Yeah, no worries. I'll edit that part out later.
You'll never know, but you at least get to say that you did
say it, even if it never made it to anybody's ears for the Karen
tour for Pandaria. For calendar to.
The burning region for Gilneus or have not died for the Lich
King. For the.
Sindori for the Alliance for the Horn for Azeroth.
Hello and welcome to another episode of For Azeroth.
I am one of your hosts Manny AKA the true villain Manny and I am
joined by Lex. Lex, how has the World of
Warcraft been treating you? It's been treating me good,
Manny. I am reminded of why I don't
usually sweat in World of Warcraft because I burn out real
freaking fast. So I am backing off a little
bit. I spent most of this week
reading Play Nice, which is very fun.
I have many thoughts. If anyone wants to hear my
thoughts on Twitter, I probably won't tweet them, but you can
ask me for them and I'll tell you them.
And I also played a little bit of the anniversary, which is
very fun and we'll talk about later, But I was having a good
little time. Oh.
Man, OK, I think I've hit a bit of burnout too.
Now that now that you're, you're saying it like the last couple
of, well, you know what, like part of it's just been because
I've been busier in other things.
So I just haven't had the time to play as much as I would have
liked. And then because my time is
being squished and that makes it harder to fit in everything that
I would want to fit in. It's made it less enjoyable to
like go at my own pace because now I have this checklist of
things that I, that I'm falling behind on and so forth.
So like I man, it's weird. OK, so I was doing really well
getting contracts every week, pushing my renown and I fell off
the last couple of weeks. I didn't get a contract.
I think the last last week, the week before I didn't do half the
world quest that I would normally do.
This week I didn't pick up a contract at all.
And we're now halfway through the week, so I've probably lost
it. So lost like a bunch of world
quests as well. So I've fallen behind where I
would have been if I had kept things up.
That said, I am 23 with most renowns.
The track ends at 25 and the one that's lagging behind is only at
20. I say that in that way because I
don't want to say like, oh I've fallen behind and stuff because
I have friends that are nowhere near that.
I have friends that are like who have completed the track, but
for me, I wanted to get those flying mounts and I'm a mountain
collector, so 23 was the big hit and I I got that this week.
I can pretty much relax except we've got this new patch that
hit and new activities to do. I haven't done any of the other
farming. Like my usual pattern is that I
will go pretty hardcore. I, I will go into my version of
being a sweat for the first little bit to like get all the
power that I can to get to the, the level that that I need to.
And then it sort of shifts into a maintenance mode.
And while I'm in that kind of maintenance mode, I will be
doing all of this sort of side stuff.
So it's not that I play less, it's just that like my focus
sort of shifts and it's like I don't need to do like a bunch of
keys and all the delves and plug into a bunch of raids to finish
anything that I that I've missed.
So I will go and I will hunt down mounts from like past EX
dimensions and and so forth. The cadence pretty much since
Dragonflight hasn't has been fast enough that I have had less
time to get into that mode. And maybe that's part of why I'm
the sort of like, oh, I haven't had the breather.
Yeah, that is true. That especially after everything
that happened with Shadow Lands, they started working really hard
to make sure that they were constantly pushing content,
right, Even if it was a story. I will say right now feels very
busy to me too. The fact that we're, you know,
still only in Season 1 of a new expansion and all of a sudden we
actually have double, you know, double raids and all of these
other activities, which luckily are giving some things like
delve keys. I didn't I realized that it was
it was going to overlap in that way and like some gear and
stuff. So it's the same things as as
the the chest that you would have gotten had you been doing
more stuff in Dornagall proper. But it it does feel like there's
a lot right? Like I'm still kind of at the
point where I'm, I've gotten my feet more or less under me with
the new, the, the new content, but I was just kind of getting
into the swing of it and now it's like, and here's even more
content to do. Well, let's dive into it because
it's Wednesday. Yesterday we got a new patch and
with that new patch we got the big anniversary patch.
So this is 11.0 point five that is hit.
And with that, we've got the anniversary event grounds right
in front of the Cavern of Time. It all of the stuff that we were
talking about last week. We've had a day, an evening
because it came up late in NA to get our first taste of it.
And So what have you experienced so far?
So I did a lot of running around the fairgrounds itself, right?
I did all the entry level quests, the talking to everyone,
you know, going and figuring out where everything is.
I hung out a little bit with, I did fashion Frenzy and I got two
votes for my outfit, which was nowhere near winning, but I
felt, and I ran around with a little Otter for a while, which
is very fun if you're a Demon Hunter because you get wings.
If you drop like you can, you can glide and you get little,
stupid little demon wings. It's amazing.
And then I hung out with the bounce and I remember that I'm
not a mount collector because I couldn't show any of the ones
that they were everyone else was showing.
But it was cute. It was fun because everyone was
like putting on their mounts at the same time and it felt like a
big fun group activity. I did, I will say I did the
Anchorage event, which I was saying I was very excited for
because Anchorage was something that I missed in Classic,
obviously, and I'm sure this is known to everyone else.
I don't really PTRI don't really do a lot of testing.
So I don't know if this was available on the PTR, but I went
in expecting that it was going to be like a cool, you know,
this the nostalgia trip from classic.
And it was a a little bit of a, shall we say, nostalgia trip
from a couple months ago because it was virtually identical to
the pre patch event I thought, which I am feeling a little bit
salty about. I am like, that was one of the
more boring free patches we've had and we decided to copy and
paste it into a scenario. But not everything is for
everyone and not everything is for me.
And so it's OK. How are you feeling about it,
Manny? I mean, like I will say that
like there's got to be some restraint on how often and how
quickly you go back to a well. Yeah.
Like I I think you're you were discounting your criticism too
quickly there. It it is very odd for them to do
an event that is structured so similar to the pre patch event
and use the same graphical cues. To me, it would have been so
much better for them to pull a graphical cue from somewhere
else just to at least not immediately remind people of
that, of like that same sort of event.
So I can understand the disappointment with that.
I think there's a lot of people who are somewhat disappointed,
but for me I think that it's way too early to have drawn the
conclusions yet. Because we haven't done the time
walking, I haven't had a chance to jump into the raid, which
some people like. The majority of of the buzz that
I've heard from social media is that it's overtuned, that it is
difficult, that you will get roughly 3 bosses in and then it
will suddenly jump up in difficulty and be a much harder
experience. So my team wasn't rushing in
there. We did our RE clear yesterday,
getting 7 out of eight. So we'll go deal with Anzerek
later. We're going to do a third grade
day to give this a try, and I'm glad that it's there, but it
also feels like a lot of teams are still quite entrenched in
their progress, and if it wasn't for this being tied to the
anniversary, this could have come out later.
Yeah, well, and I think I've complained about this on this
podcast before. 10 to 15 people is an awkward number, right?
Because it's if you aren't at a full 20 on your raid team, it's
hard to split. Like one thing that we're
talking about on my team is that we tend to hit around I think
like 16-17 people, which means what we're probably going to
have to do is we're probably going to have to divide and pug,
which is fine, but isn't really ideal, right?
Like either we're going to sit people or we're going to have to
pug people, which usually like we are pretty aggressively anti
pugging people because, you know, we are really like the the
point of raid night for us is that it's the time that you're
hanging out with your buddies and the people that you know and
that have, you know, gone through the whole testing
process that the officers have to make sure everything is happy
and joyful. Would you know, it's not to say
anything bad about pugs. I've been a pug, but that's
something. Known it's just a random element
that you don't want to introduce into it.
Right, especially since we're hoping to do this as like a true
progression, right? Like we have heard it's harder
than expected. So we already had a bonus raid
night that we were going to be jumping into.
Usually we do like re clear or clean up things that we've done
previously, but it's not a required raid night.
And so we're going to turn that into our Black Rock deaths
night, which is very exciting and very fun, but it is going to
get a little bit awkward. And also, you know, if teams
kind of developed different straps or different ways of
going through fights, it'll be hard if we have to shuffle that
around. So I, I never loved the decision
to make it such a small window of, of numbers of players.
And as I'm thinking about this as a, as a raid officer, I'm
liking it less and less. I'm sure that there were reasons
they had to do that, but like, I think it, it's a little
uncomfortable. That's just my take though.
The reason that it's 10 to 15 is I don't believe it's a
programming thing. I literally think it's a space
thing though. Like BlackRock depths isn't
built for a large large team. Like I believe it was originally
A10 or A-15 man raid. Oh, fascinating, that makes
sense. So they may have been like, OK,
we're going to adjust scaling and allow you to go win it in
with as little as 10 people. But pushing it above 15, there's
not space for people to be actually be in some of these
environments. Yeah, that is fair.
And so I think I believe that's the case.
I would love to hear from the fast listeners.
Let me know if I'm smoking something.
That was way back in vanilla, 20 years ago now.
I was incredibly new to rating. My first rating experience was
out of combat rezing. So I would stand making sure I
didn't get into combat and when somebody would die it would like
send them a rez with my shaman. That was my entire contribution
to the raid. Rating was a different beast
back then. Lex.
Oh. God I love that's so much.
I'm glad you got that experience.
It's like when you have an intern that's so cute.
That's that's pretty it like it was it was something else.
Anyway, I like I like that they're they brought this back.
I think that they could have actually staggered the raid
release a little bit later, just because when we're dealing with
all these things to do, staggering things out helps.
Like we aren't doing time walking right now.
We haven't had a chance to do any of the time walking dungeons
that are supposedly coming later.
This week's This Week is What's the weekly quest this week?
There definitely is one for Black Rock depth.
Oh, I think it's just killing the world bosses.
Right, OK, so sorry. So there the there isn't a time
walking week quest and that's coming later.
You could have had the raid, even though they have the BRD
this week, they they could have put it off to something else and
just given us the go do world events.
The fair will count towards the world events and that would
encourage people to do the do the fair next week where they
introduce something else. We're going to have dark Moon
fair coming because we're literally going into November,
right? And then space out because it's
going to be here 3, three months through till like well, more two
months in a bit because it's 10 weeks.
So it's going to be going through till January.
There's lots, lots of time. I'm surprised at the rate is so
difficult because it's going through all of these holiday
times, but considering also that we're going to have three months
to Prague or other 10 weeks to Prague through this.
I guess it does. It's nice that it has a bit of
difficulty to it and that you can you can give that stuff for
people who genuinely are done with the challenge.
So I just I see it as an extra, but it also feels like there's a
lot of there's a lot of, oh, the new stuff and I want to do it
and but I haven't finished with the old stuff.
This is a situation that we haven't had since like what?
I guess recently it was Legion, definitely Warlords going from
the first raid into BlackRock. Foundry seemed really quick to
go between that and I guess Mr. Pandaria when they were doing
the three raids in the first tier that kept on like
releasing. You're like, Oh my goodness, I
don't think I had enough time to get through to get to the next
one. So like we've been in this
situation before. I think it's the lesser of
evils. I'd rather be like all this,
there's all this stuff to do, but how do I deal with the
burnout? Let's how are you dealing with
the burnout? Like you're just stepping away
and be like, I'm going to, I'm going to read a book, guys.
I need to look at something other than the screen.
Yeah, I'm being very conscious of the fact that this is a video
game that I play for fun. And I've, I've done this in the
past with different activities. I, I think I even sat on this
podcast. I did this with time walking or
time running. Excuse me, where if I am playing
World of Warcraft and I realize that I am just not having fun, I
log off. There is obviously there are
exceptions. One of the reasons that I'm
feeling kind of burnt out is that I, I hit a couple of
dungeon walls. There was one Arakara dungeon.
I sending so much love and affection to the people who did
that Arakara with me because it was vicious.
Like I think it took almost an hour and a half for us to get
through and it was all my fault. It was like entirely just that I
was positioning wrong. Anyway, I won't get into it, but
like, obviously I'm not going to be like I'm not having fun.
Bye besties log off when I'm doing something with people.
But more so I realized after that like, oh God, like I'm not
looking at mythic plus in this moment as like this joyful thing
that I am super excited to do anymore.
It's become, Oh, it's a day that I have a couple hours in the
evening. That means it's time to get on
and do M plus because I need to work on my M plus because I need
to grind up and I need to be a better tank.
I need to I need to learn all the dungeons and I don't do M
plus. I'm not going to be able to keep
moving. I'm not going to be able to keep
grinding. And when I noticed that I'm
getting into that mindset, I stop.
I take a night off, I read a book, I watch TVI go for a walk.
Not anymore because it gets dark at like 4:00 now.
Not that's not true 6, but still it's very early.
I I prioritize the other things in my life that bring me joy.
And I remember that this is a fun little game that I play
because it is fun and it makes me happy and it lets me relax
and it lets me, you know, get excited about things and learn
things. And when it ceases to be that,
it is ceasing to do its job and I need to put it aside.
OK, OK. For me, I look for story because
I really when I am most having fun is like when there are new
moments and stuff and we've had the disc weeklies that happen
every couple of weeks where it's like a new little bit of lore
that we get. But it it doesn't, it's not
quite satisfying because it's such a small amount.
Like it's like there are some revelations and I, I do love
talking about about those, but I'm really looking forward to
the next patch, next major patch because I want the next part of
this story. We started so strong with the
questing, the story and all of that.
I was hoping that maybe there was some time gated story or
story that was behind renown and such.
Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case, but that just means
that it more than I'm looking forward to and I will say that
there are some stuff with this patch that are encrypted there's
the dalarans survivors that are going around the city that are
more prominent now that we're in 11 point O .5.
There is one particular survivor that has a quest marker on them
that is silver and I don't know what will open that up, but that
was encrypted on the PTR so nobody could tell.
I'm looking forward to seeing that.
And of course they are already feeding the next story, so there
is a lot to talk about with that that makes me excited for where
this is going for it. But 11 point O .5 came with
unfortunately a lot of rough edges.
Now the patch issues are pretty varied and pretty and pretty
wild. I want to say before we get too
deep into this, I expect that that many of these issues are
going to be dealt with fast. A big issue is that many of the
hot fixes that we have seen all the way through the initial part
of this expansion did not get merged with the PTR patch.
And so when the PTR patch came on to life, it actually wiped
out a lot of that progression that we've seen.
And so a lot of teams have seen like a bit of regression or a
lot of classes have seen a lot of the like the benefits that
they had been getting over the this first part kind of just
torn back from them. So shadow priests are really
hurting right now. And they were also some quality
of life changes that they were making that caused some
unintended buffs and nerves. And a lot of people were
wondering, well, why in the world is arcane getting such a
huge buff? And it was like double digits,
like 11 or something, 11 or 12% DPS buff and arcane was doing
fine. Why in the world are they
getting that? Why in the world are DKS, blood
DKS getting such a hit when they are not?
Like the tank and lizard did a quick hot fix that came out just
prior to the patch going live to make some of these adjustments
because they realized that the quality of life changes had also
done that. But then on top of that, there
are unfortunately a number of bugs that are a lot more severe.
And so I'm going to talk to you about these ones.
They made some major retuning for shaman.
If you want to know more about that.
I got to sit down with two of the theory crafters, Hawk, who
covers elemental as one of the theory crafters with the with
the earthshine and of course, word up who does enhancement.
We got to sit down and we talked about that and there were a
number of alarm bells that they were raising.
One of them definitely got fixed ahead of time and Blizzard put
that into the patch notes and it's like, OK, great, here's a
temporary fix so that this doesn't run out of control and
this is what we're going to be doing later to bring it in line.
And then another one, it seems that they had done the work and
and adjusted it, but we never saw that work being put into the
script. Unfortunately, there is
currently an issue with elemental shaman.
They increase the relative ability of mastery and they
change the way ascendance works. And basically what ascendance
now does is that it double dips your mastery.
So elemental mastery is that every time you shoot a
particular spell, you have a chance of getting a second less
effective version of that spell just automatically shot off.
Ascendance means that every time you proc that second copy of the
spell, you actually get 2 copies of that spell.
This has apparently not being tested and there is a lot of
people who are saying that like the the patch seems to be
lacking some thorough testing that we've come to expect from
Bridson. Because now while some classes
are doing a million and odd going up into like some low
digit millions, which is still like Oh my goodness, millions of
damage. There have been reports of
elemental shamans doing 1020 times the damage of other
classes in the same pool. Oh my.
Yeah, you've got like some classes and they're like
fighting and you've got the the warriors doing burst.
I I'm sorry, I know warriors aren't doing as much burst as
they used to. Sean, Sean can pour one out for
that one. But classes doing burst and
they're doing like 1-2 million or something, you're seeing
elemental shamans doing 2025 million.
This is obviously something that is going to be addressed
quickly, hopefully before long. I have seen already on the
central distribution network a new version of the patch.
I expect that we'll see that that applied quickly because
they're running out of time and the launcher right now, they are
performing scheduled maintenance in NA tomorrow morning.
So I expect that we'll see that patch rolled in tomorrow morning
before most people even hear me say this, and that will fix some
of those things. I have a question for you Manny.
I am feeling like the patches are getting messier recently and
we've been seeing a ton of post release tuning.
It feels like when Blizzard comes up with an idea it usually
is not super clean until the players tell them it needs to
get fixed and then to their credit they fix it very quickly.
I'm not sure though how much of that is just that I'm paying
significantly closer attention now that I am like podcasting
regularly about World of Warcraft and things like that.
So as somebody who's been paying significantly closer attention
for a much longer time than me, do you also feel like things are
messy currently, or is that just how patches are and they're just
communicating better? If you had asked me that two
weeks ago, I would have said it's business as usual.
I think that with new systems being added in at the beginning
of the expansion, there's always this bit of growing pain.
We saw it with Dragonflight, we saw it with shadow lands, we saw
it with BFA, especially BFA for poor shamans.
These things, these things happen and it can either go like
BFA where they have a fundamental issue that they keep
having to adjust things. And it felt like BFA, they were
constantly trying to make up for how the game launched with the
with the systems that they stacked on top of azerite armor
in shadow lands. It was having to adjust
covenants and people will make these complaints constantly.
And before they would make these complaints and be like,
Blizzard's not listening to us. And now Blizzard is very much
listening. But the cadence is coming so
fast that with this patch, it feels like yes, this, this felt
like they had their backs against the wall where they had
this idea for an anniversary. They wanted to do something big.
It's their big 30th anniversary of World of Warcraft.
It is their big, sorry, rather 30th anniversary of Warcraft.
It's their big 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft.
And they wanted to do this big thing.
And for the most part, a lot of this stuff feels great.
I think that if you look at the fairgrounds that you were going
around, I don't think there's that much that many bugs or that
that many issues, not notable ones that I've heard anybody
complaining about. The balance, though, this feels
like a, especially in the case of shamans, this feels like a
remnant of them running out of time before they could launch.
And then because they are on this set schedule, because
they've had so many disruptions with layoff after layoff after
wave of layoffs. And that doesn't just mean that
they're working with less people, even though they say
that they're not getting hit, they're not hitting the
development teams. It means that the people who go
into work and how many people that they used to work with are
no longer there like that. That's disruptive, period.
And it's been happening frequently.
Oh yeah. So I, I felt that we would feel
the effects of these layoffs later down the line.
There's no way for me to say definitively that this is an
effect of that. But you can go back to the first
big nearly 1000 people that were laid off and Holly Longdale, the
great leader that she is, rallying the truth and be like,
we're still going to do everything that we said we were
going to do. Don't you worry, guys, we're
still going to deliver. And my response was like, like,
I hear what you're saying, but it feels like you're still
trying to do everything you're trying to do with less.
Yeah, I that's, and I've, I've said this on this podcast
before, I will once again make my plea to the Blizzard employee
who, you know, listens to the show.
You can slow down like this is to at Blizzard.
Please listen to me. It's OK.
Like we would rather maybe I'm, I'm speaking for everyone
because I am the queen of World Warcraft, as you all know, in my
opinions are everyone's opinions, in my views,
everyone's view. And so if I say something's OK,
everyone says OK, Now that we've got that out of the way, we
would rather longer developmental cycles, the end
with more successful products. We would rather longer
developmental cycles. That means that the team stays
together, right? That the people aren't burning
out. People aren't getting horrible
amounts of crunch, right. We want the devs who make this
game that we love to also love the game and to also have good
lives. It's every time I've looked at
the road maps, my first thought has always been Jesus Christ,
right? Like great, if possible, but
that's my God. Like, good Lord, that's a lot.
And that's, and it just, it keeps on going and it's like,
it's OK to throw in the towel. It's OK to say, you know what?
Now we're also looking at the road maps and saying Jesus
Christ like, it's, it's fine, we get it.
Please, please allow this to take the time it needs.
I would so much rather continue to play a game that has long
cycles between content and then mannequin mount farm and it's
great and everyone's happy, than a game that quality starts
getting sacrificed for speed again.
As the Queen of World of Warcraft, that's my take.
And so that's everyone's. Take.
But to contradict myself a little bit, I think that this
patch is most more likely to be an Aardvark than anything else
because it had to coincide with a specific date of the World of
Warcraft anniversary. That's really true, yeah.
So 11 point O point 711.1. Those ones are more likely to
have the wiggle room to shift a bit in order for them to put in
the time to do what they need to do and get that Blizzard Polish.
So I don't see this as immediately a sign of things to
come. I just think that it was like
the worst sort of scenario where it it had to go and be live
quickly. I would have liked for them to
have treat treated this more like instead of a .5 patch, a .0
patch where they gave like here's the patch.
We're going to work out the bugs in week 1 and then we're going
to release the raid in Week 2, right?
Like just have like a quasi pre season because that would have
still been fine for them to allow it because the 30th like
yeah, it's right before Halloween, but like Halloween's
like the 1st and and like Cinco de Marte is like the second day.
And that's not that bad to like have that as a disruption to a
raid that is really just a celebration and will be around
for another eight weeks after that.
That's fair, yeah. The other part to this though is
that the PTR itself was down for long stretches.
They would like just between the release Tuesday and last week, I
was sitting down again with the the theory crafters on Monday.
On Wednesday the patch went down or the PTR went down and it
wasn't back up over the weekend. So there was little time for
people to give some testing. That wasn't the first time he
had gone down and come back up for a bit.
So that kind of hurt the testing that they could do publicly, but
also it's a .5 patch. A lot of people, a lot more
people. Are.
Not testing this then they would obviously the alpha, the beta,
the so forth and when 11.1 starts coming on the PTRI think
more people would be willing to test that then this .5 patch or
even the .7 patch that is out there on the on the distribution
networks. Yeah, that is fair.
That is fair. I don't mean to alarmist, I
don't mean to doomer. I suppose is more the word I'm I
should say. No, it's a good question to ask
though. I am I, I, I continue to be just
concerned, but also extremely grateful.
And to be fair, amazing things have come out of the last few
patches and the last few developmental cycles.
So we love please don't kill yourself for the game like it's
OK. We want, we love that you're
putting out the content. We want the content to be the
game to be sustained rather than like, yeah, like I think the
fact that you and I are both experiencing some level of
burnout means that it's likely shared with a lot of players
that are seeing all of this stuff where and it's it's just
hitting a lot, a lot of players. Again, I'd love to hear from the
fast community because this is really where I want to hear from
more people, not just us in our own little echo chamber about
where people's heads are at. I'm sure there are some people
who are like super into the raid, but like, I've lost what,
2-3 weeks of Mythic plus? I feel like it's going to be a
hellscape for me to try and pug into that now because I think
there is a direct correlation of like what your Mythic plus score
is the key that you're going for and how late into the season
you're at. So it's going to be, it's going
to be hard for me to pick up in Mythic plus again.
And I, I wanted to go for like Keystone Heroes and Portables
and all of that sort of stuff. And diving back into that might
be a lot. With that said, I'd like to take
this time to thank our newest patron.
So a special thanks to you, Siphon.
Siphon, Thank you very much. FAZ will always be free, but if
you enjoy the content that we produce, consider becoming a
patron like Siphon or and many others over at Patreon.
That is patreon.com/faz. Next week when we have Sean
back, we'll do a story. I just didn't have time to
think. I was going to say we'll make
that happen, Simon, I swear. OK.
Lex, do you want to cover our last little bit of news here?
Yeah, for sure. So there is a new documentary
coming to Netflix this Friday, October 25th.
It is called The Remarkable Life of Eveline.
Man, did I say that right? You know how bad I am with
names. I would not know either, so
we're going to let it go. Great.
At the very least, it's not like the the last time I tried to
thank a patron. Anyway, we're moving on.
We don't need to remember that moment.
The Remarkable Life of Eveline, which is a documentary about a
Norwegian gamer who died of a degenerative muscular disease at
the age of 25 named Matt Steen. And my understanding of the
movie is that he played World of Warcraft and had a lot of
friends. Yeah, like it's, it is really
amazing because he, again, he's suffering from this degenerative
muscle disease. And so his mobility is lessened.
He can't go out as much. But he found his community, he
found friends and everything through World of Warcraft.
And his parents weren't actually aware of the life he was living
in the game. And it wasn't until after he
passed that his friends started reaching out being like, oh,
where's Eibulene? Because they they didn't know,
right? And then his parents found out
like the life, the second life that is, that is that their
child was living this like entire, well, not child.
He was at that point. He was a man of 25 this, right,
and how full of a life he had had and the relationships that
he had developed when they thought that he had been so
confined. And so I think it's going to be
an amazing, if not sad, poignant, yeah, but poignant
experience that comes out. It came out again at the
Norwegian Film Festival at at the beginning of this year.
It is being released on Netflix this Friday.
And I suggest if you've got the time, go watch this movie
because like I, I really do love when you have those people that
are connected that way. I was part of AIE and we would
hold every year a March to celebrate a fundamental member
and. And you don't know what's going
on with people, with people and what's going on in their lives.
But like, the fact that you can touch somebody's life, be a true
friend even through, like, the monitor and the Internet and
everything. Like, I think that there's a lot
of positivity in this story, even if there is some sadness as
well. Yeah.
Yeah, I think we all have those stories of the, you know,
connections we've made and the, the I, I've moved so many times
in my life. And the one thing that's kind of
kept me sane through all of that is my online friends.
And I think it's easy to kind of fall into the mindset of like,
oh, these are friendships that are like, you know, yeah.
Like you have your friends and you have your online friends,
but these are, you know, some of the most core friendships in my
life, right? Like, these are not secondary
closeness. These are not secondary people.
Y'all are just my folks and I think it's I'm really glad that
we're seeing that yet recognize the ways that we can continue to
remain connected even through our through our video games.
So the I realize that we're talking about this, but we
forgot one big piece of story news.
I was just. Thinking that too, I was like,
oh God, we're going to go. Back up there so we're we're
we're going to we're going to reel you guys back in for one
more story because today Blizzard made a big announcement
there is the Warcraft 30th anniversary direct.
It is a presentation that I that is going to be what everybody
was saying is the replacement for BlizzCon this year.
And I do feel that we I do feel we need to pause very briefly
just so that I can say Sean was right about what Warcraft Direct
meant. It wasn't them going to all of
our cute little cities and having fun little fancy events
where I got to meet the devs. It was the video thing.
Congratulations, Sean. Sorry, Manny.
We can continue talking about what it actually is.
Yeah, no worries. I'll edit that part out later.
You'll never know, but you at least get to say that you did
say it, even if it never made it to anybody's ears.
Fair enough, it made it to your ears.
So this is happening on November 13th?
You're right, it does seem like it's going to be closer to a
BlizzCon line, but a much shorter truncated thing.
It's going to be at 10:00 PM, Sorry, 10AMP St. that is 1
eastern or if you're over in the UK that is 6:00 PM GMT.
It's going to last about an hour.
Ahead of it there will be 1/2 hour pre show and after there's
going to be a broadcast of the World of Warcraft 20 Years of
Music concert. That was the concert that took
place in in Europe where you saw a number of content creators
that had watched it live while they've recorded that and
they're going to give a broadcast of that.
So you can listen, listen to that after the the hour
presentation. The presentation is going to be
on all the major platforms. So you've got TikTok, you've got
YouTube, you've got Twitch and other people can rebroadcast it.
So your favorite streamer will most likely be streaming it or
saying, no Mandy, I don't stream anymore.
Stop asking, but we'll leave Lex out of it.
I was going to make a joke about Sean, so we got there
eventually. Just as a little incentive,
players that tune into the broadcast from any Warcraft
channel will also be able to to earn rewards for in game items
across all the Warcraft games. So that is World of Warcraft,
Hearthstone, and of course Warcraft Rumble.
Now, I don't know if this applies to the people who are
restreaming it, but Blizzard will give more details later.
And if you want to know all of the details, make sure you do
check out the show notes. We've got a link to that article
that shows all of that. So are you excited for this,
Lex? Yeah, I, I mean, it is in the
middle of the day, unfortunately, tragically.
So we'll see if I can. Second screen.
Yeah, work, work, work, work and not and have my phone watching
something that I definitely will not be paying attention to.
You can't schedule your lunch a little bit later.
That's fair. We'll see.
We'll see, we'll see what I can
do. But I, I am really excited.
I think it's going to be fun and it's going to be cool and it's
going to be a cute little, a cute little thing for the 30th
anniversary. I do really appreciate as a big
Rumble girlie, that Rumble is officially considered part of
the Warcraft universe. I'm sure the Hearthstone people
feel the same. I, I think, I think it's going
to be fun. I think it's going to be a fun,
a fun little bit. I did have a moment of mourning
when I was like, Oh yeah, because we're not having 30th
anniversary BlizzCon. But we knew that long ago.
That's not like news. So this is going to be covering
like, you know, celebrating 30 years of Warcraft and it's going
to have the developers talking about like memories and so
forth. And it's also look ahead of
what's next. I already said that the 11 point
O .7 patch is on the central distribution network.
So I doubt they're going to be talking much about it.
They'll probably announce the date that that's coming out and
also talk a a bit about like the 11.1 patch and where we're going
for the next major patch. That's my expectation.
They say you don't want to miss. This is a quote.
You won't want to miss a moment or a single surprise.
So I'm deciding that they're going to drop major more
spoilers just because I want to be disappointed.
I I suspect that it will include like some major things that are
coming from 11.1, but not just like I suspect that they're
going to drop mechanical new stuff much like we saw in dragon
fight where it's like, hey, here's this like additional
thing. I don't believe we'll see like
Ogvokers or an additional spec to to because we don't have a
new class. That's true.
But maybe we'll see more race class expansion, additional
restrictions for transmog lifted, like a bunch of fan
service things that everybody should be like, yeah, you're
finally doing it. That's what I expect to see.
Oh yeah sorry I'm currently scrolling down the forum
comments on the world the Warcraft post.
People are mean. Y'all need to chill out what is
going on? You can just not watch it.
Like you don't have to lose your entire God damn mind.
Good Lord. But yeah no I I also don't think
that they're actually going to say anything.
That's like life changing. They could, they could watch it.
They might. Wouldn't you be so sad if you
didn't watch Cross? Region coming in 11.1.
Oh God I wish, but maybe they'll announce World of Warcraft 2.
That worked really well for Overwatch.
Ouch. Sorry, but you.
Used to play that game. Yeah, a lot of people used to
play. That was very mean.
I, I, I miss it. I miss Overwatch as it was.
Or one out. Considering it's an hour,
considering that it's going to be hitting Wow, Hearthstone and
Warcraft Rumble, I do not expect that this is going to be
anything other than a quick video.
Probably an extended Wow cast if you would, just the initial
stuff. And then there's going to be a
bunch of posts afterwards going through until December that are
like coming in the new year. We'll see this.
What I would love is a 2025 road map.
That's that's I think the biggest thing that I would hope
for out of this. What is the biggest thing that
you would hope for? I think that they are going to
they I want them to announce that Warcraft Rumble is taking
over for World of Warcraft as the main MMO.
Sorry, I'll take this seriously. I swear, I, I don't know, I
think I really just want a fun little nostalgia trip, right?
We've had so many huge announcements.
Again, I am so worried about these tests.
I feel like they're moms. I feel like I'm just like
sitting here, like, OK, honey, but are you coming home for
Christmas this year? Like, I'm so worried about them.
So I just want them to have a good time telling me all the
cool things they're doing and showing me all the Pretty Little
art. And then I want them to go home
and take a very long nap. That's what I want to get out of
this. OK, OK, well, I guess we will
call it here. Next week will be the 300th
episode, so we'll be doing a little something special for you
guys. Make sure you tune in.
This is an episode that you will not want to miss.
But until next time, don't fumble the rumble.