 Hello. How is everybody doing? We are here for, we are here for Classic Cast with Brian Gonzalez and, sorry, Omar Gonzalez and Brian Birmingham. I was looking, I was looking at Brian and I was like, with Omar Gonzalez and Brian Birmingham. So no, we're here with, we're here with Bromar guys. We're here with Omar Gonzalez and Brian Birmingham. And yeah, we're very, very excited. These are the two lead developers for WoW Classic. Of course, we're here with Stay Safe TV, Tips Out Baby. Guys, this is the last episode of Classic Cast that we're having. Before, before Classic comes out, we'll be taking a little hiatus for the early rush of Classic. But we're very, very, very excited to have Brian and Omar here with us here today. And yeah, can you guys go ahead? I mean, a lot of people know who you guys are, but a lot of people also don't know who you guys are. Can you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves and kind of say what you guys have done working on WoW, your history with Blizzard and all that? Sure. I'll go first. My name is Brian Birmingham. I'm the lead software engineer on WoW Classic. And I've been at Blizzard for 13 years. I first joined Blizzard back in 2006 around when Patch 110 was coming out. I was, of course, an avid WoW player back then. I was playing a ton of it. And so I was really excited when I got the job opportunity to come work at Blizzard. And I worked on WoW for about eight and a half years. Then I got a job on the Hearthstone team. I worked there for about three years. And then I came back to WoW to help work on WoW Classic. And I'm Omar Gonzalez. I'm a senior software engineer on WoW Classic. I've been with Blizzard for just over 16 years. I started in the QA department. I did a little bit of testing for WoW 3, the Frozen Throne. But immediately after that, we started QA and working on World of Warcraft. And it's just been such a phenomenal game. I stuck with it. I got to start on the development team once I had graduated college and got my degree. I started off as an engineer just after launch. And I've been working on World of Warcraft continuously ever since. Wow, that's awesome. I have to say real quick, I think chat is so excited that we're getting an encore because we summoned you once. We summoned you once at the end of one of the stress tests. So I think they're super happy that we got a chance to summon you guys again. A lot of people excited. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I'm happy to be here too. Thank you guys. Having you guys on. Absolutely. One thing I kind of wanted to go ahead and lead off with is we've heard the story a little bit before, but kind of the story of how classic initially came to be where, you know, the not necessarily just the idea came from, but one of you guys kind of realized like, wait, this is actually going to this is actually possible. Yeah, you guys want to go ahead and say that story? Absolutely. I'll just lead it in a little bit because it's mostly Omar's story. But but early on, like there's been of course, this huge outpouring of support and of passion around WoW Classic and people asking us for years and years to make this. And it was one of those things that we kind of always thought we didn't really want to do because we had always kind of thought of it as a we really want to take that old 15 year old code base with the bugs and exploits that we knew were there then that we fixed all the problems integrating it with our modern infrastructure that didn't seem like a good way to go. And so when we got all this outpouring of support, there was really like a plan to kind of try to do a different approach. I guess Omar, you want to talk about that? That was basically you who were doing that. Yeah, I got pulled into a meeting at some point, obviously, before we announced where because again, we've had discussions in response to sort of this demand for for Classic and we knew what we didn't want to do. And we knew how we weren't going to go about it. But we still want to talk about how we could move forward. And, and sort of there was a sort of thought experiment pitch that was being discussed at a pretty high level. And that was what if we could take all the old data, all the old quest, all the old bits and parts of the game that all the players see on their screen, but run that on our modern code base and our modern infrastructure. Like that was at that point, it was just, could this work? Is this a good idea? But they we felt it was worth exploring. So I spent a little bit time. I kind of was sequestered in a room for for for a little while. And I just I just yeah, it's Siberia to make sure I had no no distractions whatsoever. To just just kind of play out this idea, how would it work transforming all the old data, which is as we talked about in sort of the old format, could we even run it on our new code and new infrastructure. And so after the two weeks, I came away with with a short demo. It was I recorded myself playing about 40 minutes of no mage. And it we saw a little bit of footage of that at BlizzCon. It was the basic core mechanics, I could pick up a quest, I could complete it. The spawns would would be there the I could cast spells, they like the numbers behind them were way off. But you know, creatures would die, I could pick up old spells. And and I got to about level five. And I came back to to sort of the leads and said, Well, okay, two weeks. This is about the tiny slice of what that that looked at. And so the they went back in and talked about a little bit more. And it was shortly after that demo that we sort of had the whole project greenlit. We we started to put together a team pretty shortly after that. And we had that big, wonderful announcement that at BlizzCon 2007. And we're still building the team at that point. Oh, yeah, like that, like that was a really, really early announcement. Like, like, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if if everyone really appreciates normally, we don't like, we wouldn't normally announce, like, given where we were, like, at the time, like, I was barely a team. Yeah, it's really true. Like, I remember it was kind of intimidating. Like, I had just taken the job. They just said, like, yeah, we're going to do this. We want a team to be built up around this. Omar and I, I think like one other person the time we're just starting to think about it. They're like, we're going to announce it at BlizzCon. And I was like, the one coming up this year, like, right now. I kind of assumed it was no, like, the the one year later. Yeah. After we had, you know, after we had to spend some time on it. But no, we kind of went for it in 2017. Yeah. And it was really exciting, too. Because like, having that, like, obviously, that put a little bit of pressure on us, but it was kind of a good kind of pressure. Like, hey, if we told everybody we're going to do this, we got to get moving. Like, let's get this going, we got to like, get get started to get get things going and and really make progress as soon as we can. So we came back and like, took the prototype and said, okay, that's the right approach you want to take. Let's do that again. But a little bit more like careful this time, make sure we record everything we're doing, like make make notes along the way, build up a bigger team and share with them the strategy. And then we started doing that, make sure that our tools and our systems could support having a set of data that was separate from the the main line set of data, the the modern wow set of data, so we can have them kind of running in parallel tracks, and then use of all of our like build systems to be able to build both of them together and have the data protected from one another so they wouldn't spill into each other. So we did all that kind of building right after that. And then that was, you know, we're off and running. Yeah, it was full steam ahead ever since that announcement. Yeah. And here we are a few days away. Yeah. Did you guys have any idea how like any idea how big this was going to be or how much support or hype there was going to be behind this? Sort of, I mean, like, I don't know if I would say like, I quite understood this, the scale to which how people are going to be so excited, like, I knew people were excited. I knew I was excited. I knew Omar was excited, right? Like, so it wasn't like I was completely unaware that this was an exciting and fun thing that people wanted to do. And obviously, like I said, people had been asking us to do this for years. It had been something we thought about. But I didn't realize just quite how many people and how excited those people would be when we started talking about it. And I started seeing that even after that first BlizzCon announcement, when we announced it, and everybody just went wild, right? There was cheering. I remember people like, there were videos people took of the announcement, they were like sitting amongst the audience and had videos of that. And you could hear people whispering like, Are they gonna? Are they gonna? Is that what they're going to say? And then when we did it, it was like, they were just like, flipping out. There was a lot of disbelief. It was like, no, no. So yeah, that was really exciting. It was it was a great, it was a really great BlizzCon for me to like talking to people after that is they were like so excited and just wanted to come up and be like, Oh, thank you guys so much for doing this. I'm so excited about it. Oh, I have a great little story in that BlizzCon. So we had a little sort of a media a pre BlizzCon like media mixer where I got a chance to kind of meet some members of the press and media the day before we had made the announcement. So I knew we were going to talk about it, but they didn't know. And I was carefully, but it was it was a topic of discussion. Yeah, wondering like, Why are they doing this? And so like, I kind of went around and I kind of tried to try to gauge interest. Like, what do you think? Like, what would that look like to you? Or what's your level of excitement kind of in my head knowing? Yeah, because I had that information, but they didn't. It was it was kind of fantastic for me to see that level of excitement. Everyone just wanted to go back to their memories. And just specifically to your point, it wasn't a surprise that there was excitement. Like, we knew that there was excitement and demand that that wasn't surprising. But the scale of it was surprising. Like, not that there was excitement, we knew that there was, but just how fast it was and how many people and players want to want to come back to it. I think that that was one of the most surprising aspects to me. Yeah, absolutely. Like the name reservations, like almost every server is full right now. Did you guys expect the name reservations to go up so fast? Do you expect that many people to register before? I was really excited to see that, I have to say, like we knew again, like that there would be some excitement. But yeah, it's really exciting to see just how quickly they filled up. And fortunately, we were there ready to respond with new servers and we're going to continue to be ready to respond with new servers as we go forward if we need to. But yeah, like we're really trying at this point to encourage people like spread out, like take up, we've got more servers that you guys can spread out. I really hope everybody gets that message and tries to pick one of the servers that is not quite so full right now. Yeah, we opened with knowing a conservative number of realms initially. So it wasn't a complete surprise that they might end up very full towards the end. That wasn't complete surprise because we have contingency plans for the level of demand. But when we saw it play out, we were like, whoa, okay. So we had a few servers that we have waiting in the wings. Yeah. But we're like, no, we let's let's go now. Yeah, in response to this crazy support that we have from our fans and we're happy to sort of do our part and and provide room and capacity for you guys to come and play. Yeah. So these servers that are full right now, what are the queue times looking like on those servers? Do you think it's really hard to predict exact queues? But I would say if their market is full, you should expect excessive queues. You really ought to move off of them if they're full. I know like it's harder to convince people because like nobody can say for sure from just like, I've reserved a name, whether or not everybody's going to show up on day one to play all at the same time. So like it's comparing Apple store just a little bit, but it's a lot of people. You should move. Move to one of the ones that is medium. Okay. Medium is still going to be a healthy population. Especially on sort of like day one. Yeah. Day one is probably going to be because everyone is going to be sitting at that character selection screen. Yeah. Everyone wants to log in an enter world at the same time. That's going to be when it's most rough. You're going to see most players log in and once they're in, stay playing for, you know, in excess. And that that actually makes queue times even longer, given the same number of players waiting. Right. We hope that that will sort of smooth out and speed up beyond the first 24 hours. But we're going to be carefully monitoring and the best advice we can give is try to spread out a little bit. Yeah. Make a plan with your with your guildmates to find someplace else that you could move to when you see those queues. So plan ahead. Make sure you're ready. When you see the queues, you know where you're all going together. It's easy. It's a little bit easiest to move now or to shift around now before anyone's actually logged in and leveled up. So we continue to highly encourage that now rather than later. Absolutely. And let's say it is later. Do you guys have any plans to, you know, you guys talked about free character transfers possibly coming in sometime after launch? Do you guys have any contingency plans for that right now? Do you know when you would implement that service or is it a little bit further down the line? We don't have any specific plans yet. I mean, like we definitely have those capabilities and we've been talking about that for exactly these reasons. We want to make sure that we're prepared to offer the appropriate service at the appropriate time. So we don't have a specific date in mind for when we would do any specific thing. We have right now a plan to have a lot of contingency plans, a lot of things that we could do in response to what we see. So if we see huge cues, we can open new realms. If we see them really late, we could talk about free character migrations. We'll be able to make those decisions based on what happens. Yeah, for us, it's a matter, we have the capability now. It's developed and ready to go as far as when we would pull the trigger and under what circumstances, because we will do that in response to what we're seeing cues. We don't really want to pre-announce that at the moment. The idea here is to be as responsive as we can to cue times and player demand and see how those actually shape up. Yeah. And that just kind of goes to sort of this, the whole philosophy for things like how many realms do we spin up? Everyone can kind of make their expectations and make their predictions, but we really want to be making our decisions based on sort of the concrete information of how this actually plays out as opposed to trying to predict. I mean, we still have our predictions and expectations, but we also have contingencies in either direction. I mean, it goes to like our content unlike plan too, that we also don't want to pre-announce the dates for those, because we want to be able to control those based on how players play and experience the content. You guys have already talked about that, right? Like the six content phases that we've done? Is that something you guys want me to go over again or is that cool? I think we spent a lot of time kind of beating that over the head for a long time. We're talking about that, so we don't have to talk about that too much. But one thing just to kind of touch on the server and population, I guess concerns, a big reason for the pre-registration of names was so you guys could get a gauge of how many people are going to be playing on what servers. There's probably going to be a whole lot of people that have not activated their counts already and already registered their names and stuff like that. So if every server ends up being full, the overwhelming majority of servers look to be full now, how big of a concern, I guess, is that for launch? Are you guys going to be like, okay, I mean, we got to pull the trigger now as far as contingency plans go, or what are you guys going to see? Well, so certainly that's what we're talking about, is we have already launched new realms in various, I think in like North America, Europe, and China, we've all launched new realms there. All of those are the regions that we're seeing lots of people reserving names. And so we are already responding. And so we are also increasing our contingency plans, starting to adjust those contingency plans and make more plans and prepare more things for this to be like a really crazy release. So like Omar already said, we already did imagine that it could go this way, but we have no way to be 100% sure. So we have like a kind of a cone of uncertainty, like there's a wide range that we could expect that it might happen in. And so we said, OK, well, let's start with a small number of realms because it's really easy to grow and it's harder to shrink. And so we start with a small number and then as we see the populations showing up on them, we increase more and more and more. And if it continues to increase, we'll continue to increase realms to be able to meet that. Yeah. One of the benefits of running on our modern infrastructure, as opposed to the literal old code and how those old system works is that it's way, way easier for us to open new realms now, given the systems that we have available to us, that it's not really a blocking concern. We have the realms that are available now. We have realms already in reserve and we still have capacity beyond that. And it's much easier for us to respond and acquire new capacity as we see players engage and play. But again, just going back, we're preparing as best we can for a number of different scenarios and core pieces that we want everyone who wants to play to play, but we also want to make sure we end up with very healthy realm populations. So in many cases, we're trying to find that optimal balance between how launch plays out and how the long term game plays out way, way down the road. That's important in our minds. And there's an optimal point in order to get the best outcomes for both short-term and long-term, and that's kind of what we're focused on as well. That's awesome. So launch is going to be crazy, but you mentioned this. I'm really concerned about phase one into phase two. When you get rid of layering, at the same time, diamonds out, world bosses are out, there's another reason for people to log in again. What makes you confident that you won't need layering with that huge surge of players when phase two starts, when people are coming back or they have a reason to log in again? The thing that makes us confident is that we expect to be able to launch new realms. It is that same thing again. We're going to be able to launch those and spread them out. And the fact that we are going to have ultimately realm caps and realm queues, we aren't just letting as many people as we want to play onto each server. We need to have an upper bound so that we can pull that back before phase two and have only one layer per realm. That's the goal, is make sure that we can get to one layer per realm. That's something we've committed to. We really want to make sure we can hit that. In order to do that, that's why we have to have some upper bound on the number of players that can play on a single realm and queue people after that. If we really didn't care about getting to one realm, we could just sky the limit. That's a commitment. We really want to make sure that there's one layer per realm by the time we get to phase two. So you're hoping that, sorry, go ahead. Just a follow up. I know a lot of players asked for specific numbers as far as layers and players for layer. And we really have been holding that back. And one of the reasons to do that is because for us, these aren't like constant fixed numbers. These are settings that we can use, that we can dial, and we can adjust on the fly, even on a day by day basis. And that goes into things like number of layers on each realm. It's not at one or the other thing. It's not necessarily the case that we have to go from lots to one overnight. We have the ability to slowly tweak it and pull that in slowly on a day by day or week by week basis. So you don't have this sort of one day you're experienced again. This way in the next day it's completely different. We want to kind of make sure that it's a smooth transition. Yeah. Okay. I got a follow up question on the layering just real quick in terms of the logic behind it and like how it works exactly. So I noticed the other day during the last rest test, a couple of friends of mine logged in at the same time but even if we logged in at the same time we noticed all three of us were put on separate layers. The determining logic to determine which layer you're on is it based on when you log in when you create your character. Do you guys have any insight on exactly how it works and how it pairs you on a layer? Yeah. I mean like I don't want to go into too much detail but basically it tries to pick a place where you will not cause additional load. So it tries to pick the place where if you log in you're not going to make the servers overly burdened. So if you guys all logged in at the same time and you ended up on different layers they were probably all about evenly balanced in terms of how burdened they were and in terms of stimulating your characters in the world. So then it was just kind of like oh well this one's the lowest right now and then the next person logs in this one's the lowest and then this one's the lowest and you guys all end up spread out. If you were in different areas it might have been different. If you were spread out throughout the world it might have been different. If you staggered your logins it might have been different. It's trying to make sure that like since they're there primarily to try to make sure the servers are stable at launch. We try to make sure that we spread you out to to distribute the the load. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So okay. Good. Speaking of speaking of that you I think it was in the red at AMA you guys mentioned how if you had more characters let's say the same amount of characters in a small area versus a larger area it would put more load on the servers. Does that mean that the different layers can have different numbers of people on them or are the numbers like as a setting like we're all layers like the same are all layers equal at the same time is kind of that what I'm asking or is that something that's more dynamic between layers? It's very dynamic and so I mean like it's not like it's not it's not like strict control like Omar was saying like their settings we can set and they're all kind of like guidelines for the server to try to make its best choice and a lot of that is because we really want to make sure we don't transition you arbitrarily so once you're on a layer you're there and you should only ever leave if somebody invites you to their group and they're on another layer that should be the only thing that ever makes you transition to another layer and and that means that it is kind of going to be dynamic if a bunch of people all invite to them one layer then as people are logging in we'll fill in the one that's that's not as overloaded but yeah like it can become uneven over time as people shift because of invites and whatnot and then the server will try to like balance it out as people log in okay but like theoretically you could have you know as in gold and soda pop and all of us invite everyone that we possibly can to one layer and you would have a mega layer right and then as new people log in okay as new people log in it would try to pop the smaller layers yes exactly and but you're right if you literally all tried to get onto one layer eventually you will cause that sort of lag so severely that it'll be unplayable and so I hope nobody does that please don't I hope I'm not giving anybody like a nuclear weapon here but yeah it will the server will try to balance itself out but it doesn't want to do it by splitting players but yeah that is one of the consequences of saying that we're going to put things on a single layer per realm is that yeah players if they cluster just like it was back in 2004 and six right like that does cause the server to have to work harder and so we'll start to get laggy and so if you find yourself experiencing lag in an area often times the best thing to do is try to find someplace else to play for a little while until that area kind of like spreads out a little bit okay okay okay um something that a lot of people you know just kind of looking around getting involved the community and seeing something that a lot of people were asking about I guess over the last couple days is skeletons right and feeling that you're in a war torn battlefield and in world pvp and this kind of thing can you guys explain how skeletons worked on the reference client like whenever you guys were I guess supporting everything to classic or yeah yeah I I did kind of look into it and and in 112 in our 112 reference we're matching the 112 implementation in well classic so so we we feel pretty confident that that we're matching at least the 112 version of the skeleton functionality but we do know that this is a very important topic and there's a lot of conversation one of the things we're that we're investigating is the history of changes like because we you know we've seen the screenshots and we have the same memories and and we we want to look at and and understand the the changes that occurred during the first original patch cycle because you know it was a dynamic game and and they patch and change functionality over over time you know during the original's lifespan so we we want to make sure that we also understand sort of the genesis of of those types of changes because sorry I was because I have a different example that's similar like where so like a lot of times we talk about the mount system and like the mount system if we were to look at like 112 two like the very last the really like right before burning crusade the mount system changed and it was the one where you could it was expensive to get the training because the training types were like journeymen like expert riding and that was because we're preparing for a world where you're going to eventually be able to buy like flying mounted flying kind of right as we're like okay well that doesn't really feel like it fits classic and if we go back just a little bit to like 112 one we find like I think it was 112 one or 112 oh but it was one of the other 112 patches where we said oh at this point the mount system was the same way that it was for the entire history of of of of pre burning crusade rather than a world of warcraft and so we're looking at this and going okay this is the right mount system this is the classic mount system and that was the one that we wanted to do because it really made sense for that and it was it was the most authentic classic feeling mount system and and it kind of like a different example but it's also similar is we found that in 112 there was a change to the way like friendly name plates appeared and yeah well like we were just looking at this the other day and we thought it was yesterday yeah literally just yesterday we were talking about this bug and we thought we had to make a change because someone was pointing out it affected the what is it called the eye of divinity quest chain benediction benediction yeah to get benediction and anathema there's a quest where because you have the eye of divinity these these guys that are normally invisible can be seen by you so basically I have divinities giving you a see invisibility effect and these guys are invisible and the code in 112 says if it's invisible you can't see a friendly name plate not like whether it's visible to you but if it is invisible no friendly name plate as we were about to put that back and take away friendly name plates from anything that was invisible whether you could see that thing or not because that was how it worked in the reference client and then we dug just a little bit deeper and we said wait a minute that change happened literally in patch 112 all of again one one through 111 you could see friendly name plates on invisible units and then they changed it in 112 and literally the very next patch they changed it back so it was like oh this is a lip on the radar this bug was active for one patch and it happens to be the patch we're looking at we're not going to reintroduce that bug that's that was just something that made it really almost too difficult to do that quest for no good reason yeah so just kind of sum up the point is going back to the skeleton question we we're matching the 112 but we're still sort of investigating and looking into the history of changes and once we have we want to be able to talk about that but for the moment we're keeping the functionality as it is yeah I guess it's also worth pointing out like like we're at the point where we're going to launch on Monday yeah and we're really excited about this product we think it's a really good state and it's ready to go and we think this this product is fantastic and it really is an authentic recreation of of World of Warcraft classic as it was in that 2006 time frame but we're not done like if we if we continue to find things that feel like they're not quite right we're going to keep making little polish tweaks that is something we are committed to doing including like we're going to add the key ring in our first patch our job is not done on Monday right yeah we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that we maintain this service and keep polishing it for anything that anybody else finds after launch there you go so you mentioned you mentioned classic WoW or vanilla WoW authenticity at BlizzCon Ian mentioned add-ons and add-ons of my undermine the vanilla WoW gameplay experience has that philosophy changed or where you guys at with add-ons right now so sorry Ed there was a little bit of a video cut out but I think I heard you asking a question about our add-on philosophy and just generally how that works is that right right exactly yeah okay so yeah I feel like it's more or less the same that we are we are based based on that modern code base which has more or less the modern add-on API but at the same time there are some things that we've added to it over time that weren't allowed in classic and we restricted some of those especially in cases where it affected gameplay so a really good example of this is Caspar add-ons Caspar add-ons that existed back in in patch 112 they could exist but they were doing a lot of guesswork and so they weren't super accurate and so even though they give you a gameplay advantage it wasn't as good a gameplay advantage as the Caspar's that came later and that are available in modern world of Warcraft so we made sure we took back out that data so you still have to kind of go back and kind of guess at that and it's hard to write a Caspar add-on again so you can still write one if you want like the some of the hooks are there but it's not going to be exactly as accurate as it used to be because that data didn't used to be available on the other hand there were things you could do in the classic add-on language that were basically like you could use it to essentially bot there were basically no restrictions it was a wide open field you could completely control any of your characters actions automate them all and we've never really felt like automating your character was an appropriate use of the add-on system and so we are keeping those restrictions that come with the modern I remember I was a Holy Pally writing molten core and the healing add-ons it would just put the right heal target right in the middle and I would just flash of light flash of light flash of light we win yeah it's like it's all maybe yeah if yeah if your add-on is doing that for you like are you really playing a game with this point so I'm like yeah we want to make sure that it's still a fun and engaging experience for everybody mm-hmm another add-on that comes to mind is recursive which a lot of people have been using for years right the old version of it so this is something that is probably not going to work with the with the new API or at least not the same way that it was written yeah that's correct so we talk a lot about like the difficulty of the raids and some things being like easier just because of the the nitroof cutting out okay hello sorry I just found we lost you there for a minute oh no you're good I'm I'm I've been lost most my life so couldn't hear the question I'm sorry the video got up was like I was no you're fine so what I was saying was talking about like how some of the raids might be easier right just because of some of the way the way the games designed this and that some add-ons that people are used to that people rely on pretty heavily like a lot of healers use recursive in some ways could you see the game being more difficult because of that or kind of like Omar said the healing the healing add-on I think I heard the question this time it was whether or not the game is more difficult because some of the the add-ons that people used to use won't be available or whether it would be easier just because people have learned the mechanics and I think it's it's really a balance between those two things it's like because now I got to learn chromagus right you got to actually learn chromagus I don't know how chromagus works because my job was to sit out of our West and de-cursing and I literally I had a wireless mouse one time and I got thirsty and I carried the wireless mouse with me just just clicking the button while I went down to the kitchen to grab a soda grab a drinking and came by and raid leader had no idea oh man that reminds me of a story a different story of one of our guild members who was this is like we were doing molten core and you guys know that that the trash that you have to clear from like after baron getting in shazra you have to clear through these flame packs all the way to sulfuron and golemag and there's just like this whole like a like a gauntlet of all these flame packs and that guy he didn't tell us until years later like I literally learned this like last year he was like oh yeah every time we got to those I would just put myself on auto follow and go take a shower and I was like are you kidding me I was so angry I was like I can't believe you would like let us down for that like we were always struggling through those he was like yeah I wasn't even there but your question about add-ons the uh yeah like I feel like there will be like additional challenge for things like chromagus and at the same time like people have learned so much we can't put people's knowledge back in a lockbox so people who have learned how these fights and strategies work will be able to share those solutions to people who want to know about it but at the same time for anybody who hasn't done them like you can try to like like shield yourself and like learn it on your own I know one of the things that my guild like to used to like to do was we would try not to read the strategies that were posted online even back then and we would try to figure it out on our own a lot of times that was hard and made it more of a challenge so if you want it to be challenging you can make a challenging for yourself awesome and like because the game is so old or you know it's coming back after a long break a lot of people know all the mechanics now and it makes things easier but at the same time like you said the add-on API is a lot more modern now and people have the tools to make more sophisticated add-ons than they did back in the day possibly add-ons that trivialize things like in-game boss mechanics or even things like grouping up and being able to group up faster for add-ons like this that maybe make the game a little bit too easy or do things that are not exactly maybe in the spirit of vanilla do you guys have any kind of philosophy as to how to address these add-ons? Sorry we lost the audio just at the very the very end of that question but it sounded like he was asking if we have philosophy about add-ons just in general like which ones would be allowed and I feel like the general philosophy is like if it automates gameplay we don't like it to automate the gameplay for you if it's helping you see the layout in a way that makes you feel like it's more comfortable for you to view and respond to that's exactly why add-ons are in the game is to make sure that we can make like the interface more comfortable for you to read and respond to especially for anybody who like uses them to help with disabilities and things like that that's that's something we're absolutely committed to is one of the reasons why we left in colorblind mode like what kind of jerks would be to take that out right so yeah like we really want people to be able to see and experience and react to the game in a way that feels comfortable to them but we don't want it to be played for them so yeah it's good to hear that yeah so something you touch on mounts a little bit earlier I'm sure you guys have heard a lot of the the feedback about people wanting unarmored mounts and this is that what was the what was the logic behind not introducing the unarmored mounts early in the game sure again you cut out a little bit but I think the question was just about unarmored mounts and why we're deciding not to include them and how passionate the community is about this I actually have a good story that this just happened this week our shipping and receiving department was sending me emails saying like oh yeah there's a package waiting for you downstairs and I was like what do you mean there's a package waiting for you downstairs I didn't order anything and I went down to pick it up and one of our fans and thank you so much if you're watching sent me I couldn't believe it a bouquet of black roses yeah and true story and and a mask that they had made out of like a it was it was the ivory raptor head they had made an ivory raptor head mask and mail it to me and I wish I had it with me I would show it on camera and and then they picture they also made they photoshopped a picture I assume it's a picture of their character riding an ivory raptor it's a troll with a thunder fury and it has my head photoshopped onto it it's hilarious it has a note written on it's a very nice note I was super thrilled at the same time we're not putting unarmored mounts into our classic and I'm so sorry the reason we're not is because we really felt like they were something that was kind of a surprise that we took away back then that nobody was really like planning their life around like I'm gonna definitely level and try to make this achievement it was one of those things where the original development team saw it as just kind of like a natural transition and they were trying to remove those and they didn't occur to them how like rare and special this would become once they were unavailable and we we really felt like if we put them in for a limited time and while classic it would like unreasonably incentivize people who want to be mount collectors to really push themselves to level fast and burn through the content faster than they would really feel comfortable doing we talked to even like a lot of people on our team who said I want to take my time I want to level slowly I want to like bring my friend or my boyfriend or my girlfriend I want to have them level alongside me I want to introduce them to this game show them this beautiful world and explore it slowly at their pace but if the unarmored mounts are in for a limited time then I'm going to abandon them I'm going to push to the end I'm going to burn myself out I'm going to get that thing and I feel kind of bad that I'm going to do that and we said that that feels bad to us too we don't want to put this thing in that that wasn't the way people played the game back then was to try to race to get the unarmed mounts it was just kind of like oh I happen to be a fast level or I happen to have bought this mount and now I get to have it and so we didn't want to make that like artificial race for people who really want to take their time yeah I do want to call out that like part of the magic of that is that it was sort of a happy accident yeah right it was a happy accident that happened that first time around but what I'm really looking forward to is what are the happy accidents that are going to happen you know with World of Warcraft Classic that we can't even foresee that we might respond to in a different way down the line like I'm really excited about well what is this generation's version of unarmored mount yeah that's a really good point because there's so much meta out there there's so much emergent gameplay there's so much that we can't predict because you guys are all just wonderful explorers and you know we'll play this game and who knows how you know what is going to turn out next like that's what I'm really excited for so if there's some next gen version of a happy accident we definitely want to support that as opposed to necessarily trying to recreate the old happy accidents because they wouldn't be an accident if we did those again yeah right that's what you're saying it's kind of like the corruptive play and some yeah yeah like I'll see the binding chart also probably not right right yeah we're not we're not gonna do those exactly because part of the magic is because they weren't planned they were surprised to everyone so like trying to recreate something completely unaware like it was all kind of emergent and accidental and I'm actually very excited to what emergent experiences are going to play out this time around and that's what we want to be hugely supported of now I don't mean to be rude but I don't know I don't know how how true that story is about somebody on the team saying their girlfriend they were playing with their girlfriend whenever they're playing classic because I don't know how you can play classic and have a girlfriend I mean it seems a little bit far-fetched I played classic with my girlfriend she's my wife now how dare you at the time the time investment the time investment both of them very impressive I commend you I commend you I have a really like positive memory of like even coming out of like I was playing a Forsaken warrior and she was playing a Forsaken warlock and we were leveling up together even like from level one to five so we came out of death knell and into that like pumpkin patch that's like right outside and like I still have fond memories of we were like trying to like skate around those humans and like can we get out there and get that pumpkin I gotta apparently we need to poison that and kill some guys like that's that was yeah that's this is something that's still really kind of special to us that's awesome that's awesome no yeah I was mostly joking about the I was joking about like the time the time no no I know so yeah I can for me personally I can barely take care of myself let alone having somebody else to care about too that's a lot of hair to take care of that's a lot of hair holy warrenton well understood basic and I don't have to worry about that you know definitely so kind of speaking of speaking of the team right is the team that you guys have have come up with the team the total team for the classic team how much of how many of these people were maybe new hires or people that came from outside of wow and how many people were actually already working on wow whatever you guys were putting the team together it's so hard to say because I mean like it's such a like a giant full team effort like not just the people who are like focusing on just wow classic but like the world of warcraft team its entirety has been supporting this like we literally had somebody from our engine team helping us last night try to figure out an engine bug we've had tools guys who have been working on all of our tools and build pipeline so it's it's hard for me to say like that that there was any like you know it's it is a big team effort it is world of warcraft is shipping world of warcraft classic I mean it's really nice to be getting all this credit for because we've been working on it exclusively but it has been a team-wide project that has included both people who we've hired over the last two years and people like Omar and I have been here for like 15 years or in your case 13 years in my case so yeah it's it's a mix of both but I mean like everybody has been really passionate and excited and is a a hardcore classic player who has been playing for a long time yeah a mix is the best answer we can really give to that yeah that's cool that's very cool so so we we talked a little bit about layering being removed in in phase two that's a that's a hard commit at this point it's not it's not a goal it's yeah and actually let me correct you there before phase two I don't know when before phase two I don't know when before phase two it might be the day before but as soon as possible the goal is as soon as possible and the commitment is before phase two yeah that's that's the aim that's that's our heading yeah there you go will layering be taken away from servers individually or is it going to be a broad thing okay layering is off every server now or it will be a server by server again it's one of those things where we have flexibility we could do it server by server but we're not planning to but we'll see how it goes like I really like it really is like I said before it's a matter of like everybody's clustered in these starting zones this is like this is going to be a very different game launch experience than we had in 2004 in 2004 when we did our midnight release you had to drive to the store you had to buy the box you had to get through checkout you had to go home you had to pull out the CDs not even DVDs they were CDs and install them one at a time patch the game so that naturally spread the population out don't forget don't just count that download oh that's right that's the idea take one download the download for that and just just just hope like your parents don't pick up the phone or you're trying to download oh that's right because you're probably on a modem yeah because there were people so that was a thing back then so yeah that like that would like spread out the number of people who are all jumping in at that moment one this time we're doing a global simultaneous worldwide release and everybody's going to have their finger over the enter world button and it's going to light up at the same minute worldwide and they're all going to hit it so there's going to be these huge crowds in these tight areas and that's really what we're trying to like protect against really even in the first few hours as people spread out we'll probably need fewer layers even in the first few days we'll need fewer layers I can't predict for sure when we'll be able to turn them off but we are trying to do it as soon as possible okay and we'll be reducing them over time as we get to that point so is there a situation or sorry given that situation excuse me something that's kind of come up a lot and the example that people use is the gate opening event right sorry we're just in the audio again uh-oh cutting out test test test I heard you say da da da da okay that was the question all the important part and we heard the da da just you know that was the beautiful song you were saying thank you thank you yeah I was just trying to serenade you guys no uh so do we do that back now the the the the scenario that's come up quite often is talking about the the opening of the gates right this is going to be phase five oh god yeah um what is what are the concerns I guess what are what are how are you guys going to approach the situation of essentially having you won't you won't realistically have every single person but you'll have a lot of people you'll have a lot of people there so yeah I mean back in the day there were server crashes I mean what what do you guys expect so not layering yeah I mean again we're committed not to do that okay not layering we talked about it and believe me that was that was a discussion we had and it's a discussion we've had a couple times and every time we've come back to no we really can't do layering we can't do sharding we don't want to do either of those solutions for this we really want there to be one version of the event and so how we're going to survive that we're going to keep working on it but part of the fun is that lag and so maybe we could just survive in a laggy state like there's so many people it actually kind of makes things slow and chug a little bit and we're going to try to make it so it's not too bad and we're going to work on it as best we can yeah we don't know what we're definitely going to do right do know what we're not going to do but yeah there's that kind of epic feeling of everybody's there and we want to make sure that we support that and we'll try to make sure that we can make that as good an experience as we can absolutely and obviously that event is a little bit down the line I think aq is phase five yeah we do have some time we have that benefit we don't have to answer it right now have you guys given some thought as to how long you guys are going to want your phases is there a certain criteria you're looking for before you make that decision if you haven't made it we definitely haven't made it already and I know that there's not like a like we've talked about this earlier in the is that we don't have a specific time frame in mind we have kind of like rough estimates but they're really vague and there's no specific criteria we really want to watch players behavior we want to see what's going on and we're not even really sure what we're looking for specifically but I don't know I guess I could say like it's probably not going to be any slower than it was originally but probably like that's about the best we can say yeah like everything else we want the community to be part of this decision make it like the whole reason we have six instead of four right was directly because of feedback and you know we don't want to like we're not done in terms of responding to player feedback you know just we have some vague thoughts on the matter but you know it's so soft at the moment we don't even want to talk about it because at its core it's going to be community driven yeah we really want to hear what you guys say like if everybody's telling us like let's do it now and it's like a whole big chant like we want to hear that if everybody's saying like no no wait give me more time we want to hear that too so speaking of layering you're obviously doing a global classic launch with each new layer will it be a global layer launch or will NA get it Tuesday and EU gets it Wednesday how are you going to how are you going to release the ways sorry not layers phase launch like content is yeah that's okay we think right now that those will be global launches I think that's what we've been planning for but again like I think we have flexibility so we didn't have to do it that way but yeah I don't think we have a concrete definite answer we would we would definitely do it on all realms within a region at the same time like we wouldn't have phase one open for for Herod and not Antiesz for example right that's like yeah it would it it would definitely be at the same time within one region that like that's for certain okay you guys mentioned feedback you guys mentioned feedback about the phases there is one request and I hope I'm not out of line here but there is one request I'd like to make I've seen a lot of people in the community talk about it by the time we get to phase five with aq specifically Kathan he was known to be I think the longest or one of the longest bosses in the history of WoW that didn't go down and that's because of a very famous bug and actually Ian has a co-stess wrote a big post on the elitistrix forum saying how this you know Kathan was mathematically impossible would it be possible just for fun just maybe for the first week or two to get a pre-nerf Kathan just to see if we could do it now is it possible that is not on our plans right now we are planning to have all the systems in the 112 state including the bosses and abilities and that would that ought to make them killable and prevent that it's kind of like mathematically unkillable situations I understand what you're asking and yeah that's not the plan right now if you want to I'm just just spitballing here if you want to try to do it with no helmets and no shoulders equipped challenge do something all right the Omar challenge exactly like if you want to be world first no enchants half-geared equipped to take down Kathan everybody barefoot like yeah you got you got like when I think about like emerging gameplay and just kind of that fun creator like that that one's just off the top of my head but you know we'd love to see that kind of stuff come out from the community yeah for sure so you know we're kind of getting to we're about to run out of time here so I do want to ask this question I think it was the it was a event that John Hite was at in China where he was kind of talking this is a a few weeks back where he was talking about not being sure necessarily what what the plans are for sorry we're losing audio but I think I I heard the lead in yeah okay so so not being sure what the plans are for after classic quote ends or like a cycle of classic ends what are you guys thought so far on the concept of fresh servers or having a new set of maybe burning crusade open up or even like a classic plus I love all those ideas I think you guys have great ideas and they're all fantastic we don't have any plans for now today our focus really is on making sure that we get classic authentic because we know that that's something that it's been clearly communicated by so many of our fans for so long that we want to make sure we deliver on that product first and then as with all the other things we talked about like like the content phases and and the community demand for servers we want to hear where the community says what do you guys want to see next like I'm curious what do you guys what do you tell us do you guys each have your own opinion on which one you really like TBC yeah all of them all of them why not tomorrow I think from my perspective I do think you guys are probably going to have to put out fresh servers because that is something that people are always going to want to want to play vanilla right I don't want such a mean yeah people are always going to want to do that there's some people that want to play patch 1.12 patch or phase six in this case forever right I don't know Swifty for one has talked about that before how he didn't even want to go to Burning Crusade and I think the concept of force progression can be kind of bad for some people for some players I think if Burning Crusade happens it should probably happen on a on a separate server and then maybe you get the character copy over as opposed to starting fresh from level one completely on a separate server and I think that Burning Crusade should probably be a priority over classic plus even though classic plus I think could be a really really awesome thing if Burning Crusade is already available yeah I really really those are all great ideas and definitely we want to hear more of those and I really appreciate you giving those those and and yeah like we're talking about all kinds of things internally to those ideas and more and we don't have any plans to share but I really am really excited that everybody else has all these plans and ideas that they want to share with us so we can keep talking about them there you so you guys heard them community feedback let's see what the community wants so yeah believe it or not we really do read it well I I have to say like it's very apparent that you guys do listen to feedback you guys are thank you very communicative and open about it so I I appreciate that a lot yeah thank you very much we've tried really hard to I mean and it is a challenge because of course we have the work to actually like build the game too to keep on top but we have an excellent community team who helps to loop loop us in on those things and set up things like this so a really big shout out to them for helping us out with all that absolutely have you guys seen any of the Omar memes and if so what's your favorite one a few of them are actually posted up around here it's so true my favorite one my favorite one is absolutely the the one of him is Iron Man and like he built classic in the cave I love that one so much because like it's it's like it's got that grain of truth from the prototype yeah what it was like yeah go go in the cave make us more classic like right now like okay this one kind of works I kind of clued something together is his so yeah that was that was absolutely hands down my favorite do you have a favorite one too Omar I'm a big I'm a big fan of Iron Man and Robert Downey Jr and yeah so like those actually speak to me yeah personally so so yeah seeing those were just absolutely fantastic so thank you everyone and thank you Brian like like yeah even like you were talking about the the fan letter that they they sent you guys I mean we love the sort of that community created content we're big fans of it we know we'd love to see all our players engage with with not just in game but also out of game as well you know we get a big kick out of that and we encourage that absolutely yeah I definitely think you guys being more open with the community and that's one thing you guys have done so well with classic that I think a lot of people can really appreciate is kind of like the feeling of old blizzard you know all this stuff and and seeing how open you guys are constant feedback and we had that big drought right right at the beginning right after the announcement but in hindsight it's one of those things that it's fair because you guys had no idea what you were doing at that point really I mean you had a you had a very vague direction but you didn't have the whole team together you're just like hey we know we're doing it right and then right once after pretty much after we got that first piece of news after that it just kind of slowly and it's it's been really really awesome and I think a lot of people are really really appreciative of that for sure I'm I'm glad you said that I mean like that's that's one of the things we talked about was trying to make sure that we could communicate as much as possible and you're right like in those early days like we didn't have much to say yeah and so it's like it was a little tricky at first but right yeah like we okay well we're starting this out let's get going and then yeah once we once we had a direction and we had things to say we really we did want to like make sure that we included everybody passion and community sentiment community demand for this so we really wanted to make sure that we were including the community all the way and make sure that we we got your input and your feedback and shared your memories both you know the the the true memories and the faulty ones like we have our own too like I was talking earlier today about the big yeah yeah like I have a strong memory of the Sons of Eregal in Silver Pine Forest I guess I've already mentioned I was a Forsaken Warrior back in the day and and so when we got to Silver Pine Forest those Sons of Eregal were just so scary that my memory of them was that they were these enormous creatures that would like fill the entire screen and then we went back and checked and like they're normal sized where we'll stare like the same size as the other ones they just you know have a higher level and we'll just tear you to shreds but my memory of that fear like blew them up in my mind so it's so good that we have the original data the original source code to be able to go back and so we don't have to trust our memories we can actually verify that these things are true awesome so I think we're I don't want to keep you guys too long I know you guys you guys have meetings and all kinds of stuff planned yeah we like we do we have a lot to do to prepare for launch on Monday again thank you so much for joining us we're so thankful for this was at the last second this got figured out and and we're all I mean everybody's really really appreciate you guys being here for sure absolutely if I could ask one more real quick question what are you guys playing in classic well oh good question sorry the audio cut out again but yes what race are you guys playing going into classic well what faction of race yeah actually it's a good question yeah like I have always been for the last 15 years I have been for the Horde I've played that same forsaken character actually I switched to Death Knight in the Wrath of the Lich King and played that continues this event but I'm switching sides I have never experienced any of the alliance content so there's a whole new world to explore there I'm going to go alliance this time I'm probably going to make a dwarf hunter there's a whole new world to explore just in hunter abilities and like pet management I didn't know before can you guys believe this before this project before I was working on this project I did not realize that pet loyalty and pet happiness were in fact two distinct things I thought all of my hunter guildemates were talking about the same thing with different words and I was like what are you guys they'll talk about I learned that they're different and now I want to explore that whole world to and discover that I'm a trader yeah I'm a trader myself I played a raiding holy paladin and so I'm going to be switching sides as well yeah I'm going to be going I'm going to be going shaman I haven't decided whether I'm going orc or torn yet orc orc but but here's a here's the thing I'm planning to do a lot of pvp because that's the section of the game like I didn't pvp very much the first time around so I want to go complete 180 with the whole like new faction yeah class new new area the game so yeah you know I'm going to be out there windfuearing it up that's awesome warchief omar dude rank 14 omar I love it I hope is this the birth of a new mean I hope so I want to see those I want to see those on red and I want to see warchief omar oh yeah for sure that's that's awesome to hear that's it's cool to see like you know even even for you guys you guys yeah oh there it is yeah can you guys still there yeah yeah we're we're we're sure can you guys see them smile oh they see smiles but here you go test test test hello test I hear you now there you go all right very good do we sing again let it go all right great yeah we'll let you guys go we I know we've kept you over time again thank you so much for joining us we'll we'll split off and we'll kind of we'll debrief a little bit we'll we'll keep the cast going with us three again thank you guys so much huge huge huge thanks from from us and I'm sure a lot of people in the community are really excited about having us here too like I said earlier awesome the final thank you I want to thank the this is positive feedback cycle you know thank you guys we love all of our fans we want to hear from you we want to respond we want to hear back and we just want to keep this going so thank you guys so much for your time and efforts and energy we really appreciate it yeah I can't say that any better thank you guys so much for inviting us to be on for sure thank you so much thank you very much for coming on guys thank you take it awesome thank you guys please let's do this real quick let's go yeah that work okay give me one second let's switch this over nice all right sweet we're still alive right yeah yeah we're still going we're still going it's not over yet I can't believe it hi chat how was it chat dude that was awesome that was so sick dude that was great can we can we get some some bonus hearts can we get some bonus hearts in the chat for for for Brian and Omar coming on with us that was awesome let me let me fix this right quick do you know I was talking about you were tripping out yeah dude that was exciting like I we were talking about direct communication with the community and stuff like that like this is not something they had to do right they came on to hear it like you know this this is this is badass you know for sure here one second I'm going to go full screen for just a second while I transition this one second boom we'll do this give me one second here full screen let me do firehead is firehead here yeah I saw him in the chat firehead I just sent you a friend request can you do this for me accept the friend request join the call and just mute and then we'll we'll do that as fan you probably want to check the screen just real quick maybe hide anything oh there you go that was good okay I'm not bad this is good yeah it's fine it's not a big deal okay very good dude I'm loving the loktar Omar is on the chat right now dude unbelievable it's so cool because you can tell what those two guys especially like it's not just a job for them right like they're super crazy passionate about working on the project I mean Omar it was he like made it happen right and then Brian has helped like dude they're they're so passionate like they you can tell they love classic they love vanilla yeah dude a firehead firehead's face looks like a four-word picture dude that's great okay so uh so yeah no that was really really awesome so let's let's do some takeaways right let's let's have some takeaways from what happened one one thing that comes to mind layering pretty much a hard commit of before phase two right before phase two they're going to get rid of it that's awesome to hear it could be the day or the day before could be literally hey we're going to get rid of it and then servers go down for the patch but they want to get rid of it as soon as possible like that's the sentiment that I think is important and the interesting thing about it is the way they know they're going to get rid of it is because they plan on releasing more servers so like I think what's going to happen is they will basically release just servers progressively as time goes on and like I'm guessing there's probably a threshold that they're looking for the second they hit that threshold boom they take off layering and uh I'd say sooner rather than later is probably their goal well it sounds like here's like you're right like this is how phase one works in phase two some players will stop playing classic WoW will not be for everyone players will start playing at different times throughout the day some people can play in the morning in the evening in the afternoon like you know because with with a classic launch it's sort of a unique problem because everyone's taken a week off work or two weeks off work or quitting their job or getting a divorce to play classic WoW full time right but at a certain point you have to go back to the real world and live your life and so people will play at different times throughout the day so some people will stop playing some people will play throughout the day they'll add new servers with probably character transfers free character transfer to the new servers and then they're going to get rid of layering I I really hope it works out like that because like like and they know this you cannot have layering during phase two and it's because of certain events right I mean world bosses you can't have more than one Kazakh spawn you can't have more than one as a ghost spawn because then you can layer hop that's that's like a really good example of what would be potential layer abuse but it's not going to be able to happen because there's no layering at that point kind of moving on forward to the to the AQ 40 gate opening you're going to have multiple gongs if they had layering right so that's that's something else that they can't have layering for AQ 40 that's why they they made a hard commit for they're not going to turn layering back on at any point for for the AQ 40 event so really good to hear again they they mentioned something about how they're currently looking at releasing the patches the different phases globally at the same time right so this is something that they said at least regionally and I'll tell you like real quick at least reason here's the reason why I asked the question for people that are concerned and this is not really my concern but for people that are concerned about world first nefarion or world first yeah thune if n a gets it a day ahead of v u n a is going to get it every time and you know no like no one wants that we want we want global or I think global is the best option probably but then you have problems with lockouts and when they're going to be said and there's it's a it's a hard problem to solve and this is obviously problems they're having with the world first bfa mythic race and stuff like that it's a hard problem to solve well I mean let's be honest I think they actually should have it like that where n a can get it a day early because then at least we could win something because he's been kicking our butts for a long time when it comes to when it comes to world firsts so yeah it would be nice no all joking aside one of the takeaways I had from it was that how this could affect retail right maybe if it's something they're looking at for classic it might be something that they're looking at for retail as well maybe maybe starting to do like global patches or stuff or whatever at the same time having to have the patches left globally there as well which I thought was interesting for me the biggest takeaway was they did not I mean they said they're up for anything after classic like classic plus TBC I mean we always kind of assumed they would do TBC and I think we will get TBC it's it's more I don't want to confirm but I think it's very likely to get TBC but they didn't seem against the idea of classic plus and that was something we thought they probably wouldn't pursue just because it's resource heavy but I think at this point they've seen the response to classic from the community they've seen how high people are about it I think they're willing to support the project stand alone beyond just classic if they want to so if they do that that'd be very exciting well I think a lot of it I think a lot of it depends on how this whole thing plays out like what's the population going to be like in two years from now they said they don't have an exact timeline they don't think it's going to be slower they don't think it's going to be slower than it was back in the day back in the day it was like 24 and a half months you know what I think would be probably ideal is if you're doing it at about 20 21 months if you're doing it at about that time then you have burning crusade launch at the beginning of the summer as opposed to the end of the summer which could be good for more people playing who are maybe in college or they're there in school whatever right they have less stuff going on during the summer they want to stay inside because it's hot so that could be something that that would work out it would be a faster timeline it would be a faster timeline that originally happened but I think given the way they're approaching the game I don't think it would be too far-fetched to to make it a few months faster yeah here's my only concern with the rate at which they release phases is I hope they release phases when it makes sense and when it's appropriate and not when it lines up best with a BFA patch or another Blizzard game release I hope they release it with what's best for Classic WoW and Classic WoW's lifespan yeah some people in the chat are asking what is Classic Plus essentially it's developing post-Nax content once Nax is done or any kind of extra content for Classic down the line obviously you would still preserve the Classic servers like you'd keep like you know pristine classic no changes servers but then maybe you release a couple of servers also additionally where you could copy your character over and do that extra content things like the Dragon Isles I see people in chat saying things like a Shara Crater things that were never finished in Classic or possibly completely brand new content that we've never seen before so the takeaway that I had today was they did not reject that idea at all in fact they embraced it they said we're down to do any of the suggestions that the community has said so far if the community demands that then they're open to it which was like that shocked me when they said that yeah I was I was a little bit surprised by that too but it's cool I mean it's they're they're very they're being very open about it right keeping an open mind and also being pretty transparent with the community at least as much as they can be so I like I said before I kept it as like abrupt as I could I really think Burning Crusade should be a priority over over Classic Plus like make sure that that's done and that's taken care of one I think it's a layup it's going to be so easy to do Classic Plus is going to take a lot more development I think and a lot more thought well then again they don't have to have the whole thing done at once they could just have you know face seven right whatever whatever the next phase is ready to go so so really only has to be one phase at a time but I do think that I do think that Burning Crusade is essentially going to be easier and it's going to be freebie a lot of people I think you're right like sorry sorry go ahead I think that a fresh Classic and TBC both are like definite these two things have to happen right yeah um and then Classic Plus is like a hard maybe and who knows maybe maybe Classic Plus won't happen with the first iteration of Classic it'll be this it'll be with with Classic Fresh you'll have phase seven or something you know mm-hmm yeah and and I mentioned like force progression right I think they need to have character copies to whatever Burning Crusade server would open up because there's people who just want to play on that one Classic server forever they just are going to want to play phase six forever form phase six all that stuff and there's going to be so many people playing on these servers I think people are worried about oh well isn't this going to split up the community if they do all of them and I think it might but you really have to see how it all plays out in in two years from now if there's still a lot of people playing you don't need to have 50,000 people on a server for it to be healthy I mean well you look back at the original population caps it was somewhere between 25 and 3000 2500 3000 dude you're super right so for Classic wow to be a success or to to to feel like you're having fun like it's an actual classic realm you only need one healthy pop and realm you don't because you know there's cross realm bg's but vanilla realms are so insular all you really need is your own realm to be fun and happy and that's from your point of view it's it's all good but like a big unknown is we don't know how many people would want Classic TBC that have heard about Classic vanilla and they're like ah I don't care about vanilla I'm just gonna hope for TBC we don't like there could be you know there could be 10 billion people dude that want to play Classic TBC but don't care at all about vanilla right we just have no idea yeah I mean more people played burning crusade than played vanilla and more people played wrath than played burning crusade how is it going to be approached if if it comes out again like who knows but that's typically like the three people talk about whenever they talk about going and releasing expansions again it's kind of like the original trilogy because for a lot of people the end of wrath was kind of like the hard cut-off point for like going from wrath to cataclysm of when the game changed a lot right literally like the world changed a lot of the systems changed I personally think that a lot of that stuff changed in wrath and that was kind of like the beginning of the end so to speak but um I mean I think that having those three expansion there's like Classic burning crusade wrath I always call I always whenever I say expansions I always consider Classic and expansion whenever I'm talking about it but those three versions of the game those would be that those would be what they would do with Classic I would think dude listen they scrap all the expansions they release Classic it's a success they just make WoW 2 and then that's it WoW 2 designed with the same philosophies as Classic but brand new content all the way expansion after expansion and they just do it dude I just I don't think they'll do it like it's it's two making a new MMO altogether like a WoW 2 would basically end WoW right WoW 2 would end WoW and then a WoW 2 it's just so much of a it's so much of an investment to make a new MMO I don't think they would do it let us dream I mean wouldn't that kind of be what Classic Plus is in that essence right that would kind of be what Classic Plus is yeah kind of dude you know like this is sort of a weird on-topic but off-topic funny story when Classic was announced you know almost two years ago now I was like almost in denial because they had said it would never gonna happen never gonna happen you think you do but you don't for the first like two weeks I was like oh Classic WoW dude this is just gonna be a caverns of time dungeon you're gonna go in you're gonna kill Hogger Regneros Kel'Thuzad get some free epic loot and then it's over that's Classic WoW here we are we're gonna be four days away it's actually happening that's true that's true dude real quick that is hilarious we have to address this we have to address the situation guys this is something that is this is something that's very serious is kind of a serious problem that we have here it's beautiful it's amazing you kidding me you guys think you guys think it's bad enough okay you would think that it's bad enough that Kevin Jordan a former Paladin player is re-rolling Orc Shaman but Omar a former Paladin player is also re-rolling Orc Shaman do you like do you guys understand the amount of emotional distress this puts me in this is absolutely unbelievable I can't even look at please take it off man I can't even look at it that is a horrid dude unbelievable disgusting hashtag that's my war chief right there no that is I think it's cool right that even the people who made the games right even the people who have been making a game been working on the game and doing it for that many years are finding new ways to enjoy the game right I meme and stuff a lot about a lot of things you know what that's I think that's really cool they're finding new ways to enjoy it go ahead you know what man not only our Omar and the rest of the boys you know they've made classic wow they've been working on it for over two years now their final sacrifice is not taking time off work for launch they're going to be they're going to be at work drug fixing making sure everything goes well during launch it's their final sacrifice for us true the final sacrifice very very true imagine imagine if somebody on the classic team quits their job like right after I'm out I'll see you guys later no I think I think that'd be a I have a good idea oh jeez yo Ian I'm really sick today dude I can't come into work it's really bad oh man yeah that'd be that'd be great I wonder man man I couldn't imagine you should imagine somebody going in and and doing that be like come on dude we know what you're doing we know you know what they said they said like for like a server launch I wish we could have talked about this a little bit but not for a server launch but like an expansion launch there there's like a war room right there's a war room where it's like all hands on deck everybody's ready to go and it's like they got every freaking button and lever to press to make sure the state servers are staying online it's almost like they're they have a boat they they have a boat with a bunch of holes in it and they're just trying to plug it with every one of their fingers and I kind of I kind of want to know if that's what they were planning on doing with classic too with classic launch if it's just going to be like the same sort of procedure that they would normally do for a for an expansion launch yeah I wonder I mean I wonder like what am I trying to ask I wonder if they expect more trouble with the classic launch than a than a retail expansion launch I wonder like if they expect it'll go more smoothly or it's gonna be interesting you gotta think you gotta think there'll be more people coming back for a classic launch I think than than an expansion launch because classic launch captures not just the current audience but it captures everybody that quit already so you gotta expect that classic launch is going to be bigger than any expansion launch ever I think mm-hmm yeah I totally agree I think I think this is a game that over the years it's it's affected so many people right it's affected people's lives it's affected people's kind of like their gaming careers a lot of people got into online games through warcraft or through wow and you even look at a lot of the bigger streamers I mean you look at like you know Shroud Tim Lyric summit the list goes on right a lot of guys who are not in the wow section they they played wow at a very young gauge just like everybody else right like a lot of you guys here maybe a lot of you guys in chat right now you guys played wow you loved wow was a huge part of your life but over the years you kind of lost it you weren't as interested in wow because it wasn't really the same game that you were used to playing and so many people are they just want a chance to go back and we're finally going to get that here in about four days so which again that's dude it's crazy that they came on so close to launch yeah like that's they're probably packed they said they had meetings all day and that's why they they could only stay for like an hour so like the fact that they managed to fit us in that's insane because that was as far as I know they've never done a podcast or anything like that before as far as like Blizzard deads go they haven't no I don't think so yeah it's really cool it it's it speaks to how forward and open they've been with the community right because they did the AMA what two days ago or yesterday they're here today like hey they listen they talk right yeah it's it's been it's been really really good guys by the way if you haven't yet make sure to go follow stay safe and make sure go follow tips their their handles are right there in those places right under their names stay safe tv tips out baby on on twitch youtube same name and then stay safe warlock and tips out baby on twitter as well so you guys make sure to go do that if you guys haven't done that already um and pretty soon what we're going to do is we're going to do we're going to do some q&a if you guys have any questions things that maybe you want us to talk about that was brought up whenever we're talking to them or just any other questions in general you guys can tweet at us just you know at whatever put hashtag classic ass I'm going to search for hashtag classic ass on twitter and we'll do a little bit of q&a through that so um yeah so yeah build up some questions you guys are going to vegas here pretty soon for the method thing right yes that's right there is going to be a method launch event there's going to be a method classic launch event it's called the it's what is the actual is the official name race to world first I think it's officially called the race to world first but it's really a lot of different things going on and I know like as and you got a little show thing that you're doing and it's going to be a little different I think I sure as crap I'm not going for world first I'll tell you that same same I've never I've never speed leveled so this is going to be this is going to be a newer experience for me right I I think dude I'm going to be honest I don't think I'm going to hit 60 before the end of the before the end of the event well how long is it eight or nine days right yeah I mean we'll see what happens I mean I think it'll be good for me initially like I wasn't so sure if I even wanted to go but uh going I think it's going to be good for me because typically whenever I like I leave the house I'm at an event I'm at the hotel like I'm more like I'm like energizer bunny a little bit like I can go whenever I'm home like I might like get kind of my comfort zone I'm hanging around it's a little bit like going to like it's a little bit like sports like going to an away game or something you know that kind of mentality no you're totally right like I mean guys I'm staying home I'm with my dog I'm you know I can sleep in my bed I have the shampoo I use like you know all of these little tiny conveniences and things that you know and expect every day in your own home take those away it you know it does sort of tilt you off not tilt but sort of throw your gameplay off or throw you out of the vibe so like these guys that go to world first races like the method guys your limit guys that are pushing world first race like they're sleeping in hotels it's a big thing so if you see you guys are both going hard today have you guys casting on the couch or what are you guys doing every day I'm not casting yeah I'm not I'm not casting during during the leveling but once I at level 60 if I do it before the end of the event I might hop on the couch a little bit you know hang out with Mr. GM I know he's going Martin Creek is going I know Preach is going as well Bay from Final Boss TV all those guys are going so might have some good times yeah should be fun should be fun yeah and real quick something else guys just a quick shout out to sponsor for class cast is Displate is next much like Displate working I may not be working right now so I'll link it in the chat Displate they do the metal posters that you guys have seen is my rag right here guys this guy is going to be dead here in about a week a little over a week this guy is going to be dead right right here so you guys can also click Displate link in the profile yeah that's a that is a great discussion point okay how many days into classic is Regneros dying let's go around tips out when is Regneros dying possibly day five or six day five or six six probably is my guess just some some of the stuff that I'm hearing from some of these like top guilds that have you know been PTRing for the past six months there's guys they're supposedly getting to level 60 and under three days played or right around the three days played mark just get your Hydraxian it's not too difficult to get get your fire resist you've got 16 debuff slots 112 talents lower armor values confirmed on classic versus Nostcore private servers so I don't know some guys are telling me five or six days I'll take them at their word but I definitely think it'll go down during the event I think I think that I think that it while it might be like mathematically possible to get it first week I just consider potential server crashes and trying to log in and trying to coordinate everything I think it's going to be I think it's going to be so hard like I don't know maybe that's a little bit optimistic for me I think it'll probably still happen in the second week not saying that it can't 100% but I just think it's it's generally optimistic I think it could happen in the second week though we actually have somebody in the chat right now from from one of these top guilds actually somebody from Nile I'm back in the day who raided with Cungan and got the world first Kelthuzad he's in the chat right now his name is Rick Rick if you could let us know how long do you think it'll take the apes boys to get to get ragged down I'm curious but yeah sorry Steve go ahead I don't care what he says day eight I think day eight that's what I think day eight we'll see what he said okay I actually do care because he's playing up there but I think day eight day eight LMGD is saying six to seven days you know what no one said so NA gets classic wow on Monday and the west coast at 3 p.m why is no one going for a like a 14 hour Ragnaros you know like you can get it before you before the first reset just level 16 14 hours and kill Ragnaros yeah that's how it goes dude and now I think I think it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out and there's a lot of really good guilds right we've talked about it like you know you used used apes as an example apes there's a whole lot of other good guilds apes just happens to be one of the guilds that got a significant number of players in the beta so a lot of people know about them but it's going to be a lot of a lot of names are going to pop up that have been around the private server scene for a while and there's been a lot of I'll tell you man yeah go ahead in my mind it's apes for his progress that's what I think so we'll we'll see who gets it sorry I interrupted you dude salad bakers dude salad bakers I'm telling you I believe in the salad bakers Ladi's going to lead him to victory that's what it's all about there you go yeah yeah so no it's going to be uh it's going to be it's going to be really cool it's going to be interesting to see I think that a lot of people say like oh world first happened 15 years ago this and that and uh sure like world first and retail vanilla happened 15 years ago but classics a different story right it's a totally different meta it's it's different game rules all the stuff and regardless of whether or not it's like world first or whatever if they do fresh server launches it happened all the time at the private server scene everybody every fresh always talks about like server first this server first that and it's like what have you done for me lately that's how people look at it what have you done for me lately what's your recent success how good are you now I think it's I think it's going to be interesting to look at it's not going to be the end of the world but um I did a uh a short podcast today with a guy from limit and a guy from big dumb guild you know two two very advanced bfa raiding guilds and I asked them like do you guys it was about classic wow and how things are going to shake up or play out and I was like so do you guys think that's uh you know there is a classic where our world first regros and they were both like yeah you know because obviously the boss was killed 15 years ago and it's been killed on private servers all the time but with classic well launch people are playing harder there's new methodologies there's a new meta there's there's a different different individuals involved yeah like it is a different race a different competition I I totally agree with that yeah yeah I mean it's just like fun yeah it's something that's just fun right uh because I mean you gotta like you gotta have something you know what I mean like if if you got some soul dude have something to be excited about I think it's I think it's fun to watch it's interesting to talk about while that's certainly not what I'm doing with my guild my guild is going to be more of like a typical progression style of guild this as opposed to like a speed running guild hardcore guild I don't think you're playing a retribution paladin is conducive to an environment where you're trying to speedrun things now I do have some there's some some theory crafting of some interesting things as far as like from a from a support standpoint but I don't know if I want to go into it too much just yet until I until I test it out a little bit more but I I heard a rumor today about Spellpower ret Classic WoW is the dawn of Spellpower ret and ret's going to be actually the highest DPS spec of any spec okay I I don't think that's going to be the case but I had been talking about Spellpower ret for like a couple years now I don't know if you remember I'll stay safe but I've been I've been talking about Spellpower ret for a long time and then I got banned before I could really get the ball rolling on it so there's They banned you for talking about Spellpower ret yeah no I believe it yeah but I I think you know a lot of people have done a lot of a lot more research on it and stuff since then so we'll see I mean I I'm I want to try out whatever works best you know what I mean I certainly like the physical build and stuff like that but if if something can work with like a Spellpower build then or a majority Spellpower build as opposed to a hybrid right because you typically like lean into a hybrid at some point I think it'll be kind of it'll be interesting I'm more so thinking about some stuff with Nightfall right as far as like a support and like a hardcore grade but like being able to double up on that but I mean we can get into that whenever we know that it works I think we probably got some questions here that I'll go ahead and load up I still I do I still kind of can't believe they we got them on it was really really awesome that they came on let's see check for hashtag classic cast search pound classic cast dude I remember whatever I was doing computer science classes in college I'd get so triggered whenever someone there was a kid who was like I put a hashtag at the top and it's like it's it's a pound sign dude it's not a hashtag unbelievable it's boomer boomer clap anyway latest okay I got the stream okay yeah we should address this right because people kept asking this is from Erin Erin says I got to the stream late did you guys were blizzard and make a statement about the LFG add-on I talked earlier in the VOD we talked about it pretty extensively I even tweeted out a clip on my Twitter of of Ian has a costus kind of referencing the what they might potentially do with add-ons and we touched on add-ons like as far as like and from like an overview perspective but they weren't really going to be able to comment on any like one specific add-on like that unless they they had come to a conclusion or decision from from like a blizzard standpoint like from like a development team standpoint before they were going to be able to do that so I think we got as good as we could get so no I'm sure someone hopefully clipped and hopefully someone clipped the question answer just because I kind of forgot what they said too but it sounded like they said that if there's add-ons that trivialized the game and do like they said automation if there's any add-on that does anything automatically it sounded like they would intervene but I can't remember their full answer if somebody clipped it they could link in the chat that'd be awesome that that is what Brian ended up saying he said if there are if there are add-ons that automate gameplay they don't like those and are you're willing to shut those things down and this actually like I'm just gonna say there's an add-on I forget what it's called it's a questing add-on that will auto accept an auto turn in quest and leotrics I don't like that add-on I wish that add-on would shut down I don't know about you guys I don't like add-ons that like it's like buttons for you you know what I mean what is a I'm not familiar what does it do exactly I like it so much dude oh no it's yeah I know what you're saying though yeah it's it objectively increases leveling speed like it it helps you level faster but what it'll do is auto accept auto complete auto pick up quest NPCs lazy yeah exactly exactly lazy lazy pick part of the reason why lazy pig was considered to be such a big deal in private servers this is a post post vanilla add-on too lazy pig was as far as I know maybe I'm wrong about that but I'm pretty sure it was a post vanilla add-on lazy pig why people liked it so much was because of ranking and trying to get in battlegrounds and stuff because people needed that time where it's just like immediately accepts everything so if you got out of a battleground you queued as fast as you possibly could to make sure you get in the next one before it fills up plus whoever else joined the queue while you were while you were in the game sorry so yeah I don't know I don't know if something like that is going to end up working or not working whenever classic comes out but I think that's general rule of thumb is they don't like automation I think that's a I think that's a pretty good answer from them as far as as good as we were probably going to get yeah I would say my favorite part about leotrix actually has nothing to do with like the automated side but it has a setting that reduces the amount of time it takes to loot an object so like you know how in classic because the batching it takes a long time to loot like it just like makes that time like almost instantaneous which is nice because the looting is just so delayed in classic what you can do is just right click a corpse and just move on immediately you don't even you don't even have to look at it just it'll come to you you don't have to wait for the window to it'll come to you yeah don't even I would recommend because there is like that batch looting time sometimes it pops up for like it feels like forever and then other times it's like whoop you just don't even really see it just right click the corpse keep moving I would not wait to see what's actually in the in the loot thing mm-hmm this is a good question this is just interesting how have guild meetings been and how do you guys go about doing your guild meetings stay safe do you want to start um I can start if you want yeah well I'll I'll say like so I have an so you can go to my discord chat we're looking so I'm not going to turn this into a a recruitment post but uh I have I've done like open recruitment asking for people that can play a ton and the phone application to say what they want to play how long they can play etc their experience and uh trial rank or not trial rank depending on how the application goes and we've had several just in voice guild meetings where we have you know each meeting has been um like you know 100 or 150 I think one meeting at 200 people in discord and we're just I've made like sort of a a google slide it's almost like a power point presentation going over information and bringing people up to speed and then they can choose based on information if the guilds for them or not for them just trying to lay it all out there for people mm-hmm so you uh you you let a guild at one point in was it retail burning crusade you had a guild for a little bit mm-hmm yeah so so you yeah and you you've you've let a guild before and stuff like that I've never let a vanilla guild I think a vanilla guild is a is a beast and I can already tell you how much work I've put in but leading a vanilla guild is a big hurdle and I know s1 you know all about that oh yeah dude I mean so I uh I didn't start out as a guild leader in my old streams but uh I eventually became guild leader of the guild that I was in I started out of the pug eventually became it got into leadership I was an officer and then eventually I became the guild leader and there was a lot that changed during that time no no don't sorry not change change a lot of things were adjusted no changes I'm sorry but a lot of things that that basically uh adjusted during that time and we we shaped up the guild quite a bit but um I think that you you experience a lot of things from a guild leadership standpoint as far as like having guild meetings and kind of knowing what the culture your guild is and how things want to be how things are going to be approached throughout the course of the lifespan of your guild and I think a lot of this stuff I think a lot of this stuff it needs to be established very early on like you you come in and you say hey like this is what we're doing this is the type of guild we are and and lay the foundation early because uh some one of the issues that we had in our old guild was we we didn't really have that strong foundation we just did things a certain way because that's how we've always done them when the reality of it is we should have been doing them this way or another way or whatever I think my guild in classic I want it to have the memes I want it to be fun I want it to be a good community environment for for everybody right I want people to enjoy it but you just need to make sure that groundwork is laid down at the beginning and that's really I want it to be a lot like my old guild was except just have that have that foundation early on as opposed to trying to like you're trying to like shovel stuff under the building after the fact you know um that's that's kind of how I feel about it and it's for oh sorry as far as guild meetings go we kind of similar situation we just have a bunch of people on discord dude I'll tell you the first time the first time we got in discord and we did our first guild meeting like obviously people are gonna be excited people are spamming discord people are everybody has their mic open and I just had to say I was like yo like chill out like this isn't twitch chat and I think that that's something that I think that's something that a lot of people who are like oh I don't want to play on a streamer server like I'm concerned for a lot of people is that the environment of twitch is always going to bleed into everything else that people do and I'll I'll be honest with you it was it was certainly like that immediately right but I think we within within a few minutes we kind of calmed everybody down maybe like it was honestly not more than like a minute or two I was in voice and I said hey like this is you know this isn't twitch this is our discord meeting or guild meeting sorry we're in discord it's a little bit different it's a different environment I don't think I had a single person interrupt me and I just talked straight for two hours it was great it was like I was streaming that's great and I mean that's that's sort of a test in and of itself right because if you have a if you have a guy or a couple of people in your meeting voice chat that just can't calm down they're interrupting they're going crazy okay now you know those are people that should not be in your guild they've just disqualified themselves that's sort of how I look at it yeah so you know it was it was definitely good experience and I think I think a lot of people understand that and a lot of people say oh zoomers I'll tell you what most people in my guilder probably my average age for my guild is like 25 26 so yeah yeah I think that's I think that's a lot of people have you guys have you guys had any kind of zoomers like younger like under 20 year olds join your guilds I don't think I have anybody under 20 in the guilds I have a couple younger people that I've invited not that I'm sorry I go ahead uh I'm good yeah I was gonna say not really that I'm aware of and you know exceptions could be made but I really don't want people that are younger than like 18 in the guild it's just uh young people act differently right and I'm not yeah I'd rather just not have them in the guild dude you're being agist dude what do you say yeah I guess I am that's the way it is I think and I absolutely think that's a thing like you might have a you might have a situation where I do think everybody's different right but certain people at certain ages have certain tendencies right they they just they think differently they might have different goals whatever but uh but not I think it's fine I don't know if I have I have a few 18 year olds I have a few people like maybe they're just starting college or something like that that are that are joining the guild but I think it's cool right and this is kind of something that we've talked about in the past the younger generation of people who never got a chance to really play classic back in the day but they want to play classic now a lot of the best players I mean a lot of the best players that that we played with on private servers if you think about it they were they're probably in their low 20s and didn't play retail classic you know or they they didn't play it at a very high level you're right you're right that a lot of young players can be very very good but can they handle themselves in social situations and not will react to things and like it's more of a social dynamic issue that I have than just a skill issue right and that's that's kind of where you have to you have to go figure that out on a case by case basis is how I feel exactly exactly yeah I mean the question was more like census oriented like I'm curious like how many younger players are getting into classic I know like I had a couple of younger players in the guild no longer there but like in general overall it seems like not too many young people so far have gotten into classic at least from my point of view but maybe they're doing like we used to do and they're just saying they're older than they are so they can download iTunes let's see is there any is there anybody in the chat who is younger than 20 years old and is going to play while classic out of curiosity just for census yeah me smile me smile I'm sure a lot I mean so Twitch doesn't give us age demographics I don't think but YouTube does and I'm sure you guys have similar similar analytics it's like 70% of my YouTube viewers are men between 25 and 35 like that's the demographic of classic wow and I'm not I'm not kidding when I say this I have 0.01% email viewers on YouTube same dude 0.01 women hey squad W yeah I don't remember what mine is I know the overwhelming majority of mine was was definitely males from 25 to 36 or whatever the number was 24 to 35 whatever whatever hot dudes only yeah yeah hot dudes only so yeah and then the the remaining is other so I mean that's that's just that's just kind of how it goes right it's a lot of it's a lot of guys it's a lot of 25 year old boomers trying to relive the glory days maybe there's single guys late 20s early 30s which is how it is let's see do you think the underdog specs this is for Mike do you think underdog specs like prop halonins will be more prominent this time around yes I do think I do think having aspects and stuff people have figured out how to play these off specs retroactively quite well for what they are but as far as like an effectiveness standpoint and being optimal it's it's just not as optimal as like a few like I'd say ret paladin right let's take let's take ret paladin for example you just don't do as much damage as a fury warrior you just you just don't do as much damage as a rogue that's just how it is that's the game it's that's the cost of playing a hybrid class but as far as knowing how to do the content it's not like having one of these guys is going to make it to where you can't clear the raids I think if you're wiping on a boss it's certainly not going to be because you have one feral or one ret or one whatever in your raid it's going to be because your raid didn't do the job right even if that one guy is doing less damage or whatever so yeah agree 100% I will say if there's one hybrid class or one kind of meme spec that's going to do decently well compared to how it did back in the day I'd say it's probably feral druids yeah feral druids I think I think feral druids is probably the best I don't like I don't like I don't think feral is that bad at all and leader of the pack is so good the people love leader of the pack I mean that that crit bonus for your group is really nice shadow is another one shadow is one that's really really good and shadow is going to be better than it was on private servers because you typically don't go shadow until patch 1.7 on private servers but you're going to have 16 debuff slots from the start so you can have a shadow priest in your raid from phase one so Stacy are you doing that or are you going to have a shadow priest right off the bat so if we had a shadow priest we'd have a power weaving priest I don't think full shadow but I don't know that in phase one or phase two we're going to really want to have enough warlocks to justify having a shadow priest or a shadow weaving to buff the warlocks I think we might run with two warlocks I'll say this though yeah I'll say this classic wow and you can clip this whatever there's going to be a boomkin revolution okay everyone's going to realize boomkins are the meta you're going to want one in your caster group dude boomkins are going to pop trust me man just trust me boomkin with mages just trust me dude it's going to be big I think what's the number for warlocks and shadow priest is it five warlocks is when it tips is that is that a number I don't remember oh to keep up ISB for for everything like all things considered one of you have a shadow priest one of you have improved shadow bowl everything um I'm not sure like the big the big thing I'm aware of is is whether or not you can have 100% of time on ISB you want like four warlocks and have like 20% or 20 between 20-25% spell create then you can have just about 100% ISB at the time yeah I'm not sure about yeah I guess I'm not sure about what you're asking I think it's the shadow weaving debuff like at what point is it worth it to bring a shadow priest yeah I'm talking about yeah like all buffs considered like the the tipping point yeah I would say dude if you're like really trying to min max a roster probably not so aq honestly yeah like I know I know a lot of good guilds like molten core bwl they only bring two warlocks they don't even they don't even debuff um curse of shadow they have curse of wreck and curse of elements like like the warlocks are only there as for those two debuffs pretty much yeah how are you going to do gar with two warlocks are you going to do like the just tank multiple strat so that might be a situation where there there's some tank memes you can do yes that um maybe you can do a hunter kiting strategy we'll have to see how far the edge leash um on top of that like it might be a situation where we have more warlocks until the raid is geared and we can just sort of overgear it and then we drop warlocks we'll have to see yeah that's interesting I always like hearing like how other guilds do stuff because I think what we're probably going to end up doing is we are going to have tanks tank everything separately and then we'll have half of them like every every tank we'll probably have two adds as a responsibility and they just go pick up the one after that one's killed and and not banished anymore as probably the strategy we're going to go with and then kill guard last and then eventually we'll do like the a we the big just I'm going to be yeah dude you're gonna you're I'm telling you like every time I say this people in chat like no way dude there are going to be guilds like probably the majority of guilds in classic wow that get hard stuck on gar for like a week or two seriously like gar gar is going to be a progression boss for most guilds in classic wow like I genuinely believe that yeah I think there's going to be guilds who they walk in they think it's going to be a walk in the park and and while something certainly are going to be I think gar is one of those bosses that has the potential of getting people hung up a little bit I mean we we got hung up on it on private server and but whenever I just joined the guild we got hung up on gar and before I was leading or anything so it was a it's just something that happens so next question did you guys see with the Q&A that on separate the other day bindings are dropping in phase one oh dude that was so interesting to me do you know what that means that their answer was like just because you didn't see it in one point just because you didn't see it before 1.4 doesn't mean it wasn't there so what that means is bindings and I've so furious could always drop from patch 1.1 but nobody just it happened to be that nobody ever saw it until 1.4 patch for both of them because rag rag was not killed until 1.4 patch had come out for the first time so you couldn't have seen that and then the bindings it would have been gore and baron get in but still same thing like it's just it's random chance it's so rare so how crazy is it that even after 15 years nobody knew that everybody thought that they came out patch 1.4 because that was the earliest record of when they dropped I think that's super cool it's true now the big question I'm really curious about are we going to see awnee heads in phase one because if there are awnee heads in phase one like that that's actually a big game changer for going for a world first classic Ragnaros I think because you're probably going to have a guild go in try to get an awnee head pop it before they go you know what I mean probably very likely so I actually didn't know this I talked to nano from the Nostalgia team because you guys don't know who nano nano was the the head of quality assurance for Nostalgia I was talking to nano he said that a nixie head actually doesn't drop in I think it doesn't drop till phase two it didn't it didn't drop right at the beginning of the game so doing a nixie before mc I think it's going to be good for the sake of getting loot or stuff but but you're not going to have the awnee head at least until phase two so I think the only thing that's going to be I think the only the only world buff at that point would be the song flower correct me if I'm wrong because the itemization question was a little bit was a little bit the way it was answered was a little complicated so I'm not sure if I got 100% but didn't they basically say that anything that dropped up until patch 1.9 will drop at the start of classic that's how I understood it that's the way I took it and that's why I was like okay maybe awnee head phase one we're just going to have to see man we're just going to have to see yeah actually that's a good point maybe they maybe they are just going to do it like that you might be right actually nixie head probably does drop phase one because of that that's a good point and you know what you know what I would love to see and I think like people that play vanilla remember this so early on in vanilla we've talked about this before early on in vanilla Ragnaros despawned after one hour you had one hour to fight him before he went away for the week in late vanilla it was increased to two hours I think it would be hilarious if you have a guild that it's like day six of classic wow their sleep deprived they've been hustling and they wipe once or twice on Ragnaros because they're just they're just like burns out and he despawns and the lockouts wasted yeah that would be hilarious that would be amazing I hope that happens the drama behind that would be so interesting to watch it would be so good it'd be so good because here's the thing they would want to wake up right after the reset and get in there as soon as possible they would have to like they have to totally work their schedules around it I think you know maybe that's what these guilds are thinking okay this is why we need a day six Ragnaros because if we fudge it we wait 12 hours we get a reset we go in again who knows yeah maybe so yeah actually I just looked it up wowhead has a log of like things that are available and what phase and for I think it's all datamined and onyxia head would drop in phase one according to this so yeah I mean based on what based on what they said about the itemization and what wowhead says then yeah onyxia head would be available so if you want to go in for that first rag run and try and get onyxia head beforehand that probably or first MC run it'd probably be a good idea so yeah and we all know that ony is on a five day reset so reset probably starts Tuesday for NA so you know maybe maybe we'll see people doing a five day ony run and then a day six MC run if that's the schedule they're trying to go on I don't know because I it makes sense you would want to do an ony run before you go in and do MC I mean who knows dude who knows especially Horde side the atumans a little brutal but yeah I mean if you could pull it off if you could pull it off it could be really good but but if you could manage to get an onyxia run in I mean imagine if you dropped a like a death bringer or something or a or a vis gag you get a vis gag or a death bringer early on for somebody going into MC that'd be so like so huge looking back at the very first class this is from fishy london looking back at the very first class cast a year and a half ago what's it like to have come so far and have the lead developers on a few days before launch it's kind of crazy man because like I don't think this is something that like ever was expected we kind of just started this as an outlet for us to talk about classic whenever like kind of how how the story of classic ass came about I had just gotten banned and I just got banned from streaming on youtube I was I was a private server streamer all this stuff that's how I made friends to stay safe stay safe he streamed a little bit but he mostly did like videos and stuff back then and I got banned trying to figure out what I was doing I was in the process of that I said hey well I'm just gonna ask blizzard I'm just gonna try and email somebody to try and ask around find out what I can do and see what the rules are and they basically said you can't do private server content so you can't do private server content you can't really do classic content the way that I was doing it before which was mostly gameplay was mostly gameplay streamer back then and I went I told a few people and I said hey guys I got why first off I told a few people that hey like I'm gonna go do this and see what they say and this will help out all of us and it was like okay cool and stay safe was there actually we were in discord together and we were talking about that before I before I I guess announced that I was gonna do that and then and then I came back and I told stay safe and a few other people what the results were and we basically stay safe kind of had my back like right off the bat and he's like okay like no more private server content like I got your back like we're like let's do this the right way let's do the right thing and we we came up with the idea of basically like we should do a podcast but it kind of got tabled and even before that like we were boys before classic got it like I actually had joined your guild at one point I was playing with you in raid 3 in BWL before right so so okay yeah that's how that's how yeah yeah yeah so so and it's funny because we were actually like before classic was announced we were like dude should we do a vanilla podcast yeah yeah I don't know classic got announced it's like okay let's do this well we talked about it and we it came up it came up again after the announcement but then we we didn't really we didn't have like our our people to talk about and then tips tips got a hold of me and was like hey would you be interested in starting a podcast like it's funny that you say that because stay safe and I talked about this and you know let's let's figure this out let's meet let's see what we want to do and we'll go from there and that's kind of how classic has started and it was like I said it was an outlet for us to basically do classic content without physically being able to play the game because that's what that's what we were I mean we were we're just just vanilla boys and to see how much classic has grown and how many people support the show and how many people tune in to watch and not only getting support from you guys but I mean even even to the point where the classic devs a few days before launch are willing to come on that's absolutely insane and I never in a million years could have could have imagined that so I mean that's that's a big testament to you guys being supportive of us too I mean it's not it's not really just us it's you guys you guys being supportive of us and believing in us too so thank you guys that's the absolute truth like viewers give the streamer the platform and then the the streamers or the content creators can do either good or bad with the platform the viewers give them so we've tried to do our best I I hope yeah like we love you guys so much like honestly like yeah remember remember the first class do you remember how many views we had in the first class cast I think we I think we had like I don't it was somewhere between a hundred and two hundred I think it was like low hundreds I think it was low hundreds the crazy thing is there's people that are in the chat right now that were there in the first one like fire had fishy lawn gnome I think it was in the first one too LMGD says he was there that's crazy Heisenberg was there I'm pretty sure as well that's crazy man yeah tell us what happens since my vanilla streams so guys in a little bit after maybe like a couple minutes I might actually start streaming and I was thinking I might actually watch I might watch on my stream today classic cast number one and see how wrong how wrong we were because this is we're talking over a year and a half because it's almost two years ago and see what's what's happened in the last two years man dude it's so funny like I feel like the things that we used to talk about then are so trivial and it's just like now completely like and no discussion like why are we even talking about this it'll be really funny to watch that that'll be that'll be really funny to watch and just kind of see how wrong we were about so many things and we're gonna say the same thing classic is gonna get close to to ending and we're gonna say the same we're gonna say some things about this podcast right now it's like oh look at us talking about like classic plus or TBC and fresh servers and kind of what our opinions are there because over time like you know you have everybody's a product of their experiences right their opinions are formed from that so over time we might see some certain things and we might learn certain things and go through certain things that change our opinion on on what we think about certain subjects so I do think it's cool to go back and watch and see how that happens so it is really really cool yeah are we ending no not quite let's we'll take a couple more questions before we before we finish out so again if you guys want to read out any questions at us it's a hashtag classic cast at Svan TV at Stacey of Warlock at tips out baby go ahead and add us I'm searching for hashtag classic cast and you guys can follow us as well if you want to do that and also if you guys came in late to the podcast I'm going to be host or I'm going to be posting excuse me this episode of classic cast with the vanilla devs Omar and Brian I'm going to be posting it on YouTube so youtube.com slash Svan TV you guys can go check that out and you guys should make make sure to check out stay safe YouTube and tips YouTube as well so make a classic cast playlist I have one and I'm working on I've been working on this for a while now but I'm trying to I'm trying to get some help on getting put it on like an audio platform too like maybe put it on Spotify or something like that as well I think it should be I think it should be good so yeah what are some oh this is a good question Jamie anytime I say the name Jamie I think of Jingle all the way Jamie what are some things you guys wanted wanted to see in classic that you didn't get for example I know stay safe said he wanted the unarmored epic mounts which I agree with by the way well I mean I'll second that right I think the unarmored epic mounts are kind of like a token of pride and I think it's something that it's you know there's not achievements right achievements in classic wow they're not on paper they're they're they're in here you know what I mean they're intangible it doesn't it doesn't say what you have you can look at somebody and you play oh that guy he has an unarmored epic mount he got his epic mount before phase two came out or I mean I honestly this how I feel I think if if the concern is that it's going to happen too fast and people are going to feel rushed to do it I would not be opposed to them having unarmored epic mounts for the first two phases and then in phase three making it to wear in phase three making it to where it goes to the armored epic mounts I wouldn't have been opposed to that I just think the unarmored epic mounts or something it's really cool in my opinion they look better I actually like how they look more but I also think it's cool is like kind of like a badge of honor so yeah what do you guys think? yeah I've got to say like I just really totally disagree with their logic on not having the unarmored epic mounts like the reason they said was that some people want to level more slowly and play with their friends and just enjoy the process like phase one is probably going to be four or five months right like that's my that's my guesstimate maybe four months so like that's quite a lot of time on top of that you have to make a choice how do you how do you want to play the game I think that I think the hardcore players should be catered to as they were back in the day and more casual players are catered to catered to in different ways I mean like you could use this argument or the justification for a lot of things and wow that have gone down right I don't know like I just don't think it stands up very well there might be I mean my original theory was it's probably because they're back porting the 112 systems and mounts kind of fall under like systems not so much the content side so that's why they couldn't reverse it but I don't know it sounded like they had you know an actual reason for it I mean I'm in I'm in StaySafe's camp here I wish they just I wish it just brought it in it would have been cool a nice little exclusive thing you get if you level fast and I'm not sure if they're open to changing it you know four days in advance but it would be cool if they did yeah I completely agree with both of you guys so this is a good question this is more of a community related question and this is from from B he says do you think that they will bring back the screenshot of the day on the website I don't know if they're going to bring back any sort of like screenshot of the day stuff kind of fun community stuff like that but let me tell you something else that if they don't bring it back on the website a community that you can get involved in especially if you want to play on Ferlina we've actually made a Ferlina discord server and a Ferlina subreddit and the Ferlina discord server I believe is just discord.gg slash Ferlina pvp is that right discord.gg slash Ferlina pvp I hope that's right click is that wrong I think that's wrong just Ferlina sorry just Ferlina not Ferlina pvp my bad that's the subreddit the subreddit is the subreddit the subreddit is Ferlina pvp so reddit.com slash r slash Ferlina pvp we're going to go there we'll show this off for a second oh wrong thing there we go we're gonna show this off just for a second so yeah there's a there's a lot of good interesting stuff on here just good fun memes people are posting like you know yeah yeah I just just funny funny memes here's there's uh oh dude this one's even better it's already up there dude oh wow yeah that's really good this is even better but yeah no this is just like a fun community place there's 2.6k people in the on on the reddit right now so if you guys want to go ahead and join that subreddit and get involved there and then also the discord server if you guys are looking for a guild if you guys are want to talk about any interesting community stuff absolutely absolutely use this and I mean even if you're not right even if you're not playing on Ferlina you might want to take a look at at this subreddit for all the fun memes and stuff that comes out of it I know Eric Eric posted his intro videos on on the subreddit too so you guys can check that out there as well really good yeah there's a lot of really funny stuff here man like you can even go to like I think top all time where is it yeah Eric make the horde ones Eric made the horde ones as well too yeah so like streamers enter the battle alliance there's a horde one somewhere I don't know where it went but uh guys say meme reddits dance game listen man like I don't blame you most reddits have very very bad memes one standard we have a very high standard meme excellence high quality on this subreddit don't even worry about it wouldn't you say we're I would say we're a bit of a meme connoisseurs is what I would call ourselves absolutely yeah meme connoisseurs very uh revolutionaries yeah absolutely absolutely so uh indubitably so did we talk to omar yes we did but guys this will be posted on youtube youtube.com slash sfan tv it'll be posted tomorrow let's take one last question one last question before we end for the day and stasis continues to stream um one last question um hey guys this is relevant because this is our last classic cast before the launch of wow classic in four days and then we're gonna we're probably gonna take a break for probably about two weeks and then we'll come back just for the the launch uh launch craziness hey guys what do you think will be the combined viewership for classic on twitch at launch we've talked about this before but what would you say I think now is the most relevant time to talk about it tips what do you think you if I remember correctly bfa's launch had around five to six hundred thousand I think I think something like that is that right is that right I remember being an it was like an observed number I think it was it was something crazy um I wish I could I wonder if I could look that up yeah bfa someone's saying bfa was 600k if bfa was 600k without all the non-endemic streamers like shroud and tim and all those guys lyric summit all those guys playing do you add those guys on top of that I would not be surprised if it hits a million um I do think it's going to be larger than bfa's whether it hits a million I don't know but I would not be surprised if it did yeah we're gonna break a million I think so we're breaking a million mm-hmm I I think that I think it'll be I think the low end is 500k I think that's the low end but whatever you factor in all the other streamers like like tip said all the people who are coming back for classic or uh I mean just classic is like a whole it's it's like a massive snowball that's just been picking up hype over the last two years I think uh I would not be surprised to see it approach a million is it gonna actually hit a million we'll see but uh I think it's certainly gonna get close yeah mm-hmm supposedly Tim yeah Tim yesterday was saying that uh he's he's willing to take a month and just go hard in classic yeah well you better do it as alliance because we got no freaking streamers that are alliance on fair lina compared to horde I'll tell you how much I got hey tim if you see this we're gonna have some words at twitch con if you're not playing alliance okay I'm telling you right now unbelievable so I gotta say I think I think I really think fair lina is gonna be like streamer memes aside I don't think it's gonna be that bad I think for lina is gonna be a great server like I really actually think that it's gonna be the greatest server in the history of about I think I think every server is going to have it some kind of culture and community and stuff like that that comes from it and I think that uh like there's a lot of people like this right like you might you might watch reality tv that server is going to be like a reality tv show like I might not want to live in in the jersey shore house but I might watch it and just kind of watch just watch the flames from a distance just sit there and just watch just look interesting so I don't know I think it'll be I think it'll be fun to watch for a lot of people fun to follow along with and uh I think it's certainly gonna be fun to play on too so it'll be it'll be really cool so um any last thoughts guys do you guys have anything else dude this was a great class cast I still am sort of in shock that they came on especially I mean especially because they're four days from launch they've got to be super busy right now yeah really really thankful really really thankful that they came on and uh their willingness to kind of like communicate with the community more and uh work with content creators more and stuff like that I think that that's yeah uh that was really incredible I hope you guys had fun man I was trying like we talked about this before but we were trying not to talk too much and it kind of we we only had a short amount of time with them and we wanted to let them roll and and we didn't really want to interrupt them and let them talk and let them really give their peace because uh there was a lot of people it's such a rare opportunity to get to do that then then we need to give them as much time as possible so we were really really excited about that and I think it went really really well honestly this whole past few years has been an amazing journey and I just want to say big thank you to asfan and stay safe to both of you guys honestly this whole time it's been a pleasure knowing you guys and uh it's been an awesome ride since the beginning and like yeah I I'm really I'm really happy to be here and and you know doing this stuff with you guys and thanks to everybody watching supporting us over the past two years it's I can't even believe it's happening like I'm I'm just at a loss really awesome it's been a really really fun time 100% so anyways guys thank you so much for joining us and stay safe is going to continue his stream we'll we'll host in to stay safe I'll I'll read off subs and donations and stuff to make sure I'm caught up on everything so I don't leave anybody out before I host and we'll see you guys next time take our boys see you guys soon