World of Warcraft: Pandora's Box | Aѕmongold Reacts to the Rise & Fall of WoW by MadSeasonShow

four months ago this video was released ever since then every single day people have asked me to watch it and i figured you know what let's cozy up let's get comfy and let's take a look inside pandora's box of world of warcraft the following video contains subjects and footage that some viewers may find disturbing all information contained within has been made publicly available by the people or entities discussed viewer discretion is advised those are the good days boys 14-inch televisions yup i had one of those session but the question is does the international addiction to an internet game represent a danger maybe but there is also no indication that anything can slow the explosive growth of the intoxicating game called world of warcraft yep that's how you knew it was a good game fox news [Music] and by the way you don't want that to do that either you think you do but you don't yep dude i love the 90s fucking oh shit my man that's a guy that guy's a gladiator incredible 16 hours a day his mother says his personality has changed and that he's become moody and violent and his addiction is tearing the family apart but our actions are going to matter more than any of these that's why they sure did matter didn't they all right damn that was so good bro what a fucking intro holy shit the power level where hey i watched this on that monitor and they get all the time oh my god [Applause] this is so good holy shit there it is the good times the best times [Music] in the world of mmorpgs you'll scarcely find anyone who hasn't heard of if not played the world of warcraft released in 2004 and it would quickly begin to make a name for itself garnering worldwide praise for its and the innovation to the community by its developer blizzard entertainment both celebrated and condemned for its addictiveness in the span of a few short months it would not only become the most popular of the mmorpg genre but also set the standard for all of those that would follow in its footsteps many would try and over the course of 15 years few would gain even a fraction of the player base of the seemingly unstoppable giant today though a much different people people forget how big wow was like wow was like it was the game it was the game people were talking about it was like fortnight in 2018 for three years four like probably longer than that like five or six years it was massive it was the fucking game different picture is painted what was initially considered inspirational in the world of game development now leaves behind a controversial history marred with what many described as betrayal deception and squandered potential leaving many asking the question how a snapshot of history of a world created within a world a microcosm of mayhem a virtual playground for humanity to show each other their best and their worst this is the story of blizzard entertainment and their iconic mmorpg the world of warcraft damn as i said i really i really cannot emphasize enough how different the whole world was like back then it was just so different it was so crazy like this yep y2k yup listen to this at the dawn of the new millennium the online world was growing rapidly the intellect of man and the advancements of technology combined bestowed upon the world the creation of the internet by al gore news of a new star wars movie was spreading storyboard for the lord of the rings the fellowship of the ring had been completed nerd culture was about to reach critical mass and bill clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman imagine that well entered the massively multiplayer online role-playing game or mmorpg for short the creation of the first mmo can be traced all the way back to the 70s depending on your definition and standards as they would be text based though they had existed for decades bro straight up my mom played those tech space games in the 70s like real shit she actually played those all the way back then it was only near the new millennia that they would attract a sizable player base i actually found her notebook of all of her notes and maps that she had made uh maybe like a couple of years ago i showed it to her and she's like yep that's right i'll have to show you guys sometime although varying in implementation they all shared the central idea of an online persistent world to be shared with players from all over the globe a genre unique in the sense that there is no planned end no credits role nor thanks for playing game content would be added as long as there are players playing and the journey would only end when the player decided that it was over it never stopped that was remarkably foreign to many at the time in these early years many would try their hand in breaking through the genre and overall it would contain a niche audience some were beginning to make a name for themselves though such as origin system sleep into the online persistent world with ultima online and isometric pretty good back then it was really good pvp combat in particular mythic entertainment who would later develop warhammer online took their shot with the dark age of camelot third person take on arthurian lore mixed with norse mythology and high fantasy star wars would make their debut into the world of mmos with the 2003 release the star wars galaxies and mmo with the more heavy focus on community and sandbox gameplay you know what's really kind of funny about it is it's almost like it is now where every company is trying to go towards a metaverse but back then they actually were and blizzard succeeded blizzard was the one whose metaverse effectively won out over everybody else and most prolific at the time was everquest in 1999 by verant interactive and 99 studios d crowning the previously reigning champion ultima online just 24 hours after launch it would quickly become the most subscribed mmorpg and uh i i thought that the i thought ultimately online looked better personally i like the aesthetics of ultima online more 10 000 subscribers yeah really 10 thousand goddamn most subscribed mmorpg at the time it would eventually peak at over five hundred thousand years after its launch this would yet be a fraction of the potential that was hidden within the genre the potential that had yet to be realized that's a lot the mmo was on the rise and the time to strike was nigh and in the background a beast was stirring silently observing the strengths the weaknesses you have to understand like back then blizzard only made the best games like you might not understand that now right but it's so different like blizzard was the from software of the 90s and the 2000s like they brought out a game and it's like world of warcraft was as far ahead of its like other competitors as like elden ring is farther ahead of any other game like it was just it was just so far ahead it just wasn't even it just put every other game in the fucking dirt successes and the failures of the then relatively unexplored genre blizzard at this point already had established themselves as innovators with their diablo starcraft and warcraft series the latter being a real time warcraft 2 right there in a fantasy world i played this shit all the time an adventure and having seen the success of other fantasy based games such as everquest the table was set after halting development on an abandoned project a small team of developers were left in that's medicine right there that that that right there is fucking medicine limbo and we're searching for inspiration on their next game they had the ip they had the funding and most importantly the timing the boys yeah all the balls 2001 long before blizzard was big enough to hold their own convention they held a panel at london's european computer trade show and it was then that the public for the first time saw the world of warcraft yep [Music] it just looks so much better than all the other old games like it was just so far above like holy shit look at that they made it clear this was not the sequel to the popular rts series at the time but rather something completely different players would transition from controlling pre-made heroes and progressing through a campaign to creating their own heroes and making their own stories the game would be multiplayer on them well they kind of had this actually in warcraft 3 do you guys remember that in the frozen throne you had like that campaign for rexar and like rexxar was just by himself and you would just like send him around on different missions and shit and i remember whenever warcraft world of warcraft came out and i was like well what kind of game is this and like zach told me he's like yo it's like remember back like the rexxar campaign in warcraft 3 i'm like oh really he's like yeah but that's like the whole game i'm like oh it's so badass like that's what it was yeah founding of durotar i don't remember what it was called but yeah that was the uh that was the first uh foray into it that they made massive skill bringing together fans of not only the warcraft series but of mmos as a whole the reaction however was mixed some waited with eager anticipation trying to imagine their beloved series making its sleep into the massively multiplayer setting and many were upset and had the abrupt change of focus preferring blizzard to concentrate on i just want you guys to see this just so you can know that there's nothing that has ever changed okay it doesn't matter like he knew he knew he was 20 years ahead of his time that yeah this is it's always the way it's been on what was proven to work instead of taking a gamble into unfettered territory the idea of paying a monthly fee to continue playing was a hard pill to swallow at the time it was bro like i'm telling you fifth fucking teen dollars a month man like 15 a month is like 25 or 30 a month nowadays like 15 bucks like i would get allowance of like maybe 20 or 25 i don't remember exactly what it was and like if it still is but bro like back then it was it was even more like that's all i'm saying like it was even more yeah it's like 49 it's a lot of fucking money to play uh to play the game back then it really was like that's why i didn't how do i a gm especially by blizzard fans who had grown accustomed to the one-time purchase models said standard by the company work would continue on the project however and the very first interview would be claimed by the computer gaming world magazine by this time everquest was the clear reigning champion but the genre as a whole had one fatal flaw that's the learning curve xp loss gear loss and even permanent character death were commonplace in nearly every game of the genre that's right because fuck that i don't want to be this guy all right like i want to be able to play the game and relax you know yeah you get your shit fucked up and like this is what i said before right remember i was bringing up how uh every game was trying to be the last big game world of warcraft tried to be the next big game and that's why it was so successful is they they did away with the shackles that the previous games uh gave the players combined with the large time investment in playing it cultivated a very niche and hardcore community and the everyday casual player would quickly succumb to the intense difficulty and seek entertainment from other more forgiving games there was a genre with a focus on character progression with death penalty centering around character regression and a steep learning curve to go along with it that however and this transitionary period would prove to be a key moment where players for the first time would leave single player games that looked like this into this online sprawling world they were incomparable to each other yeah and although it's funny to think now it was an intimidating thing the time investment was and still is incredibly high you had to have oh yeah there were so many because there were also all these news stories like i remember i started playing the game in like 2006 and like my relatives were like they're like do you know like so you let him play world of warcraft well i have a friend at work and her son started playing world of warcraft and next thing she knows he's smoking the reefer and my dad would be like yeah that's fine with me yeah it's well it's that's that's my son you know i said he'd been totally fine with that right but just in general he didn't give a fuck he was like whatever you had to have a good enough graphics card to run it you had to have internet and you had to pay a subscription yeah a month of hurdles standing between the average person and the game were already high and combined with the unforgiving gameplay of the landmark titles representing the genre it was just too much for the average person but it was this person this untapped market of new and casual players that blizzard would set their sights on world of warcraft took you know like the same thing final fantasy did 10 years later completely different style of approach during a time when xp yes was the bare minimum penalty for dying world of warcraft made you simply run back to your corpse one of the great things here is that when you die and death is an inevitability in all these games it's really not that big of a deal all other online rpgs make death a really bad thing because dying should be bad right well in world of warcraft pretty much all that happens is you sit out for a bit you respond back at a graveyard and you run and get your corpse and you respawn you don't lose experience points you don't question your tradition any of that stuff next level took years and other games world of warcraft it took months for most players and when systems were complicated requiring external literature to understand world of warcraft systems were relatively straightforward yeah and character stat and template choices were often permanent world of warcraft featured costly but reversible methods of character progression and yeah you have to remember 50 gold respects back in the culture of 2004 was an easy respect that's like oh you can just go and do whatever you want yeah that was an easy fucking respect because you have to remember like every all of the games like basically like culture around like dungeons and dragons right was was influenced primarily by tolkien obviously but like everything every bit of like fantasy gaming for like a very very long time and like you could argue still now was derivative of of the original dungeons and dragons that's why you have dice rolls for critical hits and you see that dna in like every fucking fantasy game and like back in dungeons and dragons it was harder to respect as well especially in the earlier versions that's my understanding customization in other games he had areas designed for large groups of high-level players referred to as raids but they were commonly out in the open world which resulted in having to compete against one another for kill credit due to this and there was a greater sense of urgency to complete the raid in its entirety in one sitting before any other guild had the chance to catch up yeah bring unwanted competition murders setting up 24-hour shifts was a common strategy to maintain dominion of these raids in many cases to the detriment of the health of the players this final fantasy 11 boss was engaged for 18 hours until players were forced to quit after they began to faint and vomit though this bus in particular guys he was at 10 just keep going it's only two more hours yeah come on you're almost there i remember that yeah that's how serious this game used to be like people people back in the day were ridiculous at these games it was nuts killer was nerfed shortly after the incident this was the state of the end game for most mmos in these early stages however world of warcraft had been one of the first mmos to standardize instance trades where players and guilds could create their own unique raid instances resetting on a weekly basis and as for the raid bosses themselves although today seen as archaic and simplistic at the time they're quite advanced in a genre it's like you look at this thing what is this what is this the triangle dragon the lord of geometry like what the fuck does this what the fuck does this do you know what i mean like this is the way yeah the lord of geometry like of course not like what the fuck and so like whenever wow came out and like it had instances it sounds really cool to have these outdoor raids until you have the outdoor raids and then you realize how fucking annoying it is that being said we did have a lot of fun in classic while doing the world bosses it was it was fun uh having a little bit of his okay i hope they had that natchez of creation where raid bosses boiled down to having a unique name with a higher health pool and increased damage world of warcraft would add unique and often at the time complex mechanics that required teamwork and thought to overcome which in turn would become one of the game's major selling points worlds had npcs but were commonly static whereas the world of azeroth felt more alive with dynamic npcs going about their daily lives simply put what it didn't invent it improved mmo that's the thing is like yeah back then there were just characters that just sat around like so many of the things that you take for granted now like for example like a new world there's no loading screens whenever you're running around a new world uh world of warcraft was the first mmo really or first big mmo i know to just not really have loading screens you just go from one zone to another zone that just like that simplistic thing that like everybody takes for granted now was gigantic back then it was huge we're in a constant state of almost theirs and world of warcraft was the first one to bridge that gap and bring it into a more mainstream audience and it reaped the rewards because of that the game would continue development throughout the years with teasers being released in the form of magazine interviews and trailers keeping the curious onlooker abreast on its direction and after a long alpha and beta testing period the moment of truth came on november 23rd 2004. ah yep oh man guys i can't believe that these new games can't keep these servers up it wasn't like this back in the day i tell you something back in the day they used to run a whole lot better shit changed [Music] yeah it was worse because back then appealing to the casual gamer worked well a little back then the developers didn't care like now they hire a pr person or a community manager to pretend like they care about you back then developers are like fuck really mess this one up huh oh we'll fix it eventually i i'm gonna go to lunch yeah like even give a fuck too well no way i was prepared for the frenzy of players eager to get into the world disconnect lag and roll backs would persist heavily for the opening months and still consistently through the next couple of years forms daily would be filled with outrage demands for a refund and even threats of lawsuits the miraculous thing about it though is that nothing it should even seem to slow its growth the launch today is looked at and is disastrous and yet still nobody cares about a bad launch literally nobody gives a shit they will come back and play the game later on if it's good that's why i tell people it's like every launch is gonna be shit why is it gonna be shit because it doesn't really matter look at this ram or video card yes this was a real question back in the day i i did this was back in the stone ages like people had to connect there was like an aqueduct with water and you had to connect that to the stone cutting device and then the stone cutting devices connected kinetic energy would power the hamster wheel that would cause the computer to turn on and that's what it was people came back again and again how can a game that's playable and maybe 50 of the time hold such a demand well it's because it was that good it was good years of development had paid off as world of warcraft quickly became ahead almost immediately dwarfing all competition at the time of their player bases it was the vampire of the mmo industry at its release and it would suck the life force out of every single previously mentioned staple of the genre but it was one unfortunate thing the unfortunate thing was it launched right when wow launched yeah so wow brought the whole industry down not just us every online game out there went down as soon as we all went out wow was like a huge succubus of players went over there and drove into wow yeah and it drove all our numbers down 60 levels of progression and a world of challenges awaited the eager player base and there would be many landmark moments just waiting to be claimed players rushed to the max level and the title of the world first level 60 went to a player named zenith on the stormreaver server i didn't even know the third 2004 a little less than two weeks after release by today's standards incredibly slow but back then a no-life nerd as onlookers weren't shy of expressing on january 30th 2005 the game would see its first raid cleared with the death of onyxia taken down by the guild ruined on the proudmoore server and many players for the first time got to see the famed epic quality items that she hoarded dad oh my god [Music] blizzard would spend the following years perfecting their craft as their subscriber base increased so too did their budget and more servers would quickly be added to support the booming player base new patches would not only release new raid tiers but also systems items and much more it was a lot of shit here the subscriber base would see its biggest surge for the next decade it was fucking insane man [Music] okay guys these eggs have given us a lot of trouble in the past uh does anybody need oh no one of the earliest videos to go viral in the world of warcraft was created by the guild of pals for life the guild was strategizing on how to clear out a particularly tricky room in the upper blackrock spire raid i think it's a pretty good plan we should be able to pull it off this time uh what do you think of dual can you give me a number crunch real quick uh yeah give me a sec i'm coming up with 32.33 repeating of course people still use that survival they still use that a lot better than we usually do all right guys let's do this oh my god he just ran in yeah save him stick it clean let's go let's go dude i remember having this video on my computer a group member leroy charges him prematurely with reckless abandon causing the death at the entire stick to the plan i can't move it my lagging guy can't move what the what the hell i can't even oh my god my eggs keep saying i don't think you can cast with that shit oh my god oh my god it was bad god damn it lee royce i got chicken the video was later revealed to be staged but nonetheless it cut on like wildfire and it was shared across multiple websites and forums making it one of the first videos for world of warcraft to gain viral popularity onlookers were intrigued word of mouth proved to be a prolific app it sounded so scripted no but like what you don't understand is like back then people didn't think if something was scripted or not like it just wasn't even in their mind it was just like this is a funny video wow this is funny this guy is so dumb you know what i mean like it just wasn't even it wasn't even on their radar advertising vehicle for the game it's hard to say today just how many people watched the video as some of the uploads have been lost millions and millions of warcraft movies today it said nearly 19 million views in the original youtube mirror reached at least 46 million yeah that's a lot of surviving mirrors today said at a total combined count of around 24 million 88 regardless it's by far the most viewed warcraft related video even to this day all my 15 years later it was so popular in fact that it was later featured as a question in the trivia show jeopardy just a few months later in november role-playing game out in 2004 returns to the world of azeroth where heroes like leroy jenkins do battle and that would be the world of warcraft pathetic the leroy craze wasn't the only phenomenon to spawn from the game though september of 2008 it's like i'm trying to think of like what would be the equivalent of leroy jenkins now like what's a meme that was on the same level as leroy jenkins um gangnam style uh let me solo her me no that's kind of like i don't know harambe yeah yeah it was yeah yes yes i think that's a great example haram it was as prevalent as harambe exactly and isn't that scary it was yeah it was as prevalent as harambe five saw the release of the zilger upgrade the final encounter of which was the boss named hakkar oh i know that called corrupted he's an asshole which dealt some damage to a player and if they were to stand too close to another it would spread to that person in a contained environment it's just another raid mechanic that is until one player intentionally or otherwise managed to create a virtual pandemic that spread across every single server the mechanic had one fatal flaw by getting a pet companion afflicted with the disease and then dismissing it it would persist when the pet is summoned once more this person did just that but in a crowded area and spread the affliction to every nearby player and npc and as long as there are living hosts there is no escape in tech i love how this is exactly what happened with kovid like this is exactly what happened it's like they never really got rid of it because it wasn't like oh the people would just like they would uh you know they would stay by themselves nope they just run around and i yeah you know it just kept happening entire cities became infected it was real plague word quickly spread and other players intentionally started spreading the disease yep just like the people licking things in walmart every major capital city was a death hub and was uninhabitable by lower level players the spread would continue to go on for days until blizzard eventually hotfixed the disease but the resulting chaos remains to this day to be one of the most memorable moments in the game's history and has even been used in real world research of the spread and reaction of contagious diseases [Music] it's real easy to be an asshole behind the keyboard and get away with it shows just how well shit clings to the asshole example achira and his band of dingleberries you are added to the to the to the to be camped list congratulations you have stooped lower than any other guild in mmo history that that that silly fool has no idea what is to come though there are many memorable landmark moments oh my gosh history some are more controversial than others there sure are seven six on the illidan server a player by the name of fagin passed away suddenly from a stroke yeah memoriam of one of her favorite activities fishing her guild had decided to host an in-game funeral service to pay one final tribute to her there were two problems though it was publicly advertised on their own forums and it was on a pvp there was a pvp server where players of the opposite faction could freely attack one another a guild stranded he now saw the thread they felt that they would join in to pay tribute but in a very different way having snuck through a nearby tunnel leading into the zone the entire raid team prepared to crash the funeral as players lined up to pay tribute to their friend the raid quickly closed in on the location an effort to role play many of the attendees had unequipped their armor and weapons of course defenseless against the surprise onslaught remember the fucking video where like as soon as that happened they started playing the scat man like this second like whenever they opened i heard it in my mind you know yeah exactly the funeral was quickly and easily dispatched under server and the crash still stands today as one of the most controversial in-game events in its entire history it's sure all of these moments serve a crucial role in the telling of the history of the game and it would serve as a reminder the reasons why it became such a success it's due not only to its own merits but perhaps even more drastically by the community that the world of azeroth was comprised of this world however was about to change how many of you have played world of warcraft here he is mike due to the success of world of warcraft blizzard for the first time held their own event a convention centered solely around a blizzard holy shit blizzcon this was and remains to be a unique aspect of the developer to hold a personalized maybe not remain similar to their products a form of celebration of not only the games that they're creating but also the already massive community that they've built the strong focus on the community would be something that blizzard would become known for and it created a loyalty of sorts from the players it was like you were like there were people that like for example whenever diablo 3 came out everybody that played wow a lot of my friends we all just went over and played diablo 3. it's a blizzard game right whenever overwatch came out we all just went over and we played overwatch why it's a blizzard game of course we're going to play it starcraft 2 comes out yeah we're going to play boys yeah absolutely like you have to think about how fucking ridiculous it was that this company was so popular and so well liked that they could have set up and this is like also by the way like nowadays we have other companies that do things like this we have like you know fan fest for final fantasy we have the witcher convention that they did recently too but back then like this was unheard of this company was so popular this was so big that people would travel all around the world and all around the country to come together and celebrate how much they love the games it was nuts man quakecon yeah yeah uh yeah exile con yeah there's a lot of them blizzcon was one of the originals it felt like it was more than a game it was a community of people sharing their combined love and passion for the world that they created you guys you guys take care of us man you guys really take care of us diablo starcraft warcraft fans from around the world would plan vacations around it long time friends and guild mates would meet there in person for the first time and blizzcon as a whole would become a very crucial part of blizzard's identity from this point forward always sure the very first convention held in october of 2005 a bombshell announcement was unveiled the world of warcraft is about to get bigger with the release of his first expansion the burning crusade you are not prepared that shit was crazy it's like you have to imagine like how fucking like how much you must have felt like you were just like you were there you were in it right because like this game is like the biggest pop culture phenomenon of like all time like this is so huge and then like you go to fucking the convention and then like fucking bernie crusade gets announced and it's it's just like it just it won't stop we just can't stop winning you know it was nuts man [Music] the expansion boasted what players had come to expect from the world of warcraft and more they would step in to the world of the outland and progress through 10 more character levels new zones talents dungeons spells raids races a profession a new pvp system and much more it would add on to and improve in just about every aspect of the game it did but it's still 2005 and there's a lot of game left to conquer before players began worrying about their foray into the outland there were dragons to kill and dkp to acquire dkp dragon he had casual hardcore and everything in between and there were some who took it even further beyond no reason to lose the main tank and i am blaming you because i blame my um i don't i can fucking do it everyone can do it do it right this is bullshit videos it's not wrong you understand they're wiping on magmadar like he's actually right like yeah what do you mean like you can't do it it's magmadar get up and fucking figure it out serious or angry nature get out of the fire at this point those of raid leaders chewing out members for failing and properly performing the mechanics of a boss fight yep well question was fared into it handle it [Music] fuck oh my god man it was just so good and like these people by the way these people weren't like uh this wasn't like a put on like we they did this for free like this was actually how they acted this is actually how they talk and everything dives the raid leader of the guild wipe club anixia at this point had been slain by numerous guilds and after some unsuccessful attempts one of the members decided to record what would later become one of the biggest meltdowns in history the onyxia wipe animation you have to think that like that meme is still used like people still use 50 dkp minus in like that has become a gaming meme in general an internet meme period it is a timeless meme what the fuck was that shit much like leroy and the animation would quickly become popular yeah it highlighted the frustrating side of course there are people that use that don't even know what it is challenging raids don't play like you're just fucking going through the motions you'll get your goddamn loot eventually yep fucking bullshit i know and you know you know what that was right that's like the fucking you know the little uh fucking gray mics on a stand with like the little circular platform that you buy at circuit city for 19.99 he just knocked that shit over right there yep i have one yep i had the headset so i was good well we're all gonna get attacked because we have no warlock here nice job you fucking idiot true shut the fuck up you stupid fuck is that ragnaros these videos would paint players in a much less flattering life as many people would become so obsessed that they would shirk real life responsibilities and fall out of contact with friends quit workers hell yeah and the most extreme cases cause harm to themselves in korea of june of 2005 the four-month-old child of a couple would suffocate when left unsupervised for several hours as the parents were playing world of warcraft in an internet see like i hate whenever these articles like this comes out like it's actually the game's fault like this is the game's fault that this happened uh not exactly it's so it's so disingenuous as the parents were playing world of warcraft in an internet cafe the phrase world of warcraft was coined shedding light on the dark side of video game addiction particularly that of mmos and the consequences of obsession something that the media was not shy of reporting all the world of warcraft due to its popularity would find itself at the center of this war against video game addiction an incredible 16 hours a day his mother says his personality has changed and that he's become moody and violent bro like imagine playing 16 hours a day you don't even have t1 bro i mean for real why how do you not have t1 at 16 hours a day like jesus man like you gotta you gotta up your numbers up man like what are you doing his addiction is tearing the family apart to many it was more than a game it was a virtual life with the graphical interface it attracted people from all walks of life and blended them together in the chaos of this online world news of the burning crusade remained to be scarce as it was still under nda in the friends and family alpha a blog post teasing new features would be shared scarcely but otherwise it was still largely a mystery outside of what was shared at the 2005 blisscon the excitement was palpable this was the original all over the world that's what it used to be as players got to discover and explore its features and shortly after world of warcraft would become the focus of the cartoon series south park with their make love not warcraft episode i remember i watched this episode with my dad at his house whenever it came out we watched it on television because what we would watch south park every every time it would come out right and so we just watched this one yeah i remember this so well it was so fucking good i remember i put a link to this on my myspace page back whenever it came out the episode detailed the boys fight against the hacker antagonist it's a good time i struggle with video game addiction oh that's a big boy so on release it was an instant success many years later series co-creator parker detailed his worries with the episode revealing that he even tried to get it pulled as he feared that it simply wasn't funny but and it was a bit yeah it was the best one of all time that got it got voted best one of all time and also i remember what i loved about it the most is that all of the um everything that they were using in the game were actually like real items it wasn't just like some bullshit they actually used real items besides sort of a thousand truths was hungry and cold besides that it was yeah it was all this the actual items as history has shown the episode would be the minus important success and despite the fact that the series at this point now has over 300 episodes it remains to be one of their most popular to this day looks like you're about to get pounded remember pwned perfectly owned holy shit man that's some fucking 2004 energy oh my god [Music] [Applause] yep january 16th finally came yeah and it marked the midnight release the new era the official end of vanilla world of warcraft people lined up outside of stores and tents in the freezing cold launch parties were held and the community was stronger than ever and pulled together with their one shared trade their fear of women or i mean they're collecting that both uh yes exactly no it was that was what was like i remember my mom and i we went there at the uh the midnight release from burning crusade because we pre-ordered the game so back then pre-ordering a game the reason why you would pre-order was so the like game stop or eb games or best buy or wherever you were getting it from knew how many copies to stock because you know they'd have like it was basically like you could go there whenever the game was out and you could be like guaranteed that you would get your game if you had a pre-order so my mom and i we pre-ordered the game and i remember we waited um it was at a fucking steak and shake and we waited there and like we we drove by the uh the fucking what was it uh the game stop and then we were just talking about wow we were talking about going to the dark portal because we were both 60 by then right and then we look over and it's like 11 45 and there's like a fucking million people there and so we rush over and i got my copy of burning crusade with my mom the night of bc release man and it was the same day that i got i don't have it up right now because i think it's an awash uh it's the night that i got her to buy me that shirt the burning crusade shirt man yeah i was like you know what can you buy me this shirt too she's like yep i go home i play that shit all night i wake up the next day i swear to god was a snow day i swear to fucking god the next day was a snow day i stayed home played the game all day the love for the game at this point it had amassed roughly 8 million subscribers by the expansion's release never once reporting a loss and holding on to the lion's share of the market in the background stirred some serious competition however mythic entertainment who developed the dark age of camelot sought to compete against blizzard with an mmorpg adaption of the renowned warhammer series due to its similar fantasy setting holding orcs magic elves and wizards and decided to be the direct competitor to world of warcraft and deemed it to be one of the first of many i never believed killers during the time another such game was the age of conan the hyborian adventures developed by funkom who was mostly known in the mmo community for anarchy online in 2001 his selling points would be impeccable graphics at the time and a new and fresh cop that was really good and a visceral world featuring great mechanic where players could execute each other in brutal fashion often described as the mortal combat mmorpgs and the lord of the rings online by turbine was also in development an mmo of one of the most celebrated franchises in nerd culture history certainly posed as a serious threat to blizzard at the time though these contenders would be far off from release the competition was beginning to get fierce well it really wasn't because all these games weren't very good like wow just played so much better than these other games like it just really wasn't even a competition it was so far ahead to stave them off the burning crusade had to be as exceptional as its predecessor months and months of doomsaying was put to the test did the burning crusade kill the world of warcraft of course the answer is no the expansion was a major success and the subscription base rose even more rapidly as players explored the dangerous reaches of the outland the classes evolved and the gap between them was lessened while still retaining the features that made them special the raids were more challenging the bosses more complex and offering more to conquer to the ever-growing subscriber base burning crusade was basically just a better version of the game like there were some things that vanilla was better with like i think world building in vanilla was better and there were some other advantages of vanilla wow but burning crusade for pretty much all in-game activities was just an improvement on the game and the reading scene itself proved to be even more difficult for players than what they had encountered in the base game with many lists today naming a plethora of burning crusade boxes one of the best boss in the heart of all time even over 14 years later with some of them going unkilled by 99 percent of the player base until blizzard intervened themselves to make them easier and even then it was remembered for having an extensive process for gaining entry to the raids a large series of story-based quests served as an alternate form of character progression and players would rarely find themselves with nothing to do the pvp system had evolved to be more competitive with the new arena mode where players create custom teams and battle and small skill matches to the death setting the stage for future competitive events in blizzard's attempt to gain a foothold into the growing esports scene the alliance for the first time get to experience a new class to them the shaman and for the horde the paladin both with two new races added to the game the draenei and the blood elf five-man dungeons rose back to the forefront with the advent of the more challenging heroic difficulty the expansion was packed with features and upgrades in its design it wasn't just one of the nation's most critically acclaimed releases even to this day the lord of the rings also sat release in 2007 to serve as competition for world of warcraft and although receiving favorable such dog shit like i mean really it was just such absolute fucking dog shit compared to wow like i'm sorry but like wow was just so far above it in terms of like combat and playability it was just not even remotely close like it was just yeah i don't i don't care like it looked just the thing is like every other game looked like it came from 1999. was the way i feel like yeah it just it looked like it came from 1999 and like wow was the first game that like really looked like next-gen at the time old reviews at the time it couldn't compare to the size and scope of wow selling under 200 000 copies in the first months of release and dwindling shortly thereafter the game does still run today supported by a niche community and is hovering around 40 000 active players at the time of this video better than the new world turning crusade pressed on undaunted and in the following blizzcon in august the next expansion the wrath of the lich king was announced so he missed something here raft of the lich king was not announced it was leaked and the guy whenever he announced wrath of the lich king said for anybody who already knows what this is your account is getting banned but they straight up made a joke about it and then they announced wrath of the lich king players were teased of the land of northrend where they had once visited in the events of warcraft 3. well you have to remember like in warcraft 3 the end of warcraft 3 was like arthas beating illidan so like in the context of wow we just beat illidan well the next guy is the lich king right like that's the next thing it's got to be the next thing right and so like the lich king was seen as like the last boss of wow like yeah you had things like sargeras deathwing like death rooms and warcraft ii but like really it was fucking the lich king right and like so whenever this shit happened it was like holy fuck it's like we really out here boys this is it here where they would face off against arthas menethil as the lich king ten more levels a new class the death knight new zones and siege vehicle combat were just a few of the many new features teased at the convention and due to the success of the burning crusade there was little question if it would be just as good 2008 came and on the one year anniversary of the release of the burning crusade world of warcraft hit a landmark 10 million subscribers whenever every single time one of these things would get announced because blizzard would announce these at their uh their earnings reports like everybody in general chat would be like bro there's 10 million people playing the game now there's nine million people playing the game now like it was crazy like the excitement for it and everything about that was just huge like you really felt like you were like part of it like you were really moving something it was happening right then and right there and also like another thing that like mad susan's not really talking about is the fact that like at the same time in like vanilla wow bc like wrath like in the middle of those those right there that's whenever like internet personalities first started coming into play right you had people like athene you had people like swifty and these are like the original dawns of making youtube like online content like yeah you had well yeah it was like a hobbes like and you had a few other people too like and these guys were just like absolute fucking legends man like everybody was talking about them everybody's thinking about that yeah kangen like yeah you've got a few more too it was massive and like what's so crazy is like literally swifty is still screaming to this day and he's still successful too it's fucking uh it's fucking incredible man absolutely dwarfing any and all competition yeah incoming contender the edge of the coin release in may of 2008 and received generally positive reviews by the media and it sold over 1 million copies by the end of its release month though ultimately the game had failed to retain this impressive surge of subscribers although reviewers worldwide had praised the games not as player base condemned it as being unfinished and rushed as subscriptions quickly declined and just one year later funko would perform a fatality on 31 out of its 42 servers much like the lord of the rings online the game still holds a dedicated yet niche following yeah by and large falling short of being the wow killer it just didn't quite it didn't play the way wow oh here we go here oh oh oh oh oh oh in a bombshell announcement at the height of the game's popularity the power of the dark side could be resisted no longer as blizzard's parent company vivendi announced a merger with activision already having gained a reputation for excessive monetization and driving franchises and developers to an early grave many were dismayed at the news the same would become true for their beloved franchises including the world of warcraft along with ea they would gain the reputation of exploiting the player base to the fullest extent and spirit some things never change your heads today one of the largest focus on cash shops and pay-to-win game design and just one year later in september of 2009 activision blizzard would release the paid faction chain service and one month after that the paid race change service along with in-game collectible pets i'm so glad that like mad season actually puts this into perspective because this shit happened right after right after this fucking merger man and nobody seemed to realize this yeah it happened right then these services were seen by many as an affront on the integrity of the game and although not terribly impactful by themselves it was believed that they would serve as a gateway for more damaging paid services that's what i said produced later in september of 2008 the release date for the wrath of the lich king expansion became set in stone for november nobody wanted to listen just as it was back in 2006 the clock began ticking for players to finish their activities in the burning crusade before the content was made to be irrelevant and due to the difficulty of the raiding scene in general they had their hands full there was quite a long drop between the final patch of the burning crusade and the launch of wrath nearly eight months but players didn't seem to mind dude nobody gave a fuck because there was always more content to do there were so many like you had to do like a fucking cara gruel you didn't really have to do mac you didn't really have to do gruel either really uh like ssc tempest keeb hyjal fuckin uh black temple sunwell so like most people always had something next something to do next in terms of their raids and everything no catch up well they had catch up but it wasn't all-encompassing so like for example like the badge vendor would have three or four items that were sunwell uh you know trash level quality or like black temple level quality but like that's all you could get so you couldn't get a full set of gear you just got three items like i remember you got like an axe you got like a ring and like a chess piece or something like that that's it za was catch up yeah yeah but za was still like you you would do zuleman and you would still want to do ssc and tk as well because of that other gear to the success and lingering challenge that the expansion had to offer and you couldn't do it otherwise though sought to fill in this void with release of the highly anticipated warhammer online which such release in september but wasn't enough to succeed where the lord of the rings online and age of conan failed knowing [Music] the game saw similar numbers to the age of conan selling one point two million copies at launch and just watching up with a solid subscriber base of 800 000 players but similar to funcom's debacle it simply wasn't ready performance issues also like for the scope of what warhammer 40k is i don't even know if a modern game could do it like you would have to have like you'd have to have no man's sky plus world of warcraft plus um elden ring like a plus like it's just like the the scope of it warhammer yeah but like yeah well i guess yeah warhammer's about yeah that's different sure but like i feel like a 40k universe would be fucking amazing i i would if if a massive publisher said they were making a warhammer 40k mmo i would be so excited but i just i feel like it's so hard to do like imagine having a fucking spaceship you can like land on planets and like go to war there would be so cool could have been a great experience giant server and players that have grown accustomed to world of warcraft's finally tuned and polished combats yeah it was just bad i immediately noticed a lack of fluid fluidity with its gameplay additionally the game would suffer from major scandals basically erroneously charging subscribers for years of game time in a single day with some racking up charges and overdraft fees into the thousands similar to the age of conan warhammer failed to retain this early surge of players and servers were shut down and the subscriber base dropped even lower than that of their 2001 mmo the dark cage of camelot the game officially shut down in 2013 but many deemed it to be truly dead just one year after its release because wow was so good why would you play anything else besides that and also at that point people were so invested in wow why are they going to stop playing wow whenever they're already invested in in into that game right why would they do that they're already there they've already made a character in a while they've got a guild they've got all their friends it's like there can only be one mmo yeah all their friends play well like yeah [Music] shortly after the wrath of the lich king expansion saw its release and blizzard would once more break sales records players charged into northrend with new zones to explore dungeons and raids to conquer and a new class to discover the death knight was what everyone expected and more a lot more way too much and as many saw them to be far too powerful on release they would later they're not far too powerful they were fucking broken they were fucking broken so death knights had an ability that would turn them into a they would d whenever they would die they would turn into a ghoul and then the ghoul could blow itself up and if the explosion that the ghoul used to kill itself killed you it would win the arena match it was just such like uh death and decay had would would automatically horrify your character over and over and over as long as you were inside of it it was so bad oh my god you tuned down in upcoming patches replayability was amplified as the achievement system was implemented and players could collect points titles mounts and more through this new feature i did those towards completion i did a lot of those received positive reviews of its many new features and improvements and the subscriptions continued their upward trend eventually peaking at 12 million just as with the burning crusade it seemed to be unstoppable though it would be where the first sign of weakness showed through the numbers that have been made public there wasn't a single moment where wrath had lost subscriptions between reports but it was also the first expansion where they had stopped gaining subscribers as they hovered around 11 to 12 million throughout the course of the expansion and as shown it wasn't due to any of these would-be wow killers in august of the same year the rating scene expanded i think you also uh another reason why wow kind of like this is just what's gonna happen right is like uh you hit what's called market saturation where everybody that's going to play this game has already either played it is playing it or has chosen not to play it and that's it right and there's also a uh there's like a certain level of it's 15 a month i'm not gonna play it because there's still a lot of people i remember austin like he's the guy that you know met as his girlfriend and wow uh he uh he was he didn't want to play it until like the end of wrath because it was 15 a month that's a lot of fucking money yeah it was a huge thing the big way as the third grade tier four the expansion this was certain would release with the heroic difficulty setting yup previously if players saw an extra challenge with the encounters they could impose boss specific hurdles or restrictions beyond themselves for bonus loot achievements and bragging rights players would now instead toggle this optional difficulty setting before entering the raid and every boss within would deal more damage take more damage and gain extra mechanics in exchange for better quality loot yeah this along with the mythic grading mode to be introduced later would become a landmark change in the core design of the game aim to increase accessibility by greatly lowering the base normal difficulty and funneling those seeking a greater challenge into this optional difficulty setting i remember we one shot uh some of the bosses in uh in toc like they were so fucking easy that like we just brought in 25 dumbos and i was like so yeah uh it says on uh on thoughtbot that we have to hit the uh we have to i th oh no never mind okay all right all right forget it uh so we have to have everybody wait a minute oh okay all right let's just give it a pull let's just give it a pull see what happens oh it's dead okay cool see you next week guys that was it man this change in design would later be accelerated in the next expansion of the cataclysm which would be unveiled in blizzcon 2009. this this is huge ladies and gentlemen i give you a world of warcraft [Music] the world of azeroth is about to change for good as the entire old world was deemed to be outdated by 2009 standards this expansion's villain deathwing would ravage the eastern kingdoms in kalimdor reshaping them visually and mechanically by reworking each quest players would be able to to be honest this was an improvement like the new quests that they had added into the game were massively better than the old quests like as somebody who did all the new quests and somebody who did all of the old quests the new ones were way better uh they were way more uh like fucking uh concerted in one area they were way more connected they were way better designed they weren't as annoying it was just simply an improvement i know there's people that think back and they're like oh but i like this quest yeah sure you can still like the quest but you have to admit the new ones just played a lot better explore all of these changes from the comfort of their flying mounts which were now enabled in the old world the new zones like this this looks so good back then and the goblin for the horde would also make their debut as well as a reworked talent system the game was to go over its biggest makeover today and whether it was for the better or worse was yet to be seen december marks the month of another hallmark feature being added to the game the dungeon this is whenever things begin to get a little bit turbulent this was right here it's the dungeon finder oh my fucking god like it was this was what it was it was not really like i don't i think cataclysm i don't think they should have changed the whole world until they had the tech to make it to where you could go back in time the same as you can with like the different like keepers of time and everything that they shouldn't have just done it until they were ready to do that but i actually thought cataclysm was really cool i i liked cataclysm a lot finder no longer do players have to travel the world to run to their favorite dungeons as this tool match makes them together and teleported the party directly to the entrance at the time this feature was received with overwhelmingly positive feedback and a welcome quality of life improvement though restricted the players only on their server at the time of its launch it would literally be other servers which had the unintended side effect of alienating the community from each other obviously having to manually form groups had served as a critical brother previously having to manually form groups wait bro that's jimmy and dj penguin holy fuck dj penguin is in my uh he's he's in like he's in my lost art guild like he was in my classic wow guild actually i think was in crusader river and jimmy bro like jimmy and i played uh he's like a big youtuber now like dude we played uh fucking uh we played pub g together like all the time back in the day like he still comes into my chat regularly it's wednesday my dudes come on groups had served as a critical and natural way for players to meet one another and make friends and they would soon learn the downsides of automating the process by handling the formation of group automatically social interaction was replaced with convenience and the social aspect critical to mmo gameplay suffered as a result by itself this negative impact of the system would remain relatively minor but in the coming years players would notice a trend of eliminating these critical social structures in the name of convenience and i thought raid finder was back in the day i said that they only added raid finder because there were people like and you all remember this back in like wrath right or like early cata or mid cata there are people that like they were just so fucking garbage literally everybody on the server knew that they were fucking garbage and no one would play with them nobody would play with them nobody wanted to have anything to do with them and i said that they added rate finder because these shit bags could never find a group and they kept crying about it that's what it was i'll be right back what jesus christ i'm busy fucking your moms what a day fucking idiot give me one second guys i got to uh got a water to the plants here mcconnell was mean to you good you probably deserved it all right here we go at the cost of the game's sense of community which many claimed to be one of the biggest futures to which it owed its success [Music] the community would also see changes outside of the game interesting uh fucking ice cream filled their new real id system where they're supporting foreign not just world of warcraft would no longer display character names when posting but rather real names yeah to the account players and onlookers alike reacted with concern of blizzard's disregard of basic privacy rights see i never cared about this really because i never posted on the forums the only time i would post on the forums was to talk shit like that was it all i would do is talk shit on the forums and that was literally the only thing i cared about everything else was whatever that their actions would essentially box the entire forum community doxing is the act of unearthing someone's personal information such as their name or address with the ultimate goal of real-life harassment today the advent of swatting shows the repercussions of those whose personal information was leaked for a company to do the work for them was seen as extremely dangerous flame wars and online disputes past present and future would serve as vessels for real life harassment they argued they stated that the reason for the change was to cut down on forum trolling their logic being that if someone's real name was tied to their post they'd think more carefully about how they treat others and that quote removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment and connect the blizzard community in ways that they haven't been connected before another community manager put it to the test and in an effort to quell the players fear he posted his real life name within one day players found and published his address phone number age and took to placing false pizza orders in his name and even placed death threats connecting him with i thought that what happened was that they put a bomb threat on his daughter's school that's what i remember happening is it yeah they they put a bomb threat on his daughter's school and and then uh the blizzard was like wait a minute nope never mind we're not gonna do this yep what's wrong with them well that's why you don't put people's real information out there that's why you don't do it is because somebody out there will do that the community in ways that he's never been connected before shortly after the co-founder of blizzard mike morheim stepped up i remember this that they had rescinded their plans of publishing the player's real names in october blizzard pinned down a release date for the cataclysm expansion december 7th of the same year pearl harbor fight the controversy the game in october would reach its peak subscriber count of 12 million the holidays came and the day of reckoning was at hand and the world of warcraft my mom and cody and jeff sat in the car while i had to wait in the cold and get cataclysm i had to sit out in a cold well they were sitting in the warm car talking about all the all the places they were going to fly around in azeroth i'm sitting there fucking freezing my dick off listening to some moron tell me about how there are no frost worms in wow and i'm like wait a minute didn't you just play wrath of the lich king and i finally come back with everybody's copy of the game like oh great that took you long enough and i came back home we played all fucking night i remember um cataclysm came out and it was my last day of finals and i stayed up all night and i just went to the final and i took the class it was like an entry-level like college algebra class i passed it and some girl there that i thought was really attractive failed the exam and i was gonna comfort her and talk to her because i thought she was cute and then i saw her closer up and i realized that she wasn't as attractive as i thought she was and i couldn't have been happier because it meant that i could go home to cataclysm and never think about her again straight up straight fucking up man like yup and that's exactly what i did put stuff for cataclysm in more ways than one in addition to the retuned old world the talent system would also see an overhaul altering the traditional free-form three-tree talent system into specializations players would be forced to pick just one and to lose access to many spells iconic to the other two the trees as well that was so dumb i hated and the amount of points to invest reduced class and item balance in general would also be at the forefront of changes in the expansion mostly through the form of removal spell drinks were removed and all abilities now just had one rank that's skilled with your level i thought spell ranks were stupid i think it was a good decision for them to remove them and we're trained automatically and much more the cataclysm expansion is seen by many to mark the point when the beginning of the mmo rpg was made to be lower case as it transformed into a much simpler version of an already straightforward game as world of warcraft straight further and further away from its social and rpg roots a community of private server players would grow larger and larger with each expansion yeah independent groups lasting past versions of the game the most prolific of which being of its original state referred to as vanilla though its beginnings were humble this private server community would eventually grow large enough to become a problem for blizzard they would find themselves embroiled in legal battles to protect this really happened like private servers really started to pop off in uh guess wod uh like as soon as wad came out that's whenever austin started playing on nostalrius that's whenever i started streaming i was like i don't have anything else to do and like yes no i understand there were servers before wod but i remember like whenever a lot of people like their popularity was like this like it went up so fast protect their ip from infringement alex would eventually influence a major developed project many years later he's back regardless they showed once more that they had no difficulty in selling expansions as once again they broke their own sales record with cataclysm they did selling a staggering 3.3 million copies on release day but unlike the previous expansions they had not seen an overall increase in subscribers post release instead remaining steady it was at the 12 million mark it had been stuck at since the beginning of 2009 and for the first time since its inception post category for the world of warcraft would see a loss in reported subscribers it was a lot cataclysm would fail to gain subscribers in a single reported quarter in its near two-year run discounting the release of the next expansion the mists of pandaria which would be announced in october cataclysm wasn't really that popular among a lot of people i think that the changing of azeroth really upset a lot of people because it was like oh man like this was the the world that like at that point they had grown up with and loved and like now it's different and so it kind of uh it severed that emotional bond that they had in a lot of regards i thought cattle was great oh god i know the whole reaction would be very mixed no the theme of the expansion was so unexpected that many thought it to be an out-of-season april fool's job players would explore the mysterious world of pandaria with the new race the pandering and the new class the monk dungeons were getting a special challenge mode to bring relevancy once more to five-man content and scenarios would be doable micro dungeons not exactly good players and the pet battle system was also implemented okay a minigame reminiscent of the popular pokemon franchise yeah i like pepe just for the talent system it would be simplified even further what you guys have to remember about the talent system here is that franchise the talent system in mr pandaria was actually really good because each different thing that you would use had its own purpose like every single one of these was fucking insane like in disrupting shout was an extra interrupt a rude interruption gave you a damage bonus and gag order silence to target whenever you would interrupt them it was fucking op so like the original talent tree was really really good and then over time the good talents just got gooder and the bad talents just got badder and now like you have each talent tree there's like one option and everybody picks that one option as for the talent system especially even further into the tier system offering more impactful choices but at a reduced quantity of just six points to invest and most controversially crossroam zones would eventually be implemented i thought crosstram zones were fucking amazing i think servers are simply a technological limitation and in a perfect world they would not exist i loved crossroam zones i had so much fun whenever they got added it was awesome players of differing realms would be able to see and interact with one another due to the falling subscriber base brought on by the cataclysm yeah there were far too many servers running for the player base and as a result the worlds were starting to become barren by grouping servers together blizzard aimed once more to breathe life into the world of azeroth while many looked at the expansion as something new and fresh many more would be immediately turned out of space aesthetics and due to the downward trend and subscriptions skepticism if it would be a success i thought it was all-time high this was still far into the future though and the current focus remained to be cataclysm which at this point was still steadily losing subscribers i thought i thought the firelands patch was lit well i mean literally right like i mean we had the molten front which was fucking awesome and then we also had uh firelands which was fucking awesome like that the pvp season was pretty good like it was fun man it was so fucking fun and uh it was like whenever mr pandari got announced i didn't like it like i i still thought it was i still think it's stupid i still don't feel like mr pandaria fits into like wow's aesthetic really that much at all like if you compare it to like everything else in like warcraft 2 and warcraft 3 and everything like it just was like what the fuck like if if warroads of draenor had the content that mr pandaria did warlords of draenor would be considered the greatest expansion of all time it's my opinion in november along with the final raid dragon soul the lfr system there it is similar to the dungeon finder released in the wrath of the ledger king expansion this would allow players to match make with others in a queue-based raiding mode doubling down on their design of trading away critical social and rpg functions for the sake of convenience and accessibility there's also transmog got added on that same patch by the way so like you see obviously that guy's in full tier two that guy was using the sword uh that's the red uh not red built a battle that's the sword from king yamaron last boss in a heroic outguard pinnacle and so obviously this is not cataclysm gear and uh anyway so this happened and people didn't like transmog because they felt like it took something away from the game i was like very negative about it and it did it did absolutely take something away from the game but uh obviously transm 4.2 is transmog oh really okay well yeah i don't remember exactly i thought it was 4.3 well anyway um so this happened a lot and like people like 4.3 and like cataclysm was like a really big turning point in terms of like the type of systems the game had it was fucking tremendous to accommodate for the increased disorganization that came with cubase the difficulty would be lowered even further than that of the base normal difficulty it was a fucking joke like i remember one time we had like this so this rule and i had this joke with my friends it's like everybody the person who contributes the least in uh in raid finder gets the most loot so what i did is uh i one time i was doing a madness of deathwing on my death knight and i literally took my death knight and i i swung at the first tentacle once to make sure i got credit for the fight and i jumped off and i killed myself i got rezzed up whenever the fight was over who did the sword looted girth to lack lfr yep 390. i remember 390 item level sword no big deal hey it is what it is we stay winning point forward that players no longer needed to even join a guild to experience the end game exactly it was really big they don't need to read strategies and they didn't even need to speak a single word in fact as blizzard deemed it an issue that 100 of the player base were not completing these raids in their entirety this actually kind of happened at the beginning of wrath too is because like you didn't need to have a guild in wrath like if you were in a big server there were so many pug groups that it was so fun like wrath pug culture was one of the best things about the game like i had so much fun back then and like cataclysm came out and cataclysm raids like mad susan didn't talk about this cataclysm raids were way harder than wrath rates like way more mechanically challenging like you look at the uh look at the mechanics for omnitron defense system compare that to something from icc besides putricide holy fuck and so yeah it was way way way fucking harder so like all the pug culture died out because you just had such a higher level of expectation to play and i think that was bad for the game i do i i think that hurt the game accomplishment of clearing a raid would be more accessible than ever before but as a result the accomplishment would mean nothing from this point forward yep during this time another would-be wow killer was beginning to generate interest star wars galaxies at this point had been shut down in order to bolster the subscriber base of star wars the old republic developed by bias it was popular published by uh fifa it would be attempt number two for star wars on the massively multiplayer scale this installment promised a unique and fully voice acted campaign for each of their classes a space shooter component that's a customizable ship a thriving endgame for pve and pvp and perhaps most importantly it was during the first time where the reigning champion showed weakness while ultimately the previous contenders failed on their own merits it can be argued that the tremendous success of the world of warcraft during their debut certainly made them look worse in comparison oh absolutely this weakness was showing though the timing was ideal would the old republic succeed where its predecessors failed ex-subscribers disillusioned with the direction that the game had taken throughout the cataclysm looked at the old republic as the true successor this time players had been doomed saying the imminent demise of world of warcraft ever since its launch in 2004 only this time the game's downward trend would support their claims it was bad man it really was like it was kind of depressing to be a wow player then because like everybody nobody really knew what was wrong and i think everybody had a different idea of what was wrong and now it seems a little bit more clear but i think also another thing that blizzard had literally no control over is that from the years of 2008 to 2000 and i guess 11 really whenever cataclysm came out 2012 social media really took off so like for example uh like in 2007 nobody was really using social media besides myspace in 2011 everybody was using facebook everybody people were using twitter at that point too especially 2012. so like social media played a massive role in i think hedging out some of the uh novelty of mmos because mmo's one of the most special things they had originally was that you could interact with people online with really no no friction but social media comes out same thing happens so the moment of truth came the launch arrived and like many other mmos before it the old republic launched too early in an attempt to release it during the holiday season it was rushed out and would suffer from technical issues game breaking bugs and questionable design decisions most notable of which is their use of the hero engine which proved to be poor in an mmo environment there would be a short delay between a player casting a spell and that spell actually landing [Music] an issue they attempted to rectify by tying an animation for each ability to make it seem more natural as a result though the combat felt very sluggish and awkward and those used to the crisp and smooth nature of the world of warcraft's combat system notice the huge and immediate downgrade in quality see back then guys you saw that clip blade storm used to really mean something like whenever you had bladestorm on that means that you were winning like yeah bladestorm was a big deal this combined with other disappointing features such as their spaceship component being entirely on rails hindered its success in its crucial launch period afterwards sold over 2 million copies and held 1.7 million subscribers which was around the sixth of the world of warcraft subscriptions at the time that's really good at any reason mmo came to rivaling wow's popularity since its launch in 2004 but much like the lord of the rings online the age of conan and warhammer online the star wars the old republic suffered a similar fate and the subscriptions quickly plummeted not even the way it goes later it would convert to the free-to-play model often seen as the death sentence of mmos today the game holds that was one of the reasons why people didn't want wow to go free to play back in the day is it like back then a free-to-play game meant that you lose it's like the game's going free to play that means we're giving up total of five servers once again coming nowhere near being the wow killer it was predicted to you and the be one it was said that you would destroy the world of warcraft yeah it's about right oh [Music] and for the first time since the release of september 25th expansion they saw an increase in subscriptions though the eagerness of the player base was notably diminished as this would be the first expansion to fail and breaking sales records for blizzard upon release and then dumb as hell man barring this initial surge they would be unable to halt the downward trend since the launch of cataclysm as subscribers would quickly drop from 10 million at launch to 9 million then aid and around 6.8 at its lowest point a drama you gotta remember too like in mr pandaria um the raids were also really fucking hard like mogushin vaults like yeah first two bosses were not that bad uh first first three but then like you get into like the fucking four kings that shit was hard and then uh hard of fear that was hard uh terrace at the end of spring besides the first boss that was hard like these fights were fucking hard and it completely killed pug raiding it's like the casual players like the casual dad gamers that are you know babies crying in the background wife is fucking screaming at them uh they're trying to listen to van halen and you know they can barely even hear what he's saying uh like these dad gamers were just getting fucking edged out man they were getting edged out and they were going extinct like woolly mammoths it was sad and like they just couldn't keep up of over 30 percent and the players were starting to feel the effect of a world that grew less active with each passing day crossrealm officially saw its release there was an exception to this um in throne of thunder the patch the the player numbers went up by i think two hundred thousand that's how big of a dick lee shin had he actually brought the player numbers up for one patch yep would make the world seem sprawling once more but once again at the expense of the server's community which would be present only a name from this point forward good seeing the same players and guilds on your server consistently turned out to be an integral part of establishing a community that was only realized once it was taken away i actually as i said before i kind of agree with that but i think it's so much more important to have a sprawling like massive world that you feel like you're just one little piece in like i feel like yeah that was s fan that was during oh man when was this this was during i think the beta wasn't it yeah make azeroth great again that was our guild holy shit that was our fucking guild yes that was our fucking guild oh my god yep i s that was so cool man yeah we had the hats and everything and uh it feels like last week yeah it's just it's so weird to see that and um anyway what i mean is like like i i never really liked servers i always i feel like servers were just simply a a technological limitation mike i i want to play with everybody on the same server all together i want to be part of a massive big huge world i think that's what's so fucking cool man part of establishing a community that was only realized once it was taken away the world once more had players in it but due to the large amount of servers that would be grouped together players scarcely saw or recognized other players from previous adventures that's true basis to form a community which had been a key reason for its success was now this guy um so uh ex genomer uh this guy tanked dungeons for us in classic wow uh in the classic wow beta this guy was actually a fucking legend paladin like one of the best paladins in classic it's insane well a distant memory the world was in a predicament and blizzard had a difficult problem a nearly empty world with little community or a full world ironically enough with no community though innocent enough on launch crossroad was seen today as a necessary evil for a problem which true solution lies in recapturing subscribers now lost an issue that blizzard would struggle with for years to come was the once iconic mmorpg now barely resembled an mmo due to its destroyed social structures and barely an rpg due to its abandoned rpg elements which would be taken a step further in march of 2013 as the game saw another major change with its thunder forging first instance of forged loot released with the throne of thunder raid lune had the potential to have an increased quality regardless of the difficulty at which the players defeated the bosses having previously lost longevity in the raiding scene through the reduced base difficulty they had hoped to regain it and be a randomized loot and although it was relatively tame at the time of its release this made me so mad because like you guys don't remember this maybe but like tier 14 was really hard like sexier heroic was fucking hard uh the shot of fear heroic was fucking hard uh protectors of the endless heroic elite was even fucking harder and then this wasn't enough this was enough it wasn't enough that we had to do this bullshit now we have to go and do it twice what is this shafir was too hard no the shaffer was badly designed because the first phase was just a fucking uh it was a formality urging suspension would later be seen by many to get out of hand and help diminish and confuse the reward structure that had been standard for the game for eight years yeah that's time passed patches released there he is new raids and systems debuted and much changed with the expansion in the year of 2013. something that didn't though siege of orgrimmar was the first tier they brought in flex rating it like flex rating was a really big deal because like flex rating made it to where you didn't have to fill slots like for all the time before then you would you know you'd be at 23 people and that stupid guy keeps messaging you you just invite him because it's better than nothing right and flex rating stopped that it killed 10 man rating i don't know if it killed 10 man rating like i i feel like i like the smaller raid sizes of like i like big i wish they had 40 man raids back in the day uh but like they can't make them as hard as they used to be i prefer the larger group content but there is a part of me that really enjoys smaller like focused challenge content like final fantasy like savage or something like that's really cool i think like 40 and like eight or ten men is like i view them in a way like equal separate but equal right they're both really fucking awesome for completely different for completely different reasons it's this ongoing downward trend of subscribers in blizzcon 2013 blizzard would announce its next expansion the warlord this was a really big deal player base would journey back to the world of draenor because everybody thought like the subtext of wad was that we were going back to burning crusade that was the subtext of the game is like we're going back to past the dark portal again going back into draenor we're going to see some of the same characters we've got the grand again like the same shit's happening and so everybody was expecting like a return to form like wad it was going to finally save wow an alternative they hyped it up it was so hard corrupted into what they knew holy shit expansion it's here where they would establish forward bases known as garrisons and elantra campaign against garrosh hellscream the leader of the united orc army known as the iron horde who were set to invade the land of azeroth at this point the private server community had gained considerable traction as players yearned for the game that had originally captivated them and were becoming more and more unruly as the retail version strayed further and further away from its roots it sure did began campaigning blizzard to officially develop and support this past version in a q a panel during the convention one such player asked for an official answer on the possibility of a legacy server the question was fielded by j alan brack at the time a production dream just again draw uh draw attention to the fact that all of his hair was completely black look how much like imagine this guy imagine this guy's life right so he's a developer for a while he's got a jackass right but it's whatever right he makes some stupid fucking comment about some kid with a hood on that wants to play vanilla again what the fuck does he know meanwhile he can never live this down for like the entire rest of his career at this company and then finally after all this shit happens he becomes president of the company and i did the math within two months of him being president the fucking lawsuit happened with california investigating them and then big surprise he comes back next blizzcon all his hair is gray you know what i kind of feel bad for him i do it really like i fuck that must suck man jesus yeah stress this guy got fucking wrecked before world of warcraft and he delivered this now infamous answer have you ever thought about having servers for previously there we go as they were then no no [Music] and and by the way you don't want to that to do that either you think you do but you don't remember when you had to like spam cities and say need a tank need a tank need a tank during the burning or save days you don't remember that because now you just push a button that says go to the dungeon that's right you don't want to do that though the quote would draw immediate ire of the legacy community he was right by the way with most people he was right um i think the problem was that like the game wasn't good because you had to spam trade looking for a tank the game was good because it felt rewarding and fulfilling people are looking like i i never said like i said people classic was never a solution to the game like you can't go back and try to solve the problem with an old game it would prove to be an integral moment in its development serving as a rallying the biggest wrong of all time and more attention on the possibilities of developing such a version of the game the answer was seen as dismissive and out of touch yep especially considering the fact that private servers at this point had grown to new levels of population they were really popular with this dismissive answer the questions started turning into demands and discussion of its viability or not oh bro i remember this the wall of no there were these people that were so fucking invested in not having vanilla wow it's like i can understand like ah you know what classic i don't really care about classic but like these people thought vanilla wow was gonna kill retail and so they felt like they had to protect retail from vanilla wow and continuously spam about how bad uh vanilla wow did it did it didn't though like a classic came out and it was good and then a lot of people moved over they played retail they're playing classic i think a lot of people play both yep classic versus retail becoming increasingly disillusioned of the world of warcraft and blizzard in their current state it killed both of them yet oh free money players were leaving blizzard had sought to recover financially through an increased focus and impact of their cash shop and against all assurances previously made shortly after their merger with activision they would finally turn the corner in december of 2013 and officially implemented the cash shop in game and along with it came the most impactful service to date the level boost i would disagree with that i think the faction boost was much more the faction change was much more impactful on the game but in a way that people don't realize because they don't really see it i think the faction uh faction transfer was way bigger uh the thing is like the level boost most people see like you don't might not remember this right but like back in misopandaria i never leveled any of my characters there was like this one like thunderdome area in kunwai summit that you would just pay somebody to kill the elites there and you would tag them and they would kill them you get full experience and you'd level the 90 in like three hours see people actually don't remember what really happened i do and that's what we did so this wasn't some kind of crazy fucking thing this was just that the uh they added it and they made it legitimate yeah that's what it was reckful did it yeah of course i mean we all fucking did it man absolutely transfers really pain to fix a problem that's in the game absolutely yep leveling was now skippable as players could pay sixty dollars to immediately be fast tracked to the maximum level and jump right into the end game by and large the most impactful page service at that point here what was at one point seen as a cornerstone of mmo design was now skippable through an officially endorsed service the consequence and investment of picking a class investing time into it leveling it and learning it were thrown away sacrificed like many other features for convenience accessibility and short-term financial gain i thought this was bad for the game for a reason it's completely separate from that i've every character that i've boosted i have enjoyed that character less than characters that i didn't boost because i didn't get a chance to understand how the game played i i never really understood like how the class played so like you get a 90 boost and like you're playing this character you have no idea what your buttons do you're constantly overwhelmed you're in a a consistent state of sensory overload holy shit damaging its already crippled rpg design the backlash was immediate but little did players know it was just the beginning and the standards of paid advantage in the game would sink lower and lower in the coming years it only gets better boys two things remained constant a decrease in subscriber count and stagnation the final major patch of the expansion i had released in september of the previous year 2013 and other than the addition of the level boost the game saw no updates until the warlords of draenor pre-patch it was such a cock of a raid tier that they had to turn it into two fucking seasons for pvp they they had grievous gladiator season and then after that they had fucking prideful gladiator season because it took so fucking long and then in wad it happened again we had wild gladiator and then warmongering gladiator they were both inside of the same tier set in october of twenty just like nine point two astounding gap of thirteen months in the game's development this is the longest drought yet yeah just like we're right now fled the game as the mists of pandaria failed to retain the migrating player base oh november came and with it the launch of the warlords of draenor expansion so if you want to understand how the release of warwick's draenor was take a paper ball uh might put lighter fluid all over it and then set it on fire that's what it was that was it despite the game's trouble you couldn't play the game combination 14-hour cube led to a rather successful expansion yeah over three point three million players had a big dick in hand ready to step through the dark portal for a second it went up to 10 million subs skyrocketed to 10.5 million yeah highest it had been since the mists of pandaria and it holds the record of the largest surge in subscribers though unfortunately for blizzard history would repeat itself in more ways than once yeah because once again they had failed to retain the spoon as problems soon arose after launch oh that's nice every fucking server that i even play on is offline time to play a new server oh yeah that looks like mine aren't the only ones yeah they come under a ddos attack as their servers were flooded with artificial traffic until they shut down from the strain it's kind of crazy to think about it because uh i remember this is whenever i started making content i started making my youtube videos i i had first started i was making like videos off and on and miss the pandaria and then wad came out and the beta for wod came out and i played the shit out of it like i was i made so many fucking videos and like that was the asman gold channel and fucking everything man it was great this would go on for several days as law enforcement investigated into them increasingly frustrated as the game remained to be mostly unplayable the culprits were eventually stopped damage had been done and the game experienced its worst launch since its initial release in 2004. yes once the issue subsided players were met with what is now widely considered to be one of the worst expansions in the game's history was the biggest main feature of the expansion the garrison system isolated players in their own instance where they can i remember i remember they added trade chat to the garrison and i was i was on the forums i think you'll probably find this whenever i went and i said back then i said this is not good nobody's going to leave their garrison and people was like oh no no i said yeah and they said no and then blizzard did it and i was right and they were wrong so fuck them followers start an herb garden oh my god that made me mad and even use the auction house with the correct buildings although convenient it served as yet another future to alienate an already fractured community from each other oh my god like y'all don't remember this but like that maybe you do but like you had to level up your followers because the missions would give you mythic level raid gear like as soon as you unlocked it you would get mythic level raid gear out of a box every week problem made worse of subscribers that was yet to come just as how the expansion broke subscription records on launch it also broke records for lost subscriptions shortly after as players well the day this came out i made a youtube video about it and i remember i mauled it out so fucking hard that it was on the front page of reddit like this isn't like 2014 or something and it was like that front page like this video got so many fucking views it was a big deal no you didn't yeah i fucking did go back and watch it it's a little enjoyment from what was eventually ousted as an unfinished expansion as many of the features previously teased would be left on the cutting room floor including new systems two major cities battlegrounds another zone and even an entire raid tier to name just a few that was the thing is like everybody wanted i think this is what was so frustrating about it it's like so many people wanted the game to be good and it just fucking wasn't back then like it was so frustrating for people because of that it was awful because everybody thought that like okay this is gonna be it they're gonna bring everything back it's gonna be the same as it used to be and it just did not fucking happen man it was awful and between patches would grow even larger and the patches themselves delivered less content the expansion held a total of just three major raids throughout its entirety with every expansion proceeding having at least four the combined effect of the instance it's like the raid content like people don't realize how bad wod really was like wad was absolutely legitimately fucking garbage it was one of the worst raid tiers like it was worst experience it was the worst expansion ever i'm trying to find this video i'm not really sure exactly where it is uh it's one of these here but like yeah these are all my videos seven years ago looking at gold farming spots realistically uh it's one of these here and it's like me just oh there it is yep here we go let's watch three seconds of this what's up y'all it's me it's your boy asmr gold and today we're going to talk about the fact that in the first quarter of 2015 world of warcraft has lost 2.9 million subscribers and so just to put that into perspective for everyone here that means that in a three-month period they've lost over one-fourth of their entire subscriber population you know the only real question i have to ask here is is anyone really surprised is anyone really surprised whenever people decide that they're not going to pay money to play farmville anymore is anyone really surprised when people get tired of running the same treadmill on four different difficulties is anyone really surprised that people get burnt out of an mmo that you don't even need to interact with another player in order to kill the last boss of the game it is honestly is a huge disappointment to me it's a huge disappointment to a lot of other people like if you go twitch tv look look guys if you want a comparison here runescape has more viewers than world of warcraft okay so yeah i wasn't happy about it i wasn't fucking happy about it yep that's right i was a viewer count andy there you go persons and players flocking away made the new world seem dead and so more and more that went on for 17 minutes each other in an attempt to bring life back into the dying world as subscriptions plummeted to an all-time low since its initial rise in vanilla at 5.5 million it was announced shortly after that they would no longer report subscription numbers stating that they are better indicated solved business performance the message was clear where they had lost revenue and subscriptions they gained several times over via the paid level boost no longer tied to a healthy player base ain't that just a little bit of something and although looked at today has an embarrassing period in the game's history financially it lifted the developer to new heights combined with other services the level boost and the warlords of draenor have played a large role in activision blizzard's best financial quarter to date this was this was bobby's right this was the rise of bobby you have to understand that like you see all these other characters imagine bobby is the puppet master behind everything you know he's got you know instead of eyes he's got dollar signs instead of pupils you know he's just fucking moving everybody around and everything yeah that's right the influence of the cash shop now fully realized it would be taken a step further in march of 2015 with the addition of the wow token where players could exchange real money in-game gold or on the other hand use gold to purchase a token to pay for the subscription fee or converted into a balance only spendable on blizzard products regardless of the method it would prove to be a massive commercial success huge success people love buying gold why not let them buy gold activision blizzard earning them record profits during record low subscriptions a long time had passed since the cash shop's initial rise in 2008 those who warned of the dangerous path that world of warcraft was set on as other predictions unfold slowly over the course of several years at this point in the game's history it was possible to buy levels it was possible to buy currency and with this currency you could buy items and even services from other players such as raid or arena carries and a list of things that you couldn't buy was now far shorter than the list of things that you could buy it was at this point that the game was deemed by many to get paid to win as real life purchases now had a clear and heavy impact on the power levels between different players behavior the wow token was was whenever the game was paid to win the game was not pay to win before the wow token the game was pay to win after the wow token you could argue that boosting is pay to win i think any reasonable person would say getting to max level in an mmo nowadays is not winning right it's just not wow token was paid away previously warranted i'll have to find my video about that officially endorsed and advertised and any semblance of integrity the game had left was abandoned yeah at this point subscriptions were no longer being reported morale of the game's future continued to decline [Music] it was so bad back then like you guys have no idea how fucking bad it was mike wadd was by far the worst the game has ever been and i find it to be so ridiculous that people even think that bfa was even remotely close wad was the pits of oblivion in august of the same year at the gamescom convention the next expansion legion would be announced the long-lost broken isles were discovered by the way i i predicted that i can go back in my other video predicting that it was going to be the legion you know i mean it is nice and the orc warlock gulban unleashed a second burning crusade upon azeroth it would feature a new class the demon hunter among many supporting systems such as powerful this was fucking crazy that players could obtain and level up as an additional form of character progression each class would have a story driven order hall campaign quest line a new legendary system would be added where for most activities in the game players had a small chance to obtain powerful legends oh wow to further enhance their character well that's exactly what it was this is the perfect clip right here getting suffuse and then somebody types lol there it is because you knew every single time i remember where was the the clip of zack oh my god bro like let me see if i can find this real quick oh my god i don't know where it is i'll find another time i remember zach we were doing like nighthold and he got the helmet for hunters the feign death helmet and he immediately was like and he threw himself on the ground behind his fucking pc no not zach rawr mickel reevy yeah yeah dubs would be replaced with world quests offering a greater variety in daily activities which had become standard for several years and in the mythic plus system in infinitely scaling times challenge mode to bring dungeons back once more as a focus of end game content dude mythic plus was actually after the warlord this shit was so funny like i'm sorry but like this shit was fucking hilarious like whenever they had like the uh what was it called ekihomo and it showed like all the different characters or all the different uh servers wow it was amazing it's a draenor the confidence of the players was at an all-time low and many would hope that legion would be the expansion to the demons numbers were no longer being reported it had tied the release day sales records set by cataclysm several years prior selling a total of 3.3 million copies on release big day quarterly investor reports would also provide promising data on the overall reception of the legion expansion suggesting higher play time per player mostly due to the success of its major features plus expansion as a whole proved to be a much needed recovery the order halls being public locations that place also it was like a focus on like core wow lore you know you've got like varian you've got illidan you've got fucking malfurion you've got taranda you've got jaina you've got all of those characters and everything like that like that's what it was man it was great time stamp what's this video oh yeah yep there we go here we go let's see this there it is and there he goes [Music] we're gonna like yep there it is that was the uh those were the good days right that was it here we go they're shared served as the base of options silver hand again unlike the previous garrison system didn't harm it that's exactly what paladins wanted world quests compared to the old daily hubs offered much needed varieties daily activities and mythic plus high activity as players enjoyed the timed ever-increasing challenge that they provided most of its features were received well and with a solid rating scene to support it it's generally looked back at favorably yeah even the most embittered fans with its criticisms primarily being drawn from my fourth part of the legendaries due to their low drop chance and high impact on gameplay would be a source of frustration so much so that they would receive a re-haul uh i'll keep in mind that on the announcement of legion blizzard said you were able to target the legendaries they said you would be able to target them and they fucking lied into the expansion where players could purchase specific pieces with a new currency and similarly the forging system also contributed to this atmosphere of luck by holding early look at that bro like 880. like that's fucking insane look at that eye level oh my god like this was nuts like i remember my mom she got a ring in the first tier that was like a it was like an 895 or an 890 it was like basically the item level cap out of a world quest it was like a plus 65 titan forge and i was like what the fuck how'd you get that it's just like oh no i just did the quest and it gave me this ring is it good it's got a lot of stats look at the number on it's a lot and i'm like yeah it's fucking good use it i was so pissed the forging system also contributed to this atmosphere of luck by holding too much power and character progression at this point it was called titan forging yeah at a much larger eye level range compared to the more tame thunder forging first introduced in pandaria items could roll up to 60 eye levels higher than that of their base which made it possible to obtain mythic rating quality gear from even the most mundane activities that's right world of warcraft and mmos in general already have a high amount of luck tied to progression they sure do added layer of needing the right piece to drop and for that piece to tighten forge shifted the reward structure further from time investment to blind lock and combined with the legendary system many players would liken the expansion to a slot machine oh my god please show it please show the overall legitimacy god damn it well it was meant with troubling news from within senior vice president of story and franchise development chris metzen who had been with the company for 23 years had announced his retirement studying burnout panic attacks and the desire to spend more time with his family as the primary reasons for the decision what a casual having been one of the most i didn't blame him that's a smart guy like he saw where things were going and he was like nope i'm done with this shit this is too much man too fucking much it was weird whenever chris metzen retired right because like i remember i went back and i looked at like all my warcraft 2 books and everything like he did a lot of the drawings for those like man this guy was here the whole time man public facing figures and a primary visionary for the world of warcraft and the characters who inhabited it he was the guy tremendous loss with fans and co-workers alike commenting on his influence on the franchise scraper center along with this newfound growth of legion the private server community had also been thriving and in 2016 it was larger than it had ever been at that point with most congregating to a server named nestelrius so many goddamn people yep this is literally the surface been up for about people were streaming nostalrius on twitch even like nobody gave a fuck you know who else was streaming nostalrius payo payo was streaming private servers on twitch and i followed peyo in like 2013 2014 like straight up and i was like this guy is an idiot but at least i get to watch vanilla wow soda and s fan s fan was doing it on youtube soda did it as well yep that's right minutes and people are just entering and alex don't forget about alex over 130 000 active players worldwide and impressive oh my god that users had to seek out on their own their success proved to be their downfall however as in april of 2016 and blizzard had sent cease and desist letters for those responsible for running the server threatening legal action if they refuse to shut it down i personally had a private investigator hired to track me down by a legal firm we watched this whenever it came out he called numerous people in my life including my employer my owner of my company to confirm information about me so he could serve me papers at 10 pm on a wednesday night slamming and knocking on the door freaking the crap out of my wife and waking up my baby daughter in the next room they would comply shortly after as tens of thousands of players logged in one last time to say farewell to the community that they had built what the fuck yeah see they don't do that shit in texas i can't tell you that down although completely within blizzard's rights legally naturally sparked outrage among the private server community a petition was created for an officially developed blizzard legacy server and it would reach nearly 300 000 signatures in the span of two weeks bro i remember i got a tooth pulled the day that this happened and it was the day before this happened and i was like fuck i'm gonna make a video about this and talk about this right now and i just took like a painkiller and i fucking recorded the video although it didn't provide immediate results much like the infamous you think you do but you don't quote me it would prove to be a critical moment in classics history massive man then soda made the video and then i made the video and then fucking like dude everybody started making videos like and alex made the video [Music] it was crazy the next expansion would be jontron yeah 2017 and players learned of the battle for azeroth having thwarted the second burning crusade this was my first voice turned their attention on each other and would stage an all-out war over a new resource called azerite bro i remember uh so like basically we got invited to uh to to blizzcon by blizzard like blizzard actually like they paid for us to go out there and like everything they put us in a hotel like a whole fucking thing because we actually did all crafters like me uh haunted uh rich and we had jari on the show too and uh the four of us went out to uh to to fucking california and they told us but i remember like the guy from blizzard sat us down and he told us what was gonna happen and i remember the day that he said the classic wow was gonna come out like he was right there i just fucking ran around the hotel i was so fucking happy man i was like holy shit it's actually gonna happen because to be honest i thought it just was over i thought it was over yeah yeah yeah that was the year that annie and i were matching murloc outfits that's right that's that's exactly right this resource would serve as a way i never signed the nda either i never signed the nda because it went to my email and i never checked my email and like they were like ah fuck it'll be fine whatever and to be fair i didn't tell anybody he says the system had been set up similarly to the previously successful artifact system and advertised increased customization and player agency allowing them to tailor their characters to suit their gameplay style you might find it and azerite was a cool idea power that makes you think twice about using a talent that you've previously written off and you will basically find the foundations that reinforce your favorite ways yeah beyond your character one of the main methods of obtaining this resource were through island expeditions where you have three players could fight against another team of players or ai for azerite dude island expedition pvp island expeditions were so cool man and like blizzard was just like yeah yeah never mind only throughout the island it was so cool i loved the selection placement and quests serving as the primary means of attempting to add replayability and longevity too they tried is something that we're calling dynamic replayability every time you come to this space the puzzle is different the creatures are in different locations there are additional gameplay elements what scattered throughout the world and it's always a little bit different warfronts were a new feature which were reminiscent of the original strategy games that was based off of in here you would battle for resources and construct and upgrade buildings and send off troops oh my god of defeating the enemy commander dude i was so hyped man i was unironically bat-chesting i was like what they're adding in warcraft too oh my god those are the fucking this is so cool i was so excited for warfronts man jesus wouldn't be the only announcement the world of warcraft team had though yes and i want to talk about ice cream i recorded this ice cream is great because i knew it was coming ice cream is one of my favorite desserts personally i love chocolate and i love cookies and cream cookies and cream is actually my all-time favorite dessert [Applause] but i stan i understand that for some of you [Applause] your favorite flavor is vanilla this shit was fucking ridiculous bro for years they had claimed previous versions of the game was impossible world of warcraft classic would be unveiled combining the updated legion client with old data displays thanks backup of a backup held onto by an ex-employee a small team dedicated their efforts in providing a home for the ever-growing population of vanilla fans in place of the one that they had not so long ago taken away details of development would follow shortly after with a philosophy of changing as little of the game as possible in an effort the only thing i had to feel bad for omar for is having to listen to s fan fucking dude s-fed would try to get a hold of the classic devs all the time i'd be like listen so paladins they don't really work this way and so what what they really need is so like all right so in patch 1.13 so there's a change but then it got reverted in 1.14 and so like what really paladins need to have in order for them to be good and like oh my fucking god to most accurately recreate the experience as it was from 2004 to 2007 including a phasing schedule they're originally going to do board and as requested by the player base the absence of many features such as the dungeon finder looking for raid mode and the end game cash shop to name just a few combined with legion's recent success the outlook of the game was looking more prominent it was really good before the battle for azeroth it was looking really right in august of 2018 selling 3.4 million copies on its first day breaking the record initially set by cataclysm in 2010 however when the honeymoon phase ended the faults of the expansion started to become clear the azerite armor system which was said to hold major traits that altered how classes played instead were a series of incidental procs that rarely did anything other than increased damage done healing throughput and damage mitigation with some being just base stat increases so i've gotten absorbed on my azurite gear and then my weapon has on proc absorb and then so my gloves if i have them proc i haven't absorbed and i also got a belt that every two minutes i can use it and it gives me an absorb and also uh my charge and i have a leech too so it heals me and uh basically every arena game takes 18 minutes and i lose that was fucking ridiculous uh p stickman 25 get the subs thanks a lot and by the way that was not a joke like that literally was what it was like whenever crucible came out weapon was the hallo bird gloves from first boss belt from i think first boss two yeah that wasn't a meme you might find a power that makes you think twice about using a talent that you'd previously written that was crazy and you will certainly find combinations your favorite way to play your character i love math not at all as gameplay altering as advertised wow and despite bfa being centered around a faction war warframes were exclusively a pve game mode that were also nearly impossible to lose with the only recorded losses resulting from the entire that was me that's whatever i fucking remember we got everybody together to lose the war front is that who i think it is right here is that spur gord who i know is in chat right now no it's not oh i thought it was never mind okay i thought yeah there were a lot of people like this is this is back in the day man look how much different i look i look way different i think it's because my beard maybe my hair too waiting within the base until they were overwhelmed wow i'm screenshotting this due to this lack of challenge they were seen to be more of a chore than anything else and as for island expeditions saw little replayability in the randomized selection of enemies and behind the bells and whistles was a simple and repetitive truth rush to get the required amount of azerite before the enemy team does and as a result the game mode would become very repetitive very quickly it sure would also come under heavy criticism the whole expansion would have a heavy focus on sylvanas windrunner the leader of the forsaken of the horde and throughout bfa's two-year run she would face many major lore characters and even entire armies outwitting them at every turn or dispatching them with ease in combat the decision she made often came with no reasonable explanation or logic leaving the player base in the dark for the entirety of the expansion well we're still in the dark really i mean it still doesn't really make sense yeah was what morally gray sylvanas was really cool man like she was actually one of the better characters in like cataclysm and shit she was great i don't know what happened and many would liken her to a mary sue a fiction archetype who is inexplicably free of any and all weakness such oh no any crystalians oh my god traits are also common through self-inserts which there was also evidence of as a writer for blizzard would roleplay as a major character nathanos blightcaller on twitter the narrative structure remained ambiguous throughout the entirety of the expansion with most criticism being made towards the ending as was custom with the final boss of an expansion since the wrath of the lich king those were treated with the finale cut scene a few minutes and we're fully voice acted animation presentations though for the battle for azeroth the old god nazath would be the finale with years of anticipation building up as his existence was referenced several times up to the final patch of the expansion yeah and where players expected a similar voice acted dialogue between the major lore characters and their thoughts on defeating a god they were instead met with the same footage i just droned over in a monotone manner the feedback was immediate and clear and shortly after its premiere the video would be unlisted as blizzard tried to hide the blundered finish to a blunder of an expansion god oh no come on guys let's go play video games the initial ways of excitement quickly soured as all three major systems of the expansion fell short of their goals they would later be addressed in major patches though players would have to wait nearly a year follower initial release in response monthly active users would start taking a dive and in an attempt to bolster engagement metrics the expansion would aim to rely on what many described to be an excessive amount of activities plus 100 depression weekly timers by the end of the expansion's lifespan bro i actually have i know y'all let me see if i can show you all this uh this is from i started this back in the day let's see can i get this to work yeah one sec so that right there i have a list mirrors famous tier guard sound like i actually have a whole list of everything that i had to do and i started that back in uh back in fucking in bfa i wrote everything down where's gmod oh that i don't need to write that down i don't forget it diligent farming that's right i remember this actually this one came from his video this would be the full list many would comment that the entire game at this point had devolved into a list of chores and to keep players in a gerbil-like routine of going down a checklist for their daily session instead of feeling rewarded for their play time and dedication many would feel punished for missing sessions and questioned their reasons for playing to begin with and just two months after release blizzard would suffer another devastating departure as co-founder mike morheim announced that he was stepping down as company president promoting then executive producer jaylen brown all black hair by the way just a little bit of gray from classic wow everything's pretty much fine you know yeah i got some rude comments but it is what it is right and it just went downhill from there back to take his place more troubling still these people weren't quitting game development they were quitting blizzard later in 2020 morheim would announce a new company dreamhaven messages i got a response back and secret door of which many former members of blizzard would be employed in its announcement they would stress that the goal of the company would be to prioritize product quality and player experience overshoot financial pressures a development mindset that many fans say activision blizzard had abandoned long ago yeah chris metzen would later found warchief gaming which is dedicated to developing worlds and tabletop experiences and outside of world of warcraft the former hearthstone director would launch the game bro this guy was like the entire soul of hearthstone like i i didn't i never played hearthstone but every single time that i saw him do something about hearthstone it totally made me want to play he was fucking great man go second dinner x starcraft 2 developers would join frost giant and work towards developing a new rts and lightforged game was opened by former blizzard engineer matt zimbari and would later partner with dreamhaven morheim would be just one of many longtime talent leaving the company in recent years and his departure would be instrumental in what would later be known as brain train afflicting the developer slowly but surely the people who made blizzard what they were were departing this rash of departures would be downplayed as ordinary for the world of game development and that the games were more about the team rather than individual members but internally employees shared a different story rather that these people were irreplaceable mentors and that they drew inspiration from each other and that each departure would be accompanied by a negative cascading effect to those left behind and just months later another co-founder oh yeah i forgot about this guy because we never hear about just alan adam has the last co-founder standing development with classic was progressing steadily and a release date for the summer of 2019 was announced a new game within the warcraft franchise was also revealed warcraft 3 reforged would advertise fully remodeled characters and animations as well as retuned maps and campaigns in this modern day remaster as i said does it strike anybody else as not a coincidence that the moment that warcraft 3 reforged came out and it was really bad the entire wow community stopped asking for reforging you never hear about people wanting reforging anymore do you yeah because warcraft 3 got that we don't want that again i know with the set release year of 2019 this would later be delayed to january 2020 in an official post exciting delays in development yeah people malled a high quality standard that the player base held them to though not pertaining to the world of warcraft directly but would transpire with the development of warcraft 3 and other titles revealed the priorities and development practices oh my god that's bad standard of how they would treat their community across all franchises wow world of warcraft included this was also the blizzcon 2.6 that was like my gpa in freshman year was met with a less than desirable reception [Music] i feel so bad for i was was that wyatt chang like i feel so bad for that dude man because it's just like like he knows you know what i mean like he knows like it's just like fuck i mean because they they couldn't announce diablo 4 yet and he's just stuck there you know like fuck he's the fall guy yeah do you guys not have phones yeah you guys all have identified well that's a story for another time to make matters worse the following years although financially successful would prove to be the most damaging to their reputation for reaching historic revenue earnings treatment of their employees would become the focus of negative press in february of 2019 that's when they fired tayden he fired many without warning yeah we're left crying in the parking lot bro i remember like i remember what it was but like i think they didn't even know it was gonna happen until they just came in that day and they were just like hey so by the way uh you're done it was awful man i felt i felt so bad like it's it's like i know company can do that right i'm not get that right but it still sucks this is a trend that would continue through the following years of record-breaking profits with massive layoffs and multi-million dollar ceo bonuses following shortly after in one instance yeah bobby's 200 million dollar bonus that they just got fired from working on on their way out hey here's some overwatch skins you're fired by the way it was really kind of impressive you know like they laid them off giving them nine days average and two hundred dollars in battle net balance get that is just incredible wow 200 in battle net balance and in other cases the amount of people fired would be underreported combined with the poor reception of the battle for azeroth their reputation had quickly started 200 million community first industries thanks bobby to one operated on greed predatory business practices and the cold treatment of their employees and even their player base little did everyone know though the worst was yet to come oh oh my god bro since 2008 they had hosted an esports event called the arena world championship who was it that put their neck out there to fucking put this information out there i think it was snuts right wasn't it's nuts to put his fucking neck out there yeah i remember that and then i brought that shit up and everybody was like holy shit because like that nobody was gonna know about this so basically oh he'll explain it they arena world championship wow or awc where high-end competitive players would face off in a tournament style competition of the game's arena mode for cash prizes ranging from 120 000 since its inception in 2008 to 280 000 in 2018 amazing 2019 however they had announced a special campaign where players would be able to contribute to the ever-growing prize pool two new foreign cash shop and to encourage sales 25 of the proceeds would contribute towards the prize pool of both the arena world championship and also the mythic dungeon international stating that the support of the players would help take the wow esports scene to the next level the next level and the thing is you know what was so sad about that was the fact that like so cdu me like all the pvp streamers push this they said you know listen like if you want to support like the whole pvp scene buy this and you know like you can support us and like i even defended 25 because that was the same percentage that dota took whenever uh they use part of the money that they got from whatever the fuck they they sell regularly for the prize pool so i defended this i did pvp streamers oh i wasn't a pvp streamer no but like i mean like vinrookie uh fucking like uh sea doo zico you know all the normal guys right the compendium because that's what they're that's what their percentage was so i'm like yeah this is industry standard it's low but this is what they usually do i'm just glad they're doing something right so i actually defended this shit they also assured that a minimum price pool of 500 000 would be offered split up evenly between the two events considering that all announcements used verbage such as help or contribute playerbase had assumed that this 500 000 prize pool would be funded by blizzard as they had done for a decade prior of course and that the proceeds of the toy sales would well contribute to the total why would anybody think that why would anybody think that this would possibly happen help a billion dollar company i have no problem with a player funded a crowdfunded prize pool for like a little fucking bullshit toy like i think that's totally fine almost all games do this it's not a big deal stated by after the campaign had concluded though fans were dismayed to learn that they didn't help nor contribute as blizzard pocketed what they would usually put up and put the responsibility on funding the entirety of the prize pool on the player base as confirmed by an awc participant participants nuts yes so let's rephrase holy shit look who it is i remember this so wasn't i in brd here i think yeah people gave blizzard so much money blizzard decided to give themselves even more right so they collected around 2.6 million dollars give or take and instead of adding prize money from themselves they just pocketed two million and decided to just use the money that the community gave us and pay for their tournament [Music] both competitors and viewers expressed their anger stating that they had felt deceived and that the good nature of those wishing to support the esports community of blizzard were taken advantage of blizzard would never acknowledge the controversy they're so stupid for this they're so stupid because they could have done this every year and made a free two million dollars all it would have costed them is five hundred thousand dollars to make a free two million dollars every year but now they can't do it again because nobody trusts them they're just stupid like that's all there is to it they're just straight fucking stupid like i don't understand why this happened this was the most unnecessary like uh breaking of trust that blizzard has ever done and the prize pools were funded solely by the crowdfunding campaign and despite the self-proclaimed success in raising the funds crowdfunding such as this would not be repeated for future tournaments exactly presumably due to the intense backlash that they really it hurt the players it hurt the community it hurt blizzard it hurt literally everyone no it was a literal zero person wins scenario it didn't help out no it didn't help bobby like i i bet i i bet if i explained this to bobby he would say yeah we probably fucked up there i can guarantee you do you honestly think that bob like bobby uh he doesn't do you really think that he would get in the way of his own money no of course not yeah but but you know i i genuinely believe that i genuinely believe that if i explained it to bobby and i said this is what happened and like people feel this way bobby like yeah i think that's fucked up yeah i actually think he would he probably had no idea about it [Music] oh this was it world of warcraft wasn't their only franchise that would be at the center of controversy no it just kept getting better division would attract the attention of national media here's a story which just won't go away activision blizzard it has suspended a gamer and taken his prize money away because he made comments supporting hong kong protesters the protests in hong kong were at their climax at this point having been a british colony until 1997 when sovereignty of the territory was returned to china hong kong would retain a separate legal and economic system with basic human rights safeguarded in contrast to other cities in china which are heavily governed by the authoritarian central government everybody is a number 2019 a bill would be proposed that would allow extraditions of fugitives to mainland china which infringed on these rare freedoms and due to china's opaque legal system would allow the prosecution of citizens for political purposes yeah citizens took marches and protests which quickly turned violent after they were fired upon with tear gas rubber bullets pepper spray and even live rounds as the situation spiraled out of control of course in october of the same year a tournament competitor jung naiwan or blitz chung after a victory took out a face mask similar to those being worn by the hong kong protesters and voiced his support to them quoted liberate hong kong the revolution of our times the feed was quickly cut and the following day blizzard announced that blitzchang had been banned from competing further in the tournament the two guys that were uh hosting it also got banned in addition to revoking the prize money that he had won up until that point totaling ten thousand dollars additionally he would be banned from competing for a full year yeah and the two casters interviewing blitzchang at the time would also be fired as i can understand why they like here's the thing right it's like i understand why blizzard did it but they went above and beyond by like taking away the guys money and everything like like they definitely did like yeah it's like they have to send a message i think that really if like any other company besides blizzard did this nobody would have really cared but it's because blizzard made a lot of statements on social issues over and over and over that like this is happening like at the same time with question marks okay so so basically here's here's like what i'm saying right it's like it was against the rules for you to talk about political issues uh on on the broadcast right and on top of that putting the putting the company and effectively like hundreds of people's jobs at risk by losing uh access to selling a product in china is this truly the morally right thing to do for the company i think you can make an argument that it's not and so i can see why they would make that decision on a pragmatic level yeah like and i can understand people say yes yes yes sure you can say yes i understand you guys say yes but i guarantee you if it was your mom or your dad who lost their job and now you're fucking homeless because of it you're going to think about it a little bit differently so yes these this it's always it's always people are always able to ask somebody else to take a moral stand and make a massive sacrifice because they're completely separated from the problem but i i don't think that this is what i i think it's it's so it's so presumptuous to think that's going to happen yeah it's easy to talk like oh this is what they should have done no it it was not a completely morally black and white situation it was absolutely not no i i yeah it's virtue signaling it's a hundred fucking percent virtue signaling exactly i'd follow the money every day yeah who asked you you're here not at my expense though yeah or i bring the subject up in the first place would be the right thing about banning the player i don't know if they did the right thing i think that they they over committed on punishing him does that make sense uh why is this any different than companies standing up for ukraine now um well it's very simple it's because companies don't stand to lose money for standing up for ukraine it's literally that simple they don't stand to lose money like china is a massive fucking market do you think blizzard is gonna lose like billions of dollars in revenue over being able to give somebody a platform to spread a political message do you think they're gonna do that no they're not gonna do that there's millions there's thousands about a thousand people that work at the company yeah exactly like yeah it's it's massive russian still can't pay for wow subs yeah well russia's a lot smaller than china china is fucking huge i understand that there's some people that uh some people that don't like this opinion because they feel like it's a uh you know it's like it's i'm not i'm not treating it as important right it's like oh well you know you should do the right thing no i i think yeah you should try to do the right thing but i think it's always easier to tell somebody else to do the right thing than to do it yourself activision blizzard would swiftly come under heavy criticism as many saw morality cast aside for vested financial interest yes exactly and i remember people got so mad at me because i said what i just said the day this happened imagine how mad everybody was people were fucking furious that i said this and i said very clearly i said no one's gonna give a fuck about this next expansion's gonna come out people are gonna go back to playing the game and they'll be completely forgotten about and by the time that blizzcon comes around there's going to be a handful of protesters and no one's going to care and i said that people got so fucking mad and i was right another team american university would add their voices to the protest which was also quickly censored by blizzard and that is game wpi with the win the winners similar to blitzchang they would also be banned from competing in future tournaments yup this time for six months shortly after then president j alan brack released a statement saying that the penalties were not appropriate and that blitz chung's winnings would be reinstated to him and that his ban would be reduced to six months down from 12 and also state that their business dealings with china had no influence on the initial penalties why even why even say that like i don't understand like why even say that like why because like it's such obvious bullshit like i mean that this is clearly not true why go a step farther to assert a lie why not just say yeah we're gonna undo this it is what it is right that's it could open up the following blizzcon with an apology to the mishandling of the situation we don't know that well he never said what situation maybe he was talking about another situation mad season he never said what situation he said he just said we messed up what did they mess up on i don't know their actions would speak louder than words are going to matter more than any of these words a phrase that the blizzard community would quickly become very familiar with that's right blizzcon the new expansion for world of warcraft would also be revealed players would enter the shadows i remember watching joint factions called covenants similar to the order halls in legion these would serve as a base of operations for players to conduct their campaign and also gain unique abilities and perks oh yeah i got killed by that is the power of tour guest a randomized 1-3 player dungeon crawl with powerful affixes to power up their characters and upon completion and gain the ability to craft legendary articles similar in function to those of the legion expansion oh yeah following the poor reception of the battle for azeroth many more would look at the reveal through a more critical lens well i think everybody was really positive about uh shadowlands whenever it first got announced besides the covenants people thought the idea behind it was cool like i remember like that's what a lot of the sentiment was from like at least my community like yeah there are people that didn't like it but i felt like the overwhelming majority of people were like yeah this is cool all right fine though their current projects were met with mixed reactions world warcraft classic had seen its release in august of 2019 to surprising success initially holding only a handful of servers it was quickly overwhelmed and new servers were created to hold the surprising amount of people that had longed for the azeroth of years long past upon launch interest was so underestimated that queue times would balloon up to several hours and even months following the release for some of the highest it was insane bro like i had to download a program to where i could log in on my phone so i i had to remote desktop on my phone to avoid the cues effects of the game would age well such as a renewed sense of community and a heavy focus on traditional rpg elements and other aspects such as assault and arcade grading scene and an eventual stagnation of content would remain to be problem areas within the game as well as botting because the game grew in popularity so too did third party websites spotting we love items or services in exchange for real money a practice that's against the game's terms of service these sites oftentimes oh what are they trying to cockblock us for come on and blizzard would be ineffective in controlling them throughout the duration of classic even though they were relatively easy to spot by the players as displayed many times by content creators within the community i found a warrior mob grinding in scenarios having a bit of trouble getting i love watching these videos because i literally remember reacting to them i watched this exact fucking video to his target cheating had always been and continues to be an area where blizzard would perform poorly yeah version of the game but due to the more fragile nature of the economy in world of warcraft classic and it's a community it would have greater negative consequences it was great due to its traditional design and the absence of what many now deemed to be an overly intrusive cash shop it proved to hold the attention of a wide player base consistently through its year and a half run though not every re-release was to be met with the same success uh-oh burning crusade oh in the following january though delayed as they ensured to maintain a high quality standard it was universally men with negative reviews as players saw little polish with the reasons for missing features from the original consistent crashes the latter of these issues would take the spotlight and the competitive scene shortly after in their very first major tournament in a quarterfinal match between two top players moon and thor zane a crash occurred at a key moment the score was 1-1 and thor zane seemed to be on track to take the win but suffered a disconnect mid-match thousand smells blood in the water he's going in for the kill here we have banished ready mountain king was a little hurt this is all buying time for the towers we have no breath of fire by the way it is drunken haze so big mischief wait why'd they stop attacking wait what disconnect this fight was the most important one in this game yet the match would then just started despite thor saints advantage and he would once again retake control of the rematch and once again suffered a disconnect it looks like another drop man man that is crazy i didn't know what happened twice holy shit the two time just happens oh wow that's thousand i think i kind of like his position here in this game again yeah this is so frustrating the match would be replayed for a third time and moon having adapted to thor's name strategy at this point was the one to take the lead and eliminated thor zane resulting in the forfeiture of the large prize pool he surely would have won twice though they are the most like i would have like if i was blizzard what what they should have done is they should have just said listen you guys are gonna play a show match it doesn't matter who wins you're both getting the maximum prize money we're dumb like that's it yeah you're gonna do a rematch but the outcome doesn't really matter like that was it that would have been that was the solution that should have occurred it's impactful as they happen during a quarter-final match and like what's so crazy about this is like the amount of money that that costs is like nothing i mean like you have to understand like these guys have like million and billion dollar budgets like i we're talking about like what like a fucking 50 000 who gives a shit this would not be the only disconnects to occur in the tournament as competitors in lower level brackets would also become victim to random drops at key moments later an internal investigation would reveal that they knowingly released the game in an unfinished state unwilling to delay it for a second time yeah in fear of losing the pre-orders they had already amassed yeah you've got to get those pre-orders the entire project was hamstrung by a low budget due to its low potential for being a destroyer for the company internal sources would also share their struggles with exhaustion anxiety and depression for more than a year and at their warnings of the game's unfinished state being largely ignored in order to make the tight release schedule negative reviews continued at a steady pace bro like that's just like i'm gonna be honest that does not look like arthas like i think back and it's like what's arthas like that's not arthas bro like that's that's some other dude funds his players were less than impressed at level of of received compared to what was promised the classic game teams would be shut down a new team now in their place and in a bit of irony in a bloomberg interview a blizzard spokesperson repeated the same failed promise made by brac a few months prior that their work in actions would speak louder than words yeah a delay was also announced with shadowlands this time from october to december once more citing that extra polish is needed before a release would be made and i remember whenever that happened i was actually so happy it was during an all craft that they announced that and we were so happy we were like fuck yeah they're actually going to delay the game thank god it's actually going to be good now because like the game was just not ready the struggles with the battle for azeroth blizzard proved as they have many times that selling copies wasn't the problem yeah shadowland sold an impressive 3.7 million copies on launch best-selling much like its predecessor though not long after the initial launch the expansion's major features would be the focus of criticism yeah the tower of tour gas or chore gas this player students likened it to suffered the same statements the battle for azeroth and quickly became repetitive as with most systems that reset on a weekly timer dude i think they've made tour gas a lot better over time and i think it's better now than it has ever been but like i just what i really hope they don't do is they don't like they don't just stop they don't stop doing it in the next expansion they don't just give up etc it's still shit i think it's a lot better and and i think that they can continue making it better yeah i think that they should continue trying for the expansion's high levels on the ma due to the player's inability to mount it was seen to be unnecessarily frustrating to navigate and formulate other such zones released in the past by now players were noticing a pattern of high-level zones with new reputations and excessive daily timers such as quests regulate enemies and treasure chests oh that was fun and they received a mixed reaction with some praising the unique abilities and aesthetics obtained from choosing a specific faction and others condemning them for being unbalanced thus burdening them with respect some people's classes 40 percent of their damage is just their covenant ability they're all over the place bro you remember like you remember how many videos preach made about this it's like i remember preach during legion made so many videos about how the legendaries were gonna be broken and then preach during bfa made so many videos about how azerite was going to be broken and then during shadowlands made so many videos about how uh fucking covenants were going to be broken and are broken and like finally like he he got a hair transplant and he quit the game and that was it yeah yeah he quit the game he was done like it was enough like all right i get it yep that's fine for a mess some would also take issue with getting locked out of a large amount of content offered from the other company as choosing one meant excluding three others though a time-gated quest was available should they feel the need to switch for better or for worse blizzard would stand their ground at launch but also stated that they had the ability to pull the rip cord to give players more freedom with yeah should the system spread poorly this comment would start a movement called pull the rip cord yeah they would comply to nearly a year later in patch 9.1.5 as for the story and this is under the context by the way the context of everybody leaving the game like everybody left the fucking game because they were just like well fuck this i don't want to deal with this shit like this is dumb and like obviously he's not talking about this but that was the exact time where everybody moved over to playing final fantasy yeah they admitted there yeah they said there wasn't a rip cord and then players were like okay well then never mind and then they stop playing and they're like whoa [Laughter] wait a minute we didn't mean that there wasn't a rip cord we just mean that um there is actually a record we're gonna do it okay so please please come back we just found it we just found it was right here all along see it is even worse than that of the battle for azeroth expansion the plot somehow became even more confusing and contradictory requiring external literature to follow along as even youtube channels dedicated to the lore of the game and difficulty piecing together the disorienting storylines they would not be shy in expressing their frustrations how many books are you gonna fucking get out of me how much money am i i can't believe pyro's getting so mad at final fantasy this is so totally out of character for him wow i can't i don't understand this the pay before i can finally explain the lore to the people that want to know about it to the degree that it's actually comprehensible i will never serve major cutscenes would continue to be unlisted on their youtube channel in response to them oh my god only time will tell of the fate of the shadowlands if it'll go down as a good or a bad expansion but players are quick to note the similarities between it and the battle for azeroth where the major systems are released in a poorly implemented state only to be addressed in patches several months later and many at this point would take notice to a rising contender within the mmo genre over the years final fantasy xiv would slowly but surely gain a sizable subscriber base following a failed initial launch in 2010 after listening to player feedback the mmo was remade in many ways and relaunched in 2013 it would see steady growth due to these improvements and also the shortcomings of the world of warcraft i remember during that speech he was giving i was like man like are we sure he's the bad guy this guy doesn't seem that bad at all i kind of kind of like him yeah as players became increasingly embittered with shadowlands they started migrating over including major streamers and youtube channels look bro look at that they started migrating over look at that man like that's what happened we're quitting wow i remember i watched this one too including major streamers and youtube channels creating more damn as we criticize the world of warcraft start making the game that we know you can make that's right oh yeah that's right i made remember whenever i would write twit longers so like you know how people would usually use like twit longers to like cancel someone like i would cancel entire games i would write like these massive fucking twit longers and they got super popular by the way like the the wow one that i did it literally had a million people read it like there were a million not read the whole thing right but like there were a million views on the twitlonger which is fucking wild man tension within the already tribalistic mmo community as players content creators and even employees would take shots at each other over social media those subscriptions remain to be hidden he wasn't wrong analytics began favoring final fantasy 14 to be the most active mmo with blizzard that was such a bullshit article by the way i i i still am not convinced that final fantasy has more players than world of warcraft i i am not convinced that this is the case it was a completely bullshit article the website was using bogus statistics i i don't think so it might be close you're right it could be close but i i don't think it is like based off of everything that i know it seems like that's not the case how do you know no one knows but i felt like the tools that they used in order to come to the conclusion were incomplete during even sending out surveys attempting to gauge interest in it for the first time in many years it was becoming clear to many that the world of warcraft was losing its hold on the genre yeah that was definitely true like regardless on how oh how regardless on how many uh how many subs each game has i think that what he said is true like yeah i was definitely losing its hold on a genre bro do you remember i remember whenever i made my video and like i didn't really talk a lot about the dark portal pass whenever it first came out right i made a video about it but i didn't really go over it over and over and over and like everybody was like oh it's just asmin gold oh i hate him he said oh no it's him again he's gonna spit on me and they were so upset about this right and then mad season drops a one hour mixtape both sides fucking just demolishing the dark portal pass deleting the deluxe edition and we watched the entire thing it was so good it's treason then at blizzcon 2020 the next step for classic was announced and as many expected players would begin their second journey into the outland in the burning crusade classic much like the base game the first expansion would be recreated closely to its original run in 2007 but with one exception the addition of a major development the character boost we are going to offer a level 58 boost for purchase but it does come with some restrictions so it's going to be one per account um it's not going to be usable on blood alpha draenei it'll have some for many players the feeling of anticipation was quickly replaced bbc equals the bobby charity the bobby charity oh my fucking god man it's like the thing is tbc having the level 58 boost i i don't know like it wasn't really that big of a deal i think it was more of like a um not iconic but it was more of like a symbolic thing where it's like they have the boost and it's like okay this isn't really the way the game was anymore right it was just like it's cinema yeah it sends a message and it was weird man the were specifically stated not to be released in the classic version of the not classic it's classic burning crusade and that's not the same thing mad season don't turn their words around on them that's so disingenuous as they didn't exist back then ultimately the character boost would be a one-year service bringing any character to level 58 and was offered in a bundled package that also included other digital rewards including a mount a pet and a toy ignoring the fact that they had like i never bought it lizard would pitch then it was intended for new players who didn't have the time to level um there's a lot of my friends for example who who maybe um didn't really play classic when it first came out right and so now they're behind um and they're interested in playing the burning crusade we want to make sure that those people are served too uh and one of the ways we could do that is provide a boost to people who are interested i feel like a lot of the people that like that pulled in like those people probably quit at 70. because like the thing is like yeah you can make an argument that like yeah the leveling process is too long and it's like it's a barrier entry yeah sure but like if if you think that like so show them the flow chart of the of the attunements and then be like okay so you can spend sixty dollars or forty dollars so you can get to this flow chart faster do you still want to play and i bet a lot of those fucking dad gamers are going to think ah you know what let's go back to minecraft though this was contradicted in the fact that the service was purchasable by everyone even by those who already had a high level i got i made a film in addition to the boost blizzard had also announced classic era servers for those who preferred the vanilla state of the game there's a dozen i would say dozens that's too many in transferring characters to both oh my god i forgot about this listen to this one look i talked over him listen real quick one time one more again yeah as there would be a 35 charge in transferring characters to both states of the games as characters that players spent the past year and a half leveling and gearing wait mad season got the shield when the hell did he get the shield i didn't know he had that i never got that how the fuck did he get the shield that son of a bitch that's the face of death that's the next shield yeah i didn't play yeah yeah you're right i didn't play but still man i mean it's just like fuck be dangled in front of their faces in the login screen behind the paywall the outrage was a media and blizzard would respond by lowering the charge to 15 down from 35 as for them i thought like i thought it would be fair like five bucks like five like 15 bucks it went down a bit but like you know what you call that that that methodology by the way there's a sales term for that it's called anchoring and anchoring is whenever you set a price in the consumer's mind and then you use that price to negotiate down to what the actual price that you you were using there's another term for it though that they actually talk about in warcraft arc light legends it's called sneeds greed you're right it's the same thing boost the community was quick to point out the dangers of releasing such a service such as the abandonment of the old world wait wait wait yo mcconnell you didn't hear about that you heard about that right don't tell me you didn't fucking hear about that you know that there's a character literally in uh fucking in the mobile game what what did you say it was called his name is sneed and he has an ability called sneed's greed i swear to god like i i swear to fucking guy it's real it's actually a real thing i couldn't believe it wait i'm like it's just it's fucking real i guess it is oh my god do you used to be called chuck that's a good idea but yes needs sneeze grade there you go um wow okay so yeah uh 35 fucking dollars for that and they they took it down to 15. people people thought they won it was better but it was still too much i think intel bots which had already been a major problem in classic would become empowered with the ability to skip towards the end game making them capable of farming higher level materials almost immediately thus having a greater negative effect than they previously had remember whenever i did the graph for this remember that graph i remember that graph uh we don't have the nft for it but you know maybe i should have he also warned that accepting a service as major as this would leave classic down the same familiar road and that it would suffer the same fate of the game that spawned its existence to begin with i'm glad they're speeding up the release of like all the classic servers and everything and uh just you know like now how tbc pretty much the whole life cycle of the game is less than a year like i i hope they go even faster with wrath that way they can have the classic servers catch up to the shadowland servers and everybody can be playing on like the same patch again you know like that's i i mean hopefully that's what's gonna hopefully that's what's gonna happen right in addition to creating an unfair paid element that let players pay to skip what other players had already worked for though these worries would ultimately be ignored and the level boost was released despite the backlash footage of boosted characters i remember that one started to appear immediately literally every single bar without fail was a level 58 boosted character the limitation of one per account for bots is completely irrelevant as expected for them it's just a huge time save from actually having to level and mini-san old world now abandoned as the boost now loaded the majority of the player base directly into the outland one of the core design philosophies of classic had been betrayed yeah i think so and that's what the problem was right is like i don't really have a problem with them doing that for like new games and shit like that i think you know i think i'm much more liberal with the uh micro transactions and newer games because they're newer games it's for a newer audience for newer problems and for a newer world but the difference is that uh this is an old game and classic burning crusade is supposed to be classic burning crusade it's not supposed to be final fantasy 14. it's not supposed to be wrath or lich king supposed to be burning crusade and that's what it should have been especially in terms of that systems you know don't make a leveling thing then yeah that's exactly what i meant tbc would have been dead day one without the boost boost saved the game i don't really think so i think tbc was the wow enthusiast game like if you are a tbc player you are a wow enthusiast you are already 60 man i feel like tbc so like classic wow this is my opinion right is like classic wow appealed to like fucking everybody that's why it was like this massive cultural event it was huge in 2019 and it still continued to be huge for quite a while burning crusade was only really appealing to people that were already 60 at that time they were already 70 at the time of burning crusade so you don't have the people that played classic wow and they got to level 34 well no because they don't get to re there's no new extra nostalgia for that person because they never got there so false appealed to me i didn't play classic i don't know i think that there was an opposite i think you're right there were some people that were raiders and they were like well tbc's gonna have more interesting raids but i think that's what it was i think that tbc didn't appeal to even nearly as many people as classic did a large portion of the player-based at this point were refugees from current world of warcraft due to a large part of the overzealous cash shop which was promised to be absent in the recreation shortly after a wow token with the green burning crusade background was data mined and players took to the forums creating numerous threads asking for confirmation i don't know why people are so mad about the wild token in classic wow i mean you can just buy gold and nobody got banned for it anyway like who cares like i mean functionally it's the same thing i mean really like it was the same thing like yeah obviously it would kill the game and it would be bad but like blizzard was already killing it like i mean i don't know like it's classical can win the matter yeah it just doesn't matter yeah we deserve this yeah there you go and once more we're simply ignored still to this day several months later there's no controversy of their plans to implement into the game this betrayal proved to be the final straw for many of the player base including the highly intelligent non-monotone and physically attractive youtube user not seasoned show whom after 16 years playing and seven years on youtube had announced his retirement the heart and soul now ripped away once more classic's population began to wane drastically and the remaining players would comment on the second foray into the outland becoming more and more empty with each passing day some of those who remained chose to rebel by targeting other players who had purchased the level boosters fight the good fight go out fighting you can't don't stop you can do it bundle it far if it's unofficial oh you're definitely right it legitimizes it you are absolutely definitely one hundred percent fucking right by performing in in gaming mode slash spin on anyone see right on the deluxe edition in response blizzard disabled the emone when targeting another player right i would i will have it be known that blizzard disabled slash spit before they made it to where you couldn't type the n word with the hard r yo yo you know what gets me what i don't know if it was me i remember exactly when it happened i think it was you uh maybe it was me i'm not sure actually but it that they release them out yeah oh oh everybody thinks you came up with the idea of spitting on people i was spitting on people with the storm outs but who really came up with it i have to deal with the shit i have to deal with this fucking shit and then if it gets better i see we've got s fan in the chat too i i've got to deal with all this i'm so i'm getting this from the retail andes that are mad at me and then the classic andy's i'm getting gold and so then they're hating on me and then s fandom mcconnell were messaging me off stream they're like hey man do you have like a thousand like um okay so i need 4 000 gold for my epic flying mount and somebody's gonna have to pay for this and i saw you got a lot of gold so can you give this to me i don't want to ask my chat they're going to get fucking pissed off about it like like mcconnell tried to get me to go back into classic he tried to get me to come back to streaming because we were running out of gold to read to raid bwl that's true like it had nothing to do he's like oh yeah it's yeah bash cutter yeah i gave bash cutter money i gave us my mods too yeah that wasn't because oh yeah let's come stream again no like we need gold like we've really got to make this happen i remember the one time we did that during knacks that was disgusting we made so much gold off of these idiots i think it was like 18 000 gold we got you know i gave most of that away to uh palodini so that olympus could get through uh next did you know that yeah i did that no i didn't know that i did do that wow did you know i uh whenever we transferred i well actually i paid for a lot of people's transfer yeah that's what they said yeah yeah so listen i i get it we got we gotta do what we can for the guild man we gotta we i haven't raided with them for a long time though like i need to go back and transfer over why you don't care oh yeah but like that'd be fun to do wrath for a little while i mean you know warriors op right oh warrior's always op oh yeah do you want a duel no i mean like it's op on the damaged mirror yeah i'm not going to win in a duel no oh okay so you don't want to duel no no i'm not going to do that okay okay i just i look at the wheel i just look at the leaderboards yeah all right all right all right we'll get back to the video well actually all right anyway back to the video let's see if we can spit on someone you can't do it there it is no spitting aloud wow foreign threads expressing concern with classic's future were ultimately ignored but to a community that acted against their interests blizzard's response would be immediate and clear it was revealed later that omar gonzalez who was one of the few responsible for taking action and making the classic recreation a reality had silently taken lead from blizzard to join secret door under dreamhaven contributing to the ever-growing list of people who didn't quit developing games but rather quit developing games for blizzard entertainment not long after jeff kaplan a 20-year veteran oh this was so crazy whenever jeff kaplan left blizzard it just kind of came out of nowhere man like i was like wait what the fuck jeff is leaving blizzard like what what like it was so sad and director of overwatch announced his departure this news would come as a surprise to the community as the sequel to overwatch overwatch 2 is still in development kaplan himself had gained the reputation as a leader and wholly passionate about his craft so to leave a project before even seeing its release came off as abnormal and many feared that something was deeply wrong with blizzard and prior to this oh there he is since its release in 2004 alex of frasiyabi would also quietly drop from the company in june of 2012. i wonder why banner of which he moved on however was also abnormal as had been customary with the more recognized veterans of the company taking their leave there was no farewell post nor even an acknowledgement by blizzard though the true reason probably a good idea would soon become clear oh oh so-called cube crawls in which male employees apparently drink a lot of alcohol as they crawl through their way through the cubicles often engaging in inappropriate behavior toward female employees saying it seeks among other remedies pay adjustments on july 23rd 2021 this was a big division blizzard once again became the center of national news as the world would learn the details of a two-year investigation and lawsuit by the state of california of continuous sexual misconduct and discrimination of their employees the investigation alleges that female employees in particular were underpaid and subjected to regular sexual harassment by coworkers and superiors part of it had said that the guys would make the girls do all the work because they wanted to raid like that was some fucking wild ass shit like it was just like the actual meme like believe that in the report it was revealed that one employee ultimately committed suicide during a company vacation this would occur after pictures of her vagina had allegedly been passed around a company party the investigation also described cube crawls where employees would become intoxicated and prowl to the workplace subjecting co-workers to unwanted sexual advances lewd behavior and make inappropriate comments about rape and other intrusive or that's a lie the new shock to the blizzard community and served as the final straw for many its players and content creators began to migrate away favoring other mmos such as final fantasy xiv activision blizzard's response would be swift and attempted to mitigate the allegations stating that the dfeh the plaintiffs had distorted their claims and it wasn't an inaccurate complaint and that they were sickened and found the manner of which they investigated and reported to be reprehensible referring specifically thank you bobby thanks for setting us straight no bearing on the case was quickly deemed tone deaf by onlookers and employees alike who staged a walkout in protest of the allegations and the cold response by their employer shortly after activision ceo bobby coddick also denounced the response stating that it was tone deaf and that fair and respectful treatment in the workplace was of the utmost importance not long after he would hire a firm made famous for union busting for amazon to investigate their hr practices months later it was revealed that it was he who had originally drafted the initial response and having another executive sign it in her name that is the very same one that he denounced it was also revealed that he had prior knowledge of several sexual assault cases in the workplace and settling them out of court and failing to make them public in one instance he threatened the life of one of his assistants in response of this news being made public he would reiterate his commitment to the safety and equality of his employees [Music] anyone who doubts my conviction to be the most welcoming and inclusive workplace doesn't really appreciate how important this is to me in august the dfeh accused can't stop bobby of destroying documents relevant to the investigation in violation you have the legal obligation to not tamper with evidence he won't stop though this claim would be quickly denied by an actor it's a primal evil person pictures and conversations relating to the cosby suite were also leaked the nickname for a frosty abbey's hotel room from blizzcon 2013 after the former comedian bill cosby who had at that point faced multiple accusations of dade rape in an internal email president jalen brax stated his respect and care for equal treatment and that gloria steinem a well-known activist for women's rights was a revered name in his household having failed to grind the reputation to reach exalted despite being human and having the diplomacy racial what a casual the response wasn't received very well for some reason and shortly after he would step down as president ending his near three-year tenure and was replaced with a two-person team jen o'neil and mike yabara the former of whom would announce her departure just three months later stating in an email to activision's legal team of her lack of faith of their ability to change and that she herself faced sexual harassment earlier in her career at activision she also reviewed that she was being paid less than her co-leader and then although equal pay was negotiated by both she and my kibara it was only offered to her after she announced her resignation she also described attending yeah that's like one thing that people forget is that mike ibarra also negotiated for her to be paid the same amount of money and uh it just they just didn't do it isn't that horse shit it's like they're setting him up to look bad in a 2007 party with bobby coddick were scantily clad women danced on stripper pulse yeah well yeah i'm gonna go build my own game dev studio with blackjack and hookers as for mike kibara he would quickly come under controversy not long after his new position for a tweet advertising selling raid carries for gold while this isn't against the game's terms of service it remains to be a controversial point within the world of warcraft community i hate people people got mad about that like yeah obviously selling runs is bad but selling runs wouldn't be bad if you didn't have the wow token the problem is the wow token not selling runs as it edges the line of pay to win due to the players ability to purchase gold with real money as details of the investigation unfolded many employees would quit or be fired including senior game designer jonathan lacraft the lead level designer of diablo 4 a level designer of world of warcraft as well as the inspiration for the overwatch character jesse mccree and diablo 4's game director luis boriga was also revealed to no longer be a part of blizzard leaving the upcoming action rpg without two critical leaders in the middle of its development in response to mccree's involvement in the scandal it was announced that the character mccree would be renamed and that once again actions would speak louder than words blizzard at this point i feel like it's not really that big of a thing i i don't really get like i never gave i felt like that wasn't a big thing changing the guy's name changing the character's name because like for example like i can see why they change like a wow character like that one makes sense right like this one does for sure but like changing mccree's name mccree is already an established character that exists externally from the person who it was originally named after right so like the character exists independently of who it's derivative from whereas like this character is just obviously named after a dev they deleted swifty npc of course they did i mean what do you think they needed a trial or any sort of facts no also begin a series of in-game changes such as removing items and references they deem to be inappropriate given the circumstances such as changing pictures of women into fruit in-game joke emotes that were deemed to be highly controversial would also be removed yeah are there any children in the room right now i advise you at this point to cover their ears i'd like to fart in the tub amidst the last season oh god tensions were at an all-time high a senior systems designer of world of warcraft revealed that almost no work is being done as the lawsuit was unfolding this sparked outrage among the player base as they learned that they were paying for content that was no longer being developed in an expansion which had already seen updates at a sluggish pace blizzard's had a lot of of like uh people i feel like blizzard has had more people and like game designers and people like this pop off on twitter and cause drama then pretty much every single other company in gaming put together you know what i mean like it's like it really like it's happened so many fucking times it's crazy in response to the backlash a senior game producer labeled those complaining as part of the problem as employees continued lashing out and placing yeah that was their players and community figures blizzard would see a major restructuring of their teams during this time as these employees either quit or were fired many of which holding important positions in games that were in mid-development causing major delays in production in november of 2021 he was revealed by blizzard chief financial officer armin serza that the company isn't planning to include both overwatch 2 and diablo 4 in their 2022 financial outlook yeah indicating that neither release will see their debut in all of 2022 due to delays in development as a result financially they would suffer their worst loss in 13 years as stock prices fell by more than 14 percent in a single day bringing us here to date losses to twenty-five percent that's a longer employees revealed suspicions that their breast milk was being stolen nursing mothers would label and store packages of breast milk in the break room refrigerator and when retrieving it later would find that some or all of the milk would be missing while other items in the refrigerator would remain undisturbed though as of this video no evidence exists of the alleged protein-rich caper when reached out for comment an activision blizzard spokesperson replied stating that there's no use crying over spilt milk speaking of milking blizzard would also increase focus on micro transaction offers including mounts pets and cosmetics how about the transplants and to be vastly superior to those acquirable in-game absolutely would also be criticized as their highest package would demand a price tag of 55. nearly matching that of a full aaa release as onlookers reacted with ah at the lack of awareness or care that blizzard showed to its community and image what's the video the result what's so crazy to me about this is like so there's two universes right so there's the universe where it takes a lot of effort and time for blizzard to make a new mount so like what you're saying is that they took a lot of effort and time away from developing content for paying players and you know people that are subscribed to the game in order to make a micro transaction so like that's that's the situation number one situation number two is that it actually doesn't really take that much effort or time at all and in that case if it takes not not that much effort or time at all why do why do we keep getting six recolors what why is this keep happening if it's so easy to do that the store mounts aren't taking away development from the game then why do we keep getting recorders what is this it's bad either way regardless of the outcome it'll surely be one of the darkest moments in the company's history one that's becoming increasingly difficult to break out of as scrutiny remains to be at an all-time high due to the destroyed trust between they and their community as a result a situation has been created where any flinch positive or negative is met with a dominating pessimism employees daily suffer abuse not only from the outside but is recently discovered also from the inside today they stare down the seemingly insurmountable task of repairing the damage caused to their relationship with their community it sucks i bet like if you're just a dev at blizzard like let's say you're just an artist or you work at blizzard it's just a random like you know a mid-level role and you just get harassed because it's something you didn't even do like it it sucks because like people think they're doing a good thing right it's like this is a you there's all the worst evils are always committed in the pursuit of what's good and it's just people harass developers and harass people at blizzard and try to hold them accountable for it it's awful man it's absolutely awful to each passing day their environment representing a battlefield more so than that of a game development studio while this itself is an unfair situation many deemed a consequence of casting aside the goodwill of their player base consistently over the course of three tumultuous years in the midst of the scandal it was announced that blizzcon was cancelled for the year of 2022. they would see a major restructuring if and when it returns initially a heavily community-focused innovator with franchises that redefined genres now leaves behind a sullied and controversial legacy in one of the most jarring and unforeseen falls in game development history quarterly reports show a consistent downward trend of active users but at the same time record-breaking revenue as patience and goodwill are continuously traded away from short-term financial profit just as how it breathed life into the genre with its birth in 2004 so too does it with its decline in the modern year its fall giving rise to a new generation of mmos eager to claim the crown hit once war with pride and ambition jesus this is brutal community figures and employees depart in record numbers a particularly iconic phrase of theirs is seen to be more profound no king rules forever god damn holy fucking shit we are gonna offer a level 58 boost for purchase but it does come with some restrictions so it's going to be one year account um it's not going to be usable on the blood alpha what the fuck that's true [Music] we got a lot of people waiting to be um sentenced to their eternal it's a jailer [Music] send them in the state of california is suing video game company activision blizzard for sexual harassment and discrimination they basically suspended shit and took away ten thousand dollars and his prize money everyone who doubts my conviction to be the most loved and inclusive workplace doesn't really appreciate how important this is to me i don't want to live like the scene [Music] who feel alone and i love interestingly the board of directors of activision rallying to mr kodak's side almost immediately that's right it's bobby's world moves forever my son [Music] damn oh my god oh my motherfucking god wow [Music] if only we could do that huh i am truly grateful [Music] [Music] what a masterpiece oh my god wow what a fucking masterpiece holy shit that was so good like god damn man like that was crazy it's like that yeah link the video yeah give it a like give mad season a sub the video's got 2 million views but it's got 82 000 likes we could get it up even higher than that give it a like this video is absolutely fucking amazing man is it bad that i want to play wow now no i think that's about i mean listen that's just what while players are conditioned into man that's totally it surprised you hadn't seen it i saved it because i wanted to watch it with you guys okay because i knew that everybody's going to want to see this i knew that y'all were gonna want to watch it together so it's like yeah absolutely i did a hundred fucking percent holy fucking shit what a video man oh my god i gotta read a few of these comments this should be on netflix as a documentary he's not wrong this game always be in my heart and it's just so sad how they destroyed it yeah that's going to take as i said it'll take two or three expansions to make the game truly good again uh i will always remember the ambitious gms helping players with their tickets who have been replaced by the automated look it up in the wiki bitch the third party wiki by the way i was making it a few months back to i couldn't afford anymore but i'd say i'm proud that money went towards such a fantastic documentary i'm going to forever miss wrath of the lich king one of the most memorable gaming days of my life true this is the definitive history of wow and it deserves a standing ovation this is fucking amazing you guys really take care of us that hit me right in the fields yeah i know man that was fucking brutal so bittersweet to watch i know man like it was just holy shit i mean what rewatch day one classic release do you think wow will ever be free to play i don't know like it's just holy fucking shit man god damn like god fucking damn what a video like wow i just got like i feel like there were a lot of things that like i thought of my oh man like what about this well that but like i think that he covered pretty much everything that was really important i would say so yeah i would say that in general he he did and have you seen the final fantasy 14 documentary no but we will watch that maybe we can watch the final fantasy 14 documentary this weekend how would you guys feel about that because i promised i would i mean i promise i'd watch this one and so yeah i feel like we've got to keep it even we'll watch that this weekend i think that'll be fucking amazing you guys like that okay good [Music] you

Channel: Aѕmongold TV

Views: 3,124,020

Keywords: asmongold, asmongold reacts, asmongold wow, asmongold highlights, asmongold youtube, world of warcraft, asmongold funny, asmongold tv, asmongold channel, ZackRawrr

Id: FDs_4WH5ocE

Length: 212min 29sec (12749 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022