeah um i say it was the weakest it had the least amount of content um and did the most to uh isolate the individual players from the rest of the community with garrisons and so through that process a lot of people were yearning for like remember when we used to have 40 people in a raid i wonder what that was like and it drove people to want to experience that content so in the context of all of that the solace comes up we are really successful and what we were doing we have the meeting with blizzard and i think that it was uh an opportunity for blizzard to open their eyes to the larger community that we had proved that it wasn't just a flash in the pan rose tinted glasses thing but it had real legs to it and then they just needed to figure out how they did it at that point yeah also a key point i think thrown in during what was it wow's 13th anniversary where they actually had the 40 man molten core raid that people could do right for the for the celebration people were like oh this is kind of fun it's kind of challenging garr you know we actually have to do some mechanics we can wipe on this pause yeah and the uh south shore versus torn mill uh events yeah yeah happened then too yeah which is kind of weird but it was fun yeah i think it's interesting kind of the combination of a weak point in the the history of wow in addition to to nestaurus nestaurus being like one of the more you know you're doing progressive vanilla you're doing progressive itemization progressive content release and trying to go for for the most blizz like is the term a lot of people throw around most blizz like experience kind of turned out to be the perfect storm for the popularity of the server and the popularity of the movement i would say for for legacy servers yeah right yeah i i think so i so the the context was right um like the environment soil had been enriched to the point where this could this idea could be planted in and actually grow so part of it part yeah it grew it's obvious to some degree whatever whatever degree it actually is i think it's um to some degree nesaurus made a different um and pushed this to the forefront um i think the real real the real thing that mattered the most was the petition because it wasn't just a group of people playing on server but so many different unique names people who loved the loved wow for a long time coming out in favor of it having people of influence youtubers and streamers and marquern and others who helped take up the mantle i think that whole movement of it is what initiated the meeting that allowed us the opportunity to present to blizzard and that was the real driving force behind them realizing like okay can we just continue to ignore this and i think that they landed at the answer is no we can't continue to ignore this this is something that so many people want that will bring people back into the world warcraft community that have left for whatever reason along the way so and and that where we are now so in a month we're gonna be playing classic wow demo at home yes it's crazy yeah how much how much of an emphasis one of you guys are presenting how much of how much should you guys emphasize the the concept of because this is a big question that's coming up and we all three of us feel this way where if they don't have progressive item release they don't have progressive itemization progressive content release that and maybe not itemization to to as much of an extent but especially raid content release that the game is going to suffer pretty pretty badly but they haven't really come out and said anything specifically on what they plan on doing on that front how how big of an how much did you guys emphasize how big of a deal that was for noss specifically we talked about it noss was the first server that attempted to do progressive itemization and i say attempted to because we were far from perfect and it's probably probably impossible for us to be a hundred percent perfect because things are lost to time but i think progressive content release is a absolute must like releasing naks at the outset of the of the release is basically saying the server's dla in my mind i agree yeah and i don't think they'll ever do that either these are mmo veterans they understand the idea of releasing content in drip by drip so people experience this and then they move on to the next thing it's it's all about care it's on the stick for mmo's and they they understand that um so they um i don't think that they'll ever consider that idea now what they might do is release something like soul garab earlier than how they've had it or other like battlegrounds and honor systems and that's a whole different conversation that we can get into if we want but the itemization i think is it's not as important but it's pretty close to it right the reasoning being is that the item is the items that were added later in the game were added to the game at the point where they made sense so items that were added to the five man dungeons in one point one with the revamp of itemization for those dungeons added gear that was significantly more powerful than gear that you would find in molten right now if you allowed those items to exist when only molten core exists as content then you're basically invalidating a number of the items that you that you want to get from from the raid and to be frank a lot of the items you get from on core aren't very good anyway but to lower that small number even more is will feel bad for the majority of people so yeah i'm not sure how they're going to do itemization i hope that they they embrace the idea of itemization like patch progression itemization now there's things that you can talk about that that don't matter as much to add earlier like cloth donations for rep for the cities like there's probably nothing wrong with adding that earlier questions to do with quest on them what do you think about that quest hubs probably doesn't matter either as long as they don't involve like i wouldn't add like the max level quest hub in lights hope chapel with the donations for like the floras and the dark iron scraps and that kind of stuff because the reason for those is for items that you get from the the quest vendor for the turn ins but like seren gorge quests a level 40 quest zones they added them for a reason that's because that there is there's a gap there that's missing for players and their level in content so the level 50 sunk in temple quests i don't see too much of a reason why you hold this back there are some items that are better than other pre raid items i think the hunter right the hunter quest namely though the the warlock quest has a pretty decent weapon and some stuff yeah this number of options but they're not like out of line with other content that you couldn't get from like dire mall so that those are questions that you probably have to figure out but i think that those are okay because it doesn't impact the end game balance uh to to level right so well since we're on the topic on nos on basically like with the nost core there's a number of kind of like small little custom adjustments and stuff that you guys made kind of along the lines of what you're talking about like you know adding the seren gorge quest and stuff like that um there's been a lot of talk that you know when you know we we all say like no changes but it's it's got like quotes around a little bit because we're not a hundred percent sure you know when nobody's really a hundred percent sure other than maybe blizzard like what exactly happened when and what exactly is no changes so for a lot of people it's like well what is no change there might not know either just saying maybe maybe so um for a lot of people like for me i feel like no changes is anything between like 1.11 and 1.12 just kind of anything that happened in between but uh what are what are some of the things that you guys did on on nost that were different from the actual like release of the game uh on purpose maybe like putting something in at the beginning uh so something that we did intentionally for the raid content is that we always pursued the pre-nerf versions of the content regardless of what patch it was uh that was basically not i shouldn't say pre-nerf i should say the hardest version of the boss regardless of what patch that was so for instance anxia changes patch 1.3 specifically phase two bless you stay safe thank you sorry um specifically 1.3 changes the fireballs that she has in phase two um so she targets one person and does an aoe conflag effect to anyone around them prior to 1.3 and then after that she changes to shooting three fireballs that just do blanket damage we felt that the the version of doing the conflagration was harder and therefore we maintained that version uh moving forward um now it doesn't extend to everything because we didn't actually release aq 40 on nost but we intended to not make tentacles spawn in the walls on cthune which we felt was uh which technically is the hardest version of that boss but we felt was a uh like a lose condition basically yeah it was it was more of a bug and an unintended effect than it was um something that you would consider pre-nerf right so those kind of things we we avoided um so if they were if if they can were considered bugs then we did not reproduce them right if they were considered harder versions uh or pre-nerf then we tried to implement them as best as we could right so did you do this because of uh having 1.12 talents all the way through would that have anything to do with it uh yeah so we wanted to make the content challenging as best as we could without manually going and actually adjusting uh like damage numbers and HP numbers so part part of my philosophy was it with it was is that previous private servers that released raid content had not released raid content that was the most accurate version of them so they were missing abilities they weren't scripted correctly they were doing abilities to uh like to infrequently where they didn't end up mattering um or armor values were off or resistance values were off and a number of those things so our goal was or my goal was to make sure that the raids were as close to perfect as possible and then see how the community had difficulties with that and I will obviously say that we were not perfect there's a number of things that came to learn after Nosta shut down that we had incorrect that like made me sad uh I think what I mentioned before was like Fire Ma's flame buffet where he does the AOE pulsing uh uh increasing debuff that makes you take more fire damage that does fire damage itself uh we had it set to happen every 10 seconds it's supposed to happen happen every five seconds and I found that out after after Nost closed down because I found a video that uh you could that was oh oh yeah anyway I have found a video that was synced up one second to one second based like the timer of the video was one real life second and sing it go off every five seconds and I was no fire like no wonder Fire Ma was as easy as it was um that we could just ignore that entire mechanic because we killed it fast enough before it mattered uh so so yeah I was going to say I know that this is a really really hard question but to what extent do you think raiding with 1.12 talents trivializes early content in molten core and xeo blacking layer uh I think it matters a lot um especially because the early content is so well known every you know every mechanic when it's supposed to happen um they're all pretty melee friendly and at 1.12 talents that pretty heavily favored fury warriors and roaks and especially fury warriors did not really exist until like maybe towards the tail end of bwl but really aq 40 when aq 40 came out and they had the warrior talent revamp which I think was 1.9 1.6 yeah 1.6 so yeah bwl um so once that happens then you start opening the door now rogues I believe was like 1.10 or 1.11 where they finally had their revamp and that made them much stronger and more cohesive as a dps class now you transport them back into molten core with the content being pretty melee friendly um it's no wonder that the melee charts for molten core and bwl um when you look at the like raid logs or the top 10 is like all yellow and brown um and maybe you have a seems okay to me they're awesome and so maybe maybe on a couple fights you have they're caster friendly you have more casters or maybe like um you know some good casters will show up in the top 10 but it's pretty melee friendly and when those melee talents finally get applied for rogues that they can dominate the early content so I think it matters a lot um so I don't know how you deal with it though do you do you backport talents to as they were which blister should have the ability to do you could do that it would be fun to do that I played a warlock and will continue to play a warlock and it'd be interesting to play a warlock without an op death coil um or but in some degree like the talent revamps existed because the class the classes as as has they played soft like hunters like are not all that good in 1.12 but pre talent revamp where your best abilities are hidden behind 31 point talents or priests where your best abilities are hidden behind 31 point talents uh that doesn't feel good like how would how would uh druids like to have to get 31 points just so they can that renovate before the talent revamps so those existed for a reason and do we just you know reverse that reasoning so we can experience badness I don't know so I don't have a great answer how you fix the difficulty level of molten core with 1.12 talents outside of doing significant changes to health and damage values so would you like to see that changes to health and damage values I don't I don't really want to see that um it might be it might be necessary for molten core specifically for bwl and beyond I don't want to see it absolutely I think that the content of aq 40 and x is hard enough it even for like in view of how private servers have done it it's hard enough that people will have difficulty clearing it like a lot of guilds in my view a lot of guilds aq 40 they just died because they couldn't get past a certain few bosses um so that means that the difficulty exists there now the top end guilds are always going to clear the content quick and that's true in bfa today like obviously mythic and gohun was difficult and they it took them like a week to clear it but they still cleared it in a week and they're the like the best guild methods the best guild in the world so the best vanilla guilds in the world are going to clear the content really quickly maybe day one but that's probably okay because the the skill gap between the top end guilds and your average guilds are great enough that the average guilds can still find difficulty through the content do you think that classic wow rating counters are going to be much harder than private server encounters with correct armor values and resistance values and whatever else like the flame buffer thing you mentioned yes um armor values and resistance values are the great unknowns when it comes to um raid content so with that because it's impossible for us to know it uh it's impossible for us to to reproduce it correctly right yeah so uh yeah tips has to leave he had a he has a family thing he's got to do so so tips is gonna bow out real quick before tips goes guys i just want to go ahead and mention we are doing another giveaway we we did have our winners for the three blizzcon virtual tickets it was originally one and then we we changed it to three but uh we will be doing another giveaway and i'm gonna go ahead and post that link in the chat guys uh so if you guys haven't followed us uh sub to our youtube follow us on on twitter uh follow us on twitch as well go ahead and click that link in the chat uh that that don't do the number one do the second one that i that i posted right there this one that i'm posting the chat right now so i will be emailing the winners again uh the winners from last week are and i announced it at the beginning but ethog misty cal 711 and mr ghost lore were the winners so uh so yeah go ahead and check out that link if you guys already follow us if you guys already sub to us then all you have to do is just fill in the fields and then click everything so that it verifies it for those of you guys watching on youtube this will be pinned to the top of the comments it'll be in the description uh i'll be posting that link for you guys uh whenever the time comes one of you guys are watching this so yeah good luck to you guys for that and uh tips tips is gonna bow out for now and uh we'll keep going thank you so much nano for joining us tonight always a pleasure anytime and as fans stay safe uh take care boys and to the chat congratulations on who won hey that's good stuff for sure take care brother take care all right see you guys later i'll leave you with uh this nice straw summer hat i'm sure you guys will enjoy it all right we'll hardly know the difference exactly exactly all right good night see you dude um so yeah you know now that uh i kind of want to look ahead a little bit and and put on put on the tinfoil hat a little bit you you were talking to tips before and you had told him that you hadn't heard from uh that you hadn't heard from damon or viper in quite some time yeah all right so you hadn't heard from them for a while and there are recently some alleged leaks that i've been saying this you can't really put any any stock into it you can't really you got to take it all the grain of salt i think more than anything it's um it's really well thought out and kind of gives the gives people like the feeling of like they want to believe it because of confirmation bias that's basically what it is and i'm gonna i'm totally gonna play into it right now because it's fun to talk about but you haven't heard from them in a while exactly so you haven't heard from them in a while and these these leaks say that there's potentially two people from the nos team uh that are working you know in some fashion we think more than anything it would be kind of like in a consultant type of deal like consulting i guess you know talking about maybe player data player behavior stuff like that how likely or unlikely would you say it is that damon or viper could be working with them um so i don't want to put like a percentage on it but it's completely reasonable that they would be working at blizzard mostly because of how deep of fans they are of blizzard and how capable they are as developers and and just people themselves so the one thing and that the anguish version of the leak was like the nos people are there for insured authenticity or whatever the phrase was yeah we are not the arbiters of authenticity uh we don't decide what's classic and what's not uh weren't we're not that important um but one thing that i know damon and viper uh care about is that the game is is authentic and that it plays like classic so one thing that they were adamant about for nos for instance is never implementing any sort of shop because that did not exist in vanilla and it would it would cause ideas of impropriety on our on our side um so those kind of things that they're they are advocates for um i have said one thing i will say is like i think damon and viper are great i think they're incredibly smart talented capable people and i hope that they're working on the classic team because that would be great um not just for them but also for us as players and the community because then i would know that at least two of the people that were working on the team were super passionate about what was what the team was doing providing the right content for people uh so i i don't know if they are or not i haven't spoken to them and continue but not i haven't heard from them they've they've disengaged uh completely i hope that they are and it would be great if they did well for me like i i can't imagine other people than them having spent more time sifting through old web archive links and old un old uncovered long forgotten videos like if anyone knows about this maybe forgotten stuff it's probably them right uh them and me yeah exactly okay yeah um i i probably spent more time digging through 240p videos than than they ended up doing because they would give me stuff to to research and then i would go go research it um but but yeah they they are very experienced the content of of classic and would be would be at least serve as some role if they were in an advisory role would serve as some sort of useful consulting people for sure especially when it comes in terms of like itemization because they understood the importance of that and what the big impact that it would make oh yeah and i i have no i have no problem imagining that some of this like week to week or month to month itemization changes have been lost that they weren't recorded and there's only the only way to know that is is old web archive links and stuff like that yeah i have no problem imagining that mm-hmm yep uh so guys pretty soon we uh we do want to go to q and a here um pretty soon so if you guys want to go ahead and tweet questions at us i'll be searching hashtag classic cast uh my twitter is sfan tv stay safe warlock tips out baby tips if you want to answer some questions for us at straw hat but yeah i know if you guys want to uh ask us any questions we'll we'll go into q and a we'll start with twitter and then we'll we'll also go into taking questions from the chat as well so actually this is a question that is it comes up all the time and i really i really want to know what you think about it nano what do you think about post next ramus content or bonus content for classic wow what do you think about that so i really like um the mechanics systems and content of finoa um so far i've only been hoping that it would exist at all so i haven't they got and now they will i haven't gotten to the point where i'm hoping for more than what already exists within the scope of vanilla i think the natural progression after vanilla is to release burning crusade option if they were to go that direction it seems like most of the work that they've had to do so far at least how they've presented it isn't more the technical side of making vanilla work and if they're over the overcome that and then use that for tbc then i think that makes a lot of sense for them now how does vanilla work well how does an mmo work when there is a time limit attached to it is a question that may not have ever has ever been explored so we know that vanilla ends at next and so when next is released then what do you do you play it like a diablo season and like port everybody to like the non ladder version of classic wow where you can everything is released at this point you can just join and keep on playing your characters and then you're refresh and have you know fresh for all the people out there um but you can you know restart vanilla again um i'm not sure how they'll do all that stuff in terms of 1.13 i think it'd be interesting if they were to release post max content for vanilla um now i have questions about how it would work from an itemization standpoint and power level like the the power gap between max gear which is already incredibly strong even compared to bwla q4 to cure now in order for the new content to matter you'd probably have to step up the power even more so there's concerns about that and and balance when it comes to level 60 but it would be interesting to have a different raid and it would be interesting how they would envision a new raid with new mechanics in the vanilla world might be there's probably opportunities for them to do that so if they if they did it i would probably play it and probably enjoy it uh i don't know if they're going to spend the development effort and resources to do that but it would be really interesting um if they if they did that the way that they release content with patches as they always release like a raid maybe a couple dungeons and maybe like a new pvp battleground something like that that's how i would envision patch 1.13 looking like um i've you know brainstormed in my crazy days of like maybe i want to create like custom content uh back in back in the day like how how are you do that i'm thinking about like maybe there should be a timber mall holds dungeon because timber mall hold is is a place that exists that we never get to see and the timber mall has enough it has its own reputation already um and there's an area that it could easily exist uh that would be interesting and plus there's no dungeon in that area of the map at all on the northeast portion of calum door so if you were to release a new dungeon maybe you do something with timber mall hold that might be yeah my my biggest concern like you mentioned is power creep and i think if you just avoid power creep by offering a new more dungeons or raids that doesn't have an increase in in in an item power you that is that is lateral content i think that lateral content i mean players engage in content for a reward otherwise you know players respond to incentives if they're not incentivized to do to do the content i think they might do it once or twice then not continue to do it and so i think um it wouldn't have much replayability maybe if it's if it's lateral content right well uh i think to that point and my personal opinion i really do want to see burning crusade i think that burning crusade could potentially be even like if if classic is successful i think burning crusade could potentially be even more successful um but i think that after a full cycle the consideration of doing like post-nax content and doing like 1.13 uh with kind of a more horizontal progression and uh let's say they they went to grim batol or you know you do old um caverns of time carousel and there's so much stuff in the game on the map timber hold like you said i think you could do it wouldn't you couldn't have it be like a flat horizontal progression but kind of more at a very low angle and maybe even changing up the because how the tier sets work especially in naks the naks tier sets are all designed for like what's considered the most optimal optimal spec for every class you know for the hybrids for example like paladins or holy uh the druids or heal it's that's just how it works because it's the hardest content but if they were to kind of change it a little bit and now you had like offset plate healing gear or you you took what would normally be like a main set tier and like the what would be tier four like you took that and you made that more for healing like the offset pieces and then you made like a prop palette and tanking set and you made those set bonuses kind of make up for some of the some of the shortcomings maybe like for example that gives paladins taunt or something yeah like you make judgment work as a taunt basically like something like that so you wouldn't actually have to change the talents or anything like that like or add skills but basically you give them the set bonus to now if you judge then it also works as a taunt and then maybe like the set gives like block value and stuff like that i think it would not only be like a a smaller like a like a just minor minor power creep to the other raids but it really changes how the gear works as opposed to just like the same type of gear but better i think would be kind of interesting but again i don't think they should do that until like a full cycle of classic yeah like 1.13 is kind of fun to think about and talk about and imagine i think they had what i would prefer in my ideal is that you run through the content i don't know how long it takes i i'm in favor of a faster progression cycle because the being able to farm gear and the old raids will ask you to power up to the point where the newer content i really agree with that is powered down but so let's say like there's a year between launch and finish quote unquote um and then transfer everybody over to the non ladder version release tbc give people the option to copy their characters to tbc and start at level 60 or you can re-level your new drain eyes and blood elves from level one um and then refresh uh vanilla again that would be my my preference we're now now you have tbc as an option and it creates a natural progression but you still can do classic if you want if you want to finish farming your tier three that exists for you if you want to start fresh that exists for you um so that that would be my preference where tbc has released the non ladder version of classic exists and a fresh version of classic exists that would be like my next progression through this yeah so to go in more on what you were saying going into classic around this habits on private servers people have two or three or four times more blackling layer lockout full clear is worth of loot than people had actually vanilla walks back then people had to learn the encounters and it was just harder and stuff so does that mean that with classic always speed up the release timeline to make aq harder because of less time to farm blackling layer gear i actually i i actually kind of like that idea would make everything a little bit harder yeah it's something they consider to like and um nefarion was not killed in the original version of the game until zeal grub was released and that was a year that was a month later so considering how long it took them to kill the final boss of that dungeon and then they actually got zeal grub gear now the best skills were clearing it with before they really had a big difference in zeal grub gear but zeal grub released like huge changes to like caster itemization frames like now all of a sudden you had this brand new set that was better than anything that you could get in bwl it's from a pure dps standpoint and now that exists for you so those kind of things don't exist in the private server world because nefarion does not last long enough for the private server to develop and release zeal grub so it's those kind of things we have to figure out how how it's going to work but you're right like being able to farm more nefarion's tears and being able to farm more wrath sets before you have to enter aq 40 makes aq 40 less hard now you have to balance that between the top end guilds and the average guilds because the average guilds probably not going to clear the bwl in the first week uh they typically didn't i should say uh at least on the start as most guilds did not clear the content in the first week um so you have to balance around those and and how that works so it's real interesting how how zg works zg in aq 22 kind of as more content being put in kind of as a catch up mechanic for a lot of people and especially looking back on you know actual vanilla wow with bwl not being completed until after zg was out zg had a you know it had drops in there to kind of help people out who hadn't gotten a bunch of gear from mc or whatever people who are new to the game uh like there's even a two-handed axe that increases attack power to to dragon kin i think and there's one thing that's good for you know you know there's not a lot of people using two-handed but um but still like it's just interesting like how it all works and what they added into the game for um to to be able to complete the content that they had released prior yeah um so i i saw um somebody asked me if i was her alliance and classic and i'm alliance there you go right so you're an alliance warlock what race do you play uh no what gender do you play male okay close enough all right that's fine that's fine i'll meet you halfway no the reason is is that if you well one gnome is better than human because the only good thing about being a human is sword skill and reputation decreases and you know you can just play 10 more and get the same amount of reputation you're so smart by the way you're so smart okay anyway go on uh but but you have if you're going to be alliance and you're going to be a warlock you should be a gnome one you get more int so you can increase your crit slightly and maybe get one more shadow bolt off before you have to lifetap and second escape artist is crucial like the only thing that really kills you is melee and if you can escape artist away from rogues and mortars then you're going to get a chance to actually kill them um i forgot how i get got on this uh oh alliance or alliance or horde yeah um oh the reason reason why no male specifically is that if you wear the big green beard and specific kind of hair it looks perfect with nemesis there you go okay okay that's planning that's planning ahead yeah it's real transmog before transmog you have to create your character intentionally to look good with an intentional item is that true very true uh this is a really good question that i i just want to bring up right now i really like this from zethra uh then this is very nitty gritty so what do you think about the changing of lotus from like you know for bop versus bov uh the number of spawns blizz like versus naut spawns timer of rare spawns lupos tidal charm uh thoughts on the uniqueness of pets shadow damage on lupos chase speed of pets and stuff like that basically just kind of the scope of that yeah um so this goes the the lotus is is interesting because nos did not change the lotus from being bop to boe so we had boe lotus from the very beginning i'm pretty sure it's because we didn't know that it was bop until 1.7 until start figuring it out um i'm kind of in favor of that idea um mostly if you do progressive itemization all of your casters are basically going to suck for a while and a flask of supreme power is going to be more spell power than all of your gear put together just one one consumable is better than all of the rest of your gear which is kind of crazy to think about and when you start stacking up all those consumables together then that's the most important thing to the game not the gear that you're carrying and that that's something that did not exist in the original game mostly i think because of lack of information or lack of ability to farm will to farm um but it's something to consider now because the current meta so to speak rating guilds is that every caster at least for the top end rating guilds is that every caster is supposed to have full consumables and you know every melee is supposed to have full consumables before they go in and the reason is is as those consumables are really freaking good um and so be having lotus be blp doesn't change the fact that people can have lotus but significantly decreases the ability of people to purchase flasks the the bar has been bar has been raised a significant portion because somebody both has to have herbalism at 300 and farm black lotus and the recipe to make the flasks before they can sell those flasks and most likely the supply of those is going to go down and then forces people to not use those which is probably better so that's something something to consider i think i'm in favor of having blp lotus for a while just because it'll decrease the power level of the average player yeah i'm a big fan and it having it that way rewards people that can play 20 hours a day and farm gold and then farm there like i i really like that about vanilla wow if you're a complete no life you can you can excel yeah that's yeah that's true um the the number of spawns blizz like versus not spawns not spawns there's like a few versions of them just to give a little background especially for black lotus we completely changed the system in which it spawns now i don't think how it spawned originally was a blizz like version anyway where there was like a set for spawns and you could predict you know where they were and if you had a guild of people who were incentivized to farm as many lotus as possible uh which may have been the case you could sit on every spawn and have the exact timer and nobody would ever see a black lotus other than your people i think that's bad and i don't think that's something that blizz is going to do so what we did is we instead of having four to eight spawns um for black lotus we changed it to at least 50 in every zone that it was at and then varied the timer with some wiggle room like plus or minus a certain amount of minutes i think it's the system that still exists today for whoever's using the nasko um so i think that's better because you could random yourself into a black lotus spawn you can't you can't camp 50 different spots even if you knew where all of them it's just impossible for you to do that right um so i think i think that's better um the uniqueness of pets is an interesting thing um especially lupos creates a big change for the ability for hunters and it makes the biggest difference in pvp with lupos being able to ignore armor ends with these mastery hunters just like you can click a couple buttons basically beat every caster um i i don't know what to do about that because it is was like to have them be pre 1.9 but the system as exists in 1.12 does not have lupos being op and normalized speeds and all that kind of stuff so i think i'm in favor of the final 1.12 system for pets just because it creates balance and it doesn't create this barrier where like hunters are useless unless they spend their life farming for lupos um i don't think that's a healthy system and you should be able to play a hunter without having to invest your life into lupos to be relevant um yeah definitely having conversations and thinking about questions like this highlights how simple it is to just say no changes there's so much more thought that has to go into it i i do not envy i do not envy blizzard's position right now they're after they're actually having to think through all of this it's a lot of work they're after to do yeah the the no changes you have a question there though it's like is it no changes patch for patch no changes or is it 1.12 no changes and then dealing with you know progressive itemization i uh is like well you kind of have to do patch for patch progression if you're going to try to do that but then not for spells and talents abilities so that there's um there's a question mark there that there's a lot of question marks there that had to be solved that's the thing i'm most looking forward to for this blizzcon is that um ian in the little five minute teaser video talked to that they were going to get into their philosophy on how they're they're rebuilding vanilla and i'm gonna i i spent $50 for 50 battle net dollars wow gold essentially for for the virtual ticket and i did that mainly for the demo but another the other thing that i'm going to be watching intently is that philosophy them taking into how they were doing the how are they rebuilding vanilla wow i want to i want to see what they're doing mm-hmm so kind of in that same i was just gonna add because it's kind of on the same track with uh with everything else alliance not having jujuts in the original game until i believe it was 1.10 or 1.11 i think it's 1.9 okay yeah something like that um stuff like that and i believe on from from what i know on nost it alliance had it from the beginning correct yeah so i think stuff like that is going to be really interesting to see how they approach it like that's something that they'll likely um i could see them likely just like leaving uh leaving in for the alliance as well how do you feel about that like what's your guys uh decision behind that um the reason why it was available for the alliance is we were unaware that it wasn't available for the alliance at the time so like i said like we weren't perfect we did our best but there is just so many things that changed along the the way and the game is just so big that we just didn't have the manpower to figure out all this stuff before it was already an issue so like let's just say we did figure it out by the time the bwl was released do we then after the fact make the change uh and upset half the player base because they no longer can farm gg power and then there's cries of unfairness for factions and whatever it is but we never got to that point but that would be a question for a server to make that um and plus the the buffs especially for melee are really strong um and even the resistances can be really good if you are struggling to to be the boss where you need the resistances so i mean had had there was no way for us to be perfect we were never going to be perfect so a lot a lot of times when we didn't do something so another big example the biggest i think the biggest mistake that we ever made from an itemization perspective on nost was releasing the updated blue pvp gear at the time of zil gureb rather than waiting longer for it and the reasoning was because we put our trust in one of the other qa people was incorrect and telling us that it was supposed to be released during zil gureb and we didn't do enough have enough time to do the background check on it essentially and to verify it and so we released it and then once it was released and we realized our error it was almost too late at that point to roll back uh because then we were people had vended their gear so because they had you know right gear that was better than what they needed so they just got rid of it and then it just would have been and we weren't going to do a big rollback because that's just not going to happen so at that point just became too late and so part of that was just like we're not being paid to do this and we have limited time and you know we just couldn't get everything right but that was my biggest regret probably because it significantly changed people's itemization in bwl specifically like it completely especially for casters it like basically invalidated the black link a ball that you got off a razor core and basically invalidated mission dares if you were ranked 10 and those are two items that back in the day were sought after because they were so good and we invalidated them by a by a wrong position that would be i'm so curious to see how correct blizzard launches classic wow or if they'll if they'll realize something is wrong maybe a player will send a video hey blizzard this is actually how it was in vanilla wow and a blizzard will then tweak classic wow to be in line with how it was back in the day i wonder how correct they'll be or if they'll be making changes week to week based on player feedback yeah one thing that we do do know about blizzards that they try to put as much polish on the game as possible and you would hope that they have enough people to go through these things because it is their job and they can invest all the time um now will they do they have enough people on the team to you know successfully go through all these different points and get them correct the first time around hopefully um some of it might just be philosophy changes that we might disagree with um from time to time that we'll have to just kind of suck it up and deal with i think but but we'll see i'm optimistic that was just going to deliver an excellent version of classic wow i think so i have to say everything we have of course there's still questions about how how classic wow will play out but everything we have heard i think has been very good so far do you agree with that uh i i think so uh we haven't heard a ton um but i think that there's before they set out to do this i believe that they wanted to do it right and doing your right means to make it vanilla wow as it was as best as they could and what that means for people who are as experienced and deepened the game as some of us and your viewers who knows but for the average player they're going to be like well this is classic wow this is as well as it was and i want them to be able to experience that what i think is going to be funny whenever i think it's going to be funny whenever there's people trying to tell blizzard wait no that's not how that's not how it was on nos that's not how it was here there it's like well yeah that's because they've made that custom change you know i think that'll i think that'll be funny to see right yeah i think a lot of people are going to be like wait i didn't realize this was supposed to do that um especially like class stuff because um one of the other the one of the parts of the presentation we did at blizzard that i did blizzard was talking about the different classes and the and the place that they were when we closed on the server whether they were in a good place or a bad place and one class i talked about was and this is relevant for us then is uh is paladins because they changed a lot in their mechanics throughout the course of the game where if you're trying to prove that this ability should do this or should be modified to multiply by this there's just a lot of misinformation out there with it that you can then you know say it's supposed to look like the 1.6 version in 1.12 and it's almost impossible for us for you to fight every single argument the negative of every single argument it's like no it shouldn't exist like that um so once we get to the point where blizzard releases that then we can at least hopefully put those arguments to rest because they are the definitive answer on like well no consecration is not supposed to scale with ap i'm sorry right yeah and there's there's a lot of stuff like kind of under the hood as well like with hammer of wrath resetting your swing timer because it's a spell but it effectively makes it like useless as part of a pve dps rotation or repentance resetting your swing timer but if you repentance during bubble then all of a sudden you're not swinging for like 14 seconds like yeah there's there's all kinds of like little stuff like that that it's like wait was it like this or was it not like this like repentance is an instant spell why is it resetting swing timer so yeah it's it's all kinds of stuff like that that it'll be uh it'll be exciting to see yeah um one person asked question about adding timers like the one hour veil walkout um i think those are positive things um now might really suck for the guild that wipes the veil for an hour and then cannot attempt them at all for the rest of that week but that's how it was in vanilla and if you couldn't kill them within an hour then your progression for that week is halted i think that's okay so you know it's the same way for for um ragnaros as well you'd one hour per week right and then they buffed it to two hours so i think those are positive things um you know that's part of the game you can't kill it within an hour then try again next week well i think it kind of adds to the um to the whole like a sport of rating right whenever you have that extra the extra thing factored in right so it's like okay well we we not only did we not kill the boss but we got to recover faster get buffs out get rezzed out everybody run back pop your consumes get ready find out what happened and then do it fast enough in order to get the most attempts in in that amount of time i think that's really important yep there's a reason the reason why veil destroyed a lot of guilds in vanilla is because he wiped them for weeks on ends in an hour and then they gave up uh this is a good question this is from uh ronkel bc on twitter uh thoughts on server population what is the sweet spot of two and a half to 12k when servers will be localized and not have infinite players around the clock so uh and i kind of want to add to this is like we're like how did you guys make your decision of the cap to have on the server so at least in terms of our decision to have caps on server limited by more things than blizzard would be limited by which is finances namely like it's expensive to run those servers and we were relying solely on donations and sometimes out of our own pocket to make the servers continue to run and so part of the the you know the economics of it for us was we can't have two different pvp servers and then localize one of them and then let another one run because we just don't have the resources to do that um i don't think that 12 000 players online concurrently is a healthy place for servers to be especially in terms of the leveling progression where there's like lines of an hour to kill the one quest mob with a respawn timer of 30 minutes um that i don't think that's a healthy thing necessarily now i don't think that they should necessarily reduce that time to be a minute so everyone can do it whenever they want um i think waiting is appropriate for vanilla but 12 k is a little a little heavy 2.5 on the other hand i think that they were probably limited by economics maybe not economics but just technical limitations at that time um i don't know if there's going to be a a sweet spot number that we can pinpoint and say this is the best number for it to be at but it should feel differently than the way that people do on private servers where every single moment that you walk under could be 10 000 people like there probably should be times where there's a lower population and you can go out and get more farming done without competition from the next uh region's prime time i think that's normal and appropriate so well we'll see i don't think there's a sweet spot number that we can guess at and be right okay yeah one big thing i remember about vanilla wow and tbc um as well was you know if i knew i needed to farm a bunch of primal lives in tbc or whatever it was dreamfoil i would um i'd wait till night time because people would be asleep and that you know it felt like night time because there weren't many people out that obviously the skybox is dark it was cool it it did add an immersion a lot right yeah i think that's appropriate uh and pretty soon guys well uh i want to take some questions from the chat as well so if you guys don't have twitter uh we do uh we do want to take some questions from the chat as well i think this is a good question from glaston he says uh do you think blizzard will enforce some of the rules that a lot of servers enforce such as safe spotting and fixing things such as dm solar farming on uh on the official classic servers uh i want to go ahead and say something i do remember that people would get in trouble for safe spotting in retail vanilla i remember people getting in trouble for safe spotting i remember people getting in trouble for doing the uh doing the wall jumps and war song like you can jump up to the graveyard with like if you if you hit it right because that that stuff was considered exploits and i remember people getting reported for that and getting in trouble yeah um i i think blizzard's philosophy typically is they want to avoid having their gms deal with uh day-to-day player interactions as much as possible so my thinking is that they're going to do their best to make safe spotting almost impossible through whatever means that means whether it's placing extra guards or even sometimes putting you know the dreaded invisible boxes in places where people can't reach they're going to try to keep safe spotting from ever happening more so than banning people for safe spotting because it's going to require a lot of gm work yeah that would be my guess i know this this ties into wall jumping as well i remember with pre pre 4.0 when kata came out you could wall jump i remember doing it in gold shire and all over the place right getting on top of the in in some battlegrounds and then post cataclysm they removed it and so if they're i i i guess i don't really know what i'm talking about but maybe if they're running classic wow off of the modern client and retrofitting it maybe that maybe that problem won't be there anyway yeah that's possible i mean there are places in worson gold where you can get like the smart people who realize how to do it like there's a place where you can get up in the the horde section and then get behind all the architecture cast slow fall on yourself and get to an unreachable place or literally nobody can get to you and you can sit there with the flag and stall out the entire game forever if you really wanted to um those kind of things i'm just certain that posers gonna gonna deal with there's the second part of that question is like fixing things such as dire mall solo farming that's a pretty big question because that would fall into the category of changes uh whether it's drop rates or pathing actually pathing may not be something that i would consider changes necessarily because i don't believe that the pathing for the dogs is currently exist in dire mall all those people playing i don't think that that's proper i think they should be able to just go ahead and get you when you're on that little ledge um but as far as like drop rates are concerned um that's a big question because it's no question that they mage farming in dire mall east is easily the most lucrative farm gold farm spot in the game especially because you can do it solo without competition or without worry so to the point where people are leveling multiple mages just to farm gold and uh that's kind of crazy right i don't i don't know what they're gonna do about that yeah i'll be i think that'll be something that's very interesting to see um well this is a question from cosy and and we've talked about this before about the talisman of binding shard how do you guys feel about talisman of the binding shard dropping in classic like if just one were to drop per server or one period or if it shouldn't drop at all i'll let you take your nano i think it's kind of a cool item and it doesn't matter at all um i don't think that it was ever intended to drop though right um so i'll be okay if one per server and one person gets it it really doesn't make any difference at all so like it's not a powerful item that's going to really change the way that that player that guild um does so i'm okay with it existing and dropping but i doubt that it actually does because it was never intended to drop mm-hmm yeah i i guess i don't feel super strongly either way but i i guess part of me thinks those should be special memes of the past not recreated the same thing for the zulgarov plague that happened as people suggest and they recreate that intentionally i think they should just let that be in the past it's kind of a cool thing that happened but funny story we tried to reproduce the zulgarov bug event on the starry spite implementing the old uh so like in the server code there's spells that are presented with old underscore and then spell effects whatever so we tried to make that work on hukar to be able to allow players the chance to experience the old zg plague event the problem is at least on this spell just didn't work it didn't didn't do anything it was dead so we couldn't unfortunately do that but we were going to do it for like the first like four hours i think that the that zg was out and then didn't work it um but i i in general agree um and this extends to more things too and i don't want to sound like i'm going crazy here but um from my experience on and in observing the way that the war effort has rolled out um it's clear that players don't care about the war effort the way that they used to the way that it's being revered uh now it might be different if there's like eight servers and the war effort is released on all the servers at the same time and then there is legitimate like race to see who can clear the war effort first nor so they can get in and kill kathun then people might care about it um but i have concerns that it's not going to be cool on classic well because people are just like what why would i turn in my why would i go farm purple lotus so i can turn in into this vendor or on the flip side it becomes invalidated because people know exactly what the war effort requires and then save all those items and then do they have to adjust the numbers or do they just let it be right um i've always been in favor of changing the required items for the war effort oh that throw people off basically yeah so to something similar now i'm not saying like you have to turn in you know mountain silver sage now but you know changing it from well just to like golden sand sim or something like that another herb that doesn't really have that much of an impact that there's like an abundance of on the server uh that still requires you to go out and farm but people can't anticipate exactly what those items are for the war effort and then invalidate the whole thing by you know saving up ahead of time right that's interesting it's really interesting i think a big thing going uh going into classic i think you're absolutely right like if there's only one server if there's only one classic server what could happen is you basically have the big guilds come together and they say hey look we're we're going to do it this way and we're going to stall the release because we want to have as many people as possible get um get the head of the brood lord right so we can have as many black uh black battle chargers scarab words like yeah scarab words basically battle tanks i mean but uh but yeah i think that'll be really interesting because i think it could end up being kind of like a clout thing like oh our server got it first and someone in our guild cleared before anybody else i don't know i think i think stuff like that'll be really interesting to see how it pans out yeah i mean what's what's going to be more prestigious to having 10 scarab lord mounts in your guild or having you know world first a q clear right right yeah that that is something that will change because there will presumably be multiple servers available with different guilds competing on those servers for firsts that's going to create a level of excitement and anticipation with the first races that didn't exist on the stars yeah guys we'll uh we'll take a few more questions here we'll take a few more questions here and uh before before we wrap it up so i do want to take questions from the chat as well um let's do let's do one more question from kj freshly on twitter uh does nano think that there is enough vanilla content to sustain several years with no expansions and horizontal progression with no expansions or horizontal progression if classic served as a sort of portrait that would hang in a blizzard museum how long can a snapshot of history sustain players i like this question okay um so i think the the answer to the question that i have is both yes and no which is uh i don't think that there's enough vanilla content to keep the same player engaged on the same without release like doing a new version of vanilla for years uh i think if you ended vanilla at max that there's not enough content for people to play that for three years but if you were to re-release the game every year i think that there's enough content for and enough replayability that people could do that every year and and play that for three years that makes sense so and and we have we have examples of that right how many people have played on the stall radius and then happens to maybe play on a different server after that which you shouldn't anymore by the way where classic is coming soon and let's focus on classic and making classic great and leave the private server to the private server but i think that there's enough vanilla content that people will play it and play it again and play it again and play it again but not enough that it would last one player three years on the same content i agree and i i mean i have to say blizzard in my opinion they once they release classic every couple years they have to re-release it they they're going to have to keep delivering on this otherwise they're back where they are right now and on top of that when classic wow comes out private server quality increases because now private servers can data mine classic can get these values and definitely blizzard does not want to cease offering classic that is a very bad idea they have to keep keep providing it for sure for sure uh this question this is from the brother 420 uh s-fan what about blitz chat integration talking to friends playing other games they've they've basically all but said that there's going to be a battle that integrated into into classic i mean that's just kind of like their standard that's just what they do now a concern for a lot of people particularly if you're playing on a pvp server where uh you normally you can't make a horde an alliance character on the same server uh if it's a pvp server so right that's kind of like the big concern for a lot of people is if they if they integrate battle net the uh the right way if they do it properly but they're they're basically going to have uh they basically said that they're going to have battle net integration all but said they basically told us as much at the blizzard meaning that if they were to implement it that they would have to do it within their larger um practices as a company as a whole which is to integrate everything within the battle net client and have integration and chat between those i mean it extended it's extended past just wizard games at this point destiny 2 is on the battle net launcher how duty is now on the battle net launcher where you can chat across those different clients um that's just a core part of what the blizzard and activation are doing moving forward is creating their own version of steam essentially with battle net so um that's going to exist for sure now to what degree it exists maybe a question um and obviously that raises questions about cross-faction collusion um which can have implicated implications for the famous double sword farming you can have implications for pvp like trying to avoid queuing against another premade um with world bosses it has a ton of different things that it could really impact the game so we'll see see how it does get implemented but i would be surprised if i couldn't message my friends uh playing retail bfa from the classic version would be surprised if i couldn't do that uh so here's here's another question this is from uh zeus md can you please ask nano about spell batch and whether he thinks it ought to be implemented in classic as far as i understand it was put in place to help players with lower end pcs compete but it seems obsolete now i'm not i'm not quite sure what he means by spell batch i'm not familiar do you know what you're talking about basically the way i understand it is that the server collects um the spells that you cast and kind of releases them off the small window um spell queuing yeah no but just for people in general so like if if i cast interrupt at the same moment that polymorph was about to finish casting and the retail version one of them would go off while the other one wouldn't but in vanilla they might both go off that makes sense and that's because the spell batching system where it would you know kind of group the like spells nearby to and process them all kind of simultaneously i doubt that it's necessary these days or it will be implemented like that in classic well because the technology is there where it's unnecessary and you'll you probably will lose some of the times where two paladins are fighting each other and a hammer of justice each other at the same time and they'll sit there and for four seconds staring at each other thinking now what but uh i don't know how they're gonna implement that we'll probably have to wait until the demo to find out that's spell batching and also the the old spell queuing system we're gotten rid of um with patch 4.0 similar to wall jumping a lot of other changes were made and so like like we said with wall jumping if they're running off a current wow client that's retrofitted for classic wow i'd be very surprised if these things are there for classic yeah we'll we'll see there's a lot of questions i want that will have answered when the demo comes we'll have an idea about what they want to do with graphics what they want to do a few distance specifically like that can make a big difference in the way that you play the game where you feel about the game um models kind of the back in mechanics spell mechanics all that kind of stuff i think one of the things that i legitimately think there's going to be people upset about this and and vocally upset about this probably myself included i i don't want them to fix moonwalking like i think moonwalking is something that's it's very nostalgic it's funny to do um yeah for for people who aren't i guess familiar with moonwalking i call power sliding power sliding uh like you're basically running in one direction and and if you there's a few ways to do it but basically if you if you try and move the right way your character's facing one way and running backwards and if you walk then it literally looks like he's he's moonwalking so that's that's where uh that's where the term comes from but yeah the chat slide the chat slide i'm i'm i'm still nostalgic for when you try to loot something and it just doesn't work and then you're just stuck in the loot animation forever and you're sliding around everywhere stuck in the loot animation like it's stupid but uh i i love that you'll cast a spell and then immediately go back down to your knee i think it's super funny it's super funny um i think this is a good question this has come up a few times um trill was asking this um how one of one of you guys released an astaurious because because i didn't play on nost but uh when you guys released an astaurious did you guys have uh did you guys have dynamic response and what was your decision behind that we did have dynamic response um there's two two systems for dynamic response one objects in the world and one mobs in the world um it was an necessity because we had so many players on the server that we had to do some level of dynamic responding i don't know if it's a necessity classic well because we don't know how they're going to deal with server populations there's um consequences to dynamic response that are unintended especially when a server is released and everybody's leveling where you can get ahead with a group of people and then because dynamic response applies you can like a we grind to a significantly faster pace because things keep spawning fast enough for you to keep on killing them uh that seem unintended and also there's consequences when you're stuck in a cave and you kill mob and you go to kill the other mob and by the time you kill in that second mob the first one to respond and just get stuck in this endless loop of fighting the same mobs over and over again um if you're an op class like a hunter you'll probably be okay um but if you're a warrior you're gonna you're gonna avoid every quest that sends you into a cave because you just can't kill things fast enough deal with the dynamic response so if you had to guess how many people can og azaroth no increased static response rates or no dynamic response rates how many people can og azaroth reasonably accommodate without any changes like that uh i don't know okay i think it's hard to say because it depends on how you want to deal with end game stuff like black lotus uh do you want black lotus to be available enough whenever anybody could reasonably get a flask on any given rate um if you say yes then you probably needs to deal with the respawn rate of black lotus in some way because there's four black lotus that spawn every hour in the four zone like between the four zones um so that's four black lotus every hour over the course of a day that's 20 times four you have uh 100 black lotus or 96 black lotus um is that enough to sustain multiple braiding guilds every week for each of their casters to have a flask every week probably not so if you if you don't want if you want people to have a reasonable chance to have a flask every week then you probably need to deal with the respawn rate on black lotus now if you don't care about that uh and flasks are a luxury item that costs a lot of money that only the most hard people are going to be able to afford any given week then you probably don't need to deal with dynamic response for herbs at all so those are things that you have to figure out like the philosophy behind how you want the game to play before you answer the question like what should the these dynamic respawn be um we we decided to have dynamic response on herbs for instance because there was 12 000 concurrent players but 100 000 players consistently playing every single week and so many of those players were raiding and 96 lotus every day did not meet the demands that was necessary for that level so then we just decided that the meta of our server was that raiders were bringing consumables to every raid and so we we designed the dynamic response system to fit the current meta of the players because that's what we decided to do but that's not necessarily the right way to right just a way i guess um yeah i i think it'll be really interesting to see and you know just kind of see how whenever this demo comes out how things kind of pan out i think the demo is going to be our first i mean it's definitely going to be our first look at it but we're going to be able to learn a lot from it and one of the things that we're going to be able to learn is how we might see i mean it's not done but we might see how they're thinking about approaching it like if there is any sort of sharding or dynamic response or anything like that or if they just 100 leave it as it is just for them to like sit back and look and be like okay let's see let's see how things pan out right it could be a sort of stress test really you know with with that many people playing you've got people at blizzcon you have anybody with a virtual ticket people at home are playing it over the course of a week i think it could be a really sort of a really good sort of uh just stress test is probably the best word for it to kind of sit back and observe and see how things kind of play out yeah i'm excited for the demo because it will answer a lot of questions that waiting to see the answers for for sure what what what are the maybe the top three things that you're eager to learn from the demo one i want to see what they do graphical perspective what options we have for video and graphic and sound interfaces the options that we had in vanilla or is it the current options and along with that the models that they want to go with and the options that we have for those models so is there only the new updated models is there only the old optimum updated old non updated models or can you go between the two using some sort of toggle i want to know that i want to know to what degree if any there is dynamic responding or sharding i want to have we probably won't find out from the demo but i want to have some idea at least from blizzcon how many servers they plan on releasing classic because that will make a and if they're going to be localized to regions so is there going to be an international server which i doubt will they be us eu oceana centric servers because that's that'll be a big difference for a lot of people playing on nostalgia is that it was an international group with a lot of asian players a lot of european players and some us players but going to only us players only players playing together will be a big difference and change the way that for example world bosses work uh extremely like if a world boss if cas expands at you know 10 am us time we always knew that a euro group was going to beat it before we were able to rally our people to even try so it caused us to never even try to get people to do world bosses because there was just so many more people that were able to mobilize so much faster given most time spot so why even bother but on only us player that playing field is now level so we'll see yeah i think the nature of being region local servers will also inhibit um the devil's from off you a lot because the devil's from off you was really fostered by okay the north americans are asleep the europeans take over europeans are sleeping now uh they don't see very much but now the chinese are taking over right and so there was a global a global initiative to lock down resources like that right yeah i'm uh i don't know how you deal with devil's from off you specifically um in general i dislike the idea although i uh admire the effort um because they they spent a lot of time and it's something that has become kind of like this pet thing for a certain number of players that like this is the reason why they play wow is to farm devil's or and make like all this gold by artificially capping the supply of devil's or leather i think there are ways that you can fight it without specifically going after those players which is might be more was like but changing they're varying their spawn points they don't all spawn in the same spot every single time so you can't you know camp the spawn point because they have patrols right we all know that the devil's source have patrols surely they could spawn at various points along those patrols that would cut down on on the ability for the devil's or mafia to cut to like have full monopoly over every spawn and also varying their spawn timers and locations uh would help fight it i'm against being heavy-handed and fighting against player made systems because those are dynamic and really cool in the end of the world um but the cross faction collusion that comes with it where alliance just don't kill the whore that they're working with because the whore are there to kill other alliance that show up that's really dangerous uh to be at ends against kind of the ideal of the server so i don't know they're going to deal with it i think that there's interesting ways they can solve it but the cross faction collusion it's it's dangerous mm-hmm yeah and i i'm not sure how cross faction collusion plays out in the to us but it would be either way it'd be very hard to prove if it's happening in discord and you know what i mean if it's if it's off platform yeah for sure i mean you can just observe player behavior and see like alliance and whore staying next to each other for hours at a time and then but one of those factions is attacking other alliance or whore they're showing up um so you can just observe player behavior but it requires a lot of work on the GM side that they're probably not going to want to invest their main hours in mm-hmm guys so we're going to take a few more questions maybe a couple more questions here but just as a reminder for anybody who missed it earlier we are doing another giveaway this week the giveaway is in the chat right now if you guys haven't followed myself tips and stay safe then you guys can do that through that giveaway and if you have already done it you just have to go and check the boxes basically and you are eligible to win one of three blizzcon virtual tickets and you guys can do the do the classic demo we had one giveaway already we'll be doing three a week three last week through this week and then three next week as well before blizzcon so we'll be doing a total of nine tickets as part of classic cast you guys have been very supportive of us and what we're doing and it's it's been really really awesome so we kind of want to uh now that we actually have our first taste of classic we want to give back to you guys so uh the link to that is in the chat right now for those of you guys watching on youtube it's going to be in the comments one of your watching this i'll pin it to the top of the comments so um let me see if i can scroll back up here i saw a question here that i liked see but the spirit um uh debuff slots what do you want to see with debuff slots i can guess eight and 16 yeah yeah well i play a warlock so i wouldn't mind 16 i guess there's still the remaining question like will they limit it to 16 which i think they will i i don't i don't know about eight we'll see i think it'll be 16 though yeah so i actually uh i have a blue post from eonics from 2006 where basically he explained that the debuff slot limit when they went from eight to 16 it wasn't a design decision they said very little to do with design and balance it was mostly a technical limitation and then they decided up to 16 and uh you know eventually it went higher than that but i don't know i thought that was really interesting because i think a lot of people a lot of people myself included thought it was more of a design design decision um but then no it turns out it was more of a technical thing so i think that plus the fact that they're going off at 1.12 is just gonna it leads me to believe the it leads me to assume that they're probably just gonna go 16 debuff slots yeah if if they made the decision to not have a debuff one it would really change the way that some classes played maybe for the better um it won't maybe rogues will use their rupture and and other abilities for damage over times um but it would impact hunters a lot where they could then use uh serpent sting and warlocks obviously can use multiple dots to increase their damage but the problem is that if you increase the debuff limit then everyone's damage is going to go up yeah and then they'd have to counter it with the damage and health basically you have to counter it with increase in the health and who knows if you get the balance right and it's just going to change the way that each class is played now i don't think that's necessarily bad for hunters because hunters are bad in vanilla in part because serpent sting is not a good as a debuff as other debuffs are so they're not allowed to use it at least in top end guilds which cuts their dps down really badly so it's like kind of like they lose on both ends there uh to the point where you don't even you're not supposed to bring multiple like more than three hunters and hunters is one of the most played classes so then they kind of shut out from top end raiding that's that's a problem but i don't think it's necessarily can be solved in vanilla i don't think that we should go out of our way to solve class balance stuff like that um we should i think we should leave at 16 and let guilds deal with the 16 debuff limit as they would want to deal with i i personally want to i think i think even if the reason for only having eight initially was a technical reason the first couple raids in vanilla wow were balanced around eight right they were tuned around that regardless of of the reason why there was eight that's what they were tuned around right i think it would trivialize molten core and next to this layer black mean layer um definitely if you started off with 16 the other thing the eight debuffs matter thanks to differences in pvp i can only have debuffs on players too so and big pvp battles like in arathi basin or something like that although arathi basin did not exist when eight debuffs existed in vanilla um but those big pvp battles you might have opportunity chances where you could have eight debuffs and then things start falling off because a debuff moment has been reached that would be interesting yeah i think it'll be i think it'll be cool to see how they approach it i i really do think whenever they do go into you know not the demo necessarily but whenever they go into the beta like or an alpha or whatever i think that testing period is actually going to be really really important in terms of them figuring out you know assuming they want to go with 16 debuff slots okay how does this affect kill times do we need to increase the health do we need to increase any sort of damage that the bosses are doing and uh we mostly talk about rating but i think that's what most the nitty gritty of what we're talking about applies to uh more than the leveling process and stuff like that um yeah for sure um guys i think uh i think it's about that time we had a great time here with nano uh who was head of quality assurance for nostalrius he was in the meeting with blizzard whenever they uh they were sharing what they learned with nostalrius stay safe tips who uh who had to leave where we're all very very thankful that uh that you joined us today man that was uh this has been really fun it was great dude yeah yeah i uh i love wow i love classic wow especially so anytime i get the chance to chat about it and share a little bit of whatever insight i have um i i always enjoy it and i said this earlier to you guys off off stream but i'll say it on stream as well is that i appreciate uh all that you guys do um i streaming and youtube being and doing what you guys do is is a lot of work and you guys have carried the banner for classic wow forward and some of you even before you knew there would be a thing so that you guys have been doing this consistently in classic cast and your individual streaming uh i appreciate it as a consumer of your content and i'm excited for when classic releases finally and you guys can hopefully you know your dividends will pay off uh when classic comes out and you're you're getting or subs or followers uh and uh at the end of the day that you can support yourselves and your families with what you do so that means a lot thank you so much yeah i really appreciate it i'm tearing up dude thank you very much i'm yeah for sure for sure i mean it was great here and everything i mean just uh you know the stuff that we didn't know about seeing how support we're here and how supportive en was and uh you know like you said like the brat kind of gets the brunt end of it from the community but he was actually much more supportive of classic than than really anybody knows that's really really cool yeah that's big really really cool big news yeah i know a lot of people were worried with him being the new president of blizzard but i i from everything that i've heard he's a very good guy and he's on board with classic and he's helping pushing it forward yep yep i i agree so uh i've had a lot of fun uh being here uh maybe i'll be back again someday yeah sounds great thank you very much for coming on man we really appreciate it probably in the hills of elwyn or uh duritar what on on the demo get in contact with us and let's test some stuff dude let's do it okay that'll be fun yeah that'll be great that'll be great guys thank you so much for joining us today and uh i'll continue my stream after this i'll stream for a little while longer and uh i'll see you guys here in a few minutes thank you guys so much take care everyone see you