Scott Johnson

It's a great way to have alts. We now have alts. Use them, everyone. Oh, and that is one thing that came out of the interview with Chris that I liked. They didn't do all of it, but most of it about how the allied races systems that they started putting in the game around Legion. Yeah. One of my favorite things they've done in the game because it.

Instead of just waiting every other expansion for, oh, there's one, maybe two new races. Or usually it's like, I don't know, what was it? Morgans for the Alliance and goblins for the Horde. And then, you know, Death Knights, whole different thing. And like, they always try to do this.

with either class or, or races, but to have races kind of pop and, and get, and you can get them with an expansion has made the game so much more interesting to live in just diversity of character types. Um, you know, upright, upright trolls walking around with hunched over ones. Like, yeah, just all of that vibe is so great for the game. And I hope they keep that up.

I guess with this one, we're getting, what, the earthen, the trolls that live down under the ground? Yeah, and I am excited about the earthen. I'm pretty excited about their whole story. Right now, the main earthen guy looks like his job sucks. He's just pulling that giant freaking lava hammer.

pulls the chain over and over again yeah that would that's not a fun job i don't want that i mean does he get breaks does he have like a decent dental plan like what's it like it's like sisyphus rolling the rock up a hill except he just yanking the chain yeah it's a bad time all right we're gonna get into uh what's going on this month and i have this for you i have a bunch of look i've did some things that are reminiscent of old

Like, you know, transitions and some stingers and stuff. And some that are new. I would call this one new. And big thanks to a very specific friend who pulled out his thrall voice to help me with this one. So here you go.

Yeah, that was Chris Metzen with his thing. Here's the thing, though. Yeah, he did it with his phone, which was a challenge because I was like, is this going to sound okay? And I think I got it to where I wanted it. So very happy with it. Thank you, Chris, for that. Let's talk about what's going on. Obviously, new expansion tomorrow for early access, folks. Yeah. My whole day is going to be shot.

Yeah.

Oh, right. Bobby's leaving town. I forgot.

That's a long time. Without you playing WoW. And I can tell you as a veteran of said cruise, I didn't even think you're on the same boat we were on. Yeah. The internet is so bad. You can even pay for it. It doesn't matter. It's so bad. It's terrible. So there's no, there is no playing remote WoW while you're on that boat. I promise you that. No. But grats on the 15 years and also too bad for you.

Here's the funny thing about it, though. You ended up having to pay, what, an extra 40 bucks for this privilege and you still have to leave town early? Because that's about what the epic version is, right?

Oh, right, good point, yeah. We knew, but you knew you'd get early access. She just didn't know when that would be.

Yeah. Let's air out those panties right here, right now. Cause this is not, sorry, not panties, whatever, whatever you want to air out. Okay.

Yeah. I get it, dude. I don't like, uh, For those who are afraid that the instance reboot is nothing but shiny talk about Blizzard, I actually think this was a big mistake of theirs. And it's a mistake that is not without precedent across the industry. Sure. And in a lot of ways, they're just sort of following suit. Yeah. I still don't like it. I think it's a little predatory.

I think that giving people early access... I think giving items like a bunch of cosmetics, mounts, and maybe some currency and that sort of thing, I think those are reasonable reasons to do an upgrade. I get those. Those make perfect sense to me, especially amount on the store is 20 bucks alone or 25 or whatever it is. So this is actually a pretty good deal for everything you're getting. However...

Holding when you can play over your head with money, I'm not a fan of that at all. And if I had to guess, there were probably some internal naysayers on that that just were like, do we really have to do this? This is not a good idea. And who knows when this was all solidified? It was certainly before the acquisition. So who knows who's in charge then? I don't even know.

But I don't love this part of it. And I think we'll have to just obviously live with it. But I think it's important we give them heat for this, and I hope players do, so that maybe they rethink this next time. I agree. If there's one thing I know about the marketing teams, PR teams, community, and even devs over there is that they...

They want you to have a great time in this game they work hard on. I know that for sure. And if you could really talk to those guys without a PR nightmare, I think a lot of them would say, yeah, we don't love this business decision that was made to squeeze a little more money out of players so they could have the privilege of playing the game early. Right, right. I think it's a little devious.

That being said... Of course, I paid up and I'm going to do it because I'm going to get in there.

Yeah. There goes my principled stance ends there because, I mean, maybe that's why this... What am I saying? I know this is why they do it because there will be enough people to do it. What's the harm in doing it almost? It's like, well, either everyone will be happy waiting until the day they can and they don't want to pay or they'll pay and do it.