 Welcome welcome Welcome everybody. Welcome to class cast number 16 We're here with tips where it was stay safe myself as fan and we're joined by Kevin Jordan Who's actually one of the three original game designers hired on to the World of Warcraft team? Kevin could you tell us how we got started with Blizzard and what exactly you did on the Watt team? Hi, everyone. Yeah, my name is Kevin Jordan and I I got my start As one of the original three game designers I was sort of the second full-time game designer and The third that the original game designer was on ad-hav But I was the he was only part-time at the time taking a break from this last project And so I was hired in as the second full-time and the third actual designer on the team So I was there close to the beginning and certainly for all the foundational decision-making what not for vanilla wow Right So, you know you so you told us beforehand that you had a big involvement with a lot of the A lot of the class design you did a lot of the original spell tables What what what class did you probably have the most I guess the most input on and then the most impact on Or what classes I should say Well all of them honestly, they're they're yeah, we didn't have it at the beginning We didn't have enough game designers to actually split them up So they sort of all fell in my lap and I had to treat them all as my That's my children and make sure that none of them were the favorites and that kind of thing right Just to clarify didn't I didn't actually do like a lot of the math on the spell tables and whatnot like We had a technical designer who was amazing for that and also Alan at ham started with the original tables Just to define a lot of that stuff. We'd have meetings on how things should go and what the basics were but Yeah, my my job was game design right rather than Numbers design or math design and that kind of thing just super important to the way, you know a game plays out But yeah, my focus was always came design, so And just to hear you say it real quick the staff of Jordan is named after you, right? Yes Okay, awesome. That's pretty cool Yeah, is there a reason why it was a staff and not some other random item well stone of Jordan was from Diablo and that became sort of the currency of the game Because gold was so meaningless But that was not named after me, but it was so iconic in that game That people felt like well, we need to have our own Jordan item and we actually have it short right here on the team So let's make a Let's make a staff So they may end up making a staff and then I got some items in their name after my girls as well Someone made them those really nice. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah So we um You know we we got a chance like I said earlier We got a chance to talk a little bit with Kevin a little bit beforehand and Kind of got to pick your brain a little bit ahead of time, but one thing that a lot of people have a Lot of people have talked about this before and it's and it's how the philosophy of the game particularly in terms of like class design and Just the direction of the game is or like the game the direction that the game was heading changed a lot throughout the course of the game and Particularly in cataclysm because one of those one of those things where in vanilla in burning crusade Even in wrath it kind of felt like you were playing more of a class and then in cataclysm It changed to where you're playing more of a spec What was your guys general General classes on philosophy whenever you guys were originally making the game. Yeah So we started with we wanted a certain number of classes We settled on nine and we wanted to make sure all three roles are represented We had games like ever quest to draw from in Dark Age and some other games in terms of like how Group combat functions and that kind of thing So we were pretty well versed in the roles, you know that we wanted tank healer DPS essentially and Then from there it was a trying to get in as many of the heroes and units from the previous Warcraft games Into the game, right? So we wanted people to be able to feel like I played the RTS and I can take control of one of these individual units and play as that as that character In a game where I'm seeing the world that I've I've seen only from a top-down perspective For the first time and like this 3d environment, so Well, so we just went through the units and we looked at what kinds of characters are these and we also had a lot of different races And we had different Sort of the tropes, you know from fantasy games, which is we had our warriors. We had our mages and we had our Ranged range classes and so we set out to make all of those and we ended up with nine sort of represented all of those things But like each class was a sort of generic template so that the details could be filled in Later on right so warrior was essentially It was a simple name It was a simple concept and it was a template so that people that wanted to be say a torn chieftain could make a torn warrior They wanted to be a mountain king. They can make a dwarf warrior. They wanted to be a And I hesitate to say this A demon hunter they could make a night elf warrior Really? Wow, and so that was basically the idea we we create these generic templates That people could sort of latch on to and then customize with their race And then some other mechanic right to differentiate themselves from all the other people that were also that class We didn't have concept of the talent system yet at that time And we actually referred to him as hero classes Which we thought what we would do which was after a point of being a warrior if you would graduate to this Hero class version which would be your mountain kings or torn chieftains or you know demon hunters and that would change who you were And what abilities you have and since potentially some look stuff, you know like oh now suddenly you have wings because you're a demon hunter, right? and Then later on the heroes the hero classes idea had some flaws to it and some potential hurdles and so we ended up working up this talent system idea and That's what I ended up Creating that talent system which Again was designed to give you a sense of differentiation from All the other people that shared that class with you So the idea was you start simple and then allow players to inject their own creativity into what they want to be so that they stood out and that was That was reinforced as well and both the look like we wanted every class to look Sort of different Their play mechanics would identify them, right? So you look at a guy and you say okay Well, what is he and it's like well, he's got a demon following. Okay. I understand what he is immediately It's got a pet, you know, a wolf following. I know what he is. He just dropped a totem I know what he is right like we wanted to make sure all the classes had sort of this identifier that Told people what they were and it was different from everyone else So it was really important for us to have a visual, you know, sort of a silhouette that was different A play mechanic that was different But leave enough room for people to put their own creativity and spin on things So that they felt different than everyone else because for all warriors to feel the same or interchangeable felt like a Yeah, and as far as the talent trees go those in my mind are very reminiscent of the Diablo 2 talent trees So did you work on any other did you work on Diablo 2 or Warcraft 3 or when did you get your started Blizzard? So I started actually in tech support you know, I'm a I Consider myself sort of poster child for how it used to work, right? Which is you get your job in tech support or in QA or as a GM and then you Work your way up to a development spot and that actually was my history, right? It doesn't really work that way anymore It's really tough to do to go that route these days But back in the day, that's how it worked for me and and by the end of wow I'd say probably 60 to 70 percent of the team was actually made up of people that were like me Had started lowering the company and work their way out. So mm-hmm I got my start in tech support to that for a couple years and then a spot opened up on the design team I applied thrown in but work world of Warcraft was my first game and Yeah, so that's how I got my start and I didn't work on Diablo Diablo was the Blizzard north You know brainchild and I played a ton Diablo obviously and so some of the Way that the skill trees worked in that game We found I found interesting But I wanted to put a different spin on it because I didn't want There were a couple things I wanted to avoid. One was that sense of all in on something In Diablo, it was like once you put your first point in a skill You tended to want to put all 20 of your points. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So there was very little like Deviation, right? It was basically just I make the one choice and then I just execute on those choices for the rest of my character's life Right. So that's why you have smaller numbers of talents per tier We also wanted the gold medal big big purchase, you know moments where it was like, okay I just got my moral strike or I just got you know, whatever it is. It's in the bottom of my tree We put those at 11 21 and 31 so that people could be like, oh, wow I just made a big purchase it changes my dynamic changes the way I play what you just said there is so important I think because in vanilla when we talked about this a little bit before we went live There's a sense of you're not playing the class or sorry, you're not playing the spec You're playing the class right today if you're playing retail. Wow, or a you could just be an affliction shaman and Affliction warlock. Sorry an affliction And that's all you ever have to be you never have to play any other specs if you don't want to Whereas in vanilla. Wow, you have to dabble in and out like you have points in each in each talent tree, right? And yeah, that that goes to the identity like again people being able to be creative within their class choice You put it put you can put your energies to make yourself distinct right and so a big part of that is well I want I'm a warrior sure but I want to be a dual wielding warrior Or I want to be a two-hander warrior or I want to be a sword board warrior And so those are your core choices on how you were gonna play the game and Those choices weren't always balanced like especially correct. Yeah warriors got a little bit luckier. I think that some other classes You know from a philosophical standpoint Kevin, what do you think? What do you think the the ratio should be between balance and identity? When should identity give way to balance or vice versa? It seemed like in vanilla It was more towards identity lost less towards balance. Do you think that was the right decision at the time? Absolutely, I think balance is perfect balance is really overrated right like in games and You'll hear like this was a quote from one of the Starcraft to dev members where it was like In designing intentional imbalances, right? It's like one of the goals Because you want there to be like in a game like Starcraft you want there to be counters and People trying to figure things out right and what's that sense of mastery, right? So you leave it a little bit open despite how balanced Starcraft was it was still there were still places where you could show your mastery, right? Right sort of exploiting. Oh, I found the combo, right? Which is really important for players to feel like they've beaten the game designers, right? Like they figured out something the game designer never intended, right? And We're so smart, right? And so and and I knew that this would always exist like balance was really important to me in terms of like Trying to avoid the stigma that we all saw like oh, you're this spec. You'll never be invited. That was bad But I cared a lot more about people feeling like they were a thing. I am a fire mage. I am a Retribution paladin, you know, whatever it is Rather than Everything being perfectly balanced because perfectly balanced can lead to homogenization I think you're in your pursuit of it. I should say like perfect balance is sort of this ideal that people think that we aspire to but The pursuit of that has a lot of dangerous like opportunities where yeah, things get homogenized, right? And you want to avoid that at all costs because people people want to feel different, right? Like people want to feel like they're they're a special, you know snowflake essentially and they can't be easily replaced by whatever else is out there, right? And they do that in various ways one of which is You know creating an identity for themselves and the other is, you know, how they play like from Competency standpoint, right? Yeah, I mean There was imagine a game where there's only one class and one spec You know, everyone would be exactly the same the game would be perfectly balanced And I think you know, this is one of the biggest criticism by here of vanilla. Wow is You know, everything's not balanced perfectly one to one to one to one But I think the rock paper scissors nature of the balance of vanilla was actually I really like it a lot actually, right? There's this whole game. I'm trying to remember the name but it was a it was a pen and paper role-playing game and Your character was essentially one number. It was really tongue-in-cheek, right? But it was like you were a three and everything you tried to do you were a three at right like You that was your you know, it was so funny because it was like, yeah, perfect balance exactly You know, everyone at the table is a three So None of us had any identity and it was just it was so funny that somebody took the time to make this game But it proved that how little perfect balance actually matters when it comes to delivering fun and interesting compelling content things like that So right for sure. So speaking of balance one of the big things in vanilla. Wow It's criticized. I guess is how hybrids play out whether it's paladin shamans druids And I think to some extent, you know, you can even throw priests and warriors in there Right as far as the comparison because like I've always considered warriors to be a hybrid class because they're a DPS and a tank So in a sense, they're a hybrid but how did you guys? Your guy your your guys original like let's take paladin for example because I play paladin Your guys original design philosophy behind a paladin was to have a paladin up on the front lines fighting with everybody and Kind of doing off heels like like a support DPS class, right? But then did you guys kind of change how you? Change the itemization of the gear and kind of how things how things were presented to the player base based on player data of how Players were treating the classes like shamans and paladins and whatnot and having them heal and raids mostly Well, yes and no, okay, so the yeah the original intent was to make a class that Fulfilled that you know the purpose of every class is to fulfill the fantasy that the player has when they come into it Right. What is the fantasy behind a paladin? What the fantasy is? I am heavy armor. I have a big weapon I've got this this book as well, which you know is my book of light and I weighed into the middle of things and a very durable and I cast supports bells and things like that So that's the fantasy, right? When it ended up happening because of the math of the game is He became you know a flash of light spammer and he would sit in the back nice and safe From cleaves and area of effects and just spam flash of light because it was the most efficient keel in the game, right? Efficiency was always a big deal and raids and things like that any fight that took a long time And so we weren't fulfilling the fantasy in that sense, right? And the paladin tank the prop paladin wasn't strong enough at tanking and the rep paladin wasn't strong enough at DPS and So over time people got accustomed to that's what a paladin is They got accustomed to the fact that he's a flash of light spammer his role is to sit in the back cast He'll super efficiently and carry the rage of victory, right? And so all of the items required to be that had to be for the holy speck, right? Because people wanted to be competitive, right? So people needed those items. So you drop a ret hammer that had strength and you know damage on it and Everyone would be in an uproar because it was like we just did all this work to kill this boss What I need is a you know healing Healing item and what I got was something for a speck that I'll never play right and Then of course the retidans out there were like, oh sweet Whether they were hidden retidans or not. It's just like, okay. I'm actually a closet retidant, but Can inspect talents back in the day because Do you go off and solo and you're like, oh, I can't wait to take this hammer for a spin So it's the greatest moment ever, but you have to pretend. Oh, I guess I'll take the hammer, you know, like Yeah, so some of that was you know, obviously driven by how the community was reacting to the game design and the emerging gameplay that was occurring but Again, the goal was to make sure that we were delivering on the fantasy that a lot of people had coming into the game Which is to be a hammer swinging front line support spell casting Paladin right so But it was a long road the second the second he got sort of pigeonholed into the back lines through and holy light It became a pretty long road not just get the map right but to bring people around, you know, because Once the stigman's created. It's really tough to like overcome that with that that stigma lasts to this day I think right so Yeah, and I remember we would do internal rate testing and I I made some Technique you know tweaks to the paladin. I was like here you go I fixed it reddits and reddits are actually absolutely smoking the DPS charts and these And I was like, okay, it's fixed Yeah, and it's just like well, we can't really go out like this because they're ridiculous and all the rogues and warriors And everyone else are gonna complain right so Again, you have to bring it back again But it's funny how if we had just gone out with one pack cycle of them being broken powerful That would have probably fixed the stigma right in a short amount of time Yeah, cuz then they would have been considered right but it took so long by doing trying to balance it well For people to come around they're like, yeah, okay reddit and maybe maybe it's good enough Like if you get all your gear and you learn your rotations, but we kind of have our thing go on We have our rogue and warrior for that job. We don't need you we need you in the back room in your heels Right, so it's just so difficult to like overcome that so I think I think one of the big things And I've talked about this before but it totally falls in line with what you were just saying Paladins weren't reworked until the 1.9 patch and then on top of that They didn't have a dedicated ret set for the tier sets until the avengers set in a Q40 Right, so kind of the combination of everything kind of hitting in 1.9 And then you've gone through, you know eight patches of the game Just like you were saying where it's like well the healer or the paladins were all in a healing role It ended up being a situation where anybody who was progressed far enough in Raid content and he gilded like that then they had their paladins as healers It wasn't something where like, you know If they got lucky they could maybe pick up some of the gear and do it in PvP or Anything like that, but as long as their guild stays together then there wasn't really a situation where somebody could transition That's why like, you know for me and you know for a lot of people like having playing vanilla wow patch 1.12 and going through the entire game with the Endgame talents kind of changes how the early game plays out quite a bit specifically for hybrids to for paladins Yeah, and one thing we learned about hybrids just a quick note is that If you're 10% behind at your core competency Then you're not invited, right? Mm-hmm. That's all it takes. And so this idea that a hybrid would be Jack of all trades master of none just absolutely fails in an MMO side setting You have to be like within 5% within striking distance the best at that goal in order to be viable, right? Well, that was one of the ways you guys made that up Yeah, and so and that's how fine the margins were that we discovered, right? So it did change our philosophy on how to balance them, right? Regarding that other thing you were talking about how long it took to sort of put in patches for the reddit in Some of that is you know community pressure like the squeaky wheel right getting the grease you'd be surprised it or maybe not but the All of these all the competitive players are the usually the most vocal and They're most vocal about the things that they're currently using that they need to be better, right? And so the elements that they were using they were not using the reddit, right? They were using the holy palette and so The number of complaints we got about holy palette and was through the roof compared to reddit And who was just like this lost spec, right? Like We still got complaints about the reddit and like hey, where's my you know hammer swinging paladins in the front row? And it's like well, he's not raiding that's for one And so most of the complaints we were getting are about things that people were using where your tanks being better You know holy paladins being better Frostmage is being better, right? Like I think that I think that realization really really shows in tier 3 gear in next Rammus, which is really itemized perfectly for just the most optimal spec for each class You know the the tier 3 paladin gear is holy tier 3 warrior gear is protection exactly And that you know, that's because we're trying to serve, you know like The the way the game is being successful, right? So for us to take take time off from trying to satisfy what became like this just tidal wave of feedback, right? because we were expecting You know if we do really well about 500,000 subscribers, right? And then all of a sudden there were just millions and the tidal wave of feedback we were getting was just like so powerful And it you know since we're human beings and it's like we at the end of the day we want to make people happy There's always that pressure and so you know as a game designer You try to eliminate that pressure and just try to do what's best for the game But sometimes the pressure you feel and it's just like well, let's give them what they want Let's give them that holy speck, you know here and we'll get to the reddit in a little bit later No one's playing reddit and at the time Because no one's complaining about it and so we'll put that on the back burner sort of thing But you're saying if you want something just complain really loudly, it's always been the way to everything works Yeah, let me let you know that little secret Yeah, but yeah as a game designer It's like obviously mistakes were made like we should have put more time into making everything better But it was just the easy go-to fix right to say, okay Well, these people that they actually do need things right because I used to have these giant lists of here All the things these classes needs each of the specs need right And it's like okay. Well, I have to pick one I have 27 I got to pick one to work on I can get through five of these before the next patch or whatever right and so I had to prioritize and I had to make you know tough decisions and Unfortunately, even though I was playing a reddit in you know, pretty much my entire wild career. I also had a max level mage undead mage. I Wasn't able to get to my class, you know, and I played reddit in pretty faithfully, you know throughout Wow, it's lifetime when I was playing it But the other thing to consider is, you know, not everyone's playing at that competitive level, right? So like for me personally, it's like I would play with people from work and we do it very casually And we we will not casually in the sense that we were still hitting sort of, you know, we go to lower Black Rock Spire and We had our DPS Basically heavy group. We had a tank and 4 DPS and we called it the burn it down spec, right? Because we had to kill it before it killed our tank because we didn't really have any healing But we made it work right and a lot of us were pretty good players, you know, and It was just very chill, right? And that's how a lot of people play the game They're just playing with their friends and doing crazy weird things and they're not hitting the cutting edge or the bleeding edge content And so the fact that they're a reddit in or an off-spec of something doesn't really matter. They're just having a good time, right? So We also just felt like yeah, as long as that's still going on and people are having a good time then not everything has to be, you know, perfect right in terms of Rated competitiveness and that kind of thing. Right. I completely agree hundred percent like it's crazy Like a lot of people say, you know, some of the classes in vanilla are completely imbalanced But to be honest five out of the seven raids, every raid except AQ 40 and Naxx Rammus And even AQ 40 to a certain extent you can bring a lot of different classes, even some optimal classes But like Molten Core, you know, Zoologroob, stuff like that You don't necessarily need to bring the best spec of the best class 40 out of 40, 100% of the time and yeah, I think that's that's great design I was just gonna say like I would even say into Naxx and everything else It's just about like how well you know the fights and how well you know to optimize like your own character Like it's never a situation where like you can't clear the content with you can clear the content in the game all the content in the game with 39 people or you know, it's if it's a 20 man 19 people Like if you're down one person if somebody dies right at being in the fight That doesn't mean you're not gonna be able to kill Kel'thuzad So that 40th person is a boomkin is you know, whatever. Yeah, it's it's not gonna You know, there's a lot more problems if you guys wipe then just that one guy Again, that's an outlet. I don't love problem, right? It's like what what's your approach to this game? What what lens are you viewing the game through and if that lens is hyper competitive world first rate progression, right? then every decision that you make is Revolves through that lens right or goes through that lens and so somebody trying to bring a reddit absolutely not right like Because you are the highest end but you take that outlook away and that's typically who leads these skills, right? Like gills are usually led by achievers, right? I think guys that are pushing that envelope and so You know the rest of it kind of trickles down, right? But if you if you have an outlook that's more social or more experimental or you know Whatever it is then you're gonna have all kinds of weird stuff going on and it's gonna be fun And you're still gonna clear the content you might just be a little bit slower Right for sure, but that sense of Experimentation I think is super important to a game right and once people stop experimenting and just assume They lock in on what the best thing is and and it never changes, right? That's when a game stagnates and well What's crazy about vanilla? 15 years later people are still experimenting. They're still finding new meadows. It's right. The game was so complex Yeah, that's That's healthy, right? Like it's really good for people to circle around that stuff over and over and over and and again the contextual Well, I added this one piece. What does that do to the rest of my build? Right is super compelling, right? If it's just like well, okay I took my my strength and attack power In both of these and the next item does the same next item Does the same right there's never any context for you switching up or coming up with your whole plan or There's no more evaluation, right? Cuz ideally and the old, you know Effective hit point charts that we used to have, you know back in the day How one thing could change the context of everything else that's that's the wonders of math, right is that You introduce one new variable and it affects everything else potentially if that stuff is intent, you know designed intentionally It's pretty amazing, right? So Our goal was to create a system that allowed for a lot of that. Yeah real quick before we get too far ahead We know we we we got so excited. We just kind of got rolling But I did forget to announce the winners of our last class cast virtual ticket winners Yeah, the the classic demo and all this stuff but the winners are Kuro Soler Lance hutch won and a pretty so you guys should I have your guys emails here I'll be sending you guys emails. We'll get in touch about Getting you guys your your blizzcon virtual tickets and also We have started our new and final giveaway This is the this is the third giveaway for three tickets that we're going to be doing You can type exclamation point giveaway in the chat to get the link and it's not rigged unbelievable. Okay, but Yeah, exclamation point giveaway in the chat as been hosted us earlier as been Thank you so much for that if you guys are still watching over in asman's channel You guys can kind of come on over to mine and exclamation point giveaway somebody's gonna type it you can just click the click the links there and Do that class cast giveaway for sure so Yeah, sorry tips you can go ahead. Oh, yeah I just wanted to ask you know regarding like like you said one one piece can basically change how you play an entire class There's a lot of that in vanilla We talked about this a little bit before on the call about wolves head helm the druid helmet that could just completely change how they play When you guys were designing items, did you ever say okay? This specific item we want to design it for this class Or did you ever expect a certain outcome by equipping that item beyond just you know? This will make a class stronger or something like that. Yeah, I mean it was never Obviously the set pieces were designed for a specific class specific specific role in mind but a Lot of the items were designed to be extremely flexible right so that people could do crazy experimental things and our original item designer I think he did a great job and he took a ton of flak from People complaining about items and whatnot and that's true for anyone doing game design Every time an item doesn't satisfy a particular outlook or particular person's idea of what that item should do They complain right? and some of those complaints were actually Should have been directed at me because if you guys remember there were some pieces for the mage that were agility spirit, right and That's because I told him that All classes would want all attributes and certain scenarios and so make things that Have weird combinations, right? And he probably came into my office ten times. Are you sure? But that was always the goal the goal was always to just create this really experimental canvas that people could play with right? experiment and do crazy things and And the reality most people just looked at that and said this is complete garbage. What were they thinking, right? And eventually we tried to narrow it down. Okay. Well castors no longer want to chill We'll soften our philosophy a little bit, you know But there were still places where you know spirit would actually do the job, you know like There were points with certain, you know critical mass with spirit where it actually did what it was trying to do Which is making it super sustainable, right? But yeah, he unfortunately he took a lot of flak internally and externally I swore to him. No, this is gonna be a thing. We have to allow for this to breathe, you know, so I'll tell you that one of the most frustrating things in the world for me as a melee is whenever you're Swinging at a mage and they managed to dodge something so right. It's not all for naught In early vanilla wow, you know with leveling gear and early dungeon gear and raid gear Maybe T1 and maybe a bit into T2 especially leveling gear where you have, you know Plate gloves with spirit strength and agility. You're like, why is there spirit on this? Right, so that's why I was experimental then you guys kind of honed in on what's really optimal as the game went on, right? There's a there's also a philosophy. I Remember Richard Garfield came by Blizzard and gave us a little talk and he talked about two things that I remember specifically one is The psychology of randomness and what's okay random and what's not okay random in games but the other was if You have no bad cards and people won't know what a good card is, right? And so that's actually a design philosophy that a lot of people use which is To say the bad gear is there to help define the texture of the overall experience, right You have to have a scale and this is true with Experiences and it's true with gear and it's true with decision-making, you know, like that's one of those things like you would be surprised How many people? You know come up to you and say wow So I put this debuff on him that makes my fire spells hit harder and then I hit him with a fire spell dude It was amazing and they feel like they've Discovered the most magic combo in the world and you're like cool. Okay. Good. You did it You know like but they feel super happy, right? Like Obviously, most of us are advanced beyond that point. We're like, you know, of course, right? Like that's just what you do, but Everyone wants to feel smart when they're making decisions and so allowing people to you know that Opportunity by sometimes having bad gear is actually important You know to go off that and this is pretty nitty-gritty This is talking about spell penetration and resistance values on bosses talking about spells hitting harder, right? Yeah So spell penetration was added in patch 1.9. I believe was with with on crotch prior to that there was no spell pen in the game a lot of people say that this stat was useless for PvE Because raid bosses didn't have enough resistance to make it worth it So what were the resistance ranges on bosses? Is it worth it to have spell penetration in? PvE scenarios or is it just more of a PvP stat? What was the philosophy behind that? Yeah, so the goal of it was and You know your mileage may vary because I don't remember how it actually turned out in different areas But the goal of spell pen was it was more valuable on a per-staff point level then Spell power was if you were fighting something with resist So that was the goal with it. It was just better until you dropped the creature's resistance to zero so That was the philosophy behind it so it absolutely is better if you're fighting something that has resist to use Then just regular spell power. So and speaking of resistances then we talked about this again a little bit before the call But there's a big I guess I don't want to say misconception But there's a big enigma surrounding resistances, especially on bosses in vanilla. Wow Do you remember by any chance like did you guys use an actual figure? Like do you remember like a static figure that used for resistances or anything like that? Do you remember how much you know? Frost resistance, you know Cthun had or something like that like the base resistances for all the different schools Where was it something? It was Not offhand. Yeah. Yeah Unfortunately, no, I know that we wanted it to be like lower, right? Like I don't remember the specific values, but we wanted it to be such that it would Encourage you to use, you know fireball versus frostful But not make it so that the frost mage couldn't actually be invited, right? So That was the goal. It was never our intention to force anyone to switch specs basically in order to do content. So You like even molten core is what we talked about before but even molten core Which is just like pure fire and lava and everything else like we didn't want it to feel like nope You're a frost mage. You can't come here. Or sorry, you're a fire mage. You can't come here You have to be a frost or a cane mage. So right So unlike you said we you said this pride was going live because there were situations in Diablo 2 where if you were a certain spec You'd encounter a mob that was just completely immune and so you didn't want to replicate that same issue and wow Yeah, and in Diablo like I didn't say this for it was like you could just skip that guy and go to the next or Reload the instance or whatever it was and reload the game, but in wow obviously in progression. That's not an option. So Yeah, we didn't want to punish people too much And we also considered the entire experience to be What we were after right so it actually creates again that texture of like oh this boss is I'm not going to top the DPS meters as A fire mage because he's got a little bit of fire resist the next one though. I'm gonna go to town again, you know, so But all in all, you know, I'm gonna be real good here. I'm gonna be less good here It gives everyone sort of their moment to shine right like you see that through the bosses nowadays where it's just like Yeah, may they really strong here or you know hunter safety PS was a big thing back in the day You know because it was like yeah, you can go to town and just feign death whenever and he's way in the back So it was not ever getting damaged. So everyone's like oh man hunters of it The best because our healers never have to worry about them and they're doing DCP. Yes, right? So That was an important aspect. So we wanted different classes and different specs to have their moments to shine But when you're progressing and again, you're It's that cutting edge, you know progression All that really happens is you force everyone to the right spec you get all the people you absolutely need for this one thing You knock it down and then you go to the next one and create a plan for the next one. So But that wasn't the whole game to us that you know and serving that community wasn't the whole point of our jobs, right? So, right, you know, we had a bigger picture in the bigger world in your community of players and where you go, right? I kind of want to reel it back a little bit and this is a question that I've always had but I believe it's the I think it's called like the gold flecked gloves in Dead mines their cloth gloves that give you strength and intellect. I think it's like four and four strength and intellect Do you know if those kind of items were put into the game? Like it's it's in the early levels. It's in dead mines. If something like that drops off a boss It's cloth so anybody in the game can wear it and it gives strength and it gives intellect Was it made that way so that if you had a small five-man group? Somebody in the group was going to be able to use it or was that just like one of those goofy things? Yes, some of the like the greens were randomized, right? So Right, they just had different, you know, much like Diablo. They had different suffixes and prefixes, right? Right, the blues were more than the purples were more handcrafted. So, right, right? But again, the intention was always just they create this experimental canvas for people to get things Okay, and when you look at them from a big picture, you know, it's like oh that doesn't make any sense, right? But for us the sense it made was someone will take this and experiment with it play with it and see what they can do when a certain Spec on a certain class with certain talent choices Other gear, you know and find some way to have fun with it, right? Yeah, so you wanted to give players agency and decision-making capability. That's that sounds that's awesome. That sounds crazy. That's crazy Really really just kept things fresh, right? Like it also led to people stacking their banks with all kinds of stuff that they would get around to playing with some day Put all this pressure on inventory space. Hey, that's what sells sells those Mm-hmm, so it's those 20 slot bags Right for sure so, you know speaking of Kind of we're talking about spell penetration and people aren't really sure tip said it was like an enigma like, you know, what? What are the resistance values of these bosses and and pretty much? I would say about half the game and people have made these, you know private servers fan servers and kind of have watched videos and this and that to kind of piece together what they think the game is but one of the things that When we've talked about and a lot of people are talking about this too is that whenever The official like wow classic releases their Blizzard is going to have a lot of the original data and how the game was made so We would hope right? That's how that's how it works, but um, but yeah, so We're we're really excited to see like, okay We can go back and test now everything that we've learned in the last, you know, however many years and Go back and like oh wait, this is actually how this works This is actually how this works right because and one thing we specifically talked about was about paladins and seal of command And I was really excited to hear this, you know a little little ret buff in classic On private servers seal of command can get partially resisted and you said it was specifically designed to not get partially resisted Yeah Yeah, if it lands it's not reduced essentially right so yeah, it's just funny because because like on a lot of private servers and stuff like that like That's just how it works. So It's just that's just like one example of something that is not scripted correctly, you know Yeah, it's possible. Um, I certainly Am confident in that answer, but it's also entirely possible. I've forgotten something about The way we wanted to balance certain things or whatever it is. So Um, I wouldn't be shocked if somebody dug up something that proved me wrong Some old patch note that I wrote or whatever, you know, right? Um, that's certainly the way I intended it. Uh, certainly the philosophy behind fully damage Um, and so that it'd be basically there's no resistance in the game because it always felt feared like who would have fully resistance um certainly all the bad guys would want it and None of the players would really want it because None of the bad guys are going to be throwing holy damage at you. So Well, yeah, I mean Yeah, I'm going in pvp guys, I'm going to stack up on my holy resist here and Just make sure the red is the worst possible For sure Did you guys go ahead? Go ahead. Go ahead. Uh, did you guys balance the game at all? Like classes at all like around the leveling process. Did you ever think to yourselves like Oh at level 20, you know, how's this class doing versus this class? Or was it all kind of focused towards the end game? Or did you just Kind of make classes as unique as possible and just went along with it? Uh, so for my part it was to make them as unique and fun and have good play patterns, right? Our technical designer was responsible for making everything, you know, sort of balanced And he did an amazing job in terms of like Yes, there are classes that can go one to 60 faster But it's not by such a huge margin that everyone's just like Wow, why would I ever play this class, right? So Even though it never became like our overriding focus It was sort of in the ballpark, right, which I was I was pleased with But far more important to me was just that people had fun, right? I was I was much more focused on the journey than the destination, right? For sure 100 and I I take it as a win that if you ask a player about the various classes and wow They'll say here are my favorites and here are the ones. I absolutely Not I can't stand, right? They absolutely hate them But that mix is totally different depending on who you talk to, right? So It's sort of some of the classes hit certain personalities and certain play styles and others hit others, right? And so It wasn't everyone gravitating towards these four and the rest five are considered tier two or tier three and just sort of forgotten about You play those for fun, but you don't actually play them You play them as a joke. I should say you don't play them for fun or competitiveness or anything like that. So Now that was my goal and I feel like yeah We hit the mark in terms of people getting excited about different classes Were there were there any classes that early on in vanilla white of element you wanted to add but Thematically or balance wise just didn't make the cut into the game Not that I wanted to add. I felt like we had plenty but There was a rune master class that we talked about we We had our eight classes and we wanted one that was sort of the freak class I refer to it as the freak class and a couple other places, but This was the class that was sort of new. It was some offering something different from the classic mmo tropes And just it was basically a brand new unique offering from blizzard entertainments take on the mmo experience, right? And so it came down to the warlock where the rune master and the rune master was going to cover himself with runes be a A hand-to-hand fighter like fist weapons and that kind of thing He would draw runes in the sky or on the ground or whatever and have all kinds of cool magical effects And and basically be sort of monkish in the terms of he was fighting, you know hand-to-hand But the warlock that one was like out of nowhere, right? Where it's like it had no plate like it had no reference material in World of warcraft or in the warcraft universe. There was no rts unit like it Whereas the work the warlock was like. Oh, yeah, we've got these guys, you know, so it was much more More iconic and people could go. Okay. Oh, that sounds really cool. I remember those guys from You know the stories or whatever it is. And so that's so that we ultimately went with the warlock That's crazy that the warlock wasn't the warlock was kind of like an afterthought or bonus class That's a crazy thought. Well, he almost didn't exist. They say Wow, I'd be playing every quest right now Yeah, so I don't want to give the impression it was never going to exist. We always knew that we wanted this free class, but But yeah, we certainly it certainly wasn't like one of the Standards or essential bits that we considered like Like the hunter. I know some people felt like or had heard that the hunter almost didn't make it in as well Um But for us that was so necessary because some people are just really attuned to the pet class, you know having an animal companion and obviously rangers in in various Um You know novels and and you know like aragorn or strider You know, it's the ultimate ranger and so people are going to want to be that right like good with a web A range weapon also kind of good with mail Can move around the forest and stuff like that. So we we felt like that was it was essential And we wouldn't like I don't feel like we would have ever released the game without that sort of essential piece Because where would those people go, you know in terms of? Oh, man, there's no pet class, right? Like I don't want to play the free warlock, you know, so This is a random question you mentioned aragorn. So when vanilla was being developed This is peak lord of the rings movie hysteria. Oh, did that influence your design at all? It's fine because I We all went to see it as a company, right company took us to watch it And I remember saying to a guy after, you know, the intermission because there was intermission one of the movies was so long, right? And I came out and I just basically said I don't know about you But I've been working this whole time right like because that's how so many of us felt like so many of sort like Wow, this is bringing so much that's relevant to what we're working on That some of this stuff is gonna, you know be influencing us to the point where it makes it in the game, right? So Um, absolutely. Absolutely it impacted us and we were all crazy for it Yeah, it was it was the first like Because nowadays we get a mix of quality, right? There's some really good stuff in our sort of culture group And there's still some really bad stuff But before lord of the rings almost all of it was really bad, right? So it was the first like super high quality thing That was essentially dungeon dragons or whatever, you know, like that fantasy representation and it was very high quality. So Yeah, well in a way We have a lot of people asking questions in the chat guys We are gonna do q&a a little bit later So if you guys want to go ahead and start tweeting questions at us and uh hashtag classic cast that's that's what i'll be searching for So feel free to go ahead and start tweeting out some questions. We'll get to that Towards the end, but we don't want to go to quick q&a just yet And then we'll move over to twitch chat as well So, you know speaking of, you know, you talked about the rune master free class Yeah On the vanilla wow box art there is there's been a lot of speculation about this on the vanilla box art There is a night elf with a Like, you know bandana bandana. He's he's blindfolded, right? And he's got two warg waves was and you mentioned demon hunters earlier Whereas demon hunter like one of the original class like one of you guys were originally developing Was you guys thinking about demon hunter at all or was that just thrown in there? No, I mean we we thought of demon hunter in terms of A guy would be able to make a night elf warrior go Uh dual wield and then we would give him, you know, glaive weapons to put in his hand And then eventually we still had this idea of hero classes that He could go on a series of quests to transform his look and and some make potentially some disabilities Dude, that sounds so cool. How did that not make it? Well, so here's the biggest the biggest reason I'll probably say is just Like we already had I should say I already had 27 specs to deal with right So adding a hero system or hero class system on top of that Yeah, um, whereas each Class could then make Interesting choices based on potentially his race So it was a race class specific Thing to put in the game sounds like a balancing nightmare Well, not just from a ball. I'm okay with that, right? But I'm a uh bank for the buck like a big thing for us back in the day was okay Well, who is this content for is it for everyone? Great throw it in Is it for one specific race class combination? Then no, we can't put that in because people are starved for content, right? So um In order to have pulled that off right and that was one of the flaws of the system in order to pull that off We would have had to like trickle them out a few at a time, right? And it would have been a giant nightmare of like Well, who gets the love this time or where's my you know? So it would have been like this mini pr nightmare as well as you know Trying to manage the balancing of it and all that stuff. So It had its issues, but probably just the biggest one was just the bank for the buck, you know People we had classes. We had talents. We have, you know, the specs and We had a warden alliance and we had the races and So we had a lot of combinations available So to go and do that, but that was sort of what we envisioned The demon hunter would be would be and like the hero class extension on top of the night elf warrior dual wheel their choice, right? so night elf warrior theory talents And then he goes and graduates into demon hunter to get some cool wings and that kind of thing Right. I think it's really cool. I think it's really cool that that terminology hero class was used so early on because You guys know when wrath came out the death might was coined this world of workouts first hero class Right. I think that's the only time they used it. I don't think that monks are technically a hero class I don't know that demon hunters with legion are a hero class either. It's only death nights. I think And uh, yeah, so that was sort of the execution on that old idea was and it took a totally different form Which is we'll make a new class. It'll start at a high level We'll consider it a hero class and it'll be super specific in terms of lore and background and You know abilities and it will be its own thing, right? So that's the form hero classes eventually took rather than the old idea it was Just add more classes essentially, which is something I never I always worried about right because the pie was already pretty Pretty split, you know, like we had nine classes. We had all the roles covered and so People were already having trouble sort of getting invited and so every time We added a class was that going to make that pie more problematic essentially? And so I was always really hesitant to add any more classes What I wanted to do was keep making the existing classes and specs more compelling more interesting develop from there, but Yeah, they eventually went a different route. I didn't work on the death night. I didn't develop it but Yeah, so essentially that was the history behind the form that that hero class idea that had been around since the original talks about classes It eventually took the form of the let's just add more classes and and part of the reason for that is because When you ask players what they want in the next expansion A new class is probably right at the top of the list every time That's what players are always clamoring for Despite, you know, again, like what it might do to the game what it might do to the the structure of how people are Interacting with each other socially and grouping and rating and putting people in their guild, you know, all that stuff People just want a new class that's just one of those things that games are traditionally always delivered and Became one of those things that people always asked for so Always tons of pressure for us to add new classes. Right I'm kind of connecting to dots or you said the warlocks were kind of an afterthought when they added death nights And then subsequently when they added demon hunters They pruned a lot of stuff from warlocks and gave it to those classes It's like warlocks. There's always on the freaking talking block man. It's ridiculous Yeah, I mean that's the other problem with uh adding a new class it's like When you have the nine classes and three specs like you've covered tons of class mechanics, right? And the mechanics going most of the time you boil down to into their component parts, right? And so It's like, okay, it looks a little different, but it's still a dot, right? It's like, yeah, once you start adding Once you have 10 classes with thoughts. It's like Is any is is anyone really a dot class anymore? Do you feel special about being a dot class or unique as a dot class, right? so You're just stepping on the toes of someone else every time you add like unless you come up with totally brand new stuff Which is doable. It's just harder to do, you know, it's like Who's going to invent the next actual quest, you know Goal, right? It's either go fetch me something go kill something or escort something, right? Like It's not like new quest formula popping up all the time So it's it's the same with classes. There isn't limited to science space in terms of its components Um, and we want everyone to feel special, right? So So We've had You know before we had you on we had john stats on we had mark current on And all three of you guys have mentioned dark age of camelot, you know talking about like, you know influences the game Uh inspiration Did you guys draw any inspiration for like the the hero class idea? It sounds kind of like the reverse of The original class system in dark age of camelot where you would get to level five and then you would choose It was it kind of like that except flipped. It's kind of towards the end instead Oh, yes, uh, it wasn't the first time this idea had been used The hero class or advanced classes We had the concept of it before dark age came out Because dark age came out sort of mid development of wow and but I do remember Dark age was really important at Inspiring or proving two very important concepts to us one was um That pvp can be a good thing, right like I was a huge pvp person from ultima online having played that and um And almost the rest of the team all considered A pvp to be a bad thing, right synonymous with grief behavior Anytime it happened. It was you know people trying to just hurt other people play experience And so that was everyone's impression of pvp and I was like no if it's done, right It can be one of the greatest things in games ever, right? And so I wrote this huge thing this manifesto and I sent it to alan adham and And I I was crazy and impassioned and I hear I was telling him like one of the founders of the company What we had to happen the game and trying to turn him around He read it and came to me and said yeah, I pretty much agree with almost everything said and we we figured out Okay, well, we have to get You know pvp in the game, right because it wasn't going to be a thing There was not going to be a hoarder alliance. There was just going to be like ever quest A bunch of races that are all just grouping together to do content, right? There was no hoarder alliance at this point really yeah, so uh and because we chore basically everyone it was playing ever quest and Everquest was uh that it was that's how it was built, right? It was just everyone just makes a race and yeah, you can't go to their town because they guard to attack you But you can group with anyone you can play with anyone So there's just one, you know, basically justice league force and we'd all go out and punish the bad guys together, right? So I wrote this huge thing basically saying well. No, this is the world of war craft and the whole thing is based on Works versus humans, right? It's awesome. So We can't not have pvp in our game We can't not have two different sides, right? And so I wrote this whole thing and I basically convinced adham that we had to do this and And what dark age allowed us to do was dark age came out sort of after I had convinced him, but he hadn't really experienced, right? And so we went and played dark age and I said all right We're going to be on this server and we're going to go look for pvp. We're going to have a good time I'm going to show you why it's important and sure enough He became like my biggest disciple, right? Like He'd go out soloing pvp all the time. I'd log in and he'd just be like, all right. Let's go. Let's go. Like he was just And so it proved to him That you know, basically wow needed pvp and that needed the sense of identity, right and And horde versus alliance is probably the biggest decision that people make And also stand by in terms of like their identity in the game, right? So Um, I mean it affects friendships, right? Like you've learned so much about a person. Just the answer to that question seems like, right? Like can I be friends with you? Can I date you? I'm not sure I was going to say marriages, relationships, all of that So it ended up turning out to be probably the most important aspect of identity in the game, right? But Not only that it just fit perfectly with the world that had already been established by all the rts It was a game about war and conflict between the two sides, right? So So anyway, the other thing it taught us was that how much more fun It is to delve down into a dungeon and defeat a boss than it is to campus stagnant spawn Like we did in dq and just farm it over and over until you get the piece of gear you want, right? Because they didn't have instancing in their game, right? So you walk in the door and you you send messages to the zone Hey, is the commander spawned or is the commander camped? Is there anyone in the in the which doctor's room? Is there anyone in the, you know, sergeant arms room or whatever? And then, you know, whatever camp was open You take your group down there and you sit there for six hours and farm it every time it responds until you had all your gear And I was like this cannot be the way our dungeons work, right? Like you have to instance them so that You can have a beginning and an end. You can have a drive to push through to the end. You can tell a story You know that has a beginning and an end and people can have a satisfaction But you know feeling like they've made a run and they defeat they got this far They defeated the entire thing and that kind of thing and so it sort of was proof and concept of and uh, why you know, uh dungeons were important to be treated as Like roller coaster rides, right? You go through them rather than sitting in one spot and just Farming the content over and over so that's why dark age was amazing in terms of its influence on us in And its timing of when it came out It also did a lot of other things like hey, we need a button, you know for release when you actually die That's slash release Yeah, I was a big day out player. So yeah, I remember I remember the struggles as well And that took them like nine months or whatever to put in because you know, they put that game out in 18 months with a tiny team so massive kudos because that was a huge accomplishment, but It was missing out a lot of the basics that Blizzard would never consider, you know release worthy, right? So So Considering pvp was sort of an afterthought, you know Down the road when you're balancing classes and balancing specs, are you only thinking how does the spec play in a raid or a dungeon? Or are you also thinking, you know, how does this spec interact with other specs? What's the pvp balance here? Right. Yes, we had to do all three, right? So And some of that is just structure, right? Like if you treat the monsters About the same that you treat the players then the balance job becomes Pretty similar, right? And so that was always the goal, right? You know, you could you could change Values on a you know percentage basis like a single player Sorry to a single mob that you're fighting out in the outdoor world That's not a lead. That's your level might have x values that don't compare to a players But they're at least in the same ballpark, right? It's not two totally different systems So that was what helped us make sure that the The balance was in the same ballpark, right? So Killing a monster was no different in terms of Like how it played then it can killing a player the values were just different Of course the player was more active and using usability is theoretically more intelligent some players. Yeah That's the idea, but yeah So but yeah, it didn't it made our job a lot easier, right in terms of balancing it so But there were things that just didn't work like as far as play pattern, right? Like I'll give you an example the hunter It felt really good for the hunter to shoot a Same level mob coming in You know, you shoot him three four times then he gets to you and you whip out your two-handed axe and raptor strike it And it dies, right? You bend down loot it and You go to the next mob that felt perfect, right? Now when a player is fighting a hunter The hunter has all these mechanics to keep distance, right? And so It's a giant pain in the butt to finally get to the hunter Right and your reward for finally getting to the hunter is a giant two-handed axe raptor strike to the head, right? so That didn't feel particularly great in terms of like the pvp play pattern Compared to the pve one which felt amazing, right? So That's a you know the place where things, you know, sometimes didn't work out as as we had hoped Hmm So you mentioned alan adham and uh, you know, you've heard the news alan adham He just got promoted. There's been a lot of talk about, you know, morheim leaving and uh, Jalen brack being promoted But one of the things that's I think it's totally understated and it might just be because And john and mark said the same thing. He's he's he doesn't like the limelight He's very kind of like under the radar, but he played a huge role in Making wow what it was And blizzard entertainment in general. Yeah, so alan left the company. He came back two years ago And now he he got promoted onto the executive leadership team How big of a deal do you think it is that uh that that alan's in that position now? It can be a huge deal, especially in terms of classic But it's entirely up to him Honestly, like how much of a part he wants to play in classic or modern wow That moving forward, right? so he can be an influence that Effects classic in a positive way And he could but here's the thing that we both agreed on sort of You know at that lunch we had a while back I had lunch with them last year, you know before I came to I moved to out of california But we talked about current state of wow, right? And there's a lot of decisions that have been made over time that I don't think have been great for the game But are essentially irreversible now because once you give a community or a game some things They're almost impossible to pull out and you know Take back out of the game without making a lot of people upset, right? So um So he might also and he agrees like so he might also just feel like as far as modern wow goes Maybe his hands are a little bit tied. He wouldn't have done things the way they were done But now that it is what it is. So classic is a real opportunity He wants to like step in and oversee it to make it Again what it was intended to be back in the day, right? So we'll see it depends on what his involvement wants to be Um, I'll give you a specific example so they're essentially it's it's uh old content and new technology, right and they're trying to merge the two, right? and So they have this job on their hands trying to do that and so it's a basically a lot of technical hurdles, right? there's there's no design as far as like Making this happen. There's very little design. It's just mostly about hooking things up So a programmer is going to come to the part where okay, we have to get instances working And they're going to get instances working and some other things and they're going to go into a meeting Where they to talk about okay, what progress have you made in the last two weeks? It's like, well, I got instances working. Oh, and by the way, I found the place where I can very easily add dungeon finder cross realm dungeon finder. You want me to flip that switch and turn it on? Right and it might seem like oh, that's a simple decision right to a tech guy And and who's going to answer that question? Right, right? It's going to be a tech meeting and there isn't going to be a game designer involved, right? So who's going to answer that question? Are they going to say? Well, let's go find out and have him and ask him what he wants to do, right? He's going to say, oh, no All right, do not turn that on Or are they going to say yeah tech is good. They're not even going to get out of that Room they're just going to say yeah tech is good. Turn it on. I love dungeon finder. It's amazing I can find a group in no time, right? and so Um, and then there's going to be another question about well, should I leave in the bug that allows Paladins to one-shot work Kazakh by saving up charges, right? And they're going well, no, I mean we should fix that bug tech is good. Let's let's fix the bugs, right? So obviously two completely different questions that In a lot of cases require a game designer to answer, right? Right? The question is what is their process? You know like Because at the moment it seems like it's just you know old content new tech Let's put things together, but Is there a game designer and who is that game designer, right? Like they might go instead of asking out at him They might go and ask the modern wow designer and they might say yeah dungeon finders the the best turn it on You want to have all the bells and whistles that a modern wow experience has right? So again old content new technology, right? But it's like all the classic people are going to be like to not turn that on or not all the classic people with Many classic people. So that's a big question on how is this game going to unfold, right? What is that classic going to be? And again, once you add dungeon finder, you can't pull it back out It's just too difficult people are too used to the convenience, right? So I I I think it was Mark Curran This is that suggests this at one point sort of a an internal constitution Like a set of ideals or philosophies that they stick to that are you know in line with classics original design philosophy So hopefully internally they've had that discussion. Okay. This is classic. This is not classic, you know, right? But do but again who's involved in that discussion? Do they even understand the difference, right? Like I mean I can have discussions now with people that are on the modern wow team and talk about some of the old philosophies But since I've left and since adham's left Who's going to be part of that like who's going to carry that flag for old school philosophy? You know or is he just going to now I'm just going to be busy with his own things and let other people answer the classic wow question or not So, yeah, it's a big question. Like he could have a very dramatic impact Or he could you know sort of be in the background and they could be asking other people Yeah, I think one thing that uh, I'm I'm really excited about is that in the dev water cooler update that they put out a few months ago They specifically talked about how Things that were not in the game in the past Or I guess in the in the past put into the game after classic I worded that really weird, but things that were put into the game after classic They're not planning on having that in the game So basically they want to strip down the modern game and kind of like reverse engineer engineer it back to vanilla So, uh As far as we've heard so far like we we haven't heard anything that you know for those of us who Might not necessarily be fans of looking for raid or looking for dungeon um There's nothing that's really been alarming As I guess up to this point. So that's something that we're really excited about Yeah, yeah, and and yeah, don't get me wrong. Blizzard are pretty smart if they know This is what you guys want And they're paying attention to what the classic community is begging for Because the private servers don't have a lot of that stuff, right? So Uh, but some of those things right you probably do want there probably are some quality of life changes That are no brainers in terms of cost Uh that you guys probably do want um And so but it would take a game designer to sort of understand the difference between You know no cost changes and changes that are going to heavily influence the game one way or another so Right, and I don't know who would be making those decisions Or if the answer is just always no if it wasn't present then It shouldn't be present now, right? So Right, you know, there's it's a tough thing to imagine. I don't know their process But that's what uh, that's what I think about when I think about what if their job is as far as Uh getting it ready to go. Yeah Speaking of small sort of changes Can you explain if if you even remember this the the reason for the change between eight debuff slots and 16 debuff slots? purely a tech limit We always wanted more um, and we were completely hamstrung a lot of times by that limit, so Um, we were trying to always like horse trade, you know, like we'll give us six buff slots So we can have 12 for the raid, you know or whatever it was, you know right Yeah, I actually found a blue post uh from back in 2006 that uh, eonics Eonics was saying the same thing because people were asking about on the forums and he said look, this is something that Uh, you know, we we wanted to do we wanted to increase the debuff limit But it was just a tech thing and we were at eight and then we thought 16 would be good And then if they like if you guys really really wanted to then you could have increased it even more But you guys thought 16 was uh, we just find where you're at given given how far you've gotten tech wise No, we would have had unlimited if we wanted it. Oh, yeah I mean, I can't think of a design limit, right? There's there's ui limitations, right on how many you can actually display before things get crazy And certainly in individual encounters, you don't want a hundred different things going on because players just get confused or and overwhelmed by it, right, but um It we would have never wanted to have been a tech limit, right it would have always been limited either by ui or design and We had more capacity than what we were given In terms of design and ui so well because a lot of that stuff was Also under the hood like we hid various debuffs Just to track the progress of some raid mechanics and things like that like timers and things like that But because we had to use a slot in some cases, right To make it work early on It caused problems And so there were times when you couldn't actually attach that extra debuff, right? Because there was something hidden there. Yeah, it was blocking it, right? And everyone was just like, well, why is this guy of a smaller limit than everyone else, right? but eventually we got into scripting and the game became more advanced technically and We were able to manage some of that stuff without using debuff slots, but Yeah, this is sort of like our workarounds for we had to use the systems we had to make the content So so when when designing raids and balancing raids, you know deciding Okay, how much hp does this boss have are you like, okay? We have 16 debuff slots now We can make the bosses a little bit harder because more dps is going out from the raid Or did you did you intentionally like balance around the debuff slots? It was certainly a factor. Yeah, um, okay But ultimately I mean things just came down to combat time and you know like how long does it take? You know a group of players to mathematically destroy this thing given what we know about outputs and things like that Or how long or can and is that number smaller than its berserk timer or whatever timer it has that's where it's basically just going to become unmanageable and kill the raid So a lot of it was feel, you know, like we had a mathematical starting point, but then A lot of it was just feel right and you know play it out test it out Yeah, that's so we were also trying to identify play pattern stuff of what's fun. What's not fun. What's confusing? What's not confusing? So, right? I was gonna say it's it's so interesting because so many people who've been fans of classic for for such a long time have always thought that The debuff slots are are such a big like it was a design decision and Basically the debuff slots were designed around the the bosses and the encounters But I guess it was the other way around where to protect the bosses from too much damage Yeah, that's that's what everybody's thought or so many people had thought that but uh, but yeah No, it's it's so cool to see that it's actually the other way around Yeah, it's funny like because that is the approach of sub designers. I Uh, I'm sad to say like they create sort of an adversarial relationship with their player base. You won't kill my bosses I'm going to make it super hard But the content obviously is designed to be defeated, right? Like you have to put in some effort, right? You have to work at it You have to earn it Um, but it's there to be defeated, right? It's there to give you that sense of accomplishment Like you've achieved something, right? So um You know game designers typically don't treat them as their personal Like they're personally losing if a raid boss is killed, right? So Yeah, I mean an idea that basically protects the raid boss from too many dots essentially Um, yeah, it's never something that we would want to do Well, there was also a few things, uh You know, let's let's pull it back a little bit Talking about the alpha like the the development of the game originally There was there was a lot of things that were in the original game or in In development in the alpha that got taken out or changed going into release Uh, I want to get confirmation. Uh, but also I want to get your uh your thoughts on it Hunter hunters used to have a focus bar in alpha. Is that true? Yes So in retail while right now they've given the focus bar back to the hunter, uh What was the original idea of like what was the original reason of getting rid of the focus bar for the hunter and going to mana? And so what we see now It was an experiment to get the hunter a slightly different Resource system. We wanted it to be based more around his, you know shooting Shooting and moving essentially But he had enough mechanics that Didn't fit into that scheme at all like traps where We were just struggling with like well that just means all this stuff is going to be cooldown based and When things are just cooldown based They're problematic, right? Right like you need to have some sort of expendable resource Yeah, so mana was something that covered both of you know, both Parts of what the hunter kit was about But the the focus bar was an attempt to create his own Resource system that was different that that so many of the other classes also had Uh with rage and combo points and things like that. So it was our attempt to get that away, but we couldn't quite get it Tweaked and iterated on enough before retail. So we bounced it back to the mana bar And then I actually don't know what form it takes now in terms of how they resolve some of those problems Um So Yeah, maybe I'll play a hunter I'm curious, but that was why it was there briefly and why we pulled it before it Actually went to retail. Yeah, and then the other question I had was about uh, it was about paladin strikes actually In the alpha paladins had a you know kit that was full of different strikes and whatnot. Yeah Why did you guys change from the strike system to uh to what we had on release with paladins? Again an attempt to do something different like Most of the classes mainly classes just had a series of strikes So to create a gameplay dynamic that was a little more interesting A little more, um, like I've always considered the paladin to be more of a chess game than You know a twitch game, right? Right not checkers. Yeah, not checkers. No checkers. Okay It takes a chess grandmaster to play ret paladin. Yeah. Oh, okay It's funny that because this is one of rap artists classic lenders um at blizzcon where He sort of listed the philosophies behind The classes and you might remember One of them was easy to play for paladins, right? Which of course just set the community off, right? Like Oh, it's the baby class or it's you know, it's the face roll class where you just don't even have to think, right? But I always considered it more of a chess class where it was like it was more about planning and strategy because He could heal himself. He could bubble himself, you know, like he was so survival. He knew Okay, well, this is going to be a five minute fight, right? Like there's no way you're just going to combo me out And I'm done. This is going to be a long fight. So let me strategize. I'm going to put these elements in play I'm going to capitalize on these moments that I know are coming up now like I'm going to plan several moves ahead sort of thing. So I always considered the paladin more of a chess You know, like a longer term strategy. That was the idea. So That's what I got with the seals and the judgment system, right was a little bit of planning a little bit of like Set up and break down and you know that kind of thing And then of course crusader strike didn't fit in that once we got that whole thing going So that was the reason crusader strike got yanked because judgment was supposed to be the primary reason Or delivery system for i'm attacking with whatever it is. I've got going so And then crusader strike came back later That system had its flaws, right? And eventually we tried to refine it and move away from some of it, but That was my attempt at putting in an interesting system that was different than the other classes sort of again like Fell into what I felt the paladin was about which was more long-term strategy and plan So if that was ret what was your idea with the prop paladin, which doesn't really shine in in really many circumstances, right? So the prop paladin was supposed to be damage from being hit Right retribution holy shield retribution aura Holy shield, you know things like this like I would generate threat this way Um, you know, I would punish evil for daring to attack me this eventually um and then on top of that We wanted his taunt to be more of a rescue operation than a direct like insult, right? Like the warrior was just like hey, you you're a jerk come attack me right very direct I'm intimidating, you know, whatever it is Whereas for the paladin the idea was like oh one of my friends is in trouble I'll cast a spell on my friend and it will transfer the threat to me and get that monster to come over and right So that's more in line with the thematic that he's a protector and he's a saver Rather than, you know, like a direct, you know, yelling screaming. So that was the approach, right? Yeah The thematic approach the the mechanics were difficult because It was much harder to switch targets and use an ability on a friend Without the smart targeting stuff that eventually went in and it wasn't just, you know Hit taunt on the thing that you were already targeting, right? So he had some mechanical difficulties and then he was fine Generating threat as long as the thing was on him, but once it was off him It was really difficult to Get it back on him. So they go back to generating the threat, right? Whereas the warrior was more direct and more You know, uh consistent. So just to kind of like explain what uh, what kevin's talking about is is righteous defense, which is a It's the paladin taunt that's added in burning crusade specifically Yeah, because some people were saying like, you know, no paladin is not taunt and vanilla But which actually is to another question. What why uh in vanilla originally? Why why didn't you guys give them a taunt and vanilla? because we It's one of those things where we didn't have the idea worked out yet and we didn't want to just Bandate it by giving him a taunt because once you give him a taunt, you can't take it away, right? Like anything anything less than that or even different than that and people are going to be like, why why would you do this to us? Just give us the thing we've had, right? So It's really difficult to take mechanics away. We didn't have the total specific idea worked out on how He was actually going to taunt. So We were still experimenting and learning as we went, you know, but our goal and our Our philosophy was always do it different, you know, make make the bear tank a certain way Make the paladin tank a certain way make the warrior tank a certain way And and to a lesser extent make the void walker tank a certain way, right? Like Just have them feel differently have them function differently so that you get a different experience, you know And it changes the dynamic of the group and how people have to play when there's different Things going on again, like that canvas for different experiences That you change one piece and other things have to change around it. So Makes people think and makes people plan and keeps them engaged and to moment to moment. So also shamans also had some tanking capability early in vanilla and I guess early in the game's development Were they intended to be? Like, you know, raid tanks or what was the idea behind that? They were not intended to be raid tanks But they tell about sunken temple. They were actually totally viable as tanks But it felt it fell off a little bit. We didn't mind that they were sort of soft tanks Or off tanks, you know in certain situations But yeah, they were never intended to be looking back You know because someone mentioned the discipline priest tank was that also like Something that you we considered I actually like that idea a lot. I feel like All the classes could do dps, right all nine classes could be dps, but only Three maybe four if you count the warlock void walker could do tank And even then it is no question on some of them And then only like four or five could do healing, right? I feel like those numbers are probably off by a little bit, right? Like I probably should have made more specs be tank more specs be healer Because the average group was one tank one healer three dps and so because you needed Usually at least one tank and one healer that became those two became the lynching for every group, right, so Probably should have had more specs be capable of tanking more Healing in order to keep the game sort of flowing in that sense of group organization getting dungeons run, so It would have been nice to make the enhancement shaman, you know a tank The discipline priest the tank Just to give them a little more opportunity potentially the survival Hunter could have been you know a tank or even a healer, you know, could have done some First aid style or medic style healing Yeah, that's so crazy to think about like I would totally like to change Yeah, yeah, that's that's crazy to think about So again guys we uh, we are going to go to q&a here shortly Um, again tweeted us hashtag classic cast and and that's what I'll go through to pick out some questions Then we'll also look at twitch chat as well. It's just uh easier to read on uh on twitter You're probably more likely to to get your question through on twitter Uh tip states if you guys have anything I'll see you guys want to touch on I'm speaking to tanking and void walker tank and I'm I'm just gonna share memory This is from burning crusade not vanilla, but so in burning crusade your your pet hp and stamina scaled off of The warlocks hp and stamina it whereas in vanilla it didn't and so I remember at one point playing a warlock in tbc I gemmed entirely stamina and threw on like a bunch of stamina cloth gear I was tanking heroics and stuff with my void walker. It was crazy. There was also that uh Where you that warlock himself was a tank and one of the raid bosses, right? Right at two emperors. Yeah, I can't remember the raid, but yeah, so crazy things happened, right? But um Yeah, we did consider the the void walker to be Like or we wanted him to be a decent, you know, sort of five man tank anything higher than that and we wanted to you know um a primary tank to stand out to be Something that one of the players actually did right rather than a pet the player So it was your vision for in vanilla wow void walkers. We're gonna be tanking five minutes. Yes Okay, that's really cool. Wow Yeah, so we we probably didn't hit it uh and mainly because of ai right like The ai can just make so many mistakes when it comes to pathing and suddenly the boss turns into the wrong place, you know and cleaves the whole party right or whatever it is so um You know little things like that cost, you know cost wipes. So uh, that's probably the biggest reason Just like hunter pets aggroing things as you're trying to you know Streamline the content by skipping rooms or skipping encounters, you know, it's like oh hunter pet Hold that room now. We're in for it And they kill two people before you guys are even aware. So yeah, I got some issues with pathing. So yeah Just miss your pet man, but that's my cool idea I can't get rid of fluffy. That's how you guys know Yeah, so tough moments. I actually have a question here from thornquist who's in the chat. He asks Um, Kevin, you had lunch recently with alan. Did you get the feeling that alan was eager to dive back into mmo's when talking to him? No, I did not get that He feels he he plays um a ton of wow though like um He didn't mention at the time, but I heard later that he was like he had a huge achievement score or whatever That's one of those things that people judge you on right? Um, so he plays a ton. He definitely had opinions how eager he was to sort of dive back in um Because you know, that's that's a big thing for him to come in to the leadership of wow that's been in place Since he left which is a long time And say all right. Let's start doing things differently now. You know is Is bad in the business sense As well as problematic and just changing the game sense, right? So even if he wanted to which would take, you know, quite a bit of He would have to be his passion again to like change wow And again, some of those things you cannot undo right you can't unring some of those bells, right? So Uh, it becomes difficult, you know So I don't know and he might just want a new thing. I remember we talked about You know other games, right and What other games had taught me about game design? Since I had stopped playing wow and mmo's in general because I was so hungry for other types of things after I stopped playing Wow, I played a ton of things and learned a massive amount about game design Because I was no longer, you know focused only on that wow experience, right? So Stuff that can very well translate back into wow And stuff that also just, you know convinced me that some of the decisions we made and wow were the right ones, you know, so Yeah, we talked a lot about that kind of stuff So this is another question for you Jordan. Kevin. Sorry Um, he says Jordan. What were your favorite and least favorite parts of vanilla class design? Oh, my least favorite parts. I think I mentioned this in the podcast amplify magic and damp and magic can die in a fire Hated those two spells Probably my least favorite Probably one of my favorite things is what we accomplished with the warrior A lot of games to date The warrior had been super simple Just sit there and take damage Throw your one button, which was taunt or whatever And that was it And what we were able to accomplish the warrior that made him, you know living breathing class that got to push buttons and do things and zip around the battlefield and Um, I was really pleased with so, you know, a lot of the other classes It's just assumed, you know, like the mage is going to be casting spells and doing interesting things You know, the the pet class is going to have this cool pet that is part of your, you know, gameplay and fun Um, you know, the rogue is going to have a stealth mechanic. He's going to sneak around and do stuff Um, so it was sort of assumed, you know, all of those things but with the assumption for the warrior, you know, again to date Was just yeah, you're just this big bag of hit points that you have to protect and Someone has to heal as long as you don't die. You're doing a job. So that wasn't enough In my mind, so I still think, uh, you know, 14 years later The stance dancing mechanic for warriors is the best class mechanic that's ever been designed. I think in any game I've ever played No, it was great. That's really really cool Yeah, uh, it's funny like uh, because I did not like eq bar twisting, right? And that's why paladin boras didn't function that way We had the tech to prevent it And so we designed around it not being something he just focused on like burning all his globals just to switch and overlap Oras would have been really bad And so And in other games that it had been something that you did but not necessarily How it was designed like I don't think they ever designed it that way But the technology allowed for that overlap because of the server ticks um, so We were able to Solve that problem and I was happy to but the stance dancing thing I really liked Stance dancing felt different. It felt very strategic and uh, really fun. So It probably got to a point where it was a little obscene You know mixing charge and intercept especially like I love that. It's just like Uh, there was charge and there was intercept and then there was something else. I think oh it's interbeat, right? And it was just like Hmm Didn't he just charge or move around battlefield twice on me? All right I remember seeing uh, I remember seeing warriors with spinal reaper and what they would do is they'd go up They'd literally they could kill somebody and get out of con combat Charge at somebody and execute and kill like steal the kill basically and because they have spinal reaper They get a they get a bunch of rage. They got like 20 range after they after they kill somebody So now that he has 20 rage his charge is on cooldown, but he can intercept so you can go kill somebody charge Execute intercept kill somebody else Yeah, and really we tried to balance pvp. It was like always how many tricks do you have right? Like how many times can the mage stop you versus how many times you can get out of their thing and charge them, right? And so It ended up being this like Always this arms race and mechanics, you know Yeah um, so this is another question Uh that kind of relates to that This is from caro. Did professions influence the classes in any way or vice versa? Did professions have anything to to like were they in your thoughts at all whenever you're doing class balance or anything like that? absolutely We wanted to make sure that none of the professions sort of stepped on the toes of class mechanics, right so You were just basically subclassing Um, but we also wanted again to be a big canvas where people could experiment with different combinations, you know, like Especially the tinker class the engineer class, you know, like your engineer profession That gave a lot of potential for people to try out different things Which we were excited about so um Yeah, basically what I and and I didn't develop the crafting But what I always told the guy who was working on it wherever it was Was that you can't steal my mechanics basically And sometimes it still happened in certain ways and I would okay like it's very very small doses, right? But um, yeah, if it was anything like very repeatable or You know, just all of a sudden now everyone's got a dot they can throw on things, you know Right engineering comes to mind, right? Yeah engineering had a ton of mechanics. So Mm-hmm Well, that's one of the things I think is so great about engineering Uh, a lot of times people complain about the class balance in in vanilla. Wow, and uh, I get the vibe as a paladin That like sure there's some classes that are better in pve at this certain thing or that certain thing But when it comes to pvp I I kind of feel like everybody does have like anybody can kill me and I can kill anybody If I use all the tools available to me, like if I if I have engineering and I'm like, okay Well, I have something that can fill the gap here where my class is lacking You know, I could throw a grenade at somebody if I can't catch up to them or something like that It is a big equalizer. That's for sure And engineering was a super popular one obviously because it did add a ton of mechanics that you didn't normally have access to And it's some of the reason why The other the other trade skills Uh, we tried to add things that were you could only use if you were that guy Right, you had to make it for yourself and it wasn't something you could hand out, right? So There was some power level coming from You know your profession like everyone was sort of getting from engineering So we had to compete with engineering like adding all kinds of crazy stuff. So You know the the arm or the blacksmith would get to make a really sweet weapon You know only he could use right all right going to burning crusade with the uh, Was it lionheart executioner and storm herald and the lows? Yeah Yeah, so Yeah, but yeah, I was supposed to support and enhance the experience rather than Step on the toes of or compete with or nullify, you know that kind of things Yeah, I've got a question here from storm axe Um, he asks, uh, what do you think kevin about druid class design overall and did you design druids, right? Yes, um What do I think about it? I think it was uh, so obviously we wanted to add a shapeshifting class That was always the intent. Uh, he was the ultimate hybrid, right? So again had that really tough learning curve of Okay, you're gonna be 80 percent as good as As everyone else at everything and that was just like complete fail, right? Because 80 percent is just not even close to be something that people want right so um Yeah, so we had to bump his number significantly, especially in like as the main tank on the bear and as the dps um, either as roomkin or um as the cat uh, so Yeah, I thought I thought the the uh, the class design was good I just think some of the math and some of our assumptions were off like you always make assumptions about how things are going to be used And how effective they have to be in order to be Considered worth using right so and our assumptions were just off, you know, some of that was just learning experience You know, we were learning as we were as we were deciding as well. So Right So Farrell, I was gonna say going back to class balance. What was your idea behind? Um priests especially have these race specific buffs like fear work on a dwarf priest. What was the idea behind that? Uh, yeah, we're I was always trying to do more race specific content, um It was definitely experimental like and it it actually caused a lot of headaches, especially in arenas and specifically but pdp in general like What the race of a priest you were actually became a big deal um Or at least it was perceived to be a big deal. Um, I think trolls were We're a big deal because it had a soft mortal strike effect that so you didn't need a warrior And uh, so yeah, it caused it caused some problems But that was our attempt to like again make your race an important thing and create more identity create You know some distinctiveness between you and another priest and also thematically it was just You know, we can't have all the races sort of worshiping light and And having this shadow side to them In equal measures, right? Like a human priest was such a different thing thematically You know from a like a culture or whatever religion standpoint, you know, we didn't really have religions, but Um, what's like an rpg? Oh priest was you know, like yeah in the classic rpg It's like what got her you and I get your totally different abilities. All right Um Yeah, so it made sense to us to give some distinctiveness to each of the races, you know, based on their culture and their thematic um, that would tweak them in certain ways but not Not be overpowering in sense of like well, you're only this thing if you're a troll priest You have to go shadow because the mechanics for your racial spells forced you to Want to be you know shadow And vice versa for a night elf, you know um So that was the idea behind it, but yeah that They were tough to manage. It was always an ongoing balancing issue And obviously giving specific mechanics like the mortal strike debuff Uh to only one race on one faction Was you know tough, right, right So this uh, well actually real quick guys one more time, uh in case you guys missed it a little bit earlier We are doing a giveaway for blizzcon virtual tickets We are giving away three more blizzcon virtual tickets. We we gave away three at the beginning of the stream This giveaway will be it'll end saturday night and we'll announce it at the beginning of the next classicast We do classicast every sunday at uh, you know, sometime between 6 6 30 p.m central time So yeah Exploitation point giveaway. Yeah, it's in the chat right now. There's a classicast giveaway there for three blizzcon virtual tickets So yeah, you guys can do that and Hopefully you get a chance at playing the classic demo during blizzcon So that's uh, that's kind of our way of saying thanks to you guys You guys have been incredibly supportive of all three of us and Uh, just kind of everything that's gone on in the last year since the classic announcement So that's kind of our way of saying thank you to you guys Uh for all the support really and now that we got our you know first taste to kind of getting our hands on classic Uh, so other than that it's gonna be big. It's gonna be big. Yeah, it's gonna be very very big But uh, the this question actually falls up what we were talking about really really well. This is from be the gathering He says what was mr. Jordan's favorite class to work on when he began designing If you have one I was always partial to stealth classes in games probably because of the pvp You know loving side of me. So I like working on the rogue a lot Um It also had some really interesting possibilities with the combo system Because it's scaled so differently based on what you were fighting because you would you would use Basically if you tried to collect too many combo points on a single target that was not elite You'd end up wasting them because it'd be dead before you used your finisher So but then once you got to bigger targets like bosses and things That's when you would play with your five point combo system and use different abilities So the dynamic changed quite a bit between based on the content you were fighting. So I thought that was really interesting We actually have Sorry, go ahead. No, whereas the early mage or frost mage specifically was just like frost bolts all the time anytime. So um At the beginning anyway, so uh, he was a lot more fun to work on Hmm I was going to say I have a personal question here. Do you remember exactly what the vanilla wow Server population cap was and in your mind for classic wow like or just in general What is the maximum player capacity you think og unaltered vanilla azeroth with like the same respawn rates could reasonably accommodate If you're looking to bump up the server size for classic wow well, um Yeah, so I think mark touched on this in his classic cast but it was a design limitation, right and We always felt that any more than 2k was Starting to become problematic right like when you log into a server We always wanted you to feel like oh, there's a bunch of people chatting This is a world full of people right because if there was no tackling on you'd feel like oh, it's kind of a single player game Um, so we wanted you to feel like there was a presence always, you know, no matter what's own you were in And now obviously early on We didn't have the population spread as much right like there was a healthy point in the in the games progression where um You know people were sort of spread out across the entire level range There weren't too many people at the you know at the highest level and there weren't You know tons of people hitting those newbie zones for the first time and flooding them So 2k obviously it's a It's a an arbitrary number when you talk about what time The server's life you're talking about but we always felt like 2,000 people hit the sweet spot of like I log in there's lots of people talking but each individual area isn't you know over camped or Or too too busy to make it, you know problematic to actually just play the game experience the game Like we always wanted you to run into people right but not too many people Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. It's cool to hear that you're right. I've been asking everyone that comes on I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges that the classic team is Trying to you know wrestle with right now is how big should these servers right for sure Yeah, and 2k is sort of what we settled on If you remember the If you were on a busy server at launch like you had to wait in a queue Some of that was log in server relief But some of it was just designed Like we didn't want there to be 4,000 people on a particular server because that's the way things work, you know, if you're allowed to it's like Well, my entire friend group joined this server and when people jump in For the first time and they see oh this server has 3000 people on it And this server has 500 people on it. I probably want to go to the 3000 one because That seems like where it's at, you know, nothing gathers a crowd like a crowd, right? And so you would get this really bad stacking And so the queues helps put you in a situation where it was like well, I really want to play So I could either wait an hour to log in And be on this server that's stacked or I can go log into a smaller one and then You know once you're on that smaller one We sort of got you because you're developing this character. You don't want to give up and You're starting to form friendships and things like that before, you know, like your life around that server, so Yeah, that's really interesting Especially in the concept of design thing Sorry It's really interesting especially in the concept of classic in the context of classic because You know, there's a big discussion about the popularity of classic How many millions of people are going to play on launch and if there are millions of people Then how many servers will you need if they go with 2000 limits? And um, it's interesting And well, you know, should they up that limit? I mean, they're more they're most important decision is day one, right because You don't want to recreate the launch of vanilla. Wow, right if you can avoid it Um, so yeah, they're gonna have to figure out what their caps are like get those queues back in place if necessary um yeah Find a way to pre-register people in some way or something, you know, like I don't know. Yeah, maybe maybe some way to mitigate the the massive influx they're gonna have right online. Yeah I mean, theoretically we've learned lessons, right? So Let's put those lessons To use now. So we'll see what they do. Right. It'll be interesting So we have another question from uh From twitter here, which I think is a good question. This is something everybody talks about every day But uh, what would you like to see in in wild classic? What would you like to see after It's kind of run its course after the 1.12 patch. Would you like to see it progress to burning crusade? Would you like to see uh, like a 1.13 patch where they start putting in Some things like kerosene and and things that were in development During vanilla or even prior to that ended up not being put into the game. What would you like to see? Well, what I like to see personally, you know to so far I've been sort of ambivalent as far as Because one of the one of the fascinating things for me looking forward to classic is Uh, how is it going to be received and what is the community going to want once it's been out? You know for a little while How are they going to want it to progress? Are they going to want to stay? 1.13 forever. Are they going to want tpc or are they going to You know because like you can only run that so many times, you know, right That's just for people that are looking to do content. They never had a chance to Um, some people are just looking to level up again or for the first time in a different philosophy type of game, right? so um They might be happy for years, you know, because it seems like There was a time in modern wow where A lot of people were still not max level and the game wasn't really for them anymore And so now there will be a game that doesn't mind that they're not max level and uh Uh, so it'll be really fascinating to see what people want from the game moving forward and also Um How blissive response to that, you know, like are they prepared to manage two different time periods Of game essentially like It's like we've all wandered into the caverns of time We're playing We're trying to play all the classic moments and wow history replay them, you know, right? Um, and so yeah, that's what's fascinating. What will you guys demand? You know, how many of you will kind of jump in and Maybe find out it's not your thing and go back to modern wow or or not playing piano at all How many people will be like, no, this is amazing. Keep it going as is forever How many people are like sort of a mix where it's like, yeah, I played it for two years But now I want tbc. I want some of those Quality of life changes that we have in modern that have no cost From a game design perspective and yeah, who's going to be in charge of Sort of the caretaker of that experience, you know, yeah, you mentioned you mentioned clearing next ramus I've always personally wondered this in hindsight, you know, bernie crusade comes down a couple months after, you know, vanilla's over Do you guys regret? Next ram is being so exclusive. Do you wish you had made it easier or the very eventry Lower so more people could have experienced it or were you did you want it to be a very exclusive raid? I didn't mind it being exclusive it's funny like Because so many people especially streamers Especially, you know people that are very vocal on forums and they post videos of their content and their play and things like that Are playing at the very highest levels, right? And that's a great in terms of like bringing people in That might be leveling up because they imagine themselves as you someday, right? Like oh, I can't wait to get to the content that he's doing, right? So it's sort of the reason they keep playing at their low level in some cases um And it doesn't take much it only takes, you know, five percent of the community to actually be hitting the Cutting-edge content in order to trickle down that sense of that's what i'm going to be doing someday and inspire the rest of the community But once you get like I remember there was a point where like 60 or 70 percent of the population had Been through molten core at some point. This was laid on um That starts to change sort of the focus of the game, right because if the too much of the community is stacked up there Um, it changes people's needs and the lens of which they view the game, right? And so you get this sense that it's now just a rating game, right? And that can have a detrimental effect if You know, because again as human beings we want to make people happy, right? So if 60 percent of the population is just telling us make more rate experience make great experience better and that becomes our focus Then that's what you have you got a lot of people leveling up that are just like What are we doing? You know, like where's our game? Where are our improvements? So it's world of warcraft not just the end game, right? So I do think there's dangers and too many people stacking up there and You know difficulty and that kind of thing organization actually Helps mitigate that to some extent, but um Yeah, this idea. I think that's one of the main problems with you know, um Some designers thinking is that Really the end game is the only game. Let's just get everyone up there, right? Um, so that they can be playing the real game, but I don't consider that to be The real game I consider that to be one part of it Because I think a lot of people might level up where they might have a boost or something and suddenly they're Instantly teleport to the end game where they they've sort of been convinced is the real game And then it's a totally different game and they might not even enjoy it They might be like, what is this? You know, why was I pushed so hard to get here? When I was having a great time where I was You know, like now I've got all these other things that I don't really want to do. It's just not for me. So I don't know like There's a lot of different play styles. There's a lot of different outlooks You know, a lot of people are after a different Different things from the game, you know, so they want different experiences. So You can really you can really get into trouble by focusing too much on one type, you know So, yeah There's a question here from plexity He's asking when you guys designed class abilities. Did you ever design abilities specifically for pvp or pve in mind? Or did you just kind of just make abilities? Well, there are certain mechanics like obviously resilience was pvp only And taunt was pretty much pve only but We never set out to make any ability only work in one. We wanted everything to have Usability in as many places as possible Action bar space was always at a premium after sort of the start of the game And so any button that was too narrow in use Was a hard sell, you know to earn that spot on the action bar so Yeah, the goal was always making usable different places for different reasons potentially, but Still usable so with the exception of sort of the fun flavorful things, you know the sentry totems and You know, I have kill rug and things like those You know, those were sort of outside the the normal Scope of our design and that we just wanted to be fun and class identifying and Right and people be able to interact with the world in a fun way You know kept him coming back be silly at times and things like that so right This is a uh, this is a pretty fun question I'm I'm really interested in this one. This is from carlo nato in twitch chat Please ask kevin about the atmosphere and what was going on in the office during the oh crap moments of balancing Such as when the palette and wreck bomb kazakh and one shot him What was the general atmosphere like? um For me it was always positive like I love that stuff. I loved it when people found cool ways to You know either break the game or Do something interesting Uh, because I you know, I haven't come from ultima online where a merchant gameplay was 80 of that game Because of bugs and other just oversights um So much fun could be had because of some of that stuff that when it happened in wow It was usually a pretty positive thing like um I know a lot of people would like consider that a bug and feel bad about like the fact that it snuck through or Or angry that somebody was able to cheat the system for some reward, you know, but For me it was always just sweet. Somebody was creative and you know broke down something and figured out Some secret that allowed me to do something really memorable. So And that's what you know a lot of early wow was about like the number of explorers in early wow It's just astounding like how many people that have come to my channel Um to tell me about the time that they Found this place that they thought no one had ever been to They're like, oh, yeah this one place that I found if you just shimmy up the side of this cliff and get into a place that you weren't supposed to be like That stuff always makes me really happy because it's like People just having fun with the game and exploring and there seems to be less and less of that these days, right? Guys, we're gonna take uh, we're gonna take one or two more questions before we wrap it up One more time. We are doing a giveaway for three blizzcon virtual tickets If you guys are watching this on youtube, this will be in the comments. It'll be in the description below Uh, but explanation point giveaway in the chat on twitch You guys can get the link to that giveaway get a chance to play the wild classic demo whenever blizzcon rolls around and also Kevin just started streaming on twitch So if you guys want to give kevin a follow, he's failure analysis So you can see it you can see it up there on the screen as well. So you guys can go ahead and give uh You guys can go ahead and give him a follow as well. So So kevin, are you going to be streaming the demo and then subsequently classic wow when it comes out? Uh, I don't know if I'll do the demo. Uh, I might need to wait for the full release of Classic, but I do intend to play both modern and classic in the future. So That's awesome. And I yeah, I hope to do like a commentary version or You know, that would be great. Yeah, even youtube videos like I would love to watch that. Yeah, so That is the plan. I think I'd have a lot of fun with it. I think a lot of people get kicked out of just like You know Seeing behind the scenes, you know Behind the curtain, you know Aw, that's the weird old wizard Yeah, this is a good question from zoolace and I feel like it's it's kind of a kim to the uh, to the wreck bomb question But uh, what did you think about the the wall jumping different ways to you know Getting on top of gulch iron in or getting under storm wind. How did you feel about that kind of stuff? Whatever players would do that? Again, I didn't really mind it like uh, our concern was always, um How things looked right like We did not like it took so long to get flying mounts in which is not something I really wanted either but It took a long time to get it Um in because the game didn't look good From all angles at that elevation, right? Like the level designers didn't have to spend the time Polish up that kind of stuff, right? So the only thing we had to worry about were the griffin rides, right? So it was like as long as it looks good along this particular path and we're swollen, right? So That was always our concern our players getting into places where the game didn't look good, right? It was like oh the ugly underbelly of some spot they got to you know, so um, but again like People jumping around and finding cool ways to you know wall jump and get up in the weird places I thought was totally fun. Now if it happened to be in uh, like A pvp setting like worse on bulge where you had to do some really weird thing And then a hunter could just shoot you from a place you could never get to that became a problem We had to address right but Aside from that. Yeah knock yourself out. Have fun I mean that whole the whole one of the big philosophies about wow, it's just it's a toy It's a sandbox. It's a world. Go explore it. Go live it. Go do weird things Yeah, you want to you want to invent parkour and and wow God bless, right? Just jumping on the iron forge the little gap and iron forge back and forth hundred times. That's right So and yeah, I think you've posted on your twitch about some uh, or your twitter as fan about You know the the priest that snuck in and killed the Mpc's and iron forge. I remember that stuff too like rogues breaking in and killing bankers and stuff and shutting down Like Throwing infernal in there You know despite, you know the lines it caused at the bank like it was super fun And I was super excited to you know see that kind of stuff because again just people being creative You know breaking up everyone's mundane day Wanted through iron forge doing their typical runs. It's like all of a sudden This event happens and you feel like you're a part of it and it's a memory And mostly I just wanted to create stories for people to tell other people about this game. You know that we're interested Yeah, so uh, this is the last question that we'll take. Um, this is from firehead Uh, what's the deal with old iron forge and why was it never used? Gosh old iron forge. I'm trying to think what that even is. Um I guess iron forge opened up in this, you know, you you weren't a level designer, but right Uh, it opened up in the king's throne room king of iron forge throne or it went underneath. So yeah, that's Um, do do you have any recollection of why uh, don't It could have been the player housing annex, you know, like Like similar to the one in storm went like we intended there to be Essentially housing and from all the main cities, right? So Yeah, you know different flavors, you know that kind of thing Wow, okay. Well, well, uh, yeah, I'm not sure exactly. Yeah um We'll do one more question. This is the last one. This is the real last one. This is from mix bass 731 Uh, this is just a fun one. What's your favorite vanilla item and why? Oh, it has to be Penelope's rose because it's my daughter. There you go. That is Yeah, it's a trinket and feels good here. I'll show the picture This is original art from the artist um Of that's of my daughter. It was actually a picture we took of her She's a gnome In the backyard Wearing those sandals and holding that rose and then we sent to the picture to the artist and she She made this painting which became a world of warcraft trading card game card And it was also an item in That is so cool. That's awesome. I think it's in Stratholm. You guys can find it in Stratholm pretty sure Yeah in my classic. So that is awesome. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining us, man This was a pleasure for sure. It was great. Thank you so much for coming on, dude Yeah, thanks for talking about old times good times and I'm looking forward to classic and I hope it's everyone's dream come true Once again for sure for sure. I might uh, I might have to pick your brain A little extra on some on some palette and stuff in another video or something But I don't know if you guys are aware of that night at fries where we We hung out and we signed copies of the game and whatnot, you know for you want to know something I actually have a 10 second video of that. I found an old video It's 10 seconds long of that signing there if you want to take a look at it. Awesome But yeah, if you guys want to buy me a ticket I'll fly out to fries and everyone can meet me It's classic wildfires up That fries is unfortunately out of business it is not really. Yeah, that's heartbreak Yeah, thank you guys so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you guys being here Yeah, for sure. Uh guys, if you haven't already, please Follow tips follow stay safe follow kevin on twitch and then also youtube and uh and twitter as well All the links are going to be in the description on youtube and also on the screen now Make sure to check out that giveaway if you haven't already get a chance at getting a free Virtual ticket wild classic demo that's going to come out around blizzcon time Even if you already have one maybe you can give it to a friend and uh, maybe maybe rekindle some some old friendships But uh anyways that that's it from us guys and we'll see you guys next time Peace take care guys. Thank you everyone. Thank you