 Welcome, welcome everybody to classic cast number 13. I think my my audio should be good. We had to make some changes to the audio settings. Hopefully it's fine. I'm here with tips out baby. I'm here with stay safe TV and also we're joined again by John Statz, former vanilla wow level designer and then also former vanilla wow team lead, Mark Kern. And this is you know, this is something we're very excited about. This is something a lot of people are very excited about. John was with us last week. John, do you want to go ahead and reintroduce yourself to anybody who wasn't here last week? Yes, I would. Thank you again for having me again. Classic cast was gracious enough to welcome me on there, welcome me on their show to promote my book, The Wow Diary. And it's been, it's in its final stages on Kickstarter, which doesn't sound good when I say it that way. But it's in the late stages of its Kickstarter and it's doing very well. And I have, of course, The Wow fans and classic cast. Thank for that. For sure. Well, you have another three days left on your on your Kickstarter goal, right? So it's, it's getting urgent or times. We have 66 hours left. We've hit all our stretch goals. This book is going to be a lot rarer than the garden variety version of The Wow Diary that you'll find on Amazon. And there's a lot of bells and whistles on it, a lot of add, you know, little things we've added to it. And if anyone's interested in checking it out, it's at TheWowDiary.com. And that'll take you straight to the Kickstarter. Some, some cool stuff. Book I don't think is comparable to any book that I know of. And that's probably one of the reasons why I wrote it because there's, it's pretty cool. There's a lot of cool stuff in it. If you like game, if you like game development, yeah. Maybe you were gracious enough to give us a little sneak preview of it. And I got to say, I said this last time, even if you're not much of a reader, there are tons, tons of really cool old vanilla photos or pre-vanilla photos of stuff that didn't quite make it into the game. It doubles as a picture book. It's really awesome. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's some pictures of the office too. I, one of the pictures was Mark and Shane's desk Mark and Shane used to sit in the hallways. Yeah, just so that they could be approachable to, you know, the whole team. And Mark had up against his wall, his diploma, his old, his old diploma with a little sticky tab that said 80 grand for sale. You want to say, why did you put that on there? Like what was the thinking behind that, Mark? Well, you know, at the time 80 grand for a law school education was considered a lot. And it was kind of a joke because I actually used my legal education a lot at Blizzard. And in fact, I wrote the Wow China contract, which was the template for MMO contracts in Asia. I wrote the outline for that that legal used. And I use my legal education a lot writing the terms of service for battle net and that actually went to court and the clause I wrote held up so I was happy about that. But at the same time, my, my love was in the game, right. And my third year of law school, I was making games for interplay, I was making games for naughty talk. And I was skipping all my classes. And so, you know, I thought, well, maybe maybe I should get some value out of this law degree other than what I'm doing now. And so I put a posted on it and I said, free Photoshop, Photoshop your name into this law degree. No takers. So sadly, that was early on in the project that you were joking about that. I think later as the project got to realization. That's when all the legal mumbo jumbo actually was so important to the company. Well, Mark, I don't know if it's too late, but I would love to have a law degree. Don't do it. I went to give a talk at my, my, my old law school, Boston University, and they invited me to come talk to the students and they all showed up. And I thought that I was, I had this all presentation laid out about the parallels between law and programming, programming games and law and how you, you know, do all this. It's very similar in these ways. And I was already to talk about this and they all to to a person said, we just want to know how to get out of law and get into games like you did. We want to do law. And I was like, Oh, wow, what's going on? And turns out that that the legal jobs just had dried up at the time. I don't know how the situation is now, but they were nobody wanted to hear my presentation. They just wanted to hear about games and game development, how to get into the games room for lawyers to be. That's great. So before we get too far ahead, Mark, I mean, we already started talking to Mark a little bit, but Mark, will you go ahead and introduce yourself, former vanilla wow team lead? Sure. My name is Mark Kern. I was the shipping lead on World of Warcraft vanilla. And I also worked on the Stalrius's petition to get classic wow and helped deliver the petition in person to Mike Morheim. That's what I promised. I said, Hey, I worked for Mike. Mike was my direct boss during World of Warcraft development. And I hand delivered the petition to him and had a, I promised he would be a private conversation several hours about the difficulties and the pros and cons of getting wow back into circulation. And of course, I was very pro and Mike played devil's advocate and asked me a lot of hard questions, which was a good thing to do when you're when you're being this careful about something that's as classic as wow. And you want to make sure that the quality is very high. So on the project, I basically, I wore a lot of hats because it started off the team lead of projects before then were really responsible for organization management of the team making sure that the game is not just, you know, efficiently run but also that it's fun and that it's considered quality and that we're we're getting it out to everybody, but they grew because wow was the first time that we went from a box game to a service, and we had to grow the company dramatically in many different areas we had to create a whole new GM system to hold you all these divisions. So my role expanded over time and I was eventually going around all the way down to educating going to our sales teams and doing huge conferences and Palm Springs with a worldwide sales team about how do you sell an MMO and I kept and I remember there was this barrier they were thinking about box sales and not about how to sell this as an ongoing service and how to get more customers in and reduce churn and I had to like sort of change that whole mindset and that was a new experience for me because I was just, you know, just doing game stuff before that. But in the early days, you know, I had a lot of fun because the team was small I got to do things like set out some like the basic Wow quest template design. I wrote up a doc of the 12 I don't know if that's in your book I wrote up a doc of the 12, you know, quest templates and circulate around and Alan was like this is this is good stuff we should look at this and then early UI design, mini map design all that stuff but I love that stuff and unfortunately towards the end of wow it was more like being a mini CEO running around all these divisions I literally had two blackberries on me the whole time because there were fires all the time. And I remember, you know, Mike chewing me out one night, saying the servers were down where were you and I had had dinner for an hour, and I hadn't had no sleep. And I was very upset and I said, Mike, I have to have some kind of life we need a fallback plan. I, you know, I can't be solely responsible. I'm running with two blackberries right now. And I was I remember being pretty upset because I was like I just took an hour or two for dinner and everything went up went went crazy during that time unfortunately. And it was a very tense moment, you know, launching Wow it was it was make it or break it for Blizzard. So one of those 12 quest templates was the escort quest wasn't it. I'm sorry. Oh my God, you did this. Nobody thought it was a bad idea at the time. I don't know. I don't remember anybody going I remember a lot of debate over first person versus third person things like that but I don't remember escort quest ever popping up as it going to be a future problem in anyone's mind. Well, the plan was I don't know why you wrote a template for it because the plan was that the producers are going to make quests in their own time in their own spare time. They would just make a couple quests and that would be good enough, you know. Oh yeah, that would never happen. The producers was so busy. I was so busy in their spare time. Yeah, that spare time evaporated. I mean, I remember doing early itemization early all the early UI work on all the early quest template work and then that time just evaporated and it was it was completely running around, you know, managing everything and and making some some pretty big decisions like swapping out the animation system at the end at the very end of the project. That was a big risk. Yeah, because we had so many bugs with the original animation system, and we were we were we were pounding on all these bugs and we were getting, you know, locked animation states and things weren't working quite right. And someone was writing one of our programmers was writing a completely new animation system. And we at some point, and from my experience from project management, sometimes you're better off rewriting a system than trying to plug 1000 holes in a system that's grown organically over five years. And and trying to get that to work the the basic instinct is usually to just hey we've got something working. Let's make it work. I hedge my bet. I said, OK, you can complete this in parallel. And if you can guarantee me a lower bug rate, we'll do a hot swap, and we'll get the new animation system in at the end. So I authorized a development in parallel of the old system fixing the bug and the new system that this programmer was making. And it turned out that the new system solved a lot of issues. And so we went with that. But yeah, it was really, really tense. I mean, we were we were the black sheep project of the company. So especially in the beginning. Well, just just from my own curiosity, what other Blizzard products you said prior to while you were with Blizzard, what other games did you work on prior to wow? Starcraft and I helped cancel Warcraft Adventures. I'm sorry. That was the board game, right? No, Warcraft Adventures was going to be an adventure game. Well, if you remember the LucasArts games like Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, it was really inspired by Full Throttle. These sort of graphic adventures that you would go through that were click and point. And this was being outsourced by Blizzard to a Russian outsource company. And when I came in, one of the first things I had to do was look at this game because I was a huge adventure game fan. That was that was my my jam back then. So, you know, I said, OK, we've got to completely rewrite this. And I got Steve Moritzky from Infocom. He's a he was a big text adventure writer back then and graphic adventure writer. And I brought him in and we sealed ourselves in a room with Bill Roper and Chris Miller. And we rewrote all the entire, all the puzzles, all the quests, all the jokes, everything else for three days. We didn't leave that room. We just sealed ourselves in. But when it came time to implement it, we were having issues with our third party and they're long gone. So I can talk about this now. We had issues with the third party implementing these changes. And this is when I learned one of my my rules was always look at source code. You know, if you're having problems with the game, you know, you can you can look at the code and see where you really are because you can fake a lot of stuff. So I went in the source code and I was horrified because the code was basically copy and pasted over a thousand different environments in the game, which meant if you wanted to change in the way inventory worked on the beginning of the game, you had to make it in a fact the chain change in a thousand different places to get it to work at the end of the game. And that causes a lot of bugs and slowdowns and everything else. And I realized at that point that we were we were going to have a lot of difficulties getting the quality bar that we wanted out of that. So Warcraft Adventures, you know, I went to Bill Roper. I was like, we got to pull the plug. I just got to pull the plug on this. And so I was producer on that Diablo to also was Blizzard HQ producer on the game swallowed my soul. And millions of others, I'm sure I led strike teams on that and I led strike teams on Starcraft and and brood war and what do you mean exactly my strike team. Yeah, I don't know if they do this anymore and we didn't do it for Wow. Wow is probably the first game. I remember us not doing it. But a strike team was actually a team that was picked different perspectives throughout the company, different people of game playing ability and everything else. And we would submit design feedback because we felt that the teams themselves would be too close to it. So we picked people from other teams or from, you know, or who weren't in management positions. And I ran these strike teams that would when we did we play the game exhaustively and generate tons of feedback like Diablo, you know, we probably Diablo two we probably shouldn't have the paladin eating hearts and internal organs of his slain enemies to revitalize health. I mean, this is the way that health regeneration worked in D2. And we just didn't, you know, thematically we're like, I don't think this is going to work. And so, so that's what strike teams did. And for Wow, we didn't have one. I think we just ran out of time. There was so much to do. And it eventually just absorbed the whole company to get this game out. And so that's what that's what strike teams did. For sure. For sure. So, you know, you were obviously with Blizzard for a long time beforehand before Wow came to fruition. How closely did you guys work together? You know, just directly while you guys were working on Wow? Oh, John and I pretty closely. I remember coming to your office and sitting down and doing this a lot. Yeah, yeah. Mark interviewed actually Mark interviewed me. You were you were recruiting even like while I remember talking to you, you were the first face I saw. We had to build the Wow team and we didn't I didn't believe in I knew I knew. Okay, so one of the one of the things going against Wow was this. John, I don't know if you were here. Do you know how story out how I was going to be canceled? Tell us that story. I didn't know. Okay, so we had another team lead at the time, and we had another team lead on on team two working on Warcraft three and they and and the Wow team. You know, I was, I had gone from producer of those other titles now is now manager of product development. So I was responsible for training all our producers and overall, you know, getting all of our projects spun up and and to completion and the Wow team was coming to me. I wasn't directly on the Wow team at the time, and they were coming to me because they were getting a lot of complaints from other teams like this game would never work. You know, it's, it's too confusing. You know, the art style is different. It didn't look anything like Warcraft art style at the time. And we had a lot of issues to solve there. And so they were already sort of under ropes as far as a project was going and a small very small team at the time I think it was 10 people. And what happened was the two leads left to form, along with our VP of tech left to form arena that to do Guild Wars. And we had this giant sucking sound of leadership in the company and everyone was sort of panicked. And they, they called a big meeting and I remember I was there with Mike and Alan Adham, the other founder of the company and Frank and I think Pardo was there too and Shane. And so there's like five of us in Mike's office and everyone's everyone around us is saying we've got to cancel the game. We can't go on. There's no way we we don't have enough blizzard blue on the project. We talked a lot about, you know, people who bleed blizzard blue who have been, you know, trained up through the system that are blizzard veterans that are standard values of game design and game game production. And, and they said, and we don't have we don't have a technical lead or a team lead. And I said, look, you know, Shane can be team lead, because, you know, Shane was the first team lead for for Wow. At that point after that. And I said, Shane can be team lead. And as far as the technical person out, you know, and the staff the triple a staff that you want to do this I'll go find them. I'll find them myself. And Alan Adham said if you can find a new technical lead for World of Warcraft, who understands networking enough to do this game and I will buy you dinner. I will buy you dinner. That was so while basically was was hinging upon motivating some guy to go out and find a new lead programmer and motivating him with dinner. Which is par for the budget, you know, for a lot of love. It's so crazy to me. I like to think that while like might have possibly been canceled and to see how the game that it's grown into today. Yeah, it was it was going to be canceled. And until I went out and I personally recruited John Cash from id software. And as far as networking goes he helped invent the old Nobel IPX networking protocol and he was an EverQuest fiend. So the real barrier to that was convincing his wife to move again because they they bought two homes and moved twice. So I went out home shopping and I got brochures and everything else and and then I knew John like to drive BMW M3s and I had an M3s so we talk about our passion for M3s. I did everything I could come on John and he's like, hey, I've got to make the wife happy to us like here's some gorgeous houses that I found, you know, and I went out on my weekends how shopping and finally convinced John to come meet the team. And he sat down and the interview goes both way. The team has to be okay with John. The John's got to be okay with the team and they just clicked and John is such a nice guy that it just it just went really, really smoothly after that. And then Blizzard felt like they had, okay, we've got a toehold here. We've got we've got Shane is team lead. We've got John Cash. You can't ask for a better networking programmer because he was like lead on quake three. He was tech lead on quick to but I mean quick to he wrote their network code. I mean what game had better network code ever than well just id software all their games their network code was just genius. I mean, yep. So the next step after that was proving we could build a triple a team and so I you know I I told HR is like send me every resume. Don't filter it for me. I never direct filtered anything. I looked at every single resume. I did a lot of the hiring at Blizzard at the time, every even cinematics team I went through all their reels and would say hey you should really look at this guy. Give this guy a shot. Take a look at him. People like Jeff Chamberlain and stuff. And so, you know a lot of it was proving that we could get this team. And I would say there was a little Blizzard arrogance going on at the time because I remember I brought in an artist who worked at Square Enix we had a couple guys that worked on Square Enix, you know, massive console titles, but some people on our team didn't really know consoles that well. And so in the middle of the interview, our art director Bill Petrus goes, I see you've worked on a lot of games, but have you ever worked on a triple A game before? And my face just blanked. Thanks, Bill. I was like, Bill, Bill, Final Fantasy is a triple A game. And, and, and I say this, it's just on console. And so, so yeah, we had, we had to overcome that we had to build a whole team that was non Blizzard inside of Blizzard Division. And the other critique was from the outside, Blizzard's never made an MMO before. We got a lot of people saying it will never succeed because they've never made this type of game before. I remember being at E3. And, John, do you remember the fake out we did for E3 on the UI? I know we used like old code on the UI, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember why we did that? Was this before? We kept our UI under wraps for a while. Was this before EverQuest welcomed Alan Adham and showed him, gave him a preview of the UI that they were that they just told him that they had stolen from our announcement magazines that they had seen something and Smedley. Mind telling them, oh yeah, we just stole it from you. We're going to ship your, your UI before you're going to actually, you know. Oh my God. I got into, I got into an argument with John Smedley a couple years later about that. I said, I accused him of always taking our ideas like our UI, as well as, you know, Griffin rides, you know, EQ2 suddenly had Griffin rides of their own. All the way to some stuff we were working on, on Firefall when he was doing Planet Sight 2 and we'd given him and given him inside investor pitches. Now, you know, there are tense moments in gaming, but you know, I love John. John's a great guy, great dev. I think we inspire each other, but we were very competitive. So before E3 came out, and I don't remember if this was before or after John said this, probably after we rolled back our UI code. We had a brand new UI. We had all these, you know, everything that we were going to ship with. We rolled it back to prior versions for E3 so that our competition couldn't copy the new UI. We did this deliberately. And, you know, and my, how we got to this point, I think it's, we were talking about people saying we couldn't do this. I remember being at E3 and showing off the game and there were EQ devs standing behind us and they were just, they'd be here like looking for the cocktail and snickering and laughing at us. And that was a little hard to take, you know, but we were like, we could do this. We could do this. But there was a lot of doubt and I was reading the comments on every screenshot. People would diss us for the being low poly. And we were being so aggressive on the poly counts because there was a split in the industry at the time. I was looking at the hardware stats going Intel screwed us. People are going, what do you mean? They're coming out with integrated graphics and this is going to sweep penetration in the marketplace and we can't run on that. And Mike was like, we got to run on it. We got to run on everything. Blizzard always tries to run on everything. And we tried and we tried, but the chip set wasn't powerful enough at the time. And I finally said, Mike, we can't do it. And this led to us thinking that WoW wasn't, it was part of the reason why we thought WoW wasn't going to sell very well. Do you remember any of this? Oh, totally. Mark, you know, I got a, that was a 2002 E3. I actually cover all the E3s in my book. Each one it's, there was a payoff in 2003. Actually, when we showed the Griffin rides, my first walk into the Blizzard area. And I talk about this in my book was expletives coming from EverQuest designers. Raging that he told the programmers that air taxis were actually possible. And his programmers had said, no, it's impossible. So now he's walking in here and he's saying, look, we knew the reason why it was bad frame rate. Okay, but we hid our bad frame rate. We kept our Griffin rides. If you remember, we stayed out of the alleys between the zones where there was too many textures like loading from both the zones at the same time. But that's one of the things that we were able to just one up them on. But yeah, I thought that was a funny. Streaming speed. We're worried about streaming those textures over hard drives, you know, and getting them into memory fast enough to for the speed of Griffin rides. But, but yeah, no, that was, that was, you know, that was something we're like, hey, where'd they get taxis from now? I don't, I don't actually remember the lead designer going off like that. Oh, no, no, I could. No, no, this was, I overheard this like you have to scream into each other's ear. This is at E3. This is at E3. His first reaction to the game was seeing griffins. He and I mean, expletives. Okay. Those programmers told we couldn't do taxis in the air. We could have done this. We could have come out with this before. We're sitting before them. This is ridiculous. You know, he was absolutely and probably one reason why he's yelling is because he's that the volume, the decibel volume is E3. Actually, I actually researched this in 110 decibels is that's, that's what E3 go goes to and back in the days. They, they, they regulated it later on, but he had the shout into the ear of the person next to him. I was, I just happened to be right behind. I didn't know he was, you know, EverQuest until he turned around. I saw the badge. So that was a funny discovery. That's hilarious, honestly. And like just hearing that, hearing how wow basically hinged upon like one hiring basically and like a dinner bet and like just all the competition between like you guys and EverQuest. It seems like one thing Blizzard is very complimented on, especially today is like creative liberty that they give to their employees and stuff like that. When it comes to World of Warcraft, was it like a very kind of hierarchical, you know, rigid management like structure? Or did they kind of allow you guys just to, did Mike allow you guys just like run loose and kind of do your own thing and pull it off? I guess it's you, Mark. Yeah, Mark would know that more than me. I mean between like working under Mark and Shane, it was remarkably little depth in management. Like they hired the right people and Mark was good at that. He used, once he had John Cash, okay, he introduced John Cash to all the prospective employees that he really wanted to hire. So he used the star power of John Cash to like recruit people, but no, at least working under Mark and Shane, it was, they hired the right people and they trusted us to make the game. But I don't know how much, like how is Mike and Paul and Frank? Well, this is where having some perspective and maturity later versus being younger on the WoW team has really sort of opened my eyes, less than I learned. I was probably actually, you know, I had a lot of issues with trying to get WoW made at an upper management level and some arguments I got into with Mike and Frank about this. And I didn't realize at the time just how much rope they gave me to hang myself with and the team, how much freedom they gave us. I didn't appreciate that at the time. Until later on, I was a CEO and everybody else worried about these risks. So they gave me a lot of creative freedom. Totally. And you don't appreciate that when you're a rebellious teenager out to change the world, you know, I don't think you appreciate that. If Mike is watching this, I just want to say, I'm sorry I was such an asshole teenager about that. And I really appreciate the amount of freedom and flexibility he gave the whole team, Shane and myself. I mean, it's incredible that we had this latitude. I remember going into the Vendee's board of directors because they were very concerned with how much this project was costing. You know, and this is a giant board of a huge multinational company at the time. And I didn't understand how difficult this task was going to be. But after the presentation, I showed the board, you know, the demo and I walked him through everything. The board members would come around me and they would like put their hand on my shoulder and push down really hard. And I would look the board member in the eye and go, well, what was that for? And he's like, you have a lot to bear. I just want to see if you can do it. And I had no realization at the time of the significance of the project to Blizzard or to the Vendee's eventual success. But they had, they saw something I didn't. And I have to admit that, you know, in my arguments with Mike, sometimes I was a bit of a jerk about that. I wanted freedom for the team. I wanted, you know, all this stuff. You always feel like, you know, you're ruining my life. Thanks to Deager. Yeah, and later when I became a CEO of my own and everything else, I totally appreciate that now. That's awesome. That's so awesome. We had a lot of freedom that we didn't realize we had. And a lot of risk and responsibility that we didn't, maybe it's good that we didn't see it, because I think we've been scared to death. It allowed you to take risks, you know? Yeah, I think so. It's probably good that we didn't see it. So I know when, sorry, I was going to say, so just to touch on this, when WoW was sort of, its fate was more rocky, when it was sort of more on the cutting board, you didn't know if it was going to work out or not. Were you guys thinking of any ideas like Starcraft MMO or anything else like the Diablo MMO? You were bouncing around internally? Well, John probably has more insight on this. I only remember a couple of discussions. I remember we picked the wrong game, because no one can tell the difference between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. This was the thing. This was the thing internally, because Warcraft 3 has heroes that you level. Wow, his heroes that you level. Warcraft 3 has a camera that can go over the shoulder. Wow, it has an over-the-shoulder camera. I can't tell the difference between these two games, people would say, internally. What's the difference? I mean, what's the fundamental difference? Well, it's the multiplayer aspect and the RPG aspect. We've got stats in Warcraft, we've got leveling, we've got items, and this was an argument we had to fight over and again. What should we do instead? Well, if you really want to hit the casual mass market, and Eric Dodds would say this a lot. Mark, I think we should have gone with Diablo. We should have made Diablo the MMO instead, and third person, not third person, but three-quarter perspective screen and click and point. We should have done that. And you know, he wasn't wrong. If you look at the success of Lineage in Korea and other games that adopted that Diablo style. But there was so much doubt. There was so much doubt. Another one was we should have done the Sims Online. We should have done something like that, where it's much more mass appeal. And the reason Wow is not going to sell as much is because of several factors. One is your graphics requirements are too high. You can't run on Intel integrated graphics. You need an online connection. Only X percent of our customers are online. You need a credit card to play. So let's take Warcraft 3 sales and start chipping away, because Warcraft 3 is very accessible. Or sorry, Warcraft 2 or Starcraft or whatever, and start chipping away. It's like, okay, let's reduce it 33% for requiring online. Let's reduce it another 33% for requiring a credit card for your mom and dad. Okay, well, it's third of a much as any of our other games. And how are we going to justify the cost, the extreme cost of this project, if we're only going to make a third of the money? That was a huge, huge risk. Yeah, I remember the first day I was at Wow, they were showing me what the game looked like. I think the build had broken and the only machine that was running, that was the demo machine out in the hallway. And Shane saw that, you know, Shane and John Cash came up to meet me. And I think Eric was showing me or someone was showing me the exterior train or something. And Shane started to explain how Wow might work. And that if you want a quest and, you know, go out and run around in the zone and solo, you would just play locally on your machine. And that's smart because it saves the bandwidth. Okay, because we were absolutely nuts about saving our bandwidth money because we were, EverQuest apparently had terrible, terrible efficiency with their network code. And so a lot of their money actually got lost and chewed up by bandwidth costs. So while Shane is explaining this to me, John Cash is standing behind him. And he's going, he's just shaking his head and very comically just shaking his head and I start smiling. And as Shane is talking, he's like, what, what? And he turns around and John says, no, we can't do that. We can't, we can't leave all that stuff on the client. I mean, anything that anything on the client can be hacked. That means AI, pathing, like the items, we can't put any of that online. That has to be kept on the server. And Shane says, well, we'll not have, you know, single player like fight. And he's like, no, no. And he turned and now Shane, okay, team lead at the time. He turns around and goes, well, I guess we won't do it that way. I just wish every decision was that easy to make. Well, I think it's so interesting. Like just thinking about like games 15 years ago, 14 years ago and how, you know, the concept of like not having single player seems so foreign, especially like with Blizzard games, you know, like you said, like you have so much of a, of the player base who, you know, doesn't use battle net, doesn't play online. They just play the campaign to play single player. I don't know. I think that's so cool to think about like how, I mean, it's, it's really, it's, it's a part of gaming history. Well, the Warcraft is, it's a big part of gaming history. And it wasn't the only game, but there were a lot of games around that time. You know, and even a few MMOs prior that really started to make the online only play a little bit more mainstream. And I think that's so awesome. Yeah, it's funny you guys mentioned server side hacks and client side hacks or sorry, client side hacks. That was a big problem. I remember back in the day with Diablo two online, like that was a very big problem. So it was a wise choice. Yeah, I, I learned a lot from Diablo two because I had to, I was sitting down with Adrian. Adrian left designing the server infrastructure on the hardware and networking site for that. And we didn't know much at the time. So I remember frantically reading networking books and counting bytes and TCP IP frames and everything else and just, you know, debating layer two switching versus layer three switching. This was all new at the time. And when we did, wow, I was like, okay, we have John and I would have long conversations with John about how to approach this and how to avoid the pitfalls of what we went through on Diablo two architecture for the server and networking side. But yeah, running everything server side was also, you know, something that we were very adamant about. We didn't want any of the duping bugs that we had in D2. We didn't want to deal with any of the trusting the client issues. And so we were very, very religious about that. And John and his team came up with a very clever way to eliminate the risk of duping bugs that other people hadn't used at the time. And so that was, that was great. And you know, and that saved us a lot of headache. But I do remember thinking some things would be easy that I mocked other games for. Nice humble pie, huh? Oh, so much, so much humble pie. I used to, I used to laugh at how EverQuest would get boats so wrong. Because whenever you took the boat in EverQuest to cross zones, then back then they made it where it was a 20 minute or half an hour boat ride to get from one zone to another. But they had bugs where when you're transferring between, on a boat between two servers, a lot can go wrong. The connection between the servers can drop the character as it transitions from the memory of one machine to another one can drop. And I said, how can you not get boat rides, right? It seems so simple. How can you not get that right? We're not going to have any problem with boats. And of course, when we launched, we had so many problems with boats and people dropping connections to everything else. So, yeah, there was some stuff I thought that was going to be tremendously easy. That turned out to be really difficult later. And so whoever did the boats in EQ, I'm sorry I mocked it. It's really hard to do. And you're really smart for rigging it out. I'm just thinking of people getting feared on boats. Oh my goodness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And, sorry, I was just going to say speaking of like, just like network issues and stuff like that. There's a big kind of like contention now when it comes to vanilla in particular about like server population sizes and stuff like that. And I think, John, you told us last week that server sizes were around like 2,500 concurrent players or something. And I think, Mark, you've kind of shed light about that in a tweet a while back. Was there any particular reason why you guys chose that population concurrent cap? Was it technical? Was it just, this is how much players we think should be in the world? Or was it kind of like, you know, just like, yeah, that's all we can support at this time from back in. And I guess so we'll start with John. I know. I can't imagine it was a design decision. I think it would have to be a tech. Technical notation? Yeah. I mean, it wasn't. It was entirely driven by design, ironically. Oh, really? Wow. Really? We're talking, are we talking post launch cap on concurrency or are we talking about our initial server ideas? Our goal for population of servers and why we... What's design? Yes. Yeah, what's design. Later on was technical. Yeah. We can't do more than this. Right. From a cost perspective, you want to get as many players onto a server as you can. You don't want a lot of empty cycles sitting around where you can shove a player in and utilize the electricity and the bandwidth and everything else. But Alan Adam was very adamant about communities and servers. And he very much wanted a world where you... It was like the bars and cheers where everybody knows your name. And you see the same names running by over and over again. Absolutely. So that you would form these social bonds. You'd be like, I know that guy. I've seen him before. And so he wanted even smaller sizes on servers. Really? Yeah. Okay. When we shipped, the servers were actually running okay. We had a bottleneck on the back end. I can't go too much in detail about it. But we had a bottleneck that was on the back end that caused us far more headaches. And so we had server caps and soft caps. But we were trying to get it as low as possible. And I was trying to find the right balance between this and everything else to do this. And to build a community at the same time. And I have to say that's one aspect I really miss from MMOs. And including modern WoW is the loss of that feeling of community. And I think Alan was very right in that respect. And that you do trade something off for that. Yeah. I think that is definitely the biggest appeal of vanilla WoWs is the way that it fosters and encourages and reinforces player interaction and community. Yeah. But I know that a lot of, I know that Nostalrius and other realms ran much higher counts on their servers. And I remember seeing screenshots of lines for certain quests. And that actually seemed to build their communities. So that's an example that goes in a completely opposite direction where it feels like there's a lot of activity or bustling city almost. And hey, everyone's here. This is really popular. And so I want to keep playing. I don't care if there's a line versus that sort of tight-knit community that Alan had really wanted for World of Warcraft. Yeah. I'm excited to see what one of our classic releases, what they decide to go with as far as population cap and stuff. I think that's been a big topic discussion for both of those reasons. I know for me, I like the concept of having a big server. And to me, that's more people to meet. But for some people, having too big of a server is almost overwhelming. And you don't really see the same face twice. So kind of like Adam said. So kind of speaking of classic a little bit, you're familiar with the Dev water cooler update they gave out a few months ago. Was it the one and only update on classic? Yeah. That's the one. Yeah. I read it. So basically, with your guys' development background, is it typical to give a 100% current progress update? Because they said they're on their third prototype. So far. They said they're on their third prototype so far. They've gone through two different iterations of how they were looking at doing classic. My speculation was that this is what they're willing to tell us so far. It could even be possible that they're farther along than what they're saying. But I don't know what's typical in the industry. Is that like? John, do you want to? I speculate. Well, I don't know anything. So it's easy for me to speculate. Blizzard was kind of forced. Yeah. It's kind of weird. Well, in my experience, they've always shown what they can guarantee. If they're not sure, if they see thin ice ahead, they're not going to say, oh, everything's good. They've been in the butt so many times with Warcraft 3. I think they're paranoid about showing too much, unless they're absolutely sure that they can actually go forward with it. Yeah, definitely. But that's all I know. Blizzard always plays their cards close to the chest. And so is the question more about how far along they are or what does their prototype mean? No, I meant more in terms of if a company is usually willing to say, OK, this is what they're willing to show us so far. This is what they're showing us so far. Is that more of something that they're willing to show us based on they might be farther along? Or is it more common to just 100% give you a current progress update? I think Blizzard tends to be more conservative, probably a little farther along. Other companies that want a lot of PR will go bleeding edge. And what you see is what you get. It's literally hot off the dev servers. And they push that line really hard. I saw that time and time again competing against these guys and that they would drop their latest and greatest and we were always holding something back, like how we rolled the UI back, how we did all this. We were always playing it conservative. I don't know if that's the way it is now. Maybe Blizzard isn't as far as had as I think they are. Third prototype sounds really good. It sounds like they got something. And I think I read in that update that they found a way to quickly bootstrap the old servers up and connect it up to their existing infrastructure, which is a good sign that they did something. It sounded like they did something really clever. And just from the way they said it and the speech patterns, I was like, it sounds like they found a quick way, a quick way to get this running. But most of the work at Blizzard, it's done when it's done is the final polish. And that's the part that takes the longest. So even if they've got the technology bootstrapped and they've got it running, it could take a long time after that for the polish phase. Yeah, someone's going to have an opinion and they're going to have, well, what happens? See, what I don't know is like, how are, oh boy. Yeah, this is, I'm amazed that they're doing it. I don't know how they're going to support this for how many years. Like this is going to be a lot of, this is going to be a big thing. It's a big project. Blizzard doesn't do small games. Okay. Hearthstone was remarkable in that Eric Dodds and his team was able to get it through all the hoops inside Blizzard, convincing them that, yes, you can do a small game at Blizzard, but for an MMO, I don't know if they're willing to just say, okay, yeah, you saw, here's a 15 year old game. Here it is. Right, right. I just don't know, especially when so many devs are so creative and they want to have their own ideas and they want to try their own stuff out. I don't know. That's the great fear in the classic community right now. Absolutely. Just how far will they go with the changes? Yeah. Where do you stop? I have a feeling they have to be aware that if they push too many changes, they're just alienated everyone that was interested in the first place. I think they're really aware at this point. Especially after that update, they said they want to give as much of an accurate vanilla feel and representation of what the original game was as possible. For me, the dev update was really, really encouraging. Especially seeing a third prototype, like that sounds good. I'm not a programmer, but that sounds good to me. I like that. Also them saying, kind of being very transparent and saying what are the different things they're looking at and how they're changing the spell system. Under the hood type of changes as opposed to changes to the game player, the mechanics and stuff like that. I thought that was cool. They're being very transparent with that. Yeah. It was nice to get something after like six or seven months of silence, but now we're all sitting here right now kind of holding our breath for the next event on the horizon, which is BlizzCon. BlizzCon, baby. Do you guys think we'll get anything big? Mark, do you think something's coming for us? Who knows? Who knows? I think it's too early still. That's my gut talking, but we have no idea how many people are on it. We don't know how polished their prototype is or if internally they want to... Because I know they're very, very concerned about quality. This is an old game, right? And it has to... I know that they feel that it has not just to the quality of the past, but the present quality of Blizzard products. If you want to do that before you show it, I think it's going to take some time. I think there's going to be a lot of internal discussion about what to do with the graphics, what to do with some elements of the gameplay and integration and everything else, and that's going to take some time. It's such a gem in the Blizzard crown. I don't think they would just say, hey, look, we've got old WoW running. I think they would really want something special to show, and if that's the case, I don't think you'd see anything at BlizzCon, but who knows? It could be really far along. You're talking about it. You're talking about an MMO. I kind of chuckled to myself when you said, six months of silence. When you're talking about developing an MMO, six months is just like, oh my God. How long were we in from the friends and family alpha? I mean, holy moly. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, too. See, we're the angsty teenagers now. Exactly. They're also not rebuilding everything with art and sound from the ground up, right? They do have a foundation that I think speeded along. When you think? Yeah, content was always interesting. John, do you have to quote in the book about eating my hat if code holds up shipping this game versus art? Oh, boy. No, I don't have that one. That was Colin, right? Yeah, that's right. Every Blizzard game up to that point has been held up by, I guess, art and design and final polish, and all the bugs are hammered out. That was so programming. They were so sure, because Colin, old school, was so sure that code was never going to hold up shipping this game. In fact, what happened was code was neck and neck with art and design. We shipped a CD that did not work. The build was broken. The only thing that worked was the patcher. It was day one patch in order to get that thing running. The game did not work, and physical media meant we had to get it all on disk ahead of time in order to get it on store shelves in time. That was a change in Blizzard, too. That was the first time that the technology was so difficult. You've got to remember, nobody knew how to do massive scaling of MMOs at the time. There wasn't social media. Nobody did websites at huge scale. The only thing you could look at was the stock market and how it operated and banks and things like this. We had to learn to solve from scratch, and we had to invent it on the fly and make a lot of mistakes. It was the first time that I think that technology was just as much of a hold up as art and design on a Blizzard project at that time. I also quoted Colin twice already in my book. Apparently, he was a very quotable person, so I held him to two. He never did eat his hat. There were a lot of bets that worked. He was supposed to eat his hat, and if we reached, what was it, one million subs, Shane was supposed to get a tattoo of the logo on his forehead. Was that what it was? People did not believe. We had so many bets that I think, that never got resolved. There's a lot of... When WoW came out, your competitors Dayock and EverQuest, what was the highest MMO sub count at that point before WoW came out? Do you remember? EQ was 500,000. 500,000? Okay. That was our target. We could do that. I think you beat it by a little bit. Just a little bit. But their concurrency was like 15 or 20%. It was really low. We speculated, correct me if I'm wrong, we speculated, okay, we can handle maybe double what their highest concurrency was, which is 15%. We was like 30, 40, and then when November came along, I was talking to Joey, he said we have like 90% concurrency, or like 70 to 90, or something crazy concurrency. It was kind of hard to actually compare the two. You had a lot of very addicted gamers, 90% concurrency. It was Thanksgiving vacation. We had nobody had anything to do other than play World of Warcraft, because that's all they were looking forward to do. They had cleared their schedules. I had a lot to do Thanksgiving. I spent it at Blizzard instead of with my family. It was like those, whenever you watch a TV show, they have a Christmas or Thanksgiving special, and maybe it's some hospital drama, and all the doctors are still there. They have to put together a meager Thanksgiving meal, and somehow they still managed to have a warm, glowing feeling at the end of it. We had that sort of, except without the warm, glowing feeling, it was more like sheer panic. As a bunch of us spent our Thanksgiving trying to rub two sticks together with what we had to get while running, because we knew everyone would be playing it over Thanksgiving, and we had to keep the servers up. And so we were all losing sleep, and I think we did get some turkey brought in or something, but it was very meager, and there was no warm, cheery afterglow. It was just like, oh my God! It was panic time. But yeah, I did not get to play well. For you guys, if you can think of the one single biggest hurdle you had to overcome with getting wow up and running, and also I guess bonus question, what would you imagine the current Blizzard Classic wow team, what is their biggest hurdle that you would speculate on? I would guess hiring. Hiring? Hiring, getting the right people who are passionate about getting a game that's, frankly, not theirs. They can't really, they can't say, oh, this is my game. How do you hire good people? You need really good people. It's an MMO, so you're looking for the very best and are they forcing people's hands to go onto the project? Or maybe it's a nice project that everybody wants to be a part of? I don't know. It's such a different thing. No games, no companies ever done anything like this. It's such a weird thing to release a product that's already been out, you know? Oh, RuneQuest did it. RuneScape, yeah, they did it. RuneScape. RuneScape was a little different because Jagex, the company behind RuneScape, basically in one change and like one sweeping update, they flipped the entire game upside down. And so for like years afterwards, players were like, what the heck? Like in one update, the entire combat changed, everything with the game changed, so they felt like they had to regress. But with Blizzard, it's a little bit different because Blizzard, multi-billion dollar conglomerate, there doesn't seem to be any financial need to do something like this. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's so cool that it happened. I definitely wouldn't expect this from any other AAA developer. Yeah, I think going back to what Staysafe said, talking about technical challenges, we talked a little bit about this before the call and John, you said creative talent. Like, is there anything on the technical side that we should be really worried about? Like, oh, this is just, it's going to take so long or, you know, what are the things from that end? He's definitely not asking me. Oh, cool. Yeah, for the technical end, yeah, that's my answer. Actually, I don't think I see any huge barrier. In fact, I see a lot of technologies available today that make the job easier. Server virtualization, our databases are so much better now. I think, you know, the risk from a technology perspective is, I think they did talk about this. At one point, when they said, should we do wow or not, somebody said, oh, they lost something, right? Do you remember that? What do you mean they lost something? Oh, this is more towards the classic cast team, John, this is something that happened. Yeah, I remember hearing this. They lost the source code, yeah, they lost the source code or something like that. It wasn't anything specific, right? They didn't say anything, they just said it wasn't, either way, yeah, continue. They said there was a technical challenge and there was a technical challenge, but it wasn't an acceptable one with sufficient time and resources. And I thought that there was enough of both to sort of like, you know, to get this to happen. So it looks like they did find it and they would not do this if they had not overcome that problem. So I think that the main technical risk is behind us and what you're really looking at now is what are we going to deliver is that was probably what they're thinking. And at Blizzard, I agree with John, it's really about does the team believe in this? You have to have true believers on any of the game projects inside of Blizzard. The team has to want this to happen. It's not like Blizzard goes here's the game you will make. Team two, here's the game you will make. They don't really do that. They want the team to really be driven by their own passions to make this game because that's how you get the best quality, that's how you get the best result. So where do you find that team? Who wants to remake somebody else's game? And not only do you have to be very careful about interjecting there's very little room for your own creativity there, but there's also a very high bar of expectation of what you need to deliver. You're going to be in the hot seat on this. Where do you find people willing to say, okay, I'm going to suppress my creative vision because I'm a huge fan of the original and I've got all the technical and art skills and everything else that they need to do this. That's a very unique sort of individual staff a whole team that way that's passionate about recreating the past but are also super talented and yet willing to put their creativity second to honoring an image of the past that's hard to do. If you're very technically competent and you're very I suppose on the technical side there's a lot of great challenges like how do we get this old stuff to run and to do it quickly and to do it well. On the art side and design side that's tougher. It's like, oh, well we can't really touch the original graphics or interpret them too much or we can't really redesign this raid encounter or if we do we've got to be super, super careful and nobody's going to like us no matter what we do if we change one thing we're going to be in the hot seat on this. That's kind of a thankless job. So I agree with John. I think finding the right motivated team and building that up carefully and staffing it up is one of the greatest challenges to doing this product well. Here's a question. I have a question. I've answered this question many times. I would never want to be on that team. An MMO that has such high experience. There's only a measure of how much you've failed. It's like inheriting the Tonight Show. You don't want to inherit the Tonight Show. Mark, would you want to work? Say they meet your price and all that stuff like that. Would you want to work on this project? Wow. Yeah, see me, no thank you. Absolutely not. There's no way I would want to work on another MMO. No way. I think that might be one of those things that just might be hard. Once you've already done something and then going back and doing it again. Yeah. And done something for 10 years. The problem with getting the original people to do it is we would want to change stuff. We know where we drop the ball. I don't think we'd be the right people because we would not be able to resist just one thing. You want to go try and make this better? Yeah, of course. That brings up a really big question. If you guys could each change one thing about vanilla while where you think you dropped the ball, what would it be? I don't think we did drop. Honestly, with the challenges up against us, people keep asking me what's the thing that didn't get into the game that you really wanted to get in. Everything got cut was kind of crappy. Sometimes it was by someone else's hand. Thank God that said, no, John, this is not good. You don't want to do it. We're not going to move forward with this. Yeah, so I don't think there's really any part that we I mean, I would have liked to have shipped PVP, but I knew the tech problems that we were putting. So many fires out for six months before even started on PVP after we shipped. I can't just pretend that everything was rosy and that nobody was complaining on the boards about all these systems that were just on fire after we shipped. My gosh, I don't think there was a mark. I mean, can you think of anything that we... On the technical side, I have many regrets. Yeah. I think there's a bunch of things we would have wished differently on the technical side. On the design side, you know, I think that it's hard to say because whatever we shipped worked. So we were wrong if we wanted this instead of what we shipped. All the individual thousands hundreds of thousands of decisions that go into it. And it's really hard to go back and change it. But I know that if we reassembled the entire WoW team, there were so many different opinions and if you asked us to ship that WoW we'd get nothing done. Because even if I'm like easy going about this feature or something else, during development there would be a line out my door about people saying we should do it this way or we should do it that way. Because we had an open door policy. You could talk shit about the game. You didn't like the way it was going in some aspect. Go ahead and talk. You're not going to be dinged for it. You're not going to be fired for it. It's open door policy. Say whatever you want because all we want is the best goddamn idea out there. And so we would just argue endlessly. I mean, there were so many arguments. There were people who really thought first person was the way to go because it's more immersive. That first person should be the default. Every game I worked on seems to have this debate. Even on Firefall we ended up doing both first and third. You can switch between them for a shooter. But I think that but again, in hindsight I did say it. I did say we would be tempted to change stuff. I'm like, how could we? But I think we would get arguments. We would get arguments, especially with game mechanics. Because there's stuff that was obviously broken. Class balance. I think that's where the arguments would be. I think that's exactly where the debates arguments would be. And probably they're happening now but since the people involved didn't make the original they're not going to be as passionate about it. They're not going to be especially, see I told you this would be a problem. So I've got points and I'm going to spend them on my pet feature over here. Alright. So just real quick guys, people who are watching we are going to go into a Q&A session in a little bit. How we usually do this is we usually check Twitter first then we pick stuff out of chat afterwards. If you guys want to go ahead and follow myself tips out baby stay safe warlock on Twitter and then also feel free to follow tips out baby, stay safe TV and Mondstream as well of course on Twitch, YouTube and then Jon Statz and Grums Jon Statz WIR and Grums on Twitter. So if you guys have any questions tweet it at us, hashtag classicast and I'll go through in a little bit and I'll start picking some out and then we'll move into the chat. Yeah. What do you think Mark is? Especially because you met with him the Nostalria's team you know obviously there's a lot of appreciation for what the Nost guys did in our community and stuff like that and since then we haven't really heard from them have you kept tabs with Viper or Diemen or any of those guys do you know what they're up to these days? I haven't. I have one of the devs Idiakor is on my project right now but we haven't really talked about classic wow or anything and he did some of the recreating of the raid boss logic for Nostalria's for their servers but I have to say that I was super super impressed when I met them and talked to them. This was this team was so smart and so dedicated and so passionate and organized they were tremendously tremendously organized. I was shocked more organized than the original wow team probably and I knew I said okay Blizzard's got to talk to you guys we got to make this happen so I was very comfortable going to bat for them and saying hey you should really listen to these guys they have a lot to say they've done a lot of work here they know what they're talking about and they're mature and they're organized and they've got what it takes to help make this happen if you need any help in this area or that area if you want to just know about their numbers and expectations of their player base and what the interest is because there was a lot of doubt a lot of people saying that no one's going to be interested in classic wow right remember this? there was a lot of doubt and you have a split between you have two audiences in wow we're talking about this at blizzard 2 we have two audiences in wow we have those that grew up with vanilla wow and went through that and we have everybody else that came afterwards and jumped in at sort of so and so expansion and there's a lot of them there's a lot of them and they are two competing views and they're worried about resources being taken away from one or the other initiative so you had an audience that was split between wanting to see this happen and I got a lot of hate for asking for it to happen you know and it just astounded me at the time because how could you be against this but I think people don't realize that it doesn't take anything away from current wow to do this they're not sucking resources out of the wow team to do this it's not going to hurt all their efforts to make current wow as epic and as awesome as they can they can do both and if you've never been on a dev team we used to joke back in the day because they would get mad at Jeff Frazier for being on our forums he was posting a lot for us why are you posting on the forums you should get back to the game no it doesn't take away from the dev team at all this is Jeff's job this is what he does and he doesn't code at the time he doesn't code so it doesn't take away at all and so I hope people out there really understand that now that classic wow is no threat to new wow new wow is no threat to classic wow they can coexist there's plenty of room there's plenty of audience out there one is not going to starve the other of either technology, resources, money or player base I think that we're talking about two separate player bases or a player base that straddles the two and would keep both running at the same time yeah I was going to ask do you think if classic wow is very successful retail wow more successful modern wow more successful there's a bunch of crossover absolutely every time we would release a new game at blizzard for any publisher releases a new game you get the knock-on effect to their back catalog it lifts all both any successful title shipping from a publisher boosts sales of all their other titles that's awesome so if classic wow turns out to be popular it will boost sales of new wow and you know it will boost sales of all blizzard games and there's literally no downside financially I can see doing this given that I don't think it's it won't cost the original budget of wow to make the audience is baked in there's tremendous demand there and you know it's not going to siphon customers away from one product or another it's basically just going to grow with the audience and it's going to people back I firmly believe that and it seems like you know blizzard is bought into that too where they wouldn't do this blizzard is always very good at balancing their business decision with their game ambitions and making sure that both needs are met so it's funny we were talking about this I was talking about this with some friends last night like as far as like plans for whenever classic releases and whatnot I firmly believe that for a lot of players the game has two separate audiences right you have the classic fans and you have the retail wow fans but it's kind of like a Venn Diagram and in the center there's some overlap and I'm one of those people who you know as I've kind of gotten more into streaming and content creation and stuff I like I personally am enjoying BFA right now I'm one of those people that is starting to sit more in the middle of the Venn Diagram more towards classic of course but if I'm doing classic right I'm rating I'm getting my world buffs I'm getting ready to raid okay I got all my stuff set my character is ready to raid tonight what am I going to do now I'm going to log off and I'm going to go play BFA I'm going to go play live wow and I think there's a lot of people that are going to be like that and I don't very I personally I'm excited for World of Warcraft as a whole as an entire game as opposed to you know vanilla versus BFA or whatever yeah there's definitely huge potential for a symbiotic relationship between two especially if they link up the subscriptions I think that's like from a consumer standpoint a fan standpoint a lot of us are curious how are they going to manage the subscriptions for both games is going to be a separate sub yeah are they going to sell a box version of classic or are they going to kind of let you ride on both games with a single subscription I hope they don't get too greedy we used to say at Blizzard intern Alan used to say this a lot it's like don't be too greedy don't you know when we talked about pricing for wow sub in China and things like this and you know deliver a lot of value to your customers for their money I would do it under one sub because I firmly believe that it would just it would just explode subscription rates and get players going in both aspects of the game I would not do a separate subscription for classic well I actually think it's pretty crazy that I mean just considering like inflation or whatever right the games cost has not gone up at all in the 14 years I mean it's still 1499 I remember you know I put I was a big big Dark Age of Camo player back before I played wow that's how I got into MMOs and eventually into wow I remember it was originally 1299 and they increased the price to 1499 around the time that wow came out and it was just like a huge deal and everybody was upset about it I think it's really cool that they've managed to keep the same price for the subscription of the game throughout all this time I mean Dayak increased the price after freaking two or three years I think well Blizzard puts a lot of work into efficiency and economies of scale so that the work on running the game the bandwidth cost server cost has never stopped they've optimized that continuously you know over the 10 years plus that the game's been running so I think you're seeing a lot of efficiencies there and a lot of efficiencies and how do you handle customer support for that many people and I think that's why they've been able to not raise the price and keep it going yeah especially the customer service became you had left the company their customer service cues had dropped way way like a tenth of what it was a couple years after wow had shipped I mean the number of people that it would take to answer all the questions and all the problems that the wow customers would have was a huge huge win and that's probably that was their biggest expenditure was their customer service so and they there was way more efficient it's got to be so much more efficient now like it might even be like one twentieth of what it you know used to be so and that's a huge deal that's a lot of money you know just historically bandwidth cost have dropped dramatically and bandwidth was so expensive when wow shipped and it's so cheap now in bulk that that that that was another you know big pricing concern mark do you remember the conversations on whether or not to have a mouse to control the player well to control the player facing like a to save bandwidth because the the facing of the player updating that to everybody around you I remember Joe was working on Joe Rumsey our server guy he was trying to you know make sure and of course Joe was way more efficient than the like ten times more efficient than the the Sony online had for their mouse but the facing of the character constantly had to be updated and if there's like 40 people around you and if there's a rogue they need to know whether or not they're backstabbing so that's constantly broadcasting everybody's facing as they're playing the game so that was kind of like the big expense for the mouse is your job in my memory I actually forgot all about that yeah yeah I think it was a bandwidth optimization was always such a we were trying to run on modems at the time we're worried not enough people had broadband yeah we really tried to make this work on dialogue as far as the mouse goes what did take into my head more than that was the fact that Korea told us that the game had to be fully controllable with mouse only and we need to click to move and the rationale was that in Korea at the time most gameplay was in game rooms and you had people in there that were smoking it's very big in Korea so you had people that were chain smoking so we needed the smoking interface you needed this hand free to take drags off your cigarette while and be able to play everything with the mouse so you know I think we did implement click to move didn't we like I think that that was like absolutely they mentioned it and you said oh if Korea wants click to move won't give them click to move because it even saves on bandwidth as well it's far cheaper in bandwidth because the facing isn't constantly changing as you're moving toward an area so you hear this all the time with the classical discussion I've seen in chat a couple times there are people that say people are only interested in classical because of nostalgia what would you what's your what's what would be your response to that I can't remember I mean it's hard to I mean I don't know the game has changed incrementally just a little bit a little bit a little bit a little bit I remember honestly what it was like I'm sure the forums weren't all glowing with happy rave reviews you know you know in vanilla wow but I just I don't know I played through Wrath of the Witch King you know it seemed like one big blur yeah so I can't actually sell you know this I it was only a few a couple expansions okay people who have played way more expansions have a lot more perspective because there's also you know more turnover on the team as well so maybe I can just shed some light just talking in my talks with the nostalgia team and some of their customer base and you know what was it after that Elysium or whatever there were a lot of people that I talked to that and this is anecdotal I don't have I don't have data or anything but there were a lot of people that seemed that had were current wow players and we're looking for something a little different and tried you know one of these vanilla servers and really fell in love with the way the game was like they'd never seen this before and I had several anecdotal stories of this and the nostalgia team was telling me that yeah there's a bunch of players here who never played classic wow so I don't know how many there are what percentage there are but I think it's simplistic to say that this is purely nostalgia and people have rose colored glasses on it it's only the people who played the original wow that will even go try this thing I've seen enough people say oh so that's what wow was like before who had never tried it before on a vanilla server that I think that there is some percentage out there and not a trivial percentage that would enjoy it just the way it was back then I definitely agree I think vanilla wow delivers on a gameplay experience that is really absent from the current game market especially the current MMO market it's very very unique just on the curiosity man they released Star Wars 30 years later and my friend he's my age he goes to the movie theater and he goes during the day and the theater is filled with 16 year old boys screaming and yelling this isn't the movie they grow up on but when the lights came down silence this was Star Wars there was just a reverence this was a movie to not be missed and so I think there's a lot of people that were too young to play World of Warcraft at that so this might be a lot bigger audience I mean I'm the Atari generation computer games that was part of the culture the MTV culture that I grew up with I think it could be a new thing that might be the next new thing because it's a different audience I was just going to say one of the big things and I think about it this way imagine this doesn't go this way for everybody but imagine you could go back in time 14-15 years and you have the knowledge that you have now and you can replay certain events in your life the opportunity to go back and finish I think that's what people are really looking forward to with classic is the chance to go back might have been 10 years old I'm just running around and I'm a little 30 and I don't know what's going on but the chance to go back and to finish and to go through all the raids to go do knacks that's the big thing on almost everybody's checklist I want to do knacks so many people want to experience that who didn't get to experience that that's kind of what I like to boil it down to is the opportunity to finish for so many people I completely agree it's funny you don't see people doubting the appeal of a game like chess to a new generation or a movie like The Godfather or something like that because these are considered timeless classics they're always great the appeal to so many different generations and they will always be great and I think there's something to be said about vanilla wow it is a timeless classic if you look at the Nostalraeus post-mortem that was released after Nosh shut down and you look at their actual demographics 35% of people that have played it between the ages of like 16 and 21 and you know going back 14 years ago these people would have been much much too young play vanilla like during it's actual release and it's just you think about it Johnny said it could be the next big thing it could be the next big thing for this new generation coming up I mean think about all the games that came out in 2003, 2004, 2005 okay why is classic vanilla wow like the biggest deal out of all of them there is something special about it well I think you touched on it when you said that there really isn't a current MMO experience like it MMOs are so streamlined now and so single player focused so that you can solo everything that a lot of the socialization a lot of the community building a lot of the difficulty too is gone I mean there is a not insignificant relation out there of hardcore gamers right people who love a tougher challenge you know people who who want to have the time and are interested in figuring out how a game ticks and how it works, how to optimize it how to get past a huge rate that you know there is the mass market really doesn't have the patience for that publishers really kind of have I think underserved this more hardcore gamer community it's never been tiny it's what propelled gaming into the mass market in the first place is all these hardcore gamers that form the X and I think they're currently underserved and classic wow could potentially hook a lot of them and ignite another fire because what happens when you get the hardcore fired up is they bring in all their casual friends so I'm sorry I didn't mean to cut you off well we used to talk about this at Blizzard a lot you want the hardcore and you want the mass audience you have to have the hardcore because they're the ones that bring everybody in they're the ones that if you're not a hardcore gamer you ask your hardcore gamer friend what game should I be playing now and what game can I play with you because you're really good I think AAA publishers underserved the hardcore market that's where a lot of indie games and even Japanese games have excelled at in terms of retaining difficulty levels retaining challenge and retaining a little bit of that you know like getting the right gear and looking at someone instead of gear going where did you get that versus being a transmog it makes it much more special whenever you can see like I can establish a difficulty or you had to go through a certain task in order to get what you're wearing right now yeah I mean I feel like being cool looking and powerful has so much more meaning and value to you when you spend 90 plus percent of your time looking like an idiot right and that's the way it is in vanilla wow you have to have some rainy days to value the sunny days and just real quick going to what Mark said about the whole you know the hardcore gamers being underserved I'm actually going to quote Asman Gold real quick he said this a while back like there's this kind of again misguided notion in the industry that the hardcore gamers they're gone they're gone because people have so much less time now and people have gotten so busy and there's so many different sources of entertainment but the hardcore gamers the neck beards we're not gone you know we're just waiting we're waiting for the right opportunity the right game and stuff like that for some developer to finally have the Cajones to put something out there that appeals to that hardcore community sense and you know it's great to see Blizzard being the one to come back to do it after all these years I really think and I've been saying this since the classic announcement I really think that we could be on the cusp of like a renaissance in the gaming industry where if if classic does well if classic is successful I think a lot of people are going to go back and look at these old games like wait wait why did that work why how come putting a battle royale in my game is not working right now like you know what I'm saying like not every game needs to be battle royale I think it's going to give people kind of a chance to step take a step back and say look at this this was good people enjoy this why and I'm excited for it I think it's going to be great yeah I mean classic wow classic wow success I mean assuming hopefully it is successful could definitely influence future Blizzard games maybe and then also non-blizzard games as well yeah it's going to be successful it's also going to be highly controversial I'll guarantee those two things it'll be very successful this is my prediction it's going to be hugely successful it's going to boost wow subscribership across the board and a lot of people are going to be unhappy with it no matter what you do no matter what you do a lot of people are not insignificant and very loud group of people are going to be unhappy with whatever the result is and you're going to have a little polarization but it will be very successful and it will it will boost all of wow sales not just classic yeah pretty soon here guys I want to start looking at some of the tweets and we've got a few lined up here I want to go into Q&A here pretty soon stay safe and tips do you guys have anything else you want to add before we do this I was just going to say I mean we talked about this earlier I'm not a Blizzard market analyst but I definitely think that if they have a shared subscription model there will be days when classic comes out I'm all in on classic but there will be days maybe I just finished ranking or I'm raid logging forward with classic I'm going to go over and try retail wow or give it a give it a shot for the first couple time and for the first time in a couple months because I'm I need a break from classic and I think there will be crossover both ways I think creating that healthy wow ecosystem both retail and classic I think is a really positive thing they might they might even put you know cross game achievements cross game rewards who knows like there could be benefits to playing both maybe they'll try to leverage that yeah the only thing I want to say is just thank you to John and Mark for coming on and absolutely and guys if you have not checked out the wow diary it's only got like 67 ish hours I think 65 hours maybe left on it's Kickstarter campaign I'm spamming in the chat right now we got to we got to read a significant portion of it and if you like vanilla if you're excited for classic if you just love World of Warcraft in general or game design I promise you you don't want to miss it it's really really good it's very Frank that's what I like about it's very like Frank and to the point and John doesn't shy away from from spitting the truth so and of course Mark thank you so much for coming on can I can I add something to John's book like I just want to say that the whole time I've known John he is one of the most meticulous devs I know with a penchant maybe even a fetish for detail and getting things right and and on no other team that I know of did someone keep a diary of what went down that day or that week with the exact words that were spoken it's almost as good as having a tape recorder that ran through the whole goddamn development I mean you know it there there's so many moments in there that I don't even remember and and and to have that preserve that way and this is not someone's recollection okay I mean yes there are recollected parts this is this is what actually happened on that day on that week on that month as it happened it's like a blow by blow account you cannot get that anywhere if you're interested in game development if you're interested in game history if you're interested in what wow at all this is not this is this is not an option you have to have this book and not only that he has put so much time into things like the paper quality of this book the paper you know and this is only something that you can get I think John this is only something available in Kickstarter right the quit that that oh yeah the quality version yeah the Kickstarter has got a number of bells and whistles that frankly you don't even see in other books there's I could go over the nerdy stuff you know spot varnishing but if John is in my office talking to me about one pixel being off on screen you can count on this book you can count on this book just being so wonderfully put together it's going to seem like an Apple product it's going to seem like you know it's obsessive compulsive John really gets into this detail and and like I said you cannot find this anywhere else and if you're interested in game dev at all there is no other resource like this it does not exist anywhere else and and if you want the best copy of this book if you want the highest quality if you want everything that John wanted this book to be this is your last chance to get it you've got three days left and you know and of course it'll be available after that but I just wanted to stress that I'm so excited for this book and as soon as I heard about it I was like John you got to you got to do this you got to make and you know back at your market I what my first kickstarter was so ridiculously bad I made so many mistakes I was so naive going into it that I did walk away I had three I've less than 300 backers after eight days okay so I think I've passed 6000 backers maybe I don't even know what it is yeah it's a yeah I'm over 6000 backers I did walk away you know oh there were tears you know I was I was just absolutely miserable I was walking away from it I had the impression that this is a niche book people really weren't into a fad of you know a bygone you know I don't play computer games and I so I don't anymore okay because of my hands I so I'm not in the culture any you know as much so I just I had the strong that nobody cared about the the meticulous ins and out the details of game development so I was ready to move on when Mark he came and said hey John you know how you doing I saw your campaign what happened and he pulled me out of the muck and he said okay I've done all kinds of advertising I've done all kinds of promotion this is the way to do it and he educated we spoke for hours and you know the next day we spoke for hours again and you know Mark doesn't have any dog in this fight other than just he was really impressed that I had gone through with printing this book so my promise to you is if you read this book there are gobs and gobs of really really embarrassing stories I got stuff that he's forgot about they're all in there okay and this is the only source Mark won't even remember so there's some crazy stuff in there I probably drank most of those memories away vanilla was that hard on you yeah it was hard on all of us it was probably one of the longest most intense crunches Blizzard had gone through and yeah it was very emotional throughout so I mean the stakes were so high and yeah so this is something that transformed the entire company Blizzard had always been viewed as a high-end brand a Gucci of game development that maybe didn't have that mass appeal but everything they shipped was a gem and high quality and this changed the whole company this the trajectory of the company went from here to just straight up vertical and this was the definitive moment this is what changed it and this book is the only insight into that that you can find anywhere and yes the stuff in there that I'm embarrassed about and yes I was a different person then than I am now and I really don't want to read the book cover to cover because I don't want to relive everything that went down but you should absolutely see what it was like and come on my Twitter and tease me about it and I'll respond I'm very responsive on Twitter I reply to everybody so but yeah I mean I think people get the sometimes get the wrong impression of this book like you know there's a lot of reading or everything I was like no you're right it's a copy table book but it's also packed with anecdotes and backs and nothing is made up you know this is this is Blizzard approved nothing is made up it's all as it happened the time that it happened and it's accurate there's nothing nothing like it anywhere else I just I was so fascinated with the book and Jon's right I don't have and I don't have any any any steak in this I just want to see this book do well I want people to know what it took to make wow because it was such an important part of our lives and consumed so much of our energy I want people to see see what everybody went through see what it took to do this yeah and I started with like I wanted it to be a textbook I wanted to go into teaching you know like I that's what I would love to see this most because you know when you go to Blizzard 80% of the company is from Southern California and I'm from Akron Ohio and I know through my life I've been surrounded by super smart intelligent creative people and I know they're they're those type of people in Wisconsin and Florida and Alaska and Maine and not just Southern California and if this book could do anything I would love to bridge the gap between the developer in the traditional game development areas where our entertainment industry is focused on the West Coast and a little in Texas and a little in New York you know it I think that I just think there's a lot of a lot of people can get a lot out of this book there's a lot of honesty in it so for sure I want to go ahead and start on the first question and we've talked about this before but I do think it's a good starter question especially with you guys on here the question is and this is on Twitter do you think Blizzard will could possibly launch Burning Crusade after Classic Wow vanilla basically like for me personally I would say that it all depends on the success of the game if the game successful if they're making money off of it then that's something for me personally I would be very very excited for is to get a chance to go back to Burning Crusade Blizzard is very smart about money and making money you know like I said we've always blended the business sense with with the game sense there's a lot of studios that maybe are too pie in the sky you know and creative visions and they run into trouble later pursuing those there's some that are way too business focused and they forget what the gamers really like you still have Mike there Mike still running the show he has that view that balance I know that a lot of people say Blizzard's not the way it used to be and yes it has changed in many ways but the person who cares about it is going to look at a way to be to be true to both like Mike is a gamer you know people probably don't know that and Mike is also extremely shrewd businessman and I think he's going to find a way to blend the two if this product is successful yes they will find more ways to make money from it that's what they do but not in any sort of cynical way as much as people think that that's you know maybe the case a couple things they've done I really think what especially when it comes to wow you're going to see just you know like John said that that's sort of reverence that's sort of like it has to be good and if we're going to make money for it it's not the money's sake that we have to deliver something special here well definitely I think if the company whose product you love and enjoy is being successful in making money that's a very good thing for you as the consumer the person consuming the product that you enjoy and love right so great I'm hoping fingers crossed for a classic TBC as well and more yeah real quick I see this a lot a lot of people coming to the channel say what have I missed so far guys if if you did miss the early part of the podcast what you can do is you can go to my YouTube channel as fan TV I post all the podcast there the next day or within the next couple of days so you guys can go there you guys can sub there and I'll post there of course tips out baby and stay safe TV on YouTube as well if you guys would like to go sub to them classic content if you're interested in wow classic if you're interested in vanilla wow the place to be for sure the next question and we talked actually we John John and I talked about this a little bit off stream this is from big pop of gris when it came to PVP being put into the game what was the biggest concern outside of a technical standpoint of how will this work and how does this counter that to create a great experience in vanilla wow John if you want to start I'm I'm sorry could you say that again sorry when it came to being PVP put in the game what was the biggest concern outside of the the technical aspects of the game as I remember it I everybody wanted to try something different or their own idea there was never a quorum of oh let's do it this way like for for raids we you know the EverQuest guys they knew what to do they were all moving in the same direction that's how more core got made in a in a week you know I mean it was it was it was crazy for PVP well I had my idea I mean everybody had their own ideas that that that I think in the problem was with no programmers available you really couldn't test anything so yeah we tried to test early and when things weren't working it was just I wrote a whole article about after we shipped wow us trying to test PVP it was just it was so it was you would never think that this is Blizzard the amount of yeah the amount of failure at so many levels I mean when we we don't have the tools to set everybody up on a high level character so that everybody they didn't recognize the spells like the testers these are the devs who are testing that it would take weeks and weeks of servers down you know the test was canceled okay get up to get the new build the next day okay you wait for one o'clock the test is at one o'clock nobody everybody's walk around the hallways to find out what happened not there's something wrong with the bill it was weeks of that so much to the point people stopped volunteering for the tests people start stopped getting the build stopped reading the emails responding to the emails I mean this was this was this is before we got to the test which was also a disaster like people were just like you know like oh this is terrible this is not fun so it was but that's all the technical stuff I guess you said well you also mentioned before we went live with classic cast as we were kind of hanging out or you had said that you were afraid of people griefing there would be too much oh yeah oh well that was years okay so alright yesterday I had an AMA with Kevin Jordan and he had told me something I didn't even realize it's not in my book that he had sent Alan a super long email this manifesto on how there should be a Horde Alliance split and that's he brought up he was talking about this that he says John this thing was that I was quoting fight club you know how do you know what you're capable of doing unless you faced adversity like these are the things that he's pulling into the super long email trying to convince Alan at him because Blizzard equated pvp with griefing there had been no game out there that had before anarchy are online and dark age of Camelot of course there had been no games pvp was synonymous with griefing behavior just absolutely game ruining behavior and all the designers were except Kevin I guess they were absolutely opposed to that Kevin's a griefer by the way all everyone was opposed to that type of gameplay and Alan came by and this is the guy that founded the company and he said Kevin I want you to know I agree with every single thing you wrote in that email and the change that you know and then he has also had proof of concept at the time where anarchy online came along and they control and same dark age of Camelot reinforced it but that's the ball that got rolling so yeah people learn as you go as you are developing the product there is no I think the one thing that I didn't realize that all these AMAs have taught me is how players their concept of how we develop games is that there's a plan a plan okay surprise then you get punched in the face as Mike Tyson says okay there's a plan okay but that is not how game development you learn as you go you discover things as you go and in questions what was the plan for this what was the overall plans did you guys string things no we were just like making assets and then we'd have it as an asset and then the game designers say okay this one's kind of cool we can do this little game in here there's no planning okay because and again the lore would change so frequently because assets would become unavailable technology would become unavailable that Chris Metzen would have to change the story so he couldn't have this the tablets from down on the mountain saying this is what the game is going to be that was never the case Chris was flexible when we got assets made finally months later when things could be tested years later then we kind of worked with what we had so that's probably the biggest change in PvP was no exception to that we were just learning as we go so we were pretty surprised that open world PvP servers were so popular but there's also the dedicated PvP maps and we had issues with that too in terms of being too NPC reliant in places do you mean battlegrounds or who knew MOBA was a thing we knew MOBAs were a thing we would not have been concerned with the amount of NPCs we had running around doing stuff so maybe we missed the boat on that a little bit because we were to remove the focus of NPCs basically doing attacks but we were shocked by the amount of support and love for open world PvP in the game although Alan was always a big PvP in Dark Age every time we played Dark Age we would jump in and he's always the one leading the charge about going into PvP in Dark Age of Camelot so I think Alan always wanted PvP and I'm talking about pre Dark Age Alan at Ham PvP was not popular on EverQuest because it was all griefing and it was an awful experience that's what they imagined Blizzard PvP was going to be right so pre Dark Age pre Kevin's email absolutely I was from the shooter so I didn't have any sympathy for somebody who couldn't hold their own against a one on one contest but Eric Dodds would just go we're probably not going to have that we don't want to foster that type of behavior and we just didn't realize that you can actually have consensual PvP and make it fun and actually make it fairly open world I played on a PvP server and even when we launched when Alan was gone and Rob and Jeff no PvP is not going to be good because in their heads they remembered EverQuest and how EverQuest had actually offered PvP and they were surprised when our few PvP servers crushed with PvP servers I remember having to allocate more and more PvP servers and being utterly shocked at how popular it was but John was really interesting about how about planning the problem with World of Warcraft is that we knew we had so much content to create we had to build it before we even knew what the gameplay was we didn't know about the death mechanic how it was going to work we didn't know how big raids were going to be we didn't know how many people would fit into a corridor what scale things would be we had no idea about the gameplay how much maneuverability we needed to build X amount of dungeons and we knew we had to build X amount of zones we had no choice but to build blindly in order to meet the shipping deadlines before we even know what the gameplay was going to be so yeah that was a real role of the dice I remember being on a tour of an aircraft carrier and it was it was they were describing what the new aircraft carriers are the ones that are being built right now and they have on their bridge where real estate is absolutely at a premium on the bridge of these aircraft carriers there's 5000 people on this ship the bridge prime real estate they have an empty area on the bridge there's no consoles there there's no machines and it's for the technology that the US Navy will need years later that they just don't even know what it is so that's kind of like what we were doing if it takes so long to build a dungeon some of these dungeons took many months to do by the time you're done you realize that monster was cancelled so we can't populate the dungeon with that monster anymore so we'd have to find a new monster and then that monster didn't go with the boss monster that we were going to put there so we'd have to find a new boss boss monster and some bosses completely changed Karazhan used to be a giant demon named Malganis that was the boss of Karazhan way back in the day I got a really good question actually that I saw from earlier we should have asked this last week too John but before we do what does the number 12,000 mean to you John I don't what's 12,000 you are 12,000 dollars away from being the most crowdfunded book of all time oh my goodness something is happening holy moly we gotta do this 12,000 we could do 12,000 come on let's do this it's the World of Warcraft Diary you're gonna set a record John it went up $6,000 in the past hour if only Kickstarter took Twitch Prime that would be crazy we hit it right now okay I have like 130 extra backers so there's some people listening to this who aren't buying the book what's wrong with you guys we know how many people no no come on so whenever here's a question from Fisheelon were you guys really good one we're gonna forget if we don't ask it now the South Park episode what did you guys think about the South Park episode I don't remember it ever being that was something I think Mauricio was doing our animators were just gone they were crunching on that for a long time when it was I'm sure we got a preview of it internally but unfortunately yeah we didn't know it was a thing while it was being developed and this is again Blizzard playing its cards very close to their chest because if Matt Stone didn't like the episode it got canceled it didn't want to to get everybody's hopes super high until they absolutely knew okay here's the finished polish here's the polished product you know but I don't have any memory other than seeing it like maybe a day before it was on the air so I didn't know of anything going on do you like it I did like it I love recognizing Joey Ray as he's the guy the guy who sat you know this the guy who has no life that was modeled after Joey Ray and he's on my Joey Ray put a lot of work into that episode too yeah he's our oh geez I don't even know he's my cousin no it was a running joke we looked nothing alike so the running joke was that Joey Ray was my cousin and we would voice this off on suspecting team members and try to convince them Joey Ray is so so rude and so frank that he's an acquired taste I thought he was picking on me when I first started Blizzard he would come into my office and just say shit and I was like who is this guy and what is he saying to me and then I confronted him one day and he suddenly got this puppy dog look he was like oh my gosh if you've been reading me wrong this whole time I really like you I just I didn't ever meant to hurt your feelings I was just talking shit that was really surprising that's when we we realized we both had relatives from back in Ohio and stuff and we forged this myth that we were cousins and we tried to perpetuate it but that episode floored me because I'd already left the company at the time and people said it was coming out and at my new company we all gathered around on the TV to watch it and after the episode because most of the people on our team had not worked on World of Warcraft with a new company all the heads turned to me and we're like what just happened how do you feel just like you guys are asking now and it was really numb it was like I can't believe it's reached some sort of cultural relevance here and the significance was not lost on me it was true it was stunning absolutely flooring me I was speechless and it was so funny and I laughed so hard to the whole thing that's really the first pop culture real reference to World of Warcraft I completely forgot you're right it was a realization it's so funny I didn't mean to cut you off just reinforcing John's point it was some sort of some sort of wall fell not just for WoW but for all of gaming something broke that day and just spilled out into the zeitgeist of consciousness that I never thought was possible before I was going to say I was really well known for being a WoW player I played football in high school and I was a good WoW player so whenever everybody finally saw this game that I was always talking about guys you got to try out this game this game is awesome whatever and they see it on South Park because everybody watches South Park in high school they were like dude what is wrong with you I was like no dude it's amazing and I remember I loved that episode so much but I was like yeah dude I'm the guy I'm the guy with the chip on my stomach Ray actually has that picture that's his Facebook portrait that's so awesome that's what he is on Facebook this kind of leads into actually into Fishi's question but he was talking about how how eye-opening was it for you guys whenever you saw the support for Blizzard sanctioned legacy servers you obviously delivered the petition to Mike Morheim Mark I was surprised when you were like wow there's a lot of people that really still want to play vanilla WoW from 14 years ago yeah I thought I thought it would be the number of the signed petition would be a lot lower than it was I forget how many signatures we reached was it over 300,000? it was like 290 I think and I knew I knew I wanted to and I took an old Blizzard trick I said when I deliver this petition to Blizzard and this comes from when we ship box games when Blizzard ship box games we would always include a notepad just a blank notepad with the Blizzard logo on it you could take notes for your game and we would put that in every box and why we did that was the whole concept of perceived value back in the day you would pick up the box you would turn it around you would have to in your hand and we wanted that thing to feel heavy we wanted to feel heavier than any other game in that store so for your 60 bucks you felt like you were getting something twice as much as the other game because it weighed twice as much and so and it worked these types of apples very good at talking Steve Jobs used to talk about what was special and he would obsess over every industrial design feature of a phone to make you feel like you had high perceived value Blizzard was the same way with his boxes and so when I delivered the petition to Mike I said it has to be printed out Mike has to see how heavy this is he's got to lift the box to feel these signatures and not just get an email with them and people were giving me so much crap about killing trees and doing this and it's like no they saved those boxes and I knew we were onto something then when they kept those boxes and they didn't toss them out Mike specifically ordered those boxes to be preserved and so that's when I actually printed all that out and I saw how many pages there were packed with signatures I was like this is demand there really is something here and so I really wanted to convince Mike of that and I insisted on doing that and I was actually a wow fan his mother ran a local printing shop who cut us a deal on getting that turned around real fast and efficiently and for us to be able to do that so that was great and I did use Mike's own dirty trick on him well that's also something to put in the Blizzard Museum as well I mean I think so oh yeah I think if they're moving forward with the project that is definitely something you would want to see in the Blizzard Museum I mean that's that's evidence that's hard evidence of the passion of the fans you know behind one of their products which is basically what their museum's about it's got the Starcraft CD that's been up in the space shuttle and it's got the sneakers the Starcraft sneakers from Korea just like all the permeation of to people know about that John the Starcraft CD I was just about to ask oh yeah well they Blizzard okay so Blizzard you're cutting out you're cutting out let's not lose the story let's see a little bit of lag here hey there we're good there's a there's a museum apparently I actually don't know I'm googling right now while we're talking so I know what I'm talking about you probably know but there was a NASA astronaut that was a big Starcraft fan and astronauts are allowed to bring a certain weight and size of personal effects with them into orbit when they launch on the shuttle missions and this astronaut had carried this CD of Starcraft into orbit circled the earth X number of times and traveled at this rate of speed and he didn't know who to give it to so he called up Blizzard customer support and okay can you imagine being in Blizzard here you are you're a tech support rep and you get a call and the guy goes I'm an astronaut and I'm just going to start grabbing today package what's your address and you're not going to buy this right so basically the guy hung up on him and I didn't know this story I didn't know this story yeah and was this Mark Downey who took the call and I think it was one of the guys that ended up being a level designer on the WoW team I wish I could remember but he was telling me Josh sounds like a Josh but the guy called back the astronaut called back and he reached someone in tech support who was willing to believe him I really think this is real and so he was willing to put in the time to talk through it to verify everything and give him the address and sure enough I remember when this thing arrived it was framed it had the NASA mission badges because every NASA mission has a unique badge so it had the mission badge from it it was exactly how many times it orbited the earth at what speed at what altitude and everything else it was just the coolest thing and it sat gathering dust for a long time because we didn't have a museum in fact we had no archival at all I was one of the first people and I think this is why I was so passionate about classic WoW I was one of the first people that hired an archivist at Blizzard I went out and I tried to find someone who I said it's got to be a background in library sciences and preservation of stuff and I made the first archivist hire and all that stuff would just get shoved in her office along with data preservation so all the build service for Starcraft because the game would not build except on this one PC that was Mike's office and so we had to sconce that PC and deliver the whole PC into her office in order to preserve it so we could build Starcraft because there's no other way it would work and so yeah there really is a CD of Starcraft that has orbited the earth that's amazing, that blows my mind that's so freaking cool and I'm glad that it's in there in the museum now and they've got a place to display it and I think John's right I think that petition did get saved Mike did specifically say he was going to save it it's history, I mean that's got to be if they come out with this this server I mean my gosh that's the inception right there, you rarely because we're in digital you rarely have something tangible that actually goes into a game it's always a digital file you know at best it's a digital file worst it's a movie that just doesn't, you have to have a screen and stuff like that to show it yeah, the physical aspect is so important, I remember on WoW they only wanted to deliver me bug reports digitally and I insisted on printouts because I wanted to feel the gravity of the situation how many bugs we're up against and I felt like team leads need to that you can't just clap eyes on it because you're like oh there's 6000 bugs, I see a counter on a website, big deal but you get 6000 bugs delivered on your desk and paper and a bunch of them are highlighted with your name on it you take that more seriously there's a real psychology to this that I think a lot of people miss in a pure digital space about how much the tangibility of something can affect your perception of it I think you're really right and that's why going back to the self work episode when he holds up the 1000 truths on the thumb drive it's like the exact opposite of that it's so good, yeah and who knows maybe they got the idea of burning the tree for BFA from all those petition signatures as well that was one thing Metzen didn't get he wanted an actual tree and we couldn't have the tech to do it at the time so we kind of got this mushroom thing instead so that's why the shape of the tree changed that's awesome pretty soon guys I want to go from twitter questions to chat questions this one's more of a fun one this one comes from Matt the Kiefer do you guys have any favorite wow memes you know this is for everybody right, any favorite wow memes like Mancrux wife any stories around big game events or bugs like the aq opening the Hakkar corrupted blood incident or shrunk or shoulder pads I had forgotten about the small shoulder pads I remember that was the thing forever but yeah like any sort of like funny certain things like jokes that came out of the game any memes that came out of the game that you guys really enjoyed for me it was all the player content mm-hmm it wasn't what we the Easter eggs we put into the game it was really more dots you know Leroy Jenkins you know it was all the user created stuff because we would have passed those around the office and gather around absolutely illegal Danish they're they're their movies were just fantastic and we'd get these things I mean what was the all the single ladies the song about every every items for the hunters everything's a hunter weapon all it was that name oh my gosh yeah I mean anytime a video was done using wow yeah it usually got circulated through the team yeah that's awesome that's so cool that meant more to us than any meme that the game directly inspired you know I think what I remember the most is just being so incredulous that people would put their time into creating something around our game or just the moments that it created the user content around it the user stories it's very endearing yeah I find myself whenever I would leave the bubble the blizzard bubble and I'd leave and I'd talk to my cousins or something like that and I'd meet their friends they would come across like my cousins oh John worked on wow and or he would say John worked on computer games my cousin was he he only played console games so he didn't know computer games very well and I would explain it's a MMO called World of Warcraft and this is after wow had shipped you know everyone had heard of World of Warcraft so to them I didn't want to be presumptuous in assuming oh everyone's heard of you know the game that I worked on you know but I ended up patronizing like talking down like as if they hadn't heard of World of Warcraft so a lot of people had to stop me like yeah yeah yeah I've heard of that okay but I mean it's like you you're in a bubble and you don't realize like that South Park that was I had forgotten yeah that was like a moment that wow people have really heard of what this what we were working on I mean it's when everything's on the forums when everything's on email or YouTube you really don't realize that it penetrates to late night talk shows Jimmy Fallon talking about World of Warcraft you know it's you forget that it's that big so especially if you're deaf yeah it's kind of weird I mean I've got kids I don't know how many of you are parents but you know I talked to my kids about wow and Diablo and games I've worked on and it never really sinks in but then you know I remember in a more social setting they're meeting other people who either recognize me or have played the game and love it and they start talking about Diablo or wow and geeking out and asking them questions about the game that they never ask me and it's like it's like okay you've got someone who was on the project living with you and yet you're more interested in talking to this other guy about their experiences in the game and I think that that's that keeps you in check and also it's just indicative that I think again the stories that the gamers share around the games we've made are what's really special you know I think that those moments are what I that geek is out the most we love hearing about people getting married in the game or you know or events that happened organically that we never planned for is it true that Tom Chilton met his wife and wow is that true oh that I don't know John I don't know that either I don't that was after my time there yeah that would have been yeah a lot of people did though a lot of people did and a lot of people message me about how the game literally saved their lives and going through tough moments and things and I never thought about it before until all these stories started pouring in about you know people would message me on twitter or anything and say yeah I was going through a tough time in high school or I was suffering from some disease and this was the only thing that kept me going and to realize that a game a game might have saved lives on a huge scale more than maybe most doctors get to save I mean collectively when you talk about the game just the sheer volume of people playing yeah the population is greater than that of many major cities you know and to think that that the game didn't just entertain but maybe saved lives is I never thought of that before and it's extremely humbling and it made me feel that it was all worth it all the pain and suffering went through all the arguments everything we did to you know I used to I don't know if you've got me quoting the book John is saying oh this is like a plane we're going to land it it may be missing an engine and landing gear but this game will ship I personally I was going to say oh sorry go ahead John I was just on what Mark was saying I personally don't want to take credit for those people looking for you know saving their lives or something because I don't want to take the blame for all the people that flunked out of college playing our game you can't take just one and not the other so I'm just I don't want to be responsible all those flunkouts because I've heard a lot more flunk out stories than anything I never know whether I should apologize for it well I'll tell you one of the most heartwarming stories I've ever heard is the kid I think his name was Ezra and it was Make-A-Wish Foundation he got the world first Phoenix Burning Crusades I always thought that was so awesome yeah really cool and like when I knew like this is when I knew wow was like how powerful the game was after classic was announced the amount of phone calls I got in that first month from friends that I had lost touch with that hadn't spoken to in like over five years more there's a particular friend of mine he's a big shot lawyer now up north in Silicon Valley he does patents intellectual property patents for like Google and Facebook and all these big companies the next day after classic wow was announced at BlizzCon I get a phone call from this guy who I haven't spoken to like six or seven years dude you know we're gonna play classic again it's gonna be amazing it's gonna be like real days and stuff and it was just incredible to see how many people have brought back together even after you know years of just you know losing touch that was really cool yeah I did I had like a I was an above average player in Burning Crusade I was pretty decent I sound like that guy talking about high school football now but I actually I had a bunch of people I played with in-game who found my stream since and they like guys that I had added on Facebook that I hadn't talked to in years and just like dude like that's so crazy that you're into like classic wow and all this stuff and you're streaming now and this and that and you know people I literally hadn't talked to in almost ten years I've come into my stream I've gotten a chance to talk to them and I've gotten a chance to reconnect with people and that's what it's all about dude it's about like whether you make friends in-game or whether it's friends that you've had in real life and the community that this game fosters is so freaking amazing and like I have like real memories like sure it was in a game but I have real memories with these people like real things happen to me even though it's either it's pixels right that's that's one of the things that I love it love it it's awesome I'm gonna play because I think it's been long enough and I've forgotten enough that I can actually experience it as maybe a player would there you go that's awesome because when you're working on it you're that close to it and this is a real challenge I have with you know especially with you know when people ask me specifically for how this mechanism worked or that it's like we changed it so many times or renamed something so many times I can't remember half the stuff anymore and that's that's gonna let me I think experience it as if it were new and I always wanted to do that it's like I always wanted to know what does it feel like to play this game because when you ship it you you you can't see that you can't have that experience but enough time has passed enough changes have gone through that I don't remember the original experience anymore and I'm really looking forward to trying it and seeing it actually seeing it for the first time it's order alliance order alliance I was always alliance but I went horde when when blood elves came out so I do alliance I'd be on the alliance side good call good call you're a good guy you're a good guy you're a good guy did you guys know about how there was a horde alliance imbalance especially in Korea when we first ship the game really well that's what prompted Blizzard to make blood elves right because they wanted their girlfriends to be able to play is that true yeah that's one of the reasons Johnson is saying no absolutely yeah yeah yeah okay so especially in Korea we were having a huge imbalance where most players were going alliance over horde and and we would we would be combing through the game trying to figure this out and we did find for example that there were more quest chains on the alliance side and there were fewer gats so we thought maybe that was one reason but the other thing that I was doing is I was taking Korean gaming magazines and I was going through all their games I couldn't read anything I was going through every screenshot and every image and trying to figure out why we're getting this imbalance and I realized that if they had like an evil side there was always a butypic race on that side butypic male butypic female there was always some sort of beauty ideal and all we had were monstrous creatures around the horde pretty much yeah and so you know we talked to our Korean office about this and it was their theory I actually think it was their theory and I was going through all the magazines to try to confirm this and I was like holy crap I think they're right and you know I left six months after we shipped WoW to start my own company but I'm glad to see that but when blood elves came back I mean it totally pulled my wife and I back into horde it's like because we were like that we wanted to play that type of idea you know that type of not a monstrous race but like a humanoid you know a dutiful race to go do that so yeah there was this huge imbalance and we were very very concerned about it for a long time I think it's really cool that even though you had stopped working on the game that you went back to the game and you were still playing I think that's really cool I feel like that's something that seems kind of unexpected because like you'd go and you'd work on another project but like you still cared for the game that yeah I think that well at Blizzard we always said that we knew we made a good game if after you shipped it you still wanted to play it if you weren't 100% sick of it by the time you shipped it then you had something so I mean that was the case so but yeah even after I left I was still interested in playing it but again I couldn't have that new player experience you know and so that's why I'm really looking forward to it now because you know maybe it'll stir up a lot of a bunch of memories but I also know it's going to be so fresh to me in some ways because enough time has passed to get some of that magic all right you know what you should stream it that would be so interesting to watch you level up and play the game and kind of comment oh this is why we did that that would be so entertaining I'd watch I was thinking of doing a director's cut of just walking through one of my dungeons and just pointing out how I made things and who helped that would be really cool you know that sounds like a lot of work I mean getting all the technical stuff like I'm not a film or anything like that but you forget how long this dungeons are too I was typing in the chat a little bit trying to prompt some questions from people in the chat I didn't get a chance to say I don't want to interrupt anybody but we are taking some questions from the chat now again we are kind of doing more of a Q&A and we might think of some stuff ourselves too but one question from Novelty Engine what was the internal reaction to this old grub plague whenever that went haywire because were you around for this mark or was this right after? John was though I was around for this I get asked this question a lot and I'm really curious I was I want to say let's see I think Kevin and Pat were Kevin Jordan who I was at the AMA and Pat Nagel we were at lunch and Pat just casually mentioned that there's like this plague going around okay we didn't know about this as much like sometimes when something happens on the forums you know very few of the artists very few of the programmers the designers are usually onto the forums to find out what's going on so it was just like we didn't think it was a big deal at all it was a kind of funny anecdote maybe 15 seconds worth of conversation then we went on to the next thing that was the only thing we knew about this ridiculous event um when we launched the public beta this was the the public beta mark do you remember mark completely has forgotten about this we had bugs this is the open beta we had queued a whole bunch of emails and here's the link but something was wrong with the download the AT&T there was some weird thing going on with something that it was one of our partners but a day went by nothing happened in the open beta then another day went by so it's one of those things we're preparing for a test but technical problems stops us so people stop paying attention okay and it finally goes public beta the word is out it was like dinner time it was like 6 or 7 o'clock at night and the PA system announces attention the wow open beta is now live the first transport is away I repeat the first transport is away and the PA goes off our reaction was we have a PA system you know we have a PA system and we're waiting for here it comes and then nothing happens and we're all looking at each other and a couple people look out their door to see if anybody's gathering in the hallways we're still working it's 7 o'clock at night they go back and Eric Keller and I just started laughing it was like we couldn't care less it was just like it was just so pathetic that we just didn't care less yet outside of the building outside of the blizzard building battle net melts it goes down I mean just the entire world except 133 theory was where we were at that was our location in Irvine nobody cared like we talked about it after like when dinner finally came then as we were sitting around eating our spaghetti or pizza or whatever it was people would talk well would you want to work on another MMO how many copies they would be just like this casual because frankly they were playing a build that was probably 6 months old, 3 months old some super old build there's nothing exciting we had seen everything if we got excited this is of course the tail end of the development that we'd be excited about pets cats, house cats in the game that was the last really big thing that everybody got excited about that was little you know dogs and cats in the game but we couldn't care less it was just like a couple people would go to the forums but we had gone to the forums the announcement of the game was a huge deal on the team the productivity shut down for 2 days when we announced at the ECTS Mark was in Europe so that was okay he wasn't watching our schedule Mark was away the mice were playing I was at ECTS, yes you were at ECTS yeah I have your letter by the way that's part of the book there's nothing bad in it I flipped my shit because the automated Sierra's automated they paid a million bucks for this automated email system and it sent out the news of the game before the leak and I have a flying phobia I hate planes, I hate travel and I feel like I'm risking my life every time I take a flight so this was, I took it really personally I was like I did not slept my way on a plane and risked my life to come out here because that's the way I really feel because it's such a phobia of flying that it was that pressing and I was tired and getting this build ready and we're prepping for this and when I heard that Sierra's million dollar email system goofed basically stole the thunder and jumped the clock on the announcement, I was furious I wanted whoever was responsible for that email system fired I was just moved it because the emotions were so high and John's right we tried to shield the team a lot of that but the email that I'm referring to was you after the event no one had heard of it at the event it was all positive you were describing to the devs what the ECTS was after we actually demoed the game where hoof and mouth disease was kind of like a do you remember that hoof and mouth you're not talking about the SARS incident are you? not the SARS incident they went ECTS European computer trade show they go to the UK and the UK had just had they had killed tens of thousands of cows they had slaughtered them and one of your characters in the demo was called hoof and mouth which was like the American there's photobnop okay oh go on John it was a little foible it was like a little misstep where you weren't being sensitive to this catastrophic loss of beef in the UK and one of the characters so you had to rename the character I don't remember that at all this is your email to the team we're talking about so is this why there's no flying mounts in classic violence because you're afraid of flying mark no no purely well there's a lot of reasons for it we didn't want to shrink the world that's good ultimately one of the things that people say was one of the things they wish they could have turned back we didn't want to shrink the world we wanted travel time to be a thing we were fine with taxis because they were on fixed routes you can't unlock it until you get on foot explored the other area and we wanted that sense of world one thing that modern MMOs lack now is the feeling that you could live in this world that it's not just a game that it's an alternate reality and you could retire here spend your life here and it feels real it feels like a living life experience and you don't get that with modern MMOs and you're just using group finder, dungeon finder whatever to get through the next content and you're doing it mostly solo and yeah you miss all that but there's a trend I've noticed here John Plague seems to follow World of Warcraft you've got the corrupted blood incident you've got the hook in that and do you remember the SARS episode? Oh it's in the book too yeah you went to you were talking to partners abroad you were going to pick who was going to operate the game Asian partners, yes and you were we all called them patient zero for a few days because he had to be quarantined you were quarantined for quite a while I think I had yeah it was a while I got back from China and this is when the SARS epidemic hit and everyone thought this was the this was it this was the avian flu that was going to wipe out and and I got back and I was having cold like symptoms and at the airport they hand you a yellow card that says if you have these symptoms go see a doctor right and so because they were you know CDC Center for Disease Control was really worried about this so I got this card and I had these symptoms and so I quarantined myself in my place and I told my girlfriend I need food I can't really eat because all I could eat was soup I was like buy me some soup just drop it at the door and I went in because I might have been exposed to this horrible horrible disease that's killing people and so you know I would get the food delivered and I wasn't getting any better I wasn't getting any better at all and so I decided to go to the emergency room but I was really concerned about infecting anyone and so I went they have a side door I looked all around the emergency room walk-in center and they have a side door for biological or chemical contagion right and a big red button that says ring this doorbell if you know if you need if you believe you've been exposed to this or if this sort of incidents happen to you so I was like great they've got a special path for this I don't have to go through a waiting room and sit around a bunch of people and maybe infect all of them with a deadly disease that I may or may not have and so I rang the buzzer and nothing happened nobody answered the door and to be honest if you work there would you answer the you know if the light came on that said the infectious disease door there's someone there would you go answer it you know this probably hasn't been used in years right and so I ended up you know having to go into the main room and I went right to the front desk and I didn't want to sit with any of the other patients and I handed them the yellow card at the center of disease control sent me and I said I might have been exposed to SARS I was in China can you please have someone see me and the lady just didn't take me seriously at all she's like what's SARS and it was all over the news in China when I was there right it's like it's like people are dying and everyone's freaking out in Asia and they think that this thing is going to wipe out half the planet if it's not contained and I'm just aghast I'm like okay well this card explains it it's a very serious disease that's highly infectious and I think I need to see someone because I haven't gotten better and I have all these symptoms they made me wait hours so what I did was instead of waiting with the clientele I got a blanket out and a Game Boy and I sat on the grass away from everybody as I could and told them that I would be outside and waited and finally the doctor saw me what makes you think you have SARS and he didn't even have a mask on and I just came from China trying to find a partner for World of Warcraft and everyone's got masks on everyone's worried about this stuff and the doctor's just kind of chuckling and saying you know what's the big deal and as soon as he called the center of disease control they wouldn't let me leave it was a total shutdown okay and suddenly the mask is on and he comes back in and they're hovering around me and they say you can't leave and you guys stayed at the hospital and it's like how much is that going to cost it's like well you're deductible to 500 it's like wait I'm being quarantined against my will and I get to pay for it and they're like yes and so I'm telling the team this I'm like I can't come back to work I'm quarantined and the team took great pity on me and the team bag had all sorts of stuff that somebody who's quarantined for several weeks might need including for some reasons a Playboy magazine not good and yes they say we don't know how long you're going to be you're either going to recover you'll be dead you know and you know they had me in a room with double airlock doors and a big machine I remember not being able to sleep jet engine recycling the air and purifying it or something but I could not sleep and then I was watching the news and other planes were coming in and the CDC would say oh two people came in on an aircraft from China suspected of having SARS we're going to shut the plane down on the landing pad and check it out and these guys were released these passengers were released within two days and I was still stuck in the hospital it's like the CDC cleared these guys they forget about me I'm sitting here I haven't died I'm not getting worse but the team was great Shane came and visited they had to put on like special rounds yeah so how far along into the development was this oh we're pretty close yeah you were talking to partners probably a year before it launched before it's launched and we're trying to find a partner in China and we're freaking out over can we launch a game in three territories at the same time Korea, the US and pretty soon China and okay John you take it from here what happened when I got back to the office finally alright so wow I just opened the book to Blizzard books to Asia how fortuitous is that page 190 talk amongst yourselves I'll find what Mark is talking about yeah we're getting back to that quite a bit on a bunch of questions so like we can go through some of these for sure this is a question that Firehead actually had last week and it was about alternate skins this might lean more towards John but I'll go ahead and say it anyway planning on alternate skins of battlegrounds back when they were in development he actually sent me some screenshots because this is something that I wasn't aware of but I guess like Worsong Gulch had a basically like it was textured differently there was like files or the screenshots of it being textured differently with like a human sort of theme to it I don't know anything about this actually but it's not something that I knew completely wrong Worsong Gulch was now Worsong Gulch was pretty tough because I had to have the same footprint with the same walls if something was smooth or curved or flat it was hard to do an orc building and a night elf building with the exact same footprint because they're a very fundamentally type of different footprints I think that they're probably looking at a human keep or oh I know what they're looking at they're looking at a bunch of guild castles which was this pitch Mark you probably don't even remember remember I had a row of these little upgradable castles they would get better and better kind of like you would see how a component in Farmville would slowly improve on different like type of it would just be like different shutters it would go from metal shutters to golden shutters or something like that and that's how I showed to Alan and him he loved the idea that it might have some implication on guild housing but some of that stuff creeped into the game even though we never used them they were super low poly they were just like tests of what we could have and yeah that's what they're probably looking at they're probably always orc and night off what's the other area that people always ask us about the files we discovered like someone's asking if it was going to be a raid at some point oh Azara Azara Basin right? Azara Crater I couldn't remember John so I was going to ask you I actually I just talked to so Jim is one of our first we hired four exterior level designers at the same time Jim was one of them and he's now the lead on the WoW team for Exteriors and Jim said that with Arathi Basin playing so well that we didn't need to duplicate the the battleground it wouldn't have changed significantly it would have been a slightly different but it would have been roughly the same game this is for Azara Crater yeah Azara Crater so he just well it was just decided why do the exact same thing let's do something different so it's trivial I mean he probably spent maybe like four or five days on it and they chucked it and moved on to the next thing and that's what happened there's just a lot of stuff that people dug up and they asked me what was the plan for this and I can't remember and you have to talk to the person on the team so much content was flying in so fast at the end Shane and I would log into the build and suddenly there was a new area that we'd never seen before it got to the point where we could not keep track of what was going to the game because it was happening so fast at the end and so when people ask me what was this area and what was that I have a hard time recalling and I'm glad I'm not the only one I'm glad I'm trying to ask someone else and it wasn't just me I know I'm looking in the book for your SARS incidence still I think it's the moment we talked about housing a little bit you know your proposal for guild housing you guys are familiar with Dark Age of Camelot I thought the housing system in that game was so cool was there ever any thought of putting something similar to that in the game I know they eventually put in garrisons but it's not quite the same it's not like an open area where you can go and check out other people's houses and stuff and we talked yeah go ahead sorry I don't know we talked about it but no one could come up with a good idea to is that where you were where you were going well basically I a lot of people think that the portal is a form when it's gated off and a lot of people think that that could have been a player housing 100% by the way March 2002 was during the internal alpha march that was the SARS outbreak amid international tensions with North Korea and the SARS outbreak Mark traveled to Seoul Taipei China yeah this is the whole thing they surround John hold up the book because people gotta see this thing that you wrote and it's just massive show them the spine it looks like a textbook yeah that's the textbook this is a cheap and dirty print out this is print on demand the final product I've got a dummy book somewhere around here that's the actual the printer makes a dummy book and the paper and the weight and you can feel the the hard binding but this is the cheap print it's massive though it's huge it's constantly like $36 to mail this to Australia that's so far the most expensive thing and everyone's complaining about the shipping but that's what it takes I mean you know international shipping is brutal yeah they're killing me on but player housing was gonna be a big thing Alan had huge plans for player housing you're supposed to instance into a neighborhood where everyone has that's what we call it we call it neighborhoods because you wanted to peacock and show your own house to your neighbors and housing had to have a good reason for you to be there or housing never gets used it's very vanity based he wanted actual trading player to player trading I think was gonna go on there and things like vendors I forget how it was gonna work but he had some plan where players could set up shop and sell stuff to other players and this would be prior to auction house because we would talk about the problem with auction houses is that there is no social component to it it's all just emailed to you and Alan was huge on the social aspects of the game and everything that he designed for and it was really a lot of his vision that drove wow and so what he wanted was okay maybe there's an auction house but you still have to go see the guy to get your item or go to their house at least and their vendor or something something to establish that sort of personal relationship and I think housing was supposed to dovetail to that I remember distinctly the portal in Stormwind and the neighborhoods that were supposed to be instance stacked of these different player houses we didn't want houses we loved Ultima Online so much so many of us played it but we didn't want houses like just carpeted over the land like it wasn't that game and getting in the way of the content and everything else so the idea was to portal this stuff off into instance neighborhoods where every player would get their own house you guys speak very highly of Alan both John and Mark John I think you mentioned a bunch of times in your book out of curiosity Alan had a huge role to play in the game could you give us a little background on Alan during these AMAs lots of questions sometimes thoughts kind of congeal into a perfect nugget Alan Adham is the Steve Jobs of Blizzard that hates publicity that's Alan I know that's understandable some people just don't want a lot of attention he's absolutely brilliant he's probably one of the best designers of all time and people haven't heard of him because he's the most patient person in the world just well okay I'm sorry watching somebody play the game he's a slave driver like Alan Jobs or Steve Jobs Alan was like a father figure you always wanted to please him you always wanted to go the extra mile for him and it's really his philosophy guided all of Blizzard's early development along with other key members but I gotta give it to Alan Alan was the one we looked up to Alan stepped away from the company for a while before coming back on Wow that was he was sorely missed and when he came back on Wow was awesome but he was also very much like Jobs very driven and very passionate and sometimes fiery if you were at the layer of management that's directly working with him he would let you have it with both barrels certainly and in private you know and it was really hard to work for the guy but amazing but you wanted to because he was so amazing and it's kind of like a football coach yeah and when he decided to step away towards the end of Wow development I remember I was at a point where I was having an argument with the guy but I recognized how important he was and I wrote this long email and went to talk to Alan to try to convince him to stay because I thought it was that important to the project whatever personal issue we had at the time and we got together years later over lunch and dinner and everything else but at that time whatever personal issue I said none of that's important none of that's important what's important is that this game has your vision in it and we need that vision on the title he was pretty adamant about stepping away and he did that time but luckily he recently came back didn't he yes he did and that bodes well for Blizzard that bodes very well for future Blizzard titles I mean you never hear about him but he is really the huge component of the soul of Blizzard yeah all the think about all the slide shows all the public BlizzCon all the talks all the GDC panels that you hear a Blizzard star one of the designers talk about intelligently just how the method of making a game they're parroting Alan I mean the longer you work with Alan the more you just say screw it I'm just going to parrot what this guy says because there is just arguing with the logic that is just so it's just everything he's just a great guy yeah go ahead sorry we could talk about Alan all day he doesn't need the credit he doesn't care at all about the credit it's awesome but yeah whenever I'm designing or whenever I'm making a game I'm thinking of Alan what would Alan do absolutely I have a question I was going to ask this earlier and I just remembered focusing more on the game again last week John you talked about how AQ was actually the first raid that you built it wasn't molten core which is actually the third raid the third big 40 man raid was there did the final I guess the final order of raid tears did that match the original vision for what you guys saw somebody asked this question during the AMA and this is a great question there was no order there was a list of places where we thought could be raids and I would build a place Karazhan wasn't supposed to be a raid it was supposed to be a dungeon but it was big enough to actually put more people Upper Blacks Rock Spire they said a little more people they eventually said it at 15 yeah there was no order whatsoever you were talking I started I had this this funny it was a graph paper with the eastern kingdoms and Kalimdor and I had all our raids where the newbie there was a tauren newbie dungeon I think I saw this in the sample you showed us this sample I think I have that paper still lying around here it was just my own someone had written it on the board and I thought it was important enough to actually just to re-refer to and it was just kind of neat to see and yeah the plans changed so many times I used the example Derek Simmons built an intra web intranet page where the developers could look at this map and have something that was relatively up to date and keep everybody on the same page where the cities were where everything was in the world of warcraft it was like the big map with all the little locations of a dungeon or a city and it was outdated by the time he put it up and if he revised it it would have been outdated by the time he sent the email and that's just things are constantly constantly changing after a couple of years after you've shipped a game you realize at least this is the blizzard now there are some companies who are very heavy handed with their plans they write a blueprint and to the detriment of their product the team sticks to that blueprint blizzard is a lot more agile they self publish their own games they can delay things they can speed things up when they discover something's cool or cancel something that's really not cool they can do all this internally so the plans are man makes plans god laughs that's organic as far as the lore goes who was the one making sure the lore was being respected or sort of maneuvered around? decisions? I'm interested in this what I remember is maybe a little different metson would come in and talk about the lore early on I remember the whiteboards and the maps and he had plans for all this stuff it seemed like whenever he met with you guys things would change ideas would get tossed around I don't think it was unidirectional I think people have the impression that metson would say this is the way it is and we'd all go do it but you're right sometimes there would be technological issues or level design issues and there was back and forth absolutely when metson metson's a game developer he knows animation that's where he does concept art he did games before he actually became a lore person he used to write stories about the warcraft one units and he'd kind of like almost like do it on the side so he doesn't get in trouble for wasting time writing stories about the characters that's really how it was and he wouldn't stop doing it so they said okay we'll ship one of these stories with the warcraft one game a little bit more serious with the warcraft okay we'll actually tell a story we'll actually name some of these units that you're coming up with fine we'll do that so he knows development and when he comes to us and this is what makes him such a great creative director he pitches an idea to the guys who have to execute it so he pitches something and if they're not jiving with it or they may say well we kind of did that already in the eastern play clients and this is kind of right next to that oh okay well what do you think would work there you know and only stuff he would only like dig in his heels if it's canon that's been shipped before in warcraft 2 or maybe even warcraft 3 then he'd have to say well we can't introduce an inconsistency because that's the brand so he was super flexible and super open to cool ideas you know like on Karash he would describe it as not full on egyptian okay but it's a desert temple he doesn't want to go crazy with the hieroglyphs up the yin yang looking like egypt so that's why I had this weird the building was like a scarab beetle it was kind of like on the ground so it was like a roundish building so it didn't look like egyptian and it just found its way at least the exterior had a little bit of its own character that way it didn't look greek it didn't look roman it didn't look egyptian but it was its own thing so that's kind of how things went and sometimes technology would go oh no yeah we can't do that we'd have to scale that back you know he'd say well can you do it this way and sometimes technology well we can do it or sometimes no we can't do it that way either and sometimes design would say we've got so much content in the barons we don't need a wild west mini dungeon or newbie dungeon for the torrent torrent didn't have their own dungeons so they they cancelled that and so much content and that was one of his like little things and sometimes it's a half hour of just musing this is the easiest thing in the world to throw out versus if you got a programmer working on code for two and a half weeks if half hour or two and a half weeks you can definitely go with check out the half hour so metson was super flexible very inspiring to work because you could inject your own things and he wasn't a micromanager as long as you were in the flavor that he was going for um yeah go ahead go nuts it's not like chris reviewed every single quest text that came through too i mean there was so much stuff that had to go into the game so fast he did review names though names were absolutely something because he had a great naming scheme i have a whole chapter to go to the war i mean yeah so kind of going back to you know you're talking about the design of in the style of like a q a q 20 and a q 40 have two very like distinct designs like a q 20 is a service level raid and then a q 40 you go underground it's more cavernous um were there because you made a q first was it originally in the plans to eventually introduce 20 man raids as a kind of catch-up mechanic or no okay no we had some pieces uh we pulled out some pieces from the temple and we were going to just that was i think some of the flavor uh alan was really into the idea of this is not all of his ideas are great the uh the common areas okay the common areas are where all the elite mobs are where people are supposedly going to group up to take out elite mobs until enough people show up that you have a a dungeon crew then you'll just like without a care in the world you'll roll into that dungeon and have a grand time okay that was his vision but uh i think we just made a bunch of pieces because it was easy we had textures for it we had geometry we had its own like the visual language of what the temple was going to look like i had enough pieces that matt sanders who was the exterior level designer at the time could just arrange stuff around and i'm sure one of the probably jeff kaplan or uh alex afrasabi he was the guy behind the aq event big time he uh they probably had the idea you know what i'm feeling enough that we could make cool content for two raids here and that's probably where it happened they saw matt sanders uh putting all this flavor stuff around the temple before you go into the aq 40 area i think they saw all that and said you know we could get ourselves this just made why not do a raid on the on the surface on the exterior like uh zelgar rub so um that's unless zelgar rub came afterwards i think 1.7 yeah zg was first yeah okay so love zelgar rub um yeah so that and that's pretty much it and i remember like them trying them point metzin into the conversation saying okay what are some of what what what could be some of the boss monsters and this is my i don't know why it's funny okay where metzin okay he he he did his homework and he came up with a bunch of bosses and he came up with like i don't know six or nine bosses or something ridiculous he was always a little bit testy when you tried to nail him down on the boss because it was just something that i don't know he didn't think he needed to do right now and somebody asked him the first boss was this beast like a like an insect kind of beast coming out of the ground and he just wanted it to be beast you don't want to get too buggy or too hivish okay and this is just during the and jeff kaplan so what's the name of that monster and metz is like i don't fucking mongo you know that just just makes us it's just the funniest freaking name in the world i would love to be killing a boss need mongo okay and i don't know why that's funny but i just that's just throw something out there for now yeah well just put a price over for crying out loud get to it when we get to it you know yeah his language was so colorful too yeah he's more pepper we gotta wear more pepper to this you guys used to joke about you know he also said it needs to be epic it needs to be mighty and so we had the epicity we called it the epicity scale and the epicity yes mitocity and so we reviewed dungeons and stuff was like well it could use another point or two on the epicity scale and maybe tone down the mitocity yeah whatever we made had to have pepper the epic and mighty and those were the guiding principles yeah mitocity quantitative values for sure yeah and you know what it's funny when erin was working on the remember when erin was working on the login screen and everybody was okay so you were probably busy on business stuff at this point this is kind of at the tail end right before the probably the alpha public open beta the login screen could be anything so everybody was bothering erin about the login screen they all wanted to pitch the ideas and this is you know metzen is a dork too don't let him fill you he's a nerd just like anybody else he comes in and he i remember it was friday night erin and i were erin was ready to go home to his wife seven o'clock enrolls metzen he's like okay i want to give you my take on what could be a real cool login so this is pitch number 47 for erin hearing about what a cool login screen could be and metzen starts talking about the titans okay and metzen likes the titans like no one else likes the titans because no one else liked the titans they were the titans they were a pain in the ass to work with they were all way too hard to scale in the game when you're a little player with you know super you know galacticus type of titan type of character characters and creatures that he wanted he starts talking about how they made the world of warcraft he gets into the cosmogony of how the world was created and erin i know like i'm digging this because i'm a nerd i don't have a wife to go home to on friday night so i'm digging it i'm hearing from the source what he wanted to i can just see erin just trying not to oh she's waiting for me right now and i'm hearing this long blended piece and he we started talking about the warcraft movie that's the first time i heard about the warcraft movie he started pitching and that's the first time of course i have an opinion already on the warcraft movie on saint don't make it too complicated just do one little story just do one little story i remember telling him but anyway he starts talking and talking he goes through the whole war of warcraft one warcraft and it's just like oh don't care don't care don't care but he's the greatest director so he's kind of like trying to prop up a smile that was uh anyway that's metton sometimes that's crazy like how like just mentally invested like mentally and emotionally invested that's so cool to me sometimes he comes off very cool don't be fooled he's a dork okay he's a dork like he's got the right heavy metal the right posters but you know what he's a nerd like anybody else this is a little different between blizzard as it was and blizzard as it is now i mean you're hearing stories about how casual it was between metton and the team and how it was back and forth and everything it was really kind of flat and you had these names in blizzard and what happened later on is there was the company got really big and so some people were basically elevated and enshrined in these positions and access it becomes a problem i think that's something natural so we were there at blizzard at the time where there was everything to each other and metton is a creative director but you still have people sitting there jiving with him and pushing back and forth ideas and things like this and what happens when you get to a certain size is i think people don't have access to that anymore not as many people do and things get stratified a little more and also new people come on board people who new people who come on board are afraid to push back to challenge an idea and that you lose something when that happens but also chris chris wasn't like the person elevating himself too i don't want to it's when there's now instead of a team of 40 people you've got a hundred something people you have kind of jealousy of some people have access he only has so much time and you kind of like can't say everybody can have access to him you can understand how is a new hire someone new to the company how it can be hard to sort of like get into the clique or feel sort of at home like the other people that have been there for a very long time well the company it's not even that where you feel like it's a clique or anything it's just that the company is so large it's not physically possible interactions anymore john's right chris never elevated himself never that just happened as a function of scale you know when the company gets to be a certain size and and that's why i think people really like smaller teams that's why in pardo's new company he's all about 10-15 person teams and that's why i don't like teams above 30 because the drama index goes up and you know it's just something that you lose and i think that you know you get the best ideas when you can pitch stuff back and forth like this and everyone is playing hardball to try to get their idea out there and try to get the best idea but at the end of the day everyone just wants the right thing for the game and they're very passionate about that here's a question here did you guys ever think of guild banks going into vanilla because they were added at the tail end of TBC not in vanilla no no we're pretty sure we talked about that guild banks yeah well i guess yeah maybe so there was a laundry list of things we needed to get to pretty sure guild banks even back when we were talking about trading and we were doing the anti cheat trade interface because in Diablo 2 you could like yank the item back at the last minute and the trade would go through and the guy would be ripped off and so we would engineer all these safety mechanisms into the trade UI and also i think anytime we talked about guilds or housing or anything else i'm pretty sure storage came up but there's so much so it was originally linked to housing basically no i don't want to say that i'm saying that it was on the same sort of list that housing was it was on a wish list didn't we call it the list of love is that what we call it yeah this was so that ideas didn't get forgotten they had a whole long list there's a couple cultures of and i think it was called the list of love because it's like hey these are great ideas but we can't get to them so we're gonna keep them in this file and so people felt that their idea was listened to and heard and it wasn't a priority right now so we go into this giant list which half lived in hard copy and half lived in people's minds as memory, collective memory oh yeah we want to get to that someday that's awesome yeah we are running kind of short on time so i want to get to just a couple more questions oh there there you go that's the whiteboard with this is the designers whiteboard i don't think the list is quite there there's another whiteboard in here that does have that long list a whole bunch of ideas they put the things that they didn't like frown faces by them yeah so let's wrap it up here with a couple more questions one is was there anything for you guys that got cut from the final game that you guys really wanted to see in the game before it shipped well nothing, well let me quote Mark Kern okay we're not cutting anything we're just putting it to the back burner okay so that is Mark talking to just a burnt out dev team low morale oh this is such a cool idea why can't we do it we're not cutting it we're just pushing it off it's a living game we're going to have updates we're going to have more features so yeah that oh i've got one i know instantly every time i play the witcher that sucked into Gwent i remember how i really wanted a couple things i pitched i really wanted and a couple people really wanted a trading card game in World of Warcraft and i wanted it to be organic so that you could play it anywhere but when you went into an inn because we're always looking for a way to make inns more relevant when you played it in a city or in Goldshire or anything you would automatically be ranked competitively so you know if you go to an inn or you could play anywhere else and i really wanted to see this and i wanted to be able to be redeemed for physical cards too because we used to play so many collectible card games at Blizzard and i really really wanted to see that but the other thing that went in i got fishing i love that so that was something that Eric worked on and actually because my wife loved fishing in Japanese RPGs so and so it was a gift to her i went to Eric and i said you know can you make a fishing game that would be cool and he did and he went off with someone else Sam Latinga he coded and they put together a fishing prototype and we got into the game so i was really happy but the card game didn't make it i really wanted to see that in there especially since we played so i enjoyed Gwent in Witcher and it seems like a no brainer now with her stone right oh yeah well i mean i even mentioned this that my first time i've heard about someone from Blizzard North had made a physical card game that the designers Eric, Frank Gilson they were playing this we were all the magic they were playing you know champions and we were all playing this and going wow this is better than 80% of the CCGs out there and we wanted to have rares appear on mobs you know as a drop and oh boy i can put that into my deck you know that kind of thing but holy moly that would have been that is such a pie in the sky type i mean everybody loved it but it's kind of funny when they were talking 2002 then Blizzard made their card game okay and then her stone came how many years later i mean it was a few generations of that type of what was that 2013 or 2014 was her stone i think 2014 was the beta i think okay everyone calls it her stone but i'm pretty sure that on the team i was pronouncing it her stone for the longest time was it her? not when we were talking about the game didn't exist the rock we were talking about the rock the actual stone and every time i hear heart stone it feels weird to me because i always called it her stone i thought it was like the hearth of the plot that's by the end you've got a nice big hearth by the fire well yeah that's the correct pronunciation i've just been mispronouncing it oh okay strangely enough there's a street in Irvine called her stone so one last question i mean clearly people are going to be asking this question a lot we've all said before tips stay safe myself we all kind of expect to we're being a little bit optimistic but we're all hoping to see some sort of testing period this year when we think that the game could come out as early as next year john talked about it again on the last podcast and for you mark how do you feel like given the update that they've given with the water cooler update they said they're on the third prototype they have a plan listed out they've been pretty transparent about how do you feel it's ready when it's ready that's the blizzard mantra and it's really it all depends on what great ideas drop out of that process as they're playing that prototype what sparks the imagination about what would be cool to do and i think blizzard's going to do something really i think they're looking for something special something cool whether it's you know well i think you're going to see something that hasn't been talked about that not game changing like that but there's going to be some clever little thing in there that links the current game to the classic game or something that we haven't heard of that's what i'm hoping for because that's i've seen that happen so many times at blizzard where great ideas just percolate to the top and that's what i'm hoping for here that they've got something something special planned and if so take as long as they need you know make sure that it's quality i'm hoping this blizz con is a pretty special one that's for sure so we can all hope we can hope but guys we are out of time here we've gone a little bit over time actually thank you guys for joining us if you guys haven't already please you guys can follow tips stay safe john and mark i mean all the links are down there below below everybody's camera pictures and if you guys miss the earlier part of classcast i will be posting this on youtube on my youtube channel youtube.com slash sfan tv again if you haven't subbed to tips and stay safe you guys should do that as well and tips is actually gonna go ahead and stream afterwards if you guys want to check out tips stream and we will see you guys next time thank you so much for joining us john thank you mark thanks for having us i really appreciate that