The Instance: Forever is a long time

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1:01That's Q-U-O.com-tek. My dearest Martha, I'm tired of plain old texts to speech that reads every chat message in the same monotonous voice. I wish it had more variety. Well now it does. Give your chat unique voices with Bumblebee, a voice fit for a wizard. For a little sweetheart. I have my suspicions. Your streaming companion for Twitch and YouTube. Get started free at Bumblebee.buzz. Best chat text to speech in this life. And the next. So I think because we didn't get press pass as to BlizzCon, we actually dodged a bullet. What? We're there. Oh, I was about to go in a dark direction. What bullet did we dodge? The COVID-19 new variant bullet. Because everybody I know who went, not everybody, because they haven't confirmed what they have. But a lot of people that went that I have talked to since the con are all now in bed with fevers and testing positive for this new variant.

2:03So that we learn anything? No. Cover your mouth when you sneeze. Don't touch your face. Wash your hands. Yeah. And stay six feet away from each other at a convention. Yeah. And do not spend any time in the Overwatch arena. I Hello. Welcome to the instance, Bobby. I don't know if it's probably been since wrath of the lich king since I've felt the palpability of the World of Warcraft permeate the culture the way it is right now for a thing that neither of us really thought too much about before, before this thing. Yeah. That makes me feel exciting. But we still kind of don't know, right? But this is going to come up today.

3:04World of Warcraft forever. Yeah, it'll come up forever. Did you? So, okay, I'll show you something. Look at this. I made a dude in there. He's an undead man. I went with newer models because F the old shit. Undead mage and lead mage. A tree. Yeah, mage. And his name is Gurp Johnson. And you may say to yourself, I forgot already, forgot we are going to get surname. Yeah, we get surnames. So you could have a whole family of Johnson's or, you know, Frankenburgers or whatever you want. And I think that the way it works is you can have, if as long as you've got that surname in there, I think you can name anybody anything you want. Even if someone else has that first name, just like in real life, right? You know a few bobbies or bobs. That is like real life. Yeah. How you determine which one you're talking to is often their surname. So I think that's pretty cool. None of this matters today, though, because you can't actually register

4:04for good the name you want until I think it's a week before the actual release on the fourth or something like that. Anything people are scrambling to do, like I saw a dude named Comic Sans, yesterday, that was pretty cool. That's pretty good. Yeah. If it says, well, we ought to do all the fonts like, I don't know, time, hell, Vedic, that could be like a, that's pretty good. Maybe that'll be my, my, what would be hell, Vedic demon hunter? No, it would be like a death night. Death night or this now warlock, maybe a warlock. Okay. What about an undead paladin? Because that's now a thing for you to do. Yeah, I know this game. Not even in retail. You can't play that in retail. But you can play it in this forever business, which is a little crazy to say, but I think I am going to do an undead paladin is what I, is my plan. I mean, you always go paladin. So why wouldn't you go paladin here? And my very first, because in the reason, I have to do paladin. I love paladin too much. But not only have I always wanted an undead paladin,

5:08I just think the, I think the lore behind it is really cool. I think that there's a theming behind it. There's a lot of, that I really like about the idea of an undead paladin. But it's, it's just perfect to me. It's so full circle because, wow, forever is going back to the beginning. Right. And my very first World of Warcraft character was an undead rogue. So it was undead. And I played an undead for a really, really long time. So it feels like sort of like a marriage of my first character in my, my favorite class, you know. And so undead paladin it is. But what would my undead paladin's name be? Yeah. So you got to work on that. You got to think about it now. I have beta access. I know you don't, neither of us are beta testers by tradition. I don't love doing it. That's the back. Why don't you like doing it, and did paladin? Um, a couple of reasons. One, it all gets wiped on day one. Or maybe even before, but you're not going to get to keep any progress you do or anything you've done.

6:11That just seems like time wasted. It's for a good cause. We're trying to make a, help them make a stable game and have, you know, put it through its paces and all the stuff you got to do. I definitely think that people should beta test it. It's just not going to be me. You're right. Right. And so my goal is, I, okay, so here's the deal. I have beta access. I put the key in. It says download it. I did all these things. I have it on my PC and my Mac. I wanted to test both. And in both cases, somebody told me this might be an undead problem, like their zones are even just picking undead in general. But there's a sizeable percentage of people when they create the character, an undead character, and you start to do this silver moon or silver pine forest voice over guy. Starts talking to you undead lord or on the thing of the magic, but do that guy. Yeah. That there's some kind of bug that causes like full on like system white crashes. Not system white, but it's like a crash locked up frozen. Sure enough, in both cases, my up to date Windows PC and my up to date,

7:15Mac Studio, both of them. And so I kind of had to give up because what I haven't tested is let's see if we can make because I do get as far as the character creator, making characters no problem. Like you saw my guy there. But I can't get into the game and into the world without all this lockup. Super frustrating and irritating. It's a beta. This is another reason I don't love beta's. All right. Is that they're beta. It's kind of a mess on purpose. They're trying to work out bugs. Right. And power to everybody who's like in there doing it. What I don't understand is like these influencers who get in and go, we're starting our guild. I'm like, yeah, but it's not out yet. But yeah, but we're starting it and like thousands of people join this guild. And it's all just going to get wiped. You're going to have to do it all over again. I guess you get your hand, your head around the tools and the differences or whatever. But yeah, I mean, it is good to get in there and figure out how guilds work. Sure. But I think like big streamers and influencers and everything they're doing that because,

8:17I mean, because of it gets it gets the views. Because they're the people coming to them, right? Yeah. Yeah, I blows up their numbers on Twitter, whatever. All of that's fine. I just don't I'm just not a tester guy. And yeah, I have enough. I have such a limited amount of time to play games anyway, which is an interesting thing around forever because forever represents quite the sink if you want to look at it that way. A time sink that is. Previous time spent in, you know, leveling and saving the current state of retail in midnight, you'd do that in a couple of days. Like you're you're all rushing to do it. You're speed running, all that stuff. So you can get to end game and start building your score and doing all the things you do in the modern game. This is not me poo poo and on any of that. It's just that's what it's evolved into. So what they are asking of me here sounds really enticing. It makes my 2003 self get real jazzed about going back and starting again and this horizontal

9:18progress rather than the vertical model that the retail uses is pretty damn exciting. And obviously it's exciting to a lot of people because my understanding is yesterday, silver moon was a ghost town. It was like it was a five year old expansion that nobody visits. Oh, you mean like in the retail? Yeah, because everybody was in the beta. There were so many people in there. I saw bow playing from the core podcast. Bow was playing a torrent. And they were like 100 torrents just right there trying to turn question like it was a lot. Wow. So and we're run realm that we even mentioned that. This is a single realm video game, Bobby. What do you think of that idea that we're all in the same boat, man? I don't know, man. I don't have a problem with it. It sounds like I'm about to say I have a problem with it. What I'm confused about is it's like, it's like they just changed the name of realms to game mode or whatever it is. Kind of, yeah.

10:19You know, because you can choose the way to get the top or you choose. Yeah, you go in. You'll choose either a PVP mode or a PVE mode or they have, I think they have slightly different names than what I'm saying right now. But but there's essentially like a PVP, a PVE and RP mode and then a hardcore mode. Correct. Hardcore and PVP, they're sorry, RP are not in yet or at least didn't let me choose it when I went to make my first dude. So that's coming though. And if you're in the, whenever you're in those modes, you're not playing with other people. That are in other modes. And within each of those modes, they are still, it seems like they keep calling it, what they're layering you don't, aren't they calling it like layers? Yeah, but it's essentially, it's essentially phasing. It's a phasing you, but to different phases based on, so I think they're saying it's realmless, but it's not like everyone who's playing is going to see everyone else.

11:25Exactly. It's kind of like, yes, so does a single realm. That was the thing they change in mainstream as well, but then who else? Somebody else does this. But anyway, who may think enough? Oh, Eve online. It's a little easier space, space is big. But yeah, so to us, to us, it's a little smoother because we're just not going to choose realms, but there's realms. There's servers happening on the background, in the background. Like there's server shards sharding happening and they have to separate people. So I just don't know how this is, I don't know how this is going to feel any different, is except that a couple of the annoyances that currently exist in retail that have to do with what server you're on won't exist anymore. So I guess that's a good thing, but there aren't very many of those annoyances anymore because they have like cross server, dull sorts of things.

12:27Yeah, no, this is how, I have a theory about this. Do you tell me if you think this is crackers or not, all right? But there had to have been a meeting at some point. I have no insight in following this, but some meeting at some point where they said, classic, we got a problem with classic. And we did season discovery and we shook things up, but really the problem with classic is it's on the road to retail, it always was. Like they're on Pandaria now. That's pretty damn close to where we are now systems wise. A lot changed in Pandaria. And so what are you going to do? Roll right into Dra'nor. Like that doesn't make any sense. So I think at some point they were like, there are the people who want the vanilla game to stay vanilla if they want to play the expansions fine, but if they just want to play what was available to them when it was available to them, then they'll play that. Now somebody in that room probably raised their hand and said, what if there was like

13:27a middle ground where we could do some graphical improvement and give them toggles for some of those improvements. If some of these purists want to look at ugly models and crappy lighting, let them. But we'll make a way for everybody else if they want to to have in some cases even better tech in the engine than they're using currently in retail. Some of that lighting is like beyond what they're doing in retail. And then that also gave them license to say, what if we filled in Hyggell and all these other like zones of void where it seems like some things there, but there's really nothing there was never developed out. We develop out these areas. We put quests in it. We make the whole thing. We make raids in those places. Like we kind of go nuts with all this land we never used. And we introduce new land and new kinds of things. And then we change everybody's ratios. And we let people there. People's feedback will have to determine the future of those ratios and the decisions that we're making at the core. So it's like this having it both ways thing that blizzards getting away with mostly because I think this is they sold it the right way. They're like classic is

14:33doing classic things. Modern is doing modern things. Here's this thing where we think a lot of you are going to want to come check this out. And it may be the first time they actually cannibalize in a major way. Like classic had an impact, but not that big of an impact. Not one to strip retail down to its knees or anything. But I think this is the thing. The thing over the decades, people have talked about the wow what's going to be the wow killer. And also we get questions all the time and people asking us what would a wow to look like. And my answer is always like why would they even need to make a wow to they're always improving it. What would that look like? How would they change the story? Would they like jump 50 years in the future? Like all that kind of stuff. It really feels like to me this is this if there is ever going to be a wow to this is how it's done. Is the only way it could work. And I also agree that this that this is the only way this is the way I see

15:37the real potential for a wow killer meaning the retail wow killer right right. No, I think that's that's exactly how I feel about it. And I don't I don't know I'm tell we see it up and running for a while. I don't think we really know the result of it. If it can be the promise that it feels like now the hype is pretty sick. It's kind of hard to cut through it. Yeah, it is it is and I'm trying to remind myself of that because I'm also really, really excited about wow. That's what I'm calling it by the way. Are you going to call it wow. I think we said that on the when we were watching the stream. Yeah, we did. I was hoping that was the drunken idea of a madman, but no, you're going to know I'm sticking with walf. Okay. So whenever I'm really excited about it. But I didn't I think I said on this I think I said last week that that I I was not when people talked about classic plus which is this is essentially what everybody was talking about with classic plus right even as the

16:40room even the Blizzard people said of course all the rumors turned it out to be this. This is one yeah, yeah. And so anytime anybody talked to me about classic plus I was like what is clat? What does that even mean? I am not interested in that give whatever and I just always dismissed it. But the more I saw of what they were talking about with walf. Yeah, maybe I won't call it well. The more I say it. You've got you've used it twice. Maybe three times now and you're already having a second guess myself. I got it. But the more I heard them talk about it, the more I was like, man, this sounds really, really exciting. And you know, it is a really interesting Scott. I was talking to my wife, Stephanie. You know, Stephanie. Yeah, she's great. Love her. She used to play World of Warcraft a long time ago. She doesn't need more. But I was talking to her about this and explaining it to her. And she thought it was pretty interesting. And then as I was explaining how it would be different than retail for the first time because of the contrast

17:44of describing the potential of a well forever and what current retail is. For the very first time, I was really struck by how boring retail might actually really be. So let me clarify. Because I don't actually mean it's boring. I clearly really enjoy retail. Yeah, you play it all the time. You're rating, you're doing everything. Yeah. So what I mean by boring is they just are, they just do the same thing over and over again. From a gameplay perspective, it is on loop. Yeah. Yes. From the gameplay perspective. Yeah. Now it happens to be a gameplay that I enjoy a lot. Right. Yeah. So I don't have a problem with that. But in describing it, I for the first time, realized like what people are complaining about. I was like, oh, I just happened to really like it. But this is the same thing every single time that I'll tell you what really made me realize it is

18:49because I was trying to explain to her, I'm sure you heard Scott that that one of the things that they've decided to do with well forever is to sort of obfuscate all of the the like gear data and bosses and and what you've down to not just the possibilities, but even what bosses you will be facing in raids and dungeons and stuff like that. So what'll happen is when you're playing it, you can't data mine it. Right. Nobody will be able to data mine it. They won't be able to find it. That obfuscation will not unlock until someone has looted the piece of gear or encountered the boss. Right. Right. Like, which is a very stuff will be locked discovery kind of eventually idea concept. Yeah. And so I was explaining to her and she was like, oh, why would they do that? And I was explaining why that would be cool because you know, you get to go in and and you don't know what gear is going to drop. And then again, she was like, well, why is

19:52that cool? And I was forced to explain well right now every time a patch comes out, it's sort of like solved before it releases, right? Oh, yeah. Or like, if not, it's within the next 10 minutes, it feels like it is once a kid. Yeah. So it's a new patch. New season comes out. And what do you do? You don't run into the raid and explore and discover you go to our head or icy veins. You look up what your best and slot list is you. So now you know all the gear you need to find this and you know, which gear to pass on does this rotation for you for the leveling does your rotation for you when you're ready for raiding all that. You find the rotation that you need to do. What were the updates that made it so that you don't use this ability like you know. So now someone is tell someone is now it's been solved. You these are the buttons you need to press. These are the these are the pieces of gear you need to seek out. And then once you have checked off all the boxes on this list that someone is else's has handed to you, you have now finished the the season. The world

21:00worked. Yeah. And then the next season comes out and someone else hands you the the sheet of solved problems and and you do it again. Right. Right. Right. Like I said, again, I still have to clear I enjoy it. I really do enjoy it. No. Because there is a gameplay that is involved to to check the boxes off on that solved sheet of things. Sure. But that's when I realize like, oh, oh, this is like boring to a lot of people probably. Yeah. I'm not I'm not it's really easy for people right now to slide into this thinking of everything sucks, but forever. Wow. It's only potential. Yeah. It's now held by this new thing. And I don't like that thinking for two reasons. One, we don't know a damn thing yet. Yeah, we don't know. We've been sold a pretty good package on paper. Everything looks real good. The presentations made a lot of sense. Like it's exciting and a lot of potential. And I'm hyped. I'm super hyped for it. But we'll see. Like people wow didn't evolve in a vacuum.

22:08It happened with the way that wow iterated over the years and with expansions and everything. By the way, with expansions that some people who now complain about retail wow loved when at the time. They love that we got flying mounts and and yeah, Dranoor and they love that we got, you know, Litch King stuff and whatever like at the height of the game, people were stoked about this new stuff because the model was and then in a lot of cases still is that's the idea that's you get expansion, you get a whole ton of new content, old world stuff becomes less important. You move forward. There's nothing crazy about that or weird or misguided. It's just the way the game evolved. Well, now they've had to have obviously have had to have real coming to Jesus moment. There's picture view in there in that office. But anyway, they they had to come together and go hold on a minute. Well, it even is this now, you know, like where are we going with this? And and it's quite a ride from 2021 or whatever it was here in jail on Brack. Go you think you want classic, but you don't

23:11and everybody be impist at him. A long way from that that stupid statement, even though I don't care about classic, totally dumb statement. But all these years later, now it is like for front, at least this week it is, right? Like it's just like, wow, forever is this thing. But I but I also think they're going to be some purists who are like, well, it's not really classic. Well, yeah, it's not. That's why classic exists. They've given you three tiers of wow to choose from and jump back and forth between if you want for the same low monthly price. Like it's actually kind of crazy that they're doing this. Yeah. So I am correct. And we will have to we'll have to pay for wow, forever, right? But it's like you just have to pay for acts like you would pay for the next expansion. Right. That's my understanding. Bo yesterday said that you just it's free for everybody to play. The only thing you pay for this time around is if you want that skybound race and any of those I did hear that somewhere. Yeah. So I don't know if that's still true. What that tells me is

24:12they poorly communicated this part. Well, yeah, sure. It should be super simple to understand it. Chad saying just the sub I heard somebody else earlier today said, no, it's not you got to buy the box like there's some confusion. My my current belief is that you'll get it without the skybound stuff. If you want that, you pay what that means for future content. I don't know like you're not going to play this game for free for eternity. They have to they have to have a business model around this. Yeah. At the end of the day, like they can't just go we're going to do this free thing for every they're not doing that. That's what I said last week was that my big concern is how does this thing how do they pay for the team developing this? Yeah. And it's and some of it the reason team, but you still got to pay for it. You know, yeah, the reason it's a concern of mine, you might say like, oh, how nice of you, Bobby, to care about all the developers. I don't care about the developers. No, I'm just kidding. But the the reason it's a concern I have is because they've if they're not paying for it with a subscription or they're not paying for it with a box

25:16price, they got to they're going to pay for it somehow. And is that going to be like microtransactions and and stuff like that that might be way more annoying? Well, when I was on campus, one of my favorite things I saw was this room full of doctors by that. I mean PhD scientists. Oh, okay, I thought you meant like they're there to help you with your leaky bladder or whatever. No, it's like these guys or their PhDs and they are experts in everything from statistical like statistics like drop rates, something as simple as that in a raid to what drives players to do what and when and when do they open their wallet versus when they don't and yeah, they also look very studiously at when players say they don't want a thing. But secretly they do anyway. Right. It's like saying, I'm not going to see that TV show, but then you watch it because no one's watching you watch it. You play you'll be going to play like that. They kind of know in a broad sense where people are

26:18headed and what they're going to do. And I think that information is really valuable to them. I have no doubt that they've crunched as many numbers as possible. And they've come up with what they think is a good plan and that good plan might include early on anyway, a much smoother on ramp for players. You don't have to invest 50 bucks to get in. And then later on down the road when they're like, ooh, a new mysterious cave was just discovered. I don't know where off by some goblin town. And we didn't know it's been there for 20 years. We had no idea. This week players are encouraged to take their 10 man's down there and see what the hell's going on. Well, that stuff just roll out or will they be tempted or forced to do content packs that cost money. And then what does that mean to the player? The world moves on without them. And they're just stuck with where they are up to that point. Kind of like it used to be in the vanilla days. When the first expansion came out, you could just keep staying in vanilla if you wanted for however long you want to. But of course nobody did.

27:20What's the game that everybody keeps talking about that already does this horizontal progression that old school runescape. Yeah. So how do they make money? Good question. That would have been something I should have looked up for the show. Does anyone in the chat because we love you guys? Ask Mr. Groove. You know what? Guild Wars 2 is a better example. So Guild Wars 2 is an interesting thing because they're kind of a hybrid situation. Great MMO. I think maybe if you're pound for pound, it might be the best one. It just doesn't have the reach that wow does. But it's a really good game. And it uses this horizontal progression as well. How it does it is there's what a level 80 cap I believe. And anything past that is you know kind of this idea with wow forever. But the way they do it is outside of small updates here and there, they put them out as expansions kind of. But the expansion isn't 10 more levels and forget about the the the forget about all those purple sweet legendaries you just found. Let's get let's get greens in this new zone that are going to beat last

28:22seasons, whatever. It isn't like that at all. It's like we introduced they introduced mounts for example and one of those patches. And then another patch introduced a whole like cotton, a full of dragon shit and stuff like that. So there's a there's a lot of stuff they put in there. I assume old school runescape is maybe similar. I just looked it up if if Gemini is to be believed that times it isn't. It told me the other day that Leonardo DiCaprio painted the cysteine chapel. And that's things that's wrong. But not the one you're thinking. No. Plus that wasn't even him that painted that so it was kind of after anyway. Go ahead. Sorry. Membership subscriptions, which is we're already have talked about how what they've said that they're not doing that for this game. They say they the other source of income for them is you can buy gold. So maybe they'll have us buy gold like we can do in well. And they do that in old school runescape as well. So that might be it. Yeah. That yeah. That's what I mean is they they call them old school bonds a pair of bonds

29:26apparently. It's just a way it's kind of like tokens in retail. You can buy a token and trade it in for gold. Right. I think that they'll I'm sure they have a plan. Right. I just don't know what it means. Content wise, maybe this guy born stuff that starting area and that race, which is really just a re skin blood elf. Let's be honest. I mean, I didn't say it's got to listen guys. I like I mean, I like it. But that's what it is. They're stand the same wave and they got the same stand still stance. They probably laughed ridiculously as well when they when you tickle them or whatever. But anyway, sorry, those little shade and the total race I don't like in the game. I know they're hot and that's why the word likes them. Anyway, point is what was my point. My point was that this might be an indicator what they are going to do because to play this guy bound and participate in that extra content initially, you have to pay for that. So maybe it's like that where they introduce,

30:27you know, the concept of allied races is kind of old in the games lifecycle now. But if you think about it, that would have been revolutionary and original. Wow. To say, here's a pack with the new race. Yeah. I think that's I don't think that's a bad way to monetize it. Also, we, we got to assume that like we got to figure that a lot of some number of people, some non zero number of people are going to come back and resub to world of work or work craft. Are they going to call it world war? It is still world of work. World of work. Forever. Yes. So some non zero number of people are going to come back and resubstribe to world of work. So that's going to make them some extra money too. Yeah. I had somebody tell me today, via email that they think the wow, forever logo, I shouldn't bring this up. They think it's woke. Let me let me pull it up. Now, I don't even know what that word means anymore. Just someone somewhere, some email or that sent something to the instance. Okay. I'll show you what I mean.

31:30Let me see if I can tell me how it's woke. Okay. Here we go. You're going to have to look at this play button in the middle of it. All right. So they think that this little eternity symbol is a little frilly. Like it's a little too friendly. Yeah. We want more of the purple. Is that what they think woke means? Yeah. I don't know, dude. I've given up on that section of humanity. I don't get it. I don't understand it anymore. Call me stupid. I don't know because for you do know what the infinity means, right? It means forever. It means forever. Yeah. Exactly. I wonder why they chose to put an infinity symbol in it. Weird. I know. Right? I canography. It seems like it seems like a thing blizzard knows a little bit about that. I think they know what they're doing. Shout out, by the way, to the Cinematics team who completely fooled me during that livestream. That looked identical to the start of the wow cinematic from 2004. Well, no kidding. It did. That was crazy. It did. Crazy. I love that. And I was having a moment where

32:35I was watching it and thinking, this looks like it's like better graph. It's upres. It's everything. But I can't really tell because like my memories are also upres. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So like I'm like, is this, are they playing the old one or a current? It was good back then. So maybe I just remember it being really, I don't know. And I was like really, really confused. And then it started doing new stuff. And I was like, Oh, okay, this is new. Yeah. But it was, I was like thrown a bit. That was pretty impressive. You're right. It was like shot for shot. Are you and when you, well, I'm a, I played Hunter for a long time in this game. And I was a little offended that they were suggesting the only thing it takes to distract a hunter from his goal is a little whisp going, he won't follow me this way and he just follow a bug somewhere else. I kind of took a little, I found that just slightly offensive to hunters. That's all. I did not even think about that. I think you might be a little on the defense. She know he says he saw that I saw people saying it was woke for the bear to be playing with the

33:37whisp in the trailer. We really, I really, I really can't deal. I can't be around these people anymore. I can't do it. I can't. We got to start our own. We got to wall it off. I don't know how. So dumb. That's what they're working on. It's kind of already there. So all of that being said, how much time will I play in this beta? Probably not a ton. Just because I don't want to spoil it. And I know what I'm spoiling is old stuff I've already played in a lot of cases, right? Even if I wanted to, I don't think I have time. I just started a new job. You're teaching now. I'm a teacher now. Yeah, which is really cool. Yeah. If you're kids in South Carolina somewhere, time to move. In a very particular part of South Carolina, you may get taught science by Mr. Frankenberger. I'd go to that class. Sounds awesome. But that's also my problem. I don't have a ton of time for it. That's why I said my O304 Scott would just be so out

34:38of his mind excited about something like this because I had expendable time. I mean, I still haven't even finished zero company. Yeah, me either. I know big shots. Scott doesn't finish all his video games. Ha ha. I know. But I do finish things. But I'm playing it on like not the normal difficulty, but the one one up from that. Yeah. So you like a challenge. I like a little bit of a challenge. I get it. So if they, if this succeeds like crazy and brings back the subs to some, I don't know, 2008 levels or something at 13, 14, 15 million people or whatever. Yeah. That's legitimately enough of a force to see this becoming important for another 20 years. If this is interesting and as good as it sounds. But you can see the downsides of doing this. The, the, how do I put this, the risks of it? Because there's no way the retail team doesn't see

35:42this and go at the very least. Are we going to, are we cannibalizing what we're working on here? Like, did we bring Metson back to do this other story for nothing? Although he's involved in all of it. But do you know what I mean? Like it, that you've, that you've built this other thing, which is a worthy thing you've done. Part of me has to think whether they did this on purpose or whether they're thinking this is a, this, this may be just like a happy accident. But part of me has to think that they see, wow, forever, hopefully as an insurance policy against world retail, getting long in the tooth. Oh, interesting. Okay. You know what I mean? Like, like, okay. People are starting to slowly attrition is happening and, and now, now we've got this thing that we're introducing that could be a place for people to go. You know. Right. It does like that's how I'm thinking about it. I, I, I'm in it. I'm in retail. I, I don't want people to,

36:49not that why do I care if people think this? But I'm not like, I'm not like Mealy Mouth saying I'm going to quit retail. I'm in it at the very least. I'm, I'm, I'm dedicated to seeing the, this three part, this trilogy, world soul saga to, to its end, because I'm really invested in this story and where things are going. I really enjoy my raid teams that I'm on. I really enjoy Mythic Plus. But in the time between now and the end of this world soul saga, I'm also going to be playing well forever. And on, as an aside, I, I have to think, and I hope this is probably actually wishful thinking that they're going to have like a content release and a cadence in wow forever that matches up with the lows in, in retail, right? They, they've, they've got to be thinking about that. Oh, they'd be crazy not to, right? Yeah, they're not dumb. No, they, you don't

37:51want to force your players to make a choice if you don't, if you can avoid it. You just want them to like, at all. No. Well, but they're also not stupid that people may, will need to make a choice. But anyway, the, the point that I'm making is I hope that, that that works, although at least up until the end of this world soul saga and, and then I will have had plenty of time with well forever and have, and be able to decide, is this something that I, which one do I prefer? Yeah. Or maybe, maybe I'll be very fortunate and I won't have to choose, but, but I'm, I'm sort of like settling into the idea that I'd be okay if, like, I would, I'd be more than okay, like, it's kind of silly to think to, to not want a game to be better than your favorite game. Isn't that the best problem to have? It seems like a great problem to have. This could be way ahead of a favorite game that you play all the time that you love. And then another game is better. That's,

38:54that's amazing. That's, that would be awesome. Yeah. No, I agree. If this, this could, this could have been a whole different thing. And I don't mean like, they could just hold the line for as long as they hold it and go, and we're going to try some new things in classic, but you can just see where the walls are in that though, right? Where all the obstacles are. This just opens things up in a way that is both honorable to the original content and interesting from a new content perspective, game, gameplay perspective, all of those things, the game needs to shake up in that way, for sure. No doubt about it in my head. Yeah. So where does it lead to after that? Like what's the ultimate end game for lack of a better term? Probably do it. If they can do it as well as, I don't know, runescape seems to be like, runescape supposedly, old school runescape supposedly has the largest population in MMOs right now, like more than well. Just kind of. Yeah. I don't have any of that

39:54in front of me, but I read that somewhere. MMO RPG.com or somebody was claiming that. They have a chance here if that's, you know, if that's what it takes to do that sort of thing to bring everybody back and new people in, which is another problem they have, they have no problem bringing in middle-aged dudes, but getting the kids, you know, you only have so many lesser from concerts before you had a try new stuff. And so I think there's an aspect of that that is like that. And I also think that we as players, we've been on a very long treadmill, not just of wow, but with gaming in general where it's always like the next things coming. We got to wait for the next thing. That's when that's when things get awesome. The new console, the new game, the new version of this or that. This game is saying, now, what if, what if it's all there and you just move, did you go that way because that way is some mystery and some adventure and some discovery that you didn't have already and not just speedrunning a bunch of quests to hit some arbitrary number. I'm genuinely excited about that. Like for whatever reason and nobody

41:01has to upgrade their rigs for the most part. That's the other thing I want to say here. And I know that I mentioned it already, but this is, I'm not even saying they're being sneaky about it, but they kind of got both worlds the way they need to with this. They have all the graphical upgrades if you choose to use them, right? Giving the player choice, I think it was key there. But letting a player see, I want the HD stuff. I don't want those ugly old models or whatever. Another example of that is all the lighting and the changes to the world. Those are legitimately amazing looking at the comparison shots and video. I'm stoked for those personally. I'm a big fan of that. That's why I like modern more than classic and I've already done classic. Let's have something that doesn't look like it was made in 1995 or whatever. That's not everybody. Some people have a lot of nostalgia for that old look. That's just not my bag. So giving me that choice is really cool. Putting in things like transmog is very cool. Changing things where they need to be that where modern has really taught us some real lessons about how we spend our time in these worlds.

42:06Apply those where possible and then always keep those channels open to player feedback. Because it sounds like that's, I mean, again, this is them saying this and historically you could argue Blizzard's not been great at this maybe. But if they really are listening and we'll shape this world based on player heft and flow, that's really good for us. And I have to go buy a new rig to play it. And I don't have to go, but the next expansion, do I even bother with it? Like, I don't have to do that anymore. If this is good as we all hope it is, I don't have to feel that way anymore. But if I want to, it's there, they're still going to make it. Yeah. You know, right. I don't know. Feels like a win-win. I'm pretty sure they feel that way. Yeah. So they're banking on it. I think they did a really good job. And, you know, and if I had to guess, I could be wrong. Oh, Megan, I just said it. I'm going to guess most of the people are going to play in default modern mode. I think you're right. Because people can play in all day that they, oh, I missed

43:07the old stuff. Well, sure, dude, but we like to, we like to grow in a period. It really is kind of a, I don't know how many people are talking about it, but it really is kind of an ingenious solution to, to, because I do agree that I think it's a minority of, of people that are complaining about it. They're just a vocal minority. And it's a really genius way to shut them up. Yeah. And it also doesn't say, yeah, you don't, okay, you don't want, you don't like all the transmog and the modern upgrades to the visuals of the game. Fine, turn it off. We'll let you turn off. Yeah, get out. And here's the other thing about it. They, what's it going to say about that? I had a really, it was really good too. I had three vaccine just today and I feel stupid since. Oh, that's what happened to me like a week or two ago. Yeah, you know how, like I'm not trying to lead creed in anybody's stupid conspiracy theories. What I mean is your body is having a reaction,

44:10it's supposed to build, you know, some defenses against this year's flu, COVID, whatever. And as a result, I am just like dumb three is a lot three is a lot. It's fine. You, you can get three at once, but your body has to react to that. Yeah, it did. And the hepatitis A and B one is a beast. I'm just telling you right now, better than the shingles one. But anyway, the point is it's made me stupid and I forget things right away. Here's what I know. Here's what I know. I think we're going to know pretty quickly in November. Very quickly, how this sticks. Yeah. And the only real question I have is how much of is it, how much of it does it swing in the direction of, ooh, retails dropped like 80% players. We don't even have the tight end, the last tight end, yeah. But what are we going to, you know, like I worry about that a little bit, not that, I mean, what would they're going to see it through. But we may be down, okay, conspiracy, Tim Foyle hat for it. We may be looking down the barrel of how they can kind of end retail.

45:13Not saying they're gonna, but think about it for a second. You have this long open ended thing over here that everyone's super stoked about. And if it's as good as they say and everyone loves it and glums onto it, and we're suddenly less interested in this churn that we do with retail, well, then what's to stop Blizzard and what, what maybe, maybe this world soul saga was designed to be an exit strategy for the grind for the right. You're right. If again, to echo, you said and say, you know, putting on a little bit of a Tim Foyle hat and, and being a little conspiratorial here, but the timing of wow, forever being now gives them enough time to say, well, maybe, maybe we just blow up Azeroth at the end. Yeah. Or maybe, maybe we just tie a bow, try a ribbon around it and tie a nice bow in it. And,

46:14you know, we just solve all of Azeroth's problems. Yeah. And the other thing is because this is also virtualized now. It's not like three teams have a shard they have to worry about for each realm. And like all those days are gone. It's all very virtualized. So don't, I hope players don't get to wind up in this idea that, oh, how are they going to manage three games? It's way less than that. The thing, it's kind of one giant code base with a bunch of forks in it. And they can kind of manipulate it in real time. As it should be, this is the modernization of these things. It's the reason they can do the one realm. It's the reason a bunch of things are going to happen with this. So I'm not so much worried about that. I think this is just a way for them to say. And they see the numbers, right? If the, if their retail plan no longer has teeth to get the maximum number of players resubbing every time there's a new expansion buying a box. Then this is a great solution to soften that transition for a 20 plus year old game, 22 year old game now. And if that's true, it's kind of really smart. And it's probably that room full of doctors that

47:19I saw that came up with that. Yeah, they're all under doctors all then they're banging their heads around. Well, that's what's coming. Hey, we got an email. Can I read this? Do you want me to read this? No. All right. I mean, yes. I mean, I'm you asked me. Yes. Here's what it is. So it's Matuba who's a regular in the community. He sent this as a voicemail, but the voicemail got ported. I don't know what happened. It was just all scratchy and terrible. But it did the translation of it, the transcription. So I'm going to read what it said. Hopefully none of this is jacked up. Hi, it's Matuba. You asked about what class it'd be fun to add to World of Warcraft. And I'm kind of with Bobby. I think this day and age, do we really need another class? Like note that this skybound is not a class. It's just a, it's just a race. Yeah, it's just a, it's a skin really. People, people get mad that I just say it's a skin night elf, but the air well, it is. I mean, the visuals are a skin, but it does have its own racial abilities and stuff. And it's own starting zone and it's on little story and quest and stuff, which is great. I'm not,

48:20I'm not, no poo poo here. I just, for those who are just like, oh, and they made a whole new race. I'm like, well, yeah, they pulled a blood off and painted it. That's what you mean. Anyway, just from the art perspective, yes, to a lot of other blush says they already have so many that they overlap a little bit. He's talking about retail, obviously. However, now that we're going back to the old war stuff with the Titans and all that, those are some crafty MFers, he says. So I think I've always thought this would be a fun class anyway, like a tinker or engineer type, where you can build turrets and barriers and support stuff like that. Guild Wars 2 has a character like that or a class is fantastic in there. I think it's called the engineer. Anyway, but you know bombs and stuff like that. If I could click on enough people like a portal or sorry, click on enough people like a portal, click on a bomb and then set off nukes over here and something and then you could put turrets down. I think that was the translation. Anyway, I don't know, I think a tinker would be a really cool class to add to Titans as a little late now, but you asked for it. Yeah, we did ask for that. We asked for your ideas. Oh, I guess. Yeah, that's not bad one.

49:24I like tinker is not a bad idea. I've, the only other one I've ever thought of that, because as Matupa said, I'm kind of like we don't need more classes, but I think I would get excited if there was like a, what do you call it? Like a rune or rune? Carve, rune? Like a profession? I don't know. You know, like a professional class, like a class where you drop the idea behind it to me is that you drop, remember back in, in like Old War, there were all these, there were all these enemies that would drop runes on the ground and you'd have to stand in them to get above for you. Have to get out of them, keep the enemies out of them because they would get all this kind of stuff. Yeah, I always thought, wouldn't that be a neat idea for a class? I'm not the only one who's thought this other people have had this idea. I think that would be a fun class to toy around with. A support class would be hard to get it to work, but you could do DPS runes, put those under your stationary mage characters that aren't moving around much, boost their damage

50:29by 25%. Like kind of a healer bit in more of a augment. Yeah, I like that actually. That's good. You know, maybe, you know, there are classes that are melee, you know, that have to move around and follow the boss, but maybe you can drop a rune on the ground that when someone runs through it, it consumes the rune and gives them a buff temporarily or something like, you know, that kind of thing. I think that could be fun, but I do like this tinker idea of dropping, you know, like, what's his name and overwatch, dropping turrets? Torbjorn. Torbjorn. I'm a big turret guy if I'm putting them down. I accept turrets in most situations except for tower defense games. F that. Don't like that. But if I'm like in a fight and I go, slunch, slunch, slunk, and throw down some stuff, hell yeah. Let's go. Right. Yeah. Great comment, Matuba. And it's interesting. I'm going to follow in the chat today. People like someone just said the bard is the answer. I look in theory, I like bards because they can do all sorts of boost morale, which has not kind of effects about strength or resilience or

51:37constitution or whatever, whether you're talking D&D or something else. But I hate the idea of a guy walking around with a instrument while you're all fighting hand to fist, magic flying everywhere, weapons, knives, staves, whatever. And then there's a little dude running around with a ukulele going, hey, you're going to get a better hit this time because I'm sorry. I hate that. That the, the, what do you call it? The, the fantasy of it. I hate it. And yeah. And in every D&D game, the bard just steals the show and you're just like, oh, God. Yeah. And unless you've got good players, I know people are going to, you know, send any emails or at me or something. If you've got good, there are people who can be good and share the spotlight with a bard. I know. I've played with them before. Sure. But, but anyway, the problem with a bard in wow right now is I think people just like the idea of somebody with an instrument running around, but in terms of gameplay, the augmentation evoker is kind of like a bard, isn't it?

52:38Kind of a vocal kind of goes around and buffs a little bit people. That's like how it, how it does its thing is it buffs other people. And that's probably as close that and shamaners closest they've gotten to that kind of buffery, you know. So it'd be hard. At this point, it would be hard to make a bard different than augmentation evokers, I think. Yeah. There is a there's a game out now mortal shell too, I think. It's a soul's like nothing to do with an MMO, but they have a bard skilled class tree. You can go down like you can build out that way. And it is pretty funny. There's this scene where it looks like he's lured, lured these Eastern European grandmas out into the street. And he attacks them with playing this organ. What's what is weird outplay? What's that accordion accordion? So he's like, and they go, pro, I go flying back. So they made them like super offensive weapons or gave them that. So maybe there's a way to go that way. But I don't know, warcraft and

53:41in songcraft, they're just not the same. Man. I'm just saying. And you're not wrong. Most D&D people I've ever played with were bad bards. John was the exception. He was a very good bard. Yeah, again, there are good people who know how to share the spotlight in a tabletop RPG. But that is true. Yeah. Well, here's the deal. We need you guys to keep your messages coming because we like talking about the instance to email.com. If somebody gives you a key between now and the fourth of November, will you, will you dabble? Will you put your toe in? I don't think so. You don't think so. You don't want to just going to say it. Don't waste it on me. Okay. Fair. I mean, look, I'm going to get in, run around a bit, do some stuff, level a couple of levels and then go, okay, I'm good and not get in again and tell the games out. So I'm kind of a part of the problem. Good. I'm glad I want you to tell me about what you're doing in our weekly chats here. Yeah. We'll talk more about it. If I can get it not to lock my computer up entirely,

54:45that would be great. Speaking of zero company, I have to lunch that game twice every time because it crashes the first time every time. But it works the second. Yeah. That's weird. It is weird. I don't know what the problem is. Let me tell you my, here's my beef in this week. I tried to play the new No Man's Sky update, the Cosmos update and did on my local hardware. But at one point, I was in a place where it was not easy for me to get to. So I was like, well, I'll use G-Force now and log into it. When I got in, G-Force now said, or it looked like crap. I'm like, what's going on with the graphics? I went into the system settings. It was all set to low. And I don't know why it didn't need to be the 50, 90s, the thing they use in over the cloud stuff. So I'm like, there's no reason for this. So I turn everything to high. And then I go to apply it. And it says, these changes in the graphics settings require restart. No big deal. Fine. I've had games like that. You got to restart to apply the changes. Higher, higher res textures, whatever it is. So I do that with this game. It reboots into the thing. I go in. Everything looks the same.

55:49I go and check the thing. It resets it all back to the low. Whatever. Yeah. To whatever you came in there with. So it's the thing. It seems to be the fact that I'm doing a virtualized session through a service like G-Force now that doesn't expect the behavior of the restart. They're like, restart. What's restart? So that really irritated me. So I guess, you know, if I can say anything about wow and forever make it so I can actually enter the game as an undead player because I'm not doing anything else right now. I'm not going to go do a work again. I've done a million of them. I'm not going to go play. I ain't going to Alliance. F that. Okay. Okay. F it. Like all these years later, are you kidding? No. We're not suddenly changing. I'm not suddenly going to switch sides. Are we allowed to pull rank and force the core guild to go hoard? So Tanner did a what do you call a poll and the poll was overwhelmingly hard. So I'm

56:51not worried about we don't have to worry about throwing our weight around. No. But also, why would you want to not do hard? I don't. I don't understand people. Look, are we for real? Like humans are very excited about the idea that you, me, Bo, John and I don't know, let's invite Tanner. We're like five manning it up. Yeah. Hell yeah. In well forever. Sure. That's all I think. And I want to play the hell out of that thing. The only question will be, you know, what will all our schedules look like in November? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Who knows? Yeah. I'm a little nervous about that. My schedule will be well forever in my free time. There you go. Well, per usual, check out the website. Support us on Patreon, patreon.com.sash instance. You can find the website at frogpants.com slash instance and keep the emails, text, and all that stuff coming is right there on the page. We're out of here. Do everything else you'd like to add? No. I'm very tired teaching children sciences exhausting. Yeah, but

57:56someone needs to do it. Yes. Get more at frogpants.gov. My dearest Martha, I'm tired of plain old text to speech that reads every chat message in the same anonymous voice. I wish it had more variety. Well, now it does. Give your chat unique voices with Bumblebee, a voice fit for a wizard, or a little sweetheart. I have my suspicions. You're streaming companion for Twitch and YouTube. Get started free at Bumblebee.buzz. Best chat text to speech in this life. And the next. FX's American Horror Story Returns for an unrivaled 13th installment

59:01with the iconic horrors you love to fear and an all-star cast reprising fan favorite roles. Light your candles, draw your pentagrams, and prepare for a supreme surprise. FX's American Horror Story 13 premieres September 24th on FX and Hulu.