Watching Blizzard Explain WoW in 2005 Is Actually Insane

All right, those of you guys who don't know, BlizzCon is this weekend, but I think it would be really fun to go back and watch something that I've never seen before. Now, I'm a big classic WoW guy. I'm a big classic games guy in general. There's some videos of the 2005 BlizzCon, which was the first BlizzCon ever out there that we got a hold of and we're like, "Hey, it would be really fun to go through and watch these videos, especially for like a version of the game that we appreciate so much and them talk about the things in WoW and classic WoW back then, talking about like the design principles of the game and what they were thinking and what they saw." And I think it just might be interesting to look through this and see what we can learn cuz there's there's a lot of different panels and a lot of different cool stuff. And what better way than to get ready for the BlizzCon 21 years later than to look at the first one and see see some things that will probably be really interesting. So you'll see guys like Mike Moheim, Jeff Kaplan. I'm sure Kevin Jordan is going to be there. All the the OGs, the guys who originally made the game are there at Blizzcon. We're going to watch this video of them talking about stuff. So let's get started. This is going to be a long one. It's gonna be juicy. It's gonna be good. >> I had no idea that one day I would be >> I think I think one of the best things about this, by the way, is going to be comparing Blizzcon that we see this weekend to this Blizzcon. I think would be really funny. >> That one day I would be standing up here welcoming almost 8,000 people. >> 8,000 people. >> Oh my gosh. >> We just wanted to make some great games. >> That's crazy to think about. 8,000 people. >> Our lives on hold. We would not be here today doing what we do without your support. >> Volume's good enough. >> And that's really what Blizzcon is all about. This is an opportunity for you to meet our developers and speak with them to learn a little bit about how they perform their craft and about how Blizzard goes about making games. Make sure you check that out. We also have two very big announcements to make. >> Two big announcements. >> The first is related to Starcraft Ghost. It's >> added playable Zerg. >> No way. Still grab Ghost, dude. The game that never was. >> And our second announcement. Well, how many of you looking at the crowd of Warcraft? >> In a very short time, we will be announcing details about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade. Oh, Burning Crusade. >> Of course, there's the costume contest. Jonathan Davis from Korn is here. >> And he will be judging the song contest tonight. >> Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. >> Why is World of Warcraft so successful? I mean, there's >> Yeah, there's many reasons as you can tell. >> Yeah, exactly, guys. There is one reason that comes to my mind. It's community. >> The fantastic community we have players like all of you. >> And you know it's it's not it's it's on a daily basis where we read your stories, watch your videos. I mean it's we can't get through a day without it. So on behalf of everyone at Blizzard and the Warcraft team, I salute you. Actually I I should say slash salute you. But we are especially excited to be here today, as Mike mentioned, to unveil for you our first World of Warcraft expansion, >> The Burning Crusade. >> You will get to play two new races, the first of which we're debuting today, the blood elves of Qualas. >> Players will get to adventure into the shattered world of Outland and explore through the dark portal. exciting new dungeons to name a few. Medivh's Tower of Kerazan, >> oh, >> broken and shattered by vile magics. Now, this is an exciting one. Caverns of Time where players >> players will get to go back into the past and actually participate in famous Warcraft moments. >> Illan, >> it's crazy. This was before live streaming, so like nobody saw this. >> Do we got any Illins out there? Actually, I don't know. Yeah, right there. Yeah. You get to go to the Black Temple, which he calls his home, and kick his ass. >> Guys like our age. Yeah. >> Players will get to purchase flying mounts. Epic flying mounts in Outland. >> Oh no. >> These mounts will allow you to explore areas of Outland that are otherwise unreachable. New profession of jewel crafting. The idea of socketed items where you can now do more customization to weapons and armor. Blood elves. What do you think? Huh? Guess that means more guys playing girls. Yeah. >> Okay. But seriously, replenish your health, restore your mana, relax. Welcome to Blizzcon. >> That was good. Actually, now we have the Blizzcon raid design panel. So, I think this is going to be really interesting. Look at like how they designed the raids in Vanilla WoW and why they did the things they did. Let's look at this. So, we'll start off with the definition of a raid >> cuz it's PowerPoint and we got to be corporate and um No, I'm just kidding. The the dictionary defines a raid as an entrance into another's territory for the purpose of seizing goods or valuables. So, we know exactly why you guys are raiding. Don't think for a second that we're ignorant to that. uh for today's discussion when we talk about rating we're talking about large groups encountering uh tough NPCs at the end game. So let's talk about endgame content and why that is important. We don't have experience loss in World of Warcraft and heat only rises. All of our player characters, anybody who buys World of Warcraft and starts playing, they're only going to level up. We also have to give players something to aspire to. There's a lot to be said for that moment when you're sitting in orar as a newbie and somebody runs through in like all raid gear and you're like, "Wow, that guy must be so powerful." It's crazy. We still to this day, 20 years later, we still talk about that sort of experience and how important it is. And these guys had it figured out and they understood what they were doing 20 years ago. Is that not crazy? >> Or eBay or something. Um, so, um, anyway, the world is a lot bigger for everyone if there's unbeaten content out there. Even if you're the guy who's like level 30 doing an Arathy Highlands quest, but you know that the resident Uber guild of your server is, you know, trying to kill Nefarian, it it creates an epic feel for the whole world. Um, how come there aren't any low-level raids? If you ever want to raid something at low level, you could just try something that's higher level, but there's no real point to us creating this raid content that's going to be trivialized by levels anyway. >> That's so interesting cuz of Season of Discovery. Season of Discovery would have made no sense if there was no phase level caps like like if they didn't do that with the phases with like the different, you know what I mean? Dude, that's why like I I don't think they should do mid-level raids necessarily in Classic Plus because it kind of just makes no sense. >> I'll never raid. Why should I care about raid content in World of Warcraft? Well, we hear this all the time and then people end up contradicting themselves. They actually end up raiding. So, a lot of people say, "I'll never that's not something that I'll ever do." And then they'll get into that like one Zool Guru braid and go, "That was so much fun. I got this awesome item. It's actually something I want to do." I told everybody yesterday about my mom. She had never played a video game before and then um she I I got her into our friends and family alpha because she loaded up and go, "Oh, the graphics are pretty." You know, is that what you do? Um but >> she actually started playing the game and she got pretty good at it and now she has two level 60s and a level 50 that she's like on the way up with that one. And she plays horde by the way. So she's >> um so >> dance game. >> My whole point is that people who said that they would never engage in this sort of thing might one day find themselves doing it. She gets invited in molten core raids all the time. So there's what I like to call the 1% myth. Why do you create content for 1% of your population? 1% is such the convenient number just pulled out of thin air. Um, our server programmers Joe Ramsey and Brian Gibson winch provided me with some statistics. They're able to log everything. So, every night at prime time in the US, there are 500 molten cores with 15,000 players. Uh, 150 Onixas with 2500 players. >> This is so interesting. >> 250 Blackwing layers, that's 6,000 players. And 700 Zulgar instances with 10,000 players. But I like to point out that most raiding guilds do Onixia once a week and they do molten core one night a week. So this is different groups that you're seeing on a lot of servers. We will see 5 to 700 people in molten core at prime time every night of the week. So there's a ton of people. Um on the weekend like right now um there's going to be 35,000 people in molten core and zulgar. So 800 of those molten cores and 700 Zulgaroos the night Zulgar went live I think >> what's the website to check like current rating stats ironforge.pro Pro. So, right now on Night Slayer, let's see. Okay, this is in all of Burning Crusade. Right now, you have 227,000 people raiding every week. Characters rating at least once from 19. This is Okay, this is a character, not people, but this is characters, but they're they're also tracking characters. Combine this 35,000 players each weekend. So 35,000 35* 7 321 in vanilla. Wow. The average amount of people rating per week or the average amount of characters rating per week is the same or very similar to the number of characters rating right now in Burning Crusade. Kind of crazy. That's just Burning Crusade. In Mists of Panderia, like classic 2019 that became Mist of Pandaria, there's 43,000 this week. In classic era, there's 17,000. I'm going to be honest. I'm surprised at both the mop number and the era number. Season of discovery there's still 6,400. That's kind of crazy actually. Oh, in US alone. Oh, in classic across all of them right now you have 4317. I mean this is a little bit higher than that. Was wo bigger in Europe in original vanilla or in the US or was it equal? I don't know. US versus EU population vanilla. Wow, they're they're very close. >> So, Anixia was the first raid encounter that we implemented. I took a picture of her on her birthday right there. That's right after she got placed. It's a placeholder model. We didn't have the final model for Anixie at the time. Um, so it's I think August 12th at 11:30. >> Oh, they just they just increased the size though. Um, so we wanted to break the standard raid mold with her. We wanted to make her a really uh compelling encounter. So, here's some of the things that we did. We concepted a three-stage encounter. Uh, stage one is the introduction. There she is sleeping and you know, you see her and your guild charges in and your main tank better turn her quick enough or you know that guy you want to kick out of the guild is in the welps and um >> that was crazy. just kick the guy out already, you know, he's just absorbing loot. Um anyway, so then, you know, we thought it was cool. You're fighting on Nixia. Oh, wow. She looks awesome. We're all in the right place. Uh we want to mix it up. Let's have another stage where everybody changes roles. So, um and also was like this challenge to us like, can we make her fly? And and we did. So, Onixia flies. Um and then stage three is the all hell breaks loose stage. Um, and that's where everybody better do the right things at the right time. So, kind of like the grand finale. When we're making a raid encounter, we sit down and constantly ask ourselves, what is each class doing right now? Um, if I'm a druid, what am I doing? Am I healing? Is there something for me to hibernate? If I'm a rogue, am I, you know, am I going to get ripped apart by the AE? If I I'm a warrior, am I single tanking this or off tanking? We have to ask ourselves, what is each class doing? We never want to approach a raid from too far back and too big picture that we forget what it's like to be an individual player at that encounter at that time. So um we also try to mix things up and I think onia is a good example of that or like the razor encounter. We don't want everything to be like this 30 minute snoozefest of okay here we go everybody start doing DPS and healing and that's all you're going to do for the next 30 minutes because there's just nothing interesting about that and we also don't want one boss to feel just like the next boss. So if you look at Molten Core you know compare Magar to Lucifer within any raid dungeon we also want the fights to feel very different. We don't want them all the same. So, we always have a duration in mind before implementing an encounter. Um, sometimes we come close to hitting these durations. Sometimes we're way off. As an example, for Valance Straws, our whole vision for that encounter is that it would be a twominute fight or actually 3 minutes is the real timer cuz then you're screwed. But, um, so pacing is important in these fights. We don't want it ever to feel like something is dragging out. And if it ever feels like that, then we've done something wrong and we need to go back and fix it somehow. Uh we want to challenge the players so they feel a sense of accomplishment. Uh this is a real tricky one. You you can turn that knob of difficulty up on the players. If you ratchet it up too high, it creates a lot of um frustration on the player base. Um we try to make it challenging but not too challenging at the same time. And then we constantly want to raise the bar on ourselves. And what I mean by this is come up with new encounters that we hadn't done before. So like in our dungeons, we come up with guys like Arcadus, which is this awesome titan who's, you know, bringing guys out of stone form all around the room. And then we get to our raid encounter. It's like we have to do something a little bit more than that. This slide I call smart. This is uh to address a lot of things that always comes up on the board. >> Dude, I just I love listening to Jeff talk. Like I I think I think Jeff Jeff is just such like a he has such a good energy about whenever he's talking about things and presenting things. It's just so interesting. I'm such a big fan of Jeff, dude. And he's he's he's like one of my favorite people to listen to talk. It's so good. >> Um how come you guys don't make a smart raid boss when a smart raid boss kill all the healers first? Okay, for one second, pretend that you play a priest. And and let's pretend Onia is so brilliant that she's figured out somehow to kill the priests first. So, your raid charges down into Anixia's lair and bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, all your priests are killed. Did that somehow make the encounter more fun for anybody at that point? Everybody always likes to play the realism card, you know. Well, I would, of course, I would kill the priests if I was, but um you know, there's not really dragons at the end of the day. And you know, they don't walk around with like helms of wrath stashed under their wings. So, you know, sometimes you got to do stuff to address game play. I like to say that killing players is easy. So I I think Jeff, if he wanted to, >> he could kill you in any way that you could possibly imagine. He could kill the druids by mind controlling the priests and having him kill the druids if he wanted to. >> And then then Scott could send you to Thousand Needles, kill you, and break all your gear. You know, we have amazing tools. It's not like we're limited by technology. We we could kill you anytime we want, like like in the beta. That's Magmadar and Stormwind and those are real players. Um >> I think dude dude these days like when you hear stories or see things like this where it's like oh yeah this is in the WoW beta. We just spawned a boss randomly in Stormwind cuz we thought it was funny. That's why when you go back like go back in time and like think about the uh when we were doing the classic beta and we were like walking around Stormwind and Omar showed up and he was like super big and he was like dancing and I was like oh the GMs are here. Like it's cool. It's like a cool experience. It's memorable for a lot of people you know. >> That's Yeah, we could put everybody. We could put Ragnaros in Razer Hill. I think that was nobody still to this day knows who put Rag Ragnaros in Razer Hill but he was there. So that's Magmodar in Stormwind. Um, so killing players is really one of the easiest things that we can do. Um, it doesn't even take a lot of thought. You know, we can be really noncreative and just oops, you know, cleave but for eight billion and everybody's dead. Um, so the point is it's not like it's us against you guys. We're not trying like Nefarian is not our baby and don't kill him. Um, we put them in the game so you'll kill them, you know, like we want you to kill our raid monsters. We put loot on them because we expect you to kill those things. So, you have to get away from this assumption that we have to have content that we just don't want the players to beat. We want you to beat our encounters, but we want the encounters to challenge you in a fun and creative way. We want you to as players to walk away and say, "We really had to work on our strategy. We didn't get it on. >> That is true. >> Yeah. We want the players to walk away and say, "Spound." >> Thank you for the three months. I know, right? >> On the first try, you know, maybe we didn't even get it on the first two weeks of trying, but we were able to, you know, unify as a raid and and beat this thing. So, uh, challenging players in a fun way is the designer challenge. That's that's what we have to come up with. So, this brings us to our next slide. These are raid creatures and who kills what the most. In one day, Valen Straws killed 24,000 people. And then you have the Blood Lord with 11,000 people and Fire Maw is at like 10,000. And I threw some other stuff in there like on on the low end of the scale. Uh is the Rashi Adder. That's like one of the snakes in Zulu. Oh my gosh. Um 4,000. The Fire Walker, which is just funny. Like I love watching people pull those, you know? Like make the paladin pull the the fire walker. I'm I'm serious too. It's like Anyway, as comparison, >> I love that. >> The gadget bruiser is weighing in there. So, maybe we should put >> Bruiser killed 19,000 people in one day >> on that guy or something. He's earning his keep goblin style. Um, also the defas pillagers. I'd like to point out that the alliance is not easy mode. Anybody who's leveled been level 14 in >> Yeah. Moonbrook, they're like you see four of them start at once and you're like, "Oh god." We had that one guy. We're trying to do Hakkar. We're testing him. >> Here we go. >> And we know the we Jeff made up the encounter and Jeff's telling us what to do and he's like, "All right, guys. just don't remove, you know, the curse, whatever you do. And this dude is just spamming, you know, and he's like, when we want the curse removed, we can't get it removed. But this one time, there's a guy just everybody stripped of it. And sometimes, uh, things occur on production realms that cannot be simulated in house. So, a lot of the testing that we do is not actually on a production realm, but on our own personal servers. >> Yeah, true. >> So, then we try to test it on the PTR, too, and I'll get to that in a little bit. So, a lot of players wanted a Blackwing layer kept off the PTR. So, players wanted the sense of competition and surprise revealed u by keeping Black off the PTR. >> That's crazy. I I didn't even know that cuz I wasn't like I wasn't like a cutting edge raider or anything whenever I played in vanilla like that. That's crazy. So, dude, they did not even publicly test Blackwing Layer because the players didn't want to. They listened to the players. They said, "No, no, we we want to." Which is cool. I mean, that's what I'm like that's what I'm saying about like Classic Blaz. I'm like, "I I think and I hope that they decide not to do a beta." I think that would be cool. That's crazy. They actually did that. >> Um, so we did that, but we felt like ultimately the zone was not tested as thoroughly as it needed to be and it suffered for that. And for that, we apologize. We make mistakes. We never claim that we're in foul. >> That's why they'll not do it again. >> So, as all of you guys know, we followed it up right away with Zulu Guru. We put it on a test server and we feel like it was a pretty solid zone when it came out. Uh, relatively few bugs there. Wow. Was in alpha/BA for over one year. Um, and our current patch turnaround cycle is somewhere from 3 to 8 weeks. And this includes development and testing. That's a really short period of time. WoW was so polished when it came out, the 1 to 59 game, because we had a long time to work on that content and make sure it's solid. Well, you take something like a zone like Blackwing Lair under tremendous demand from the player base to get it out as quickly as possible. Um, and it sort of puts an an extra burden on us to to make sure that, you know, we get extra testing or whatever. I just want to remind everybody that these patch cycles are extremely fast compared to normal development. So sometimes that that causes us to let a bug here and there slip in and we try to fix those as quickly as possible. Obviously, I'll just finish up with uh looking at the big picture a little bit. Our goal is to have enough content to keep a fulltime raid busy each night of the week >> um for a week. For the expansion, we want to deliver a menu of raid content. Um kind of the way that raid content has worked out so far in WoW has been very linear and we feel like this causes a lot of problems. And then finally, bigger is not always better. Um um what I'm talking about is raid size. Um, even hardcore raid players, and I know lots of them, and I am one myself, appreciate a smaller raid. Adding more people to a raid does not make it better somehow. All it does is make us turn to math to go, okay, we've got to ramp the DPS up, and then they've got to ramp their character, you know, power up. And it kind of does this whole inflation of the game that's not necessary. If we can keep raid sizes smaller, each individual who shows up counts for more and their decisions feel more impactful. It's much cooler if each person in the raid can feel like they're contributing to something rather than, you know, okay, Jeff is DPS, Steven is healing, you know, Alex is more DPS, God is healing. Like, we don't want it to be a numbers game. We want every individual who shows up on your raid to feel like they matter. So that's what I mean by bigger is not always better. >> I I completely disagree. I know damn well these guys I've done 40man raids. There's plenty of people in those raids that they they're they're glad to get carried. Okay. These guys do not pull their weight. They know they don't pull their weight and they are totally fine freaking collecting loot even though they're not doing a damn thing. I know. Hey, he's wrong about it. Everybody says 40 man never organized it. I mean I organized it and you're like but you're a streamer. I organized it before I was a streamer. I actually think 25 man raids are dumb. I think 20 man should have should have been the number. But uh it's funny. I talked to Jeff about So I talked to Jeff about this a few months ago. I was like, "Why'd you guys go with 25?" And like he was like, "I don't know. We just picked a number that was like less than 40 that we thought sounded cool." That was pretty much it. It literally was just that they just picked a number that was less than 40 that they thought sound There was no math, no real thought behind it. They just said 25. But it's like, yeah, in hindsight, 20 was actually probably a better choice. I think that things are different than this and I think that 40 mans have their place. Uh I think 40 mans have their place, 20 mans I I think there should be 40, 20, and 10 man raids in in Classic Plus. Wasn't it 25? Because there were 12 classes and that meant two of each. No, wait, there's not 12 classes. What? There's nine classes cuz it's eight and then plus one whenever they add Shaman Paladin. No, I think all the size of the vanilla raids make sense. Next, PWL, AQ40, MC. I think 40man makes sense for the size of all those raids. And I think that it would be nice to add more 40man as well. Uh but I think they should add more 20man. Uh and they should add more 10 man. That's what I think. >> Started uh trying to come up with classes for World of Warcraft. We looked at a lot of different sources, but primarily what we were looking at was kind of traditional role playing game classes. And then the other big thing we looked at, of course, was >> So So yeah, what they're what they're going to talk about is like the the class design. And that's that's for me, dude. Gameplay and design is the key to this thing. You bring everybody in. Like, have you guys heard the like it's like marketing terms. Have you guys heard like the steak and the sizzle? That sort of analogy thing in school. I feel like the stake is gameplay, uh, class design. And these things are almost they're they're very tangible, but they're almost treated like intangibles because you they're they're subconscious, right? Those things really keep you invested into the game. Those are the things that are like the gameplay loop really keeps you like, hey, like I like this. I don't know why I like this. Why does this feel so good to me? I don't know. But that's really what it is. It's it's class design and that class identity and all these things that I've talked a lot about and I'm I'm I'm a real stickler for it because I think that's really what makes Vanilla WoW vanilla. But I think it's a little bit less exciting than the sizzle in this case, which is, hey, new dungeon, new raids, new zones, new this, you know what I mean? Uh, but I think it's the most important. It's the most important and it's the like in development and stuff, it's probably like the the thing that takes the least amount of time, but you just kind of have to get it right. Whereas, if you want to build out like a new raid or a new zone that it takes like grinder time, you know? So, one of the uh first approaches was another uh philosophy that we use at Blizzard a lot, which is called concentrated coolness. You know, rather than just having, let's say, a class and we just kind of throw a bunch of random stuff on it. We want kind of everything about the class to feel focused and to make sense with >> By the way, those of you guys who don't know, I believe this is Rob Parardau. Rob Parardau is like there's a few guys that are like the minds like the secret weapons behind WoW and and what made WoW what it was and this is one of them. Rob Robardau was one of them. I don't think he's currently still at Blizzard. I think Alan Adam left and came back. Jeff Kaplan is not there anymore. Jeff left like 5 years ago. He started his own studio, not publisher or and they're making a game called Arcaron. That's what it is. I just looked it up. Anyway, let's continue. everything about the class to feel focused and to make sense within the context of that class. But we also wanted to make sure that there was a separation of roles between every class. Something we didn't want to do was have just a few classes and then have a bunch of hybrid classes that fit in between. Obviously, some classes ended up on the cutting room floor. And a couple of those classes we mention up here is the necromancer was a popular unit in Warcraft 3. Obviously makes sense as a class. Didn't quite make it in. Um, the death knight was another example of a very popular hero type in Warcraft 3 that didn't make it. So, the uh origination of the mage came uh obviously from kind of traditional role playing games and it also came out of a couple units that we had in Warcraft 3, the sorceress and the arc mage. So, you can see some of the abilities on the mage really kind of look a little bit like the the Warcraft 3 heroes. You know, in particular, you know, an emphasis on fire magic and frost magic. you know, we really wanted uh to really kind of keep that same vibe and and coolness with the uh from the Warcraft 3 element. One of the major >> I think I think that's one of the key things that you notice throughout all of WoW and uh Kevin Jordan. So Kevin Jordan was the original class designer for vanilla WoW and he was in charge of all the classes in vanilla. He played a paladin based but Kevin I talked to him and you can see these old videos from years ago where I'm talking to Kevin. This is This is seven years ago, dude. This is with uh with Kevin Jordan. Oh my gosh. This is like right whenever I went full-time streaming, I think. Actually, because I went full-time whenever I moved into this house, the house in this video. But yeah, I mean, just talking to Kevin, this guy is just a freaking gold mine. Just complete gold line of of information. Genius. It's so I mean, we got to we got to we got to we got to get Kevin Jordan back on stream someday. He's working on his own game right now that I think is coming out in the fall. He's working on another game right now. But um but yeah, I mean what a time. But yeah, so Kevin Jordan talking to him and I was like, "Yeah, like a lot of the abilities, a lot of the class design, all this stuff in in Warcraft, not just World of Warcraft, but in Warcraft in general, it's based in RP. A lot of it's based in roleplay. What does that mean?" It's like, well, look at whenever they had like Torin, for example. It's a race, not a class, but you you'll understand the point. Whenever they initially made torin in WoW, they were too big to be able to sit on mounts. And because they were too big to sit on mounts, they gave them planes running. So you if you ran for 3 seconds in one direction, then you would get a speed boost like you were on a mount, right? They got rid of that pretty quickly because from a gameplay standpoint, from a design standpoint, it just didn't work. But they started initial kind of discussion point of how things work while they were trying to figure this game out and build it was, hey, what makes sense in roleplay? I think it's interesting kind of seeing all this stuff and and seeing how this plays out. summon water elemental spell. And that's because um what we wanted to see out of the mage was not really a pet class. And we wanted to reserve that for for other classes. And we felt like if we did that with a mage, it would actually kind of water down how the mage would play in ambassador multiplayer game. And one of the spells that he had early in development was called chains of ice, which brings us to um our crowd control philosophy with classes. So, when Chains of Ice was on the mage, the way that it worked was that you could actually um cast it on any enemy monster and that monster would stay in place and you can cast on any number of monsters. And what we found out very early on was all you had to do was take a mage to any dungeon and you only had to fight one monster at a time because the mage could cast chains of ice on all the rest of the monsters and if you had a six pull, an eight pull, whatever it was, the mage could lock them all down except for the one. And what we really wanted to achieve was to make sure that uh all the classes that had crowd control had very limited crowd control. We wanted to try to get everyone involved in the crowd control if possible. We didn't want to have like one class that really changed the entire game. >> Okay, >> so here's a comedic interlude about the mage. Thank >> comedic interlude. Proceed. >> You Penny Arcade. I hope you guys have all gone by their booth. So, uh, >> Penny Arcade, by the way, those you guys who don't know, Penny Arcade is PAX. Yeah, Penny Arcade is PAX, like PAX East, PAX West. >> Just out of curiosity, how many >> It started as a comic and a website. >> Porn players. And how many play Alliance? >> Wait, they had more Alliance. I think from yesterday we probably should have learned our lesson and actually separated the crowd, but >> Okay, dude. Okay, dude. >> The origination of the paladin came pretty much 3, which was um a little bit unique in that um it's a very defensive class. You know, historically, if you look at traditional RPGs, you know, it's very much a hybrid warrior priest class. And while our paladin certainly had that, we really wanted him to concentrate on defense. We wanted the paladin to be one of the easier classes to play, it was actually intentional. And the main reason was we found that uh the paladin was a very attractive class for people to want to play initially cuz they felt like it was supposed to be a hybrid class and we can skip some of these. >> The negative aspect that would come with doing that which is the paladin probably out of all of our classes has the less uh the least the paladin would kind of have an easier time. Now, there is a kind of a negative aspect that would come up with doing that, which is the paladin probably out of all of our classes has the less uh the least amount of button mashing to do in combat. >> So, that's something that we're continuing to look at and continuing to try to address. We want to try to make sure that continu >> constant struggle between too complex versus not enough to do. Here's the thing. Easy to play, hard to master. All right? Like when you're when you're like a a vanilla brain, okay? You're you're like a chess grandmaster vanilla brain that you're you're sitting back, you have like a bird's eye view of every situation, dude. That's what you got to understand when you're playing the vanilla paladin. Like, oh, look at these other classes. Just that that that that just I'm spamming. I'm spamming, right? What about I'm playing a rogue two two two sinister strike. Sinister strike. Sinister strike. No, Paladins don't do that. Okay, paladins don't do that at all. Paladins, we are noble. We are stoic. We don't mash the buttons for us. It's about grace. It's about the style. It's about the timing, dude. It's about giving the old seal twist. I got my seal of command up. And then within point4 seconds, I want to swap my seal. And I'm going to seal justice. And I'm going boom. Guess what? White hit. Seal of command proc. Seal of justice 2 seconds stun. Cast command judgment double damage because you're stunned. Hodge another six seconds 8 second stun then a repentance and I dance for six seconds and then I attack again I kill the guy look that's what happens that's the style that's the that's the you know what people say all the time what is the stat priority for a for a paladin do I go strength do I go crit do I go agility what do I do attack power no none of those important stat for a paladin charisma how else are you going to convince them all to give you the loot in raid. Okay, you got to have some charisma, dude. You gota you gota you gota be you gota have some negotiation power anyway. >> So that's something that less uh the least amount of button mashing to do in combat. So that's something that we're continuing to look at and continue to try to address. We want to try to make sure the paladin continues to be fairly easy to play, but we do want to make him a little more interactive over time. The priest was a probably a little more of a unique concept in our game than you might have seen in uh other traditional role playing games. A lot of I think other RPGs have the >> there's a reason paladins have aura troop. Paladins invented aura chat >> sort of priest class and we wanted our priest to again separate itself a little bit from other RPGs and that's how also we portrayed the priest in Warcraft 3 which is much more of a caster class. A lot of people when they first started playing the priest were surprised to see that they're wearing cloth robes and such. But that also allowed us to uh make the priest a little more interesting on the damage side. You can see like if you uh spec much more as a shadow priest or even without being a shadow priest, our priest has a lot more damage potential than you might see with more the traditional cleric. And then we came up with the idea of uh racial specific spells which you know we decided to do with a priest obviously and you can see kind of each man the racial spells are such a cool RP thing but it really makes things rough and you're seeing this a lot in like in Burning Crusade you see it a lot. I do think it's cool, but like I mean you see it in vanilla where like dwarf priest is just king, but it also happens again in Burning Crusade in Anniversary. They give them like their what is it? Desperate prayer or whatever. Dwarf Priest is is also like insanely good in Burning Crusade cuz they have they have more bonus stuff. They homogenized it a little bit so it's not quite as bad. Troll Priest has a 20% mortal strike which is really good especially for like certain comps. Let's say you're like a if you're like a double healer warlock team with a troll priest then um yeah I mean you have like a mortal strike built in that's like super nice. >> Initially the shaman didn't have totems and you know he wasn't a particularly interesting class when you compared him to let's say the mage or any other cast. >> Dude shamans are and I I will say this shamans are probably one of the weirdest classes in vanilla but like when we talk about class identity and and you know making sure the classes are distinctly different from one another. Shaman hits the nail on the head. Like, man, the the class fantasy around like using your totems. And I get that they're like annoying, but they're so powerful. They're so powerful. Such a high impact. They're high impact buttons. And I know people are like, "Oh, I hate having to like set all my totems at the same time or I hate this." But I think stuff like that is just so important. I I really do. I I think having like these distinct differences in the classes and like you place your totems and it's like this is like a big time thing. I mean, dude, I was in a I was in an arena match the other night. We were looking at it and we're like, dude, this guy's healing stream totem did most of his healing healing stream totem and we ignore it. I'm like, damn, if I'm running by and I see a healing stream totem, I should just I should just judge it or something. Just something easy, you know? I'll throw something at it. Maybe maybe I just walk by and I auto it if I'm not in range of anything else, right? Because then he at least has to cast the healing stream again. Maybe he doesn't notice, right? We found very early on that it wasn't a particularly interesting class because you would just kind of wait for all your abilities to be up on their cool down and it, you know, you're kind of just punching a metronome. You know, you'd wait for the taunt ability to come up. This is going to be an interesting one that you'd wait for the strike ability come up and then press that and there really weren't a lot of choices to make since there really was no reason not to punch those abilities every time they came up. >> Oh my gosh, that's crazy. Oh my dude, I I already had like so I've never gotten a chance to talk to him or meet him or anything, right? Rob Partardo, but like I talked about this on stream not too long ago. I have so much respect for for Rob Partardeau. Like like my respect for Rob Partardeau was already here. It just shot up. So me and Draova Draova came over the other day. Actually, Draova was in town and and we were like hanging not the other It was this is like I guess maybe a couple months ago or whatever, but Draco came over and we're like hanging out and just like catching up and stuff cuz cuz I I hadn't seen him in a long time. We talked I'll say like semi- irregularly. So like we'll just we keep in touch, right? But like he's he's like adult now, you know? He has like a job and things. Uh I'm a loser. So we were talking about exactly what Rob Partardeau is talking about right here. He says you wait for the strike ability to come up and press that and there really isn't anything else. really weren't a lot of choices to make. >> And it's crazy. Draco and I were having this discussion and I talked about this on stream and people said I was dumb, but I'm like I think inherently having a button to press every x amount of seconds is just kind of boring. Like from a design perspective, it's just kind of boring. Now, what do you do about that? I don't know. But I think from a design perspective, like hey, you know, Crusader Strike, even though I love Crusader Strike, right? I love Burning Crusade, all that. Just hitting Crusader Strike every six seconds. And hey, make sure you hit Crusader Strike as often as possible is kind of boring. Just just inherently just on paper it is a boring thing to do. It's not um it's not like the rest of the Paladin class which is very like proactive and reactive where I have open globals and I'm seeing what they're doing and I'm making a play on something or hey let's be let's be aggressive. You watch me do arenas if you if you watch me do my late night arena streams or whatever and it's like I'm playing with Mosquito or Settle or whoever, right? And like sometimes I like I'll I'll bubble offensively, right? I'll bubble and I'll go I'll use my defensive cool down as an offensive cool down and I'll be like, "Hey, I'll bubble and then bop and I'm like, "Yo, kill this guy." And then we're both just sending into him. Even though he's a healer, he's like chain lightning, lightning bolt, whatever. That's what I think makes the Paladin class so cool is just having this like open playing field where you can kind of have that proactive and reactive gameplay and it's just constantly things are changing. >> So the hunter was another uh interesting class to develop. I want to point out something that's really really important. By the way, it's so funny. Watered down version of Paladin. The way he talked about Warrior is so funny because I remember in the original on the original WoW website, you would go to look at like the class descriptions and it would say what they're best at and it said a warrior best at taking damage. And we thought it was so funny because we're like, dude, warriors suck. And warriors did suck, but not really. It was just that people did not understand how to play them back then. That's part one. Part two, there was a warrior re rework in patch 1.6 that gave us basically the version of warrior that we have now in vanilla. Changed how mortal strike works, changed changed how a number of things work, right? But that's the version of warrior we have now was after the 1.6 rework. But also back then, if you play back then, I don't remember having very many DPS warriors. Most warriors were tanks. Almost all of them were tanks. If you went to a raid, very few of them would be DPSing. And if they were, they'd be like arms putting mortal strike on the boss, taking up a debuff slot, not knowing what they're doing. But now whenever people understand all the math and all the different parts to playing a warrior and they they know all the minmaxs, they know the itemization, they understand how hard they scale with with stats, warriors became kind of like I would say I was going to say the god class in vanilla. I would say they're one of two god classes. We used to take eight warrior tanks to every molen core and never had a DPS warrior. Yeah, I think the other god class is mage >> really. You know, if you look at other games that have done rogues, a lot of times they're very similar to kind of what I was talking about. My pet peeve with the warrior was you ended up with a uh very monotonous sort of class that you just waited for cool downs and used that. >> That's so interesting. That's so interesting. I that like blow that that's so mind-blowing to me that that Rob Partardo brought that up because like that sort of press the same button every x amount of seven. It is kind of boring, right? It is kind of boring, but that's also what WOW is. And I guess they just never figured out like a a I mean really for almost every class it's like you have rotations, you know? It's so interesting. One approach we tried was the idea of every single Warlock pet would be this extremely powerful sort of pet and you would just bring them out for that fight and then the next fight you need a different pet. So you might in this fight you >> that see like stuff like that that he just mentioned that that's like a cool idea in theory but it it sounds like it's super tedious. >> It's the succubus because the succubus was really high damage or had crowd control and the fight would end and now the succubus might be on a 15-minute cool down. So the next fight you'd be kind of forced to use, let's say, the infernal and then he' now be on a cool town. So you >> I think I think the way they developed that to where it's like having cool downs on pets and it stuff like that, I think I think it would just be too much. >> So the druid came from Warcraft 3 again and it was we kind of made our druid as a combination of all the >> the big recurring theme of this whole thing, you see how different each one of these classes are and and I think this is a very very important thing to to to think about in class design. If you're looking at the class design of like a classic plus, you have to maintain this class identity. Every single one of these classes are so different. Not only in like just what they look like and and just the the aesthetic and the way the abilities are. It's it's not just like all that. They're completely different. Not every class has pets. Not every class has an interrupt. Not every class has uh crowd control, right? Or at least like a hard CC, soft CC. Uh you know what I mean? It's It's so good because every class feels special in what they can do. They should be different. When I think about this stuff, I think of a way to be like, man, I I do think they should give Paladins Crusader Strike, right? Especially, it's again, I I can't It blows my mind that Rob Partardo said that because Draov and I were talking about it and we both agreed. We're like, "Yeah, it's kind of it is kind of like lazy dumb to just like hit a button every x amount of seconds." But yeah, to hear Rob Partardo say it too just like kind it kind of blows my mind because that's kind of what WoW is. And I do think they should give Paladins Crusader Strike. We'll we'll get to this. I actually do have my SFAN version of Paladin Classic Plus Talents Paladin rework. Some of we're going to work on stream together, but I actually have that finally like the visualization stuff done cuz I've had it for a long time. But as far as like the cool like the visualization of it for stream for a YouTube video, I finally have that done. So, uh we're finally going to do that. have that to you before Blizzcon just so like people can see like oh this is kind of what I think they should do. >> We really struggled for a long time about whether or not you know how true we wanted to stay to that lore and like our creative director at first really was was uh insistent that only night elf males could be druids because that's the way we portrayed the night elves in Warcraft 3. That's so interesting because what I said earlier was uh well like whenever I was talking about like talking to Kevin Jordan and how like everything was really based in roleplay first. That's like a that's so good. >> The fighters you know they're the ones that you know kind of wore the pants in the night elf family. You know the you know the male stayed at home and wore the robes and you know talk druid of magic. So we wanted our druid rather than just kind of be a staff wielding robe wearing tree hugger, we wanted him to be a shape shifter, you know, kind of that concept of, you know, take that druidic. >> So that that like the tree hugger is kind of like how uh the tree hugger was like the dark age of Camelot Drew was like that. Look at how different this looks. Character skills, reputation, right? You already have this, but look at how different this looks. So also this style of putting in attribute points, this it was like this in Dark Age of Camelot, too. like a lot of old MMOs like you had like a certain amount of attribute points that you could just spend. >> Moving on to another system that was definitely more developed and as you can see >> and then this it's funny I'm I'm keep talking about Dark Age of Camelot today. So, the Dark Age of Camelot, the window for like your skills and stuff looked a lot like this originally if you if you were a Deox player. But I also know like having talked to some of the old devs like like Kevin Jordan, Mark Kern, who you know, everybody we talk to, they drew a lot of influence from from different games, namely EverQuest, right, from a PvE perspective. Dark Age of Camelot was the game that convinced them. It was the game that convinced them to put PvP in the game because originally they weren't even going to put PvP in the game. says this is Tom Chilton. So Tom Chilton is another one of those guys that's like uh I I actually should have mentioned him earlier uh when I was talking about like Bordeaux and Alan Adam and these guys who like these guys who like are the the there's there's a number of them, right? But he's on the list of guys that were like on the heart and soul of the original design of World of Warcraft. Look at the first version of the talent trees. Tier one talents. What is this for? An orc mage? This is for an orc mage. >> How does it all work out? So, we started with this UI mockup here, which >> what does this look like? Oh, yeah. Somebody already said, "Dude, this looks like the Mist of Pandaria talents. It looks just It looks like It looks like a elementary version of the the Mist talents. Isn't that funny?" >> Sort of has a a motif of actually going left to right where you would have tier one talents, for example, and you would purchase talents in tier one. And once you got all the talents in that tier, it would automatically open up the the Uber talent at the at the end of that tier. >> The Uber talent, >> we didn't feel like the actual UI implementation was as clear as we wanted. >> That's why I said fire, frost. It's an orc mage. Yeah, it's it's an orc mage. >> Fire frost and arcane. So, here was another method that we talked about going with. You'd be able to select pretty much >> Yeah, you it's linear. It's too firepower. increased fire damage, 2% elf >> any talent there, assuming you had the the points required to spend it in and you'd be able to spend multiple points in the talent kind of like you can today. >> Exceptional talent. >> The problem with this one, it it didn't feel very visual. It didn't feel like it it jumped out at you as to what it meant like and how it related to the exceptional talents that were down below. Um, the ones that you see at the very bottom section, exceptional talents, would kind of be the the onepoint talents that you automatically get if you spent enough points in the tree. In trying to go with something a little bit more visual, we went on to the next evolution. You have a, you know, set of talents that have, you know, prerequisites. There's a there's a definite path that you can kind of see how you might work your way down the tree. Talents potentially would have multiple prerequisites. We thought this would actually be a pretty interesting way to go. This was really kind of the screenshot where we decided, you know what, I think we're we're on the right path. And I think we can, you know, go ahead and take this and refine it a little bit more and turn it into something that's actually really usable in the end. We started to realize as we did a little bit more design work in that previous one that we were going a little too far with the prerequisites. Not only should the prerequisites not necessarily completely constrain the >> Dude, this is so interesting. Looking at the talent tree design and like how it developed is so interesting to me cuz yeah like everything is basically too it's too streamlined. Too streamlined. No, not good. It's too streamlined. You're not giving enough agency to the players. You're not giving enough uh you're not you're thinking for the players too much and there's no creativity in getting to like build your class. >> I think we can, you know, go ahead and take this and refine it a little bit more and turn it into something that's actually really usable in the end. We started to realize as we did a little bit more design work in that previous one that >> we were going a little too far with the prerequisites. Not only should the prerequisites not necessarily completely constrain the player in terms of what choices they're able to make, but we also wanted to make sure that there were a lot of different paths to get down the tree. If you have too many prerequisites, it really cramps your ability to get down the tree in different ways. What some of the things that make our class balance a considerable challenge are that we have a lot of different types of gameplay. In addition, we have issues where sometimes our approach to a character class doesn't necessarily match the vision of what was intend for that character class. >> We've certainly seen this to some degree in the paladin case. We always kind of imagine the paladin class as being the holy warrior where you would get in there with the warriors and you had your plate armor on so you could take the damage and you would be beating on the mob. And yes, you would be a healer in a backup situation, but that's not really how it's kind of played out over time because healing is such a strong mechanic. So, we're always facing >> I think what happened back in the day is every raid needed x amount of healers. So, all the hybrid classes ending ended up getting relegated to healing because you had a 40-man raid. And if you're just looking at like a kind of natural split, like you would get like probably like like 12 healers back then. I'm talking back then, like you you minimum probably had 12 healers. So if you wanted a little bit of every class and getting everything in, then you have a priest, you have a druid, and you have shaman or paladin. So four of each, four to five of each one. Then there's not a lot of room for non-healers. And that's that was kind of like the emergent sort of gameplay. So they reworked, a lot of people don't know this, they reworked a lot of the gear and a lot of the I guess design of the Paladin class to lean into certain things more so like the holy tree if you went deep holy had a lot of damage talents before and all the bonus healing stuff was at the top of the tree before the 1.9 rework. The judgment gear and the the lawbringer gear were way different whenever the game launched. Especially judgment. If you got judgment gear in molten core because judgment used to drop in molten core before they uh a little bit before they added black wing layer they they took it out and they put it back in in Blackwing layer and they reitized it. There was like a set bonus that it was like if you crit you have a chance to proc an additional like 300 holy damage hit or something. It was great. So it was super super cool like how they did that like the the judgment set with a rep paladin set but they're like man a lot of these guys are playing holy. So then they reworked the judgment set into a holy paladin set, but then eventually reworked it into a spell power set. Like version two, I don't remember if it was version two or three. I can't remember if there was three or four versions, but the version of the judgment paladin set before the most recent one was god tier. I remember using that cuz we had progressive itemization before they changed it on private servers. They would have progressive itemization on classic. We didn't get progressive itemization. We kind of got cucked unfortunately. But man, I'm telling you, right around that ZG patch time, you had a paladin in full judgment gear. These guys are freaking battle healers. It's insane, dude. Insane. It was so fun. Me, Spoogie, Draco going out there like threeman paladins like doing crazy stuff like fighting people off in Black Rock Mountain. Those are the days, dude. Those are the days. This is in 20 This is Blizzcon 2005. The next panel, battleground philosophy. Oh, originally Ultra Valley was going to be persistent. I didn't know that. persistent zone. What we felt like this was going to get us is it was going to get us the feel that it was feeling that it was very meaningful kind of battleground since there was only one of them. I don't know if a lot of you can see it, but it says LFG Cororac, please don't tell. That was definitely one of an example of one of our quests that didn't line up with the overall quest objectives. We had Cororak. We had an objective out there to kill a troll boss that had nothing to do with winning or losing the battleground and rewarded you with some really pretty good loot if you completed the quest. So, a lot of players out there that went to Alterak Valley weren't even necessarily interested in winning or losing. All they really cared about was I just want to kill Borak and get my ice bar spear or whatever and get out of here. So another lesson that we learned was we don't want to make players compete for loot in a battleground. So what this had the side effect of doing is it caused players to compete over loot. >> Yeah, it's like people are like not helping do the objective. >> Have you know rogues going around stealth doing nothing but looting and that really >> oh my gosh does not match up with wanting to have team based behavior. Another lesson that we learned was that the capture and respawn points shouldn't be in physically the same location. There should at least be some amount of meaningful separation geographically between them. Epic big fights good, but a giant cluster at the graveyard bad. So that brings us to the next point, which is that players want a feeling of obtainable resolution. They don't want to get in there, fight for a long time, and then have to leave. Some of you have probably heard that we were working on a battleground named Jar Crater. Um, some number of months ago, we were actually working on it in Tainara Crater, >> and as a result, it shared a lot of the basic design philosophies and tenants that we used for Altra Valley. Even the way the very map was built wasn't going to lend itself well to a very different style of gameplay. A lot of us want a battleground that has that very obtainable resolution that you can >> This is 2005 a short amount of time. >> So with Gurubashi Catacombs, it was going to take place in Strangle Thorn Veil at >> Now this dub I think is interesting. >> The Gurubashi arena, which most of you guys know there's a little goblin quest out there, free-for-all PVP. This was going to be the area beneath that where they held the tigers that they would release those out. Um, and we wanted to really go for that whole Stranglethorn vibe. We felt like there's a good Horde Alliance um, mix in Stranglethorn and some good tensions already there. As we were play testing, we're like, "Capture the Flag is awesome. Let's try Deathmatch out." Our whole thought process going into it was that this was going to be a five on five single elimination deathmatch map. There's a >> Oh my gosh. Like when we do allstar 5v5 in Guru Bashi Arena, they wanted it to be allstar 5v5. lot of us at Blizzard who like games like Counter Strike and Quake and HalfLife and Unreal and all these first-person shooters where you know >> Oh, wait. Maybe it's No, no, it's No, it's an arena. He's No, my bad. It's not Allstar. It's just an arena. It's a five arena >> specifically for that for World of Warcraft. We started very early prototyping on this one. The screenshot, I think it's the only one that exists of um the Gurubashi play test and we spent a whole afternoon playing on the map. You can see the textures are very rough. They're not really applied right. um is the first treatment to this map. We learned a lot from the Gurubashi play test. Uh World of Warcraft is not a first person shooter. >> Well, lots of first-person shooters, you know, everybody is exactly equal and it just depends. Did you pick up the rocket gun or the grenade launcher? Or maybe it is a class-based first-person shooter. And you know, Tom just killed me with his anti-tank guy, so I can come back instantly as infantry or next time as a sniper. Well, WoW is not like that. You have your character, like it or not, for a long period of time. There's also no rail gun, one-shot sniper kills. There's no head shot in World of Warcraft. These are all things that really drive gameplay dynamics in first person shooter deathmatch maps. So, deathmatch doesn't really work out in WoW PvP. It's not fun being the healer in single elimination deathmatch. You guys all know what to do if if a group is coming at you and you've got that big torn warrior but that undead priest casting bubble in the back. Bam. That guy's got to die. you know, he's just and he's wearing a dress and he dies easily. >> The torin takes forever to kill. You know, >> we had all these guys who like play like, "Yeah, it's awesome. We can't wait to put it in the game." But um you know, we have to go. >> But it's also funny cuz it's like you're saying healing is not fun. This is in the context of vanilla WoW and also people not knowing how to peel properly and how to like protect their healers. So, this is pretty funny. like people like didn't understand like how to CC people cuz especially in vanilla and a 5v5 like CC would have been so broken before like the normalization they added in Burning Crusade. There's a lot of coolness in that Gurubashi um catacombs, you know, that that five on five. There's something to be said for that. So, we didn't just dismiss it and say, "No, that was a bad idea." We just felt like that wasn't a good battleground. But the idea of a group duel, that's something that we'd like to explore further down the road. So, >> a group a group duel, >> they want to explore a group duel further down the road. Interesting. That eventually is what became arenas. >> This is the first prototype that we actually played it at this point. Um, so very early on we just like to get something in the game. >> Wow, look at this. Look at this. This is the this is the initial like world building like they're building the map and like wow editor whatever I guess for for Arathy Basin. >> Play it. We can very quickly. Okay, let's try it 20 on 20. Um, and when we do something like this, it allows us to test out, you know, how quickly can I get from the stables to the town hall? It was a town hall at the time. Um, how quickly can I get there on an epic mount on a regular horse or just on foot? Because if at this stage we want to move something or totally remove like the lumber mill, it's very easy. And we didn't just set an artist back, you know, six week in his time. >> It's like watching Mon visible from any spot. We thought that would make it accessible in the battleground, too. Like from right here, I can see the mine. I can see the center of the map. I can actually see beyond the map a little bit. I can see the blacksmith and the lumber mill. Um, in our battleground, we have an expanded area of interest where you can see all of the characters all over the map. We we kind of got away from the the lore based names like Stone Hearth and Ice Blood and all of those names um where you might not necessarily know where that was. There's only one mill in Arai Basin. So if somebody says mill, you can visually recognize it and you know exactly where they're going to go. We also came up with the thought that we didn't want to just reward the winners and we we did this through our resource system. Even if you lose, you walk away with something from the battleground. So, Arai Basin was the first battleground to do that. And then later, more recently, we've implemented our token quest system. So, people in Warsaw Gulch and Altarak Valley are also rewarded a little bit even if they lose. Of course, the winners are always rewarded more. >> Interesting. That was interesting. That was interesting. So, yeah. And that that kind of covers like the raid design and the character class design of Blizzcon 2005. So, I think it's like I said, I I think this has been super interesting to look at and and seeing the way that they approached the design of the game originally and kind of maintaining a lot of those same sort of like vanilla design principles for a classic plus. I think that's super important. So, I think there's stuff to learn from here and I think it's just interesting hearing some of the old old guard like the Tom Chiltons and the Rob Parardos and the the Jeff Kaplan, right? hearing some of these guys Chris Metson talk about the game design as it was back then and you know learning from it and seeing uh seeing what you can kind of take from that as far as kind of maintaining things like class identity and tank identity right healer identity you know having these different roles and I think that was really really interesting whenever we talked about the class design hearing about the raid design how they approach stuff that was kind of fun just like in general but even like the lore and stuff like that Chris Mson left Blizzard for a for a long time I think for a good amount of time but but now Chris Mson is back So, it's just fun hearing. You hear all these stories about Chris Metson just being like this mad scientist of lore and he's just spouting off, but like when you actually see it in 2005, like kind of the first BlizzCon ever, it's it's pretty cool. So, anyways, thank you guys for watching the YouTube video. Thank you guys so much. Uh, make sure to follow me everywhere. I'm going to be live all of Blizzcon. I'll be on the floor IRL streams, you know, react at a desktop. I mean, I'm I'm in the trenches. I'm there. I mean, you want the top tier, the best BlizzCon coverage, the best the best BlizzCon coverage as good as it can get. You're going to have drops on Twitch. You're going to have drops on YouTube. I'll also be live on kick. I'll be live on Rumble. I'll be live on Twitter. So, everything is SPF TV will be live everywhere. It's going to be absolutely incredible. I hope you guys enjoyed watching the YouTube video and I'll see you guys at Blizzcon. Actually, starting at Friday, Friday, I'll be live. Uh, I have a big party that I'm hosting on Friday night, Saturday, all day, Sunday, all day. So, sub to the YouTube. Everything is Asan TV.