Hello, how's everybody doing? What's up guys? Welcome to classic cast number 26. We're here with stay safe TV We're here with tips out baby, and we're here with our guest Sony formerly known as Sony D So we're here to talk about PvP guys. There's a lot that's happened since the last classic cast It's been a few weeks. We've I know we've been all over the place Stay safe was in Taiwan. I've been in I was at twitch con in Berlin and then Amsterdam in London There's been a lot so it's been a little bit since our last classic cast So we got a good bit to talk about some PvP news some potential beta news some speculation And I think we're gonna have a really good time. So before we get into all that One thing to mention We're we're in the process of working on some things some exciting things for classic cast That's gonna come the next month or so we have we have some merch that we're working on a lot of people have been asking about, you know, classic cast t-shirts and just some just some cool stuff that we can do and We started the process on that in addition to some other stuff. So yeah, Pog Pog you. Yeah, exactly, of course So, yeah, we're gonna finally be doing some of that stuff. I know it's been it's a year and a half We don't have any merch yet. So We're finally gonna get the ball rolling on that And yeah, I think that's something that's gonna be pretty exciting So maybe by the next episode next couple episodes will be able to officially release it. So Some to look forward to Real quick, let's go ahead and let's talk to Sony a little bit. Let's introduce Sony Sony do you want to tell us a little bit about? How you got into wow where you got started when you started playing vanilla your your you were a season three rank one Is that right and burning crusade? Yeah, and season three. I was the number one warrior in the world for a while with And we were like the top three on arena junkies Basically back when their world rankings existed for all like collaborative 2v2 3 3 5 5 rating It was soda up top and rookie and then me right that was that's that's where I guess I You claim the fame Popularity or whatever you want to call it. I made some Warcraft movie Montages that were pretty dope with some Disarmonia Monday and stuff, but um, yeah, I've been playing I've been playing wow since since vanilla a little bit before bg's came out There you go So when when did they take down arena junkies? I used to love reading a read junkies man That was a great website. It was it was actually only recently. It was like it was like it was in Legion Yeah, cuz vanguard's was running it. He had to shut it down. Oh Vanguards is running arena junkies.  Yeah, I didn't realize he was the one running arena junkies actually Eventually, I don't know if he was I don't know if like he was always running it But I think eventually it kind of just like trickled down to him. Oh, okay. Okay so yeah Your vanilla experience you you told me before Yeah, you told me before that you were you started playing pretty early on like before the the honor system was even put in right? Like before patch 1.4. So a few months before that probably would have been early 2005 What's your experience there? Um, so yeah, I started playing wow Started leveling up a night off shadow priest got him like 42 Then I went horde on my torn warrior the same Sony digital Leveled him to 60 and I think like around the level like 35 battlegrounds came out So I wasn't even 60 when the ranking system came out well because the ranking system came out before bgs, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, just a little bit before but back then like nobody really knew what the hell was going on So nobody grinded rank in world PvP or anything like that So I think we only really saw like rank 14s once bgs came out But um, yeah, I was I got to rank 8 on my warrior got ranked 12 on a shaman that I bought and then that got hacked and Taken away from me and I didn't have the pass or anything.  So yeah, I'm able to do much But um, that was a bit of my classic experience rated molten core BWL ZG AQ 40 got a little bit in the next but didn't really couldn't didn't have the time to do that because my mom wouldn't let me so Yeah, I remember back We used to have dial up at my house And so if I was like in a dungeon or trying to do anything really and my mom called a friend of hers or a friend Called my mom like intern. It's out made it very hard to get anything done Yeah, you guys remember like the first time we got cable. I don't know when you guys got cable It was like it was revolutionary like internet was so fast once we got cable I remember definitely I'm trying to think back like whenever I first started playing Wow I think I think by the time that I was playing Wow, I had DSL I think I had DSL at that point. So I was good for Wow, but I remember when I was playing Dark Age of Camelot I had like Kmart blue light internet I had net zero and we always had these these discs that you can go get it It came out or wherever and it was like oh like 15 hours free So what what I would do is I would keep a dial-up internet And I would keep making accounts for like 15 free hours so that I would just cycle through Free internet it was super slow and people would call it like disconnected all the time, but it was super fun Yeah, wait, what was DSL? I I remember hearing about that, but I don't think I ever like I don't think we had DSL I think I had dial up DSL was like the first high-speed internet, right? Yeah, it was it was in between in between dial-up and cable. It was DSL Yeah, yeah, or maybe it's something else chat chat knows it's something else to apparently I didn't know that not dick-sucking lips But yeah, so I remember growing up in elementary school I had a rich friend and we used to go to his house and play flash arcade games on his on his dial-up or on His DSL internet it was bad-ass and I always depressed when I had to go back to my place and use dial-up bad Frickin American online logo slowly running. Oh, they're quite reaching there, dude.  Yeah, let me figure that out. Okay. Yeah for some reason you're just a tad quiet for us, but um But yeah, so you played Sony you played back in back in the day You know you did BWL you rated you ranked you said you got to rank 13 or sorry ranked 12. You didn't quite get to 13 No But for you like you've been a big fan of classic and kind of been pushing for classic ever since they really changed the game back in cataclysm So yeah, I started I actually started like I actually started playing private servers in cataclysm wait first when Phoenix came out which was like, I don't even know eight years ago eight nine years ago I I know I spent my entire senior year of high school summer Landing with my best friend and my brother and we all just leveled to 60 and like I never ever really wanted to go back to Retail after that like I came back to mop a little bit played that and then with wad I found out that I found out about twitch I was like, okay, maybe I'll stream, but what's crazy to me is like I was never actually passionate about retail since Hmm wrath like ever ever like since I came back to since I came back to wow I had always wanted classic and I streamed the star is for a bit But then I got you know, I got a warning that I couldn't Quickly shut down But yeah, man I've been a huge advocate for classic since I started streaming four years ago And it's like crazy to see that it's finally happening. Yeah, really really crazy So when you say since wrath like you haven't had the same passion of the game since wrath Was that including wrath like burning crusade after burning crusade you kind of lost the passion for it or after wrath you lost passion for it After wrath cataclysm was like cataclysm was cool But I feel like every expansion since then it was just like a it was a vanity aspect that kept bringing me back to the game Like oh, I got some cool mounts. I got some like cool You know armor and shit, but like really nothing else Nothing that like there were moments in Legion that was fun There were moments in wad that were fun, but nothing kept me attached to the game for as long as like TBC your classic did or even wrath right Well, yeah, there was definitely a transition between like traditional RPG style gameplay and vanilla TBC And they're like I would say like the first half of wrath and the more like collection of style gameplay mounts pets Which is what needs to incentivize a lot of content today, right? Mm-hmm 100% yeah retail WoW is basically a dress-up game nowadays Feels a lot of times. It's like even so even amongst like streamers like we always talk about like, you know I want to I want to stream WoW want to play WoW and Somebody's echoing. I'm not sure who it is, but you know, you want to you want to play WoW you want to stream WoW and then What do I do go do transmog runs go do mount runs stuff like that and that's fine, right? I mean, that's essentially like if you want to do that That's basically like you're doing just chatting right at that point. You're basically doing just chatting So it's like why not go to just chatting. It's like a whole thing The problem is for me and for you know I would guess for you guys and I would guess for the overwhelming majority of people who are excited for classic And that's the kind of game that they want to play. That's just outright boring Like it's not it's not something that particularly interests them Like just running around like collecting mounts and stuff like sure I might be cool and classic to get like a mount or something here or there But it's like a that's like a side quest the main quest build up your character get strong Get good loot all that stuff and and actually like play the game and then develop that the Vanity stuff should be on the side not the main thing and that's kind of the problem with retail WoW right now for a lot of people Yeah, yeah, absolutely and God sunny No, I was just gonna talk about the competitive aspect, too Cuz like obviously there's like progression progressing your character and all this and all that but like when you really dive into the Competitive like PvP aspect of the game. It's just progressively gotten much much worse And whatever I whenever I try to get back into that with like current expansions Whether it was Legion BFA or WAD like class design in general has just gotten worse So it's it's like you're saying stay safe. It's like gone away from traditional RPG Feeling in every aspect of the game So not just like your general like you can progress your character But like there's no RPG feeling PvP either cuz like warriors just feel like every other class like rogues feel like it's just like Everything's meshed. It's just a it's a kind of buckle of not a whole lot of fun, dude That's actually really interesting hearing that from like a PvP like players perspective I don't think we've ever had like a super high in PvP run. Have we Actually, no not yet not somebody who's ranked really high in in retail arenas or in arenas, I guess Yeah, cuz like it's really interesting to say that you would think that PvP years would kind of I Guess would have kind of steered more towards like the homogenization And would like the idea of all classes having interrupts and stuff like that It sounds like you're not a big fan of that kind of stuff Well, so it's it's become that but they've they've managed to strip away Inherent class identity because like at the start of BFA I think you guys might have heard like warriors were supposed to be the big two-handed You know wielding big chunks of damage at a time And it was literally that for a week and a half and then Blizzard was like, okay, no fuck this We're going back to just dots and like deep wounds damage Stuff and bleeding him out and since then it's just like it's been slowly just trickling away from any sort of class design Class identity so I think one of the big things and we've had Kevin Jordan on before but like, you know Kevin Jordan for those of you guys who don't know, you know, he streams on Twitch I think he actually changed his twitch name to Kevin Jordan at this point But yeah, he's he's the original vanilla while class designer. He was literally in charge of building Every class in vanilla. Wow. He worked on the team from vanilla bread and crusade to wrath and then he was gone He wasn't working at Blizzard anymore And I don't think it's coincidence that you saw such a big difference in class design From the original trilogy the the first three games to cataclysm and onward Kind of like tip said it got a lot more homogenized everything kind of came together as like, okay This class everything had a template, right? Okay. We're not gonna play a spec or a class We're gonna play a spec and a for example a rep paladin is no longer a paladin a rep paladin needs to fit in the mold of a DPS So he needs an interrupt he needs this he needs this so that way We can have this guy go into an arena team and he'll fit into that role in the arena team More proper like, you know the right way. So yeah, I think that's fine on paper And it's like super optimized and it like looks cool I guess looks really neat but the problem is is that takes away from like the soul of the game and it's It's just not good like it's just outright I don't know for me like if I want to play an MMO RPG if you're taking RPG elements out of the game Then it's not really the same game anymore And I know there's a lot of pvp ears and and Sony I'm sure you know this too like there's there's plenty of guys who thought like Cata wasn't that bad or or miss was really good pvp And I'm sure there's a lot of people who think that they really like the pvp and missed but from for me personally You started to see things as you started to see things move away more and more as far as like class fantasy style or Perspective it took away from what the game was. So Yeah, absolutely I think like the easiest way to balance a game is to only have one class, right? If everyone is exactly the same then the game is perfectly balanced. The problem with that is that it's just not fun Like right now. Wow balance is boring. Yeah, like vanilla. Wow Everyone was so different and it wasn't perfectly one and we've talked about this a lot It wasn't perfectly one to one to one to one balanced But it was more like rock-paper-scissors balance everything at a hard counter and yeah, like but It was fun to stomp people that you countered and at the same time It was fun to maybe struggle and beat the guy that was supposed to counter you so that was right It was rewarding both ways It's sort of like instilled fear in you like if you're a warrior and you're out running around the world You see a major like ah crap so like There was that there was an RPG element, but yeah, like everyone was so unique and I think that's what made it special Yeah, and like one of the great things about vanilla class design was that it Complimented or supplemented the item design so well wherever classes had gaps You could fill those gaps in with interesting items and like for example as a warrior You don't have a reset. So use a goblin rocket helm instead You know you can't you get kited a lot. So maybe you should try using goblin rocket boots Yeah, so stuff like that like yeah, sorry. I just saw that picture knows the way what no you're fine. Yeah But oh yeah, so like you have different ways of making up your class's weaknesses But there's always trade-offs and that's what makes it so interesting You know you're not gonna be able to use goblin rocket without sacrificing some stats and stuff like that It actually reminds me a lot of MOBAs like I Don't know if anybody in the chat plays Dota 2 where Sony if you play Dota 2 But like in Dota You know there's a character named anti mage and anti mage has a blink ability and there's a lot of classes in Dota That would do a lot better if they had a blink ability, but they don't have one But they can you know purchase a blink dagger from the shop and it's an item that allows them to blink essentially so It takes up an item slot. So again, there's like a trade-off there But the ability to acquire certain items to kind of make up and compensate for some of your classes weaknesses But with a counter is like really really interesting a class design, I think Yeah, I think that's what people crave in PvP. They miss being able to counter, you know, it's and there's not Once again, it's just it's just it's going over the same things But basically there's there's none of that in in current Wow, and there hasn't been since mop There was a little bit of it in Wad, but just it's just been getting progressively worse So we've been talking a lot about PvP And something I want to hit on that and again It's been a really long time since we've done the last class cast and we're going to be getting a lot more consistent with these soon I mean, you know stay safe got sick. I got sick. We were out of town. We were flying all over the place But it has been a while since this news has been a couple of weeks But I do want to touch on this the classic PvP content plan So I'm gonna go ahead and pull this up here should show up just in a second. There we go So yeah, I want to I want to talk about this real quick We talked about in the last classic cast how they explained That they want to do the six phases. There's no PvP And and where we kind of see PvP fitting in or actually no, sorry. This wasn't the last one with Quissy This was the one with nano where we talked about it But since then for those of you guys who don't know We talked about you know the potential of maybe them putting in in phase two Maybe putting it in phase three putting it in the middle or in an ideal world, maybe even spreading out PvP release throughout the course of Throughout the course of vinyl wow throughout the course of the cycle of the server and I think we all thought that was kind of unlikely But that's actually what they're gonna be doing. So pretty pretty exciting. I know I know I'm pretty excited about that Just to look over this real quick as you can see this is from from the classic Wowhead website by the way that did a really good job of Laying this out kind of fitting in the content release with PvP release and making a nice little chart. So we're gonna use that We're gonna look at that So you can see phase two honor system and PvP rank rewards phase three Altrac Valley and Warsong Gulch phase four Arathi basin And then they're possible. I think I think Wowhead put this in on their own Like if they want to do PvP vendor updates, maybe they should do it in phase five But what does that mean updating from previous like 1.0? The the original PvP gear Yeah, the original PvP gear to the I think it was the next patch stat update But but they're not going to be doing that. So that's straight to items. There's like the spell pen ring I think that should be added on to the Oh, the rep rewards are gonna get are gonna get out of that's what it was gonna get added in. Yeah Maybe different because didn't um Didn't like the spell power sword come later as well Like there was like the spell power sword the dagger because at first it was just that's that's true Yeah, but I think based on the language in the post it looks like those will be coming. They're just bringing everything early on Yeah, the items you're talking about it in 111. I think but yeah, it's like tip said it sounds like those are gonna be in pretty early so that's a super that's actually a super debatable topic because like We're getting 1.12 items before BWL even comes out, right? If you get rank 14 hypothetically, yeah, if you get rank 14 Hypothetically before WL, you're gonna be pumping insane amounts of damage You're gonna be having items that are better than everything to be WL and on par with aq 40 items So the fastest you can go from rank one to rank 14 is three months exactly if you're bracket one every week And that's that's like dream scenario very rare for people to do that So if phase two the open-world PVP ranking phase lasts two months I think it'll last around two months It'll be a month or a month and a half or two months after BWL was outright before you start seeing rank 14s I think isn't like a big of a deal. Yeah, what you know, really? I think that's still a huge deal because rank 14 gear is better than BWL gear. It's on par with Nax Well, what's they say they're saying was they say they're saying that it's gonna be unlikely that you'll see many people getting Grand Marshal before the release of BWL It won't impact progression or server first or stuff like that Yeah, what you see on private servers is you see entire guilds going into BWL with an entire roster of rank 14s Right, which is a bad thing in my opinion mm-hmm a bad thing was a It I think it's bad If it's bad for like a server progression if guilds are going in like the top guild is going into BWL Like launch day with an entire rank 14 roster. I think that's bad I think that like undermines the difficulty of the content So if you if it's impossible to be ranked 13 12 13 14 until a month or two months after BWL comes out I think that like I think that preserves the difficulty of BWL a little bit. Yeah But that's still up in the air because right now They've confirmed basically that 1.12 items are coming out before BWL Right and even if you get ranked 10 like ranked 10 made shoulders and boots are best in slot till next, right?   They're there to do it as fast as they can You know what I mean like just to hey we cleared it first, you know I'm curious to be clear with rank 14 gear. So I think that And this is this is a concern that I brought up in in my video talking about the update I talked about how basically exactly what you're saying if they have the 1.12 gear in from the beginning And that gear is kind of put in to compete with like a Q40 gear I I 100% believe this I 100% believe that the a Q40 gear or sorry that the The second set of PVP gear that came out the updated PVP gear. It was it was almost done too late so whenever they go and they update it to be like on par with a Q40 gear then That's fine. It was done too late in the original retail and retail vanilla. Yeah, when did it come out in retail? Sorry, I don't mean in the next patch in the next patch. Oh really? Yeah, so it probably should have come out fucker Yeah, why are they bringing it out before to that's so well So the thing that's going on basically is and this is like the whole concept of like progressive minimization and we've talked about this a lot too is Like there's different parts of progressive minimization. How does Blizzard want to approach it? Do they want to have the? the newest gear Available they like like a lot of people say this okay progressive itemization for those of you guys who don't know Progressive itemization is the concept of as the game comes out. They're going to add new items in the game They're gonna update items as they they would have been in vanilla to match the content and all that stuff What I think at this point how every how every update and how everything's kind of gone I think it's most likely that what's going to happen is they're going to release items as they were released But they're going to be released in their In their latest state so Kind of similar to and there's been private servers at this before too like obviously like Nost is kind of like the big whenever people talk about private servers to talk about Nost and Nost did a lot of things that were not exactly right. We've had nano on this show before and he's talked about it too like Gear not being updated in the right patch or whatever and then they find stuff out later And it's been fixed later on and then there's also been other private servers that come out and said whatever and we're Going to have like the newest version of the gear just available from the beginning and Just kind of have it as is I think that's probably the way that Blizzard is going to end up approaching it given all the news that we've gotten because they've said they want to go with The newest version of the gear on release I think that yeah So go ahead say I was going to say All of like the original rank 14 weapons were updated in patch 1.6 Which is the BWL patch so I think it's less of a deal if like Phase two last two months or two and a half months as long as you don't have rank 14's going into BWL The the one 11 gear that was added was that were the heat the rank 14 healing weapons The healing mace and the off-hands and also the caster main hand off-hand combos. I think that's it Those are like the big problems and those are considerably better than everything BWL and a lot of I think I think in a Q4 as well I think if we refer back to the wowhead thing that you showed I Think it'd be a really good compromise if they choose to add that stuff in phase 5 Now what that means is if I'm a caster and I rank early in Phase 2 or phase 3 or phase 4 and I get rank 14 that would suck for me that would suck for me because if I want those Caster weapons or if I'm a healer and I want the healing mace. I have to re rank right in phase 5 So that would suck a lot, but I think that's probably the most balanced way to approach it yeah, I think I think that's certainly one way looking at it too because Staff of shadow flame is is Is there a better combo than staff of shadow flame just having the staff shadow flame outright in BWL in 1.6 patch? Is there is there a better combo with like as a song mage blade or anything for more power? Now this if we had the one 11 rank 14 Spell blade and off-hand that would be considerably better than staff of shadow flame But yeah, otherwise shadow flame is best and that's partially the Sorry, just real quick. That's partially the reason why I Guess phase 3 is so interesting right now in phase 2 right now as it stands Every class wants to rank to 14 to my understanding But but every class right now if they keep the same phase content release schedule every class wants to rank to 14 because The gear that you get as early as you get it is just ahead of so much and will stay relevant for so so long Including the blue PvP sets by the way like the epic or one thing But did get to rank 10 which isn't even that hard like relatively speaking and or get to rank frickin 8 You'll have four out of six blue blue pieces like that's those are still really really good, too Well, so that's what I was saying cuz like for mages you can get ranked 10 really easily before BWL comes out and you you have best-in-slot shoulders and boots all the way until next yeah So that's one example But talking about progressive itemization What's interesting is like if we're just getting the final state of a majority of items right off launch aren't Aren't like a number of just random world drop like wrath pieces also best-in-slot for casters Like if you get a rolled like wrath like Fiery wrath like cape or something. Isn't that just like best-in-slot? Like a few a few items the way they're itemized like they just have like yeah Mounts of plus shadow or plus fire damage, right? I feel like if blizzards not What's weird about this classic launch actually the more I think about it is like we're getting a progressive content thing But we're not getting any progressive itemization and if we're not getting progressive itemization Then it's just like you're basically making content easier. Well a majority of content. They're gonna be doing it Well, they're gonna be doing it partially, right? So it's like the like the world drops that aren't in the game at the beginning aren't gonna be in the game at the beginning Well, yeah, I guess I guess rather than as my understanding right progressive item additions, which is I think that's their goal Yeah, all progressive item additions. Yeah, so like, you know, whatever Like any sort of plans items whatever whatever drops later on at least that's my understanding is that they're not gonna put it in At the beginning, but if something gets updated So now there's certain items that are concerns, right? Like savage gladiators chest is probably one of the most commonly talked about ones because the The savage gladiator chain vest from BRD the male the male chest from BRD is like, you know, the exact stats up top of my head. It's like to crit I think to crit some agility strength. It's it's really really good is basically the point It ends up being as good as it ends up being basically the best chess piece in the game for a physical DPS until a Q40 If you're a warrior, you would want the like annihilation chest There that's that that's like the first thing that is better if you're a DPS warrior. So Certain items like that end up being a big concern because you can go into BRD and get that in your mid 50s And then not have to upgrade it at all for over a year. Some people might like that, right? But that's not really I Don't necessarily think that's good to be able to have something there It's kind of taken away from the RPG element to like we were discussing off-call earlier Like we're not what's it's gonna defeat the purpose of like, yeah, dude. We're gonna hit BWL I'm gonna get my tier two chess piece, you know And that's gonna be the best item because it's the most recent up-to-date content But then you're just gonna have people like running into knacks like we were talking about with the PPP You're earlier with like blue shoulders You know and like you're not gonna replace that with tier three unless you're like PvPing But even then like ring for Tiat shoulders are probably better So it's like it just it makes this really weird combination of gear happen and like character progression happen You're right is really weird like there are best pieces for every class from like 12 and 13 You might have like your best weapons might be 14 You'll have like a trinket or maybe a neck from like a dungeon that might be best for a long time like you You get your gear from all over the place You might have a couple like of shadow wrath pieces and then some raid pieces thrown in It's you might have a couple crafted BOE's that are bis or like like Lionheart Yeah, stuff like that like your gear is just from all over the place No, no, that's that's for sure like the vanilla thing like warriors are just like that like yeah Like Lionheart helmets best in slot until I'm pretty sure knacks. It's just it's a great helmet But what I'm saying is with the current itemization plan that they have it's gonna it's gonna cause even more than that More of that than we even saw in the original version of the game Yeah, so I'm just curious like hopefully we can keep voicing this and actually get some more Just clearance on what's actually happening because I like this guy dude I like this guy. Well, and here's one thing Here's one thing to look at and this is something that bozer has to deal with that No private servers had to deal with yet is that you have literally tens of thousands of people who are Doing every single breath every single step you take whatever you do and they're putting it under my Microscope and trying to analyze it to like the nth degree. I mean, I know that's what we do That's what a lot of people watching the show do. I know that's what a lot of people watching our streams and everything do And it's really interesting because I've talked about Classic meta versus Retail vanilla meta versus private server meta They're all going to be a little bit different and a lot of the stuff that private servers did wasn't exactly It wasn't exactly blizz like they they ended up making custom changes or they made a mistake here and there and You wonder like how how much of an impact does that really have on how the game works? And I think whatever they end up doing it's going to be really really interesting to see How the game plays out I think Whatever decision they make it's so important that they look at how the game plays out and They're ready to whenever inevitably they want to release a new set of fresh vanilla servers because that's that's kind of another Discussion, but at the same time if they don't release fresh vanilla servers and people are just going to go back to private servers So surely they're gonna do that Whenever they release a new set of fresh vanilla servers, they can look at it and say you know what we made this mistake We think it would be better if Savage gladiator chain got updated in Phase 5 right something like that Oh, this is kind of like a little bit off-track, but like what do you what do you think about? Experimental experimental like servers like where vanilla ends, but instead of it just ending at next Ramas like we get more Content not just like an alternate timeline But like what if we what if they introduce like rated ballad rounds and like aesthetic Rewards with that or like like things like that. You know what I mean? Well, I don't think they if fine If they ever did like progressive content afternax like post-nax content, I don't think they should add new features I also I think that they see well. I don't think they should add new features. I think they should go TBC That's the first priority and if they ever decide to make a set of servers that are like post-nax content servers or anything like that It shouldn't be new features. It should only be new content. That's in the same vein as vanilla and The big concern is gonna be power creep So like if you if you add because I do think Part of me does think this would be cool if they did this in addition to like after they already had burning crusade and all that other Stuff if they went through and said, you know what we started working on kerosene before almost Before a lot of the other content John Stath told us this Before a lot of the other content we started working on kerosene. So put kerosene in it's a 40 man raid in vanilla Put in caverns of time you go into caverns of time You can jump jump jump glitch and go all the way down there That's the same caverns of time that's in the game Then you go into and burning crusade you can look in the game files And you can find black morass and that's in the game you go to hydral That's the same hydral that you can glitch into so I do think that the concept of post-nax content Assuming assuming that they already have burning crusade and all this stuff. This is a conversation for way down the road I do think it's something that could be cool But how much do they how much effort do they want to put into that and and like what's the payoff going to be for them? I don't know Yeah So for me like my point of view is they didn't add this stuff originally because they thought it wasn't a good fit for vanilla Wow, right? So I'm like very hesitant to do that The next question is like do do I the one of the For me one of the key features of vanilla while we're key selling points of vanilla Well, is that we know exactly what we're getting like I really like the game design from back then And I'm not so big of a fan of modern game design. And so do I trust? 2019 blizzard to make good additional content for classic wow honestly. No So I'm happy with it being exactly what we know it to be and moving on to tbc The other thing like you mentioned power creep is a big deal like like naks Power creep is already crazy big in fact a lot of and I'm sure tips you can add on this like a lot of Vanilla wow pvpers will tell you like the the best or most favorite phase of Vanilla wow pvp is with bwl gear and then after that people slowly start getting more and more glass canany I'm like during naks people can just like start globling each other. Yeah, or not not quite that much But people become really big glass cannons And so like a lot of pvpers will tell you that the most balanced air of vanilla wow as far as pvp goes Is with bwl or or maybe even zg gear damn? I'm excited to experience that again. I I don't even remember what that was like because I was a keyboard turning You know, right shitter Well like and and that's the case that's the case for a lot of people. I mean And we talk about this all the time, right? It's We this game was 14 years ago and if you look at a lot of people who are excited for vanilla wow, it's people who Uh, maybe played vanilla, but they did they feel like they didn't get to finish, right? I in like I've done everything on private servers now Except for rank. I haven't ranked to 14 But, uh, you know, it's it's like I didn't go and I didn't kill kel'thuzad I didn't rank to 14. There's stuff that I didn't do that. I want to go back and finish that I want to That I want to get done. There's a lot of people that feel that way There's a lot of people who started playing right the end of vanilla or in burning crusade I mean huge like Burning crusade and wrath were huge periods of growth for a lot of people And I would say the majority of people who are still playing wow today Are probably not people who started playing in vanilla or burning crusade. It's probably mostly people who started playing wrath cataclysm and on Um So I think a lot of people excited for classic or people who never experienced it and man Everybody talks about like the golden age and you know all these like old like war torn veterans are talking about like vanilla Wow, I want to go experience that for myself. Like what's the deal? Like is it really that good? So Uh, I think that's the big appeal for classic for a lot of people I think it's so interesting when I hear like people who started in wad Say that they love world of warcraft and they're like, yeah, dude. I love this game Like lesion was great too and like I've even recently talked to some like rank one people in bfa Who are just like came out of the woodworks and they're like, dude, this expansion is great for pvp I'm having a blast and I'm just like what like when did you start playing?  I'm like Okay, wow. So it's it's gonna be interesting seeing those players come back to vanilla and see one how they even play And two if they really enjoy the game because I was actually having random conversations in a trade chat the other day Just about how you're like, dude, are you like are you hype for classic sony? I was like, yeah, man, I'm really looking forward to it and they're just like I just I don't know if I don't know if I'm gonna dig the slow paced action of it And I'm just like well personally I I it's more like chess rather than This like just constant spammy buttons, you know, like shitstorm of pvp. It's it's it's more Thought out. I think anticipation had a bigger role in pvp back then like anticipation knowing other classes abilities Whereas nowadays you can get by without you know without knowing a lot of that like there's a lot of people at 24 2400 rating where they're just like they're just doing their dps rotation. That's all you have to do Yeah, it's the same rotation. You don't have to interrupt. You don't have to interrupt, dude I I played a 50% dampening game. There's a clip somewhere on my channel. I played a 50% dampening game I kicked the shaman five times at 15% hp. He didn't die.  In in pvp if that's not even you know helping you kill somebody so did I remember I was doing uh I raged pretty hard for me. I'm not super ragey, but like I raged pretty hard for me Whenever this was like early bfa we were doing arenas and there was a shaman who It was the same exact thing like we were just beating on him for like five minutes straight Oh, it was a 2v3. It was a 2v3 and his partner disconnected And he's just sitting there and we're like we're both interrupting him. We can't we literally can't kill the guy He's just he's taking no damage and he just starts casting like instant heals I don't even understand. I still to this day. Don't understand what happened. He's an issue It's it's yeah retail is just it's so annoying to me Even in even in game design like where is the skilled discrepancy?  Wow. I feel like I never like chunk anyone. There's so many self heels and absorbs and stuff like that and vanilla.  Yes, yeah, it's it's hard to explain that but no you're explaining it perfectly Wow understands that entirely like I I also miss running in you charge You're you press mortal strike. It's on a six second cooldown. Okay. Boom. You get a crit 50 percent of your HP is gone. You know Or you don't get a crit. Okay.   I'm very like pleasantly surprised with like your perspective It's really interesting to hear like a high-end pvp or talk about this stuff I'm curious based on, you know, your conversations and your community and all the other pvpers that you talk to What's kind of the general? I guess what's the outlook from the pvp community on classic? Well, are people kind of like uh, you know looks a little bit slower not really interested or are people super hyped like What's you know, what's the consensus in the community?  It's more enjoyable because class identity is there and there were moments where you could chunk people And if you kick people it mattered and all this but at the end of the day, like it was still There were still a lot of issues with it, you know what I mean, but back then it was more enjoyable I think just for the sheer fact that there was a lot more class identity You could chunk people and interrupts mattered cc chains mattered Whereas now it's all just you have failsafe after failsafe after failsafe after failsafe 70% dampening Oh, no, you're all right. You got a little bit more failsafe so then 90% dampening. Okay, something eventually dies Right and that just creates a very stale experience But a lot of people are actually looking forward to classic bbp because like I like I was saying it was I was I saw a zeal you guys know a zeal. He's a legal legends commentator Yeah, he used to be a multi rank one mlg playing warlock He brought up a good point about world of warcraft in general where it's like You don't have the opportunity to Isn't going to sound whatever but artistically express yourself in pvp anymore You don't have like the opportunity to artistically express yourself in any type of play style because it's all just spammy. It's all It there's a zeal said this Yeah, a zeal tweeted something like that. That's really good and keep going Yeah, and um, I just I found it really It was really profound when he said that because it's like it's true the the more expansions have gone on The less class identity have that we have and the less overall in gaming that we There's there's less artistic expression in gaming in general like new games that are coming out And I think that's why a lot of people are looking forward to classic because there's that opportunity to at least Express yourself, you know through your own unique play style Obviously streaming and youtube videos is going to ruin all that because the you know, you can just acquire knowledge very easily easily now Well, I wouldn't say ruin I wouldn't say ruin but more people are going to be able to adapt really quickly Yeah, but people but people had this like starting in burning crusade and stuff too Like I would say like not necessarily in vanilla, but I remember there being Like videos became more and more common like in the burning crusade area era and uh into wrath. I mean, especially wrath but um No, I totally I 110 agree with that and um I just so this is something this is something that uh kevin jordan said and I think you put it really really well And he was talking about so kevin jordan He played he made a ret paladin and and we made the joke. I always talk about like vanilla ret paladin five head I always make those jokes But he said like a lot of a lot of vanilla pvp And especially his ret paladin like it because it's like more slow paced or whatever it is a lot like a chess match So it's like you have to make a lot more calculated decisions with like, okay I think that this guy's gonna do this so i'm gonna do this and it's the concept of like playing Reactively versus proactively and and sometimes you do both, right? Just depending on the situation knowing like okay, if if he's gonna do this to me I'm gonna turn around and do this. I might play very aggressive and and Be very proactive and try and like rush at a guy and there's so many different ways to play and I I'm not familiar with the zeal, but uh, I think specifically using the the Analogy of like artistic expression I think that's actually really really good because if you watch a lot of vanilla pvp First off you can see certain things play out, right? Like he did this because he's gonna set this up for later And you can see okay. Well, this guy countered with this So now this guy has to make another decision and he has to change his strategy A lot of times whenever you watch retail pvp, it's okay Yeah, give this about 15 minutes and this team's gonna win like a certain point Yeah, at a certain point like you can see the calculations and then you know at a certain point like the buck stops here Okay, this team's gonna win. So an example from like a warrior perspective that I can quickly summarize is like preemptively Reflecting a death coil. That's a big deal.  You can get some big damage in you can see See the healer. You can do everything you reflect a death coil now in retail Dude, it literally does not matter It does not matter and that's the most tilting thing because Yeah, I like to be able to like do cool. Shit in the video game. I'm playing I don't like to just do like a cool thing and then it just okay. Yeah, you guys see that you'll clip it Yo, I did a cool thing, but it only really matters if you kill somebody You know because of that it only matters if there's major impact off of that play, right? Yeah, I was gonna say to add on to that like when you said artistic PvP or artistic gameplay the first thing I thought of there used to be this druid that would run around in vanilla wow in 2006 And he uh, he used to always try to find me when I was streaming and he I play warlock He would wear entire uh shadow resistance gear and like that was this thing if I saw this druid I know he's wearing full shadow resistance gear.  That was his style Yeah, like back in 2006, uh Whenever I was also streaming I uh, I had a button set on my keyboard to to switch to a shadow resist set in case I got ganked by like a warlock Or a shadow freeze by somebody coming at me. I would hit it So then I would have like lawbreaker with like shadow resist accessories and stuff So, uh, yeah, I I can definitely relate to that That's another conversation right because like now So back then you would PvE a lot you would put in extra time to get these unique items that changed certain situations like shadow resist gear Now you put in that time just to be able to compete at At a relative level right because now you need all those absorbed trinkets from crucible of storms Just to even survive or like make your class viable But back then it's just like the level of impact that getting like full shadow resist or like a few pieces of PvE gear Did it is it felt it felt different like how how how would you describe that right it felt a lot different But how what what made it so much more different back then So I I would say I would say one of the biggest things is is just the ability to build your character and to go and like You know Obviously you have the the the rpg aspect of like, okay My character is working its way through the world getting to level 60 and my character is growing Turning into this, you know a big strong warrior or whatever Um, you have that but also like once you get there It's like, okay now I get the tweak and I say like, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna put this item on here I'm gonna do this here. I'm gonna use this trinkets. Oh if I'm if I'm going into this fight I'll do this like I know one thing I do like if I'm fighting a hunter hunters are you know, fairly tough for me I I run like frost resist aura as a paladin and I put on a frost reflector trinket engineering trinket And I can tell kind of talking about like playing reactively or proactively Like if I see if I see a hunter, you know start to rush me And you got to get lucky sometimes It's just luck right if I see a hunter start to rush me and I'm like, oh he's gonna scattershot I hit my frost reflector Yeah, but I'm saying like I don't I don't hit it every time is my point, right?  So what I can do during that is I might go and I can try to kill the pet while he's doing that and then I can repentance him If I'm deep red and then I have basically like 15 16 seconds to kill the pet and then it's a one-on-one If I want to do that or I can just go ahead and engage on hunter But it all kind of depends on on how I want to approach the fight, right? So it's just uh just an example That's what made classics so great because there's examples like that for every single class And it wasn't even just so like you were talking earlier I think stay safe about how vanilla was like rock paper scissors, right? It's not one to one to one balance But instead it's rocker scissors, but with certain levels of anticipation and skill within anticipation you can make No Like I'm doing a hunter if I challenging shout the pet right as I'm charging in before he scatters me The pet's gonna break the scatter and I got full up time now, you know, and then it's over So there's like there's just so many little Finite things that you can do that just makes it so I'm getting so hyped talking about class. Does this usually happen? I know I talk about classic I was gonna say like it feels so rewarding to spend a lot of time preparing. Okay. I've got my engineering memes I've got my title charm. I'm the right spec. I have my consumables I'm going world pvp like it feels good to prepare for something and then it for it to pay off, right? and like like you said like The preparation pays off like you you can beat your counter matchup if you come to the battle prepared and it feels really really satisfying Yeah, I agree and It goes back to kind of as fans said about building your character and The creativity of being able to build your character and like when I duel in vanilla I've got a duel set for every single class There's I do not do I do not duel two classes the same and I'm wearing different gear set for every single class And again, you know, the choices you make you see the manifest in the duel and it's very satisfying It's very satisfying when you know you frost reflect a nice trap It's very satisfying when you know You goblin rocket boots a druid trying to get away from you and you're able to keep up and just Keep hamstring on because you're using the z-g neck which reduces the cost of your hamstring and stuff like that So like it's just it's very yeah, that's that's such a small item By the way, that's actually a sick example and that's like a very very tiny tiny item That yeah gift the momentum Exactly and like you have all of these different items in vanilla and like they can all change how a fight works and And stylistically, you know, you tackle this type of druid this certain way but another warrior might tackle it another way and Again, it allows you like I guess it was a zeal who said it allows you to be artistically, you know artistically express your play style And it's fun, man Like the building character thing like we see it in MOBAs There's a reason why MOBAs are popular Obviously a lot of other elements there, but the idea of just going into a match every single time being like, okay You know depending on what the enemy's doing, how am I going to build what items am I going to buy? What skills am I going to get and then implementing that strategy in combat? It's just very rewarding I was going to say you said artistically build your character. This is going back to his druid in 2006 He was in a discord channel I was on and you know, this is the guy that stacked entire shadow resistance gear and in discord one time He said I'm the warlock killer like that.  I don't know. I don't know dude Just some guy just some guy There's still there's still people like that who play well Like I think uh peekaboo tweeted out a picture one time like there was a guy like I think his name was like The pie vendor or something and he was a trade chat.  Yeah So, uh, something I want to we we we kind of got off on a tangent and we're having a good time something I want to talk about real quick is um Kind of going back to the classic pvp content plan And and and really looking at this like how how they want to spread everything out So one thing that you know just to make clear is that the honor system is going to come out with the release of dire mall And uh what that really means, right? So the honor system and pvp rank rewards are going to come out in phase two with the release of dire mall um What you're going to see because there's no battle grounds You're going to see that um War is what you're gonna There's going to be a lot of world pp camp Yeah, you're gonna have to camp flight paths if you really want to get like Top 10 ranking and there's going to be a lot of war, you know out in world pp obviously But it's like I think I think what's going to suck is if you're behind on the leveling curve come phase two You're never going to level Well ever I I think pvp peers are going to be just grinding ungrow so they can get max honor Well, I mean, I think I think people will be fine. I don't think it's going to be I I don't think it'll be that bad. I mean people obviously did world pvp the whole time like and I'm literally camping people But like you got you got to think about like the percentage of people doing this, right? So you're going to start doing that at level 48 like if players a little 48 now, they're eligible to um, basically you you can you can um You can get honor from them, right?   It's not even yeah, it's not even worth So but not only that, uh, not only all that stuff I what I was kind of trying to get to was talking about like bracket leaders and stuff um in in vanilla wow and retail vanilla in vanilla wow right in vanilla wow, uh Honor and ranking there's it's it's pretty complicated like you have people So so you have like honor points you have ranking points you have You're like Your rank on this you're standing on the server. There's all kinds of different things that factor into it and generally On private servers people have been doing this where there's somebody who's designated as the bracket leader And the bracket leader handles. Okay. These guys are bracket one players so they need to hit the bracket cap of this much honor every week and If you're bracket one, it's however many slots based on however many people are competing as a certain percentage And then it goes down bracket one bracket two whatever and i'm trying to give like a quick explanation of this whole thing um, yeah, so That's much easier to Manage whenever you have all the battlegrounds in and you've got the double honor weekend. So, you know, okay We're gonna do this this battleground all weekend When that's not in the game, I think it's gonna be very very hard to manage brackets early on So people are it's going to be the wild west like people are just going to be killing whoever they want There's going to be choke points on the world Dire malls obviously going to be a big one because that's a new in the game on top of there being the pvp system Put in dire mall like is you can't go in there without a group like it's going to be an absolute bloodbath It's going to be cool. It's going to be fun. Um But dire dire mall is going to be nuts for one Use I I don't know how hard it'll be to manage brackets I don't think it'll be too hard when it's open world pvp Like you still just if if you're at bracket cap, you just don't go out in world pvp, right? Well, I think it might be hard for people to because it's it's more random in terms It's it's less, uh, it's less systematic. That's what I should say So here's the thing like let's let's say your bracket cap is one million honor exactly And you're at 999 whatever like you're you're 130 honor away or something, right?  Okay, if I kill level 51 Twice I'll get this much honor the first time this much honor the second time people always round off their honor caps By going and getting a couple world kills So that's that's like pretty planned out. I don't think it'll be that hard to plan brackets with uh during What I'm thinking is it's going to be hard to actually get everybody to to get their proper spots in the brackets That's that's what I think would be difficult I think so too because it's not it's not like a It's it's hard to quantify every day how much honor you're going to be getting from world pvp Whereas before you could go in battlegrounds and be like, okay, I'm gonna play this many wins.  Let's this is how I think it'll play out Like let's say, you know after a couple weeks of ranking. Okay. Our faction has Seven bracket one spots. We can only have seven people in bracket one. Okay So we're we're running running around as a seven man death squad and we're all killing the same targets We're all playing for the same amount of time It's essentially a pre-made still but open world and you're all playing together You're on a schedule and you're all farming the same honor And even if one of you plays a couple hours less one day like that person that person could just catch up on on Monday morning or whatever, right so like I don't really see it being a big problem stacking brackets and planting brackets And I think you'll still have bracket one brackets. You may bracket three coordinated Hypothetically though, because all of our experiences Recently has been on private servers. It's one server. It's a very tight-knit group Everyone's usually in in close relations with everybody. Everyone's talking Now we're gonna get multiple servers.   That's like that's sort of how it plays out. I think it's gonna be really really interesting My Spurgs will always rise to the top and it's what I've seen in the past is it's typically not just people from one guild Like that's how it'll start. Okay guys, we're gonna have a guild pre-made But you'll have merges from other guilds and the Spurgs always rise to the top and then the Yeah, that's that's what it ends up. Yeah, the Spurg made exactly Yeah, basic physics Spurgs always rise to the top Yeah, no, I think I think it's gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out because I think uh I don't know. I think but I think both sides the argument are good Like it's just gonna be interesting like what what actually happens. I just think like That's the big thing. It's just gonna be hard to manage everybody But yeah, I know like for example if like my guild if my guild rolls on the same server as Soda poppin and we both go horde That's gonna be a shit show for honor, you know war like it's gonna be back and forth non-stop and I just like competing on the same faction I guess my biggest concern is like competing on the same faction for honor brackets with too many people can get really really bad like Nobody wants to do that right because it's just like you got like 50 people fighting for a top standing Now the good news or the silver lining I guess I should say is in patch 112 They changed the percentage of people that uh can achieve the top bracket spot if I remember correctly Um, so one from It went from point zero three, right? Yeah, I from point zero point zero one maybe to point zero three. Maybe it was point zero two But point zero two, so that's a little bit more leeway So you can have more people on your faction get rank 14 each week Then it was you know in the earlier patches. So silver lining I'm depending on how big the server population cap is And and how many people are actually in the honor system that week? How many have you know qualified or whatever? That you know that that could be affected. So if we have 10 000 population servers and and let's say, you know You have 10 000 people just hypothetically Um qualifying for honor that week you could have 30 people my calculations are right I think 30 people get uh Is that right 30 people standing one Is it 30 or three Terrible at math don't ask me. I think it's 30. I think it's 30 you can get standing one something like that Well, so that's that's also Yeah, what we're gonna see and this always happens. You'll you'll have people that are like invested in ranking They'll have a couple alts and on monday They'll be like they need to go get 15 hks to qualify for the the bracket system to expand bracket one and bracket two And the pyramid sort of trickles down You'll you'll have people in trade chat on monday, you know right before the reset Yo, everyone go get 15 hks if you haven't already go get 15 hks Or they'll log into their alts and get 15 hks to try to inflate the brackets to get one or two more people in there If they possibly can't Yeah, there it is I guess uh, what I was gonna say is like another interesting thing to debate would be I think just this whole 1.12 patch is bringing Both a lot of pros but also a shitload of cons the more we talk about it um because Well the way I at least for me like I think with the pvp items for one being incredibly overpowered that just It's just weird. Like I don't know if that's getting good for this thing of progression The only pvp weapons that are a problem are the healing weapons and the the main hand often cast or combo and like I said I may lay may lay dps weapons are not a are not a problem. They get updated in 1.6 Yeah, which is to be so we're not we're not getting the 1.6 updated weapons. No, no we are but Reasonably, you're probably not going to get them before bwl comes out. Anyway But They were finalized in 1.6. That's where they remained But even if we're getting them during bwl, like they're gonna be crazy for aq 40 Well, that that happened in that happened in retail vanilla 2 So so they they have the retail vanilla. Nobody there weren't a lot of spurs Well, so so and this is what I was gonna say like kind of like as a rebuttal of what you're saying Does do the concerns that you have do they really come from Uh, the the decisions for classic or do they come from the fact that so many people know like How to approach the game now if they want to play it at the highest level right and they want to mend max So that's that's the thing that you got to really look at I mean if if If they rolled out the game the way that they've said it the same way You know and we didn't know anything at all about like brackets and this and that then I I mean, maybe somebody would hit grand marshal by the time bwl came out But I mean probably not right reasonably, you know, surely somebody will but there's there There'd be more people that do it now than there would be have people not known about like how the brackets and stuff work Right, I mean, I would argue. It's the blue set. That's that's far more detrimental because the blue set can be You know, you can get that. Yeah, you can get that a few weeks Super fast two months and let's say let's say the uh, let's say phase two lasts three months You could potentially have, you know, you can get to rank eight in like like a month or something like that You could have four pieces if you want to go to rank tense like six weeks within six weeks you can have like Basically gear better than anything in bwl and bwl isn't even out yet more or less for some classes Well, that's that's the big problem. You'll have a two set So it's you have 17 pieces of gear, right? So you have two pieces that that'll be good for for a while I don't know. I I don't really think that's the end of the world. That's essentially how it played out in vanilla. Wow Um, I don't think it's that big of a deal So as far as like as far as like they're not being as many spurts back then as there are today, I mean Even if people back then didn't weren't intentionally ranking hard or didn't understand the bracket system because the entire thing is percentage based There were still people that were getting bracket one, uh, that are getting bracket one and bracket two, right? So there were still people that were ranking. It was it was still happening. Somebody is still going to get yeah, you're right Someone's still getting it inadvertently even if they're not intentionally Well, but here's the thing But here's the thing they're not they're not always going to get standing one You see what i'm saying like they might not get it every single week because that's the that's the biggest problem The biggest problem With the honor system in vanilla is probably that like the fact that you have to consider you can't take a break Because if you take a break like you lose one week, but you lose two weeks or more even depending on People definitely were not bracket stacking back So Yeah, I mean I guess my biggest sorry good, sonny but also with like the 1.12 system like tippets was saying uh or tips I was saying that like the percentage was increased as well Right, so that that means more people can get the rank rewards per week. Yeah, the bracket was like like 30 broader 10 bits why you gotta do me like that dude? We just met man No, dude, I forgive you dude. You're horrid. It's all good Yeah, yeah, he's horrid. It sounds about right All right, dude, okay, this is getting stony. He's stony our first horrid guest. No, no, no nixie. I'm nixie was horrid I'm gonna want to see it was on the border though. He was you know, he was faction curious Yeah, yeah, he was he was bifact factional Yeah, I'm dead warrior, baby lane time. I'm dead warrior.  I kind of want to keep talking about this actually. Um, so We're talking about when the honor system comes in right now just to catch it. I mean anybody up who's new We're talking about when the honor system comes in with no battlegrounds and stuff So the concern is people getting gear In this phase right here Uh, that is on par with gear from this phase as far as the armor goes and on par with gear from this phase phase Three as far as weapons go black wing layer aq 40 is is kind of the armor Um, now the difference the difference is uh, you have pvp gear and Item level is not really a metric that people really look at in vanilla wow But it's still there. It's it's there to to plug in as a variable into an equation for how many itemization points an item has And then they take those itemization points and that that's how that's what your stats are and they distribute them properly for Uh, whatever gear you have pvp gear is itemized in a way to have a little bit more stamina Generally speaking to have a little bit more stamina a little bit more tanky stats that are better for pvp pve gear is itemized better for more damage, right? Uh, so that's the big difference between aq 40 year And and pvp gear, but there are some pieces of pvp gear that end up being better than pieces of aq 40 year That makes sense. So, um Basically in between all this phase four, you would have a rathy basin come out That would be with the zg patch and then av and worson gulch will come in with black wing layer So you're going to have a lot of content in in each one of these phases that come in And they're going to be spread out. Hopefully pretty well Uh, we're all assuming that phase one takes not too long. Maybe maybe a couple months. Maybe a few months Same thing with phase two and then going into phase three with black wing layer now in retail vanilla in retail vanilla black wing layer was put into the game about eight months in so If we're talking about maybe phase two being a few months Maybe two months. Maybe three months max Um, how long would you say phase one is for it to kind of match up with that timeline as as closely as possible? Surely, it's not going to be the exact same but I don't know like The way the way it sounds like the way we're talking about it Then it's like it sounds like six months max before black wing layer comes out And I I think it might be closer to like the seventh month mark. Maybe even the eight month mark Yeah, like in my mind phase one is five or six months And uh, and then phase two is two months long, which would be bw out seven or eight months I think like last for five but five months will be longer than a long time Yeah, phase one would be if phase one would be terrible with five months because you literally like There's no content. There's no content especially Like personally, I'm going to be bored during phase one if it's five or six months But most people they have no idea what's going on. It's going to be their first time They're not going to be min maxing. They're just like it's going to take them Three or four months to hit level 60 Like so guys like us probably people that are watching as well We're like We're like the 1% right like no one's going to nerd out as hard as we are if you're watching right now You're a vanilla wow turbosberg more than likely I I don't think that they should cater the timeline to people I guess in all honesty like they have to they have to appeal to The majority that's fair. That's fair. But why why would you make it longer out of curiosity? What's what's the incentive to make it longer on blizzards? I'm assuming to let people get to level 60 and actually get geared It's it's not the level experience The leveling experience is so hard for a complete newcomer. Are you kidding me? Will you imagine a fresh level one warrior who's never played the game in his life?  Wow, like that's not really a deviation Then bwos on month seven or eight. It's that's pretty much how it happened back in the day Wasn't it three and a half months for phase one? I don't know might I can't remember the exact wasn't it three and a half months for molten core and then Dire Molcans out after that. I was gonna say I don't see phase one being like I think it's four months tops And it's not gonna have to be exactly at like the four month. Okay exactly, you know 122 days boom. It's I think it's gonna be like roughly I think it'll be less than four months, but I think four months tops, you know At the same time it is an MMO and it's always been an MMO and there's always the catch up factor Like it doesn't matter if new content comes out these people can still level to 60 You know what I mean?  Are they really though? They're just releasing content along the way and it's like these people will eventually do that content too You know what I mean? Like they're gonna get this I think the biggest thing I guess like my main point is it like what I had said is pretty pretty in line with how it actually happened Okay, I I think the biggest thing is that um And this is what I'm going with the six phases of content release and this is something that um I think it's pretty well documented that a lot of people are really excited about the six phases versus four phases I think the goal was originally yeah, it was originally four phases. They announced that at blizzcon and that was not good. That was terrible Um, oh my god, yeah Yeah, so whenever they went to six phases I think the idea behind their decisions or they want to make a game that's going to work for everybody It's going to work for the casual players is going to work for the hardcore players um Now you can't every decision can't be made to appeal to everybody But the product of all those decisions needs to be something that works for everybody if that makes sense. So The concern with that's a tall order, dude Well, well, here's the thing. Here's the concern. Here's the concern with four phases um from before was that Basically, there's too much content in too few phases and because of that all like the super hardcore players We're going to go through rush through and they were going to smoke all the more casual players And then they were probably going to get bored While the casual players are just going to get wrecked just stomped on and then they would be like well I don't even want to play this anymore because I'm I'm so far behind right so it was too uh It was too polarizing right with the six phases you can go in and you can break up the content a little bit more Spread it out and you have more hype right because okay instead of having to wait Let's say phase one six months phase two six months phase three now It's like okay three or four months in we can do phase two. Okay another another two or three months phase three So you have a more constant stream of content being released to you So the super hardcore players can't get too far ahead While the more casual players can you know take it in as as the game was kind of more More so how the game was meant to be taken in without getting just absolutely wrecked And it ends up being better for everybody. So I think their general philosophy of how they want to approach the game Is it's kind of that like is this going to be something that that works for uh, the general audience is the um The the the sum of all the decisions going to be better for everybody. That's what I think Yeah, like for me my biggest concern with phase one and phase two is making sure that phase two is less than Three months long because I think that having people go into bwl like a phase two is four months And your raid roster if you've been managing that's kind of yeah If if you have 15 people in your raid roster go into bwl day one with rank 14 gear with the weapons and stuff Like that really undermines the difficulty of bwl and just it just makes it like a lot less fun It makes it way way more trivial and so I can my opinion I think phase two perfect length two months at most if you've been managing your brackets You have a couple people that are ranked 12 um I would like to see a two month phase two. I also think like Maybe and I can understand this like one concern with the open world pvp phase phase two is that it would You know like if there's roaming desk wads or flight path camping you would turn people away from classic wow I think that's I don't think it's going to be a huge deal But if phase two goes on for too long, I could see that being a problem So let's let's say phase two one for four months and like you're trying to level and you're a new player to the game and Like between level 48 and 60 it takes you a month and a half just because a mix of you're new to the game You're solo leveling And everywhere you go you're getting camped like that's probably pretty frustrating, right? So I think two months is like the best timeframe for that Yeah, the more I look at it the more I kind of think that phase two actually probably shouldn't last that long at all It's really not that much content. It's just some features being introduced and world bosses So it's like why drag that along Yeah from launch. Yeah from launch to to bg's it should be like no more than six months if I'm looking at the schedule here Uh dire mall came out less than or three months and a half after release So dire mall three months after With the world bosses. So phase one should really only be three and a half to four months And then from there another approximately three months till bg's I mean you could go you could go three and a half two and a half and then you have seven months in that's blackling layer Which is like a month sooner. It's a month sooner than uh blackling layer was actually released and retail vanilla But that's that's probably fine How long would you guys want ideally phase three to last out of curiosity? Uh Phase because I I'm looking at it. That looks like the golden that looks like the golden phase to be yeah Well, honestly, even even even in it even into phase four like I think really phase four is is probably that phase So phase I think phase four is the golden one. Yeah. Well, because Three and phase four or yeah, so we're gonna have a long time Yeah, you have a b in the game and then zg helps the casters out a lot Um, I think you could go into phase you can go into phase three Let's say like the seventh six or seventh month mark I I I feel like six is just a little bit fast um but if you go into phase three at the seven month mark and You're sitting in phase three for let's say Hmm, let's look at this a little bit so if you're sitting in phase three for another two to three months And then that now you're the ten month mark and then ab and zg goes on for two more months Then aq comes out about a year after which I think a year after I think aq came out at the 13 month mark in in retail vanilla Uh, I I think I think it was like 13 or 13 and a half month Like are they have they kind of uh, I think they every every like Everything that they've said so far has basically been like they want to try and emulate vanilla as much as possible Like they want to try and go back and and basically they want to do it the right way So if you go and look at this and let's say at the one year mark you have aq come out so you have Let's say six months to do the war effort That you know that could take however long it's dependent on server do the war effort open the gates go do aq and then like six months later You open up nax and then nax phase six lasts for six months And then at the end of 24 months at two years they go and they release a new set of fresh servers That's that's kind of the way that I see it playing out You're saying aq 40 phase is gonna last six months Yeah, that's how it was Yeah, so it was Yeah, but the thing is that phase is so it's so long for a few reasons right One is the fact that you have to open the gates There's a lot of content and like if you start not everybody is going to be on the cutting edge You know what I mean, of course So they they have to naturally like stretch it out more and more as the as the stuff goes on later on You can go like boom boom boom boom boom boom stretch it out a little bit But there's going to be a lot going on within that time because people are going to want to catch up and do all that And also with zg and stuff like that coming out in the phase before I think I think that's likely what's going to end up happening because it's it let's say it's a six month phase Right or even a five month phase. It's not really that It's really going to be like almost like a month last maybe because I could see this happening on a lot of servers Okay, we can go in and we can open the gates like that we can do that if we wanted to but no We're going to hold on and we're going to try and get three or four scarab lords You know what I mean for a guilt. Yeah, so someone snipes it Well and somebody could go and snipe it too But then at that at that point like you got to be ready on the ball But like I I know what's happened before on private servers is like you get the top guilds together and they're like No, they plant the flag and say we're running this And nobody else can really do anything about it So everybody just kind of waits for them to open it up How do you guys like this is kind of random? But you guys ever thought about like how we're we're going to be playing world of warcraft for like another two years Yeah, at least then maybe burning crusade and then maybe we're at then burning Yeah, and then we'll graduate high school again. It'll be great. Yeah It'll be it'll be outstanding. It'll be good stuff This is going to sound weird, but like I really want to be addicted to wow again And that's not I'll I'll log into retail wow and I'll I'll have a thought like I really want to enjoy this I'm going to try to do something and I just I can't feel that way man. Like classic wow is going to be great, dude Yeah For sure for sure Real quick guys, uh, just a quick little shout out if you guys haven't Please please please go ahead and do this if you have not followed stay safe tv If you have not followed tips out, baby If you haven't followed sony all their handles are on the screen right now mods If you could if you could put their their links in the chat, please to help us out Please go follow them go sub to their youtube channels Um Regularly it's it's myself and tips on the show and then we have a guest on sony's our guest today Uh, and obviously you guys can see that we're mostly talking about pvp um And also we're going to be doing a uh, we're going to be doing q&a at the end So you can ask any questions to us uh here on the show today and and we usually start with twitter So make sure to follow us on twitter tweet at us hashtag classicast. That's usually how I look at everything And uh, we can go from there. So, um Again kind of continuing on with the pvp discussion um Something that has kind of come up lately and I think that this is something that's very important is the concept of like tournament realms or um dueling servers stuff like that, um For for the actual release of classic wow a place where people can go on there You can get like an instant level 60 and you can test stuff out and you can uh, you can do with other players This is something that happens in like the private server scene. Um But also for the sake of like content creation youtube and stuff like that like people will go on there And they'll make videos of like oh like looking me using the certain item because it's something that they didn't actually go and attain um But for you know the average player and and we know what people would want to do like if we want to host like A dueling tournament or something like that. Maybe it's not something that's always open to the public but This is something that blizzard could come in and and host like actual events and I mean everybody's always e-sports this e-sports that look vanilla is not like a real e-sport But one thing that's for sure is that it's damn entertaining And I think that uh, we've seen this in the private server scene where people will do like pre-made versus pre-made battlegrounds And uh, people will host dueling tournaments and stuff like that and it's uh, it's something that's fun And something that people want to watch so having some sort of support in place where like blizzard could activate this if they want Is uh, it's something that I I know i'm certainly a big fan of and and when When would you want that? Well, it would just be like just in classic, right? So Like just in classic. I mean just just have like Well, what I'm talking about the perfect way to do it is to have these like tournament realms Or like ptr is what everyone would call them at the end of each raid tier and they're up for maybe two or three weeks And it's something that blizzard can advertise and get hype around and you introduce it at the end of a raid tier When things are kind of like fizzled out anyway, and it's a low key time period and like I think that if you have them up permanently, it's way less hype It's kind of stale and stagnant But if you have like Four four tournament realms and it comes up at the end of each raid tier and they're up for two or three weeks Like that's a big hype event people come forward to they can raise They can raise prize pools and they can organize events and that'd be badass And like you said vanilla wow is not an esport. I don't think that's what this is about Exactly and player interaction and what better way to do that than to have a big dual tournament where you have Hundreds of people standing in the crowd during each other on and have big crazy pop and streams I mean there's obviously a desire for it because both tips and I Hosted dual tournaments. I mean thousands of viewers. It was crazy people loved it. It was a lot of fun There was a private server event. It was a dual tournament also. I think and that did very very well like there's obviously Well, and dude, is this something that people do? like I find it shocking that you actually want something like that as fun so Just because you guys talk so much about like, you know character development character progression like The thing with these arena tournament realms because they had them in wrath. I played them They had them in burning crusade too. Yeah, and burning crusade too. Yeah for tournaments It it takes away entirely from the progression But back then obviously it's more fun to like mess around another class. Well here you can test out everything That's not necessarily what it's about, right? It's not about it's not about playing the game like playing classic Wow like in that sense like of course not Yeah, so like this is something that I know like I know people do this like in the in the pvp scene on private servers Like somebody will host their own like a locally hosted private server and they will go pre-made versus pre-made and they will do like all day You have like two of the top pre-mades just go through and they would just just play against each other just for fun and Well until somebody gets upset and spurges out and then d-doss is the server and and then you can't play anymore So so this is something that happens in the private server scene where like people will go in and they They will they will play and they will practice against each other They'll just do it for fun and just for bragging rights and they go spurge out on on discord or whatever about it and I think that's fine, but like my point is that this is going to happen whether Whether blizzard wants to or not people are going to make these private servers and they're going to go do this And like even for me, I've said this yeah Yeah, yeah, because it's it happens like there's I mean like I would say one of the more active private servers Right now is like that for people who aren't interested in like playing through classic right now But they want to like kind of dick around or whatever and And just just practice dueling and stuff like you know, that's that's how I feel about it So it's just one of those things that I think if people are going to do this Anyway, then adding some sort of support for it not where it's open all the time kind of like stay safe said But having some sort of support for it or If there's any sort of like cool events or whatever like you said at the end of like a raid tier or whatever Like every few months you open it up for a few weeks. I think that's something that could be cool No, I think I actually do agree like I think at the end of a raid tier once all the content's fizzled out Like that's kind of what they did with tournament realms, too Yeah, like they only they only really introduced tournament realms at the end of content and like one time they introduced it for ESL, I think but you only had access to it if you got invited to ESL And so I think that's I think that's a fine idea Yeah, and it's funny like uh, you know stacy mentioned the dueling tournaments that we have said before that I I just had never crossed my mind like I remember I participated in dueling tournaments back in vanilla We would host them like a level 30 and stuff like that in guru basher. Yeah, yeah But but I never knew it was like such a spectacle and how much people wanted to watch it until you know, I hosted mine Stay safe hosted his and they're both really successful And then recently we had that other big tournament and it was really successful all things considered And it's like wait a minute this this is actually a thing and again, you know that There's a certain realm right now that people have been playing on it's really popular And maybe this is just a thing that you like, you know, stay safe said at the very end of content the last You know just the last couple of weeks maybe two weeks Blizzard allows the community to host, you know, little mini tournaments on these realms with the gear that's available on live And yeah, just just for fun just a community event. That's it. Yeah, like it's it's such a gamey for blizzard It's such an easy win. It's such a fan service move Like I don't really see a good argument not to do it other than if you're just like super spurred turbo No changes because it didn't happen this way and vanilla wow and can't have like well doesn't even affect your game That's the thing. It doesn't even affect the server area. Yeah, it's completely separated thing Like it's it would just be a ton of fun. Yeah I think for blizzard the It would be depending on, you know, how much it costs to run these servers and You know, what how does blizzard benefit? I that's what they would be looking at.  You know what I mean like Listen, I'm really stoked.   I mean tips outs dual term it had like 10k viewers and mine had like seven care, whatever like It's it's huge. It's it's an enormous amount of eyeballs on this game And people will see this these crazy play moves of these crazy dual gameplay and stuff like this and be like, wow I want to play that game. Okay. I'm gonna log into classical. I'm gonna level up Like it's it's just free advertising I think Well, and just to put it into perspective like the world first race is going on and there's World first race streams that don't have that many views, you know Like the like that's that's on the level of some of the biggest world first race streams You know, well, it's the it's the one competitive aspect of vanilla dueling, you know I mean like yeah battlegrounds and even then Go ahead. Sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off No, I was just gonna say pre-made battlegrounds like they get pretty stale If you get too top tier teams going at it like it's kind of a little bit Well, I think I think it's easier to follow I think I think battlegrounds are in vanilla. It's easier to follow than in uh Then in retail like in retail like there's there's kind of like stupid stuff to it And like there's like the timer on war song Gulch, which in a sense that's like, okay Well, you need to have a time limit for you know, they might see it as like you need to have a time limit for an event or whatever But I think that totally changes the middle of war song Gulch and retail. Wow versus vanilla. Wow so I don't know. I think I think it could be cool to watch like you have like spectator cam you're flying around It's like, oh look at how look how this team is moving like this group is moving here in a rathy basin Like they're they're you know russian blacksmith. I don't know. I think it could be pretty cool to watch actually Um, I just I just know war song with like two fully stacked best in slot pre-made to the best compositions two druids Gart like it's just for me. It's not it's interesting to watch I've never been a fan of battlegrounds though like rated battlegrounds In any in any competitive because the killing is just too slow, you know, like you get fully You get best in slot healers healing a flag carrier. There's no Increased damage to flag carriers back then, right? I'm pretty sure that's not it's not Yeah, so I can get very dull in my opinion, but that's just me everyone has different interests Yeah, yeah Part of me with the tournament realm stuff like I could see from buzzer's point of view how they're like, okay This tournament realm issue It's like it's a situation where you give a mouse a cookie is going to ask for a glass of milk Right you give you give a vanilla player a classic server He's going to ask for a tournament realm kind of deal like I I would understand that kind of argument, but at the same time like It's such a free w man. Like it would be so fun. Like it's such an easy win for them I don't know it would be amazing. You know many things have been easy wins for blizzard that they have been done Like esport tabards for one. Sorry.  So I don't care anymore I actually didn't know that but but yeah, like If blizzard it would be amazing if blizzard allowed us, you know Just for research and development purposes to host a tournament before a classic, you know Just just to see you know, just to gauge how much demand there would be for this type of thing If anyone from blizzard is watching That would be that would be great And if it gets a lot of views and a lot of engagement that maybe we could have tournament realms Possibly. Yeah, just wanted to say that Well, let me put this way our our our tournaments had thousands of people on the demo This is a two week long impromptu quickly planned level 19 cap demo with tons of bugs auto attack bugs and regen rate bug It was it was the most scuffed environment. You could possibly have a tournament. It was so bad Still thousands of viewers man. Like there's the desire there And who doesn't want to see and it was hard counter warlocks again That's true. Yes true and the other thing is it was behind a $50 paywall to even play on it and still Still it was crazy popping. Yeah Yeah, I mean, I think I think it'll be really cool to to to see some stuff like that You know, even if it's even if it's not on a tournament realm I think people are going to host dueling tournaments on their servers their own servers and whatnot And I think I think all that it's going to be really really really cool. So for sure um I go ahead. I want to go ahead pretty soon and and we started a little bit late today. We had some issues and stuff getting started But we do want to go into q&a here pretty soon. So guys if you have any questions, please go ahead and tweet at us with hashtag classcast, I'm going to be checking twitter and And picking out some good questions for For us to talk about if you have any questions for any of us on here Sony tips out baby or stay safe tv. We're going to start taking a look at some of that stuff This is actually a good one. This is a good one to start blizzard stop publicly releasing subscriber metrics by wad Do you guys think that they will release sub numbers for classic? um And this is from brandon So I think that's I think that's a fair question, right?  It's just going to be one sub for both games So they're surely going to have a huge boost in sub numbers So they might like try and flex and be like, hey, we have you know, 10 million people playing again or whatever and that's fine Uh, but I think it's going to be weird if they like all of a sudden they want to talk about it when it's good And then not talk about it when it's bad because what ends up happening is people are just going to assume if they're not talking about it Then let's say let's say they talk about it at 10 million or 8 million or 6 million Right, whatever number it is And then all of a sudden they say they're not going to talk about sub numbers anymore Then they're going to assume that the sub number that they say is always lower than whenever they came back and announced the sub number again That's how I feel about it Yeah, so my understanding of why they stopped talking about sub numbers was because they switched to more like micro transactions And they they added the in-game shop and so rather than sub numbers now we have like the quarterly revenue reports I don't think I don't think we'll have sub numbers for classic WoW or retail WoW ever again What I do think like I don't know if you guys remember the what was it the quarter four earnings report that we all talked about and watched They they showed WoW's revenue, right? um I think that I think that classical WoW's revenue will just be rolled into that So the WoW revenue column there on the on the graph that we saw a couple months ago That will be an addition of classic WoW. It's a shared sub and retail WoW In addition to retail WoW's micro transactions. I think it'll all be the same thing So I I don't really think we'll have a metric to see like how successful classic WoW is I think hypothetically if we did if they had separate subscriptions, I Especially don't think Blizzard would release sub numbers then because it would just Blunder it would show how bad retail would probably be doing because Imagine if they released numbers and the classic was higher than retail Like yeah, that would look so bad for the company. So I I think it will be I think it will be and you're right They're not going to come out and say all right guys retail WoW is three million subs and classic WoW Has a six million active players or subs right? They're never going to say right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think uh, I think what would be one of the best things that could come out of classic is If classic Is a success which we're all hoping that it is if classic is a success and people come in and they say, hey Okay, why are people liking classic so much? Let's break this down and what elements of classic can we take and put into the retail game and what are people really not enjoying about retail and You can kind of fix the retail game up a little bit. I've said this from the beginning You have two different games for two different markets of people It's like a Venn diagram and right in the middle There's going to be some people who like classic and people who like retail. There's people who like both um I do think that you you you probably should have two games for two different markets But if this if a certain Circle in the Venn diagram starts to get smaller and smaller Then you got to find a way to make that circle bigger, right? Even if that circle starts to Go into this circle. You see what i'm saying Um, maybe I didn't visualize that the best way, but now it's perfect. I saw it didn't eon Is that how you say his name? Ion Ian. Yeah Didn't Ian say something about uh, wanting to make retail Like take hints of classic design and put that into retail. Did you mention something about that? I think that was like something he said, uh When they when they were talking about bfa development, right a little bit And uh, like they definitely brought a couple things back with uh, like more world world engagement and they brought back a couple class buffs But I think a lot of it was sort of a miss. Well, there was a recent clip with with ian and lore the other day um when they were talking about a potential level squish And how the conversation has been brought up several times And uh, the idea behind it would essentially to be add more to add more I guess, um Exciting things that you get at each level. So instead of having to wait, you know 15 is it 15 levels for a talent point now? Maybe you'd only wait like three levels or maybe just one level just like you had back in vanilla stuff like that so, um I mean, I personally believe 100 percent If classic is successful not just by our standards, but more importantly by whatever Standard or metric blizzard is going to be examining. I can definitely see the possibility of some features being you know Reimplemented I guess, uh, you know into into the live game, but at the end of the day, um You know, it's good to have two games that are a little bit different too that appeal to different audiences So we'll see how blizzard manages to do I'm more in line with that Like I think classical and retail. Wow are intentionally appealing to very different demographics I think that they have their retail wow demographic unlock and I think that uh Like classic WoW is an attempt to peel this more like old school RPG MMO style of gamer I I would honestly be very surprised if they start taking like successful aspects of classic WoW and putting them into retail WoW because I'm not I'm not sure and I don't know if they know how positively the retail WoW player base would Respond to those gameplay aspects like they those those the people that are enjoying retail retail WoW right now They just might not want that stuff, you know, and when do you think the demographic shifted? I I think it's been a slow shift really like Because everything after cataclysm, I think well, I think what's happened is it? Yeah, maybe even wrath Yeah, like I think what kind of happened over the years is that like people kind of fell out of the game and new people Started playing who maybe like didn't know what the game was like before what's the hype about and they happen to enjoy the game as it was so you've kind of got this like churning of the bucket going on and You know there might be people who are intrigued by classic or excited about classic who haven't even played it Sorry excited about classic who haven't even played it, but I think the buckets been churned quite a bit to the point where You just have a lot of players who they they don't really like the type of gameplay that classic has to offer and that's fine Right. There's just different different games for different people. That's fine But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything in classic Putting everything in classic in retail would be bad or everything in classic and retail would be good I think that's one of those things like dude. I hear this argument all the time Well, it was that way in vanilla. It's like okay guys just because something was that way in vanilla doesn't necessarily mean It's good for classic, you know and like obviously, you know me like I'm big on vanilla I'm big on classic all this stuff, but it's like just using that as a blanket statement for it was that way before Doesn't always make it good for the current version of the game. I Don't know. It's just you got it. There's so many different factors in there It's a lot harder than that So just having it like vanilla is vanilla and retail is retail like I think that's fine So yeah, no change. Exactly. I Really never dissected it about like when it kind of shifted because to me I just figured that the game was going to shit and they didn't you know, I didn't think about it Maybe they were just trying to the appeal to a different demographic entirely because it's still an MMO You know, that's that's what right. It's still an MMORPG like how are you gonna cater an MMORPG to a different demographic? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I know like I think I think people are misunderstanding We're talking about retail a little bit at this point like this this kind of like spun off into something else So I'm not necessarily talking about like I'm not talking about this way for like it used to be that way in vanilla And we're talking about classic. I'm talking about Taking everything from vanilla and putting it into retail. Wow and saying that it would be better for retail Wow, like certain things are better for the game Based on everything else that's involved in the game It's one piece in a puzzle as opposed to Just looking at every piece of that puzzle individually. That's kind of that's the point. I was trying to get across I think that's a good point like so two things that I really dislike about retail Wow, I mean we can talk about like LFR and flying mounts I think those are really bad additions to the game And I think that that like changed the way players interact with the game a lot But I think if they took those things out of the game today that would up like I'm not really invested in retail Wow right now. I'm not playing it. I've been logged in a couple months if they took those things out Sure, they would be appealing to me, but they're not appealing to the current retail web demographic I think that would upset a lot of current retail web players So there's really like there's no reason for them to do that, right? They need to keep the people that are playing happy, right now. There's certain things like Sorry, go ahead We're flying mounts dumb in tbc because I really do not remember flying mounts being I love flying mounts In tbc a lot of people love flying mounts and I was one of them But it's one of those things hindsight is 2020 and then you look back on it and you're like, well There were some cool world pvp things that happened in burning crusade like they had the like the halah battles I always thought were fun in negran. Yeah, uh, but elemental plateau Yeah, elemental plateau all that stuff was was really really cool And uh, like, you know flying mounts were a big part I'm flying in general was a big part of that because in halah you flew around you dropped the bombs and all this stuff but um I think that there was world pvp in burning crusade But the fact that now instead of playing on this plane you were now playing in this area It totally changed everything for world pvp. And that's that's what a lot of people didn't like about flying mounts and burning crusade So hindsight is 2020 flying mounts really changed the way in which players interact with the world You know, I I don't think that like getting places should really be that convenient I think that flight paths like go flight paths like are like a perfect bridge between convenience And having to interact with the world around you So in vanilla wow, if you're running from the top of a zone to the bottom of the zone You have to dodge monsters or dodger the players and you're forced to interact You like you might see your friends out there and that feels cool Like you might see horde players if i'm playing alliance, I have to either fight them or run around them There's monsters or elite monsters. I have to dodge like the world feels more alive when I can't just fly up 5000 feet It's also another thing lore pointed out that like most people had 60% flying back then You know like now everyone just has like insta 310 you could only get 310 back in tbc Maybe even wrath. I can't remember if you got gladiator Right, uh, I think so that I think it was the gladiator mount was uh, yeah Because that's how I got that's how I got 310. It was gladiator mounts and ashes of all our yeah, that's right So with people flying on 60% I think that I actually 60% looking back at it was like an interesting spin on it because like Yeah, you could travel, you know every axi, but it was slower. You know what I mean?  I I remember seeing I mean, obviously, that's not like there were that many gladiators But like most of the people I knew that got gladiator like there was no way they were going to be able to afford Epic flying mount because they're same people Dude pvpers like just were like always just like scratching the bottom of the barrel for like repair costs That's what I remember. Like that's how I was So Yeah, 60% until I got gladiator in season two. Yeah in season two. I'd see like 60% Yeah I mean, I think the concept of trying to retrofit retail wow with elements of classic I think it sounds a lot better in kind of theory than it would be in reality Barring like a few exceptions that might be really good for the game I think what you know the ideal situation kind of the pie in the sky situation Would be if classic is so successful And it shows an approved demand for a more old school style mmo That blizzard would in turn at some point in the future whether it be a few years after Maybe even after they launched tbc, etc Maybe they you know, they they take another crack at at the old school mmo genre entirely and we get a new game I think I think we might see a whole new arc of gaming in general because like what did we see with brs When they started catching traction, right?  I like that would be dope. I think hypothetically. This is this was my thought is I've said this since the classic announcement is that we might be like on on the cusp of like a renaissance in gaming Where and you already you're you're starting to see like a bunch of companies are like Oh, they're they're re-releasing a bunch of old games either remaster or just re-release for you know any platform consoles all this stuff and I think that's cool and I think Somebody at some point is going to say why the hell do these guys like these old games more than the new games? And it's not just nostalgia, right? I very very much it's so annoying because it's like dude I'm glad you're not the only one. Well, dude. Okay. So this is how this is exactly how I feel I came back and whenever I started the whole reason I got back into vanilla was I was working I was in the real world. I was doing football.  I've played a rep paladin since You know the very beginning I started playing a week after launch and I've always played a rep paladin So I make a rep paladin and you know, I give him a goofy mustache I normally have a goatee my character normally has a goatee and I gave him a mustache because I like Okay, I'm just gonna make him look stupid because I'll uh, I'll quit after like a month or so Maybe I'll get to 60 and quit So, um, I start playing and I start having these these experiences and I start like I start making friends with people and I start doing things and I'm like, dude Why is this game better than I remember it being? I thought that I was going to play this for like a month or so And I I swear to god, I I genuinely feel this way. I had more fun Playing on like on private sort of vanilla. Wow, like playing vanilla again in 2018 2017 Then I had playing vanilla Back in the day like it's just how I remember it like I'm like I had fun back in the day But I had more fun playing it more recently just because I'm older. I'm smarter I I can I can make better decisions. I have more time to play. There's more things that I can do I think that the design of the game is genuinely good So yeah 100% on top of that. And of course, this is my anecdote, but having spent a lot of time on private vanilla. Wow fan forums Most people that are playing those fan forums They they never played vanilla. Wow in the first place Like they heard about it or their retail wow players and they were interested about like the origins of wow You know, they they heard an art article about nastares or whatever And so they go back and they try it out and they fall in love with it And it's the first time playing they never played vanilla. So it can't be installed for these people I'm gonna be honest like I haven't been having any fun playing any video games lately But the most fun I've been having recently is on these vanilla wow fan forums Like This is exactly how I feel right now, especially with being as close as we are to a classic like like it's real Like I and I and I felt this way since I got banned right because I got I got banned the classic launch came out Oh here's the thing. I'll give you the timeline quick rundown classic classic was announced I was like, well crap. Okay. Well, I'm gonna finish out my time here I don't know if I want to re-roll on a fresh or anything like that, but I'll I'll finish out my time here I'll go through I'll clear naks. I'll stream it whatever all this stuff Get banned. So whenever I get banned It just kind of like I'm really thinking about this stuff And I'm like, you know, I still wanted to play because I wanted to finish the job Right. I wanted to go through I wanted to clear naks doing my ret thing Whatever just being a meme and and I did that and then like a new fresh server comes out And I'm like dude with classic coming out on the horizon Like I just don't want to do it again And there's other stuff that I want to do And and I I especially feel that way now more than ever because like we know it's right around the corner Like it's it's happening this summer. So For me it was like just been writing I've just been writing these huge essays on how to level right right exactly And posting them on the fan forums So so yeah, so for me like it's it's just been one of those things where it's like I And I know a lot of people a lot of streamers feel this way It's like people will turn on their streams and they like they don't have like a game that they want to That they want to play they don't have a game to grind and there's a lot of you know People who are not streamers who feel this way They're they basically don't have the game that they want to play But then at the same time like they might not want to go play on a priser because it's like dude Like what am I going to do? I'm going to level all the way to 60 and then as soon as I hit 60 reroll again like come on So I think I think that's how a lot of people feel right now and it's just just hold on it's so close We like we just got to hold on hopefully we'll get a beta and in the next I don't know like maybe month or so I think and and We're we're running kind of low on time. This might be a topic for the next classic cast but uh Just talking about like beta predictions and stuff like that and we've all talked about it on our streams again Please please please please go follow stay safe tv go follow tips out baby go follow sony Sony's our guest today. Normally it's myself and and stay safe and tips who are here And then and then we we have a guest come join us so If you haven't done that please go follow them as well as this channel But yeah, like we we always talk about this stuff We're constantly talking about vanilla. Wow, whether we're playing whether we're playing vanilla. Wow, or sorry not vanilla whether playing retail wow or Playing another game or doing whatever. I think that's a core component of all of our channels Like we're always down to talk to vanilla almost always down to talk vanilla So, yeah, I think All I do on my streams recently is just bitch about how bad games are now And then just talk about how much I want to play classic and like Just theory eyes all this stuff and talk about the guild and plans and everything. It's just I I don't care about any games. Like I played for tonight for a while, but it's just That's not even an MMO. I'm just an MMO gamer. So that's not gonna cure my itch at all Yeah, it's just it's hard time for gamers Yeah, let's get to another question here. This is from yine who I unbanned for my chat today so Yine asks You know big streamers are gonna come back and they're gonna stream classic. Wow shroud So on tim the time and we all know a lot of guys are gonna be coming back and and streaming classic. He says These guys will introduce a huge amount of new players to blizzard games So whenever the new retail gets launched classic will probably help the new expansion pack get close to the record high sub number thoughts um Maybe Honestly, it could be that's a good way of looking at it As far as viewership on twitch goes that's going to be something interesting to look at because if you look at Runescape and old school runescape. They're in two different sections. Are they going to do the same thing for Wow and wow classic I'd imagine so maybe yeah, so I don't know it'll it'll be interesting either way You know in regards to what you're saying whether people are watching in the wow section or in the classic wow section It's the same sub. It's a shared sub. So yeah, probably I mean not probably but potentially like I mean if blizzard gets back to that 12 and a half million I think if blizzard gets back to that 12 and a half million number They are Going to get worked. Like I don't think any Realistically, I don't think they're expecting to get back to that number to have that many people play classic because If they have the original amount of servers open up that they had in retail vanilla, that is That is not going to be enough for having as many subs available. You know what I'm saying Yeah, and based on based on the information we've received so far It seems like they're going to have less servers than they had they could yeah original launch I think original launch had something like 94 u.s servers And based on a relatively recent tweet from e and we could potentially get like 20 30 servers for classic Yeah, I think so too Yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be insane, dude. I hope we get to log in day one. That's why I hope Yeah, I think it's gonna be good. Um, yeah, they're probably gonna have to get some more hamsters It's for sure As as far as like the big streamer thing it depends on what they're saying on stream if they're if they're Week one playing classical and they're like wow classical is great. Um, retail wow is terrible in comparison, right people Their viewers are not going to be as eager to go over play retail. Wow, right? It depends on what they say. I think and how they kind of spin it. Yeah, it'll be really interesting. Um Hmm I'm sure not understand this question. Uh Do you think they'll tune raids slash open world content properly for the 1.12 items that'll be in the game from the beginning of classic Uh, I think they're going to try and keep it as Close to vanilla as possible like Surely, you know, there's going to be a little bit of a difference with having like 1.12 versions of items in From the beginning, but you're not going to have all the 1.12 items in the game from the beginning, right? So there's a few select items that are going to make a difference as far as like molten core progression and this and that and People joke about like the difficulty of vanilla. Wow, like quote difficulty of vanilla. Wow The difficulty of vanilla. Wow, so much of it comes from the preparation of the game, right? Like preparation knowledge and being able to manage a raid roster because you might know something and it oh Okay, like I can run out against uh, we're fighting baron get it and I know that I have to run out So I don't get smoked, but there's 39 other people in that raid And I guarantee you you will almost always see And not I'm not almost always see but but in in the in your rating in your rating career I guarantee you will see people died of baron getten I have died to baron getten because I've been like getting greedy and I'm trying like I try and stay in there for as many ticks as I can, you know, so it's just like It just happens, you know what I mean Or living bomb dude Okay, oh you got the bomb run out.  Well, they allow stuff like that in the infernal thing Do you think like releasing demons? Do you think they'll allow that or that be considered griefing? I think I think at a certain point it becomes griefing, but I think if you just do it It's like whatever like, you know what I mean like Yeah, I think at a certain point it becomes griefing Like if if you're doing something to where like people can't like use the auction house at all It becomes griefing but just let them like let the kids play like I know I had I think what you said about people Undermining the preparation it required for vanilla is actually so true because it's not that the game mechanics themselves are hard But people don't realize how prepared you have to get even for mc Like people are gonna try to get an mc week two with like a full rate of 40 Dude, they are gonna get clapped man. Like I don't think people understand There's gonna be healers like running on fumes with mana like, you know 25 of the way into the fight. Yeah, you know, it's just it doesn't It's a lot harder In addition to that I guarantee you're gonna have like some more like like fresh casual guilds that maybe haven't played vanilla wow before They're gonna go into mc. Maybe it's like week five or week six.  What what the heck is this? What how do we summon ragnaros?  You need to run out of the raid But because you can instant cast spells you can instant cast hearth hearth out of the raid and then log out and because it's a debuff debuffs keep taking away while you're offline Whereas buffs don't so you you hearth you're in and in instant log out Wait 30 seconds or whatever log back in The debuffs gone and then good. You can you can get summoned back to the raid. That's one way people do it so I remember I did this one time and dps dps dps instant hearth and I hearth And I would just like sat there in the in and iron forge and I was like laughing about something And I just I just brain for I just forgot that So I blew up and I killed everybody in the iron forge in just because like a complete brain for like I didn't even think about it So, uh, so yeah, that's just like stuff like that happens I mean, I don't know like if if I were to do that and get banned for it or something I would be like come on like I obviously didn't want to die with my world buffs. That's the whole reason I left but Hey, that's how good they're lenient with Griefing things like that, you know, because it's just like You're you're putting gms that know about these bugs into a game that has these bugs But back then the gms didn't really like know about the bugs So it's going to be interesting to see how they deal with punishment towards those kind of things Yeah, let them I can't imagine a world where stuff like that is banable like let's be like If if they're banning for stuff like that, even if people are doing it intentionally like it's hilarious Come on. Like it's not that big of a deal. I'm the war. I'm the warlock They would drop infernals and and drop in the level low level zones or drop an infernal on a mailbox and banish it And even though it was banishing infernals like a we fire emulate or it would still kill low levels Like bank ults in the mailbox. I was that guy man. Like if I can't do that, I'm going to be very upset Well, that's the thing they ban people for a lot less nowadays.  I hope they understand like that's one of the quirks of vanilla. Well, I hope they get that Yeah, yeah Well, so far it seems like we have a whole development team that's like very in line with it being classic and Kind of get more hardcore rpg mmo fashion, so They definitely get it. They definitely yeah.  So Yeah, which is really really cool here. We're gonna we're gonna take a couple more questions guys before we before we call it a night But um, this one's from patrick and I think this is a really good question I won't be able to dedicate enough time to classic for rating. What class and professions could I roll that would provide the most benefit to a guild? I think that's something that is Is For a lot of people the case right like they might not be able to raid hardcore or whatever They might not be on the cutting edge of everything and that's fine But they want to be in a guild. They want to be able to contribute They want to make friends They want to enjoy the social aspect of vanilla wow the the social aspect the classic wow offers That retail wow may not offer to you know the type of player that you are Herbalism I think herbalism is really really good alchemy is really really good gathering professions in general are really good But but I would say herbalism is definitely the first one Um That's how do you guys feel what's so cool about classic right because I've actually had I'm running my own classic guild And I'm not advertising anybody saying that but I'm just saying I am and there's there's like five separate people who are like Dude man, I can't raid but I want to let you know saying like all I want to do is farm mats Give them to you to help you guys achieve You know whatever and like that's that's one way you can contribute and like enjoy an experience Like it keeps you very social you can still do a little majority of content You still a part of the guild you still contribute even if you're not 100% and if those are the guys that if they ever show up to a guild dungeon run or a split run If they have time like they're getting loot like stuff like that If you're on the g if you're on the on the officer team or the gym of the guild Like you should recognize that stuff because I'm leading the guild also And those guys are going to be rewarded in some way. I think or they should be at least Absolutely But yeah, definitely alkyl is alkyl or sorry herbalism in any gathering I think mining is pretty good too, especially if you're a pvp guild if you can consistently supply people with enough mats for like grenades Or let's say you're an engineer and you're just you're just making grenades and stuff for people, you know Yeah, you could do that as well making sadly you're a goblin engineer and you're making sapper charges for people who might be Nomish engineers Like there's a lot. There's a lot you can do There's a lot you can do You know with a lot of professions to be able to contribute to the guild and help out other people But but I would say gathering professions in general are really really valuable So yeah, yeah herbalism. Yeah, it's not much, but it's honest work. Exactly. Just do a little bit of farming Yeah, I think that was really good Let's see And then obviously herbalism alchemy if you want to like help a raid team Right because you're going to be supplying a lot of health pots and mana pots and flasks and all that Yeah, um I'm trying to pick a good one here. Last question. Yeah, I'm trying to pick a good one here Uh, are you worried about high population pvp servers becoming too high pop? Like not having enough room and having q times to get into servers imagine ticondrius, but on classic I think this is the big question that's still on the table for blizzard for everybody right I think that You know are Everybody says, you know, no sharding know this and that and I think that's the ideal situation, right? Because I think everybody has a pretty bad taste in their mouth about how sharding works in retail. Wow So we're hoping that they find a solution now They told us they specifically when we were at blizzcon and we got a chance to go talk to the devs They like they specifically told us that sharding was a temporary solution For the sake of the demo because they thought if you take a full full population server and put it into Westfall and the barons just just dump everybody into two zones that there was Surely going to be issues and if there's like a one-week demo or whatever They didn't want to have a situation where People can't play during the one-week demo and it's like blizzard low w like, you know small indie company, whatever, right? So they just wanted to have a situation where they knew it was going to work um And they said that we're actively trying to find the best possible solution So I hope that's still the case Go ahead. Yeah I mean, dude, there's no way you're gonna fit 500 people people in tiras full glades and have people level without sharding, right? When that's that's one, uh That's one solution Some people say like okay just for the starting zones having sharding For the starting zones for like the first couple days or whatever and then and then go from there But I think it ends up creating another bottleneck too. Now the bottleneck's going to be bigger, right in terms of So so basically you have the influx of players coming in right and you've got this big thing But their bottleneck because there's only a certain amount of mobs and everything and everybody's trying to go through the bottleneck Now if you move that bottleneck down To let's say level 10 or whatever and and you start putting you know You only have it in the starting zone that bottleneck's going to be a little bit bigger because people are going to level at different rates Instead of everybody starting at level one you see what i'm saying so Basically by by having it down there It's going to stretch that bottleneck out a little bit, but it's still going to be another bottleneck So then at what point does it stop a lot of people in that next zone? Yeah, it's it's going to be it's going to be a whole thing. So is it a solution possibly? Um But a lot of people are concerned about like the long term like okay Or they're going to end up having sharding for the aq 40 event and then all of a sudden there's two gongs and It ends up being a whole thing, right? Oh, yeah.  Uh, I think what do you get? My this is this is my kind of like thought process on it Is I really would like for them to have a stress testing like stress test to launch And just everybody log in and just see what happens because that way the devs can see what happens That way the the community can see what happens No sharding and then with sharding and just see how it plays out I mean who knows right who knows exactly how it's gonna go. Yeah, I think that's I think that would be really important I think stress testing is really really important going into the release I th