All right, what's up guys? How's everybody doing? Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to classic cast 24 We're here with nano. Sorry. My voice is a little gone In case you guys didn't see my stream yesterday or my last video. I think I was I was being rather loud. So Yeah, that's uh Kind of why my voice a little scuffed up lately, but yeah, we're here with our friend nano quality assurance lead team lead for Nost and And we are very very excited to have him here We were actually we had planned on having him on before the most recent classic news because we wanted to talk about a lot of the differences between private servers and Between private servers and retail vanilla, which is something that's actually been discussed quite a bit, right? We've been talking about that since Before yeah, I mean since since before the the announcement even it's like, okay Yeah, like you're playing on private servers and people say all the time. It's like, okay Well, I experienced this game or whatever one of our last experience this game, right? Whenever I played in vanilla, it's like this worked like this this work like that and this is how we're doing on private servers and that discussion is really even It's it's picked up a lot recently and it's it's been growing constantly since the announcement So again, I'm here with stay safe TV with tips out, baby If you guys haven't followed them yet, you definitely should and of course our guest nano nano What have you been up to since the last time that we had you on? I've been playing video games living my life Selling copiers Exciting man, it's exciting. I grew up watching to do that all my life and now I got finally got to do it So, mm-hmm. That's good There you go. That's that's that's that's most kids dream most kids dream growing up Player football player anything like that Give me a kind of comminota. I'll be happy Yeah, I just want to bring this up because it's so cool But after Nostalgia shut down Blizzard had you as well as some other Nostalgia members Go out to Blizzard HQ in case anyone in chat didn't know that true And they talked to you about vanilla wow and sort of how you guys pulled off Nostalgia is right. Correct. Yeah and the so some of the fun stuff that's come out since we last talked is If the sins was was sharing a little bit about like he didn't know that they had started working on classic and then found That later and seemed like the timeline was either slightly before we were invited to to Blizzard to talk or slightly after we had our conversation at At the HQ so it's a It's it's cool to see that everybody is you know We're at where we're at right now where we got in classic news and we're like Getting closer to the to the launch point. It's it's crazy. It's fun. Oh, yeah I mean like we know within six months. We'll be playing for release classic Wow Maybe as soon as four months like right we're getting we're getting really close man And we've already we've already waited 17 months, right? So yeah And to put the four months to put the four months into context It's been over four months since blizzcon. So there's a chance There might be less time between now and classic than there was between now and blizzcon It's also been over four months since I've talked to a girl. So Yeah, that's that's how it goes But that's like last time than usual, right? Yeah Let's not let most of the people in the chat right now for sure. Yeah, let's let's just go with that. Yeah Anyway, no, so so yeah, I think that was really good to stay safe bring that back up again Because not everybody watches every episode of classic cast But yeah, whenever we had nano one last time we talked about how they went out to Blizzard HQ And they got a chance to meet with the devs And it is really cool to to kind of hear all the stories and I had this realization where we had Jethysons on Last week or two weeks ago Whenever whenever he was kind of explained the timeline and I think it's so cool to go back and to piece everything together After the family like wait, so whenever nano did this like it was just like it was great I loved it. Yeah, when Jethysons was talking about that the impression I got when listening to it Was that they had been working on classic like at least six months prior to flying you guys out Yeah, I remember incorrectly Yeah, it's it's possible Like which would make it a lot a lot more sense, right? Why yeah, they invited us out Now I don't know about six months because we We shut down and in April and we were shut down Technically in like March and then we actually finally shut down in April and then we went out that summer Which is like less than six months, but Maybe maybe they're working on classic before we got shut down and then invite us to be a part of the process anyway But they were just part of like they had a lot of questions about how we developed it the back end of working Like how we got how much population on the servers as we did like they had a lot of those questions. So Yeah, I love all that I think I think that's great So let's let's go ahead and start talking about I know like I said the the original reason We thought Nostra and nano would be such a good fit for this show is talking about a lot of the differences of private servers with Nost And and what was retail vanilla, but we had such big news yesterday Finally, you got okay.  So yes, it was finally confirmed Okay, finally confirmed they they decided that they're going to increase it from four to six phases So big claps in the chat. Good job, everybody. We did it pop the red bulls. It's all good I Was so like I Okay, I was literally about to go to bed because I'd been up all night.  I was like I Totally just nerdgasm. Just it was it was a It was a lot. Yeah, so I was super super excited about that and Let's go ahead and talk about what that really means, right? Let's talk about what that really means to actually go from four to six phases In a nutshell kind of like broadly and then and then we'll go down into each phase and what we think about it Stay safe. Do you want to start? Well, yeah, like the two big differences here Are that dire mall will not be in phase one with molten corn and Ixia, which is very very big As they said in their blue post dire mall a lot of the gear is better than molten core gear And that would serve to make more than core and early progression a lot easier and then also splitting up So grab and BW well so grab has a lot of really good cast here as well for as well as other gear and the enchants Which are really good, which would make BW well progression easier for a lot of guilds. That's the biggest change What do you guys think about it? I mean definitely like from a pure gameplay perspective. I agree 100% The two biggest things I took away from it kind of beyond the gameplay was number one It means that Blizzard is clearly listening The suggestions of the six stages was something we all pushed here on classic cast So many people pushed for it on YouTube on on the forums on reddit So it definitely showed that Blizzard was listening and almost more importantly than that I think it showed that Blizzard is willing to take the harder way rather than just the easy way out Six stages means more overhead for Blizzard. It means they have to you know test more patches as they roll them out It means they have to moderate these patches as they go live with more people I'm guessing it's just it's the more expensive route and I think for a lot of people the fear about classic was Especially after we heard about the loot sharing and stuff like that was Blizzard going to take the easy financially friendly way out and I think if anything yesterday's post confirmed that no They're willing to spend the extra dime to make sure it's more authentic and closer to vanilla as it was back in Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean at this point I have no doubt that they sincerely genuinely want to recreate classic WoW or recreate vanilla WoW in classic WoW as closely as they possibly can like I really think they're sincere with that goal Yeah, well when we got a chance to just to add on to that when we got a chance to actually meet some of these guys Right when we got a chance to meet Brian and Omar at Blizzcon I mean these are guys who actually worked on the original like vanilla WoW team, right? These are guys who worked on vanilla WoW, you know from from or back in the period of time between 2004 2006 and they really care like it's something that's important to them is to is to make the game, right? And even like even John Hite who's who's Jalen he has Jalen Bragg's old position with WoW He wasn't there with whenever whenever vanilla was active, but he was a fan of the game and he's somebody who like The way the vibe that I got from him is like he has like full trust in like in those guys to be able to recreate The game as closely as possible Nana, what do you think? How did you feel about it? Yeah, I thought it was great A lot of things like Stay Safe mentioned that about you know, I care a lot as a player I want the game to be balanced as we go along My fear with having Dire Maul available at release is that some of the power levels within shifts where you can just skip Some raid items as upgrades. You don't have to worry about those because you can just be satisfied with the the slightly or evenly goods item from Dire Maul Or just the straight upgrade from Dire Maul like things like Padres, Trousers and Ogre, Magi Staff and and those kind of items Those are really really strong early game and so especially Dire Maul early and then also bounce like spreading out the the length between, you know, the World Bosses and Zulgarub and Zulgarub not landing at the same spot as BWL It definitely means at the very least that the Caster's level power level are gonna just gonna go down significantly like the loss of blood fine is a big deal But also there's a lot of great melee weapons and he were he were items that are available in Zulgarub as well So as far as like the item balance and making the raids feel worthwhile That was a really important thing Mm-hmm Yeah, I knew and on top of that it just helps to recreate the actual vanilla about timeline Which is what I think people want with classic route as you know with within reason Right. Well, and that's something that they have done on private servers, right? They've gone through and they've faced content together and they've packaged it together where You know, for example, the launch patch for most private service is 1.2 Where it's like, okay You know what Marathon came out a few weeks after release It makes sense in the national progression of things to have a level 40 dungeon a little 40 range dungeon Inside the game at at launch, right? So you'll have 1.2 in the game on the flip side of things on the back end of it 1.12 like there's things that change in every patch but some patches have like a content release and other ones don't right and With 1.12 like they added in the cross realm battlegrounds and basically we're preparing the game for burning crusade So it doesn't really make sense to have that release on its own packaging that with The the next patch makes sense. It's natural. So I think it's it's something that's We thought it was gonna happen. We literally we actually talked about it before they announced it We're like, well, we could see them doing it like this. So cool to see that there that it feels like they're listening They're doing things the right way Splitting up dire mall splitting up zg away from the raids because one thing that happens actually one thing that happens in the progression of vanilla wow is That they release a rate here. They release content and then they release content after the fact That's easier than the content. They've already released But it's treated as a natural catch-up mechanic to people who maybe have have come to the game and are new to the game Maybe they're rolling an alt. Maybe it's something to do on the side And what's really really good about this content that they add whether it's dire mall being five-man content or ZG being 20-man content that gives blues despite the fact that you've had BWL and MC out at this point and an XIA and world bosses It's that there's other things that you can get in ZG that are valuable to even the top-end Raiders who are you know Pushing BWL and all this other stuff. So what happens is the top-end Raiders are going to want a group with people who may be rolling An alt or somebody's new to the game Who needs like all the crappy gear that like, you know, the little pieces and then they get the big pieces and it Just it's a natural cycle of getting everybody geared out and content for everybody. Yeah, so that's very good The way they balanced, I'm sorry now good. I was gonna say you go ahead Well, the way they balanced a new catch-up content for both the hardcore and the casual player was something that I don't think has been done Since vanilla at least not that well Like S-Vance said like ZG like even the most hardcore players are gonna want to go into ZG And even the most casual players want to go to ZG and that's a very very great balancing act and I want to go back to what S-Vance said just a little bit earlier about You know dire mall serving as a catch-up mechanic My biggest concern with dire mall coming out at launch aside from the power gains was the disruption of like the progression curve in vanilla like in vanilla like there's a very steady linear progression as you go along and If you put dire mall or catch-up raids earlier on then they were intended to be all of a sudden You take away weight and value from the previous content the raids that were supposed to be there instead And you start to accelerate people on the progression curve so it no longer feels natural it feels disjointed And it's kind of like an intangible concept But you know when you're in it when you're experiencing it like basically the way they have it now You're always gonna feel like you're growing in every single stage in every single patch You're never gonna feel like you're experiencing content that trivializes other content, right? What I was gonna say is like the One of the big differences between classic and the current BFA game is that there's no Expectation and classic to be fully bis unless you have like a really really long time to farm the content So like you're in molten quarry you're in next year for a while Most likely not all of your melee are gonna be able to have gotten an onslaught grill and the band of a Curia by the time That BW all comes out and so when you start adding in dire mall Then you can fill some more of those slots So it just like increases the power level of the whole raid by a substantial amount So it's not that the items themselves are that great is that the items themselves are a Lot more accessible that each individual player can expect to have that item so like tarnish elven ring is a really great ring for Melees and hunters and so having the ability to have every melee have those two things relatively easily just running five minutes Makes the you know the power level of everybody improve significantly. So That's really the difference is because ZG is so much more accessible than BW well and dire mall so much more accessible than MC and you know even later, which we'll get to probably now is progressive itemization We're at the 110 items Increases are so much more accessible than a queue and so being able to increase everybody's power level from easy gear You know really makes a big difference if you hold it back Yeah, I agree with everything you guys said I think that this is a very very good start in my mind There are two issues with this current timeline That's going to be addressed and you just brought one of them up progressive Itemization so they've talked about not adding certain items until one until 110 But certain items need to be updated prior to that or at that point Items changed a lot like items that were in the game earlier Changed several times and so there's there's that progressive itemization has yet to be talked about and then also the pvp system If you look at their new proposed phases list it says tba So I think that's actually wise because I think this is something that they probably need feedback on they need to hear What people want and and just think about it more probably because you know for those of you They don't know for the first four months of vanilla. Wow. There was no pvp system You couldn't rank There were no battlegrounds. You couldn't rank up one to 14 and then in patch 1.4 they added yeah 1.4 They added the honor system and so you can start ranking But it wasn't for another two months that they added battlegrounds And so this two months period prior to battlegrounds, but after the pvp system was introduced this was the era of You know Tarn Mill versus South Shore and world pvp and stuff like that. I would really like those What would have been dishonorable kills to yes, yeah, exactly I want to know you guys think about that. I made a video talking about this this morning I really want to see the pvp system added in In phase two with more sorry with dire mall as it goes in Kazakh Which is going to be a very big world pvp phase anyway Because now you have two world boss pvp objectives now you have dire mall which is Crazy for world pvp and then you know a couple months later battlegrounds being added with blacking layer That's what I would like to see replicate that feeling. Yeah, I think I think that Uh, I think that would be a really good way to approach it if they wanted to split up the introduction of the honor system and the release of battlegrounds I Think that would probably be the best way to do it. I think you're right. I think I think Those are really good thing if they don't let's say they don't want to do that, right if they wouldn't want to do that I think that if they put it in with phase two with dire mall or if they put it in between Dire mall and blacking layer. I think that would work as well But I agree with you I think I think you saying that they should split it up between two and three would probably be the best way to do it so I I advocated for that on Twitter yesterday and then thought about it more and I've changed our minds on that and Mostly it's based on the Type of player that's gonna be playing this game like MMO players much more sophisticated They're gonna min max at a much larger scale like Toran Mill and South Shore was not a very efficient way to get honor And it just wasn't you know what the most efficient way to get on there without battlegrounds is farming flight points and burning steeps Yeah, or or winter spring or that's what that's actually that's actually why we started the paladin police force stuff It's because we would go police the flight points to kill people who are ganking people. Yeah, right? so that's my fear is that you know by Eliminating bgs, then you're gonna incentivize people to farm flight points And so you're really rewarding people to hit 60 faster and those people who were slower and taking their time in the Though the leveling system They're just gonna get pounded once they hit level 48 level 50 in those leveling zones At the flight points, and that's just not great for the health of the server long term Yeah, I mean have people being like shoved down as they're trying to level Keep in mind though, you know the PvP system even without battlegrounds would not be added until you know month four or five right in That time frame so that's that's a lot of time you're right people do level slowly, but that is a lot of time There would still be people leveling. I think that people you know if this is happening, you know You're gonna have world defense channels people are gonna say, you know don't fly here. There's someone camping this guy Or you know people players can be very reactionary just to stuff like that Yeah, you definitely open the door to having that type of meta gameplay Meta faction gameplay That would be like that would be my concern if I was on the design team and making this decision to be splitting these two up Like where the ultimate ramifications of that like are the pros of Having that availability and that meta, you know PvP system available Is that better than? then the feelings of the players who are Decided they're just gonna not level until bg's come out because all the gankers are gonna go away is like which is those is better Which is you know about like healthier for the stuff So out of curiosity is that why you guys decided to release bg's at launch for NOS? Was that you're kind of thinking because NOS was a little bit different you did release bg's at launch you didn't put it later on in the game and A lot of private servers have done that since and I think even before NOS to my memory serves me correctly But what was the rationale behind that? So I wasn't part of the launch team for NOS They joined like a couple months right when dire mall was being released on NOS So I don't know the full Like plan of why they had bg's at the beginning most likely because they didn't consider that it wasn't in the beginning And the other thing in the private server community. There's a lot of PvP heroes for lack of a better term who wants to be able to get to rank 14 ASAP So they can get their best-in-slot weapons before BWL is even out and just out gear everybody like crazy and So they are also the loudest people on forums and discords and that kind of stuff And so it's very possible that they just didn't want to deal with the personalities and and just you know Yeah, you can have your battlegrounds. It's fine so so I think One thing to that point is how the private server meta is different from the vanilla meta and that's all that it's gonna be different from the classic meta and the private server meta of PvP The progression was a lot more linear whereas in retail vanilla you had PvP as an alternative method for being able to gear up your character you Could either PvP and you could gear up your character there Or you can PvE and you can raid and do all that and some people would do both but it wasn't treated the same way that it's treated on private servers whereas People go and they they rush rank 14 and they'll do split runs and they might even go and They might even raid around the reset where some of the most hardcore guilds What they'll do is let's say reset is on Tuesday So they would raid Monday night and they would raid Tuesday night And then they would grind on her for two weeks and then they would raid two nights in a row every two weeks That was one method that people would use whenever they're trying to get as many people rank 14 as possible So that you have as many GM weapons or high warlord weapons in the raid by the time black wing layer comes out I don't think that's that that's not the way the game was initially intended to be played But that's the way that some of the speedrunning guilds and whatnot played on private servers We've talked about that before I Don't I don't think that's particularly healthy for the game for it to be For that to be the way to play the game But to not have PvP until the black wing layer patch That's the opposite way basically of doing it where it's like okay Now all of a sudden like nobody can get anything before BWL and there might not be enough content for those PvPers For who knows maybe six seven months until black wing layer comes out. So Yeah, sorry guys, I'm going through puberty. I know I said no changes. I know I said no changes. Okay, but we're having some changes today But but no the idea that that stays they've proposed in this video I'm assuming this is the idea in the video because we've talked about it before but of splitting up the PvP system instead of just bringing the entire PvP system the honor system plus bgs into one stage Divided up as it was back in vanilla Release the first part of the PvP package, which is just the honor system as a whole Release that in phase two with dynamal as you're goes kazakh and then save the second half Which is the battlegrounds themselves for phase three with BWL and that replicates the vanilla process a lot more The honor system was introduced in patch 1.4 and bgs were introduced in patch 1.5 So more mimics vanilla and at the same time It does allow for that Terran mill versus south shore memory that so many people have heard about so many people I've seen videos of but never got to experience. I think it's really important to preserve You know of all the events in vanilla That's definitely one of the ones that I think a lot of people really want to see again. Yeah I think you're really right. I think even if it's not the most, you know min max way to farm I think people will still do it people will still organize giant events. So let's say they don't split Let's go opposite direction. Let's say they don't split it and they add the PVP system and battlegrounds either in phase two or phase three So let's say they added in phase two so phase two The I think the biggest concern with that is that you'll have battleground reputation rewards You have all truck Valley rewards You can get exalted in literally, you know, like five days less than that with all talk Valley and Your worse on gold as well So you'll have people that are exalted with worse song and all truck Valley by the time BWL is out And that would also compromise some BWL gear. So yeah, I think not adding it in phase two is a smart move So let's say you added in phase three One thing I've seen a lot of people complain about with having a later PVP release is you're not gonna have PVP trinkets Which are very very helpful in a lot of situations. So I think I really think that they should split it I really think that's the best solution here I mean in a perfect world right in a perfect world You could even have it to where they split it and then they don't even release all the battlegrounds at the same time But I'm not so sure that they would do that. No, that would be great I would I would love for them to do that and I don't see honestly I don't see why they couldn't do that to be completely honest Well, they could and you know like let's so how happened in vanilla? Wow, it was worse on gold all truck Valley that came out first together With one point five and then and then later on was added a ratty basin So let's say they added let's let's say this split it three ways, right? Let's say you have honor system added phase two and then war song Gulch All truck Valley phase three and a ratty basin, which the ratty basins rewards are probably the best of all of them I think AV has some really good exalted rewards and even like honored river words Let's say they add that phase four was over up and that works because phase four Yeah, ZG and and Arathi came in 1.7. So it actually kind of lines up perfectly They wouldn't have to change anything in their face schedule. It's all right there. Yeah, so I would actually advocate for Slipping in a seventh phase where it's just the PVP addition phase in in between dire mall and black wing layer So we don't know how much time length is gonna be between these different phases will probably vary between what's what's doing but I Would I would fit in like the honor system as its own update in between those two phase two and phase three as we have it now Like if you do it four weeks before black wing layers guy come out There's not gonna like you will get off-hands and the AV rewards available Because I would be putting honor and bgs together But you won't have access to the rank 7 to 10 or the rank 14 gear until well into BWL's release So that's kind of how I would I would slot it in. Yeah, I think that's a concern is having people You know rank 12 13 14 going into BWL. I think they should really make a point to avoid that, right? Well, I mean it wasn't it wasn't necessarily impossible back in the day, right? Because because you had 1.4 patch came out and then you didn't have BWL until 1.6 So you could have had some people that you could have a whole roster of rank 14 warriors Yeah, so what if it would have been possible technically at exactly three months, right? Because it's it's 12 weeks. Just yeah, so if you're if you're a bracket one every week Now is it was it likely? I mean people didn't understand the brackets and stuff back then but Surely, I don't know. I mean, I wonder who the first ever rank 14 was that'd be interesting to find out It was me Yeah, I just first question what's wrong with you? What kind of problems do you have? How much did it cost you when you dropped out of college? Yeah Well, no that the big unforeseen condition now is the duration of the phases like you're saying 12 weeks like What is the spacing now? I think most of us Speculated that in the original plan. It was gonna be six months Now you look at it you have six phases of our 24 month period Is it gonna be four months each? Are they going to make certain phases longer than others? Are they planning to balance the phases around retail? Wow content patches? Yeah, I Don't think each phase should be the same link. I mean for example like phase five, which is the aq phase should not be as Short as phase four phase two, which is Diamonds will grow up, right? So let's say phase two and phase four are like two months, you know phase five might need to be five or six months Yeah, yeah, that would and that would be about right because I think it was I think it was six months because it came out in January of 2006 back in the day and then It's either June or July it's a July 11th, right for the night for the next batch. Yeah, so yeah, there you go I think it makes little I think it makes sense to have that phase longer anyway Because you have to do the gate opening and whatnot now Now the gate opening is gonna probably happen a lot faster than it did back in the day because people are gonna be prepared for that and But you also might have people that are intentionally delaying it to form The red the the black cross you resonate crystals, right? We've seen that before too Yeah, like I mean you'll see like sometimes you'll have like the top guilds on the server essentially like hold that hostage Yeah, and they'll they'll talk and they they go through and they say okay We're gonna do this and we're gonna hold off so we can get as many mounts as possible now I don't remember the exact story. I this was one of her. I was on Illidan. This was one of ours on Illidan at the time and I Don't remember all the details. I won't go into it too much But there was some drama on Illidan about how they basically were planning to ring the gong at the same time And then somebody went rogue and they they I think it was pick Low maybe pick low went rogue and rang the gong before he was supposed to and then somebody ended up not getting them out Because of it because there's like a six-hour window Or was it the other guy, maybe it was the undead Classy played but yeah either way like there was there was some drama about that in the past I know on Illidan server So yeah, or ten hour window. Maybe I don't know I can't remember the exact numbers, but um ten hour window So yeah, the it's very very very possible actually that happens So that's not the case one other thing that we talked about progressive itemization and when it comes to the blue pvp sets That matters a lot too. It's like what What version of the blue pvp sets are they gonna make available because the second set which was changed in the next patch The original one the original one was you know 1.5 Or 1.4 whatever was but they changed they updated the blue sets to be really good In the next patch 1.11 which is a really long time away and by that point everybody basically who was going to get them Anyway had already gotten something better But like what version do they go with do they go with the next level ones where you can like skip a lot of bwl items because you have especially for casters like you can kind of Get away with not getting mission dares and black link a ball because you have head shoulder two piece and that's better um If they have that available then you know that's going to change how the gear works in in nbwl or maybe they'll update it when it comes or whatever it is So that's a question I have to answer too because it changes the balance of of rate gear There's that so yeah originally there was the level 58 blue pvp sets that later on became level 60 It was it wasn't that they changed the items. It was an entirely new set they stopped offering the 58 gear and then added new level 60 blue gear and Also on top of that they at one point. I I think I actually thought it was later But we were looking at some web archive stuff Was it 1.6 that they reworked or re-itemized the epic pvp sets? I thought it was like 1.9 But the the weapons they they changed in 1.6. Yeah Okay, so the weapons got changed earlier to to match the bwl weapons, right? Okay But also at a certain point they added more weapons, right? Because there wasn't like a caster maze and stuff like that They added more weapons. They read the max patch next patch. Yeah, yeah But they added like the spell blade and an off-hands and a number of other things that was all the way to the next patch So tldr the pvp stuff changed a lot and just waiting until 110 to do it or like phase five I'm not sure if that would be adequate and it's it's actually bigger than just the pvp items We need to talk more about progressive itemization because so many items changed I mean, let's talk about bone re-reset to change like six times There is a lot that changed and uh I think just waiting till phase five or whatever it is that they wanted to do would just be too long Yeah, some of these items. Well Can we get a quick summary s fand of of what exactly they talked about when it comes to progressive itemization? What exactly did they say? Yeah, so so basically in in this last article the Main thing that they touched on is the fact that there are items that change later on in the game Uh, namely in the 1.10 patch they add items like heart of warmth lock or warm phallic or every pronounce it And lbrs stuff like that. Um blue items that are added to dungeons So that's really the only thing they touched on however throughout the entire course of vanilla There are items added to different dungeons. Um, I think it's like reanimated chain necklace I think it's the name of it the the healing necklace in uh In strathun dead and baron side that drops off ramstein Um But yeah, there's you know not not to get too much into specifics there But there's items that are added at every point, but the 1.10 patch is considered one that is uh, like they basically did like a big revamp Um, there's different parts to progressive itemization, right? There's times where like they add new items There's times where they update items and uh, this happens all the way throughout vanilla So for them to go through and actually look at every single item specifically and uh to see when things update I think is I don't think it's gonna happen to get like true progressive itemization Especially because we're into phases now and then they'd have to like package stuff together or whatever But I do think there's some big points, uh, like the pvp weapons, for example, or like the pvp gear, excuse me Um That if they have all the best pvp gear in from the beginning or as soon as pvp is the thing Then it might not necessarily be a good thing because it might just be way too strong. Um I think uh I think we're definitely like off off to the right start like saying that we're gonna add these items in later So these items aren't in that are supposed to be in the end of the game. So that's that's basically what they talked about That's what's like confirmed so far So like one one like weird example of how this works So they talk about like changing drop tables, right to fit how they were in those patches so And the original molten core both tier one and tier two pieces dropped off of molten core bosses And then Later when they added new items to the molten core loot tables, which is patch 1.4 They removed the tier two's out. So they would slot them in for black wing layer and so And then later made those tier two items significantly better than the tier ones So we don't know how they're going to do that here, right? Are they going to have the The mc loot tables as they ended up being a 1.5. So they added items at 1.4 and 1.5 Are they going to have that as the new mc? Are they going to have tier two as part of the drops and then change the items that's like There's a lot of questions that they have to answer on that The easiest path in my mind is that you make the 1.5 items in mc available at the launch Um, you don't have to change drop tables anymore. That's the only you know And that will include items like mana igniting core talisman of ethereal power, um quick strike ring Um items that are good for like almost all of vanilla Uh benediction ancient petrified leaf like the items off of domo because until 1.4 domo had no items at all Um, and I also think that my guess is that at the end of the day They're going to have at the very least like tier items have their final stats and not update their stats over the course of the The game just because that's too much micro work that they're going to be putting themselves through to update Yeah, I do. I do think that's a pretty that's a pretty big I I think that's pretty big if they start putting in all all those items in from that point instead of like right before bwl um But I also think you're right about saying that it's it ends up being a lot of like little changes that they have to make later on So I don't know. I don't know how they approach it. I think it's um It's definitely something that affects the game But is it something that's going to hurt the game? Uh, if it's if it's in from the beginning, that's something like you'd really have to sit down and think about Well, if you like if you have tier two early and then in order to fill in the Drop table gaps of not having the 1.4 1.5 items Then you're going to change right too And if you don't have them in and you don't have the 1.4 1.5 items Then there are still some really good items like uh band of acoria That's going to be like 40 of the time whenever you kill rag because they're just not enough items in the drop table to even that out so There's those things you have to really figure out like What's what's the best option for them as a design side and for the balance side for players So so you made a really good point right there talking about how there used to be tier two and mc Because it was 1.4 whenever they took the tier two gear out of mc and uh, some of the gear So, okay, let's explain this for people who don't know Originally one of a while came out There was tier two gear available in molten core and in the 1.4 patch They took this out and then they reworked it a little bit and they saved it to reintroduce it in blackwing layer So you could get as a paladin you could get both the judgment gear and the law bringer gear I think to I think to have that would be really cool, right? But more than likely they won't have that especially because the judgment gear The original judgment gear for paladins and then i'm speaking from my own personal thing Was insane like it was a it was a ret paladin set It was awesome like a chance on like 20 chance one of you crit that you do like a holy damage prop. It was great. It was amazing um And then they made it suck and they made it like a pvp healing set And in one of they one of they took it out and then they released it in blackwing layer in 1.6 It was a pvp healing set and then in 1.9 They made it to where the paladin set was reworked to be more of a spell power plate set Like more of a shock it in type of set like spell power ret maybe uh some of the pieces so um Yeah, I know I they made it good. It was actually insanely good pvp healing set but for me it sucked right um For me it would have sucked I should say uh if I had it so um, yeah the um Sorry, I kind of lost my train of thought there, but my my my basic point is Uh, you make a really good point about if they take that stuff out and they don't have that in and they don't replace it With anything else they uh make the rewards for molten core a lot a lot weaker overall If they don't have the 1.5 stuff in because they took it out 1.4 And then they put they they filled it back in in 1.5 And in retuling 115. Yeah. Oh, that's true. Actually there's some things 1.4 as well That's true One of my concerns with like them changing itemization too much I mean of course things need to change but changing it too much and I'll use the example of the BRE again because it changed like six times and there happens to be like six content phases. So Like it would change like every content phase pretty much uh for to keep with pace. Um I I think like having too many itemization changes will be sort of like overwhelming or confusing Is your average player that isn't a super vanilla turbo spur like they log in one day and they're like What the hell happened to my item and it's like, you know So I think there has to be like a pretty reasonable balance with a lot of these things I agree And I like what nano suggested to come in with the 1.5 gear And then change it later on But honestly more than like one or two changes like like you said stay safe. It's It's going to throw a lot of people off. I think Yeah, uh, so I do advocate for like the final item stats for the tier gears But I have issues with the Five man dungeon gear being in their final stats that get updated in 110 So like the glad gladiators chest and fan thoughts sash and and other items that get updated Because those become really really good And would you know that same idea right over Compensate for for raid gear. So it like There's no perfect world here in the progressive itemization. You kind of have to ad hoc it But the good thing is is that classic gives them like an opportunity to just create the new normal Without changing the heart of the the system that much, right? Yeah, you can have These are your molten core drops from 1.5 until the end of vanilla. These were the molten core drops These are the molten core drops in classic And so that's kind of the idea that behind behind all that and it allows them to create the drop tables once And I'll have to edit them again And you know from a design perspective that sounds nice Yeah, I think uh, I think it certainly changes some things. So like on on naut specifically They did what you said, right with the with the tier two sets like just using that for example We actually updated those tier sets like four different times over the course of oh really? Yeah, okay So I I was under the impression because I didn't play nauts. Uh, I've said that before Uh, I was on the impression that the paladin set whenever it was introduced was a spell power set in 1.6 That's that's why I said that um So, yeah, I I had heard that before so that's my mistake But um, but yeah, no, I I think that that's something that's probably reasonable That's something that's probably is going to happen is that they won't go through and they won't update every single item But there's certain things that are just like too powerful early on if they go with the final version um So this this might be like an oversimplification But how many how many itemization changes do you think is too many like is is too too many is three too many And if it's like I I sort of think too like if I if I had to pick when they're gonna Do like mass items that can change as I would say probably phase three and phase five Does that make sense? I think two is too many. I think having having a moment where things get upgraded Makes sense like you can sell that to the players. You can communicate that to the players like guys tier five Or phase five is coming out. Here's the like coming with phase five as part of also the big blue Dungeon upgrade process, right? But to say like phase three just remember guys like Your tier gear gets updated this phase, but not this gear But that that's hard for for them to communicate properly for the the normal average player Let's not be confused like why they're previously bad green ring is now really good blue ring That's level 55 or 35 or whatever it is like that's too confusing So I would advocate for like the big dungeon shift to happen in 1.10 or phase five as we have it now Would you include the pvp gear in that or would that be kind of a separate thing? I I would also But that that's a difficult thing because you don't know the timing of when they're gonna do pvp thing If they did my version of like a month before pwl I I probably do that because you're gonna have like five months or six months in between bwl and acu probably And that's enough time for everybody to get ranked 10 if they want it So I would wait till phase five to upgrade the pvp gear to Yeah, I think uh If okay, so if you want phase five and you did the pvp gear upgrade that would make it fall in line with Basically to where it's on the same level as acu gear because that's essentially what happens and retail vanilla The pvp gear gets updated after the acu patch to be on par with acu, but if it comes out then it's going to be Uh, it's going to be on par with acu whenever acu comes out. So Well, here's the concern with that, right? Let's say let's say people have their gear Right. Let's say people already have their gear and then acu comes out and the day the patch hits they have gear that's like acu acu caliber gear and They haven't even done acu yet, right? So we're talking about like the high end now I'm kind of I'm kind of thinking out loud here. The gear is itemized differently for the pvp sets You know, it's got it's very stamina heavy and whatnot. It's itemized a little bit differently than Then the pve gear is going to be But I think that would be the one concern is the fact that like if if they do the update and then okay acu is out Uh, well acu isn't even out actually the the event has started. So you might have gear that's on par with acu gear Right. Um, hmm. So that's that's just something to think about. I think you might be right But that would be the concern is that you end up having like acu caliber gear In terms of like itemization points goes, um Even if it's itemized differently, it's not going to be the best gear for pve, but it's going to be very very strong Yeah, so like I I play a warlock, right? So I'm really familiar with the caster gearing process And so the level 60 blue pvp gear like you you want the two piece you want the heads You want the shoulders and with the two piece set you get an extra 23 spell spell power And so by the time you get to acu That set gets replaced by to 2.5. And so it's not better than the acu gear that you can get it just It's better than the bwl gear or good enough that you can hold off on caring about the bwl gear until you get to acu and so You know by allowing it to be accessible early Then you're doing the thing where I mentioned early where you just You're opening up the doors that anybody can really get to rank 10 if they try if they're playing enough You can get to rank 10 So you're just opening the door to everybody's every caster's power level just being able to be that much higher so right Yeah, it's going to be very interesting to see I think I think you still might be right In terms of like uh when they should update the pp gear Because because nax is too late. Yeah, I that's what I was going to say I think that phase one time to do it. I mean My concern right now is having updated molten core loot tables at launch Like I I would I would update molten core loot tables in phase two or something That's why I said like two two itemization changes I don't think having that stuff updated in phase one is the right approach I think you'd have to update it in phase two preferably phase two maybe phase three Yeah, it's a conversation. That's worth having for sure. Yeah, I think a lot of this stuff is just too powerful there at launch Yeah, it's definitely a can of worms, but I'm guessing we're going to get some updates and some philosophical answers from blizzard pretty soon Well, honestly, dude, the fact that we've gotten two updates in like Two weeks time within two weeks. Um, I think that's a very good sign The previous shortest period between updates was like 127 days or something I calculated it I'm just happy that I don't have I'm not going to have to farm first bell weavers Turban and Diana's pearl necklace from like the very watch So I'm just really excited. I don't have to do No, I think uh I think I you know kind of touching back on the thing more broadly. I think it's it's a really good sign I think it's a really good sign. Uh, you know the fact that we've been pushing for this A lot of people have been echoing our sentiment and uh, you know coming up with a sentiment on their own as well uh, and and blizzard blizzard listening and and kind of taking the community feedback and saying You know what? This is actually a good idea. We should do this. Uh, it's it's a really good sign for uh for classic. I think and uh Like I said earlier. I think oh more and brian those guys seem very very passionate about doing classic the right way Uh, as opposed to like just getting it out there to be like, okay here. We did it like check the boxes I think they want to do it the right way and I think that's really really good Mm-hmm So kind of uh, oh one thing one more thing that I wanted to touch on, um We talked about we talked about how long phase five is going to be Uh, if it's if it's probably going to last about six months or so six seven months, maybe before you get to uh before you get to Nax and then nax phase That's phase six It's the scourge invasion, which is really the nax event. That's like the pre the pre event But it's still no nax patch. Uh, and then nax comes out and then that lasted about six months uh six seven months until The 2.0 patch which happened in december of 2006 and then the 2.0 patch lasted for you know It didn't last for but it was it was an it was a month between the actual burning crusade patch release and then burning crusade release a little over right if you go and you look at it on that kind of scale there's about a 25 month cycle of vanilla 24 25 month cycle of vanilla and It seems to come up every time, but I think this is a good time to actually talk about it a little more Does the nax patch last six seven months as it did before?  That's something that I think is really interesting to think about I think it really depends on what comes next Like what what happens after are they? Bringing the server down and offering Like they're not going to leave that as a stasis server like it could last forever right and it could just be a Stasis server and people do whatever they want to hang out Are they going to bring it down and just do complete fresh and you can't play your your classic? Wow round one characters anymore. Are they going to transition into burning crusade? You know really really the transition to burning crusade is what dictates how long phase six should last in my opinion Yeah, so Go ahead go ahead. Well, I'm just saying like the more I think about it the more difficult it seems like They would just transition to burning crusade after six months because just the feasibility study They would have to do to determine whether or not to be financially viable to go on to burning crusade Would probably not be able to be completed until vanilla's done That's probably when they would conclude that study at the very minimum because they have to see how it works I mean they can't just assume. Oh, you know Six months into classic. Yep. This is a big thing. Let's do tbc Well, what if 12 months down the line? They just hit a big wall and there's a huge drop off of players I think like you know To be financially responsible, they have to see the whole thing the whole thing through At which point then they can decide, you know, the specifics of how would we do tbc? And you know, there's a whole patch progression there and there's the changes there and the boss nurse and stuff like that So we could see three years of vanilla minimum I think before tbc even gets announced but well Yeah, I see I don't think that makes sense from like a like game progression standpoint Right, because if they if they do it at if they if they don't do it at the end of vanilla Right at the end of one cycle of vanilla, then they have to do it at the end of two cycles of vanilla So because it would kill the server, right? And we've seen this on private servers all the time where One private server goes and they last for about you know a year or so maybe less maybe more And then another private server comes in and they're like oh like we want all the players and then people like they They spur down like oh, I want to go play fresh, right for a number of reasons, right? The fresh experience is fun.  They can go more hardcore if they want to or whatnot So then people want to go play fresh and then it kills the server beforehand So if you go through and let's say there's like a year before burning crusade actually comes out after the first cycle of vanilla Then It could kill it could kill class like it could it wouldn't necessarily kill Vanilla classic, right? There's people who are going to play vanilla forever There's people that want to play 1.12 forever. There's people that want to keep rerolling and playing fresh forever There's there's certainly a market of people For that right there's certainly a market for people like that If They do this with burning crusade though is you're going to end up fracturing a lot of guilds because there's going to be People like that who are playing together with people who are not like that and they really want burning crusade um I think they they're going to have to make the decision well in advance of one of her Uh, I mean they probably would have would have had to make the decision by the time aq comes out around that time Realistically now. I think that the fact that they've gone through and they've pulled everything back From 735 to 1.12 vanilla Is going to I I would I would guess right? I would guess I I'm not 100 sure because I'm I'm not making the game and I'm not Super smart programmer man But I would guess that it's easier to if you've pulled all this back to progress it forward a little bit After the fact and I'm sure that Blizzard has been working on this with that in mind. I'm sure that they've been thinking like okay There's a potential for us moving forward to burning crusade whenever we go through and we pull all this stuff back Let's do it the right way so that we can go and push it back forward as well Yeah, yeah I was going to say I agree. Um, I think that's probably something on their mind I think they're probably Even though not publicly they're probably internally thinking about what are we going to do after classic? Wow? I mean, I think probably rather than a three-year classic server where they decide whether or not they're going to do tbc It's probably more likely If they need extra time just to do two two-year vanilla servers, right? They'll do have the first one then another fresh and then they'll move on a tbc maybe Um, or or you know like right now they could already sort of be on the back burner working on classic tbc And they could already be be committed to it Who knows like I'm I'm sure that this conversation like what comes after classic was one of the first conversations that they had when they started developing the process because Blizzard what garros of you want to say about bfa? I'm not going to make any judgments here But blizzard are the masters of the mmo space, right? They've owned this mmo space for 14 years And they they know that mmo's are essentially Series of treadmills and carrots on sticks and if you run out of the next thing for you to work towards Then your interest goes away, right? Everyone's seen the guy who's gotten full best-in-slug gear and then stops logging in like Right, it's like oh, I finally got that drake fang talisman now I can stop playing because my carrot on the stick has gone away Because yes they did We lost like five of those in my guilt So So like you have to have something that comes next For mmo's to be long-term successful So I'm sure they've had the conversation But it's not the right time to talk about that yet because There's still so much to get right about the launch of classic before they start talking about what comes after So I'm sure they've made a decision, but they're just not gonna tell us yet Yeah, let's let's say they've made the decision and let's say they're they're going all in with classic dbc They're already thinking about it. They're serious about it. When do you think we'd hear about it? Phase four phase five like at what point is the right time for them to tell us about it Hey after naks, we're gonna give you six months of naks and we're moving on to tbc I think tips this point is also right where they need to see the feedback first because they can start to develop like They're a game development company They're gonna develop things and sometimes it doesn't work And so they have to drop it before they really go all out and invest really heavily in it So I'm sure like there's probably like two dudes who are like Starting the process of like figuring out tbc. Like what's our reference code? Like what does it look like? How can we do that kind of stuff? Now already and then once classic is out and they see the response and And you know where it's going from there Then they can start investing more heavily in it and at that point then they would feel comfortable saying Okay, we're definitely doing this and they would announce it when that is I would I would say that's going to be after classic launches somehow and they can see the response and the roi and all the kind of stuff But I couldn't tell exactly when and going back to blizzcon They they did kind of give us I mean depends on how much you want to look into this But they give us some kind of indication I can't remember if it was john height or omar or brian But somebody said something along the lines of when we're in the classic business. We're in it for good And right one of them said, you know, we want to make sure that when we release the the content stages Um that you know, this is something we can do one year five year 10 year, you know, whatever he said like he 10 15 years down the line. They said 15 years. Yeah 15 years. So um Based on that, you know, just deduction, right? I think that Their intention as of now Is we'll just release fresh servers two or three years down the line, whatever it may be Um because when they when we asked them directly during that interview when we asked them directly Are you thinking about tbc servers where somebody asked them? I can't remember who it was. Um, they said, uh, no Or they basically said we're not thinking about that right now I think they I think they said their their sole focus is vanilla or classic. Well, I think that's yeah The focus the focus is basically to get like classic right is basically the idea They want to make sure they get classic right and then go from there because I think the the thing that came up was Uh, if I remember correctly, I think the question was burning crusade or custom content, right? Not custom content progressive content after naks Like that's not something that that we really like looking at right now. We're just looking at like Let's get let's figure out how to do vanilla right first and then and then go from there So I think it makes sense. I mean at the end of the day, they're a business and whatever whatever they see is like financially viable Uh, is what they're going to go with and I mean, I'm a little biased Uh, but I I think that that going on past vanilla. Wow past like classic vanilla is going to be Pretty good idea for them. So absolutely and like the only thing that stands in their way I think unfortunately or stands in the community's way. I should say is unlike vanilla You don't really have that proof of concept at the same scale that you did with install rates Like you had install rates You had millions of accounts or close to a million accounts hundreds of thousands of players over 15 000 concurrent You had that major server the aftermath after it that sort of catalyzed this whole thing or at least you would think With tbc You don't really have I don't want to say the demand is in there. I think the demand is equally there I think a lot of people want to play tbc again, but you don't have that kind of big catalyst That that makes blizzard go back and study it. What are they going to study? How do they study demand for tbc right now? It's uh, it's like play tbc That was play tbc new gmt plus one Yeah All the servers hosted in russia right There you go. Well, yeah, and I think that's what a lot of people are seeing right a lot of people feel like they're You know and kind of talking back to the private server scene Uh Vanilla is established right like vanilla is something that and then really get started with nostre doing it the right way Um with uh like progressive content. Okay. We're going to add all the patches whatever Uh, that hasn't really been successfully done. I would say like in in the private server scene burning crusade But uh, there's definitely a desire for it because you see hype around it whatever and then and then it pretty much falls through every time Um, and and like I said before I don't have too much experience with like the burning crusade private server scene But that doesn't mean I don't see it, right? Um I think I think it'll be very interesting to see but I think that burning crusade would be a good idea for them to do and Okay, I want to talk about something that stay safe actually you touched on this like 20 minutes ago Maybe but I think it's a good time to bring it back. Um You mentioned them possibly saying like okay. Well, like let's like lock this and set it aside not necessarily like, uh Like what if they do that? Not necessarily just like a stasis server or whatever, but if they lock it and they do like, you know round one Okay, put it aside. I think that the Concept of force progression forcing people to go to bc or to like take away people's characters from them It's kind of the same in that regard Uh And I think it's not a good idea. I think I think force progression is not good I think there's people that are going to want to play those characters forever and uh Like we've talked about before and and you brought this up to with the stasis server Like if they go and they move everybody into stasis server and they want to have everybody Okay, all the people that want to play 1.12 forever Let's keep them here, right and then put everybody there. You can you can copy over there. You can transfer over there Whatever, uh, or you merge sets of servers together as they start to die out and and I'm kind of you know I'm speaking very broadly here I think that you can get really really in depth with it and actually look at like okay Like look at the populations here a horde is higher here aligns is here very similar to how they did like the cross realm uh battlegrounds in 1.12 they can kind of look at this stuff and package it together and and Uh have it to where the people that want to play 1.12 forever can do that And the people that want to go and character copy onto like a burning crusade fresh server or something can do that as well So so let me ask you guys this. What do you think is healthier for a burning crusade server for transitioning into a burger burning crusade server? I almost said burger crusade. I'm gonna go on one of those What do you think is better for a bc server is it is it Forcing everyone to and all of their alts and everything and all of the materials people have accumulated on their bank alts and everything To transfer to to tbc for the server just to go from vanilla tbc as it did back in the day Or for or to offer people character transfers because I I think the first is better actually I think it'd be better for server health. I think it'd be better for server economy. Um Otherwise, I think you're only going to have like a bunch of like very highly geared level 60 characters transferring to tbc and um I think that that would actually have a lot of negative ramifications on the tbc server So you said you think it should be fresh only I I don't misunderstand what you're saying. Um If they're gonna do tbc I don't know I of course you Oh man people people be so unhappy with this because I think the best way to do tbc Is to have the original classic server become a tbc server as it did back in vanilla wow to tbc I think that's the healthiest way to do it That might be that's the thing like the second best way I think is to have fresh tbc servers and then the third best way where everyone starts at 1 in plays 1 to 70 And then the third best way I think Would be to have character transfers Yeah, I think I think that You might be right Where that's the way that they would want to have to do it and if you want to keep playing vanilla You would character copy over to another server and then you then you can continue to play vanilla on that character um You might be right. Honestly, you might be right I think that if you take vanilla away from people, it's going to be bad, dude We're not you're not taking vanilla at the same time you offer a fresh vanilla server, right? Yeah, you're not because you're not you're not taking vanilla away What you would be doing is like, okay if you want to keep playing vanilla, then you can copy over here Um, so the what are the concerns of that? Oh, yeah, okay So I didn't even think about that so you so the character copies would be your deck 60s onto a 60 realm, right? Yeah, onto a new classic realm onto a 1.12 onto a 1.12 like stasis server And then but that original classic server everything that's on there that's not transferred or like yeah would go to tbc And you I think you should make it a copy not a transfer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right So I think having it as a copy not a transfer is good because it allows people to play both because I know for me Let's say like okay, assuming they would do this right assuming they would do this If they were the you know force progression to burning crusade But allow the option Of me to to copy over and play on a vanilla stasis server with my original character Versus not do it. I'm much more likely to go keep playing on that 1.12 server Uh, if I have my character there because I might not want to re-level another character and go play there You know, uh, I would probably just go play fresh If I really wanted to play vanilla I think the downside of a fresh tbc server is that people would feel less inclined at the very end of the classic vanilla servers to you know Keep playing through naks and you know what I mean and keep progressing their account Like I think that character attachment is very important and you lose that entire aspect with a fresh tbc server and um Well, something else with fresh tbc to talk about is if you look at every single fresh tbc server, there's always population issues always absolutely absolutely I mean part of it is like oh, I want to put go play blood elves are super strong I mean, I think blood elves are super strong And I'm particularly biased because I play paladin and they're so much better Like so much better as as blood elf as they are than they are like alliance Uh door for human Now human have their benefits to your like alliance has their benefits too. Don't get me wrong But uh, a lot of people really want to go play blood elves and burning crusade for For their ratios So you end up having like a massive horde imbalance if it's fresh Now if you if you have it to where you can Like copy or you at least have some form of your original level 60 characters in vanilla Then you might be more likely to be like dude. I just want to play burning crusade. I already have a level 60 gnome mage I'm not going to go re-roll horde. I'm just going to keep my guy. Yeah, exactly I just have a crazy random thought like nine months ago in classic gas We were talking about oh man, I hope they don't add pet battles and I hope they don't have achievements And now we're talking about what's the best way to to to move on to classic tbc, right? So like just we've come a long way the last year There's there's a lot of logistics issues with a lot of these ideas when it comes to like server populations character transfers like fresh whatever so like if you had Um, if you didn't transfer everybody force transfer everybody to tbc Then you have to keep that vanilla server alive Then you have to have a second tbc server That's you know available and then you have to have a new fresh Presumably a new fresh classic Server and so now you have and then as the years go by you're piling up all this different server stuff Over over and over again. We're eventually just run out of warcraft names to name all the servers, right? But there's just a lot of logistics issues with running that many different You know virtual servers and how they do it these days. So I don't know what the right answer is That's probably like we're not going to solve the issue They're going to eventually solve it and tell us Um, I hope that I can always play classic my classic player character forever I also if i'm going to play tbc. I'm not really interested leveling from over one I want to transfer my classic character to tbc and play tbc as my character from vanilla Um, because that's how it was and uh, and that's you know I have investment in that character and I want to keep that investment going. I agree. I agree. All right Yeah, I think uh, and I mean yeah, we're talking a lot about tbc right now and and that's fine I mean, we're not we're not here to try and figure out the answer I think it's something that uh, it's it's a topic that I think is very interesting to touch upon because whenever you go through And you're talking about the entire Release schedule of vanilla. Wow. I think it's important to know that You know, there is a final phase in that release schedule and there's something that happens after that So we're not here necessarily trying to answer the question, right? But but we are trying to um We are trying to kind of lay out some options I think this is something that's going to be a big challenge for them to figure out how to do it the right way And I'm sure it's something that they're probably thinking about Um, they're probably gonna start thinking about if they haven't started thinking about it already. Yeah So moving on a little bit and before we move on um Real quick guys, if you haven't followed if you haven't followed nano Stay safe for tips. Please go ahead and do that And that's fan that would be nice as well So Their links are in the chat right now exclamation point follow you guys can click on stay safe tips out nano You know follow them on twitch follow them on youtube All that stuff for sure in twitter as well The their handles are on the screen. So please make sure to do that and also we're going to do a q&a Not not right away, but we're going to do a q&a here in a little bit and Uh, you can you can tweet at us put hashtag classic cast on the tweet because that's what I'll be searching for Tweet at us follow us tweet at us Hashtag classic cast on the tweet if you guys want to ask Any of us questions you want to ask nano any questions while while we have them here for this episode Please feel free to do that at the end and then uh Let's kind of get to we talked about that a lot because it was such big news right the new phases, but The the big reason that we wanted to have nano here today is because the news that came out prior Between between the last episode and now we I guess we had two two updates um Was them going through and talking about some of the things that they've seen Kind of you know, again, they're looking at community feedback and They've been looking at actually yithersons mentioned this ironically not the yithersons mentioned that's like right but mentioned this right before They put out this update, but he was talking about how there was like that big reddit post and You know he he was echoing our sentiments about about stuff and he he specifically saw the the big reddit post about like okay, we saw this different in the demo we saw this different in the demo and uh, he took that and he presented that to the the rest of the development team and uh The what was said in that update really matched up with what yithersons was saying It's like yeah, you know, we've been looking at community feedback and you know, we've noticed this with like, you know Warlock summoning we've noticed this with you know, the spell crits being doubled damage And they're not supposed to be right I think that was really good and the main thing that we want to talk about originally was um kind of the differences between uh private server and classic and retail vanilla from a Uh scripting standpoint essentially like how things were programmed how things were coded So nano being the qa lead the quality assurance lead You probably as much as anybody uh went through and and we're looking at you know The the internet time machine looking at web archives looking at all this stuff Just just trying to find everything on old thought bot articles and stuff Which are actually now on wowhead, which is nice a lot of the old thought bot stuff is on wowhead. So uh, yeah Your job would have gotten a lot easier now That's for sure But uh But yeah, you you're the guy who kind of went through and and looked at all this stuff Like I said as much as anybody so uh, we thought nano would be a perfect fit for today's show to kind of go through And and look at a lot of this stuff. It's it's a hot topic right now for sure. Um Do you want to expand on that a little bit nano like what what were some of the things that uh Like what were some of like the big decisions that you had to make? I guess whenever you you went through and looking at stuff that like, okay We had this and well actually hold on instead of that. Let's pull it back a little bit What percent would you say? I mean we've talked about this before How much would you say was stuff that it's like, okay? This is based on research and guesswork and this is like data mind Uh, that's that's a great question. So uh damon developed a tool to troll Wayback archives. Uh, wow alakazam to get as many of the When we were working on the progressive itemization That was like the biggest challenge that we need to overcome because we actually had to do that right We had to get the data To be able to do that properly and so he created a bot that trolled all the data off of um that wayback archive for um So we can access that and they ported that into the database But there was a ton of errors in that still because if you go to any one item There's like six different options for how you can get to that item You can look at on drop tables. You can look at the item itself. You can look at an item set So you can do all different kinds of things. So That data wasn't perfect. And so it requires a lot of the manual back and forth of like, let's look at this Let's look at that In terms of like what was automated Our core was originally based off of the the mangoes core developed over time on the the French only realm for install risk where they did a lot of scripting and editing there um And then eventually Built that database for the progressive itemization stuff It's hard to say put a percentage on it. Maybe maybe 60 percent automated 40 percent like starting to You know go back and and find all the different references we could um and like I I'm so jealous of the classic team before Or classic team now because they have the actual 1.2 reference They can go back and see exactly how it was and exactly how it is now And see that's and like play the spot the differences game And and I did like my reference guide my reference code was any random video that I found on wow like on youtube or Or finding like this random forum post that we're like Hoping this dude was actually right when he wrote a detailed article about how things worked Uh, like I didn't have a reference guide. I didn't I was hot potching every all the info I could find I would source it. I would collect it I would make big forum posts about it where we're collecting info for individual bosses or dungeons or You know classes or all different kinds of things right And so it was there's a lot of like I was trying to build that reference guide Um with as much information as I could find Right, right. And I mean it's obviously like a whole ton of work and um It's a it is very nice that they have that reference code now That's very good Very good. Very good. That's why I I should say that's why I trust the classic team More than I trust any other person And especially any person's memory because my memory was wrong on a lot of things like your guys's memories on the How things worked 14 years ago 15 years ago, you know are not right like right? And that's for everything in life. It's not just wow related But like that girl probably wasn't as cute as you like you thought you she was just two years ago, right? Or whatever it is Right, right. Yeah, or guy or guy or guy or guy. Yeah Well, I mean they didn't even really start work on classic well until they you know Just sort of accidentally found the soul the 112 client right or this information about 112 prior to that It sounds like they thought it was uh, just sort of like just unfeasible Yeah, which is like they would have had to do essentially But you guys did whereas just go through old videos or forum posts or web archives and just try to pick things out Which is a lot of work Exactly, right, and uh, it's funny about the memory thing So, you know the warlock thing that that blizzard disproved the summoning of the warlock pets um There are people that still Comments on that video that I made like a couple weeks back and they still say I swear there's a guy that wrote a comment blizzard is lying. I remember I remember it would just Yeah, yeah, there is literally a drake dog video. I know I posted it. Yeah, where he done and it works exactly how blizzard says it does Like those guys are so wrong It's like it's almost I don't understand. I very specifically remember ret paladins doing 3000 dps at level 15 So I don't know like what everybody's talking about That was that was legion. That was legion. Oh, yeah, right No, I um I think I think this is very interesting to talk about and we'll talk about some specific examples, right? We'll talk about some specific examples Um, one of which actually is uh, let's talk about armor and resistances I know Stay safe. You brought this up in the past about the resistances. There's been a lot of discussion about armor values Whether in actual vanilla armor values were lower Or if they were even higher like nobody really knows, right? There's a number of things that You know, you made the decision based on like research You guys made the decisions based on research and you're like, okay. Well, we can assume this because of this Uh, there's things that you guys made like even custom changes to to vanilla And then we can talk about that too, right things that are different from private server and people just They get their their memory gets clouded and they're like, well, I mean it's like this on You know, it was like this on nost, right? How come it's not like this in vanilla? It's like, well, it's because they changed it, right? Um, so let's talk a little bit more about armor and resistances and just to start with armor One of the big things that people talk about with armor is somebody went through and they uh, They used kick as a you know as a as a baseline right kick does 80 flat damage And they looked at somebody's buffs and they they kind of went through and just just in meticulously like, okay They had this okay the dark warfare or whatever this this this and this uh, and it should do I Think I think in the thumbnail or I think in the in the picture. I believe it was like 92 damage I think I think that I think the two numbers and I really should uh I really should have the exact numbers on me, but basically I think they were looking at like 92 damage versus 94 damage and The idea was is that okay? Well really on private servers the bosses have too much armor because he should have been doing more damage Right, you should you should or you should have he should have been doing less damage if it's like what it is on private servers Uh, now there's some assumptions there right and and nano you you said you've seen the same thing Where dark moon fair buff like you see the dark moon fair buff, but you don't know Is it 1% roll? Is it 10% roll? You don't know that you don't know anything else really? I mean, there's there's so many other things going on. Do you want to expand on that a little bit? Yeah, so It it's very possible and I would say more likely than not that the post that this person made is Good math doing the right thing, you know Did the best that he could to figure out and then using the armor In formula that we're aware of You know figuring out what katie's armor was supposed to be and it's very possible that katie's armor was supposed to be 3000 or whatever the result of that post was Um What that doesn't tell you is it doesn't tell you well should every boss now be 3000 armor because I know that's wrong Because I have source on mixna and a screenshot with with beast lord That's made its way around a little while that mixna has like 3735 armor or something like that But and and so when you have those differences in armors like when we're developing the Dungeons, we're just making our best guesses We don't have any references for how much armor nefarious was supposed to have And we don't know if nefarious armor is supposed to have changed between 1.6 and 1.12 or we don't know if the formula is changed between 1.6 and 1.12 We don't have any of that data Now we can make our best guesses which we did and then we kind of like flat lines You know all the bosses are supposed to have this much armor and we're just going to use that The last boss we're going to make a little bit more armor just because we're going to try to make it harder those kind of things But you know we we did our best But we didn't we don't have the data like I have no idea how much armor patchwork is supposed to have like KT is supposed to have 3000 mixna apparently has 3700 Who knows how much patchwork is supposed to have who knows how much Thaddeus is supposed to have Who knows how much gluth is supposed to have there are different types of you know characters or You know like it's like it's like one's a mage. One's a yeah, so one's an a bomb one's whatever And and that trickles down to everything every single NPC in the game not just raid NPCs, but there's turtles out in the world that have like 3600 armor on the Noscor that People are still using today like is at like level 32. Is that right? Should they have 3600 armor? Should they have 2600 armor like nobody has any idea? And so there there is some like dungeon beast guides that exist for the lower level NPCs out in the world, but And if you take armor and are unknown and you multiply that to the nth degree you get to resistances And we have no idea how much resistances passive resistances bosses supposed to have they could have 100 they could have five they could you know, who knows So in in the in the wow atlas there are like a handful of bosses, maybe like 10 at most and Each of these bosses that are listed. It's just 10. I think kt is actually listed There are a couple molten core bosses. I don't think they're any from aq. I don't think they're any from black minglayer either But on the bosses that are listed it shows Like two resistances per boss and so for example, like I think kt. He has his resistance is listed It's like a frost and a shadow resistance, but we have no idea. So so private servers have have included those because it says those in the atlas but Those are two out of five resistances, right? So it doesn't mention, you know, if it mentions, you know shadow and frost What's the fire? What's the arcane? What's the whatever? So those are not listed and also It's it's just a handful bosses out of out of several handfuls of bosses, right? So you're right most of them It's just complete guesswork In fact on a lot of private servers a lot of bosses their spell resistances are just left at zero They have they have zero spell resistance On top of that there's supposed to be Level-based spell resistance. So if a monster is higher or lower level than you it gets more or less resistance And no one knows exactly what that value is either people speculate, but somewhere between five and eight per level But that's that's not That's not known for certain either. So you're absolutely right The NOS core by the way is eight eight resists per level. So per level. Yeah, so each boss will have a pass of 24 resists to all If you're a level 60 character, yeah Okay, uh, so yeah I think uh, yeah, I think it's very interesting. Uh, so and then there's like, um Kind of speaking of resistances and stuff I know we talked to we talked to kevin jordan, right the kevin jordan for those of you guys who don't know Uh, he's he's failure analysis on twitch and he is uh the original vanilla wow class designer Uh, he designed all the classes main to ret paladin by the way And uh, he talked about like holy damage and how holy damage the the idea behind holy damage was that there's okay there's no holy resistance that can't be resisted and uh, sometimes on private servers you'll see like partial resist or full resist of holy damage and uh, You know, sometimes it's like, okay. Is that is that chalked up to? Uh, them having a natural resist due to like a level difference or is it like what's going on there? So nobody really knows and uh, he has said like the whole point of holy damage was that it can't be resisted So there shouldn't be like and there's separate roles, right and stay safe You can expand on this a lot more, but there's there's separate roles for Spell resists, right? There's there's a role for like, okay, does it hit or not? And then once it hits can it get partial? So, uh, that's there's kind of the the Yeah, and it's particularly it's particularly confusing for a lot of people because there's yellow resists and there's white resists.  It's it's like it's like technically it's a 100 percent partial resist So it's partially resisted 100 if that I don't think a weird way to put it. Yeah Yeah, it's it's pretty good works every time. Yeah, pretty much No, yeah, I think both of them read off as resist and so a lot of people conflate the two and it's confusing for a lot of people Uh, especially when paired with the fact that really no one has any idea like how much resist is on anything Yeah, so so it's it is a big thing. Uh, I mean, I know like, um So kind of this is this is something that is Uh, this is something that like is not really sure right people are unsure of this how how it works But like the chromatic resistance is in bwl, right where in you you have the drakes and you have chromagus Uh, they go through and they have like a specific weakness and and chromagus cycles through his weaknesses The the big drakes they they have like a preset weakness like, you know, we'll find out when we start attacking them To different types of magic fire frost shadow, whatever the trash, right the trash. Yeah Uh, nature. Yeah, our nature or whatever, right? Um, but um The the way that it's scripted on private servers Is that they do like I think it's 75 reduced damage if you don't have their weakness and if you do their weakness You do way more, um And this is to kind of like balance it out, right? Like it's kind of interesting, right? Oh, they're weak to this so so if you have that kind of spell use that kind of spell to kill it faster um But the 75 percent is like a flat 75 magic damage decrease and if you're using a holy damage, right where holy damage There's no resistance. There's no holy resistance in the game The only thing close to it. I think it's like an absorb like holy protection potion or something where you can absorb holy damage um So there's no holy resistance. So conversely, there's no holy weakness But it's still reducing that damage on private servers and I I haven't I've tried to go look at old screenshots and stuff And the only thing that I could find is I saw a video of a holy paladin Doing chromagus and he and he threw a hammer of wrath at chromagus and it did triple digit damage So that's why I thought okay. Maybe it's not actually supposed to reduce holy damage But nobody really knows and uh how it's applied on private now. This doesn't affect a lot of people, right? This doesn't affect a lot of people. It's like you're like six other people Yeah, it's like it's about seven or eight of us. So it's either it's either smite priests or or ret paladin Um, so yeah, yeah, it doesn't affect a whole lot of people. So that's why like They obviously wouldn't have a holy resistance or holy weakness because if you have a holy weakness you very well could have A a raid without any holy damage and it would just be it would suck, right? I mean you have 40 people in there and no holy damage would suck. So Does it reduce holy damage at all like who knows? I mean it I think it shouldn't right like just like logically how it works I would guess that it wouldn't reduce it. I would guess that it shouldn't So let me let me tell you this I found off to final I I lost all my bookmarks when I built my new computer, but I had this old video of a smite priest and It looked like it looked like he had a 25 partial and the only way that would have happened was if um Obviously there's no holy resistance, but if holy was being affected by level based resistance That's the only way because it's not like his target had had holy resistance. Yeah, so that would be incredibly like if if it is Level based resistance that that's affecting holy damage The chance of a 25 percent partial be incredibly incredibly small, but I'll I'll be so curious To see how it plays out in classic wow Yeah, it'll be really interesting and uh, like like the big thing like for me is like just like that that interaction right the interaction between the schools and the mobs and like Also the mobs themselves and the ai that dictates how the mobs operate And uh, this was actually something that was really interesting that was raised to me by valenor All of the abilities that are most the vast majority of the abilities that mobs have in vanilla Especially the world mobs were back ported in manually um And the way those abilities are cast is unknown and one of the most interesting examples He gave me was mobs that have the daze ability You know how like you always get first hit dazed like certain mobs. They always first hit daze you So that's actually an ability and some mobs have it some mobs don't and the mobs that have it are programmed on Nostcore to cast it the first spell out of all of their other spells And they use it on cooldown So that's why you know that you always get first hit days and that's why they cast it so you know repetitively Yeah, yeah Dude, you you reminded me of something so cool. Um, I have this old video I found it a couple months ago. It's it's of people in 2005 fighting Ammonar the cold bringer the last boss in a razor fin downs. I think right? It's the lich at the top of the mount and The most amazing thing happens and I've never seen this happen on a private server Ammonar frost novas The tank and then ammonar once the tank is frost novid Ammonar moves away like five or six yards away from the tank and continues casting frost bowl So the tank can't keep auto attacking it. There's a video from 2005. I have never seen that sort of uh, mob called ingenuity or scripting I've never seen that on a private server It was it's the craziest thing. Yeah, I'll I'll show you guys. It's a video from 2005 I do believe that that One of the other the I'll just say I don't want to give credit to the other private servers that are active right now But the competing private server when noss was released had some interaction like that were things like The devious pillagers would run like frost nova and run away from you and stuff like that It didn't exist, but that was something that they developed to add to it. It wasn't like built into the ai that existed. Yeah Okay So let's let's oh, sorry tips go ahead and like the big thing that I noticed too is like Like I give the example in the video that I talked about this But when you interrupt mobs that that are casting spells mobs that have multiple schools of of magic damage or magical spells When you interrupt them on nost core They automatically like instantaneously start casting their next magic school Spell that's available to them And if you go like anywhere else like on retail wow if you interrupt a mob that has multiple magic school damage It will automatically stop just for a second or two It'll auto attack you or something like that and then it'll begin casting the next spell So you can't just chain interrupt back to back to back to back You have to wait until the second spell gets cast basically Yeah, so like you can experience like we we talked about this earlier a little bit and that and thinking about more so Most casters and healers you'll have the experience on chaser right he does the big aoe interrupt If you get interrupted it cycles a global cooldown And then you can start casting again. So when you get uninterrupted you have the global cooldown that happens before you can start casting again most likely what's happening on the nost core is that The ai mobs don't have a global cooldown So they don't have to wait that 1.5 seconds before they can start casting again And so most likely that's what's going on there in that in that situation where they're they were the They're always going to try to cast the next spell immediately, but then that that gcd Processor the mobs isn't being applied properly. Most likely Interesting Yeah, so the ai are cheaters Yeah, so with um, yeah, we we touched on intentional changes I think that's something that we should certainly talk about is some of the intentional changes that you guys made and That private servers make in general um With vanilla wow things that were Different from retail vanilla and they did it on purpose because it's like well This is better for the health of the game right if we have blank Uh, one of those things are the changes to dire mall Uh farming dire mall. Do you want to talk about that a little bit to explain exactly what it is? Yeah, so, uh, there's a number of controversial changes that we made to um try to lower the amount of industrial level gold farming As as the terms that we used um More like specifically behind the hood There's a lot of exploits that people were using to Get to the end point of dire mall tribute that most players weren't aware of that We were working on fixes to get rid of but still existed and so Certain types of players were running dire mall tribute for that box over and over and over again and doing it super efficiently To the point where they were farming so much gold that they're then using to sell to other players and So what's the fastest way for us to keep them from being able to do that is Is changing the way that the encounter works. So it's not able to be sold That was the fastest way and then we go back and try to fix the exploit more deeply itself Um, so that's a little bit behind the in terms of dire mall tribute Which was the most lucrative farm for a long time on on the stall risk And so a lot of the fight a lot of the stuff that we're doing is like fighting against Industrial level gold farmers because they were using that goal to then impact the server in other ways And selling it and all the different kinds of things So it's not just like we don't want people to be able to farm bugs and dire mall tribute to in order to sell the graze Um to to vendors because it's lucrative farm like gold is it's like we have to be Careful on how we design and manage the server To keep gold's inflation from being to a point where the average player is going to be priced out of being able to You know participate in the rest of the game Right That's something that we had to consider and and take advantage like and and take action against Should do it Yeah Should blizzard do it in classic should blizzard do the same thing So we don't know exactly if the drop tables that we had were right. I'm I'm certain that blizzard has more So for instance like dire mall tribute x when I'm talking about where people were able to skip most of it And be able to you know kill the king and like do a whole run in less than five minutes kind of kind of farming Like I'm sure blizzard's going to be able to handle all that kind of stuff And I doubt that blizzard goes out of the way to change the way that the fight works So it's impossible to be soloed Well, is this something that you think people were botting or was it actually your player that was doing this players most likely Most likely botting. Okay. Yeah But there's just so many players and there's so small of a staff and it's instanced Botting right so it's really difficult for us to police people on their own instances Because almost every single bot player that gets reported they get investigated like every single report was investigated for botting But it's hard to report somebody who's running from dire mall west dire mall north to do that farm Right, you'd have to like report every single person and that's just like unfeasible with the amount of people They're on the server I I don't know like there's always going to be more lucrative gold farms than other Gold farms like when dire mall east was nerfed on noscore people started farming in a brd Right the a we made farm at brd and people were using that to sell stuff in order to make gold So there's always going to be a most lucrative way to make gold. It's just It's it's very dangerous to have the most lucrative way be in an instance because that's completely Like outside of the rest of the economy of the game. It's non competitive People can do that on their own time. They're going to do this much as they want without interruption And that's not like mmo's so right we tried to take steps to nerf those to try to push the most lucrative gold farms out Into the world where it then becomes competitive. It doesn't impact the economy as much And blitz themselves did that too to an extent with uh, I mean the fact that you can only do so many resets of a raid Uh in an hour, so there there's some there's some stuff in the game already for that, but uh At least for you guys, you didn't see it as enough in vanilla while it was five and I think now in retail It's uh, it's 10 So if if they were if they were doing five minute I'm not familiar with with the exact farm you're talking about but five minute tribute runs They'd still have like over half an hour of downtime. I guess they'd be botting multiple accounts So it wouldn't really matter, right? Right. I mean hunters are not very hard to level Yeah The team behind it so and you did not have to be Very well geared at all. You can you know have level 60 starter gear and be able to have soloids So, right?  I mean, are there any more that come to mind like things that you guys did or things That maybe have been done on other private servers That you guys thought were generally good for the health of the game So and not this isn't like nerfing or or specifically going our way to change things as they used to be but There are some intentional design decisions that we went through A lot of times when it came to to raids, right? So our vision and how we were going to Design raids would try to be looking for the pre nerf versions Of different bosses, for instance So we wanted to use the pre nerf version of enixia where the fireball System was different than it was after so 1.3 was the the change between enixia's original form and its later form We believe that the earlier form was more difficult. So we wanted to try to get that So the 1.3 form is what's on last court today, which is that firebolt comes with a conflagrate effect where you get Disoriented for three seconds and does an aoe Disorient around the person that was targeted the later version just sends three fireballs out to the top three Threat targets and does flat damage. We didn't feel like that was very difficult So we wanted to up the difficulty and we made that intentional design decision Most likely I would imagine that blizzard is going to use the final 1.12 design for that boss Because that was in 1.12. So those kind of design decisions we we you know We intentionally set out to do something different than what was 1.12 There you go One one that you already talked about And actually every private server has done this as far as I know is having the pvp system there originally That that's a very very big change and I think a lot of people that have been playing on private servers. They don't even really Um grasp it at this point because it's been just so common on private service for so long That's going to be a big like a splash of cold water going into classic wow where they won't have the the pvp system there at launch right Guess you just have to pvp for the fun of it for the fun of it.  It's it really makes the content easier right another thing um that's been talked about uh in video in other videos, but World buffs is a really big thing that we we I should say that we didn't change to be blizz like Even though we knew that it would be blizz like so for those that don't know specifically for the rallying cry the dragonslayer buff that There was a timer that was in between the amount of time you could Drop the heads so to speak and receive the rallying cry of the dragonslayer buff famously the hillum, I believe trolled death and taxes before they were trying to kill kt And dropped the head early so they would not be able to actually get the rallying cry at the dragonslayer buff When they were intending to go raid and try to compete for world first at kt That's a pretty famous example of that being true And they did that intentionally. I'm not I think I guess they maybe paid somebody to drop the head On the u.s.  But we didn't we didn't have that cooldown exist On the noscore and a couple reasons why we decided against it because we did have a conversation of whether we should do or Do not is one our population was insane Like if you just stood in storm wind or orgammar during, you know main raid times you'd see A head buff dropping like every five minutes Like guilds are there at the same time and one just happens to drop when your whole guild is waiting for one You're like, I guess we don't have to drop a head today. You're right on. It's like so frequently that Um There's just so many people on the server It we couldn't decide on what the right cooldown should be Um other because everything else was dynamic And then we felt like if we did change it It wasn't worth the pr headache that we'd have to deal with between all the people who's now Rating meta relied on them Getting raid buffs constantly and so it wasn't worth the fight for us to to nerf rally and cry the dragon slayer or the The war chiefs blessing buff so Yeah, I think um, I mean that's something that you know just thinking about that um It is pretty brutal to like let's say you're you're going and you want to raid at a certain time now Another thing to add on to that is the fact that Nost was you know private servers in general their international servers, right? So there's people around the clock So you might have like two times during the day where all of a sudden just heads are just like popping off like left and right Um, but then you also get it, you know naturally throughout the course of the day as well I think if they were to keep that cooldown in I mean again a lot of this depends on like server population, right? If they're to keep that cooldown in then you would almost have to like set up in in like a like a Like a cartel like a nixie head cartel and it's like okay guys every guild is gonna raid like at this time That's probably what's gonna happen. That's cool. I I think it's such an interesting social dynamic And um, if you want to break out of the cartel or not be a part of it I mean what you would do is like let's say you're doing to be so easy to screw everybody What you what what you do is before you want to let's say I want to raid at 6 p.m Okay, I'm also going to drop an on above at 4 p.m. So I so I know at 6 p.m I'm able to drop it when I want to go raid so you would you would Drop multiple on raid day to ensure that it's up at the time you want it to be up Yeah, it's good to do like you almost have people doing it on cooldown What was the original it wasn't two hours. Was it I'm pretty sure it was six hours. That's what I thought Okay, I had her two hours whatever it was so the buff lasts for two hours But I'm pretty sure the buff wouldn't drop if the head existed while if it was hanging in the Either on the spike in orgrimmar and the gates and storm winds and I'm pretty sure that head lasted for six hours And that's the annoying part right is the fact that Okay, if you if it lasts for two hours and then the cooldown is six hours Then you basically have four hours where you just like nobody can get a buff Um, I don't know that'll be that'll be interesting. I think that'll uh It's gonna be very interesting the effect that that's gonna have on raiding. Um I have a lot of opinions about world buffs Mostly that I I don't like them because they're pretty toxic for the raiding meta And so part of me hopes that they don't even apply in raids at all Even though I don't think that's gonna happen Because that wasn't classic like they were available classic and I think they're going to be available on on classic but Yeah Anything that that lowers the Ubiquity of world buffs. I'm in favor of Mm-hmm Yeah, I mean personally. I am not a big fan of world buffs if they got rid of them I would not be too upset, but it was vanilla It is a cool thing because you know It's it's a new like player reaction dynamic, you know, okay We're gonna go get diorama buffs.    I uh so What you can do right if you get burning adrenaline you can technically You can hearth out.    Yeah, not good But uh, but yeah, that was like just like one way to counteract it and I uh, and I blew it So funny story. Yeah, you literally blew it. I literally blew it. Yeah, literally blew it couldn't haul it No, it was not good. It was not good. So, um Yeah, I think that uh, I think that it's really interesting to talk about all this stuff and to look at You know things that you guys intentionally did things that you weren't so sure about right, whether it's with the um Whether it's with different things with armor or resistances um There's also some other things with uh Well, actually one more thing, right and this is related to what we were just talking about with the world buffs And how they might want to approach it How did you guys come up with population cap decision? Like how how did you guys approach the uh that question and um, Like with dynamic response you guys decided to go with okay, let's go with a really big cap dynamic response How did you guys kind of come up with that decision? Yeah Uh, well, we didn't really have that many options because we couldn't afford to open a second realm Um, and then the logistics of having a second realm You know getting enough population there and balancing like the accessibility is like that just wasn't possible for us to handle So the only option available for us was to have a massive pvp realm with a bunch of people on it And then that creates a ton of new issues that you have to solve And so the way that we solved it was the dynamic response system where you know objects in the world Um, you know node like mining nodes herbalism nodes quest items those kind of things We all added to a dynamic response system Uh, there's actually we developed two dynamic response systems The the first dynamic response system was just a flat one based on total world population That would decrease by percentages based on certain like bench point or benchmark numbers Um, so like at 3000 population it would be this much less at 6000 population would be this much less and so on so forth Uh, and there was also a proximity Dynamic one for mobs in the world. So the more players around a certain Mob when it dies with the lower its respawn timer kind of thing So those things most likely won't exist in classic because they're not going to have the same population issue that we had where they're going to be I doubt that the population will be 13,000 people concurrently on a any given classic server I don't know what that population is going to end up being But most likely your spawn timers for herbs are going to be as they were in 1.12 Which would mean An hour of black will it is 45 minutes for You know dreamfoil like 45 minutes or plague bloom and around those times Um, but the other difference there is that you know your spawn points themselves are going to be different They aren't a nascar like the spawning system itself is probably going to be different than how we developed it Because we were going on our best guesses on how that system worked And then where the nodes should be and all the different kinds of stuff So there's there's a lot to that but population created a whole set of new issues that were unique to what we're doing um And or at least unique to the private server world with super high population servers that we had to solve and so With that and then the way that the population itself is just completely different than it was back in Classic like so many more like such a higher percentage of the population is rating on private servers today than they did back in vanilla originally and so A one hour cooldown timer for black lotus back in 2005 That was cool because not that many people were getting black lotus, but today casters are using Flasks of supreme power in almost every single raid multiple times a week And that requires black lotus and so in order to not have that price be so enormously high You have to adjust it somehow and so the servers decided to Instead of letting the price get super high because of demands To increase the supply to keep the cost low. It's funny because that's sort of um in an indirect way made the content easier You know because more black lotus, you know a little bit, right? Yeah, so if if they keep the spawns much longer as they were in vanilla That in a roundabout way makes the content a little bit more difficult Yeah, it sort of changes the rating meta where only like your extreme Like turbo nerds are going to be flasking right and then your average players you're probably never flask ever Right. I mean if it costs 300 golds per black lotus, you're not going to see that many flasks around Because we're not going to be able to afford that every single raid every single absolutely 300 gold for two hours of a flask is a bad ROI Yeah, that would be that would not be good. Um, well also on top of that too. It's like uh With respect costs and this isn't something that you guys did. I believe but um This is something that like, uh, you know that they did on like, uh, the lights hope right whenever we uh Whenever They went from 25 or 50 gold respect cap to 25 gold respect cap That they did that in order to increase pvp participation because a lot of people want to respect for pvp and uh respect for pve, right and For someone like myself who I would respect for every raid Not everybody does this a lot of times people just play one spec and they just kind of do their thing Uh, they might only they might focus on pve and they might just only stay spec for pve or pvp or whatever But I would respect every raid So going from my like weekly taxes being 50 gold instead of 100 gold is very very I mean that that was like a good thing for me personally, right? So if you couple that let's say you're going from 25 gold to 50 gold so now 100 gold a week plus the cost of consumables being higher It's pretty expensive to raid like at the highest level and then you're gonna have to farm like a lot harder I mean some people are most likely people are most likely use their You know not completely 100% optimum specs and won't use as many consumables Making the bosses harder not as many world buffs on top of that. So Yeah, it definitely Yeah, I think people would still do it. They would still find a way to make it work. It would just be like brutal There's people out there to do it.  I did less damage than the tank Seriously less image of the tank and everyone always linked that log every time like, oh man, it was terrible I will never not respect ever again I'm always respecting to raid I'm getting a little bit of lag here. I don't know if we want to let it level out or something I don't know what's going on. Yes It's getting choppy. I don't know what the deal is I don't know. It's just video lag. I mean we can keep going. It's fine. It's just video But yeah, um No, I think uh, I think it's very interesting to actually think about all this stuff because a lot of times we look at big picture stuff and Uh A lot of the the little details end up getting lost.  There's this like how is this going to actually be treated? So I think I think it's really interesting to get to talk about some of this stuff too with stuff like this with respects and being optimal raid spec literally every every raid and uh, you know asking every raid it comes down to like um Is is there a problem with the game rewarding being extreme no life to that extent and I I don't really Think there is that issue like if you want to perform at the highest possible capacity every raid and have a flask And be proper spec every raid. Um, you're gonna have to invest a lot of time You can still declare the content if you're not proper spec and not flask But do you want to like be a top parser on logs?  Is that a problem? I personally don't think so right. I mean we know like from bfa that there's just a different caliber of player That's willing to do far more than your average player is to You know be first And so yeah and like the average player is not going to get into a 100 million gold debt in order to You know be 20 dps better on their parse for nefarion or whatever it is But there's some players. There's like a small subset of players that are willing to do that and that's okay Yeah, um Let's talk about uh Let's talk about some things that are different. Oh, actually this is one thing that's interesting I want to talk about it's paladin specific Um, yeah Well, so so I know like with paladins like on private servers, you guys probably went with that class more than any other class Uh, just kind of like, okay. Well, like we got to like hack this together Like we've got to make this work this way and uh, it's also the class that probably had the biggest unknowns Right because it's it's not well documented that a lot of people were playing a ret paladin back in vanilla and raiding and whatnot um One of the reasons for that is because paladins didn't get their rework until 1.9 and by that point like A major part of the content had already been uh had already been like passed through right they added the ret set and a q 40 Right, so they they did the rework they gave ret a set and like, okay, here you go. Go have fun Um, but by that point it was like too late for a lot of people because they hadn't gotten all the other items They need to to be able to rate as ret until they you know over the course of the next six months Happen to get a full ret set and then maybe their guild and their guild they'd be lucky enough to go rate in next um So one of the things that are different like I know for ret paladin specifically like you guys made it to where Uh, see everybody's leaving because you're talking about ret. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, they can deal with it So a lot of people are gonna be talking about ret on this on this stream here. So no, but we um I remember one thing that uh that you guys did was I believe you put a half a second delay on seal a command Uh in order to make it actually apply like all the bonuses like vengeance and sanctity or like all the other bonuses that occur like one of you're doing on hit stuff and um What ends up happening?  It's avoided somehow because the stun might end the cc might end And it ends up not applying or like let's say they die and you're in you're in pve You hit somebody else kills it and then you die and then it's absorbed And essentially what happens there is you waste the damage from the proc because it's 7 ppm Whereas like if the damage were to have applied right away You would have hit and then that dps is like added to your like total number or whatever That's like being silly like how effective is the damage to that point whatever But it's like one of you're looking at like the little numbers and parses and whatnot. Um How how it affects it like positively also in pvp too simply in pvp like we're getting the kill or Like you hit them you hit them.  It's it's really interesting to see like, okay We don't really know like how this class played out. So there's Did you talk about judgment of crusader stacking yet? No, and that's something else Okay, well, dude, I was telling you I found a video. It was actually from the tbc prepatch It was 2.0 and there was a 40 man paladin raid that went in and tried to kill anixia as this old video someone linked me it had like 400 views on youtube and There were multiple judgment crusader stacks on On the trash and and on anixia I don't know if it was a visual bug or if it was actually applying Right bonus holy damage or what but um, there were definitely multiple stacks on the mobs Right, so to to that point like I I know like we and this is exactly what we talked about early on I specifically remember like that being a thing I remember physically seeing multiple stacks of like judgment of the crusader on a target But people don't know Is that something that was changed? Was that something that was just a visual bug that was fixed?  So it's like did they get changed and then get changed back? Like people it's something that's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out um Because I know that's that's like a topic of controversy. Oh, man the talent community. I think this is really funny I have a video. Um, there's four paladins in a warlock. It's like december 2005. They're the old man They're all like in their 40s And uh, I'm like, okay for sure one of like there's going to be multiple crusaders on this not a single one of them judge crusader december 2005 red paladins Nice nice Yeah, yeah, so that's how it goes dude. That's how it was the There was a couple rep paladins that are very active in the private server scene or at least were when I was um, helping with the q18 with nost and they Spent so much time and effort trying to make the Class as good as possible um, and using the Like most beneficial videos that ever existed Um in order to make themselves You know prove that they were as good as they said that they were And oftentimes they're like cherry picking something from 2000 You know like four and like patch 1.4 before they got changed to 1.9 and how it works And or like liking things from tbc and saying prove me that was never supposed to have changed and those kind of things like uh, when when it comes to Uh, when it comes to rep paladins, it's really hard because the it's really hard to say like this This the the period of time where you could say that this is how rep paladins are supposed to work during vanilla was very small And the amount of people who are playing rep paladins was also very small And the amount of people who are willing to record themselves playing rep paladins Like youtube didn't even exist at the beginning of vanilla technically right so So being able to find proofs of how everything was actually supposed to work is nearly impossible so like Yeah, trying to say how it was supposed to work is very difficult We did our best and kind of hot podge and ad hoc people things together And then make them work based on how we had the like the 1.5 seconds Obviously that wasn't right But we had to do it in a way in order to make the rest of it work and that was the best we came up with All the different kinds of stuff like yeah We do our best we try not to change things unless we have solid Complete evidence that was supposed to be that way and if you can't prove it Beyond a reasonable doubt then We're not going to we wouldn't have changed it We are we are going to learn a lot come classic wow and I promise like if there are discrepancies between private servers and classic Wow, there will be private server people saying no no we had it right on the private server and you guys Blizzard you have it wrong and like I guarantee that's going to come up. Yes. Well it already has right it already has Yeah, I think uh, that's a killer duke in uh the award Oh, yeah No, I think I think like you said I think it's just hard to say right I I think it's hard to say because sometimes you see some I know I know I I've done it too where like I I would see like One thing that I'm not so sure about is like the like berserking buff and divine shield like I remember it not Canceling but like is my memory getting clouded from like playing burning crusade, right? That's whenever I peeked and I've said it before sometimes whenever I get something wrong Like I'm like thinking about it incorrectly Uh, I'm thinking about burning crusade instead of thinking about vanilla Like a lot of times I get I get the the two mixed up just like we're calling on my Um, so yeah, I think I think it's a natural thing. Um So, yeah, I guess tips is tips is in a different shard Right now unfortunately, so hopefully yeah, maybe maybe he'll he'll he'll run out and run back in here But uh, just a reminder guys, uh, if you haven't yet Give stays a follow give nano a follow give tips a follow. Uh, also something on youtube Uh, it would be would be a great idea for sure And then uh, we're gonna start a q&a soon. We'll do q&a if you guys have any questions for nano Yeah, if you guys have any questions for for us Uh, we'll uh, we'll do that on twitter and then we'll take some questions from chat as well But if you guys want to tweet some questions at us, I'm actually gonna go get my phone, uh, right now I had it in the charge because I was running out of battery Yeah, because this rep paladin segment is sponsored by method Oh man Yeah tips is stuck in another shard that means that there are too many people watching We need everyone to leave so we can get tips back I'm kidding Yes Speaking of rep paladin stuff. I'm just gonna go off on rep paladin. So last fun is gone. There was a video I I I downloaded all these old videos from this like ancient, uh, vanilla well like media sharing site And uh, one of the videos it's a suble 60 a paladin. He's in full lawbringer. He has obsidian edge blade And uh, the video is called like rep pal like sick ret dps dot avi or something, right? Tips is back. Nice a couple people left Awesome. I think I think one of her I left it like reset the shard and then somebody else got shard. It's so real good There it is Yeah Anyway, this guy's running around, uh, the ghouls just east of jillwin camp and uh, like attacking them Like they're level 51 as if it's like a good job and he's doing like 150 dps by the way It was like, oh man Anyway, anyway, yeah, like one shadow Yeah, right Um Do you guys like my new phone? By the way, this is a uh, this is a no kia actually, uh, you can see No, no, I got a I got a charging case and uh, yeah for for the iRL streams, but dude, it's like It's like five pounds. It's Okay, um, I like I like chat no key the no kia thick Yeah, no kia thick, of course, of course, uh, okay, so, um Let's go ahead and uh, oh This is a good one Oh, wait, no, that's something else. Okay. Um Josh Phillips asks classic casts when the pvp ranking was first put in vanilla It required you to know life the game for 14 hours a day to get rank 14 It was unchanged patch one point sell slightly relax those requirements Do you think it should be in the same in classic or start with the latest patch? Uh, so I think as a general got a little bit wider. They got a tiny bit wider. Yeah Yeah, I I think as a general rule for the game I think they're going to go with like with stuff like that I would I would assume that they're going to go with the 1.12 version the the latest version of the game What do you guys think? Absolutely. I think in general when when you have questions like this I think they explicitly set up blizzcon They only were able to recover the data from like 1.8 and beyond And they decided to commit based on the first water cooler update to commit to the 112 code So I think if you were just to take a guess The general approach is 112 unless and there's some exceptions like The atomization stuff we talked about earlier and some other things But I think typically like default to 112 Unless stated otherwise Yeah The other thing is like this is going to be different from private service on to classic is that the populations then increase the amount The like honor pools and which then increase the brackets of the amount of people who can be in bracket one So to speak and get that standing one the level of rp Uh, or rank points in order to increase their their rank levels So like that's going to be very different So you're not going to have as many people being able to hit rank 14 as quickly just because the populations are lower And the amount of people in the honor pools are going to be significantly lower So that's one thing to consider as well. It's like it'll be Like that level of 1.8 most likely. Um, it's not going to be like I'll be shocked if it's the pre 1.8 version of difficulty to get rank 14 But it's also not going to be quite as, um, simple as it is on on Private servers now when when it comes to like the brackets and getting your rp pools Yeah, I think also on private servers We've seen that brackets are very very very well coordinated because uh, there's just a lot of Like you said, there's just a lot of like there's a very active ranking committee on private servers Because all all these like super turbo nerds are condensed onto one server, right? Um, I think on a lot of classical servers ranking will be a lot more Hectic and less coordinated. There'll be a lot less bracket stacking Um, it'll be sort of like uh, anyone's game every week is is sort of what I expect Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I mean, I think with