What's up, body, people, And welcome to Countdown to Classic, where it's not my opinion that counts, but yours.

Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Countdown to Classic.

And we've got a huge three hour chat today all about a new server that just launched.

What's that, Josh?

Because it hasn't released a new server, we know we're talking about something a little bit different today.

It's a private server.

We touched on it in the last episode.

We're going a bit deeper given that it's now launched today.

Guys.

I know it's a private server and it's a bit weird for a lot of you, but you'll understand why we're talking about it when you get to the chat.

And I wanted to get this one out today.

I don't normally release over the weekend.

I normally release on like a Monday or a Tuesday.

I've changed it up for this one.

Give you guys a chance to maybe give this one a shot or a bit of a dabble over the weekend.

So please do consider that after you've heard the episode, you'll decide whether or not you might like to give it a look.

See and I'll speak to you at the end.

Thanks.

Everyone.

All right, after crazy audio and technical issues, we are now starting again for a huge talk all about the first week of Project Epoch.

And look, guys, half of you just heard me say that and say what the fuck is Project Epoch?

And the other half of you are saying, oh my god, can you stop talking about this thing already?

I'm so sick of hearing about Project Epoch and just those very you know, polar opposite reactions to this is sort of part of the whole storyline of this private server that's fired up this week.

And guys, we're talking about a private server.

Yes.

Again, many of you are going, Josh, what are you doing?

Oh my god, are we seriously about to devote a whole episode to a private server.

Yes, and it's for a good reason, and we'll get to that over the next two to three hours.

So we've got a shitload of people on the line because people have been fired up about this thing.

They finally got to play it after about a three week false start, and you know, that is part of the game with private servers.

There was a lot of technical issues, a lot of launch issues.

This is an amateur gig by hobbyists, and they really struggle to get it off the start line.

But we'll talk all about all of that and what happened and more importantly, what we're actually seeing in game now that things are actually running.

So look, I won't introduce everyone, but we've got, you know, thirteen of us here on the line, and maybe not all of them will speak, but I'm sure people will pop in when they want to, when they hear something that fires them up.

But the real driving force behind this podcast, I mean, I have to shout him out and for sort of getting my blood pumping and putting the boot up my bum to sort of do this is ubiquitous.

Mate.

How are you?

I'm pretty good, that's the way.

Now.

Look mate, I mean it's funny because sometimes I do podcast episodes and no matter what I'm doing a podcast on you know, I found this with the rugby podcast that I started recently as well, guest started turning up with manifestos written out.

Now I've got so much to say and I want to make sure I don't miss a point.

Did you It sounded like you were drafting a bit of a ubiquitous manifesto over Project Epoch at one stage.

It has been living in my head.

Rent free the entire time.

I'm not already playing it.

Very good, very good.

Well look mate, before we get you tearing through, you know, the so called manifesto, as we say, I think we should spend just a little bit of time.

I don't want to do the thing I always do and spend thirty to forty minutes on this relatively innocuous point that no one gives a fuck about because they want us to get to what the server's like.

But we do have to touch on the issues surrounding launch.

Now that they're in the past and it's all been put to bed, nobody really cares as much.

But a huge thing happened with this server where you know, they fucked up the launch.

It was a bit of a travesty.

They did not have the tech or the you know, the expertise, if you will, to get this thing rolling with so many people kicking down their door.

And we talked about this on the last podcast.

I don't begrudge these guys this.

You know, three or four guys that were launching a little server for five hundred, one thousand, two thousand people and then went to turn the open closed sign to open and they had thirty forty thousand people kicking down their door, and they did not have you know, they didn't order enough food to feed that many people.

But that's what happened.

Everything fell to shit, delay after delay as they struggled under the weight of needing to do all this technical stuff quickly that they just couldn't do, and eventually a bailout was proposed by the team behind Project Ascension.

This is a private This is a private server that I've not had a lot of love for in the past.

Now, guys, I don't play many private servers these days, but I do keep tabs on the scene and I jump on a server every now and again for a little bit over the last three or four years.

Ascension is just something I've never had any interest in.

Sod came out and everyone goes, oh, it's just Ascension.

We talked about that a little bit on the show when it happened.

But they do have a little bit of a reputation for being rather obnoxious with the micro transactions, and you know, that's something that's obviously optional, but you know, the pay to win stuff was kind of out of control on their servers, and it was just something I really disregarded even though they were very popular.

So Ascension reached out to the Epoch team and said, look, I mean, I'm just assuming what the conversation was at this point.

You guys can correct me if you think I say something wrong here, but they've basically said, look, you can either not exist because you're struggling and you can't do any of this, or you can make a partnership with us.

I'm presuming they're going to split profits in some fashion, and you get your project up and running, You get people seeing the stuff that you spent three to four years building eyeballs on, all your hard work, and you get to make some money out of it, and it's better than just being dead in the water and everyone forgetting about you in a week or two.

We can help you with this, and they made a deal.

We don't know what the exact parameters of the deal financially were, but basically, the Epoch team is going to take care of content moving forward, and the Ascension team is completely in charge of the technical aspect, the admin behind the running of the server, all the nuts and bolts.

And that was something that was received a bit awkwardly at first, because while people know that Ascension can do this technically.

They instantly grew concerned that that would mean that the Epoch project would now become inundated with the influence of the Ascension quote unquote greed of all their microtans, transactions and pater Win items, and some people wrote it off and go, that's it for Epoch.

This is like Activision Blizzard all over again over again.

You see what happens here, laiter down the track, loll I'm not touching this one, and that is obviously yet to be seen, because that may well happen.

I'm not naive enough to think it won't happen, but I would.

My gut tells me that Ascension coming out and saying, look, guys, we're not going to go stupid.

We realized the golden goose that is Project Epoch, and we're not going to be stupid with the micro transactions on this one like we are with our other servers.

Have faith in us that this is going to be okay for you guys.

So some people dove in the pool with that faith.

Others said no, thank you, but I think the majority still gave it a go.

Ub I'll throw it over to you.

After that really extended monologue.

There.

Do you think I summed up a wild last month?

Well enough there, yeah, pretty much.

It's kind of like, I don't know, these guys tried to launch a rocket, it blew up on the fucking platform, and then Private Server whew, NASA came in and brought them out.

So I think.

I mean, I've been thoroughly educated on the Private Server history from like its very origins this week, and apparently these guys are the fucking technological bes knees of this area.

So and I mean from playing on the server, you can kind of tell.

Of the deep, the deep dark back alleys that is the Private Server universe.

Yeah, yeah, they.

Got they got the best crack in the alley.

So yeah.

Hey, so, guys, I want to know from anyone else, did anyone jump in here on this point of ascension going into partnership with Epoch.

Were any of you guys concerned about what that might lead to and how did you react to it.

It's always concerning handing over any element of control of something that like you've created.

I've ran smaller scale game service in the past and had an opportunity to team up with a larger provider of those like same sort of game servers, and we turned it down because giving that control away was something that we weren't willing to do.

However, this is much larger numbers, much larger amounts of people.

It was likely that if they didn't do it, Yeah, they just wouldn't have existed in the.

Way that they do now.

Yeah, Oh, I mean, I fucking would be loath to give one percent of say or control to any individual over what I do with Countdown.

For example, Like, I still vividly remember the day in Countdowns, very early days in twenty eighteen, having a very long, like hour long conversation with Cargoes over the phone when I was at work in Australia and he was pitching me on you know, the website that they were starting up and wanting to get Countdown to Classic involved and marrying up business wise there.

And I mean, it was a fine little pitch and everything, but it was one of the easiest nos I've ever given someone, because I'm like, I'm not I'm I'm a control freak.

I want to do with my show what i want to do and I'm not fucking working with other people.

And I've never regretted that.

But you know, sometimes a partnership is mutually beneficial to great degrees for both parties.

Was anyone else here?

You know?

Is anyone here?

Please, don't be shy.

Is anyone here?

You know?

Still I'm convinced they're going to go full pay to win later down the track.

Well, I guess like I got another point on it to usse the sticking point for us was the admin side of things.

They wanted to take some admin on most of the admin all of the admin likely would have been the case, and having like not being able to remove people off of server that you essentially created.

It's it was, Yeah, it's just too risky because it just tarnishes your reputation as like a moder.

These guys are moders.

They've modeled World of Warcraft Classic, and yeah, it's they could be put in a really bad situation by handing off the administrative side of the server running, which I sincerely hope doesn't happen, either with micro transactions or admin abuse type behaviors.

You be Can I throw it to you on this one just because I feel like you had a good point.

I've raised it very slightly there, but you had a good point in the discord a couple of weeks ago about you know, I'm I'm willing to bet that these guys won't kill the golden goose here because they know what they've lucked into the Ascension team with you know, everything that happened with Epoch being so fortuitous for them, they would have to be the dumbest men alive to all of a sudden fuck with that and deliver a store that is not designed for this player base.

Is that right?

Yeah?

I was going down the fucking, you know, the business logic route, because if you wanted to just jack this server up with oh, you can buy full tier one for fifty bucks, It's like, if you had players that are fine with that, would have already probably been just playing Ascension Server.

The reason why this server is you know, popping off is because the guys that come up with it were pretty strict on it just being a really you know, staying in its lane as a classic server like in the Vanilla Realm, and that's something that they've been very clear on, like even after the takeover the I think Dutch is the big dogg a discension.

He's made a lot of posts and they've been very very clear that the Epoch team have one hundred percent creative control of the shop and in game and all that.

And yeah, the.

Reasoning was, you know, if they opened a shop up tomorrow, we've boosts fucking heirlooms for cash and all that shit, Fucking eighty percent of this server stops playing tomorrow.

Yeah, why would you?

Why why would why would you invent and buy this whole asset to go and change it?

Change it at it's very core And I mean people will probably doubt that Ascension is a big business, and this wouldn't have been cheap to buy this off the Project Epoch guys, I'm sure they've made a nice little fucking fund in their back pocket from this.

So you know, while we should buy an asset for you know, let's just say hundreds of thousands, could could have been more, we don't know, and then go and flip it on its head, that would just be fucking moronic.

And I'm pretty sure the Ascension team much smarter than that.

Yeah, I definitely agree.

Look, wasn't it wild to see once Epoch eventually did wave the white flag and sort of say, look, we realized we can't do this where we're losing team members.

Everyone's sort of crumbling to the pressure.

We've tried to crunch over the last week to get this server out to you guys, but we're just it's it's bigger than us.

And then announced they've gone into partnership with the Sense and Ascension jumping in.

You know, the moment they did, as you say, that sort of passing of the baton from ktotes to Dutch.

The noticeable difference in communication in crunch in results was wild, and you know, I think it was a six day turnaround from from Ascension getting involved to launch.

And you know, when when this happened, we had a big chat about it in the discord, and so many people were convinced that there was so much wrong with the Epoch server technically that it would not be ready anytime soon.

And a few of us sort of said, you know what, I think these guys will do everything it takes.

They will move mountains to launch this thing before Total Wow launches their new server, Ambushire.

And that's fucking exactly what happened.

And you know, I think Vestige, you were you were a bit you know, doubtful of the possibility of this happening, and I backed it straight away, and I just said, it's fucking going to happen.

And I know that could be deemed cope and blind optimism, but I genuinely was basing that on some form of like optics as well, Like I believed that these guys could do it, and they fucking did it.

Were you shocked, Vestige?

I was.

I was pretty shocked at how quickly they were able to put everything together.

And I don't know if that I don't know if it's the Epoch team and they were so close maybe to figuring things out, but they just burned themselves out after two weeks and then Ascension carried it across the line.

Or if Ascension is so godly in their knowledge of Trinity Corps and stuff that they were just able to just manhandle this thing into existence, or a combination of both.

Maybe I don't really know, but I am.

Shark that they were able to get it as quickly as they could into a very very playable state at launch it because I'm guessing they just figured we got to beat Ambushire at all costs.

At all costs one hundred percent, And as you say, playable is really the key word there, because they said to the community and we'll talk about this sort of you know, this is just our players being fucking wow players.

But they said to the community, look, do you guys want us to sit on this?

And it wasn't really it was never going to be up for debate that I think they just asked this, you know, knowing full well that the answer was that we're going to do whatever it took to launch before Turtle Well, but they put it out there the community go, do you want us to just launch this thing with some bugs that will fix as we go on, or do you want it to be held back and refined and polished?

And everyone just said, just fucking ship the fuck up.

If it's playable, it's playable.

Work the kinks out as we go, and that's what they did.

And I think the vast majority of the player base has been more than okay with that.

I know I have.

Yeah, of course, I've seen little things, and I've seen little things that would make the sweatiest people lose their shit that ultimately I shrugged my shoulders over.

But they are getting fixed, Ubie.

Isn't that You're keeping a keen eye on the change log, aren't you?

Yeah?

I was going to say, I was they had a twenty four seventeam for that week, and that was it was eye opening to know that they actually have that kind of work capacity as a team.

And yeah, I'm I'm I'm shook, I'm rattled.

There's way too much clear, concise communication with results being told to the community.

I'm usually left in the dark and I don't know what's ever going to happen with the game on the other versions that we may play for the last five years.

So and yeah, the change log is mind boggling, the amount of shit that they're doing every single day, right down to fixing like a weapon animation and how it sits on you or character.

What was that one?

Tell people what you found there?

Like just amongst the changes of you know, a bazillion quest getting tweaked and this ship then there's like shield of as if sheaths properly now and it's like, all right, good to know that they're they're digging right through the weeds that thoroughly to fix the specific shield in the game going on your back correctly.

But yeah, the change the change log is I've actually been entertained by it at work, just watching the roll out happen, but it's been.

It's very it's genuinely impressive.

And like I said, I was pretty oblivious.

I've been a career long private server hater and douter and then just because of a gap between games that I wanted to play, I gave it a try and I'm really surprised by actually the quality and yeah, like what they can actually churn out as a as a team.

Well that's one thing to say.

What monetization buys.

You, Yeah, yeah, cash money.

I'm guessing the Project Epoch is essentially founded by for hobbyists center basement, but then Ascension is a big corp, you know, like a workforce that with salaries I imagine, and because they generate the income via their other servers.

We'll touch on the private server portion of things.

Sorry, was that Fred or someone was about to jump in there?

Axially, I was just going to say that.

It's also you know, when the players have been conditioned to a certain level of bugs already, it makes it way easier to just ship it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not like please, it's not like Blizard servers a fucking pristine and bug clear, is it?

Guys?

We'll move into the next portion, which is that that's now put to bed.

That little intro there about the history of the technical issues and stuff and how the server came to launch.

I'm glad we covered that just in fifteen minutes, thank you, but just on the private aspects, private server aspect of all this ub so the server launchers, and will get into very soon why everyone on this call is having a lot of fun with this server and sort of you know, the hopes that this could be the next big thing amongst us.

But we've sort of been talking about it a lot in the discord and it's caught some people going like, oh, what's all this.

I haven't heard of this.

Oh okay, maybe I'll give it a go, or oh it's a private server.

No, I don't want to touch that.

I don't do the private server thing, which is like it is understandable, don't get you last week yep, And it's been it's been me in the past as well.

I have I have, you know, it's a jeckel and hide wrestle inside of myself over how I feel about private servers.

And we're not getting into all the bullshit about it.

That's not even a conversation.

We're touching on today, but you know, it's always something I've never been like feeling great about.

But there's obviously the Nostarious example.

It's really looked back upon as a relatively wholesome example of a private server community coming together enjoying the game, and then that leading to something great, which was the invention of Wow Classic, and the whole franchise bloomed from there because of the success of Nostarius.

There were other private servers outside of Nastarius.

I know the history, but Nostarius was the one that hit the success that sparked the dollar signs in Blizzard's eyes that God is to Classic.

So this kind of, well, not kind of.

This is the biggest thing since Nastarius.

And it's not just the biggest thing since it's twice as big as Nostarius.

This thing has been epic.

It's had about thirty odd thirty five thousand people roll on this server just in the first week.

And don't get me wrong, those numbers might come down, it might have been a lot of tourists, but the initial explosion of interest is crazy.

I think Nastarius had something like fifteen thousand people playing on it.

This is more than double so my question you'd be at this point is you've been why don't you tell a story?

And you don't have to name names, but you've been reaching out to a lot of countdown people saying, hey, mate, like, do you have any interest in this?

I know you're a C plus kind of guy.

This server might be right up your ally, and you've gotten a lot of responses about, ah, no, it's just private servers.

I don't touch them.

Uh.

Yeah.

I've been messaging some pals that I've met through the show over the years, just because I've genuinely been playing, and they're you know, they're just coming to mind like I'm playing and I'm thinking, well, fuck, Like this particular moment here in the game for me is like oh this, this fella would find this interesting or they would.

And just as I've been playing, you know, been thinking of all the people that we've spoken about Classic plus with for i'd say the last eighteen months since SOD started, really and yeah, I would I have even a few of them the pitch of you know, I was pretty against private servers across the board in every way you could be, because I thought it was like, scummy, you're ripping off Blizzard.

I'm a self admitted like, you know, I like Blizzard.

I don't like everything they do, but you could say that I'm a Blizzard fan and the games that they make.

And then I just I got caught up in the hype and I'm like, all right, give it a fucking try.

And then you're there and they're I mean, their launcher runs arguably better than the Blizzard Launcher, which I think is like a factor.

You're not running some just a shitty exy file with a manual login from your from your hard drive.

Like there's a launcher, you pick what version you want, exactly like the bn net one, but it runs nice, and then that's already a good entrance, you know what I mean, Like it feels a lot more proper than what I had imagined playing on a private server would be.

And then yeah, just a kind of across the board for me.

I've only been online for I think it's crashed three times, and two of them were in five minutes, and that's because they pushed a fucking massive patch and turned like achievements on and a thousand fixes.

So it's just yeah, I'm kind of I'm swept off my feet.

So to speak, just on how smooth everything's gone.

Really, I can't really tell the difference when I sit here for eight hours at fucking Launch and Play.

So can I ask?

Though?

When when you get your mates get back to you?

And as I say, guys, I'm not sitting I've never been one to romanticize private servers.

This is not what's happening right now in terms of private servers on the whole as an industry and an option.

But when you have had your mates get back to you and go like, oh, no, private server, no thanks, do you, like I say, do you understand?

Do you sort of go get fair play or do you have a different reaction?

No?

I get it because it was me forever, and I guess this is just kind of convinced me that it's come a long long way from what I remembered.

I guess I was according to Mike, I had still had an opinion that was based in two thousand and nine where you just imagine gms giving their friends like thunder Furies for free and unlimited gold, and you know, shady undertable bullshit going on constantly.

But this seems to be much more above board.

But I do understand if they're also of that opinion that I had, But I'm just surprised by how much more cleaned up it is.

And I guess because of the money involved, now like it's much more.

It's in their best interest to you know, provide a good, good game and good service.

And we've been seeing people, you know, they announced to the server when people got banned, and they fuck off and they clean up the bots.

Yeah, I don't, I don't.

I know you've got to steer me away from this, but I'll mildly lean on it.

It has pissed me off a little bit that I hated this whole environment or ecosystem, and now it's rustling my Jimmy's a bit to see them.

Haven't seen a bot.

I haven't seen any Chinese named bores running around barrens.

I've seen it pop up with the yellow font saying server this fuck has been banned for hacking, and you just go, hmm.

It seems like it is.

Possible to have a botless society and anyone that buys gold gets murdered by the GM and shit like that.

I'll be the guy because I've been a defender of Defender's a weird way to put it.

But my stance on the whole botting thing in terms of Blizzard servers forever has been Guys, I think I don't know because I'm not an IT professional, but I think the amount of people that Blizzard has kicking down their door to roll on their servers makes it near impossible to stop the deluge of bots and cheaters and whatnot from fucking from doing what they do on their servers, because it's just a NonStop account creation of just people trying to sell gold and do their thing, just rolling and re rolling bot after bot, And I just wondered if, like, because they were dealing with the customer base of half a million or a million people, whatever the number is, that it just made it ridiculous.

And I always gave them a pass because of a size issue where I'm like, Okay, I understand that they don't you know, they cut costs and they don't care as much about this stuff, but you know, is the tech there to stop it even if they want it?

And the answer from Blizzard, you know, it's always tough taking it from Blizzard for years has been no.

This goes beyond a discussion about will or desire, and it becomes a discussion about ability.

We have so many fucking bad actors trying to roll in our servers.

We can't do anything about it.

It's you're trying to dam up, you know, patch up a fucking waterfall here.

And I always gave them a pass for that.

Now with Epoch we have now look again, I know you guys will have to tell me if it's apples to oranges, because I'm happy to withdraw this point if it is apples to orangers.

But finally a private server has come along with some fucking girth to it in terms of player base size.

And we've got thirty odd thousand people here with a couple of hobbyist admins to police via you know, no bots, no uh hacking or cheating or whatever.

And I believe that they're stamping out GDKP as well on these servers.

And if these if these like you know, if these hobbyist admins can keep a bot free server with twelve thousand people on one server, six thousand people on another, whatever it might be.

And we start getting report thoughts come in from all servers, from Kazan, from Menethel that they have people have not been seeing bots.

Then my stance starts to change, and then I get angrier and angrier at Blizzard, where I've been the last person on the boat sort of like I say, I don't want to say defending, but understanding what Blizzard's been saying about the difficulty of stopping bots.

This server could completely blow my stance on that out of the water, to the point that I'll just turn and go, you know what, fuck them.

They could have done something and they didn't.

I'm not there yet.

I need to see more, but I agree with you Ubi.

I haven't seen a single fuck not one, not one bot in knar forty eight hours played so far in the first week on this server.

Yeah.

A common counterpoint used to be that there's not enough market demand to warrant bots trying to get on private.

That's right, but it's not just This server is.

Literally bigger than like any of the Anniversary servers, and there's a fuck load of bots on them, and there's a fuck load of gold by going on there.

So if they can police this, I'm sure Blizzard, I mean, they could come out and say Fox so od, fuck retail, fuck Mop, We're just going to police Anniversary because clearly these guys can do it for this server, like they should be able to, you know, stop the scourge of bots on at least there because that's a small server.

But they still can't, so they don't want to.

It's a great point about market demand being the other factor, because that's it.

This server will have market demand for gold should an opportunity arise.

Sorry, someone was going to speak up there, go for it.

Yeah, I was gonna say that.

What's the financial motivators for the server?

They want to have a clean, fun environment for people to play in, free of butts, so people eventually use.

The cash shop.

Yeah, it's half their whole down the line.

Yeah, they don't have a sub fee.

There's no monthly money coming in, so there's no motivation for them to take their time and say we'll do band waves eventually and figure stuff out.

No, they need to handle stuff now before it becomes a problem.

So they're incentivized to stamp it out before it even starts.

Versus Blizzard, they're incentivized to say, let's take our time, figure stuff out, do band waves.

Eventually, we'll hit some people up.

So it's a completely different model between between Blizzard and private servers.

All right, and the fact that it's so policed actually makes it more tantalizing for the bot to try and get in.

Imagine you're the only bot that manages the weasel through the wall and be the gold farmer on here.

Like there's that aspect, because it would be worth a fucking motsa.

There'd be a bloke out there ready to PayPal two years to USD for one hundred.

Gold right now, Parallax, I know what you're saying.

Parallax is said in chat.

I don't know.

Maybe it's still too new and the demand for gold isn't there yet.

I know what you're saying, but I'll disagree.

In that week.

On every other Blizzard server, we've seen gold sellers in the first few days, like one hundred on I can't whether a sod or anniversary, but you see like four or five days in oh shit, you can buy five gold for fucking fifteen bucks or something.

You know what I mean.

Now that we're gonna we're gonna head off to the things that are good about the game.

Could you imagine the price of crafting mats on this server, because crafting is good, Like, imagine those fucking pearls.

Sam as sod.

It's the pearl cost like four gold by now well on here.

They're a premium ingredient for a lot of things, and they're ninety silver because that's just what people can afford.

We've been losing our minds and we'll get to it later because we'll talk professions eventually.

But like one of the one of the lines that we've been repeating in voice chat, and like this server has you know, six to twelve of us hanging out in voice chat every day for hours at a time, hanging out and shooting the shit while we level.

It's the tagline from what I've always deemed to be fucking insane people saying, oh guys, actually bots are good for a server because they drive down the price of matts.

And I always lost my like, if you ever want to see me explode, and you have seen me explode before when this was brought up on a podcast, if you ever want to see me lose my shit, you say that, And we've been laughing about it, going like no, like it turns out, at the end of the day, a bot free server is a great thing for everyone and all the people that know why just hang out and realize why and they level their professions and do their thing.

But we'll get to it.

Guys.

Look, we've kind of warmed up there, We've done half an hour and how and a bunch of different things.

How about we talk about what we're actually playing in the content of the server.

Look, I'm not quite sure how to frame this portion of the discussion, which is going to be the bulk of the discussion, but we'll just let everyone jump in and just you know, start a free for all as well.

You know, I'll police it as best I can and build some sort of structure out of this.

But mate, if I can just get you started ubiquitous on if there's listeners out there hearing this right now, And as I say, I'm somewhat loath to advertise a private server, but I'm having a fucking great time on this server, so I just want to tell people what we're doing.

Mate, when you logged on, you started experiencing the content, How would you describe the difference between the content of this take on Classic Plus and what we've seen in the past from Blizzard or other servers privates.

I would say that what they've delivered, which would shock many of listeners that know my stances in over the last two years, this is much more in my opinion, if on the gauge, closer to what say an anniversary player would actually be looking for, or maybe the TBC waiting room player, considering we're literally playing with TBC talents, then someone that's currently playing MOP and liking like it's a it's this is much more vanilla than what SOD was.

This.

I've been jokingly calling it SOD light.

I think that's and personally I think it's a better spot for it to be.

And there's not really anything too crazy.

It's it does feel very one to sixty vanilla, but there's just you know, I don't we're going to go through all of them.

But they just pushed the bar about fifteen percent across the board on everything without They didn't they didn't add fucking extra wheels to the cart or anything.

They added carts.

That's a different story, but you know what I mean, it's they just took everything.

If you think that Vanilla's ten out of ten they've for you, this is like they've just made across the board fourteen out of ten.

In my opinion, they didn't.

They didn't make one thing twenty out of ten and make one thing five out of ten.

They just pushed everything in a very very classic Vanilla way forward.

And yeah, it's been really fun.

I think for your maybe for your pod sequence or how do you want to go through it?

I think it would suit to kind of go from where we started and then how we stumbled through the game, like no one really got into professions until a bit later.

Yeah, yeah, let me let me say this.

Yeah, we'll start at the start.

Well, I mean, and it's kind of when we start at the start again.

Unfortunately, I just have to bring up something that's not necessarily gameplay.

Well it is gameplay related, but before you really log in and take those first steps with your character, people should realize, like some people might be scratching their heads and going, hey on, hay on, Josh, you fucking hypocrite.

You said on this show many a time, never again.

You were done with one ex Vanilla Wow, never again.

Blizzard had to do something different if they wanted to entice you in any form of Classic plus server.

And now here you are spooking a fucking server that's one Exvnilla.

What gives?

And I'd say that's absolutely fair to call me out on that, and I think.

I think you made you made a perfect word.

Then sorry to interrupt you.

I said Blizzard would have to do something, and Blizzard hasn't.

The community people protested, that's not what we wanted.

This is what we wanted.

This is actual classic plus that's it's not the same.

I only I would say that SOD was warranted and fun.

I'm just more annoyed that they don't have anything.

Now, like, well that that's the right now.

Yeah, it's the big They left a big gap.

They thought they could just shove everyone off from SOD to MOP with the boost and we would like Mop and that could kind of, like, you know, satisfy us.

In the meantime, I played MOP for two days and I said this ain't it, Chief, And then I was just going to play I thank fuck.

The Battlefield six beta was around to keep me occupied for a couple of weeks.

So that that's that's a big driver for why I ended up here.

If and that's probably maybe a little a little crop for anyone else that's either farming SOD to fucking oblivion and they're getting a bit tired of it, or you've forced yourself back to Anniversary, but it's not really your vibe.

Well, that's why I ended up here.

It's got no option for me.

That's kind of exactly where I came from.

I was playing, I downloaded MOP.

It just wasn't scratching that itch, and I went literally opened the Anniversary Realm, created a character, sat in the starting zone and I'm like, I.

Just can't do it.

I just don't feel it.

And then I saw you guys chatting about this game, and I was like, oh, I need to check that out.

And I think you're right.

It's that ten to fifteen twenty percent everywhere.

It's not like one area or one thing.

It's that it's got that little bit of exploration, a couple of new quests, a little bit of class tweaking.

It's enough everywhere to make the whole experience better.

Yeah, it is the literal sprinkles on top.

And it starts at for me, what I was getting at is it starts at a few choices that they've made in terms of how to present this vanilla world this time around, because I mean that's what everyone wants.

They want the vanilla world, and you choose how to bake it and serve to us, serve it to us, and they've gone with all right, Well, first and foremost Wrath client.

I said to you guys, I would never fucking play on the one point one two client.

Again, that's why Turtle Wow will never grab me.

I despise that client.

Some of you think I'm crazy for saying that.

There's a lot of one point one two client stands out there.

I am not one of them.

And you know that's why t Wow was never really a huge option for me.

I was happy to wait on Epoch because I've got to get me that three point three five client.

Three point three points for five, you know what I mean.

So that's a great start.

But then they go, all right, here's what we're gonna do.

We're going to do basically TBC in a vanilla world with the Wrath client and that trifecta.

That three headed dragon there is really really helping because, as you guys say, like number one, everyone knows it's been you know, readily accepted universally for some time.

I'm now that a TBC like pre Patch world is a world that a lot of players have wanted to live in, and we've been effectively delivered that on top of new custom content being added as well, and we'll get to all.

The anniversary are literally asking for that right now.

They're like, can we have TBC pre patching AQ and just play nax GBC stuff?

Like they're begging for it, and it's like, guys, yeah, it exists.

It exists already.

So that that's one thing.

And then you've got, you know, but the vanilla world, which is great because they've gone, all right, we'll give you your vanilla world that you know and love, but we'll also, as you guys are really well like putting it so well, we'll change about twenty percent of it.

And even that back to the one X thing with like Josh, you said you never played one X again, everything they've done, we're all saying it.

We're all thinking the same thing.

It sort of feels like one point two X.

As lame as that sounds, guys, you know it's basically one X.

Yeah, I know what you're saying, but I'm seeing enough, like just a few new quests here and there that you go off and do when they're along the path that you were going along.

Anyway, you get a few more things hands it in and look I'm not leveling quickly.

It is still like a little bit of a slog, but it's definitely quicker than one ex Vanilla.

I'm I'm like bang on one for one with my Vanilla rate, and like I would say, I'm a decently fast leveler, but it is the like I don't really know how to not try to over romanticize it.

I'm only slowing down a little bit because I am authentically distracted about seeing what's going on in the game, Like you're just there's more quests and stuff.

Is arguably easier to kill because you've got TBC skills, but just through the nature of the game of like, oh, fucking I want to go look at my professions.

Oh there's a new quest here, I don't know where it is, and reading quests that's actually slowed me down back to the original rate, but it feels quick because you're fucking engaged, like I'm not really you're not even thinking about the speed of playing.

Sometimes I've dinged and it's like, oh fuck, I didn't even notice my xpbar for the whole last two hours because just running around finding new shit, like it's the it's very very immersive because you're just finding new shit constantly, and like that, we've been in discord for three days.

No one's even mentioned anything more than five yards in front of their character, Like, no one's asked a single meta question, No one gives a fuck, No one's talked about Level sixty.

No one's even talked about the new dungeons because we're only doing the ones that they revamped.

And this is it's the discovery element that they were trying to tap into with Season of Discovery, where players want to, you know, have things somewhat unknown, they want to sort of not have the meta worked out yet, And people would say, but Josh, you're playing TBC, we know what the meta is.

Yeah, but the spells have been lightly tweaked with the numbers have been reconfigured slightly, so whilst we can guess which way the wind is probably blowing, we don't know quite yet.

But it's a great point to touch on UB in terms of again, you've been chatting to some people who you know, maybe kind of want to know, well, what's my path to rank fourteen?

How many hours is that going to take?

Who's the best DPS in the raided Level sixty?

What should I roll you know, who's this, what's that?

Tell me the solved game?

And you have to reply with I can't tell you because I don't know.

We're just enjoying the journey and having fun figuring all this shit out along the way.

Yeah.

Perfectly distracted and then entertained is how I was putting it, because it was it actually threw me off.

The people that I was dming and you know, inquiring about endgame or you know, what's this class going to be like later?

It put me off.

I'm like, fuck, I haven't thought about it.

We'll grab him later.

This is the it's the one name I'm always happy to throw under the bus because we'll grab him later to talk about it.

It's it's arcass, It's fuck wed so.

You know, I mean, here's the sweatiest dog in this pen.

So I do understand where it comes from.

But it was actually, like I appreciate him asking it because it made me aware that the game has been, you know, so encapsulating that we haven't even cared to discuss any of it or think about it, because all I care about is making my thirty one mage thirty two and what I find along that way, and then I'll worry about thirty three and thirty four and thirty five.

Yeah.

Now, I'll guys, let's just all talk about the stuff that we'll do it in a way.

Let's do sort of no spoilers but half spoilers, if that makes sense.

So talk about things you've seen, but don't dive too deep into the detail.

Things like, you know, Okay, I won't tell you what happens.

I actually haven't done it, but I won't tell you what happens with the man Crek's wife stuff.

But just know that it's new.

Man Crik's wife has been moved.

There's new shit.

It's a whole thing now, So dive in and have a look and see what happens.

But you know, there's a bunch yeg sorry, go for it.

I was gonna say.

The one that pops up to me because I did this morning is everyone remembers the swim across, like Locke Madan, go into the hunting lodge and like the south what is it?

South?

Yeah, southeast, right corner where you do the hunting lodge quest and you go all the way back to Locke Madame Dalcamar.

They've actually put quests in the middle of the lake now on the island mother.

Yeah, it's her name is very it's almost Blizzard like namey where they call her mother.

Tessa is the big you know, lockneest monster, and then you have to kill all the other ones around there too.

So there's like four quests that make the whole roote efficient, and so it doesn't feel as bad to go back and forth to the hunter's log.

Yeah, and then a lunch feel weird.

It just feels like there it was always in the game.

There's a lot of that, and it's great.

Now, Look there's not like a boatload of quest Apparently it might be a bit more back We're hoping it might be a bit more backloaded, because like I am seeing new quests and they're great, but I wouldn't call it like a shitload of new quests by any stretch of the imagination.

Someone had said to me, I forget who in here.

But currently the bulk of their world editions are like above level thirty, because that's when it did get thin.

All the starting zones were already so well made.

But with that said, like they made the new troll at Nome starting zone.

Yeah yeah, oh yeah, the new like joint and like that's I was about to bring that up.

This is like everyone knows me.

I want to I like leveling, and I'm usually a one character stand and go hard on it.

I've already got two new characters because like.

I've seen what other races or what they've gotten involved in, and like I just got to go see it because I want to see what's going on over there and what's happened, and like even you know, I saw a Torren Warrior and they've got some new flavorful like racial thing where they can carry a totem on their back, and he was dual wielding, and I'm like, that's the cooles shit.

I've seen him walcraft for twenty years.

I've got to go make a Toron Warrior.

And then I went and made one and leveled him for a bit.

There's just so much like you're constantly peeking at what's under the hood of someone else's car.

Fuck I need to go try that too.

Like it's just it's a very new feeling because you know, prior to this, you could everyone knew every everyone knew every race and classes jam for the first thirty levels or whatever they got up to.

But now you you just want to go see the new troll starting area.

Just play a troll to level twelve to see what's going on.

To hold your experience what a lot of us wanted version of Classic Plus.

Right, Yeah, yeah, I'd like to confirm for the long term listeners that I did, indeed get to level an undead character through silver Pine to level eighteen.

About getting on a fucking zep, the dream is true.

So I was going to bring that up.

Let me, let me just touch on that UV because like, like I'm saying, even though there's not a shitload of new quests early on, there's still enough to like keep you satiated.

And when you get to yeah, okay, there's a new mine in tears Fall.

That was fun, that was cool.

But then you get to silver Pine and you sort of see what the ethos behind the construction of these new quests and filling out the world really was because silver Pine, look, i'm gonna say, probably has six or seven new quests, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it is the perfect amount just to fill out that zone.

I leveled a lot in silver Pine, which I've never done before, and I had a fuck load of fun doing it, and just extra little things like, ah, maybe we didn't give you as much to do down the south of silver Pine, and here's some more shit down there, and meaning really meaningful quest rewards when you get to the end of a chain and it's an elite quest at the end, and you're like, oh, fucking great, little Green, I'll take there, thank you very much.

It silver Pine felt fantastic.

Yeah, I do like they have I've noticed, but.

Not an annoying amount, but pretty much everywhere has got an elite quest or even a maybe like an elite area.

You've got to group up with the boys and go in there and conquer it for a bit.

So I kind of like that.

And then it ties in nicely with the the party quest drops.

Oh please mention that.

Yeah, when you're it's the shared quest drops.

I don't know what's the scarlet insignia is in Tiras Fall that there's a thousand of you fighting on launch for drops and now you can just party up and it will drop for everyone.

The only i mean, the only slight criticism for it is that it does mean that you can burn through quests getting fuck or kill XP, but that's obviously just the trade off of convenience.

I don't kind of say, I don't think Yaki, I'll get you guys to everyone jump in on this one.

I don't think yak is far off.

He's fucking spot on because I was thinking the exact same thing that every quest item is now shared.

Every quest item is now shared is easily the best change to the game for me.

Yeah, it really takes the like no one wants to kill forty of a mob changes ten things.

There's a few that I found that didn't drop, but I'm under the suspicion that it's because they're sellable and therefore you'd be getting items that can be sold.

We had issues with the dig rats.

Yeah, and there were I mean there was probably some that were bugged.

I know that the whaling essence in whaling caverns wasn't working, but apparently that's been fixed according to stand So you know, that's just that's literally the only quest that came to mind that I've done so far that I tried to have sharing, and bo wasn't like of all the ones that I've done.

But it is a huge quality of life change because like, you know, get eight of this and there's you're playing with two mates.

It's like, no one wants to go start getting twenty four of them and you're there killing mobs for an hour and they have because it's the wrath client.

I believe quest drops are increased ever so slightly, like you seem to get them a bit more consistently.

I haven't had to kill forty of anything to get ten of something, which I know maybe some purists wouldn't like it.

But because there's more quests, you don't mind that you're jogging along to the next one.

Yeah, oh, I have you bequitous?

There is one quest I have encountered where I swear the guy they need to drop eight worse.

I was recently my friend at work basically got me into it and I started playing this and I was trying to convince them to come over, and I said, the best way I can describe it to you is you are knocked off autopilot.

I could do every quest in Elwin Forest with my eyes closed.

You know it's boring, I've done.

It completely knocks you off auto pilot because there's so many different little things where you're like, wait a second, I actually be wait I'm going, but shouldn't I be going this way, and it just completely redefines the game for anyone that's even doubting how much different this game genuinely is.

Make a level one character, walk out of the human walk out and just go check out.

Gold Chai has been totally revamped.

It's no longer two buildings and a whole bunch of people just dancing in front of the inn.

It has got about fifteen buildings now.

There's about five to six new quests that completely lead you in different areas.

The Tower of Azura that's sitting out in the middle of ellen Forrest is actually a place that you want to go now.

There's things to do there.

It is so much different than Ellen Boris, and that it makes it we'll.

Touch on eventually.

We'll get to DM Whaling, Cabins, Dernhold, keep, all that stuff that we've seen so far that is entirely different.

But before we get there, I just anyone, anyone who's not named Ubiquitous for a second, just I want to touch on one thing before I forget on the grouping, quality of life things that have been introduced to the game as well.

We talked about shared quest items, but also this server has made an interesting choice in terms of the way in which experience works in a group.

So this will this will have the big conversation about sort of who this server is for, or maybe that's just going to weave into everything that we're saying.

But this, I would call this a controversial decision because it's not controversial to me.

I'm I'm on board with it, but I know a lot of vanilla purists who would fucking vomit at this choice.

And we've argued about this before in the discord in years gone by, and some people are really for it, some people are really against it and say it's it's you know, antithetical to the sandbox style of game that Wow is.

But basically they've completely capped your experience.

And I know that Blizzard has more recently taken taken some form of action against you know, the boosting meta and whatnot by messing around with experience gains.

So it's not like a unique concept or anything.

Other private servers I'm sure I've tried as well, But this one's basically said, look, if the just if the mob is gray to anyone in the party, in your dungeon group, you're not going to get You're getting like one experience from every kill you get, fuck all experience.

It's not worth it.

Don't do it.

Be mindful of who's in your group and what their levels are, because we're not doing the boosting thing on this server.

I have been okay with it.

Yes, it's already caused like the mildest of inconveniences when you go like, hey, Stan, do you want to come do this?

Sfk ah, you're you know, you're too high, your level twenty eight or something, and half three quarters of the instance will be grace you, So it'll dick over everyone else.

That's all right, we'll get someone else.

Like I've already encountered the quote unquote negative side of it.

It just doesn't bother me as much as it might others.

So again, anyone who's named ubiquitous, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I want to see if I can debunk this just with one word, that both you and you be abused, Josh, if that's all right?

And that was purists, and so far this is clearly not a private server for purists.

This isn't recreation of vanilla wow and the you know hashtag, no changes like we've experienced before.

So I think because you're removing that attitude and that kind of player, and like the power level inside of things got massively out of hand on you know, on official Bliss service, to the point where they stepped in and went, look now, we don't want this, so we're cutting it out of the source.

And the purists aren't here to get pissed off and mad at that.

I've not seen anybody in any experience I've had in the last what twenty one hours played since last Sunday kick Off, that something's different to how it was originally.

So this is just another one of those changes that people aren't here to be upset about, I think, or certainly that's that's like from my perspective.

Of it, it's it's definitely great.

You would like to say that sorry you kick once.

No, I was just saying, like with the accelerated leveling or if you've got somebody in new group that's too high a level, yes, I can see the negativity of that, But you know, if it stops majors selling boosts and in turn gold being regurgitated into the economy to those individuals, then maybe it's one of those things that all right, I don't want to say, you have to suffer it, so I don't feel like it's suffering as much.

But it's just one of those things we have to sort of get over for a bigger sort of reward or advantage to everyone in the end, if that makes sense.

Yeah, for the greater good anyone else On this one.

I would say that it's actually more pure.

It is more towards that antithetical the way things used to be in Vanilla.

Boosting was not a thing really in Vanilla, like the way it is with Classic and everything now, So doing something like this actually makes it feel more like what it used to be.

Yeah.

I would always lose my mind when because there's always going to be someone out there going, yes, it was a thing back in Vanilla, you're a fucking idiot, blah blah blah.

I always lost my mind to those responses when like one guy did it into and Sikhs, so people say it was a thing, and it's like, you know what we.

Mean, Yeah, it was not like anything what it is now.

Because the game's been sold for fifteen years, so people have had time to practice on private servers and Classic and different versions of the game to make boosting what it is today.

Back in Vanilla when I played, it was not a thing.

Maybe you had one guy on the fringe doing this stuff, but it was not a common issue that anybody had to worry about.

And I want to live in that world where it wasn't a thing.

Yeah, it wasn't an issue that became part of the servi culture.

So Ya Yak and Axle, I think one of you guys or both of you guys were going to say something, who wants to go first?

Well, I was just going to say that.

You know, within an MMO, anything that promotes people playing together is like what you're going to want, right, And so that's why the shared Quest moms are so great.

You get to group up together.

You're playing together with the other people in the world instead of like trying to dickishly, you know, out tag each other.

And with the level boosting, it's like you're not playing together.

Four people are dicking around having a conversation at the best while one person plays the game right, and it's just it's just kind of defeats the point of playing an MMO, at least in my opinion.

I didn't even know they made that change, To be honest, you'll break in the news to.

Me, Yack, you were going to say something.

Yeah, I'm super happy that they're addressing the boosting issue.

It's the only problem that I've seen with it so far is if somebody levels while you're in the dungeon, and then that first mob in the dungeon becomes greater of them, all of a sudden, everybody's experience gets newked.

So like in RC, if you hit level twenty and everybody else in your group is like sixteen or seventeen, like nobody is getting experienced anymore.

So there needs to be some form of a tweak.

Most dungeons have really low level mobs start compared to the end, like one ding largely shouldn't really fuck the whole run, And if you are dinging in the dungeon, it's usually not in the first corridor either.

Like just we were we were in RFC and we had just tiken down the first boss when I tank ding, and then we were going in towards like that second boss, the evoker guy, and everything back there was giving us like one experience for the rest of the run.

Marcus, you like to ding in the dungeon, don't you?

Oh?

I love it, mate, It's like my favorite thing to do.

Very good.

We'll look, guys, we'll keep going.

We'll just sort of talk about more about the things that you've enjoyed that you spotted again without kind of going to spoilery.

But you know, for anyone interested, Look, I've I've rolled an undead Warlock.

I'm absolutely loving it.

I'm level twenty five at the moment, like I said, tour through Tier four glades, tore through silver Pine forest and making my way through Hills Brad at the moment, and just on just on the Warlock side of things, I'll say, look, there were a couple again private servers.

There's gonna be kinks.

There are a couple of things that I thought maybe I was experiencing just as an OCEE player, and we haven't even mentioned.

By the way, everyone like the ping to this, whatever they've done with the ping.

Everyone is saying this is the smoothest feeling private server that they've ever touched.

And I've played a lot, and I generally don't dive into private servers because I'm dealing with three point fifty ms on a one point one two client that feels like four fifty ms it is the most sluggish experience of all time, but this one is night and day.

It's completely different.

It's number one the client again, moving on to three point three point five, but also just I don't know what the fuck they've done on the back end.

I get basically the same ping this server, I believe is in.

I basically get the same pin to this server that I would on a West Coast NA server.

So it feels like about two twenty to me when it should be like three point fifty three sixty.

I don't know how they've shaved off that one to one fifty ms in feel, but it feel No, it doesn't feel I still feel the lag.

It's still like, you know, two hundred odd lag and whatever.

And if you're the kind of person that you know refuses to play on an NA server because you need twenty ms or the game's literally unplayable, then yeah, okay, you're not going to like this.

Sorry, You've got you know, a higher palette for ping than I.

But it feels better than it has any right to do, and I don't understand it.

You guys have felt the same.

Right, yep?

Hunt of percent.

You described the word sluggish is yeah, what I would use to describe most experiences I've had with private servers.

But this one is good.

It's not sluggish.

I feel like I'll be able to PvP and not be three minutes behind my opponent.

So yeah, I'm pretty pretty happy with.

I only notice it when I talk to NPC's.

I don't know how they've managed to put like it's very very crisp when I write click items to pick up or all the combats really smooth.

It's just the the NPC and like mailbox interaction where I go, I have look two hundred pin.

Other than that, it feels pretty fucking good.

I mean, there's little things that I wouldn't say unnecessarily ping related, but like like I said, there are still kinks.

This server isn't perfect technically by it by any means, but it's still fantastic.

But like I thought, it was just me.

I thought it was the OCE ping where I basically said, oh, it looks like I can't really play warrior because I was charging one yard past the mob and having to do a one eighty instantly every time I engage, and it was really fucking annoying.

So but you guys said yesterday.

That wasn't just me, that was everyone.

So the server hasn't quite worked out war charge for some reason.

Feral charge is working fine, but not the Warrior charge, so that's an issue they might fix up later on, but it's kept me off Warrior for now.

But on the Warlock also, like and this wouldn't just be Warlock related.

I'm not sure if all of you guys get this, but I definitely get it.

Private Service in the past have have had this issue with tab targeting, where for whatever fucking reason, I often have to double tap tab to get it to actually shift targets.

So i've I'm they're shadow bolting with reckless abandon on one target and the second I want to start casting on the mob to its right or left, I have to hit tab twice, not once, and it's a little bit annoying, but I mean it's a it's a minor thing.

But the Warlock has felt fantastic, and I mean just on the class thing, like they've made a lot of class changes, guys, but they're relatively minor ones.

But you know, great quality of life soul shards stacked to three and that is just you know, it's done before in more modern versions of the game.

But it's a game changer.

It's a great mix between still keeping a little bit of the vanilla friction and also not being stupid about it where my bags still fill up, I'm still deleting soul shards all the time and being like, ah fuck, I can't loot that my bags are for ah well, time to get rid of some soul shards.

But I'm deleting thirty and not ten.

And it feels really good.

It feels right.

I really quite enjoy it, and just the drained soul being an execute now but not an overpowered execute.

It's one of those weird ones where it ticks just enough to make it worth pressing because you're probably not going to get the shadow bolts off in time in that last twenty percent where the mob's going to go down.

But it also doesn't feel lame to press it, like you do see a bit of feedback and see their health going down execution style while you drain sol.

It's just a really nice little tweak.

It makes it feel, really makes the button feel really fun to press, and you get that purple you know, fucking Voldemort line going out of you and you're like, yeah, yeah, die Sucker.

And again I know more modern versions of Wow have Drain Soul been executed with Warlock and it's it's just it's a vanilla execution of it and it feels really really good.

What other guys, what are the what classes are your rolling guys, and what positive or negative changes have you felt so far?

I'm playing an undead mage, I'm not playing Rogue for the first time, and fuck knows how.

Long I went.

I went with this because.

I just there's nothing they could do with with Rogue that was going to make it new for me, Because I mean, if it's based on TBC and have a bit of wrath in it, I've been there and done that.

So I figured, while I'm getting into essentially like C plus, may as well try a new class as well and just get like triple the fucking new experiences, so to speak.

It's been pretty fun.

I mean, it's just it's literally, from what I understand, it's TBC age, but you also get ocane barrage as a default ability in arcane blast is in the tree somewhere.

So yep, they checked up Kane a bit more.

Uh, who can we who can we call on who wants to step up to the play guys and guess up their class.

I'm playing a Torn priest.

Yeah, talk to us about the Torn Priest.

Oh yeah, I'm playing a Torn Priest.

I'm trying out the news Smite Speck kind of thing they got going on.

Yeah, they they they, yeah, yeah.

I've always wanted to do it, always wanted to be a reality.

So they kind of said, we're going to make a little bit.

They're not going to like balance endgame around it, but they said, hey, you should be able to level a lot easier without having to go shadow.

So I'm definitely giving the whole Smite Holy Fire kind of spec a try.

Fun.

Well, it hasn't really come into its own yet.

I need a few more levels to really start unlocking some of the talents that are going to make it a thing.

I'm only level twenty two, so hopefully by my end of my twenties I should start seeing some results with it.

Most of what they've changed, they said, is like the spell coefficient, so I won't really kick in too much until you start getting spell power, but it should kick in pretty good once you can use a talent that unlock spell power with your spirit and things like that, so it might be a very heavy spirit based priest build kind of thing going on.

Yeah, someone else is going to talk before.

Yeah, it's gonna say I've played Warrior.

How's it going?

Yeah?

Did you notice the charge thing?

Yeah?

It was.

I think it's gone now mostly this very rarely happens now, whereas it's almost every charge.

Okay.

They have Buffalo a little bit world mob difficulty to help with the player power, which you do feel compared to Vanilla, but I think it's it's not as bad as it wasn't sudd Victor Rush doesn't heals the TBC versions.

You don't get to rely on that.

But I think that though out of combat to health reach ot is way higher than it is so that helps a lot as well.

But the incoming day which is yeah, really noticed it as a cast or mobe that just thea to just chag casto and.

Then cast the mobs a crack.

Yeah, they are call me crazy.

I feel like the out of combat health and manner region you feel much more in those earlier levels and it becomes less noticeable later on.

Has anyone else experienced that?

Yeah?

Below ten, it was pretty cracked.

Yeah, and then I got past level ten, I was like, Okay, it's starting to slow down now, and now it kind of feels like it normally.

Yeah, at twenty five is a warlock.

It feels very normal.

I don't feel like it's crazy by any stock.

I'm going come on, health, come on.

I've probably just hit twenty so I felt it yet.

Okay, now, yep, I think Druid feels really good with the added attack power on weapons.

Yeah.

Well, I mean Mike's been tanking for us, and he keeps yelling out all this ap on stuff that doesn't appear on the tool tip for me, but he says a piece for him, which would be a great troll by the waves.

Oh yeah, this this fucking intellect stuff's got aph on it all right, I'll take your word for it, mister Druid, and a lot of day right there.

It actually does so only Druids can see the extra ap to bonus that it gives you in your forms, but almost all weapons above like level ten and like they're green, they all have like different ap bonuses for like the different forms, and it really just makes.

Feel it feels so much better.

Like Lowling Beer Bear through Dark Shore, usually as a slog, but it felt so much better and easier.

And then also just the reputation items that you get, which I don't know, we haven't really touched.

On that yet, but yeah, all of that, we'll get that so much easier and better.

We'll be all over the place.

We'll get to it all eventually.

But like, yeah, it's funny because we're in a DM and LO and behold emastone staff drops and I'm like, fucking happy birthday.

Hell yeah, And you know, we leave in a a free roll society.

I'm not as much as I am a loot whore in terms of my obsession with Lute.

I don't do I don't like encourage people not to roll against me or do stupid shit to fucking collect loot for myself only.

But Mike goes, holy shit, look at the ap on that thing.

And I'm like, what what are you talking about?

I want to see anyap on it.

Are you about to fucking roll on this thing?

And he goes, hell yeah, and he's like, Josh, I swear there's ap on it.

And I'm like, all right, all right, but if you get this thing, I'm gonna fucking die.

And that's when I pulled out the hundo against his ninety two, and I was fucking doing laps of ecstasy around the room because I'm a piece of shit.

But then and then completed the said, god, we did an amazing SFK run.

All my dungeon runs are being guild runs.

It's been fantastic.

We met a lovely guy who filled out the fifth spot for our SFK run this morning, a British guy.

And we'll talk about the twenty four to seven nature of the server very soon.

But this British guy, and normally I say to people like, hey, look, four of the five of us here are in voice, come join if you want.

And he goes, yeah, fuck it, why not?

And he gets in and he's the fucking loveliest guy of all time, shout out expired tuna, and he was fucking pumping with this blue crafted I believe it was a crafted sword that he had, and oh my god, and he joined the guild.

So he's happy.

We're happy, very very good making friendships and socialized socialization is alive and well.

But my point was in this SFK run, I managed to score the rose of Arragl and the shoulders as well, so I'm a little bit decked out now and feeling very good about myself.

Now someone else is going to talk about another class who was that.

I was going to just mention playing a dwarf shaman has been fun one getting to try, you know, the new ally shaman.

And it's the little things like in the talent tree, they just switched the placement of the cast time reduction and the crit talents on your lightning bolts.

So rather than being able to finally cast your lightning bolts fast at level forty, you can start casting your lightning bolts fast in your early twenties, which is not actually more like effective than leveling enhanced like always, but it's different and it's fun and it's you know, I've played a bunch of shamans and I've never bothered leveling elemental in my early twenties, and this time I am.

And it's nice to have.

That change of fred.

I'm not sure if you're just listening in, but does that title late to you at all?

Can you hear it?

By the way?

I can?

We can now?

Absolutely?

Now, okay, yeah, great, next, and sorry to go way back one small points.

That's what I trying to say earlier on the Gray XP thing that's on the Star Wars and Elysium.

Where oh.

Yeah, so if you're like a private server player, this is like nothing surprising and it's a you know, you know, and these are the service that people at the time before we had the classical leases were saying, we're blizz like and just like how it was, you know.

So it's sort of this weird, almost revisionist thing to say, well, now it's so different.

I mean, it's not different than how two thousand and four was, because clearly when we didn't have twenty nineteen Blizzard Classic, we didn't we didn't miss this because no one's actually doing it.

It's obviously a huge deviation for twentynineteen Classical.

Everyone's boosting out of their minds, but you know, totally different situation.

Anyway, That's that's what I tried to say earlier.

Sorry, we're totally going off topic on that.

One's right.

Have you looked at them?

Have you looked at the Shaman changes?

I have looked at them.

I mean I personally think that Rath Showmen is a lot more fun than tvc Shallman and and TV and this this chants plus you have you have, you have weaving, but it's like kind of like a sketch weaving because you don't have mails from weapon.

You just have like this thing on the dualial talent.

So you know, I I'm a hunter, but yes, it's it's proved a vanilla, But I mean that bar isn't hell fair enough?

Hey, rad Wie buffs help charmers out in this massively.

Everything's rayde wide virtually, isn't it.

Yeah, most of the buffs are crudeff.

You raised something I didn't realize.

Now there are more.

Again, a lot of you have said Josh, okay, fine on the one ex Vanilla, but you also said you'd never roll on the server with three minute walk backs to your body again and you were done.

I did say that, And thankfully this one has I think the TBC version of the graveyards where there's more graveyards.

It's quite noticeable, and you seem to run back to your body a little bit quicker.

So it's not nowhere near as painful as the stuff that I've driped about in the past, particularly for PvP enthusiasts, if you're dying on a semi regular basis, but also is that true with the Griffin's actually faster.

I haven't noticed the feel faster the film director, that's more of a TVC or Wrath client feature feels like it good.

I have noticed some more optimized flight routes, so maybe that's a thing.

What's the Yeah, the coach who wants to talk about the carts?

Since since you brought up Sharman, the dwarf Sharman, sorry, I would just I've got to fit it in Undead Pali and Dwarf Sharman just looks so much better out in the world than fucking blood els and and I running everywhere like now that it's here, Undead Pally is the coolest fucking thing.

Everyone knew.

Everyone knew it was going to be a winner, and we've called for it for years and it's never been done.

Now it's here, and look what how I saw?

It doesn't stand out.

They just looking cool.

They look amazing, they feel amazing, and lo and behold the quarter of the server rolled one.

I'll stick Dwarf Mage in that category as well.

There's dwarf majors yeap oh, I haven't seen any yet.

That's pretty cool.

There you go, known priests, I think known priest, human hunters.

You know, there's a few new classes.

Yeah, Undead Hunter looks creepy with their bat beets everywhere.

Yeah, but yeah, Undead Paladin has been a huge winner.

People are very very happy with them so far.

I've got one as my olds and I'm very happy with it.

Guys with any other yeah, yeah, exactly, Just yell out if anyone's playing a class that we haven't discussed yet that they want to give some love to on epoch.

But look, outside of that, there is it's the same old line of a lot of familiarity combined with just enough new stuff to make it interesting.

Now, Ubi, I feel like we should probably talk about the dungeons here because otherwise I'm not that I'll forget, but it's a good part.

Can they bring up one thing that's kind of delated, just as a little segue, the cross faction nature?

Oh yes, thank you, because there's so many things to talk about, so just yeah, if we're not, if we're forgetting something, just yell it out, please go for it.

Well, I just you know, I was earlier talking about how well you know MMOs you want people playing together.

That's the whole fucking point.

And so cross faction has been great.

The fact that we have one big guild.

We have how many of us in seventy guild members, We're across both factions.

We haven't killed each other out in the world yet, but we probably will yet.

And but we can also dungeon with each other.

Two Yeah, and raid.

It is cross faction rating, right, Am I getting that right?

I believe that.

Yeah.

On, let's dive in on that note for a second, because again I have had numerous, uh let's call them energetic discussions with people in the past about this.

You know, it's World of Warcraft, Josh.

The faction should, under no circumstances be allowed to play together.

You need to have a villain, you need to make your choice.

Doesn't fuck your and and fuck five years ago I probably said this the Pipe podcast.

Fuck your friends, You'll make new ones.

Just fucking get in there and pick a faction.

It's the lifeblood of this game.

It's buried in it's DNA coded into World of Warcraft.

That this is what this makes one.

This is what makes this one unique to a certain degree.

Pick a faction and get on with it, and then we have the other side of the argument, like you guys say, going, oh, isn't it refreshing that you know, my friends can just we can play anytime and it doesn't matter that they lost at the fucking character selection screen.

I've been very pro this over the last like two years.

On the podcast, we talked about it.

In regards to retail, I've said that, in my opinion, this is an incredibly antiquated concept and not for the better.

When you divide friends and you put a roadblock in front of them from playing together in an MMO, that is a very bad thing.

Like again, I appreciate some people greatly disagree with me, but that's been my That's been my evolved take.

I was team factions and now I'm teen.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't have factions, but have cross play between the factions to some extent.

You've got to allow people to play with their friends.

I've been big on it, and so many you know, again, real vanilla lovers have been like, don't do it.

But then you come to this server and I couldn't help but notice not a single fucking person is complaining.

And it's been a really common theme of this survey, and it's got all these things that people have gone ballistic about in the past that no one it's not controversial on this server.

No one of the thirty thousand people playing it is complaining.

And I'm like, so, let me get this straight.

It wasn't a big deal at the end of the day.

Do you guys know what I'm saying here?

No one's complaining.

Yeah, I'm probably the only person.

I think it's your distracted by one hundred good things that even like, I'm still someone that's like I like Horde versus Alliance and in my perfect C plus and utopia it would be that way.

But when there's a thousand other fun things going on, and I mean, I'm about as resistant as a fucking leaf in the wind anyway.

I'm a silver Linings operator.

I enjoy that we can all play with the Countdown crew.

Yeah.

I think it's just like there's enough, there's enough other good things happening that you kind of even if you are like me, you're like, ah, whatever, Like, can't can't win every front.

There's fifty other victories going on.

So but I'm probably an anomaly in being the person that still likes Faction.

Rivalry anyone else on Cross Faction.

I still like I still like faction rivalry.

I still like the traditional Horde versus Alliance.

I still think that's a better setup.

But at the same time, I got to realize that it is pretty convenient to just have to tell people just roll on the server to do whatever you want.

Play the faction you want to play, play the race you want to play, check out the zones you want to check out, don't have to worry about that stuff.

That is nice, but in the grand scheme of things, I do wish it was more Horde versus Alliance.

Is it possible to sorry if you want if you wanted to play MPVP you're playing a PvP server, Like, it seems to be totally fine to have cross if you were on the PV server if you.

Want mostly playing with war mode on anyway.

Yeah, there's war mode on the TVA realms with an incentive to toggle it.

We'll go to warm.

Experience.

But I mean, I just I still see Horard out in the world, and I still consider like, am I gonna throw some lightning bolts of this guys?

Yeah?

You know, yeah, I think it made it less important because I reckon.

I've seen more Red Alliance than I've seen not like probably two to one.

It's actually more common for people to be rolling with war mode on, so I really haven't noticed the the whole cross faction like that.

It's actually probably the ideal scenario where you can go do a dungeon with your Alliance buddies.

But it's still a realm with PvP on because so many people have toggled it on and all that shit.

So I think it's actually the perfect medium now that words.

Yeah, it is kind of weird though, because you can talk to the people your PvP now because I had like two Alliance tried to jump me and I killed both of them because they were lower level, but they tried to jump me and they whispered be after like a good job, and I was like, Okay, that's kind of fucking weird.

But it's just something I got to get used to now, and I've told myself I'm done with PvP servers.

I like, I'll go PV from now on because I can't stand the cancer that is PvP servers.

But it is it's a different experience and you know, it just is what it is.

It does open the door to a lot of toxicity.

Yeah, you be, it needs mentioning.

The cross faction is like literally, just for instance, content you can't go quest with your homies.

I thought you could.

I thought you could do anything outside together.

Well well where, It's yet to be seen.

I don't know if people have gotten to neutral quests.

The way they describe it, the way everything I know, like neutral quests haven't been sharable.

Those WC quests are neutral.

Yeah, I think.

I think some people just hear cross faction and imagine the whole games just running around with your alliance and ORC friends.

It's like, I don't know, you're still out in the world and you can't, Like you can't come to crossroads and doing cross.

No, you can't go.

You can't go to a hoard town if you're alliance.

But if we're out in the middle of nowhere in the Barons for whatever reason, and your hoarde and I'm alliance, can't I still invite you to group we kill a mob and share that experience.

I don't know, but like they won't Jack you're saying yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, Like I mean, if you just want to go grind mobs together.

I mean, that's fucking insane.

But I'm just saying it's not as open doors cross faction as some lunatic probably like interpret what we're saying.

Yeah, it's more.

It's just so that, yeah, you can go at least for me, it's like you can go do fucking shadow and keep with a Pali or a human pally and you know your friends.

But there's also still the part where like, I can still come and kill your friends if he has warmode on or PvP enabled, and you're just gonna I haven't.

I don't know what the interaction is going to be, but like we've killed other Alliance members out the front of a Horde dungeon, like they've summoned them, and then we've killed.

Yeah, yeah, I loved it the first All that funny into day two.

Day two, outside r f C, we've spotted our first Alliance and were just sitting right there at the front of the instance portal to r f C, and all the boys have gone, hang on, I can just attack him, right.

Yeah, and then then the Hordes going, you trying to kill my heeler.

Yeah, that's the thing.

He's your healer, not al.

The cross faction is really more for group content, because I think it still goes back to their early days of this is going to be a low pop server and so therefore, you know, we're gonna need more people to group together so they can play if there's only like a hundred lines and one hundred hoard.

That way, they are more options obvious.

I mean then I was gonna mention like, yeah, it was your spot on.

It was brought in out of necessity because they thought fucking no one would be playing on this server.

But now there's everyone playing on this server and it's still there, but I think it's still being embraced by the larger populars.

Yeah, it's going down pretty smooth.

I was curious whether it was a design choice or a social choice, like.

I think it was.

I think it was pure necessity.

Every private server now launches with cross faction play because they think they'll have fucking no one playing it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just looked for the positives.

You know, it is fun.

It's added more fun to the game.

So yeah, definitely.

Different how the group together, and.

I'll be interested to see how it works out long term, so we can see, you know, hey, how's this going to affect endgame.

How does this affect the whole like kind of life cycle of the server and if it's a pro or con, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how it works out.

Let's talk about the dungeons with that.

Sorry, sorry, who was that gonna?

That was you?

Actually, I was just going to say.

One consequence of this is also that summoning stones are active, which I mean is also just being TVC based, but it's a real necessity for cross faction, right without the ability to summon voodoo in front of stockades so that he only gets murdered twice.

On the way, and we wouldn't be able to have done that stockade one.

That's right, guys, Let's talk about the dungeons.

They're speaking of stockades without Again, it's really important that we don't get spoilery on this one, because there is stuff that you genuinely don't want to get spoiled.

There's you know, now, granted, the guys who built Project Epoch built this over a number of years, and it's just like you know, one, two, three, four, guys, they've drastically changed deadmindes and whaling cabins, and they do have new dungeons at level sixty and new I believe there might be a new raid coming, and they've jazzed up a Nixie as there and all that stuff.

So there's they've gotten in there and done new stuff for us.

But I believe that they've sort of done it with the message that look dead minds and whaling cabins, don't expect every dungeon to be completely redesigned.

They've basically only really done that for deadmindes and whaling cabins, I believe, and everything else after that is business as usual.

Say four, they have introduced new boss mechanics across the board, so every boss you encounter in a dungeon basically has a new mechanic and it's been really fun seeing all that stuff and having to again, I think it fit the bill really well for what they've done.

Where the new mechanics they introduced with these dungeon bosses, they're what the classic player base wants.

They're not difficult, they're just new.

So it just asks you to If you sit there and play AFK and you're watching a Netflix movie and you're just spamming Frost, Bowble, shadow Bolt, yeah you might die on the boss.

So pay mild attention and do the one stupid little mechanic or not stupid, but like the one interesting new mechanic that they're asking you to do.

But outside of that, I mean, I've run through RFC, DM, deadmines, SFK, and whaling cabins thus far and just thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

Number One, for the tweaking to the difficulty of the mobs.

They really feel like they've got the correct levels of HP and it takes just the right amount of time to down all of these elites and the bosses, particularly the outside world.

I'm not as stoked with how they've duced some of the mobs.

Like we talked about earlier, some mobs feel a little bit unfair, and I've complained upset.

He really did.

I died about ten times in one hour in one part of silver Pine Forest that I was going ballistic about, having flashbacks to my rants about SOD, which you know, it's a bad idea to juice up mobs in the outside world too much.

But it's mostly okay.

There's just one or two patches where it's it's not so much the mob difficulty that they've gone too hard on.

It's the density.

And there are too that I've shared like three screenshots of mobs in the outside world where they've literally just placed three or four of them within five yards of each other and no one could ever sallow it for a normal quest, And I'm like, that's dumb.

That's a little bit dumb.

Come on now.

But back to the instances, they feel really good difficulty wise, but also the DM and the WC redesign.

Look, guys, it's not what you think.

They have completely redesigned them.

When I like our jaws were on the floor going through whaling cabins, it is fucking beautiful what they've done.

You.

It is completely different.

You have no idea where you're going.

And yeah, you got I got the authentic two thousand and four experience where we got fucking lost.

We had to run around the dungeon for twenty minutes.

You spent two and a half hours in there your first run.

Yeah yeah, my first whaling caverns was two and a half hours, which I mean might fucking shock some people, but damn that warrior with shit.

You did have an ordinary group, Yeah.

Yeah, the group was The group was really really ordinary.

But yeah, like we we cleared it and like, you know, fucking all the bosses are cool, They've got new stuff that they do, but it's an entirely new space, like kind of what a few people were wishing for inside.

Like the only part that's the same is the first fucking corridor.

You go down that ramp, and then when you get to where it would open up to whaling caverns, you're going, well, I have an idea where I am in all of Azrook because this is the first time I'm ever seeing this physical space.

And then yeah, we got were cleared through it.

I mean, it wasn't hard, but fuck it was a fun adventure and it's it's it's I'm shocked at actually how well they have got the difficulty.

Like it is.

You can handle a pack, you don't have to see see every pack, but when the level eighteen Warrior but Agros an extra pack, it's like the fucking Polly's got to come out the ice trap you have to see see and it's a fucking sketchy the two packs.

It's sketchy.

And like even the bosses I found the time to kill is pretty much like spot On, Like I get to use my fucking manaba as a mage fighting the boss and then like a lot of these fights, if I'm popping icy veins and going ham like I.

Have to use.

Avocation, Like who the fuck's ever had to use a vacation to kill a boss in whaling caverns because it lasted so fucking long.

But in the.

Mechanics that like you said, you know, move out of the fire, but it does let you stand in it for two seconds without killing you, Like it's full.

I don't know, they've really nailed it with the difficulty.

I think CC is fucking back on the menu boys, and it feels amazing, and I just I really like it, and like I know these people are like, oh, it's fucking boring.

I think it's fantastic.

I've had to cast no joke about one hundred years across four dungeons and look, granted maybe maybe two thirds of those I didn't have to cast, but I did it just to be on the safe side.

Because we've pulled a four pack.

Let's just fuck one of them off, because these mobs do hit rather hard and I'll just make it a little bit easier on the healer in the tank.

And it's not it's really not for nothing, like it's when you fear one of them.

It's noticeable the difference.

And plus I'm absolutely busting out curse of weakness on each pack that we encounter.

For sure, it's fantastic.

Notice it.

And like you know, I Mike's in the crowd listening.

I'm not sure if he wants to Mike.

If you can't jump in, that's all good.

But like we did, we will come back to d M and w C.

Trust me.

I just want to say we did Deurnhold Keep yesterday and Ubu watched us do it as I streamed it on discord.

There was four of us, and you know they've completely redesigned that to be a new jincer a law.

It is an outside dungeon experience and everything in there is elite.

It fucking hits hard.

You have to be paying attention and you know exactly like jinker Alore, just be on point.

You'll get it done in about an hour.

If you have ship players or players that don't know how to use their class, you'll die.

And I had a fucking amazing time.

It was so fun.

New quests in there, new areas, like it's not just like oh yeah, we've we've we've put the you know something up there for you to go through notes.

It is really cool.

You feel like you're basically doing a dungeon as soon as you walk through the doorway, if you will, the archway to Durnhold Keep.

I can't commend them enough for that.

And my point was, like, there were four of us I had, I would have cast two hundred fears over that hour.

I had to keep a mob off MIC because of the difficulty, and it felt fucking amazing having the responsibility of needing to constantly fear.

Juggle.

Now they'd ten second fear every time.

No dr but just like juggle that mob, you know, cast fear, cast three shadow bolts, then back to the fear on the mob.

Couple more dots, back to the fear on the mob.

Okay, now they're all dead.

We'll kill the mob that's been feared the whole time.

It felt great.

I fucking loved it.

Yeah, the no spoiler way of describing it is that it's an undestroyed Durnhold Keep.

It's like it a time traveled back to before it got fucked up.

Yeah, it's very, very very cool.

Anyone else on the s scene like I've just felt like I've been using all of my classes utility in every aspect of this service so far, and I fucking love it.

All of my buttons absolutely a cold on to being pressed.

If you guys felt the same or.

Not, Yeah, I'm using my whole toolkit to keep people alive.

Yeah, how's the healing being going?

Bestage talk to us about it.

Uh, it's been a little hard sometimes.

It depends on the group you get.

You definitely want to make sure you have the right level appropriate group for the instance you're going.

Don't try to carry people too much.

But uh, yeah it can.

It can get pretty dicey pretty quickly once somebody pulls an unexpected pat.

Or something like that.

So yeah, but overall, it's not too bad.

I mean, as long as people know what they're doing and they know the general concept of tanking and what the responsibilities are, it hasn't been too bad.

And it's kind of fun to be have those moments of oh shit, I gotta, you know, be superman right now, I gotta pull my ass out and let's let's get this done, and those are always fine.

It's it's way more entasing to play on the edge than it is to just you know, go through the motions for the fiftieth times.

Yeah, and it's it's really obvious in this on this service so far when the group is playing up to their potential because like I don't know if you Uve, you know, in classic ubiquitous fashion, because he's a fucking sweat lord like self.

Admittedly he's rushed ahead of the pack.

He's level thirty one.

We're all twenty five, four five, twenty six.

UV hasn't been able to group with us very much, so he's been going off doing his own thing and just i'll get you to tell the story.

In the second you be but having a little bit of bad luck on the old group front and is wiping you know, a fair bit.

Whereas he then watches our runs on Discord smooth as butter and he's like, you can't like that was really grusy.

Yeah.

So it's had a streak of seems like people with more time than the ability to play because they're up they're up my level, but got keyboard turners, and I don't think some of them know all their abilities.

But it's still been I don't know, if anything, I'm kind of appreciating it.

Like it's just added more fun to it.

It's made it feel much more.

I mean, wiping is new, Like you're not used to wiping on anything in classic all time, so dying the stuff's fun.

And we wipe this.

We wiped the one wipe I've had in three dungeons and the dernhold Keep experience was and I was warned about it in terms of the difficulty.

Was against Aragall, who is fucking like a It's it's it doesn't ask a lot of you, but it's still a tough fight.

And I don't want to say more than that.

But just when we finished it on this, the second attempt was infinitely better than the first attempt once we realized what was happening, and we killed it on this can attempt quite handily and didn't lose anyone, and we all sort of sat there and went, oh, and I just go, boys, I don't mean to sound like a prick, and I'm hardly a god of gaming by any means, but I reckon ninety percent of groups are wiping to that, like repeatedly, and they were all like.

Yeah, yeah, I saw some Reddit comments saying that I was fucking kicking some people's teeth in so.

It was easily the most fun fight in the game.

We all fucking loved it.

Yeah, it's it's just amazing that, like, I mean, we'll give we'll give a spoiler of a minor boss.

I don't know why, but crash now spinning around like a fucking shell from Mario Kart.

It's just like, yes, he's no harder, it's still just crashing the river.

But fuck, I don't know, it just made killing him.

Yeah, do you remember if if only I had recorded the noise that we all made when we first saw it.

Yeah, yeah, discourse.

Yeah, it was so funny.

But yeah, Mike, Mike is right.

God, the Curse of Recklessness was the real MVP at Turnhold Keep with all those humans wanting to run away all the time, and they're standing quite close to each other.

If you want to make your life easier, hint, take a war loog.

But yeah, back to look w C and d M again without giving anything away.

But you know, we talk about what happened with SOD with their redesigned dungeons that were kind of like you know, the endgame raids at the end of the level bracket, you're you're black fathomed deeps and whatnot, and much of it was the dungeon hadn't changed, but just they'd given some new abilities to the bosses and everyone you know, had a good time with that.

I mean, when you see what you can do with a completely redesigned dungeon, it was crazy.

And I said straight away, like that new whaling cabin is a thousandfold better than anything we got with SOD outside of the Final raid, the Scarlet Crusade raid.

It was, and I'm not saying this to be hyperbolic, it was an eleven out of ten classic dungeon experience.

I loved it.

It looked beautiful, Deadlinds.

I really liked to Deadminds.

I liked more for the encounters than the redesign.

It is completely redesigned, but it's still a mine, and it's kind of a drab feeling that you're still kind of going through the same thing, even though you're going in different directions and everything does you know have the walls are placed in different spots and it unfurls a bit more when you get to you know, the Juggernaut or whatever, the dread Nought, whatever it's called.

But you know that the encounters in Deadlines were fantastic.

But yet whaling cabins.

Again, that sound that I said we made when we saw crash, we made that sound several times through whaling cabins.

Just the ecstasy and the excitement of oh, what the fuck is happening?

And I won't tell anyone, but there's you know, there's new stuff in there.

You should see it.

And it's all perfectly m is the word handle or bull a word, but either way it's it's cruizy.

It's like, just pay attention.

It's not that difficult than you're good.

Yeah, I can't understate the actual just aesthetic of the dungeon thematically, like it's the whaling caverns, it's the fucking sooking cave and there's little little twisty rivers spewing out of walls across the pathway and it's just it's absolutely incredible from just the physical space of it.

Yeah.

I hope they don't change argles.

That's a fair comp to Kelris.

We'll see what happened.

Sorry, someone's jumping in there, go for it.

I'm just saying, chef's kiss to their art team.

They just do I don't know who's handling that part of the project.

But just amazing job, especially on whaling caverns.

I mean, it's just it's stunning.

Stunning doesn't even do it justice.

It's fucking unbelievable.

And it feels like classics.

Still, it still feels like that same style and that same design.

It's not like they said, let's go make a new version of this, let's do retail or mop or whatever colors and effects you want to go to.

Was like, no, it feels like I just stepped into what could have just been a second wing of.

Whaling cab but now he's the thing vestige.

You tell me that those guys that built that now have the time up their sleeves too.

Now they're not even a launch I get.

Like I said, DM and Whaling Cavins are the only dungeons that have been redesigned.

But if you tell me that that team are the guys designing the new raids and dungeons at endgame or what have you, I'm like fucking signed me up because that was amazing.

Yeah, it does give me a.

Lot of hope for what's to come.

And like what we got three new dungeons.

They said that they're doing.

Yeah, yeah, so I be real custom stuff where it's kind of they can do whatever they want.

So that could go really wild if they want to.

But you know, hopefully they're staying in that aesthetic and they've set up before that everything they do is in that lens and through that prism.

Yeah, so I'm very hyped for what could be the future and what we could be seeing here.

They fucked up in that they set the bar too high early on, like the expectations are wild now.

But yeah, if you guys are playing on the server, under no circumstances are you to skip a Dead Minds or a Whaling Cabin's run, and you must go and see Durnhold Keep, So make sure you don't over level them.

Go to Dead Mines at twenty go to Whaling Cabins at twenty maybe, and you know, go to go to SFK at twenty four, go to Durnhold Keep at fucking what will we twenty four?

You will have the best time.

I'm all worked up, U, I don't even know where to go from here.

I'm all fucking hot and bothered.

We haven't even tickled professions yet.

Yeah, let's do it.

No time like the present made their amazing kickers off.

Yeah, they've stayed again.

It's just it's what it was, but they've just pushed it up a bit to the point where I think at some point my mage was wearing four crafted items that were relatively good for me, but like they're not the best shit in the world, Like I replaced them with a quest reward within a couple of levels.

But you can you go to your trainer and there's just i would say, the people for things that people would know, Like as a tailor, you always had the spider silk boots.

From level one to thirty, there's like six spider silk tear things that you're like, fuck, I want to get that, So you go out of your way to make sure that you go get like some spider silk or a pearl or whatever you need to go and get that item.

So you just get a bit more of that that crafting dopamine, and it's so much more rewarding they've got And there's also a bit like sod with the waylaid supplies.

There's crafting quest but they're much more simple, like you can once you've Yeah, it was a nice it was like an accidental find in that the quests only appear for you after you've gotten the skill.

So like I was just busy leveling away and I was like level fifteen.

I'm like, all right, I better start tailoring.

And then I cranked it up and I went back to Silver Pine and there was like three quests in town for like, yo, I need some boots, can you go make me some boots?

And then this other NPC wants a couple of bags and you hand them in and it's just for like a It's a decent amount of quest XP but nothing out of the ordinary, but just that little interaction was pretty fun too, And to stumble upon it.

Mike just wants to add, I'll read this up with this one out.

He goes Gigantro, and I wanted to mention that Mike did a second Deadminds outside of the first one that he did with us in the guild, and he goes, we had two randoms in the group that were acting like clueless players where every time they encountered something new in Dead Minds, their mind was completely blown, but more like they were expecting that nothing was going to be different in Dead Minds.

They had to be the kind of people that were thinking they were somehow just rolling on a normal Classic server and somehow wound up on Epoch.

So there you go.

It's if you're not expecting these changes, it's fucking blowing people's minds.

But that's a bit of a funny one.

But yeah, back to the professions UBI, I've loved it.

Like I said, I stand, let me double check with you if that's okay, mate.

The warrior that we had expired Tuna, did he say the sword he had was crafted?

Yeah?

Yeah, And it was fucking unbelievable, like he was destroying mobs with a blue crafted weapon at level you know, twenty six at SFK, it was it was just like the time being rewarded to sit there and do your professions as you level, Like don't just race to sixty and then come back and do your sessions, you know, because you were in a rush to get to max level.

Being rewarded so like not not necessarily in an overpowered fashion, but so healthily as you go.

Like low level, low level professions feel amazing, Like just little things like getting my you know, tailoring in chance at like you know level fifteen or whatever, my plus three spell power on my cloak very early on was great being able, Like you, he's already said crafting braces and boots and stuff that I really needed because I was up shit creek in terms of still wearing white stuff.

And look, that's always been part Don't get me wrong.

Crafting has always been a part of the game.

Some of you might be like, Josh, did you just discover professions, Like that's always been a thing.

There's new stuff, guys, and it's really really cool.

Yeah, and it's not crag good example, it's sorry you go the leather working.

There's there's a hat which is like one of the first head pieces you can get no headpiece so is such a big deal, but it's bop yeap, and.

It's like you can get to like level twenty.

Yeah, twenty one.

You can equip it and you need like one thirty leather working and it's it's plus sixteen stats total across, huge, huge damn.

Yeah.

And and normally you know you're just kind of going headless for a while.

And there was also like a crafted white shoulders that you could get just a little bit earlier normal than you normally would.

Also, the engineering goggles, there's one of each armor type.

Jill crafting has been folded into blacksmithing.

Oh what have they done with the buckles?

Or just make rings and stuff like that.

I've already got a color rings.

Oh that's cool.

I no idea.

Are you fucking level sixty?

Ol?

Ray already Anti now on level sixteen.

I got my first ring at level thirteen.

He rolled last night?

You rolled last night?

U crep.

Oh no, I've got to I got multiple characters.

Oh you're talking about you?

Because yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

Yeah, I've got to say one thing that I was going to say way earlier on, but I got lost in track.

Stability of the servers.

Kazan has gone down quite a lot of times, even in non prime times, so I'll premise.

That, yeah, they're wrestling with the higher population as well.

So you've got two choices.

If you're going PVEE, you got two choices.

If you're going PPE, you got Kazan, the quote unquote main server and the alternative server of Menithol that we're all on Menizal.

By the way, I probably buried the lead there.

If you do want to come play with the Countdown crew, go on Menophol, the Menthol, the ppe server.

It's got about I've been telling people it seems to have about I don't know a third of the population of Kazan, and I know the vast majority of people want to go And if you wouldn't go on the fucking big server, and that's fair play if you want to do that.

We've just found Menithyl to be very cozy, and we only did it knowing that the guys who now I think are earning a bit of trust who run it, say, guys, we will merge these servers as so, and as it's blatantly obvious that we need to do so.

So I'm happily sitting around being cruisy on the smaller server doesn't bother me at all.

We're not operating on Blizzard layers, so apparently because Kazan's been quite hectic for named mobs and stuff, because you're not on Barren's seventeen fucking shard.

Or yeah, and that's why I wanted to stay away.

Trying to kill the same It's like it's been rough on this server for some spawns.

Yeah, and we're one third size because everyone's packed in everything.

Every time I encounter a mild amount of friction around.

Ah fuck, this mob doesn't spawn for the next five or so minutes, and there's you know, one or two parties here waiting for it.

I think imagine if I was on Kazam with two and a half times the population.

It's oh no.

It goes into hyperspawn mode, like sometimes going to like outside of what's the village that's outside Deadmines Moonbrook.

That is deadly because the hyper spawns get going and they literally you kill a mob, it spawns back immediately.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Singular pain I felt is the Defire's escort quest.

Basically, it spawns once every ten minutes, and there's a group around it for like thirty players constantly waiting for it.

He's insane.

Yeah, I wouldn't want that.

Other than that, you're just getting groups instantly.

Everyone's just scraping up and the hyper spawns don't really.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it, go for a template.

Uh Fargo d mine.

It was crazy the hyper responding cobalds on Kazan it either Lord of the Rings that quote.

Whenever they enter the minds of Moria, it's like, you know, this is no, this is no mind as a tomb.

It literally was that because everybody kept dying because there are so many hypersponds that nobody could kill them all.

And you just there are skeletons the entire way through the mind.

Did you roll on Kazan your fucking tool?

I did you see, tried trader?

How could you?

How could you do this to us?

Well already on Casan, No, I mean but on day one, Well we all set everyone go Menethyl, but you don't love us anymore?

Templar, I get it, I get it.

That's okay.

Look again, I'll plug the guild.

Everyone countdown.

Is the guild.

If you spot us on Menethyl, say gooday, if you want to join us, come one, come all.

You know again that the not only the twenty four to seven nature of the server, the server is the server is something special because the great population with a private server blowing up like this, it's people from all across across the world gathering to it, which means the server never sleeps.

And you all knew this with Nostalias, it is you know, doubly more so with this one.

And so you log on at any given time of day, stuff is happening.

You want to do a dungeon, No, worries is Europe's awake or Australia is awake or something.

And you know, even more so with the Countdown Guild where we're not like an American guild on the World server where we all still doesn't really matter because all the guildi's go to sleep at the same time regardless of what the server is doing.

The Countdown Guild is a global guild as well, So you log online and like, granted you might not get a shitload of people, but there might be ten people online and it's you know, hey, guys want to do a dungeon run while everyone else is asleep?

Fuck?

Yeah, Like, well I did it this morning.

It was great.

When we did our SFK, there was only half a dozen people online or something and we just grabbed three or four of them and we had a great run.

So yeah, get amongst it everyone.

But back to what we were talking about the professions.

Has anyone else had any revelations with professions that we haven't mentioned yet, or enjoying or not enjoying certain aspects.

Little details like for me, clothes love going, enchanting and tailoring and lots of the caster cloth gear in it.

Having a mental blank an ingredient, A part or a component of it would be like, you know, a lesser astral and I mean it sounds like nothing, but I feel like that's just immersive, or like it just feels proper that you're creating fucking magic items that might have like two spell power on them or something, and it's like, well, no, shit might need a bit of magic dust in it.

I don't know, it's just a bit of flavor, nice simple flavor.

I've already changed to fort Have we talked about the passives.

Well, I'm literally just about to bring it up.

I was going to say I changed, let's go nuts.

I changed from two enchanting from herbalism just a couple of days ago.

I was herbalism tailoring because you guys know I love to gather.

But actually half the reason I went Herbalism this time is one of the passive bonuses that's new to this server.

So if you check out their website, they tell you what passis you get, and I was like, ah, bit of you know, the Dould Josh is going to do some BG's at level sixty.

That's probably what I'll spend half my time doing a bit of spell resistance with Herbalism.

That's interesting.

So I started leveling Herbalism and then I get to one fifty Herbalism and I spend half a silver to train the next rank, you know, to go up to like artisan and whatever the fuck it is expert.

And I discovered that at like one fifty, the spell resistance was all of six resistance to every school of magic.

And I was like, so this thing's just going to be ten resistance at cap, isn't it.

And I went, that's fucking nothing.

I'm out of here.

See you later, Herbalism.

I'm going and chanting.

But yeah, that the passive bonuses are, you know, reasonably new.

There's stuff you'll remember, like, oh, you know they gave a plus five percent total health buff to minors and things like that.

Vestige.

What have you noticed?

What are you like?

I'm doing herbalism alchemy right now.

I just literally made my first trinket for alchemy.

I get a little boosta on potions, so and potions and elixers and flasks get an extra bonus.

Uh as you're passive, So that's gonna be nice to probably an endgame.

Very cool.

Anyone else on their professions or should we move on.

Yeah, to add something, Hang on, here we got we got uh, who was the first last?

Go first?

Yeah, I just want to add that the professions they also promote the social aspect of the games the way same way as like shared quest and stuff they specifically made.

Uh.

Some professions fly on others so well.

Level of For example, blacksmiths to make a cool weapons or a shield or whatever, I forget what it is, but they need a postion from an alchemist, the elixture of defense that no one ever makes maybe before, and now you know everyone's in trade chat asking for them.

So it gives uh, gives people a reason to talk to each other and social has more.

Very cool.

Someone else is going to jump in, go for it.

I was just gonna say that that sword you're talking about, like can confirmed busted?

It is fucking broken anyway.

What's it called command?

It's something like the silvered ye to him, I can't remember.

Having the silver fucking sort of a thousand truths.

Yeah, it hits like a freight train.

It has a crapped and a strength on it when it PROCs on command, I won shot mobs.

It's just absolutely eradicate stuff.

Yeah, it wasn't like, look, it wasn't.

It wasn't sending our warrior like to the moon on the charts to the point that like it was, you know, he's doing eighty percent more damage than everyone else.

No, it was nothing like that, but like he was doing twenty percent more, you know, fifteen twenty percent more damage than us, and it was very like you couldn't catch him.

It was like, fuck me, you're slapping.

Yeah.

I find they've really put a lot of thought into how everything's weaving into each other, Like there's a fuck load more chess in dungeons and from I mean, I've only done the whaling cabins, like I've done one of everything, and then I watched your run and there were chests in the same spot, so it could be that they're like a static feature.

And then obviously in chess, like the pearls, similar to sod pearls are important for crafting these big early items, but fuck they're still rare.

Like the pearls were a gold fifty on the auction house the first few days and that was like all your fucking money, so you really had to want that item to go and get it.

But it's just a well thought out system at the moment with the professions and how they're all leaning on each other and that like, yeah, we're saying that there's this hectic sword that fuck, it's not the easiest thing in the world to craft if you don't have any money and stuff like, it's a it's well balanced.

It's I'd just say this one thing before I forget slightly off topic, but not really, Antie.

I was laughing and joking with you before we started recording, saying, you know you DMed me about the server because you saw me playing it and you're like, oh my god, are you're playing Epoch and you know it had been I looked at out dates between dms and like, dear longtime listeners of the show, which is so many of you will absolutely remember Antie from back in the day, the twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen days, and I saw that it had been five years to the day almost since you and I had last DMed, and I fucking I miss you and Auntie and I have had the I've had the pleasure of meeting up with Antie in real life and Patricia and I went out and had a lovely dinner with him once and made it's good to have you back in the fold.

But I mean it looks like the you know, you were just chasing that classic plus vibe and that's brought you back to us.

And he's been afk that whole time that I was fucking sucking him off.

That's great, perfect, No notes.

He's going to feel so good or he's going to feel absolutely.

Dready Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, all good.

Look what do we go to next?

Guys?

Where's this suckfest going next?

What about what we don't like Yeah, you can talk about what you don't like it.

I'd like to chat shit on it.

My guess kicks off.

Well, whoever suggested let's beat it up can go first.

And then I got my point.

All right, axel through the honors.

Oh that wasn't me, Sorry.

Who was a jump in?

It was Vestages me matep surprise Vestige.

But I can be critical, constructive feedback, constructive feed all right.

Yeah, there are still a lot of bugs.

I mean, don't want to say a lot, but I mean I am noticing some things here or there.

Some quest are getting broken, but they're getting fixed.

I'm having a few issues with some of my racial spells not working.

Properly, so that is a little bit of a bummer.

But I when we were doing Deadmind, I think there's a little bit too much trash in there.

Probably they could cut the trash by about twenty thirty percent make it a little bit of a nicer run.

I don't want to be stuck in dungeons too long.

I enjoy them, it's nice.

I don't want dungeons to turn into two to three hour things.

Then maybe just because they're new and they'll go faster and want to be learned them and stuff like that, but I just don't want them to be an insane amount of time.

I really like them to be at place I can dip in and dip out pretty quick.

Yeah, I'm with you, I don't.

I am not a believer.

Is some people absolutely romanticize the two hour dungeon run of Vanilla.

I think that in this day and age, that is horrible game design.

I don't think that these dungeons necessarily quite qualify.

But again, it does it really?

Like you you said earlier, it depends on what kind of group you're putting together as well.

But like you say, if a ragtag group of randoms is going to take two hours to get through it, then that's probably fucked, which I agree with.

All I can go by is what I've experienced, and you know, Countdown gamers are fucking gamers.

We're all pretty savvy people.

Every Countdown group I've run a dungeon with.

It's taken us an hour in and out done.

Loved it.

If refreshed my memory, I'll put an asterisk on my Whaling Cavern's run minus spoiler a little change.

The mobs are like one particular mob is eighty percent resistant to every school of magic, and we had three casters and a rubbish warrior, so like, that's why my run took fucking forever.

There was trash packs taking us four minutes to kill, and.

Was there something like this warrior, who you said was far from the greatest player in the world, was also the leapiest.

Yeah.

He blasted us on the first trash pack because I said you might need a shield because the raptors were absolutely munching his ass out, and he said, doesn't matter what I wear when all of you pull agro anyway, And I was like, you're still dying if I have agro and you're almost dying, what's that say?

Yeah, it's the shambles anyway.

Sorry, just to add that in.

I don't want everyone to doom and think that whaling caverns takes everybody two and a half hours.

No, but they do.

They do lean into the whole resive things.

There are a lot of and mobs that can be straight up immune to Yeah.

I found that was a shadow caster.

Yeah, that was an.

Example we talked with earlier where it was like, didn't you have a shaman in your group who wasn't purging?

Because when I did w C, I found out you could just purge that and then told me and I was.

Just, oh, is that purgable?

I didn't know I was purging it during our run?

Yeah?

Who were who was al shaman?

All right?

I don't even know that very good Stan was that you?

I can't remember?

No, who was it was that?

You?

Axel Act?

Yeah?

Are you so you were purging for us?

Yes?

I was purging the whole time.

I still remember seeing the resistances anyway.

No, no, no, the Reji, the regio.

Yeah, they're eighty percent resistant to ship and they're rejeving themselves and my party is not dispelling it.

And yeah, yeah, but I don't think you can purge the resistance, can you?

Right?

Unless like if somebody had like a neat resistance, but I thought you were talking about the cast or mobs would put up.

Like no, no, these are the deviate chamblers.

They look like the big green boss at the end.

Yeah, aumatic da.

Those fuckers just have like everything just hit for one third of its normal damage.

If that.

Yeah, But like I I mean, it sounds like a fucking horrible time.

I like the charm of it.

I'm like, resistance is back, baby, Yeah, it's not just irrelevant.

Have you have you?

Can I just say one thing.

I don't know if I should say this or not.

It's like spoilery, but not like anything substantial.

Fuck should I say it or not?

You mean, what is it about?

In s FK?

Did you?

Did you try?

And I didn't.

I didn't get to do it?

Who's done s FK?

Here?

That wasn't with me, nobody.

I'm not going to say anything.

Fuck it.

Let people discover it on their own.

It was funny.

That's some that's oh.

I know it.

Yeah, yeah, you know what I'm going to say.

Can we hold onto that one?

I say, you make it a challenge?

Yeah, I did it all right, Yeah, you will say and make it a challenge any group that can kill the horses in s FK send through the footage, take take, take them on, and I want everyone to be like, oh, let's go for the bags boys, take on the horses and see what happens.

Okay, that's interesting.

I'm in there fucking everybody up.

Oh it's out of control.

Where now we're just spinning up in our little hype chamber.

But like hearing all, this is what I was talking about earlier, Like I am so keen to already play my next character because of things that I didn't get to do, Like I didn't I didn't get to do DM or s f K by leveling past them just from like I wanted to see the zones.

And then now that.

Oh you've got it.

You've got to do if Ragle's a raid boss, you've got to do a goal.

So it's nice to have this feeling.

I've never wanted to ever level another character this whole time, and now I.

Just can't work.

Yeah, I'm I'm not going to have like it because it is still even though we say it's oh, it's like one point two x it's still a bit of a slog.

I'm not going to have time to fucking level you know, I think one will be pushing it, but like I'll go for two.

But yeah, I'd love to sort of see this through a tank size as well on my undead paladin or heal.

We'll see what happens.

Guys, we were talking about things we didn't like.

Sorry I got in the way there.

What else?

Now, Look, I'll just add just while you guys are listening off bugs or things that are fucked up that you don't like with the server, it just for all you people listening, Like, I know, we've glazed this server a little bit and we're obviously sitting here trying to convince you to give it a go.

But like, it's still a private server, and the people who have anti private service stances, they are correct in that you are still going to find some of that private server jank here.

Now, some of the complaints that real, real hardcore private server naysayers have are that like, oh, the server could be deleted tomorrow and then there's all my characters gone.

I don't I have like a fair bit of faith that that hasn't happened for a long time with private servers, and I have a bit of faith and that's not going to happen with this server where monetization is a thing.

But also, like the other part of private server complaints are generally like some of the you know, they don't get the scripting right or the coding of certain abilities, or there's just a bug or a jank that never gets fixed.

Like youb said, they are actively fixing things, but those things do exist.

So like if that bothers you, Yeah, okay, maybe you're not going to get the slickest experience.

You know, you're not going to get one hundred percent clean.

There's no issues with the server experience on this private server.

But in saying that, look, I mean, fuck, it's not like Blizzard servers a fucking super clean either as well.

Right, I don't know, but they keep.

Going with the ignorance is bliss strategy, where like I'm just going I can't tell if that's bugged or what they intended because they've you know, things are different.

Yeah, and then also just you're always battling your memory, like fuck, they'll boom a brain starting to kick in.

Can't fucking Actually.

I've said fifty times was this how it was in classic and it's like, I'm not even doing a new quest.

Yeah it wasn't classic, but you're just so caught up in everything being different.

I'll peeing them again just for the I said earlier, their mob placement, Like, you know, it's weird to me, even though like socialization is part of the game and grouping up is part of the game.

When you go and do what seems like a pretty innocuous test quest and like you do just like fuck, maybe all your boys are offline or whatever, or you're just just in the mood to solo something.

You know, the mob density is jacked up a little bit much, just in not all the time, just in pockets, and I just think that that wasn't very well thought through.

So I really would ping them massively for that one, for not only ramping up the difficulty and how hard these mobs here, but also just putting four or five of them on you when you're like, mate, now I literally have to group up to do this stupid little green quest that's not even an elite quest.

Yeah, and it's something, Yeah, you got to You've got to get into this inn.

And for some reason at the front door.

There's four wizards in a pack that you can't pull separately, and you're like, well, fuck, that's like two of these wizards kick my teeth in you'll alone four like there's this, But I mean, I'd say there's been less than a handful of times where I'm like, ah, this is like this should practically be an elite quest.

I can't swallow it.

That leading into that's by far my biggest gripe with the server is the crappy quest UI and how unhelpful it is in every fucking capacity.

And I'm talking like, I'm completely okay with don't show me on the map where to go, well, like, you know, don't give me questy by default essentially, but it pisses me off that I'm in town, there's a quest in the inn at an NPC hidden behind a drum, and there's nothing in the game that tells me on the map that that's available for me to do or collect.

I have to just see the little fucking mark above his head in game and go, oh fuck, that guy's got something for me.

And then obviously after that it doesn't tell you where to go.

You've got to read the quest and then we've downloaded a QUESTI like, add on it has most of the new shit missing anyway, Just I don't know if it's a maybe other people like it this way where you have to find quests by accident, but like, at least let me know what I can go and do, in my opinion, and also when you've completed it, show me where on the fucking map it gets handed in.

Because there's been you get a quest from some random duded caravan along a road, it doesn't tell you in the quest where he is completed, and you're like, where do I take this fucking box?

Yeah, I've said now I get Yeah, I've spent time going like literally like there's nothing in the quest text that reminds me of where I picked this quest up or if it's a different NPC to hand it into where the fuck they might be.

But it's very frustrating.

Yeah, but that'll be a bit jarring.

But then again, I think it might have been like convenience withdrawal symptoms or because now I'm used to it and I'm just reading, I'm reading a lot more quest text and stuff and go on the old school route.

But I know that I think in this day and age.

At least you know you've got quests in this town that you can get, and also, hey, this is where you hand this in is all I need.

I don't even need to be shown where it is.

But I also wouldn't I wouldn't complain if it was like the what you get in Wrath, where it just makes that blue cloud on your map of like you'll find what you need in here, go to this.

In terms, I'd be cool with that.

In terms of the new quests, though, like they I think they've smartly not asked much of the players in terms of like pushing you to run all over the map wondering where to find the quest objective, Like, generally speaking, the quest subjective is probably reasonably close to where you picked up the quest, and like, you know, you'll just you'll find they have not been complete smart asses and gone like for example, you know, like go and find this thing in a lake.

You know it's not comb the whole lake for fucking the item.

It's probably reasonably near the dock where you picked up the quest, you know what I mean, they've not been fuck whits about it, but I've I've really enjoyed that, Like I don't have my my I've got questy, but not like for the New Quest.

I've got them that that portion of it turned off, and I've enjoyed just digging around and finding out where to where to get the New Quest stuff, like, for example, in the lake, Like you know, I did have to.

I had to sniff around the lake a little bit for a couple of things, and when I found them, I was like, Oh, that wasn't like necessarily spoon fed to me.

But it also wasn't like that difficult time.

Enjoyed that.

Yeah, I'm being pretty mindful of Sometimes you're there going ah yak, yeah, and then you get it done, you're like, fuck, I kind of liked it.

Yeah, I like I like the struggle, as Yaki is saying, like, in all honesty, guys, outside of where you turned the quest back in reading the quest text, these guys aren't fucking idiots.

Read the quest text and they've they've absolutely told you where to go, like no uncertain terms.

Yeah, they's not.

Like your old Blizzard quest where they don't tell you shit.

Sometimes and you're like, where the fuck am I going to have to go with this?

And you're not even the right zone.

Yeah, just read the quest, and the quest text is it's thorough.

I've only had a single quest so far where I don't know if the guy was hung over that day or some shit that it was like the most vague Hey, I'm me go talk to this and you've never interacted with that NPC before.

It didn't say where this guy was or where he came from or what you trying to do it all.

It was just a hello, go to hear no instruction at all, and that was some question in fucking silver Pine somewhere.

But other than that yet it's been fucking solid, like.

Yak going imagine being me and not realizing that the north Shore mine could possibly have been on the north shore so I can keep going us.

We're pretty naturally falled in.

Yeah, they I've found.

It's not not full spoilery, but like the Amber Mill section of silver Pine where you I think there was like maybe two quests that you did there in classic and they're getting like Dallarian.

Pendants half a dave.

Yeah, now they've chucked in for four or five more and you've got to do two trips there yea, and like like there's a whole there's a whole farm that was literally useless to the Horde forever that they didn't have to change.

They just made a quest to go get some fucking tones there like and it's just yeah, it's already natural.

Route filled it out really nice.

Another example in Auberdeen where they really showed a lot of love, which is funny because Auberdeen was already like the most efficient Alliance leveling zone.

But like, for example, there's like this red Crystal you have to go back to a couple of times where there are these moon can along the way, and there's there's fuck all to do with those mooncan otherwise.

So they put in two series of kill.

Quests, right because you go there twice on your other quest already anyway, So it's like, hey, one series of killed the lower level moon Cans along the way quest and then one killed the higher level ones along the way.

It's like those simple little things.

What I was saying to Josh, it's so refreshing to have an abundance of quests, to have more quests than I need to be able to say, you know, there's too many people trying to do this thing.

I'm going to abandon it and I'm not going to worry about, like getting every little bit that I'm going to have to grind later to compensate for some of the.

Quests feeding so well, I actually thought one of them was wrong, like they screwed up an old quest and then I had to look it up, and then I realized it was a new quest, and I was like misremembering ship.

Yeah, yeah, And I was just thinking like.

Okay, just fed and so like I swore I've done this question before, but it should be over here, and I was like, no, it's a whole new fucking quest.

So what else have we missed in terms of the jank?

Anything else on the list?

Vestige?

Uh No, that's pretty much my list so far.

Okay, well I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, correct.

They mobs chase you for and now, look, I know everyone's gonna say, Josh, mobs have always chased you forever, mate.

I've played hardcore, I've placed, I've played Wow.

I've played a lot of Wow guys.

I fucking know how long mobs chase you for.

They chase you longer in this one.

Yeah, they are.

I don't know.

Maybe they're relentless at the leash.

The leash length is really high.

But in saying that, also, like you guys might have heard me talking about me fearing mobs left, right, and center, it also in turn seems like they've changed the fear range where like, you know, whereas you'd never fear in a dungeon because obviously you just pull fucking everything around you, they seem to cover a shorter distance now wild feed, So you can can you really can, with like ninety five percent comfort, just fear mobs in a dungeon and have it be not a big deal.

Yeah.

I noticed that in my DM run we had a warlock who was every now and then fearing somebody.

The guy would like walk off a few steps and then kind of just stand there a bit and walk.

The only wasn't like already halfway across the map.

We were like, shit, they don't like pull something.

They seemed to cap out at about fifteen odd yards away from you.

Yeah, so I was like, oh, this might have I didn't I didn't realize at the time, but I was like thinking, maybe this could be a viable CC.

But I didn't know if that was like intended or not intended, or what's going on with it, or if I just didn't know but I I did notice it in the DM run that it wasn't as scary as A used to remember fearing in it and instances used to be.

Yeah, Gigante was mentioning the Agro range.

She's it.

I've gotten conflicting reports on this, but the majority people seem to think it has been reduced.

But the one thing I'll say about the Agro is like, this might again be a little bit of jank.

I am finding that social agro is a bit off in terms of like you'll pull one and yeah, okay, he pulled the one next to him, but then you'll get like the two mobs from upstairs coming for the ride as well.

Like I've just had some weird shit happen.

I've had the opposite where like I've attacked one in a group of three and two of them ran at me and the third just was like nad I didn't like him anyway.

I've definitely had pools where like, again, guys, I've I've played a lot of Wow, I kind of know how this shit works.

I've had a lot of polls where I'm like, all right, I'll pull that one and two, will one hundred percent come and you get five, and it's just like, what the fuck.

Yeah, it's you know, there's certainly some rough edges.

I've found the leashing is definitely interesting, but then like again, I don't know if it's intended, because as I've as I've gotten to a higher level, I feel as if I'm starting to agro things from further that are my equal, whereas like when I was level ten, Fuck, you could almost like split a gap of eight yards and not agro either.

So I'm not sure if maybe they just maybe there's a curve to it.

I don't know.

Well, guess we'll find out or it's just wonky.

So what are we forgetting?

What's the one thing We're going to end this podcast and be like I can't fucking believe we didn't talk about X Y Z.

Well, I don't know, Like we've talked about what we've done, but I don't.

I don't really want to talk about the rest of the sales pitch, Like, if you're interested, go on the website if you want to have a look, like there'll be new raids and all that kind of crap.

I Stan raises a very important one.

You can do beg's while leveling and get experience from them, and people do somewhat seem to be doing them voodoo on like Day three dived into a war song gulch that was a three V three and I think he got some experience out of it.

Oh you get you get experience for each kill in.

There as well, really win, yes, And then they just they patched it just yesterday because apparently healers weren't getting XP and it was also only killing blows.

But they've fixed it up so now healers get XP for assisting in a kill and it gets split between everyone that was farming them.

It's like, I don't know, I kind.

Of surely PDP healing to level that.

That fucking tickles my pickle.

Yeah, I would love that have added those so you get they've added.

Those PvP tokens, those bloody tokens for killing people.

Yeah, more mode on and those quests and all the neutral zones to actively incentivize getting.

There's PvP items for fifteen twenty five thirty five.

Wow.

Yeah, I guess we didn't really cover war mode properly.

Like you get you've got to you can only toggle it on once you're level fifteen.

You have to go to a city to do it, and to toggle it back off costs respect gold.

Yeah, so the first time you toggled off it costs of gold, the next time it costs five.

So it's a big commitment to like, you know, you're turning it on and you are essentially not permanently, but fuck, I mean I can't afford to untoggle it.

So I have permanently turned it on.

People won't be chopping and changing willingly.

Yeah, and you get you got five percent extra XP and five percent extra REP for it.

And then if you kill people that also have it toggled on, that's where you get the Bloody token or a chance of getting one, and you can hand them in for like, if you're hand in one thousand Bloody tokens, which would mean on average four thousand honorable kills out in the world only doesn't work in battlegrounds.

You can hand it in and you get like the blood Thirsty title.

And then there's also just a bunch of like little cosmetic shit that you could buy with the tokens, And I mean, fuck the PvP system overhaul.

It's arena seasons and conquest points and on a points and you purchase gear and each season there will be better gear to buy with on a points, so you go back and play more battlegrounds and there'll be new battlegrounds.

I guess we should do the whole PvP marketing for everyone.

One of else am I missing.

There's separate gear just for marks that's useful while you level up, so there's more incentive to actually go, you know, hit some BG's when your level twenty nine to thirty nine whatever, and you can go actually buy gear that will be strong for you, like doing a dungeon.

That's everything I know off the top of my head for PvP.

But yeah, so in theory you can level through PvP completely.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

You could.

You could be the most degenerate human being ever.

And like I mean, fuck, battlegrounds are rough.

There was like level elevens in Warsong.

Golt's just getting salauted.

Yeah, it's just interesting.

I was going to say with this, like with these tweets, surely Blizzard get this is like a layup for them as observing this for their inevitable Classic plus I hope, yeah, because like you know, we mentioned this and you go, oh, you get XP for kills if this was a Blizzard official server, we would have a spreadsheet on Reddit saying, all right, if Alliance get to farm hoard every battleground for seven minutes, this is how XP per hour.

So we'll form pre mades and farm each other, and we'll level sixty in four and a half hours abusing this system.

Whereas, like on the private server, because it's a smaller community, you just.

Don't get that level of degeneracy going on.

But still we'll.

Get to see the negative effects of such an overhaul to the PvP system.

Vestige.

I didn't know the answers to the question that and you've answered it.

Their stand says, are the servers connected for PvP BG wise and you said no, is that the case?

Yeah, they said, there's no cross realm.

Oh, basically you can't play anybody else on the other servers, right, But they said a potentially, they'll look into it later, but it's not a priority at all.

It's not going to matter anyway.

Really, well, it's not going to be that big of a deal later on when they merge Kazan and Menethil.

And basically you just got the two pops there between the PvP server and the pv server.

I don't think it'll be as big of a deal.

Yeah, but for right now, they said that they have no intention of merging them anytime soon, So.

No, that's that's true.

But I mean, like if you want to be a BEG spammer at cap by the you know, eventually, I think they will merger servers, and I'm sure it won't be that big of a deal in terms of like waiting for qes and whatnot to pop.

Yeah.

Yeah, and you can pvpq anywhere.

So yeah, Mike, Mike raises a good question, and we should we should talk about it.

We've invoked the name Blizzard just then and Blizzard taking notes, and people have joked about whether or not the Classic Team is having a bit of a play on Epoch and all that stuff and taking it all in and seeing what could influence the next Classic thing.

And there's no doubt in my mind that the successes of Eposticle will be a huge influence quote unquote to the Classic team.

But Mike just says, Josh, can you guys talk about the pressure on Blizzard now to do better than this and the higher expectations we may have now for their version of Classic plus in a post epoch world.

Do you want to fucking dare tackle that one?

First?

Oh?

Fuck, I've been ramble in the last few days, haven't I.

Yeah, I've been.

I've had a growing.

Kind of pissed off feeling that you know, it's the old iron Man made this in a fucking basement with scraps or whatever.

Four hobbyist devs have made a better Classic.

Than I've played this entire time.

Like this is for me.

This is as fun as the first weeks of SOD and as fun as the first weeks of twenty nineteen.

Yeah, and you've got a factor in that I'm only playing, Like, fuck, this would be wicked if you had more of the boys playing and it was a bit more fine tuned.

But like, that's the pedigree of enjoyment that's happening is rivaling those two moments.

And I mean twenty nineteen was jacked up on nostalgia really like and just the hype of it all.

But yeah, the expectation going forward is like if Blizzard came out with here's Classic Plus and it's just, uh, you know, we made Arcnet Reaper relevant in Blacksmithing at level sixty and there's two new quests silver Pine like, I'm just gonna unsub like, I just won't play it.

I'd play this, I'd just keep I'd stay here and keep playing this.

I have to go above and beyond this.

I just wanted to echo this, and everyone pleased to chime in on this, but let me just say things something for a minute or two here, just not to reiterate too much what you just said, but the word anger is really echoing in my mind because it resonates with me and it applies to me as well.

Where I'll just say that, guys, look on this podcast, I have been very, very fair to Blizzard.

I think that's a fair word to use.

Fair.

I've always said, you know, have a go at them where they deserve it.

Where they fucked up, absolutely tear them apart, but where they earn the credit, give the credit where the credit is due.

Look, I love SOD, I really did you, Guys know I love SOD.

I'm not taking anything away from SOD.

It was a great experience.

So many of you adored SOD.

But SOD is quite a different experience to this now.

Granted we're in the early I don't want to like you know, go too nuts, because fuck, guys, look, this could all fall apart.

We could turn the caveat the huge caveat here Is.

We could all get to level forty on Project Epoch and realize it's all smoke and mirrors.

It's actually terrible server, there's no new content.

Oh my god, why didn't we realize this?

Blah blah blah.

I'm just guessing that that's not going to happen, given what we've seen in the early run up.

But I just want to say that with the experience that I've had over the last you know, it's only been five days, guys, it's Saturday, and this thing launched on Monday.

For me, I have seen enough and felt enough, like you be said, over the last five six days to know that I'm onto a good thing and to know that I can't stop playing because I'm having so much fun.

And it's been a really big group experience.

And our fun is being amplified by sitting in the group in voice chat and feeding off of everyone else's fun.

But the reason we do that is because the game is fun and it's not nostalgia for Vanilla.

We've got half the people in the group fucking hate Vanilla Wou.

Now, well maybe that's a bit harsh, but you know what I mean.

Have said I'll never play Vanilla Wau again, including me, But this server has done so thing different and it's making me enjoy it and go on.

But coming back to this word of anger, I see what I see on Epoch and I think of what we just went through with SOD, and I have felt mild moments of anger as well.

I've been angry because I that joy that I felt during that Whaling Cabin's run that I'm almost under selling to you guys.

I'm trying to sort of keep it in my pants so that you can just see it for yourselves.

But that feeling, you know, that's a ten times better feeling than anything I got in a level uprad in a BFD or an omen like.

Don't get me wrong, those were great.

We came on the show and reviewed them ten out of ten.

No Omeragonde, New Bosses ten out of ten, Experience loved it, BFD ten out of ten, New Experience loved it.

Fucking if there are ten out of ten, this Whaling Cabins is a twenty out of ten, and I get mad when I think about what could have been for a Blizzard you know, a redone season of Discovery or you know, fuck, maybe this is all coming in the next Classic.

Plus they've got more staff, they've had the boot put up their asses.

They see what Epoch is doing and they realize, Fuck, if we do anything less than this, we are fucking cooked.

But I just I get upset because I'm like, this, this should be a thing from Blizzard and it's not.

And they're going to ask people to wait, you know again, the missed opportunity.

And it's not necessarily the dev's fault.

It's a funding thing and everything.

But guess what they're going to be a year and a half behind because Epoch's out now and Blizzard's like, oh, guys, can you just wait fifteen sixteen more months until we get ours out?

Well, fucking you're slow.

You're slow on the drawer, and someone's grabbed this market opportunity and then pounce on it and they'll make the cash out of it.

Blizzard will make their money too, don't get me wrong.

But they've you know again the som gap in time, and now this sod gap in time where they're like, can you check back in with us in a year and a half when we've got something outside of Era or Anniversary to play.

It's not on.

It's just it's not the dev's fault.

But I'm talking purely to the like, you know, executive Blizzard activision level here.

It's not on New fucking idiots.

You should have been well ahead of this timetable.

Yeah, because in my now that we've played it, well, we've said that, we've talked a lot, but like, if you just get on and play, the reason why it's annoying is that it's it's not actually that much.

Like I go Tis Fall and there's a fucking there's a new mine or two, and there's ten new quests in a zone that already had fucking fifty, and somehow it is a twelve out of ten.

That's all you had to do.

It turns out that it didn't need that much fucking work, and for some reason they try to fucking gas light us into thinking that it's some mountain to fucking make classic.

Plus it's really not.

You add ten fucking new items between one and one twenty and fucking professions and everyone's raving and they're hectic.

Like it turns out the bar's pretty fucking low.

And now that's why I'm annoyed, Like it was so easy for them to have made this.

Yeah, and especially I mean their team's getting bigger, and I say all this with the expectation like I know that they could actually do better than this.

Well, let's just fuck an annoying that has taken this long.

Well that's the point I actually want to pick up on.

And this is a question we can't answer ubi, but to throw the fucking challenge out there to Blizzard.

Could they do better than this?

Could they?

Because I did that whaling cabins, and a part of me was like, Blizzard could not top this, and that's what made me angry.

I'm like, they couldn't top this.

And if anyone from Blizzard is hearing this and you're upset by what you think is in that being an outrageous comment, please, I'm begging you fucking prove me wrong.

Come out and swing at me with your next classic plus iteration and say, oh you think that's a dungeon, We'll show you a fucking dungeon.

Show me.

But these guys have done it now, and I'll tell you what.

It's a fucking tough one to debate in that kind of a ray design.

A couple things, so one we would not have gotten or we will not get Classic Plus.

That's going to happen eventually if we didn't get sawed.

So sod was you know, as we talked about the beta test for the demand of a Classic Plus, that's what I.

Would say to that.

Yeah, but.

These guys also had four years.

I was just gonna say, yes, yeah, so these guys have had four years.

They've they're hobbyists, but obviously very good.

They spun up two starter zones in a couple of weeks apparently between when the failed launch and the relaunch, so even that is kind of incredible.

So they obviously have a lot of experience and skills of what they're doing.

So these aren't just people who you know, d.

The cylinder goes in a square hole, you know, it's not kind of that kind of at going on.

They obviously have some skills to what they're doing.

Now we have no idea what Classic Puss will be.

They talked about in.

The survey, new zones, maybe a new class.

It seems like they are kind of shooting pretty high with what they've been eluding could come.

We don't know what's going to happen, so we may get something like this and more.

Absolutely absolutely, and I we look, we're all fans of the game.

We want that This isn't I don't want people to get the impression this is the massive like, fuck you, private service for life, Blizzard, You're a fucking joke, blah blah blah.

No, I'm here to be one over.

Take me.

I'm yours.

But you dumped me with nothing left to do for the next year and a half.

You walked off and said I'm gonna go fucking you know, root other people for the next Let's see other people for the next year and a half.

And I'm left standing with my dick in my hands, going, oh, okay, that's you know, as I say, outside of the dev's control.

That's a funding issue and a fucking foresight issue.

But like right now, I have nothing to do and I'm loving what I've got, and it's absolutely thrown down the glove to Blizzard to say beat this.

But you're so I'm so glad.

I was kicking myself that I forgot to mention earlier, but I was going to say, you're right.

They had four those guys had four years to build this, and every devats, every deva Blizz would rightfully be pissed off, going like, fucking give us four years and see what we can do.

That's fair, that's very very fair.

Yeah, I got the counterpoint of that it's only four guys, and they're doing it in they're off time, like they're probably I imagine that if they're this good at making a game, they're not like hobby devs.

It's probably like actual maybe they work at a different company and they're a developer or whatever.

But like.

I would expect if it took them four years to do this, because again it's not really that drastic of an overhaul.

I would think that Blizzard, with thirty full time pricks working forty hours a week on it, should bang this out in three months.

Like, not that I have any idea on dev time, but like just in ratio to four people that do it in their off time after their jobs verse a team of thirty, like you're already eight times larger and you have all the facilities to do it, you have the permissions to do it, and you have the access to do it, like it's their fucking game.

They have access to everything easily, So.

Like, I really to get Classic to what this that we're playing, And if you haven't played it, you don't know.

To move Classic this far is like pushing it two yards upfield from the base version of the game.

But it's just that much more fun moving it that ten yards up.

So I don't, I just I don't.

I can't see why it's taken this long for them.

To do it.

And I said yesterday though, if Blizzard, if Blizzard just fucking cold dropped C Plus tomorrow, I wouldn't log onto Epoch tomorrow.

I'd go try it.

What we're saying is if it's not better than this, then I'm logging back onto Epoch on Monday.

Yeah, and that the problem is the bar.

The bar hasn't just been set, it's been cemented.

It's beat this or else.

Yeah, that's I mean.

I would think with you know, a team of thirty people and what Classic Plus is probably not for another year at least, you know, if they do something similar to this with twenty five hundred new quests, some new stuff here and there, but then they say, okay, there's also.

Eight new zones.

There's a whole new class there's you know, ten new dungeons and raids and stuff like that, then you're gonna be like, holy shit, yeah that's great.

You know, we'll just have to wait and see.

It's kind of hard to pass judgment on something doesn't exist yet.

Yeah.

I want I want to eat I want to eat my words back.

I want to replay this podcast in December of next year and have a laugh at all of my you know, taunting of them to fucking one up this server, and I want all of us here to be there creaming over the new C Plus that plisse it has to live it.

Oh my god.

Wow, did they fucking take the challenge and surpass it?

Oh my god, they did it.

Of course I want that.

But I would love a Blizard official version of this for sure.

Yeah.

But but if they now come out and deliver a weaker version than this, fuck me.

I'll be more scathing than I've ever been in my life about them in this game.

Yeah.

I don't think they are.

I really don't think they are, because I think they are going to view Classic Plus as the next five year game.

Yeah, They're going to be planning.

Years and years of content for that thing, because they say, hey, it's a smart plan.

You kind of milked the anniversary cow as much as we can, yep, And I really don't think there's much more we're going to get out of that.

So if we want to keep the classic version, the vanilla version going, we have to hit it out of the park with this new Classic class.

I wouldn't be shocked at all, because I've said, like I I've actually recently started turning on the whole.

I've always said, oh, you know, they'll just keep releasing Expansion until the cash drives up, you know, Yes we'll go to Ward, Yes we'll go to Legion, all that stuff.

I've turned on that in the last few weeks where I'm like, fuck with the feedback that MOP is now getting.

And guys, yeah, a lot of you might be saying, Josh, you were just hyping up MOP and now you've literally changed service to Epoch.

You're you know, classic, Josh, You're a fucking fickle piece of shit.

You know what are you doing?

MOP didn't so many of you, guys.

I feel so justified in my personal feelings where you're like, MOP didn't grab me.

I was there to be grabbed.

MOP didn't grab me.

The one thing that a lot of people are saying is, yeah, the PvP is great, but everything else is fucking ordinary, And I completely agree it does not.

It's not there for me, the time, gating, the PvE, the everything, it's just not hitting the same.

I had more fun in Kata, to be honest with you, but look, with that now becoming more of a popular opinion.

Now there are people playing MOP, and that's great.

If you're having fun in Mop.

I'm not here to tell you fucking anything wrong with that.

You go have fun with what's giving you the fun.

But I get the impression that the community has started to take a little bit of a turn where they're like, yeah, we look, Cata was maybe a fifty to fifty call, but now that we're in MOP, this definitely ain't what the classic people want anymore.

Like we're so far removed in time and in frameworks from twenty nineteen classic that it's look.

Whether or not you call it retail is another question, but you've maybe stuck somewhere half between, but it definitely ain't classic.

And I felt that, and I've kind of like I've walked away.

I've gone, like all that work I did, I told you, guys, I've spent hours and hours crafting and MOP, and I did have fun crafting and MOP professions are great fun.

But I've just walked away from all that cash I made, all the stuff I've crafted and said I don't care anymore.

I'll just PvP every now and again, and that's it for MOP for me, which is kind of how I thought it might go, but like it's sad to have it really confirmed that way.

But what I'm getting at is I'm now backtracking, going I agree Vestige, I think that there's a chance.

The really truly think there's a chance.

Now they come out on stage in November of twenty six at pliz Gone and say, guys, look, guess what we're actually gonna wind it up here.

We've now decided that it doesn't really feel like Classic anymore.

So the Classic franchise ends at the end of MOP.

We're not doing what we're not doing Legion because guess what we've designed the next few years for you here in you know, Classic plus.

I one hundred percent anticipate that's the way it's going to go.

But all we're saying here is that would be amazing, But it goes without saying and I feel dumb saying it.

It's got to be good.

It can't be a half asked Oh shucks, we're just a team, you know, We're just a small team.

We can only go with the funding we've got here.

We all know that, and we've given you many, many an opportunity over the last few years to lean on that and say, look, guys, we'll forgive you your small team.

It's all good.

You're doing the best with what you've got.

When you get to Classic Plus, that excuses out the window, because now a small team has delivered something fucking amazing, orb it in four years.

Yes, I get it, but you still have to beat it.

And if you don't, you're fucking cooked.

Are they already making it now?

And they've just been releasing all these like, you know, the one after another.

Oh we're doing the next version of Classic you know?

Or are they looking at this going, oh shit, we're in trouble.

My biggest piece of copium is all they started Classic Plus when they put it on the Dragonfly Climb.

That's that's my That's where I think that they began to ponder the idea, because I mean, we only moved to the Dragonfly client in the middle of twenty twenty three, and that would be that's my Yeah, that's my copium.

Is that that was when the switch was so to speak of, well, if we're gonna do it, we better start from the right base, which is the right call, Like we're all gassing up this three point three point five client because one point one two plays and feels like fucking ars these these days.

But this still could have a lot of improvements.

I would like to open all of my mail with this clip of a button.

Yeah, well that's what that would be.

That would just be in that client version by default, for sure, But.

Exactly, I just want to say, like I just one last thing on this, like just for everyone who you know, if they hear me, do the tirade there and whether you're agreeing with me or disagreeing with me, Like I go in hard there because I'm like, I've never whether or not this has been obvious on the show, I've never people have called me a shill, and it's always kind of quietly burnt me a little bit because I'm like, I've never had a great allegiance to Blizzard.

This isn't like I don't fucking touch myself to the concept of Blizzard in my private time, but I've always defended the right for them to be covered fairly.

But my allegiance isn't a Blizzard.

My allegiance is to me having a fucking good time.

It's my spare time, it's my life.

I get one shot at live and I'm just gonna go where I'm having the most fun.

And if Blizzard is making that game fantastic, if they're not fantastic, doesn't bother me.

Who's making it.

I'm going to go where the fun is, and right now, the fun somewhere else.

Yeah, we know the We've spoken with the devs, and we know that they love World Warcraft.

So I'm sure if that was like a I don't know, Bobby sold his yacht and gave it back to Blizzard and said, here's funding for fucking classic and you've got full permission to make whatever the fuck you want.

The devs that we've spoken to would probably make something pretty fucking awesome.

It's just it's that big core fucking battle of resources and red tape and all that bullshit to actually get it up and off the ground with free creativity, which which is what these guys don't have to work with.

They're just they're fans.

They can make what they want, they can try with they want.

They don't have to fucking send out surveys and probe and have back and forth.

They can just go, fuck you, here's XP and Battlegrounds.

Don't fuck it up.

But Blizard would have to test it out for a year internally before scrapping it or something.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's a it's a more of a fucking yell at the the fact that the corporation itself hasn't delivered, not necessarily the devs, because yeah, yeah they got they got free reign with SOD and that was good and they did what they could with what they had.

But now, none of this is a personal attack on the devs.

You guys know, I get along with a few of the devs.

I think they're fucking a great team.

This is there's venom in my voice, not personally but professionally, and much of it is more aimed upstairs rather than at the Classic team's office.

But it's also a little bit at the Classic team going.

Like I say, except the gaudlet that accept the gauntlet that hath been laid down before you.

But just to touch on a couple of things, Krudef that you're saying, like, yeah, I have to have a lot, Like you're right hopefully, like you know my audience is smart, sheerly.

By virtue of me dedicating a whole podcast episode to a private surfer is the indication that I ain't no, you know, born and bred blizzard chill.

But also just to touch on what you say, like, I want that that second point where he says, I have no doubt a grand sees epoch and thinks to himself, we could do so much better with this if we had enough resources.

I fucking I want them to log onto Epoch and go ah, we could find what we're doing is gonna fucking smoke this.

We could absolutely do this and more.

Good.

Good, I want this.

The competition is good.

Make it push you to deliver something better, all right, Tim's Tim's listening.

Tim.

I'm fuck, it's a shame you only just jumped in.

I actually wish you'd jumped in twenty minutes earlier.

I'm I'm going real heavy, Tim on spurring the classic team onto upthing more and look, it's by virtue of a controversial avenue that we're going down here.

But like I hope when you hear this back team, you hear that again, this is not like a venomous personal attack.

This is like trying it's it's literally is the space race?

I don't know if that's Is that a fucking bad analogy to draw?

Is this not the space race?

Are we playing in the Soviet Union?

Isn't it kind of a plea to get ten more resources?

Fucking yeah?

Please, let's let the man cook.

Send him all.

I'm hoping, I'm hoping.

I'm hoping they're taking this to the higher ups the c suite and saying, look what these guys did.

This all we have to compete with.

Now, let me this thirty people not paying us fifteen dollars a month right now that would happily do if they just had a product.

He's the shot of Sorry, I keep interrupting, I keep interrupting your guy because I'm being a horrible host, because I'm so I fucking fired up right now.

But I just want to say this, and I wanted to hear from the rest of you guys on this one.

Maybe this is again one of the greatest indicators of all time on how I feel about the landscape at the moment and what's happening in terms of where I'm playing and where I'm not playing.

For the first time in seven years or six years, sorry it's twenty twenty five, first time since twenty nineteen, I ended my whal sub There we Go.

Canceled a couple of days ago because I'm somewhere else and no plans to go back anytime soon.

First time in six years.

I've had lulls with Classic in the past where I've taken like a six week holiday, eight week holiday, didn't end my sub, ended my sub this week.

That's that's the sign.

That's when you fucking lost Josh's sub.

That's a sign.

That's so funny.

I just canceled my sub too.

I did find myself just kind of what I handled around the launcher like someone at the shops, but you didn't know what you went there to buy, And I was just like dropping the menu down and clicking on my like I got two accounts and all servers and versions of the game.

I opened retail a closer at the character screen, I opened off.

I fucking did one quest.

I logged off, and I was just like I don't know where I'm supposed to be.

Look look at a look at fucking everyone in the chat, everyone saying out loud on the podcast here as guests, and saying in text chat right now, I canceled mine too.

I canceled mine too.

I canceled mine too.

Again.

It's not personal, it's we're going where the enjoyment is right now, and right now it's somewhere else outside of a Blizzard product.

Sorry Blizzard, but our you know, the the like the moth to the flame.

You know that the bright lights have distracted us and pulled us somewhere else where.

We decided that's a bit of a good time.

And all of these fucking people going, I am Spartacus.

I canceled too, that's epic.

Well, and I can just say the money I say from my canceled sub I could.

Just use to boost if I want to do a TBC then yeah.

So I mean, look at point, that's exactly what I want to fucking see.

Look at Tim's response.

Go off and play other games.

That's great, don't worry, you'll be back.

That's exactly what I want to fucking see.

But you've got to back that up, Tim, and I have faith in you and I love you, brother, But I've questioned whether you guys.

You know, you've delivered some great dungeon encounters in the past, I've questioned whether you guys can deliver the same kind of feeling that I got just a few days ago on a different server.

I want you to, I said, I don't know if they can, but I want them to.

Let's hope you get pushed to deliver that kind of feeling again in the world that you're building.

Yeah, I would like to throw it back to when they had told us like SOD is the very extreme of anything that they'd ever do, and you can perfectly see how that could be watered down to what we're doing now and having fun.

Like you know, I think it will almost be comical to look back at SOD and the things that we had going on in there.

But it was the experimental pit.

We're just chucking things in and watching what bubbled.

So yeah, it'll be it'll be interesting, for sure.

I want like everything I've said over the last half an hour, Tim, I want you.

I always joke about the person listening to the podcast while they drive to work along the highway and getting angry and throwing their phone or whatever out the window.

That's exactly what I want you to do.

I want you to be so fired up by what I say on this pod.

You know, if you happen to go back and listen to it, that you're on the highway down the road to Irvine and you're doing fucking you know, eighty miles an hour, ninety miles an hour, and just the phone gets tossed out the window, going fuck him will show him.

That's exactly what I want.

I hope they say that we've already got stuff in the books, so it's gonna blow this shit out of the water.

Just wait anyway, I'm sorry, someone else talk.

I'm too fired up.

I think I've got to go to apologize to my wife food.

I think she can hear me yelling and she's telling me to shut the fuck up.

Can you guys talk for a second.

We had to start.

One mentioned launcher before.

Can I just say, you're having add ons inside the Ascension launch that you can just clease literally just click to install is absolutely awesome.

They all just work, don't work?

They are they working now or because.

Undergoing I've got to chat one I've got updated frames, deep hop quest.

Everything's working just greats you.

Use the launch Ye's laze.

I've been battling the add ons all week, like multiple installs and ship.

It's just great.

It's so easy.

I think we're all shocked in the sides with Tim just coming in here dropping bombs.

No no, and that's but that's but that's why I'm trying to I don't want to do the thing because I hate when people hate when fucking content creators do this.

If someone from blizz gets like near them, like if within one hundred miles of them, they fucking they clean up what they're saying and they're like, huh.

You know it's with the old meme of like Tim walking in the room and you've just been slagging him and you're like, oh, hi, Tim, Oh we're just talking about you.

Yeah?

Is that was the wife and kids?

You know?

Hope, no fu that.

I hate that.

I'm not gonna I don't want to change anything about what I've been saying or the tone that we've been taking just because Tim's walked in.

Tim knows I fucking love him, But like, I'm not going to sort of shift gears just because of that.

But like, I'll just say that I'm sorry.

My wife was yelling at a rugby game, not at me, which is good so I can keep being fired up.

Uh.

What I wanted to say was Tim, that's right, Tim says, And we all know this fucking countdown listeners, the smartest Wow players out there, Tim says, maybe there's a reason why we had to stop SOD development.

You know, of course we know, we all know that you're amongst friends Tim here.

We know that I have no doubt that you guys sat down, you know, even obviously before SOD ended a month or two before, and said, right, Classic Plus development starts right now.

Guys, here's you've got to I want a little fucking I presume because this is what I would do if I was management at Blizzard.

I would have the days to Launch thing on above the door at the office that you rip down the number every day and you're counting down and you're pumping out until that launch day comes and you're doing the best job that you can until then.

But Tim, what I've said, and I'll just say this one little thing again now that you're in the room, is that, like you guys don't need to be told this, but it's it's a bar has definitely been set and I've basically said, if you know this, if you don't meet this bar, it's not a good look.

You don't want to be shown up at the game you invented.

It's like, you know, fucking the old I'm trying to think of a good reference, but like you know, fucking old doctor James James and it Dr Nasmith inventing basketball and going oh, okay, so I'm going to put a thing here and if you throw it through, it's worth two points, and then the kid he just taught that to then annihilating him and dunking him on him in the game he created.

You don't want to be shown up at your own thing, and particularly by people who don't do it professionally.

You guys, I know you want to win this race, but you've got to do it because you now have a comparison point.

And that's the tough part for you, is you're you're now not fighting against the million different ideas that get thrown out there in the ether by all the classic players, because everyone goes what's classic plus to you?

And like we always say and always joke, there's a thousand different responses.

But now you're not fighting against some hypothetical hodgepodge of ideas of what Classic plus could be.

Now you're fighting against a real collection, a tangible collection of those ideas that people can play and we literally hold side by side to your product and then decide which one they're going to choose.

That's the issue for you, guys, and you have to beat that to be able to get to a point where I go back onto your website and click that resub button because I prefer your option to theirs.

And yes, I'm so glad.

So I'm talking such shit because he's like, no, shit, Josh, He's one hundred percent spot on.

I'm sorry, I feel I don't mean to be like talking down to you, like your fucking child.

You know all this stuff.

I know, I'm just I don't know what I'm thinking.

He stopped me.

He's probably like, I wish I could just share all the shit with you that I know right now, and shaw, no.

He'd be sitting at home going fuck with we know, shut up.

I think like a part of when I was saying earlier, like it's it's that you have little moments of like, oh, for fuck's sake, why why is it hard to go and make this?

But then most of the time I'm here thinking like kind of like what you were leaning into, if it can be this fun to play this, and they only moved it from a ten out of ten to twelve out of ten.

This is all still just hyping me up the whole time to a proper classic plus.

And we spoke about it earlier.

The reason why we're here is just because I don't really want to play MOP and that's all there is going for it.

I don't want to play Anniversary.

I literally could have ended up playing TBC potentially out of desperation, had this have not caught my eye like a month ago.

But the whole time, like you're playing this and you are going like, fuck, if these guys can make just this and it's this fun, then you know what could Blizzard make and how fucking good would that be?

Like just we need like a hot tip of when to expect this.

I can take a month off at this rate, Like I could genuinely die from joy.

Of playing class.

It's going to be out of the it's going to be so hard to beat that whiling cabins.

That's why I said, could they Like I almost want to call it perfection, And that's why I say, like, could the makers of the game even beat this?

Like it was that good?

Yeah?

I said, I said the other day, like I don't know the aim of whoever actually would have made original whaling cabins, but I would love to think that they were out there and they've seen this and gone, wow, look what they did to my boy in like a proud sense because of like, it's just a modernization of it.

Really, Yeah, Like the og was good when it.

Was made, and then to see your own creation redeveloped in twenty five like that, which is pretty cool.

I think that's would have a fucking baby watching the footage of the new whaling cabins.

You think it was awesome?

Yeah, it is.

It's it's remarkable, to be honest.

So this is all still just gas.

My fucking hyph train is still absolutely jacked full of coal.

So it's just a good to wait maybe a year and a half.

All right, Well, we'll start to wind it down because we're hitting the three hour mark, but we won't end just yet, but we'll just start the slow and gradual wind down at the talk guys, I'll I've really dominated over the last forty five minutes or so.

I want to sort of hand the show back to you a little bit.

Why don't we end, you know, over the last fifteen to twenty minutes to send on some really fun cute things again in the non spoiler category, cute fun things or really fun funny moments that you've had over the last week on the servar.

What stands out to you in the story.

I've got one come back to me.

Flames the mage that I found in under City.

Remember this on day one?

Oh yeah, yeah.

I'm running.

I'm running in the under City to learn my skills, like level sixteen or some shit, and i'm you know, the little pyramid thing that the trainers are on.

Anyways, I run up to where you learn.

Oh sorry, I was level twenty because I was learning teleport.

I go to the portal trainer and there's like a level ten mage there just talking to themselves in say, going like oh fucking hell, majors must only get skills every five levels or something, and starts to walk off, and I'm like, oh that's funny.

And then I'm like, wait a fucking execut.

Did I whisper him and say, come back, come back, you're talking to the wrong fucking npiece.

And then I take him to the mage trainer and you see this poor bastard learn every fucking skill probably since level two in so this guy has been out there rank one fireballing shit till level ten.

It was fucking like the kind of people that end up on it.

It's like it's it was funny to know that someone that out of the the like out of the no can end up in this place, like we're in this weird version of the game.

Obviously it's free, so you did get a mixed bag, but yeah, it was just so fucking funny.

And I was there wondering, like, if he didn't get corrected, how far could my boy have gone with his rank one fireball or what.

Was he talking to?

You?

And Sae?

He was talking to himself.

I snuck up behind him and he was just talking to the world on his own in say chat.

He had no idea that I was there and I was walking past.

It was fucking hilarious.

Love that peak timing.

I love that one who wants to go next give me some good vibes some good funny stories.

I got one I saw, Uh, I guess since hardcore is working now, I saw somebody die doing a hardcore and there's like a server announcement when they die.

I don't know if you guys already talked about it.

Uh yeah, so there's like a server announcement similar to like the hardcore servers that.

Kind of show out.

When he died and I saw him.

He was in the in that you know, harpy area and the bearings, and I saw him die and I was like, oh shit, maybe maybe I could have helped him.

I was, you know, kind of fighting my own fight at the time, so I wasn't able to, but I was able to res him.

I didn't think I would be able to, but I just, like for shits and gigs, was like, let me see if I can't resum really fast.

And uh, he got this nasty de buff which was called Tarnish Soul.

So I really liked the the call out to dark souls and it was a pretty.

Nasty de buff.

So I don't I don't think he was getting getting back to where he had to do, where he had to go, like he couldn't hurt stone, He couldn't fly path, the speed was reduce used as attack power was reduced, like everything, and I think I left him.

All I saw was slash, cry, over and over again.

I think he realized he was good.

I'm pretty sure that that diva.

If you have to walk back to the closest major city and talk about it, Yeah, it's like the Walk of Shame was it.

Was the it was the old Yeah, because you can't even run like it reduces your run speed.

So I think he realized that, yeah, just the worst spot, surrounded by harpies, Like I don't.

I think he realized he was never getting back.

My my someone else think of a story while I quickly tell this one.

It's not a moment of triumph.

It's a moment of grief, as is usually the way with my stories.

But when I was spending fucking two hours in amber Mill with all the new quests, like you said, the four or five new quests that they've put in there, getting my fucking teeth kicked in by all these mobs, I did happen to find a chess and I was like, oh, piece of candy, and chess is a great I love what they've done with chess.

It's such a dumb little thing.

But every chest basically has two greens in it, guaranteed, And fuck, it feels good that now not seventy five percent of the chest just have a piece of fruit in it.

It really means something to find a chest.

So I find a chest and I go, oh, it's this one got And it had a level one seventy five tailoring pattern and I'm a tailor.

That's fantastic.

And oh look at that plus nine like shadow spell damage John some gloves and plus seven spirit and I was like, fucking jackpot.

Here we go.

Baby, I've made it.

And it's funny because I had you guys will know with this guy out of Macro to delete soul Shards set up with my drained soul and we only went off obviously whatever was in the last bag slot of my last bag.

And I remember saying hours before this, I've got to keep an eye on that.

I'll be all over it.

I'll be the master of my inventory management so that I never delete anything.

But the soul Shards wants something fun and expensive being deleted, and lo and behold the next mob by fight.

I fucking delete the recipe and I was gutted, but then got rid of the macro because I said, never again, I'm never letting myself be digged over like that.

So now I just delete my soul shards manually.

Who's got the next one?

Getting a plus one stem neck at like level nine was pretty cool when I was doing one of the quest and Mulgre from my time priest, all of a sudden, you you do want to do a quest and you get like your first neck, even though it's only one stam But it was like, ah, sweet, yeah, I do.

I do.

Like the jewelry has been taken off its pedestal, considering it's like one of the worst slots for actual stats, like they're generally weak items.

Necks and rings, but because make sense that they were so exclusive, Like.

It's like the guy.

It's like the guy that gets laid for the first time at thirty but the sex was horrible, but he doesn't know it.

That's a great way to put the little things that Philip slots, you know, just you know you have it's just one.

Or two stammer spirit or whatever.

It feels nice to slot something in that low to kind of fill that gap.

We're still talking about Wow, it's not like freak anything.

Someone out there will get that one, all right, but always sorry you get go for it now, boys, I think we're real almost done.

You be Are you satisfied with the extent that this conversation went to.

I feel like we've we've forgotten and left stuff out, but we've got so wound up it doesn't matter.

We covered so much I wanted.

I wanted to kind of give that a shout in the like there's just a thousand tiny things like it's I've actually struggled trying to explain the game to people because like you say, oh, there's all this stuff, it's like, all right, name him and you go, fuck, I can't.

I just know that they were there, Like there were moments or interactions, quests stuff like that where you just go, oh, this is fun and this is cool.

So I guess in a way, like I've tried to say to people, if you're if you like Classic, just commit, I'll just go play this for like four hours, and if you don't like it, you don't like it, it doesn't matter to me if you start playing or not.

This is like a plea of just if you are into this version of the game, you should do yourself right by just having a look, because I haven't had I don't know a single person that I've known for years that likes Classic and has just finished the starting zone and come back and gone fucking garbage, hated everything they did.

It sucks.

I don't even know anyone that's actually quit that has started yet.

So if you if you like Anniversary, if you like TBC, if you if you've a bit lost after SOD, just give it a look and you know it doesn't hurt.

Worst case scenario, you're fucking wasted.

Three.

Yeah, there's if you should find out by then whether you like it or not.

There's no reason that the people we know wouldn't like this.

And the only sort of out that I can think of that, like I've said earlier, I'm more than happy to give to people, is if you truly like, just have that huge hang up, whether it's morally, legally, ethically, technically, whatever it might be.

In regards to private servers, I completely understand it is the back alleys of the Internet that you know, so many people don't want to venture down.

They don't feel comfortable venturing down, and I completely understand but if that's not a hang up of yours, you have, like you have no reason not to try it, like you be said, but also there is a very high probability you're going to like it, because we all do.

And look from these again, we did the same thing with SOD very early view, way too early review.

We know that things could change on a dime.

But right now we're having a lot of fun, and that's it.

That's what it's about.

Do what's fun.

Even if it exploded tomorrow, I'd just go, oh, well, that was a fun week.

Yeah.

And as we talked about this UBI, so many people don't do it because of the tenuous nature of their characters.

People.

We've met a lot of people along the way, and again like I don't want to lay in too hard, but people who refuse to play on any server, even Blizzard related.

People said this about SOD.

They go, I will not touch Season of Discovery until I am assured of the future of my character.

I need to be able to log into this character five years from now or I'm fucking out.

I get it, but I don't just in terms of I've never shared I've never shared that feeling.

I don't check in on characters years down the track.

I don't.

I don't always feel the need to progress into the next expansion.

I'm fine with just you know, as you say, if this servey, for whatever reason, this server got taken down tomorrow, we would sit here and go, fucking how good was that week?

Yeah, I mean it sounds I'm an absolute C plus crackpot.

And then there's some twisted way I'm convincing myself that this is like field testing for just my own ideas and my own rants about the game, as far as to go in and review this and go, you know what, I had that idea two years ago, and it fucking stinks clad that that's not the game.

But fuck that.

As far as I'm concerned, it is.

We play this server, we talk on this podcast about what works and doesn't it work.

You don't think that's going anywhere?

Yeah, well, I don't know.

Maybe it's copium, but at least for me, it's what I'm driven by, Like I just want, I just want the C Plus.

Now that I've I did my I did the trio to, I've killed Lichking again, now all I really want to play is Plus so a scavenge and look for anything that's related to it.

Yeah, we didn't shout out the carts enough.

Fucking all praise the cart.

It is amazing.

They go a little too quickly when you're trying to get on, but he is the greatest thing things in slicespread.

Between the towns.

Yeah, the carts are fantastic carts.

I like that.

You can you can eject ocdo whenever you want, or catch one like it's like it's speeding down the road and you grab it by the side and jump on it if you do want to lift, if you've started to run to where you were going.

Yep, that's all very cool.

If Blizzard wanted to piss everybody off, you just copy paste it and have everyone lose their fucking minds, even though the private server is obviously stealing your IP.

You's stealing id back and then everyone goes ballistic.

Yeah I'm not I'm not saying it because Tim's here.

I read it in the discord yesterday.

I would not care if they were shameless and just fucking copy pasted some of this ship going it's our.

Yeah, go for it.

Can you haven't gone both The need to carts need to be more like flight pads and then the key to flight.

Paths are so good in the game as they allow you to afk.

Stand up, like, stretch your legs, grab beard, go to the bathroom, whatever you need to do.

Cards need to be able to AFK safely as well.

Yeah, fair enough, you need.

To be able to like it's I'm all for being able to hop on a card as it's coming, but it should just kick.

You off when it gets to it.

Stopped that way when you come back AFK fifteen minutes later.

You didn't make a round trip all the way around, you got to your destination.

Anything that can from wild players not getting you know, like blocks in their legs, from not moving rentin and all that.

You know what I mean, fucking I agree, I agree.

Look at look at look at the love.

I love it.

When not wh're not Blizzard seems he where Team Giants seems satn't with you be I'm going to get Team Jones tattooed on my butt, but but I'm not going to have the the R.

You can all guess where that goes.

We love your team.

Thank you for being here and listening to all of these.

You know we've got the fucking tim Jones, emoji and everything for you guys to spam because we're fans of his work.

Here, Look, what was I gonna say?

I think he's gone AFK, but we'll see if he's back.

For whatever fucking reason, nephew Justin, who doesn't even play well, has decided he must be heard on the podcast.

Justin, are you there?

No, he's gone to do a ship.

He'll be back real soon and then we'll hear from him.

Guys any here he is.

What what did you need to do?

You have a fine game dev point that you wanted to chip in with?

Absolutely fine, gave No.

I'm just shocked of hearing you cancer your subscription.

I'll say you are now going to buy Battlefield six?

Is that?

I feel really bad.

I feel really bad that I missed the beta because it sounded like everyone had the best fucking time.

It was.

Yeah, what what did you like?

Okay?

Because I haven't had a chance to talk to you about this since it all happened, I've been busy editing rugby videos and playing this fucking project Epoch, but UB talked about a little bit in voice over the last few days.

What was your take on everyone's meltdown on the subreddit about the map size.

I think it's just a bit of an overaction.

Obviously they can't put out all the like it's like how cod put out one map for their like thirty two verse thirty two, where like these are just they're putting out the small maps obviously that they've easily built quicker and all just put it out in the beta because it's so much easier.

It's obviously playing where they've got all this new destruction elements and stuff with the bigger maps, where it's just like, obviously you just have one big map where you have three small maps.

It's like a you know, give or take.

I think that everyone's overreacting on the small maps.

They were good.

Well, I have a wild revelation that it was a it was a beta and.

Potentially eventually potentially.

Close quarter combat in those in those maps with like four x their data retrieval of interactions between players, because maybe it was a test weekend.

I don't know, Maybe I'm crazy.

That's that's an insane, insane.

Point preposterous say that we don't we don't need to bug test.

Me and the boys driving our jeep seven minutes across the map to capture eight.

Work absolutely, but I think that I think it's very positive.

Other than the map size, everyone's like enjoying the rag doll instruction.

Well, what was the other complaint.

It's not to focus on the complaints because I want to ask about the good stuff.

But the other complaint I saw was something about the mishmashing of the role of medic.

Yeah, so now you can obviously I don't know how much you know of it.

What I played Battlefield two and three and that's it.

Well, now you can change your class mid game and like change the each like what gun each role has.

Okay, so like you could be a scout with an AR or an SMG.

Yeah, you just have It's pretty good.

But that was like everyone's a little pet peeve is like, oh, you're going away from you know, you you're stuck to that role with that gun type thing where that's it's just like the I caught the die hard Battlefield fans just like stuck.

Their thing in the hand, said no, this is shiit.

Ubi.

What was good about it?

I thought it was fucking awesome, Like I can't wait to play more.

I was one of the people begging like, give me another weekend, please.

I went, I went back to playing Doda.

Worst week ever.

So I'm just not going to play Dodor until fucking Battlefield comes out and I've got something else to play them.

Well, but I thought it was really good and apparently the biggest complaint I saw was like the cod movement, and I mean, guilty is charged.

I was knee sliding assault shotgun around corner on all the battlefield came.

Out of time.

You would be that guy?

Yeah, I was.

I was one of the zoomers in disguise.

I went the guy everyone to death.

Nah, I'm not a medic enjoyer.

I'm purely assault or when no one wants to kill the tank, I get rolled up and I go slap some C four on his booty and blow him up and then go back to be assault.

But I think, Josh, you're gonna love this one.

I'll tell you if it look if it's really good, I'll watch, and then I'll buy it and have a run around with you, like you two should team up and fucking play it.

Sounds like the the reviving anyone being able to revive anyone else is a huge action boost.

But I even like like Assault does it the slowest, so they've even got like kind of balancing between because I mean it makes sense, and then support does it a bit quicker.

And then obviously medic can instant do it with their zapp, but they can also not pull out the DF if they don't want and do like the manual revive.

So yeah, it's very very good.

When when does it come out?

Well, when does it come out?

Early October?

Yeah?

Oh yes, that's some time away.

Okay, fair enough, all.

Right, guys, get back from Europe, Josh, you can.

Fair enough reading?

Yeah, yeah, all right.

Well, look we'll wrap it up there.

Everyone stay stay in the channel and and I'll keep shooting the ship with you guys.

Once stopped recording and we're offline.

But guys, looks that you've heard what you've heard.

I'm not going to add anything more to it.

You either play or you don't, but we'll talk C plus and Epoch moving forward on the podcast.

Like I said, I'm not playing MOB, I'm not playing Anniversary.

I can only talk about what I'm playing, and you know what we want to see from Blizzard.

We can guestimate as to what we want to see in Blizzard's version of Classic Plus and we can talk about what we are currently seeing on Epoch.

And you know, that's probably going to be the next year of the show quite frankly, unless something else comes along.

I don't fucking know.

But guys, get into.

It and hit anyone up in countdown.

Everyone can invite.

Yeah, like, look for the guild if you roll on menfol.

And that's the episode for it today.

Everyone, thank you so much for listening to all of that.

I do hope you enjoyed it.

As always, we're going to shout out the amazing people that help bring this show to the air.

I would not be doing the show if it wasn't for them and their generosity.

Thank you so much for the following amazing people Flosy B.

Croxford, gra Grimoire, Honey Badger, Jaron h Odd, k Plazoor, Rengo, Sylvia K, the Mighty Doloman, vac Similar, Winter's Gate and Zorn.

Thank you so much, you lovely amazing people.

I love you all, and same to all the five dollars, two dollars and one dollar patreons too.

Guys.

That's it for today.

Look, having heard what you've heard, maybe consider giving Project Epoka go roll this weekend and see if you should dabble with it and link up with us and just see if you like it.

But until then, I'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks everyone, have a good time.