Is 90 bucks too much for an in-game auction-house mount too much to spend? Was 5 million gold too much to spend? We wade into that lake for some discussion on the matter. Plus, all the Aniversary Event reactions you can stand, our raiding life, the Play Nice book takes, Paly changes are less crazy than we thought, what to expect from the 30 year Warcraft direct coming up, a hardcore look at Bobby's Mythic+ journey, your emails and texts and more!Video version: https://youtu.be/Hg2LYc4wWs0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
the world of warcraft podcast so you don't have to this is the instance
Greetings, everybody. Welcome back to The Instance. This is The Instance for October 2024. I'm Scott Johnson, and I'm sitting right here with Bobby Frankenberger. Hi, Bobby.
Hey, how are you doing? You know, it says so you don't have to, but Scott, now I do have to. Well, you have to. I used to not have to.
No, you used to be able to just listen, enjoy it, yell at your thing about the things we'd get wrong, and then write in to correct them or whatever. I don't know if you ever did that.
That's the best part. Is that now I don't have to yell at my phone. Now I can just yell at you.
Yeah. Yeah. Just yell at me when I get something wrong. And I promise you those are coming. All right. They're coming.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. It is a longstanding tradition here at The Instance. So, yeah, we've had a month. It's been a hell of a month for me. Really fast month and a lot going on. A lot of wow, but a lot of other stuff, too. It's just been one of those... One of those falls, but I'm glad to be back and tons of great feedback over the month. You guys have been amazing.
We'll be reading some of that today and playing some of that today. You guys have been just, I don't know, just super active, and we love seeing that, which is good because the game is at a pretty good place right now, and people are playing and having a good time. Although, Bobby, don't you feel like, before we get into some of the stuff that are on our minds here,
there is a stage where wow hits a certain plateau after an expansion launches. And then from there on, it's a little bit like, okay, what do I want to do? I'm logging in. What am I doing? There's like four things I can do, but I'm really not in the mood to do that. And I've kind of had it with delves or whatever it is you're sick of. And, and you just kind of turn it off and go do something else.
And I've had that happen a couple of times this month. Mostly my month's been about not having enough time to play. Cause I've just been busy with other projects, but sure. Uh, How do you deal with that when you hit a little wall like that?
Well, I am always okay with, and I used to, I think, not be okay with this, but I am now in my aged wisdom of being a World of Warcraft player. I'm okay with taking a break. And I think some people feel like, I don't know. They can't take a break, but it's fine to take a break. So I'm okay with taking a break. So I will do that sometimes.
And also being into Mythic Plus and stuff and trying to get your rating up will naturally extend that too far. But I'll get burnt out on that even if I try to hit it too hard. So I try to pace myself in that regard. And so there's lots of different things I could be doing.
And I used to be the kind that also wanted to do everything and get everything, fill out all the achievements and all the reputations and all that kind of stuff. And I found that that burnt me out really fast. And I was a lot of times doing stuff just to have that pixel filled in on the list of pixels in the game. And I didn't really want to do it. I just wanted the...
I just wanted my achievement number to tick up.
Do you ever go for, either with earnestness or casualness, try for a lore master? Has that ever been a thing in your list of...
Oh, I did the original Loremaster when it first came out.
I always say I'm going to do it. I always commit in my head that I'm going to do it. Or at the very least, I'm going to do it with an expansion in its entirety. And then I might go back and clean up old stuff. I always say I'm going to do it. And I never do it. Because that is one I'd like.
That's a shiny mark on anyone's report card to say that you've got Loremaster throughout the entirety of this 20-year experience. I know there are people like this. I don't know who they are, but they're insane. I keep thinking I'm going to do it.
I did the original one, which I think would have just been with with vanilla. Wow. Um, and all that kind of stuff. So I did that. That was hard back then. Cause you had, you literally had to do every single quest that was available.
Right. Right.
That was the, that was the way it was originally. I think, I think it was limited by like the way they said it was, you had to have completed X number of quests, but I believe that that number was decided on because it was, that's how many quests there were.
Yeah, that sounds right to me. But also I think, I don't think it started tracking till, uh, until achievements went into the game, which I think was Wrath, right? So to do it... You had to go back. Yeah, I think you had to go back and then work your way up. But then you're only talking two and a half expansions or not even a full third expansion yet in terms of patches and stuff.
So I think it was more doable. And I remember then going, well, here's my chance. This is what I should do. And then I would get started.
And they've redone Loremaster now, so it's not as punishing as that. Yeah. It's usually some... It's all still story-based. Like, it's still... The idea is that you've done these things which require... By doing that means that you get to experience all the story that this expansion has to offer. Right. But it's not just boring like complete 1,000 quests in, you know, Hallowfall. Right, right.
It's not that anymore because that's the way it used to be. But now it's like... do this quest chain and this quest chain and complete this story mission.
And, you know, they're a lot more story based, which is good because if they do tweak something, change something, remove something or add something, it doesn't diminish your achievement. If you got it. Um, I remember when cataclysm hit, I went, well, this is bad because they've, they've gone through some zones and completely done. It's all new.
Like this is, these aren't even quests that were available in the original lore master, uh, And in my head, I was like, well, I'm not even going to bother. But what I should have realized is, of course, logically, they're going to make a path for that to work for people.
Did they make the original one a feat of strength? I don't remember.
I think something like that. I can't remember. I remember that was around the time you started hearing about feats, though, right? It was like Cataclysm came along and like, yeah, we're kind of dicking with the old world. So we'll call that a feat of strength or this other thing you thought was rad. It's no longer rad. It's kind of dumb and deprecated. Yeah.
And I remember people being mad about it. I remember there was a lot of anger in the community about that kind of stuff. That was kind of a moment for me where I realized that you can't lock any of this into permanence. It's a feeble thing to try because eventually... it's just too, it's too much. It's an MMO. It's a game that's, that's meant to be expansive and change and tweak and do all this.
And hell, this is long before, this is when classic was just regular. It was long before we were going to have classic. Now we've got a whole new slate of, uh, you know, its own separate kinds of achievements. And I don't even know how they handled when they put wrath in classic, did they add achievements to classic? Like, I don't even know how that went. Cause I didn't play classic.
That wasn't really my jam, but
anyway point is someone'll someone's yelling at their portable device right now about what they did but anyway the point is go for what you want don't do what you don't want and i will probably never get lore master even though it is a thing i think about every single expansion for some reason oh yeah well speaking of you asked me how how do i you know do i have trouble with
There's a burnout and stuff like that. What have you been doing in the past month? Well, what have you gotten done?
So I spent, I spent a lot of time, uh, just making sure dailies were done. Um, you know, rep working on the, working on renown. Yeah. The usual rep grind is, is obviously a thing. Um, but also, uh, those three quests you get in town in Dornegal that are essentially like your big weekly area activity things.
Yeah, and they'll give you some nice rewards, so it's good that you get those.
I like those. You get the crests and you get other stuff from it. I did some... What did I queue? Oh, I queued for some LFR just to get some of those achievements and also some transmog. I don't need the gear. Sure. Because we're geared up better than that. And last night, I think I walked out with that new sword and a trinket, and I think that put me at 615? Yeah. Nice. I forget.
A respectable number, even though I know there are people that are higher now. But a couple of weeks ago, I would have been way ahead of the game at about 615. But anyway, it felt good to do that. But I have not had time for extra raids with any other teams. I know you have kind of an alt team that you run with. We're more like your alt team. You have a regular team. Sort of, yeah.
Although, yeah. I don't think of them as alt teams anymore because our team... uh, is doing really well.
Yeah. Kicking ass, taking names. We played last night and, uh, cleared one shot heroic, everything up till, uh, freaking worm, worm lady.
Brood Twister.
Thank you. I can never remember their names. She's the one shitting all the eggs out and making our lives hard, covering the floor in blue goo. That's a hard fight, but we also made a lot of progress on it, so I feel pretty good about next week, assuming everyone's ready and able. I didn't expect that. I don't know why. I didn't expect that one to be such a pain in the rump, that fight.
It's tough. It's tough. Yeah. We banged our head against that a lot last night. But we one-shot everything else from top to bottom right up till her. And then she spit on three eggs and made our lives hard. So that's fine. Anyway, so when I'm not playing with you guys, and of course last week I had family stuff, so did you, so we couldn't even raid that night.
It just feels like I've had stuff get in the way and say, sorry, Scott, you're not going to go out and do your dailies tonight. You have to do this or whatever. It was almost like just nonstop, not distractions, but just other stuff I had to do. And so when I have gotten in, it's mostly been short little stuff like that, a couple of delves here and there, especially if there's a quest tied to it.
uh go down and do my packed crap with the freaking spider people um all that and then as many as many dailies as i could do and then here's my favorite thing about wow during the month of october because of how busy i was i took many meetings i don't know what happened in october but it was a month of meetings lots of calls i'm working on a book for one guy doing illustration thing for another guy an ad possibility for another thing for shows like all this stuff have to meet with these people individually on phones and zoom calls and all of that
Let me tell you, while still the reigning champion of have a call going and just casually gathering herbs and checking out mining nodes and run to the auction house and spend a little gold doing this and that and then earn a little gold doing this and that and just kind of bouncing around the place and not really having to be very mindful about it. It's still no better.
There's no better game for this. I have a lot of games where I kind of think, is this a good meeting game? This is not bad. Loop Hero, excellent. It's a very different game than WoW, but excellent meeting game, by the way, if anyone's interested. It's super cheap, so you can get it really cheap on Steam. But it runs on Mac. It's great. Just have it back here running while I'm doing work.
And WoW is still king of the hill when it comes to that. And you can even have the sound off. You don't need audio. Just flying around. Ooh, a glowy thing. Oh, it's one of those. I guess I have some webs on me for a second. Anyway, so yeah, we're thinking that'll be done by June next year. Sounds great. Thanks for the meeting. Like I'm having that experience with WoW right now.
And it's fantastic.
I love it. I love it. And Intel, this is the thing Blizzard does better than anybody or has at least traditionally. And this is true of most of their games. This is that example of the wide range of easy to get into, hard to master.
Because on the one hand, I'm having a meeting and earning money and just screwing around and also leveling my professions, my gathering professions, because screw the rest of them. Anyway, that's just a me thing. But I'm doing that while I'm getting work done. In the same exact moment of any given day, you're out there mythic plussing your heart out, right?
in some of the most difficult content the game's ever had. That's a wild thing to consider, and I love that about it. I guess most MMOs are like that now, but WoW kind of set the standard for it, I think.
Yeah, exactly. I learned from, and I know we're going to talk a little bit about the Play Nice book a little bit later, but I learned from the Play Nice book that they called that the donut. The donut. The donut theory. Yeah, the Alan Adham donut theory, right? That was mostly him. The idea that you want to...
you want the, the big outside part of the donut represents or the, the inside part of the donut, small part inside the circle. It represents your hardcore players. And then the outside represents everybody else who's just like more casual and everything. And, and they wanted, they've always from the very beginning. Yeah. It's been, uh,
uh a goal of theirs to to appeal to to all of the the whole donut yeah right and it and it that's an amazing part of this book actually because what i wanted out of the book i guess we're talking about the book a little let's do it
What I wanted out of that book or what I thought maybe I wanted out of that book was a bunch of insidery stuff like, ooh, deal between what happened with Titan and had Bobby Kotick run through the building naked with his wiener out or, you know, what salacious stories am I going to hear? And instead, that book isn't really about that.
The book is about, it's about some other struggles in that regard, but it's mostly, and I made up that Kotick thing for anyone who's, don't write that down. I made that up. Yeah. Although, whatever. Anyway, the thing about the book is what it gave me is what I actually really wanted, which was some of that fundamental sauce that we've all wondered about for so many years.
Like, what is it that put Blizzard here when everybody else was here? Why? And why was it from the very beginning? And that donut story is a great example. It's such a simple one, but this concept of...
donut outside everybody the closer you get in you're less casual and when you get to the center there's your hard cores and you must have an entire donut that that may sound obvious to all of us now especially in the current you know games are a lot of games are this way now it's like you'll have an easy mode so you can just enjoy the story or play it on really hard because you're a freak show and that's how you want to play dragon age or whatever um
But back then, this isn't a thought. This isn't even a thing like other games come out and they are either, you know, take the first XCOM on PC. Right. Nails hard on purpose. There is no there's only a donut hole. That's all there is to that original game. Right. That's who they aim for. That's who they tackle. That's what the game they want to make. And nothing wrong with that.
But then on the other hand, you may have a more arcadey experience on a console or something that is the outside of that donut only. And they never really appeal to anybody who are looking for a deeper challenge.
So to come along in the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s and say, we think we can do the entire donut turned out to be a revolutionary concept that would propel them to disgusting levels of stardom. Yeah. And in some ways almost hurt them in the in the in this long haul, because I don't know if you notice this, Bobby. These guys never owned anything for a long time.
Like they they went from, oh, shit, we got to pay payroll and we're going to do it with a credit card because we just can't keep up with what we've done. Even though they're having wild success and they're like, well, don't worry about the next game. It'll all work out. Oh, well, let's see.
The next game is going to have this ambitious online component called Battle.net that no one's ever done before. We'll acquire all kinds of archaic behind the scenes stuff going on that we can have cloud and all this like distributed computing back then. So we have to do that at the back end. Gosh, what's that going to do?
Well, if it sells well, we're going to be in debt again because we have to support this back end. And then they got to get investors. They got to sell themselves again. And then eventually this happens again. And World of Warcraft, the greatest example of this, right?
well, we think we can get 500,000 by the end of the year. And investors go, yay, that's really high-minded. What a long, hard goal, but we'll get there.
And they do it in like, what, three months or less than a week or whatever the hell it was.
It was a very short time. It was very short. They were... They've told this story before, but it's in the book again, specifically talking about World of Warcraft was that they had all these plans. They knew they had something good on their hands and that it was going to grow. Like they were very confident about that, but they had this plan. We've got all these servers. We're prepared for it.
We're going to slowly roll these servers out as it grows. You know, we're going to get everybody in there. And in the first week, Their server people are there overnight, constantly. They're trying to stand up every server they had for plans to stand them up over the course of a year.
They had to do it in a week and desperately try to keep this game going so that so many people could get on and play.
And what that represents, that represents, obviously, in the beginning, a massive time and cost sink. That they didn't necessarily expect. But again, their ambitions often were so lofty that the success that it brought in was equivalent. And then they would just go, ah! And so they got these guys living under their desks and doing, like you said, making these servers happen as fast as they could.
They got to a point where they couldn't keep up. And there was a thought to remember in the book, they said something about let's just halt sales for a while. And they may have in some markets just to slow the player on loading. And then this just got more expensive, more expensive, more exponential, more exponential. And eventually.
well, we better sell ourselves to that big French conglomerate so we got the cash, and then let's let that sit there for a while. They never really... These guys all made... Don't get me wrong. They're founders of this company. Alan Anham, Mike Morhaime, and other principals early on, and certainly some that are still there today. They made a lot of money. A lot of money.
They are rich men as a result. Rich men and women. Mostly men, but a few women. A lot of men, though. Uh... That's one thing about the book that really struck me. This is a this is a dude fest early on. Anyway, the they they've never truly to this day, Blizzard has never owned their own shit in this strange way to the point that now and the book sort of ends there.
But Microsoft now owns this thing and is the back end of it cash wise. And here we are again, 20, 30 years later, Blizzard still somebody else has to, has to keep up with that success. It's crazy to me that that's how that went, you know?
So, yeah. And, and this, this, And a little bit back to the donut theory. So there's a lot about this book that we all as fans kind of knew about it. Either we'd presumed or we'd heard stories, like you said, about how they're trying to appeal to everybody, which is a smart move. But they were kind of at the forefront of thinking that way. And we'd always known that.
But what shocked me was how early... that thinking was a part of what they did. That was, that was that donut theory was something that Alan Adham came up with either. I don't know if he explicitly named it that or, but he was thinking that way as early as, um, as early as The Lost Vikings. Yeah. And that's what that game's called, right?
Yeah, Lost Vikings. The one and two, the three, Sven, Doofus, and Morabund, or whatever their names were.
And what it was, I love this story. They were demoing the game, The Lost Vikings, at some place, and some people were playing it, and then they stopped, and he overheard people talking about how um it was uh something about how they didn't it wasn't it was boring at the beginning they were focusing on um I don't know. There was like some tutorial mode that wasn't good. A kid died early.
He died right away or something. And the kid walked away from the kiosk.
That's exactly what it was. They had created a tutorial level that killed you.
Yeah, it's not great.
To teach you lessons.
Right.
About how the game worked and what you wanted to do. And then some kid, he was watching someone play. Some kid died and then just walked away.
Yeah, went somewhere else.
And he realized right away... oh, we have to grab the attention of everybody. Like a hardcore gamer might see that and think like, oh, I need to try harder. You know, I need to think about it this way and then keep trying. But he was watching a casual kid walk up to a game, give it a shot, didn't get what they wanted out of it and move on. And that's most people.
That's the brilliant realization that they had was like, wait a minute, there are so many people who see the game and think that looks neat. So we have the hook, but we need to build a gameplay around something that is shallow enough for people who just want a casual, shallow play experience, which is lots of people, so there's no problem with that, but also deep enough.
By shallow, you're not saying shallow like we're not being pejorative here. This is a meaningful turning of the tide in gaming that continues to this day. And look, I remember when WoW came out, to jump ahead again, And people started playing it, and a lot of the quote-unquote hardcores that came from EverQuest and Ultima Online and all this sort of stuff, like, well, this is a baby MMO.
It's too easy. When you die, you just go fly to your... You know, drive to your corpse. Drive. Ride to your corpse. And you don't lose anything. Wow, what a baby MMO.
And... But I was very casual back then, and I remember hearing... about rested experience, which was a brand new concept that Blizzard came up with for World of Warcraft. The idea that you could log out in an inn and you would get just by sitting there not playing the game, you'd be rewarded the next time you played and be able to get experience faster. I was like, man, that's awesome.
Yeah, it's a great idea. You've rested. And it's also kind of world consistent. There's something lore-ish about that. There's these little things that come out. But then they said, hey, 40 men, find 40 of your friends and go in here and have the hardest fight of your life. And then just pound yourself against that for months and months and months. Like they...
They understood that donut thing by then really well. But it's I think it's revolutionary. And I also think it means lots of that for Blizzard.
Right. Which kind of segues into the other half of what I think this book is. So this book definitely does a good job of just telling the story, like taking all the stories we know about Blizzard and putting them in one place. Right. And saying, here's the story of Blizzard. But the other thing that I think this book is, is it's a story about a company.
And I'll say it generically because I think that this is not a unique story to Blizzard. But it's a story about a company who was a startup software company, particularly a games company. who had great ideas and were very excited to, to, to make games and, and, and make a product that they wanted people to love.
And, uh, and they grew really fast in the tech industry and, uh, and, and the story about what that means for a company, um, and the types of compromises that they have to make. And the types of decisions that they do make, which may not have the greatest consequences. And that's what this book is, I think, in large part about.
This is a company that, like you said, from the very beginning, that was interesting to me. I didn't know that. Even earlier than, what is it, Vivendi?
Yeah, before Vivendi, you had Davidson Associates.
Yeah, and I didn't know about Davidson Associates before then. They were even owned before Vivendi by Davidson Associates. Like you said, they've never really owned their own stuff.
No, very early. You could argue that when they were three dudes in an office, I guess they owned that.
For like a hot minute. Yeah, for maybe a month. Because very quickly, very quickly, they had these Davidson & Associates people, an educational gaming software company, right? Come around and say, oh, we like what you're doing. We'd love to buy you. And they said no for like a couple of days is what it felt like. Yeah, until they couldn't.
And then they realized, oh my gosh, we can't make payroll. We have to do something.
Yeah. Yeah. And so – but that's not – again, that's not a unique story to Blizzard.
No. Or the industry. This is not – not even just this industry and tech in general. Like, this is our version. This is gamers' version of Google. It's our version of Microsoft, of Apple, of – in-gaming lore, how companies come and go and start and whatever. This is one of those stories. And it is maybe the most significant of these stories given the meteoric rise.
It's just insane how quickly things changed and how fast they grew. And at some point, you'd think up until 2003 or 3 or 4, you would think this is already exponential growth by any other measurable standard. World of Warcraft then cranked that up exponentially, like 10 times faster. And I don't know how they made it through that, to be honest.
Reading through this book, it just seems like it laid waste to human lives. And I don't mean this in like they're to blame. I mean, sometimes success is a, well, it is a double-edged sword. You have to keep up with this demand. You have to You have to always follow up and be better the next time. You felt a really strong urge to not falter after such great heights.
I don't think that's sustainable. And I think that we ran into that in the late teens, early aughts or early 2020s. That's where we finally started to see them kind of go, oh, shit, and start to... kind of lose it a little bit.
Yeah.
And I don't think that that was a healthy, long-term, perfectly sustainable model for those people to have. Despite all the rad shit we got out of it as players. It wasn't great for people on the ground necessarily, you know?
Yeah. This, this book is, is in many ways you could say, or at least the first part is the, the story of, of Mike Morhaime and Alan, he had him, I was going to say the story of Mikey and Al. Yeah.
Mikey and Al making their way.
Yeah. But, uh, that's the beginning, but really I think the, the chunk of this story is the, the, you know, is more like, uh, like,
mike versus bobby right like because because that's what it is and i don't think i think blizzard sometimes gets a lot of blame for for you know i guess allowing themselves to be sold to activate but it's not they didn't allow anything like they they haven't been controllers of their own thing since the beginning so it's not like they had any real control over that but
um it doesn't matter though because because i feel like even if they had chosen mike morhaime had didn't according to this book by all accounts mike morhaime had no real reason to to distrust bobby kodak no because every step along the way everyone who's owned blizzard has given them the space and the latitude to do what they do that was so successful.
As the kids say, they let them cook, right?
Yeah, right. And so they did, and it's always been good. And then I really think that one thing you can point to, and again, we've seen this in the news and everything. This book just puts it all in one place, puts it in one narrative. But what really happened was once once Bobby Cody and, and in a lot of ways, Blizzard sort of shot themselves in the foot by being so successful. Yeah.
It's a weird thing to be, right?
Yeah. Cause, cause Bobby saw, well, also I think what happened was when they were part of a Vendy, they were, they were, they were one small piece of a very large, uh, And so when they would do their thing and take some time to make their games and not meet deadlines and say, we're just going to get it ready when it's ready and you can wait.
When they did that and they fell behind, it didn't hurt the bottom line of Vivendi. They had so many other parts of their company making money for them. But when Activision bought them and they became Activision Blizzard, and, and when Activision Blizzard broke from Vivendi, right? Right. Um, now the, now all the Blizzard properties are a huge, massive chunk of, of the total, uh,
income or the total profit. I don't know what the proper business words are, but the total money that Activision Blizzard is making.
I guess the revenue or the revenue potential or the... I don't know. What you're reporting to your shareholders is on the backs of Blizzard. I mean, they would also pretty quickly... you know, harness the power of call of duty. And that would be a huge part of what they do. And ironically, the acquisition of King meant they were getting the actual, the actual biggest profit center was King.
Nobody talks about this. Nobody ever talks about this, but the big, the real acquisition, most of that many billions of dollars, Microsoft just spent in acquisition money was for King and you never hear about it and nobody gives a shit and whatever people are playing candy crush, but you don't think about it at all. That's where the real money is.
The rest of this now starts to feel like... And I think Activision was in this weird... I'm not going to ever justify Activision or Bobby Kotick's methods. Yeah, that's not what I'm doing either. No, not at all. It's very cutthroat. It is corporate greed in all of its senses. Perpetual growth is not possible, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.
But where the passion is has always been on Blizzard's back.
Yeah.
And they had to somehow figure out a way to make that even more money, but retain the passion. That's a shaky alliance. That's hard.
Yeah.
So anyway.
So Bobby Kotick was always saying more, more, more, using models like Call of Duty and other things where they had the very quick turnaround on new content.
to try to try to push blizzard to do the same thing and that's why that all started happening and and then so really really everybody got burnt out and left and then now microsoft has them and that's what we're all hoping for now is that since microsoft has them microsoft is also a very very very big software company and blizzard activision blizzard is probably not going to have a huge giant it's just going to be one little page in their gigantic novel of a portfolio right yeah
I actually hope more. I hope that's more true this time around as in terms of the ownership relationship, because the less significant it is for Microsoft, the more Microsoft will will let them again, let them cook. I hope. Right. You know, let them be amazing. Let them do what they do best.
Let them somehow hire back a lot of the amazing talent they've shed over the last few years because of all this and the other issues. You know, I don't want to diminish the harassment stuff and all that. That was a huge blow.
But all of that stuff aside for just a moment, if Microsoft can just let them be what they were always meant to be and what they did previously, maybe it can't be done entirely the way it was. I don't know. But they can just let them do it. Then maybe just maybe... It's this happy little corner that Microsoft doesn't have to worry about that will produce, and it does produce.
They don't need it to be... It doesn't need to be the next Office 365 or the next freaking Windows. It can just be what it is. That's what we all hope, right? But then things happen where you're like, is that... Should we get into the $90 mount?
This is a good segue.
Yeah, I agree. Let's get into the $90 mount. Play that one more time. So the other day, a couple of days ago, they announced or they released a mount. And it's weird. I heard about it before it happened, but didn't know I'd heard about it. I'll tell you how. Somebody had told me that there was a big kind of all hands on meeting. and didn't know what it was for. And I didn't either.
And I was like, Oh, I wonder what that's about. We're, you know, it's, is it the, is it the anniversary? Is it, you know, what's going on? Is it bad? Is it good? Is it, what are we doing over there? And it turns out, uh, from all accounts, this was a all hands on meeting just about where we're about ready to pull the trigger on the $90 amount.
And so everyone needs to be ready with this messaging, this thing to say this stuff to do. I don't know the details at all, but that's what that was about. And, uh, I think I get it now, given the turmoil of the last two days.
Yeah, that kind of helps me answer a question that I've had in my head, or at least a thought that I've had in my head, which was... And we're going to get into the details in a second, but just on the top of my head was... Um, there was a lot of blowback in the community about this mount and I thought they had to have known that this was going to happen.
Yeah.
They're, they had to.
I guarantee that. In fact, okay. One other little note about that. I said this on core. I'll say it again. So if you've heard me say this, I apologize hearing it twice listeners, but, uh, When I was at Blizzard a couple of months ago, it was an awesome little trip. Had a great time over there. We did that interview. Got to hang out with Randy. It was great.
One of the things we did was tour most of the campus. Not every corner, but a bunch of it. And there were parts of that campus I didn't even know existed. And in one place, they had these offices that looked kind of nonchalant, but they had these interesting titles on the door. And I cannot remember the exact titles. But essentially, these were offices full...
of PhD statisticians, mathematicians, people whose job it is to take a ton of data and make predictions about outcomes, this sort of thing, right? I have no doubt in my mind that all of this went through them at some point, and they crunched the numbers and said, A, there'll be blowback, and we think it'll be about this much.
B, we think we're going to make a ton of money, and it'll be about this much. And we think this many will buy, this many won't. It'll probably stay in the news cycle this long. I think they had all of that... That is all – that's why they're there. They exist at that company for this reason. Right. And they do it with everything across the board.
It's not just, wow, but, you know, well, this expansion, we're launching for Diablo at this exact time. Is this the best time to do it or not? Well, what are the factors? Like, I think that's the thing they think about all the time now, and they have really smart people helping make those decisions.
I am – so I guess what I'm saying is I am with you 100 and an additional 10% because there's no way they didn't know. Right. A, that there would be a bit blowback and B, that these would sell like crazy. Some are estimating at this stage two, three days in. And again, some of these sources may not have all the details.
And I don't even know if this includes the machinations of selling tokens and gold, moving it around and all this stuff that you can do to get one of these things. But these $90 amounts have made them somewhere in the $50 million range in a couple of days only, which if that book is correct about Titan costing 80 million and then being canned,
They've almost made Titan money back, although they already did it with Overwatch money. But the point is, like, that's a lot of cash. And I know that they know this. And all you have to do is go hang around Dornigal for a while. Loads of people have this thing.
Loads of people. Before we get too much further into this, I want to make sure that everybody, in case you happen to have not known, not everybody, some people, this might be the only Warcraft-related thing they listen to. Um, the, uh, the, the mount that we're talking about is, um, is, uh, it's basically the auction house mount.
You remember that a few expansions ago, they introduced a Brutus or mount, which was, uh, a mount that cost 5 million gold. Yep. And, and, uh, the mount was huge. It's a, it's a Brontosaurus mount or a Brutus or is what they call it. Yeah. Um, and it's a huge mount. It's gigantic, uh, And it has two vendors on it. One was a mailbox and one was the auction house, which was the big deal, right?
Having an auction house anywhere. And so very clearly to me when that came out, it felt like Blizzard's way of saying, look, we acknowledge that there are people who play this game. Primarily what they're playing is the auction house and they're making lots of money.
let's uh here's something you can spend that money on right right and uh it's very you have to have made a lot of gold so it was it very much felt like a a prestige piece saying i have this mount and the reason i have this mount is because i have made a lot of gold in the game and look at me yeah that really was i've made so much gold i can now I can now have the auction house anywhere I want.
It was like your neighbor showed up one day with a freaking Lamborghini and is now showing it off in town. That's basically what this thing was. It was a wow equivalent. And I think that the price at the time matched the passion of an auction house-focused player. There are people that just love the financial game. Right. So this seemed like a... To me, that particular amount made a ton of sense.
I remember at the time going, I wish I had 5 million gold here in the battle for Azeroth. That'd be nice. But I knew that it wasn't really for me because I didn't really play the market and other people didn't. It was fine. It was no big deal.
And you saw people with that. Yeah, you saw people with that and you were like... That's someone who plays the auction house. Yeah. All right. So now the $90 amount that we're talking about is they reskinned the Brutus or it's a little bit smaller. Um, and the skin is cool. It looks really neat. Um, but, uh, but it does the same thing.
You have an auction house and a mailbox on it and it costs $90 of real American dollars.
Yeah. Yeah, cash, cash money. You got to buy it in the thing. It's got a bunch of gold on it, which makes it seem fancier than perhaps it is. Yeah, go ahead.
Now, some people say that if they've crunched the numbers and done the math, they've said, and I'm not here to say, I would like to also pause here and say, Me and Scott have talked about this a little bit offline and we both have the same feeling about the mount. We don't really like it. We're going to get into the details of why we don't like it.
But I would like to say that neither of us, I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth when I say that neither of us
begrudge anyone who spent money on this oh no not at all why we have we have we have really good friends who bought in fact we have somebody who runs our our raid team who got one and it's suddenly a really nice addition to the raid team because he's like oh shit we're out of uh potions what are you gonna do i'm gonna get some pots real quick here's the brontosaurus buy him off the auction house five seconds later he's got it in the mail
Like, we're going to benefit from him spending his $90. And he knows that.
And that's what sold it for him. And he's got the money. And people, you can spend your money on what you want to spend your money on.
Of course.
That's not what, the complaints that we're going to have are not about the people who are getting it. It's about whether it should have been
sold in the first place i think is what what we're gonna yeah it's also a little bit contrary to previous blizzard statements about individual dev statements i've read here and there uh even some blue posts back in the day that said things like well here's our justification for doing the bfa one and later on people said yeah we don't we don't love what it did to the overall game exactly like a we we kind of liked that people needed to go to a capital city and do some some actual work to do some of this stuff so
Not like they regretted it, but there was a feeling of like this was a controversial thing, even internally. I don't think there's any question about that. So to see this pop in there and suddenly be a thing, I can see why players immediately go, oh, cash grab, freaking... Is this Blizzard under Microsoft? Oh, no. And they start wanting to pick at everything. And I get the reaction.
$90.
That's a bunch of money. So my personal stance is this. It's a very simple personal stance. I am tempted for two reasons. One, mostly, it's the limited availability. That works on people, and it works on me.
It does, because I've thought about the same thing. I've thought, what if a year from now I look back and wish that I'd done it while my time has passed?
You don't want to regret a thing, right? It's FOMO. Yes, it's a form of FOMO, something I pride myself in not having that often. Usually it's video game related when I do, but I don't get FOMO for parties or hangouts or anybody who's like, hey, you want to go to that concert? No. No, I don't. I'm good. I got their, I got their CD in my car or whatever. Right.
I'm just, I don't care that much, but something like this, they're playing on that FOMO. That's part of the reason it's selling well. And that's where my issue is. It isn't, I don't even think it's a, well, I just, I just made the argument for it being a calculated decision because it is, there's a calculation in this decision, but it feels a little for me again, it's,
Just to reiterate what Bobby said, not speaking for anybody else and not judging anyone. You guys all do what you got to do. I really have no problem with other people buying this. I really don't. In fact, it's convenient to be in town and quickly run over to someone who's standing there for a long time. It's nice. Thanks for buying it.
But my biggest beef with it is that because of the calculated nature of it and because of the limited time of it, like if this is a permanent store amount, I wouldn't have so much problem with it. It's mostly about this limited time thing and the price. So you got a price point that's really high for an in-game item for your JPEG collection that you're buying and your... Actually, that's not fair.
It's a functional JPEG collection that does a couple of good things for you in the game. But still, we're dealing in virtuals here. But anyway... My main beef with it is that is the definition. Maybe the word predatory is too harsh of a word, but it is predatory in the sense that they are playing on our human emotions to get us to do a thing. And I personally don't like that.
Other people might go, no, that's what this is. If you go to a restaurant and you see a lobster and you got to have it, well, then you buy it. Well, I understand. This is the market. I'm not trying to pretend like this is any different than any other aspect of our lives. The fancy car you shouldn't spend money on versus this dumb mount, whatever.
For me, though, personally, I just feel like it's an anniversary. Shouldn't this be a thing I could at least earn in-game? Or aren't they supposed to give more stuff to us for making the game so successful for 20 years? Or... Am I buying them a gift by buying this? Like who, who's actually celebrating what here? Like there's a lot of that in my head.
And so it just puts me off and sours me and I don't want to do it again. No, I just want to clear this, make this clear. No judgment. It sounds like we are because obviously I'm making my own kind of judgment, but I'm only making it for me. Okay. I promise you that it is possible to have two thoughts in your head at once that this is too expensive and I'm not going to buy it. And good for you.
You got it. I can have those two things. Right. You know, we're complicated people.
Well, again, because the conversation we're having is about whether Blizzard's decision to offer this is a good one or not. And what it means. Like, we were just talking about, like,
how uh blizzard active blizzard activision blizzard under bobby kodak was uh felt very predatory it felt very we're good we're trying to crunch numbers and think about players as uh sources of income which okay yes i know there are many of you out there screaming at your your
phones right now saying they're a business Bobby of course it's about trying to extract value out of players and stuff like that I get that but anyway there's it can be predatory it can be unnecessary and so that's the question we thought it definitely was under Bobby Kotick we were all hoping and still are hoping that it's the switch to Microsoft like we just said is going to be an improvement in that it's going to feel better it's going to be blizzard back when it felt like
like blizzard player first blizzard player first blizzard is a good way of putting it yeah um and uh and this move is just a little bit shocking and and there's a lot of things play all at the same time the fact that it used to be um very much something that was a reward for people who who played the game in a particular way which now it's not anymore it's a huge price tag which was really shocking um and then also this this this thought about
I thought things were going to get better under Microsoft kind of thing too. All of these things at once kind of, I think, come together to just get people riled up.
That's also a good excuse for people to talk about. I admit this is tempting. The game is at a really great place right now for the most part. As good as any time it's ever had this stage of an expansion, it feels like things are really solid. And so there's also that tendency to say, just when things were looking up, you go and do it. You know, there's that. It's a natural human thing.
I get that we do it. It's a great way to pile on. You also on the other side of this have. Like somebody right now is mad because they bought it and they think we're giving them crap. And I know we keep trying to preempt that by saying that. But I've already had somebody tell me they'll never listen to anything I do again because I called them a whale. And I said, I didn't call you a whale.
I said that they're going after the whales. Meaning whales just means the people who will absolutely buy it no matter what. No matter what, there are people out there that do that. I don't care what it is. Magic the Gathering, there are people day one in line at the store buying 50 boxes. They're the whales. That's why they call him that.
And again, again, and maybe we should promise this will be the last time we harp on this, but we have people that we know and love who are these whales self-identified. Yeah, openly whalish. Yeah, and we hold no ill will towards them. This is what they want to do. This is their fun. So spend your money on it. It's fine.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with it. Look, if I had money to burn, I'd probably just get it.
Maybe that's part of why we're so upset is because we can't afford this $90.
Yeah, I mean, it's just – I have to – $90 is not nothing, all right? It just isn't. Like, we can all – I hear some of the exact same people complain that inflation is too high and then just bought this site unseen. Well, all right. Well, which is it? Do you have it or do you not have it? Like, you know, it's – That's the other thing.
This thing has bled into like real life economic discussions and all that. And it's part of why there's so much. What makes wow great is the passion around it. And sometimes that passion manifests in some grumpiness and some willingness to cut each other down. And we're not here to do that.
So a co-sign on Bobby's thing that says that's the last time you're going to hear us try to make sure you understand where we stand. All that being said, it leaves me a little unhappy, and I don't love it. And I'll tell you what, if I cave, if on January 5th, the evening of January 5th, I go, I can't stand it anymore.
I must have it.
It's been proven to me that I must cave. I'll let you know. I'll tell you, and I'll come sheepishly on the show and go... You guys, Scott did a real weird thing. 2025, baby. But I don't think that's going to happen at this point. But it's about, what do we figure? It's about a million gold equivalent, which is a lot less than the 5 million gold people spent then.
Yeah, so a lot of people are justifying it that way. And I don't, again, I don't mean a justifying in a pejorative way. I just mean like there's a justification to be made about this is almost sort of a discount. Yeah. And the logic there is that
when it was 5 million gold if you wanted to buy wow tokens to get to get 5 million gold it would have been a lot of money yeah yeah it would have been something like uh i don't know like 250 300 or something i mean if it's worth a million if we translate it then you're talking about another five that's a 500 amount really
480 something like that it's something like for around 400 probably and so so they when they say like 90 um that's like if i spent 90 on wow tokens that'd be about a million gold that's a that's quite a discount yeah and and they're not wrong about that no i i get i get it that matt if that's how you're you it's like anything though i say well this this streaming service i use is only six bucks a month
That's just one coffee I don't get. It's the same thing. Same justification. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing wrong with it. I do it all the time with all sorts of things. I did it with that. I just changed to T-Mobile. It definitely makes sense to those people. I just switched to T-Mobile from AT&T on my mobile service, and I made a similar justification.
Right.
We're just that's who we are. And I'm fine with it.
Yeah. But at any rate.
Yeah. Go ahead.
At any rate, this the last thing I have to say about it is you made me think of something. You were talking about those statisticians and economists that are sitting in Blizzard office. It makes me wonder. There are a couple of ways like like when you think about World War Cross economy, you're talking about moving gold around. There are a couple of ways that gold enters the game.
um and and one of it is completing quests you generate new gold by completing quests right you generate new gold by killing monsters and killing stuff because it drops gold and it creates gold that adds to the economy but that's a very small amount still too much still too much silver but yes keep continue yeah yeah one of the one of the biggest ways that that
world of warcraft that gold is is injected into the into the economy of world of warcraft now is by the purchase of uh of wow tokens right um and so when you when you buy gold is essentially what you're doing right you go and you buy a token and then you sell it um
that that brings money into the into the game or maybe it doesn't now that i'm thinking about that that might actually still just shuffle it around well may move it i guess not because because because now that i'm thinking about the process i just went and bought some gold because this mount kind of made the what did the market i was going to ask you to the market what did that do for you as someone who will buy tokens here and there did you benefit from this
Yeah, I don't buy tokens very often, hardly at all. But when I started to see... Normally a token is... You know, when it's... A WoW token will give you like... 160, 180,000 gold. And then when it starts to break into like 200, 210, you're thinking like, ooh, that's looking really good. And that's when... I've only ever bought two WoW tokens.
The first one was when it jumped up to that and I needed some gold at the beginning of this expansion. This is the first time I ever bought a WoW token. And then I... But then I started to hear and then looked myself to see what the price of the tokens were now that... This Brutusaur mount was out, and I think a bunch of people were going and buying, just spending money.
I'm still not clear on how the existence of the mount caused people to want to buy this, but regardless, there's a connection. And...
the the the amount of gold you got from selling a token was going up very quickly and it once it crossed into 300 000 i was like yeah i don't think it's ever like it's not going to be this high it's never been this high it's not going to be this high it'll only do this again for what their their 40th anniversary when they do some other weird stuff like this yeah right so i went and got one for 320 000 but it peaked at like 351 000 or something like that wow
yeah wow so this is why i don't play the stock market by the way all this this entire discussion reminds me that i'm bad at uh market market knowledge market manipulation market any of that stuff bottom line for me is i'm happy for everyone who got one the art on it the art on it by the way the texturing all the stuff that these artists get tasked to do for these kinds of stuff killer looks amazing yeah yeah
And I also understand why you'd have an all-hands-on meeting for this, because this affects, as we've already seen, this isn't just, all right, get ready to handle social media. That isn't it. It's get ready for the economy to be weird, and we're not sure where it's going to go and how long that will affect it. Yeah. it starts to make you realize what life is like at scale.
Like it's a great little microcosm, a fun study kind of on how systems and economies and populations are affected by something introduced that sort of disrupts things. And, To me, that's the fascinating part of this. So enjoy your mount or not. Thumb up, thumb down. Don't care. Whatever. Whichever way you go, we still like you. Okay? Yeah. And we hope you like us. We like all of you. Yeah.
You're all great. Time for some news. All right, let's get into the anniversary event so far thus far. And before we get into it and our opinions, I'm going to just tell you kind of what it was again so you understand what we got. So there's a new classic raid, Blackrock Depths.
That's a 10 to 15 player eight boss raid, which is a big throwback with a bunch of changes, new mechanics, stuff like that. Some new time walking in classic dungeons. So those are now in the rotation like the previous ones were for season one. Deadmines, original classic version, Dire Maul, East and West Wings, Strathmore, Living and Undead Wings. There are new world bosses.
They are all out there in Taranis near the sword. One of them annoys the hell out of me. I'll get to that in a minute. I've only killed one, by the way. Have you done all the three bosses yet?
I have done three, but technically there are more than that because there are some in other parts of the world, too. But there are three right there in Tanaris. Oh, I thought there were the only three. I guess I missed the... No, I think there's maybe eight altogether. There's like one in Outland as well. Some of the old...
green dragons that used to be able to, the emerald dragons from vanilla that used to be able to kill in, in, um, Whatever the name of that druid-y place was back in the day. I can't remember the names of places. The druid-y place. I like it. Yeah. The portal dragons. You know what I'm talking about. I know what you mean. The portal dragons.
The emerald dream. Emerald dream.
Thank you. The dragons of nightmare maybe is what they called themselves. I don't know.
Whatever they were. But yeah, Shaw of Anger is my favorite of this group, voiced by our pal Liam O'Brien. So it's always nice to hear him say stuff that isn't an Illidan voice. But anyway, he's out there. I fought. I tried to fight that. Got killed many times because nobody knew what they were doing. And we were trying to do it to a few people. It was day one of the patch. And I don't know.
It's just hard to get people lined up. And the sort of quest LFG stuff wasn't working for me very well that day. So I didn't get to do it. But I did beat the...
the what are they called the the big angry robot from uh the doom walker doom walker thank you and uh it's always fun to fight that because i'm reminded of some very old times and wow walking around hellfire peninsula and hearing that sound and like i gotta get the f out of here and yeah that's where you really learn how to feign death as a hunter and you know stuff like that
And anyway, we beat him. I do like you get a little trophy for that so you can like pop it out like a toy. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. I look forward to getting them all. I'm sure I will get them before the event's over. But other stuff included here, new mounts, pets, classic transmog sets.
They're going to be available to earn through the new currency, the bronze celebration tokens, which right now are trickling in. And I mean trickle. Additionally, there are updated modern versions of the tier two armor sets to be purchasable with the celebration tokens. And we all knew about that from previous reveals. If you haven't seen those, you should go check those out.
The tier twos are considered some of the best the game ever saw. And these are all redone versions of those. We talked about those a bit last time we were on. All right. One other part we didn't mention is there's this area by Caverns of Time that you go to. And when you portal there, it's just there.
So if you go to the portal near the major city, you'll pop right there and you'll see the celebration. It basically looks like a little fair is set up. There's some booths and there's stuff going on. There's some repeatable quests in there, dailies, and there are some events in there that you have to do. And at first, I was like, dude, this feels like the Northrend stuff.
Was it called the jousting tournament stuff? Oh, yeah. I can't think of it all of a sudden. The Argent tournament. Argent tournament. And I love the Argent tournament. There was something about the vibe and the atmosphere and the music and everything was just like... wow, this is like I'm really at a big fair.
I'm at a big event and I'm hanging here and I got to do stuff here every day and everything. I thought that's what I was getting into here. It has no music. It has these events that at first seemed neat, like, ooh, Laura Walker Cho is going to come out and talk on stage and tell me an old tale of Arthas or some kind of weird druid dream or whatever. He's going to retell these stories.
That seems neat. And then there's the pull out your mounts and let's see how many you have. And if one of you wins, good job. And And these various things, right? The transmog thing. They all sound amazing on paper. And also first time through, it's fine. Yeah, fun even. Fun even, you might even say. It's a slog now. I don't even want to go there. I don't want to do anything there.
The only thing I would recommend is make sure you hop on one of the balloons, which just slowly floats you around the grounds and then lands you and gives you an achievement. So if you're an achievement head, you get an achievement for that. The rest of that place can F out of here. I don't like it. I think it's boring. I think it's grindy.
I mean, I'm not saying... It's just, it's a 30-year anniversary of... I don't know what I expected. I know there's a lot going on, and the team is spread everywhere, and they're all doing different things. But if they were trying to impress me with this fair part of it, it's not working, Bobby. I really don't like it there.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but for the sake of playing devil's advocate and presenting the other side, let me make some arguments in favor of the fair.
Please do, because I need something positive about this place. I freaking hate it.
Yes. So there are a lot of other things to do other than just the Mount Mania and the story time. The, I was surprised at how kind of fun the, the, uh, the transmog event was. I'd never, I've never done the trial of style, which is what it's based on. And, um, this made me think, Oh, I might do trial of style sometime when it pops up because, because it's kind of neat.
You know, you go up there and the person on the stage gives you a, gives you a theme and, It might be cataclysmic or something like that. Then what you do is they have a transmog person there and for free you can change your transmog. It doesn't cost you anything while you're doing it there.
You go through all your stuff and you change your outfit and then you all stand around and then there's another place you go to pick up some ribbons. Everybody picks up some ribbons on another table. and then they go, everybody walks around and you target people that you think are, their transmog looks cool and you give them a ribbon and everybody's giving each other ribbons.
Five ribbons total, right?
Each person gets five and they can spread them out however they want, I think.
Yeah, and so whoever gets the most, the people who get the most votes, basically, um,
win and that's it was kind of neat um again caveat i only did that one time so that kind of does go into your uh like uh the first time it was fun well i would do it more often if it wasn't 400 million years between each one like honestly that's the other thing there's no timer anywhere so you don't get to see you you know what's up next but you don't really know when and a lot of times i come out and go that's one way they could fix it
Yeah, this guy's always says, step right up and be a part of the mount thing. It's going to be great on the first day. You hear a voice say that. And you're like, sweet. You get down there and you wait and you wait. You could go take three dumps and walk your dog four times before this thing freaking starts. Then it finally starts.
And then it's God knows how long until the next time they start the damn thing. So my biggest problem is frequency. I think I would do that. Like the transmog contest is fun. You're right. It's fun. And it's community driven. And you're voting.
and you're you know there's something about it that really works but then it's like such a long time between the next one and i just i don't even care about frequency honestly i think the frequency is fine but just add a just add a timer that i can see that tells me when it's going to start that would work yeah yeah but um regardless yeah um i'm trying i'm supposed to be making an argument oh yeah
Keep telling me the positives, Bobby. Keep doing it.
There are other things you can do. Going around in the portals and picking up little props to take screenshots of yourself. It's pretty fun. Once. It's all right. It's fun once. Yeah. The little thing where you can go and pick up a magic mirror and turn yourself into one of your pets. That's kind of fun, too. Once. Yeah. One time.
That's my whole beef here is that this is a company or this is a team that prides itself on for 20 years finding repeatable content and making it compelling to repeat it. This is all do it once and never look back for me.
Now, that kind of leads me to one thing that I'm going to try to be optimistic about, which is not all of the 20th anniversary event content is in there yet. No. They have some quest chains that are going to be introduced that sound like they're going to make you sort of a detective to be solving a mystery. There's an NPC there that is like an event coordinator.
that is is there you can't really talk to them yet but they're there and you've got a couple of people there's like a rope line and a couple of people standing in line in front of this person and they're called like some sort of like game event coordinator or something i can't remember exactly what the title is yeah she gives you the first quest to go do uh the it's essentially a world quest to go fill 100 of a meter on participating in the various activities
Right. Right. Right. So, but eventually they're going to, the blizzard is according to them, they're going to introduce a series of quests that have you help that person solve some sorts of problems that have inquire like investigation or something like that. The achievements make it sound like you're going to get a title called detective or something like that.
If you, if you do all these storylines and. So that could be really, really interesting. And maybe they're staggering out some release of this stuff to make it last a little bit longer, which is smart. But I do agree that the stuff right now is a little underwhelming. It's sort of like you... I don't know. It was just very much like, oh, this is really cool.
Oh, maybe it's not. The momentum is just weird. It's not a good momentum. I fully expected to go in there and just spend... For a couple of months, this would be a great hub to go and do stuff and then go back and do other things. But this would be where you would go while it's live. And instead, it feels like Halloween or the beer fest event. It's just like, okay, it's another thing.
In fact, those things are more well thought out. They have more... Again, you're right, though. They're going to add stuff. So I don't want to be too critical either because I don't know what they're going to add. If that lady goes, hey, come here, champion. Three goblins barfed over there behind the stage. You need to take care of it.
And then I get over there and it's like, oh, not only do I have to clean up this barf, but I also found a clue. And then the clue says, go. They barfed up a clue. Yeah. They barfed up something strange. What is this? I better take it back and show the lady.
And you know, if you're telling me that, well then maybe we're getting somewhere, but it just feels a really, if this was it, if this was all that was coming, I would probably be harsher. Cause I think it's really lame. I think that, so all that being said, I think the addition of the braid content, the unlocks, I think all that stuff's really strong. I think even the world bosses are cool.
Like that stuff's great. It's just this celebration part. Yeah. Just kind of a bummer.
Let's talk about the raid boss for a second. I don't think you've done that yet. Maybe an LFR?
Not an LFR yet, but I will be queuing for that sometime before the weekend is up, so...
so i it's it by like in lfr it just feels like lfr you just kind of like face roll all over it and it's and it's done yeah um which is great it's it's perfect the reason that exists is so people can see it and also so you can get quests done because there is a quest to complete it and um and you get a reward for it so you need it to be an lfr so my um my other raid team not the one that we run on um although the the core guilds uh
has put together some groups to go in to blackrock depths as well um but i went with the other raid team i have we went in there on normal and we were expecting it to feel like normal you know like the normal raid which is fun you go in there's a bit of a challenge and and you beat all the bosses and you have a good time hanging out yeah right yeah um and you get some loot that you probably just disenchant and it's fun yeah um maybe a transmog here and there that you didn't have but yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we did that, and immediately the first boss we did was really cool. Yeah. Because it's not that it's different. It is what it was like back then, but it was so neat to, as a tank, for example, and I didn't tank back then.
No.
As a tank, to be able to be like, oh... This is like, like tanking was so different back then. Like, like it felt different. The mechanics were different. You know, there's really like a lot of things you can expect from tanking, which you know now because you're a tank now. Yeah.
There's all, for example, almost all bosses nowadays are going to have some sort of mechanic that requires the tank, a tank swap where the tanks have to trade off back and forth throughout the whole fight.
Right.
That's expected.
This is like built in, built in coordination between the two tanks is almost always that.
Yeah, but I forgot in this raid, even from the very first boss, I forgot that one thing that tanking was like back in the day, in the early days, like Blackrock Depths, was sometimes you had a tank who was tanking the boss, and then you had another tank who had a different job the whole time.
Like there would be adds, some that were joining the fight, and the off-tank's job was to control the adds. Never tanked the main boss. And then sometimes it made me remember that sometimes in some raids you even had three tanks because you needed more people to do those things, different jobs. And they all just had different jobs.
And it wasn't that you were all doing the same thing and trading back and forth responsibility. It was neat to be able to do that. So that was cool. Also, when I don't know if the guides exist now, but when we first went in there, it was the first night and they didn't test on the PTR any of this stuff. Yeah.
And I think it was cool that they didn't in the end because you got to go in there we were in there and we had to we had to pull the boss and We read the dungeon journal and stuff, but then we pulled the boss and we wiped and we had to say, oh, okay. We had to write our own strategy is what I'm saying. We didn't have a guide to follow and we did have to figure that out. And that was fun.
That's an experience I haven't had.
So it's not just tank and spank. You guys had to learn without 20 YouTube videos and something on Wowhead. That is unique at this stage of the game, isn't it?
Yeah, but I will say, here's the criticism I have for Blackrock Depths. Do it. Which is... It's too deep. The downside... The depths are too deep. The downside to them not putting it in the PTR ahead of time was this, and I expect that there's going to be some major balancing of this content because we hit the third boss... And we wiped over and over and over.
And we could not get past the third boss. And this is a thing that I've heard lots of people talking about. that the third boss, which is Lord Incendious, is punishing. And it even got to the point, because at first we were like, maybe we just need to figure this out. I got, you guys can't, unless you're watching this on YouTube, you can't see it.
I like had a note card with like, it's probably too bright, but I had a note card that I took notes on to figure out the pattern of fire on the ground. And like we were doing it all, right? Yeah. but it got to a point where we were like, we figured this out.
Like we know what to do and we were doing it all correctly, but we still couldn't get the boss down fast enough, um, to, uh, to deal with all the ads that come out and all this kind of stuff. So it just felt like it's, it's got some tuning issues that, that need to be done. But I think if they figure out how to tune it and you can keep going, it'll be great.
I just think the experience of the, that rate is really, really good. And, And I, I like how difficult it is because we won't just stomp all over it. And it actually might be something that we will want to switch to, you know, come mid early, mid December when we're done, uh,
with the heroic narrow bar palace raid right because we basically up till where we got stuck we have that part on farm i suspect that within the next couple of weeks that will be true all the way up through silken court i hope like we don't we don't know but wherever we're going to be uh yeah like i i look forward to that and also by then obviously there's going to be some guides and people are going to understand the fights better and probably have some patches but
That's where the balancing is off, I think, because there was no PTR, therefore no feedback. You're getting live feedback, and that's it.
And that's why I expect we're going to see patch notes come this Tuesday. They're going to say Lord Incendious's health has been reduced by 30% or something. I think we'll get some things like that. They're going to tune it, and I just hope they don't cause it to be undertuned. to where now we're stomping all over and face rolling over. I like that. It's a challenge.
Yeah, I do too. I look forward to going in there for sure. Plus it's just nice to have some alt content during a time that you may not normally have it.
Yeah.
You know? Uh, so anyway, those, those are all good things. I just hope that before this event is over, there's more on the, I don't want to put this. I want to feel something.
Yeah, that's a really good way to put it.
You know what I mean?
This isn't making me feel very nostalgic.
No, it's not. And for all those people yelling, play classic. I'm not talking about that.
I mean, I want to... And let's be honest, classic from what it sounds like doesn't make you really feel very nostalgic either because it's so different. But that's another discussion.
That's a whole other thing we should probably talk about at some point. But my biggest beef is that I don't... There's nothing happening yet. We're on like 30 years, man. You know where I thought it would happen is with Laura Walker Cho's little stage show. I thought I was going to get some real meat off that bone because I loved listening to him in Mists.
You'd be in a quest line and he'd go, listen, there's a thing I'm going to say. And I'd go, oh shit, he's going to tell me another story. And I'd get a little faded out translucent image of some thing going on. And I used to love that. And they'll fall so flat for me on that stage. They just aren't working. Yeah. I don't know why. There's no music as part of it. It's just him talking.
Like all the usual heft, like the full package just doesn't feel like it's happening. I feel like I'm playing some beta stuff.
I wish they had like a little band of musicians on the side. Like you could see them playing instruments and it sounded very like minstrel-y.
Yeah, like Level 80 Torrin Chieftain or whatever they were. They could even be doing metal covers of Wild Me. Like something to bring me back, to make me feel those feelings.
um in the same way that i i have these feelings in other parts of the expansion just about the current expansion right so it shouldn't be hard to go 30 years we have we have so much 20 of this game 30 of the ip we have so much to draw from and instead i got a i got a old version of the orc model phasing in and out in front of me driving me crazy it's like i don't want to talk to that guy
It is what it is. Let's move on. Oh, we did want to talk about... So there was a big class patch as well that came with all this.
Yeah, balances and stuff like that.
Balances and also some tweaks to the heroic talents and some people not feeling like they had enough flourish to things like the... What's it called? The Hunter one? Yeah. Not Black Arrow, whatever it is. It's the use of the Black Arrow, but I forgot the name of it. Anyway, that thing was just kind of boring. Now it's got a bunch of flourishes, looks really cool.
You and I are both playing Paladins pretty exclusively this expansion. And on paper, I thought we were looking down the barrel of one of the biggest, most massive sweeping changes to Paladins ever.
Yeah, when you read the patch notes in the PTR and what was coming, it was... there's a new talent, new talent, new talent. There was like 12 different new talents. And then this talent is being no longer a talent and it's being, uh, you know, rolled into this and everything looked like it was going to be changing.
Yeah.
Everything.
Yeah. And it turns out, It's fine. I mean, there are changes. There's some stuff, and it's definitely gotten tweaked, especially with the Paladin spec, but even a little stuff with the Rett. It's fine. It's just it doesn't feel massive to me, and if anything, it seems like we're underperforming on the protection standpoint.
Well, we were massively underperforming. Protection Paladin was the least popular. It was a very underperforming tank. Yeah, prior to this even, right? Yeah, prior to this. It was huge, so much so that it was sometimes hard for me to get into Mythic Pugs because it would take forever for groups to like, like I'd be queued up for a thing and it would take like Three minutes.
This is going to sound crazy to people who are like DPS. So I apologize. I know I am in a privileged position as a tank, but it would never take it. I usually would sign up for something on the group finder and it was very quick. to, to get accepted into groups.
Sometimes it would take them a long time and they'd be like, it was because they were waiting for a warrior or they were waiting for a death night, you know, like, but they, they couldn't, there was none signed up all day. They had to settle for the paladin and paladin was underperforming. Um, and so a lot of these changes were to fix that. And, but they did a really good job.
It seems cause I've played, I've done a couple of mythics and rated since, uh, these changes and the, nothing, nothing in terms of how we play. Yeah. Nothing has changed. Right. Um, not, not much. Not really. It really seems like they have, uh, just made changes that make it easier for us to do the things we already want to do and make us a little bit more powerful, like adding, um,
damage increases to our um to our hammer thing um judgment judgment right that used to be a talent and it was basically a mandatory talent which made it hard for us to get other talents that were useful yeah um and so they just rolled it in they were just like well let's just give it to you um other things there's a lot of things that i could talk about but uh but there's only a small portion of our listenership who are paladin so i don't want to yeah i used to get in trouble with the all the hunter talk back in the day so i understand yeah
Well, you used to have a bumper for it.
Yeah, we literally called it Hunter Talk and had a whole thing for it. But what's our – I almost forget the name of the damn talent – not talent, but the ability to throw your hammer and you get three of them and they swing around you and they build –
I'm really bad with names, but I think it's a... But yeah, I know what you're talking about.
I'm just glad to have that back. That has always been badass. It looks cool. I know that prior builds, maybe it wasn't the best thing, but to be able to just start popping those and having those hammers fly everywhere, it makes me feel like Johanna in Diablo 3 again.
It's also a really useful tool to have... Because we can use it out of combat. You don't have to target anybody and you can generate holy power without being in combat, which is incredibly important for paladins because spending our holy power gives us mitigation and a buff for mitigation. So a lot of times before one of the most important things that's once you to take you from.
beginner paladin to intermediate on to expert or more is understanding that you need to use that ability to build holy power before you pull so that you can already have that shield of the righteous buff on you before you pull and It kept reminding me last night.
We were raiding last night and Bobby would pop them and I'd go, oh yeah, right, right, right.
It's funny that you say that because there was one time I was standing there. It's just like a habit thing that I have now when I'm just standing around. I just use that. I just start throwing the hammers around and they go in a circle. And I saw you, literally, I'm in the raid. I'm doing that, just standing around talking to people or listening to our raid leader and stuff like that.
And I see Scott run up. He's getting ready to start the fight and his character runs up alongside mine, looks at mine. And it's almost like I could see him, his character, look at me. Yeah. and then look ahead again and then look down at himself and be like, Oh, maybe I should be doing it. It was like that.
You see that Chinese Olympian during the Olympics when the two Italian, I think, I think gold and bronze that were both biting on their, their metal. Like that's the traditional picture. And she kind of looks at them and looks at her metal and looks back at them and then bites it super cute and very wholesome and awesome. I love that.
It's my favorite thing, favorite chunk of video from the entire Olympics, but that's what it was like.
It was like, Oh, right. I'm supposed to pre hit this.
So the rest of the night I was always whacking that thing, but it has such a great low cool down. And also if you're a jittery player, that's like wait for everybody to do pots and eat their freaking feast and everything. And you're just sitting around instead of like a fidget. Yeah.
Instead of jumping around, just that thing's always on like zero cool downs, constantly throwing hammers and driving everyone else crazy. It's great.
But that is just an example of how, because we can now get that. Before, it was harder to get that because we had to spend those talents on other things. They've shuffled things around to make it so that we can get more useful talents and it not be such a hard choice. And these are the kinds of things that they've done to all the class trees. This is relatively normal.
I think the reason that I am focused on it so much right now is because normally Paladin... is always in a really good place and never has these big changes, but other classes are used to this happening in the first season of a new expansion. Everybody, all the difficulties shake out. And in that first big patch, they, um, they make a bunch of changes, balance changes to classes.
And that's just what we're experiencing. And a lot of them, uh, enhancement shaman got a lot of them as well. I think, um,
uh balanced druid got a lot as well dude your brother's so your brother played with us last night he played he's a shaman he was i haven't seen such a cool uh transmog in a long time
He looked awesome. He's a good player.
Beautiful shaman, though. I usually think shamans are kind of dumb looking. Sorry, shaman. But he looked cool. So tell him that. Let him know that we approve. I will. Well, folks, one quick other note before we move on to some hardcore talk about Mythic Plus and Bobby's specific journey there. I want to mention that there is a 30 Years of Warcraft Direct coming.
They're using the parlance of Nintendo, I guess, now.
uh we don't know exactly what this is going to be uh because i mean they've told us mark the date here's where it's streaming they've got twitch and youtube links uh essentially but on november 13th at 10 a.m pacific time they're doing a special presentation celebrating 30 years of warcraft and a look ahead of what's next um and then there's some stuff but not a lot of details we don't exactly know uh but there's an orchestra involved um my guess is there'll be people talking there'll probably be some retrospective video
Normally, I would have heard by now if a certain couple of friends of mine at Blizzard are involved or not, but I haven't heard. So maybe we'll get to see some familiar faces. This could be exciting or it could be not. But you know what? Don't temper. I guess I'm just giving everybody a nice equal expectation level here. Show up. Don't expect the world, but maybe it'll be cool.
The official website on the thing has all the links. You just go to the official accounts on YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, and you'll be able to watch the thing live. You can earn rewards for watching it. It looks like you get Hearthstone, Warcraft Rumble, and World of Warcraft items possibly, but they don't have any details on that.
Yeah. Hopefully in our next episode, we'll be talking about the cool things that they've, that they announced. Yeah. Um, I'm hoping that they, in that one thing that I, in the plain ice book that I was surprised to see was that they were very seriously, um, considering a Warcraft four RTS for a while. They were, um, and, uh, and that it just never went anywhere because, because, uh,
Activision, Blizzard, Bobby Kotick didn't care anything about RTSs.
No. And you know what? I hate to say it, but they never really figured out a way to monetize those in a way that would make him happy. And that's really it. That's all it was. StarCraft II was outperformed. StarCraft II, what was the first one called? Wings of Liberty. Yeah. Was the most successful launch of an RTS in history.
Despite that, World of Warcraft's first premium on-store sparkly horse made more money than the entire game did. So I'm not saying I side with Bobby. I just get why he did it. And by Bobby, I mean Kodak, not Bobby Frankenberger. Very different Bobby.
but selfishly. And I, what I want to see is that I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think we're going to hear that Warcraft four is in development, but, but I would, I would be, I would fall out of my seat if that, um, if they did that, they really black eyed themselves with that botched reforged three though.
That was such a mess. Oh my God. That's still the word. I still think it's the biggest fumble I've ever done.
That was such an interesting story in the book, too, to read about why that happened. Because we knew it was a fumble, but I didn't know why it was such a fumble. That was worth reading the book just to hear about the Warcraft reforged.
We didn't really say this earlier. I do want to make this clear. I think Bobby agrees, and everyone I've talked to has read it. I think this book is, if you are a Blizzard fan or a WoW fan or any just sort of interested in games and the back end of all this...
um which has always been fascinating to me this is a must read i think it's amazing and i have it on some pretty good authority that factually speaking this thing is dead on like they didn't miss any of that they may not always cat the book doesn't always capture the passion behind some of what looks like just lunacy yeah it's hard to do that because there's magic involved and how do you describe that in a book and it's hard and you don't have every voice but
Oh.
Well, you think you do, but you don't. Bobby, let's talk about power. Let's talk about Mythic Plus power. You've acquired it all. You are now lord of your domain.
Well, not quite. Almost. I did get, so to update everybody on my Mythic Plus journey, and I am very proud of the fact that I do this all in Pugs, so I will remind everyone that I do this in Pugs. It can be a frustrating but rewarding journey. Sure. But I got Keystone Master. this past month. That's where you get 2,000 rating in Mythic+. It's cool. You get a mount.
The mount this time is pretty good. It's one of those mech mounts that you fly around in, but it's diamond.
Yeah, the diamond one. It's kind of... I don't always like these when they're just all... alternate skins. It's not that I don't, I don't, I really do love and respect the work that skins provide or that, you know, those artists are doing amazing work. Like, like we talked about with the expensive mount, uh, that's one point I didn't bring up. I kind of wish it was just more, uh,
about this expansion we're in or more overall wow and not just another one of those dinosaur models with the new skin sure anyway yeah but but in this case too i kind of just wish for special achievements like where they really hit you with the uniqueness and it's hard to get or whatever i wish they were just more than this is that one you got accidentally by questing but it's prettier because it looks like diamond you know what i mean
right yeah i'm usually a bit underwhelmed by the keystone master mount there have been some good ones um but i didn't like any of them in dragon flight for example didn't stop me from doing it because that's the mount is just a sort of like a cool reward i'm i'm doing it because of you know the challenge i just want to it's the same reason that i went in 100 100 percented
Hades when Hades was out. When Hades was around. I'm not doing it because I get anything for it. It's just a challenge. I want to complete the challenge. But it didn't feel... To get to Keystone Master did not feel like as much of an accomplishment this time as it used to, I don't think. I'm not totally sure why.
Difficulty reasons or some other factor, do you think?
I don't know. My suspicion is that it feels like And again, I'm not saying this because I feel like I need to be the only one who's doing this, but it feels like it's way easier for everyone to do it now because of Delves. Oh, I see what you mean.
Delves have made it really much easier for people to get the type of gear required to be running these Mythic Plus keys, which is, to be clear, that's a good thing. I think it's a good thing for the game. I don't think that's a bad thing, but the consequences are that I think getting Keystone Master didn't feel as challenging.
There's always going to be knock-on effects by something this new and drastic in the game, so I'm not surprised.
On the other end of it, going from Keystone Master from 2,000 rating to 2,500, which is Keystone Hero... That journey has been very exhausting and very frustrating and very difficult. Not only is it because I think the dungeons are really challenging and the way they've changed to fixes has made it very, very challenging and difficult.
Those are all good things, but also because I feel like I am encountering the meanest people in these pugs that I haven't encountered in a long time. Now, I know many of you are thinking, Bobby, you're doing a pug. What did you expect? But to be honest, in the past, like all through Dragonflight, I was always very surprised that the pugs felt...
pretty much like occasionally you run into jerks but anywhere in the game you run into jerks occasionally but all through Dragonflight I was always surprised at how how kind people were or how or at least how at the very most cynical interpretation at least how willing to tolerate people were like how tolerant people were just to be like, let's just get this done.
And I'm not going to make a, you know, be a jerk about it. I'm just going to get this done. Um, but now people are just being mean. Um, and I, I've, I've quit many groups. I have a sort of a policy where it's not just when people treat me badly, but if I see other people treating other people badly and like really being jerks about it, I will quit.
Yeah. I get out for that. I hate that.
And I will make sure to tell them why I am quitting beforehand because I don't have, maybe it's because secretly, maybe that's the dad in me. I'm secretly hoping I can teach him a lesson before I leave. Like if you hadn't been such a jerk, your tank would still be around.
See ya. Yeah. There are consequences to your bad behavior. Like I do this and I think it is a little bit of fatherhood kicking in. I do.
yeah but i feel like i'm doing that a lot more this time and it's it's a little bit more of a slog i still my suspicion is also that delves might have something to do with that i can't say for sure i think more people i think it's just more people are doing these higher mythic plus keys now
And so when you increase the number of people who are doing it, that also means you're bringing in more jerks, more buttholes.
Yeah, it's a scale problem once again. But it is one aspect to WoW that has been here since the beginning. And one of the problems of trying to satisfy the inner side of that donut, that's one thing about the donut we don't talk enough about, is the inside of that donut is a little bit, sometimes can be a little nasty in there, a little caustic.
It can be a toxic donut.
Yeah, as much as I want to...
part of that reason is the inside of the donut doesn't necessarily like the outside i'm like you know i'm the real donut here but the truth is without that outside you don't have a donut right there is no donut you know what you have if you just do the inside of the donut you have everquest and guess what that capped out at about 400 000 people max that's what you get mic drop yeah mic drop boom
well anyway um yeah it turns out yeah the donut hole is it's just a ball of dough it's not interesting okay no and the hole is kind of empty if you think about it you need the whole donut to make this an interesting group of dough yeah um it's just a ball of dough otherwise well said
Oh my gosh, we've taken a full... You know, if Adham was listening, and he's not, but if he was, because apparently, according to that book, there's never been a more burned out human in the history of the planet. Holy cow. But if he's listening, donuts for everybody. You had it right the first time.
I have other thoughts about Alan Adham, and they're positive things, actually, but that conversation has left us. Maybe another time I'll bring it up.
Adham, underrated, I would say, Adham is.
I think so. That's kind of what I think. On the note of more jerks coming into the game, I think we need to increase the number of
nice people playing and i think a lot of the people listening to this show are the type of nice people that we want oh i agree um we get the buttholes they don't last very long they're only here for a minute yeah that's how it works so i wanted to give a quick sort of i i was i was talking to people in discord in our community and and asking around and if i got the sense that there are people who are interested in doing mythic plus but don't understand how it works or have been too afraid to do it so i wanted to do a real quick
like primer on mythic plus real fast and let this also be sort of a, an introduction to, and let, let people know that I plan on also recording some supplemental episodes between our monthly episodes that go into more detail about how mythic plus works. And maybe even this could be for, this could be a Patreon tease, maybe even like, um,
Some patron content where I go deep into specific dungeons and strategies for specific dungeons and what to do in those and some tips and stuff like that.
Oh, I'd love that. Here's the thing too. Remember the Patreon stuff. Sometimes we're going to do Patreon only content and sometimes we're going to do stuff that will be in both. Well, it'll always be in both places, public and Patreon. But there might be times where we do something that is a timed exclusive in Patreon. So you may get it for a week or two before anyone else does.
And this is actually a great time to say this. One of the things when we started this up again and I approached Bobby, we decided – And agreed mutually that a monthly cadence made the most sense to get started. Like, let's see where this goes, what this is. And I think it was the right decision. It feels right to me just from an overall standpoint.
But what it has introduced is this feeling that I want to make other things in between. I've been doing it on YouTube. which is less podcasty and it's not showing up in audio feeds or anything. But just when I've got a thought about a thing, just hop in, let's talk about it real quick. Those are really fun to do. More focused stuff like you're talking about, fun to do.
So I think what you can expect is more on the audio feeds as well as sometimes video. But
patreon or otherwise we'll fill in more of those gaps because yes a month is a long time to wait if you're super passionate about the game i get it but i've also heard back from people that say you know what's great about the monthly cadence is it's no longer just this thing i expect every week it's now a thing i look forward to and then when it drops it's like yeah dude a new one in my player today i can't wait like that's that's great feedback to hear too so anyway i'm glad you brought that up because yeah yeah
And as a creator, and then I'll start talking about Mythic Plus, as a creator of the content, one thing that I like about it is that
the inter interstitial the the between episodes supplemental stuff that we do feels like oh this is me making some content about it and then once a month me and scott have a hangout where we talk about what's been going on with us in world of warcraft so that's that's and i like that feel so yeah we're gonna keep doing that i agree for for a while i agree well there you go thank you for sharing your mythic journey with us bobby anything else you want to tack on there before we get to some feedback
Yeah, so I'm going to do a little bit of it's like so expect a primer coming for Mythic Plus to talk about what is Mythic Plus. Sort of the first one I do is just going to will be a will be like an introduction to Mythic Plus for people who may have never dipped their toes in or may have only tried a little bit and they want to know more about it.
what makes all the details, you know, like what is Mythic Plus? How do keystones work? How do you get keystones? How do you upgrade them? What, you know, how's the timer work? What are the rewards? All these things, right? Yeah.
And then after that, I will keep, I'll go a little bit more detail and then maybe go into dungeon specific and then we'll see how that goes and what the feedback is on that and then go from there.
Sounds great. More on the way. And of course, every month we'll talk in depth about some sort of hardcore aspect of the game. So look forward to that. It's now time for your feedback.
Why it's the town crier. It's the town crier.
The town crier.
Yes, that's right. That music can mean only one thing, and that is that we have some Town Crier stuff to read in the form of texts, emails, phone calls, all that stuff. If you'd like to email the show, you can do it at theinstanceofgmail.com, or you can send us a text at 801-471-0462. Or you can voicemail that same line. Use it to your heart's content.
There's also a form on the website at frogpants.com slash instance. And that'll send it straight to our email account as well. So no excuses. There's a million ways to contact us and no reason not to. Let's start with this text from... Uh, did we not get a name? We didn't get a name on this one. I thought we did.
Uh, it says the subject was we are so back and I just thought this was a nice way to start out our messages today. I can hardly express how thrilled I am to hear the instances back. The show is my nostalgic kick. Uh, my first ever podcast I listened to. We hear that a lot. It's always blows my mind. And my original immersion into World of Warcraft.
As much as I've loved playing WoW these past years, this show has been missing from my being home. Welcome back, old friends. And then a little bit of a PS. On that note, I want to splurge all things instance. Where can I listen to the show from episode one? Seems to only find episodes 436 and forward. Well, I'm glad you asked. So a little bit of utility to this question.
There was... The show's been almost around since... Well, it's been around since 2006. So we are pushing 20 years. Wow. Which is an insane thing to even say, right? So when RSS began, which is essentially when the show began, very different how you made the files, where you kept them, how you stored them, how web services worked. This has all evolved very...
Quickly or slowly, depending on your point of view over the years. And as a result, multiple hosts, multiple formats, people like iTunes changing RSS feeds to need something. So we had to change it. And then you host it in a new place. And then that place goes away. And now where's the old file? And you got to do what you got to do.
I have every single file from episode one to current here locally and all sorts of backups and stuff. But the feed stuff's kind of all over the place. So on the site, you'll find an archive feed, but that's not all of them either. So what I did have was a link to an archive.org page where all the other episodes were.
That technically exists, but archive.org, as you know, got hacked and is all over the effing place right now. It's a mess. It really pisses me off. It's a horrible hack. Assuming that all resolves itself, then that will all be back there. But I am working on some other redundancies so that these early episodes can be available and hopefully –
Maybe I can parlay it into another RSS feed or something so you can get it more conveniently. I realize that's all kind of screwy, but trust me, 20 years of this, we're lucky there's a feed at all. Right. Like it's so jacked. And this is true of a lot of my shows. Film Sack has the same problem. It came out in 09, you know, again, very early in those days.
And so a lot of these things have that issue. But there are plenty of shows that I do now where we've got the entire thing. If I had started the instance five years ago. You wouldn't even be asking us this question.
So let me ask a quick question. Do you think maybe this is a missed opportunity for you, Scott? Maybe you're going to be kicking yourself after I ask you this question. Do you think it would have been cool when they released officially released classic to be like, Oh, let me start with episode one through whatever that was all released during that.
And I'm going to release all those and people can listen to those while they play classic. Oh my gosh.
And then that's actually a missed opportunity. What was I thinking? I know what I was thinking when Classic came out. I was pissed at Blizzard for all their internal bullshit and the harassment and everything else. And then the layoffs and then the pandemic and then more allegations and then those turning out to be true. And then all of that mess. I was so incensed by it.
And this is right about the time Classic is even starting.
So you had kind of a bitter taste in your mouth when you were thinking about World of Warcraft.
Yeah, I was kind of at the point where I was like, I wasn't even sure what I wanted this show to be. It was a hard time. So what ended up happening is what needed to happen, which was kind of a death, some mourning, some rebirth, and a return. Being able to control that in a way that I get to kind of, I don't know, not start over, but keep what was great, but also enter a new phase.
I needed that for this to work at all. I'm saying this in retrospect because while I'm doing it, I'm not thinking that. I don't know. I didn't have a plan.
I remember hearing you talk about it. You were done at the time.
You were done. Yeah, I had no plan. I just knew that that needed to happen and that that space had to be created. And I needed a good couple plus years of... not having it. And I needed to see what Blizzard was doing during that. And that helped. And I'm not going to lie here. A huge part of this was Chris coming back to the company. That was a big part of it for me.
He and I are very close friends, but that's not just the reason. It's the spirit he brings to things that matters to me. And what it means that he came back. And what it means.
And what it means about what's going on at Blizzard.
Yeah. What it means for him to go from a very comfortable retirement to, yes, I'll go back That meant more than just a job. That's not it. He didn't need it. That's why it mattered to me. That was a big deal for me. But anyway, long story short, I would like to get all these back in a place where people can more easily.
Well, when you do, let us all know. So because then maybe when I go back and play some classic, I'll crank up some like episode 10 while I'm playing.
It's kind of on garage bullshit or whatever we did early on. That'll be fun.
uh here's another text this is about consoles and controllers hello instance love the show is back listening to y'all talk about console port this week meaning the um uh the mod that patrick talked about uh and i love it i bought a asus rog ally and it runs windows beautifully i play any uh anywhere and everywhere in raid and in mythic plus even the only issue i've run into is pvp because of targeting and uh sorry because of targeting and keybinding not being very easy um
I only play this way now. It's great. Let's see. Y'all keep doing awesome things. Love it. Again, anonymous. That might be the dude that's at our raid team. He didn't put a name here, but that guy's also crazy. Yeah, maybe. He was leading DPS as a survival hunter with a freaking controller the whole time. It's blowing my mind.
Yeah, that is. It's hearing about him, hearing about console port, Patrick's little thing at the end, hearing these people. I really am very close to putting this on my Steam Deck so that I can farm mats in bed before I go to sleep.
Yeah, because there's a way to do it, obviously. There's a little more hoops to jump through because you're running SteamOS and not Windows directly. But that's okay. It can be worked around. What I'd really like to have happen is for Blizzard... to put World of Warcraft on Steam. I'll rebuy the current expansion. I don't care. I would too, yeah.
Because our accounts are linked, so all my progress is there. But I did this with Diablo. I'll do it again. Having it on there natively would be insanely awesome. But they're going to have to have native support for controllers. That mod is the perfect example of...
somebody getting it exactly right it's very good blizzard should just lift it i want i say that but maybe hire that guy you need a new controller guy at the company bring him in get that done i would i would be in bed every night going i'd be play oh this would be bad for me this would be really bad yeah but good but in such a good way in a good way bad but good you know as they say yeah
Uh, let's see. That's a great one. Thank you for that. Here's another one. Uh, this is a very short one. It says, do y'all think that we'll get a blizzcon 2025? I want to have dinner with y'all and Dan, the board game man. Again, I'm not sure who sent this, but I'm sure I've had dinner with them now that they've said it this way. Okay, Bob, we haven't talked about this really on this show.
It used to be a very common discussion on The Instance every year. Where will it be at BlizzCon this year? And often there was. A couple times there weren't. 2012, they didn't. 2020, they didn't. 2021, they did virtual. Let's see. And then they haven't had a new one since last year. So 2022 also didn't have one. So this last time that they had one, they didn't sell out of tickets.
That's never been the case. They've always sold out. And they even had less tickets up and they still didn't sell out of tickets. I don't think BlizzCon. Well, all right. Prior to the Microsoft acquisition, I would have been surprised there would ever be a BlizzCon again. when that happened or was at least confirmed.
Well, Bobby Kotick even said like, again, keep bringing up the book. I'm sure we're going to bring up this book many times in the future. Um, but, uh, the, uh, it, it even said in that book that he never liked BlizzCon. He thought it was a waste of time and money.
Yeah.
Um,
Yeah, because it really wasn't a profit center. They'd make money, but they don't make barrels of money, which is what Activision always wanted.
Yeah, he thought all those man hours, all those man months were better used cranking out store content or something.
Yeah, where they weren't charging enough. And then even when prices would go up, we were offering too much for too little. And he missed the point.
So yeah, I agree with you is what I'm saying that I would have, if under, before Microsoft, I would have been surprised if they ever did one again.
Yeah, under Microsoft, maybe. Because again, I think they want to let them cook. And also hearing the origins of BlizzCon is pretty crazy. In that book again, there's a whole thing where it was just two community managers, which is a very different job back in 05 than it is today. But those two just had this wild hair like...
Well, they saw the story of when World of Warcraft first released and they went to these stores where they were having.
Oh, the fries up the street. Yeah. In Orange County. Yeah.
And they were like, holy cow. They were so surprised that there were so many people out the door and down the street and circling around parking lots and buildings and stuff like that.
Yeah.
And then those community managers were like. Well, if people are lining up to do this just to buy this game, I wonder if we could throw an event and people would show up for it.
And boy, were they right. They were absolutely right. And it was only 8,000 that first year, but tickets were gone immediately. And it would eventually go to as high as 30 or whatever it is. And it's high at around 2018. But they... Yeah, that... I mean, obviously, it's a huge deal. It's a bunch of work. It means a whole lot of money and planning and all the things that it does.
I was just convinced before the Microsoft acquisition that the appetite from players wasn't where it used to be. And I think that proved out with not selling all your tickets for the very last one that they had. It was also a smaller event. They kept it a little more tight. Sure. Esports kind of took a... A side thing, a bunch of games didn't get any attention anymore.
There's all of these other issues around it. I think if they... Okay, here's my prediction, Bobby. I'm basing this on nothing, but here's my prediction. Okay. They rebrand and launch BlizzCon as a more... because that's where the most of the people are coming from. They make it a more wow focused event and they don't aim for 30 to 50,000. They aim for 10 to 12 or something.
And they just, they bring that aspect of it back and don't make it a profit center. They just make it a thing. That's a passionate subsection, a place to really show stuff off, lean hard into simulcasting it. Um, Remember when they were charged for that? They didn't the last time. Partly because of the same problem. People aren't paying. But I don't know what the future holds for this.
That's my prediction, though. They figured out a way to make it more WoW-centric. Because what didn't work, I will give Activision this if I'm giving them anything. It was a place to show off your new games, show a new cinematic, announce things like Heroes of the Storm, even though they kind of blew it at the end.
uh announced things like overwatch those are big moments but you'd still could make the argument that people weren't going to blizzcon for that stuff they were going there because of world of warcraft and yeah i i think you know buckling down and saying well that's the focus again probably wouldn't probably would help and i think it would probably hype people up and make them want to go yeah and i think um for my part of it i think
That it would... If there was a BlizzCon 2025 or even a 2026, if it took them another year, it would go a long ways to... to make me feel good about the direction of blizzard after this Microsoft acquisition.
Yeah.
Because what they need to do is, is to lean hard in that other direction into that player first culture, you know? Yeah. Um, and that would be what, what was going on. If I feel like that would be sending that signal. If they did a, if they brought blizzcon back and, and said, who cares if it doesn't sell out? Who cares if,
If it doesn't make us a ton of money, we're doing this because we're investing in the culture of our players surrounding our games. And we know that that will have a payoff in the long run because, um, it helps our reputation. That's, that's what BlizzCon has a reputation. And if, if, If they take too many more hits to that reputation, it's not going to be good.
I agree. For Blizzard. Obviously, there's some dark BlizzCon moments that have come to light that really challenge that reputation, but I think you could bring that back. I really do. And I hope they do because I really – I love that every year. I love going. I love being on stage that time.
It was one of the – that was one of the most revelatory moments of my entire life, not just career, my life. When I got up on that stage and realized – I was nervous as hell going up there. But when I got up there, I realized 30,000 people in a live room may as well be no one. And I don't mean this in a bad way. You're all human beings. But it –
I got so relaxed immediately because it was like, well, this is just everybody. So it's nobody. So it's fine. If there's a room of 10 people, I'd be terrified. You know what I mean? Like I would lose my freaking mind. If I knew when I'd live stream shows that it was one or two people, that's so much more stressful. But when it's like 500, 600 people, it's like, eh, it's fine.
So they taught me, that thing taught me a lesson. I'm grateful for that lesson. I was grateful for the opportunity, of course, but I would love to do it again. Or just, I just want to be part of the community again. I want to do a live instance on a little stage at the Hilton because me and Bobby would be there and we're going to do it. You know, like I miss that shit. Yeah. So much fun.
All right. Let's get to a phone call. We got one voicemail from a familiar voice. Check it out.
Hey, Scott and Bobby. This is for the instance. My name is Tanner, your illustrious raid leader and guild leader, of course. I was calling in about this last episode. You were talking about the story mode raid and how you couldn't do it on alts. without going through the campaign. I thought the same thing, but that is not true. You can go to the NPC executor, Nisrek.
He's the big spider dude in the room that the little spider guy outside the range sends you to. He's also the guy who gives you the last quest in that chain to kill a queen. But yeah, if you go in there on an alt, he will have a quest that starts the quest chain. You don't have to go to the little spider guy that you had to talk to on your first character.
But yeah, it's a little confusing, and they did not explain that to players very well. But it is there, and I highly recommend doing it because it drops one of the enchanted crests. which can get you a pretty decent piece of crap in here. Anyway, love the show, guys. Keep it up. Bye.
All right. Thank you, Tanner. Thanks. That's awesome. I didn't know that when I first got this. He said this a little while ago. It's been a while since the last episode, but I had no idea.
and i still haven't done it i meant to i was gonna go take the alts through there because i was for a hot minute with this expansion for about two and a half weeks i was very alt freaky like i was going nuts i got four of them up to 80 pretty quickly sharing all that experience doing delves and like having an advantage because i was getting more xp because of you know war war party stuff and all that or war wait war party war band war band thank you still not used to the name
And yeah, I just hadn't done it yet. But just so everybody knows, you don't have to go find the spider every time because that's kind of a pain in the ass. First guy, yes.
It's a pain to find many of the things related to that raid. Have you ever tried spending your tokens that give you tier pieces? No, not yet.
Yeah, well, good luck. I don't even know. I don't know what NPCs I need to talk to. Where are they? Are they all over the place? Yeah, good question.
Where are they? You would not know unless you went on to Wowhead and dug through several links and then found a map that showed you. I promise I'm not going to rant any more than this. It's very stupid where they put them. Yeah, it's dumb. It's very dumb.
Put them in town.
Put them where I can see them. Have them say it over their head. I feel like they were trying to create immersion by putting them in this other place that was like, oh, it makes sense in this culture where they would be sitting. And I'm like, but it doesn't make sense. I have no clue where they are. I had to...
It's almost as bad as saying you need to log into Hearthstone, you need to have this card, and then go over to Diablo 3, start a Necromancer, kill three mobs, and then you'll be told to go open up Heroes of the Storm. It feels that vague. And so I'm like, okay.
And besides, I already got enough gear from our rating that I was like, well, these tokens I dropped aren't going to give me jack at this point anyway. So it's fine. Yeah. All right. Well, that's going to do it for our feedback today. Again, you can find all the details about how to contact us on the website, frogpants.com slash instance.
I would like to thank some brand new folks who joined us on our Patreon. And boy, we love these people. Why do we love them? Well, because they're helping the show happen. And a bunch of people signed up since we last talked. I'm just going to name them all. Will Matheson, Dustin Remy, Dr. Samurai. Yeah. I don't know why I like that one, but I do. Me too. Billy and Paducah. Eagle Scout.
Brett Boatwright. It's way better than Boatwrong. Andrew Diamond. Pasta Matt. I love that. That's either a thing I want to buy to make pasta or that's a guy who likes pasta. I'm not sure what.
I want to know someone named Pasta Matt. I hope I meet Pasta Matt sometime. Hey, it's Pasta Matt.
Hey, Pasta Matt. Come over here. Burger Bernie and... Shake Sally. Let's go. Let's get lunch. Xavier Bertoli. Sorry, Bertolino is what I meant to say. David Hootie42Andreas. Hey, it's Hootie42. Hey. I like that guy. Matt Dodson-Handleton. Battlehammer Callahan. Another amazing name. That's a great name. Hoojohn. Steve Holler. Steve Holler, rather. And finally, Omega9, a regular in our chat room.
A big thank you to all of them for going to patreon.com slash theinstance. And signing up, we really appreciate it. We hope to be bringing you more and more content there as time goes on. And having your support means a lot. It's a monthly, which means it's really not bad. A little slow amount per month and bam, you're in. And your support means everything. So thank you guys so much.
Everything else is at frogpants.com slash instance. Bobby, anything else you want to fire off before we hose down the huge dinosaur with the nice gold trimming and send it to the garage?
I've said a lot about World of Warcraft today, and I have told you I'm going to say a lot more in these in-between releases. But if you like listening to me, I do have a science podcast you can listen to.
Oh, yeah.
It's called All Around Science.
It's a great show. If you guys are into science topics of any kind, really, there's a good chance Bobby and his co-host have talked about it at All Around Science. So check that out. You can also find more shows like this one at frogpants.com. There's Core. We mentioned we're part of the Core Guild, which is another show we do about games in general. If you haven't heard that show, you're insane.
Go check it out, frogpants.com slash core. It's going to do it for us, for me, for Bobby, and for giant $90 dinosaurs everywhere. We'll see you next time.
This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Yes. Get more at frogpants.com. What do you mean there's lore in this game?