Asmongold TV - I tried to warn them.. | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: July 12, 2025

I tried to warn them.. Asmongold show for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. --------- Keywords: esports commentary, streamer reactions, gaming podcast, pc gaming, streamer podcast, game criticism, asmongold Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A lot of Wow players are dropping Wow, and now they're moving over to Roonscape. And this is happening at like a massive rate. I'm kind of surprised that it's gone this far. Why are there so many World of Warcraft players switching to old school runescape? You must have known. Better graphics. Notice them, right? Lurking around the Grand Exchange trying to parse on a goblin,

wondering where their ability bars are and asking how Jagex is managing to update the game rather than re-releasing the same exact content over and over and over again. Imagine not. I sure did because I'm one of those wow players. Oh, wow. A year and a half ago, after around half a month of MMO soul searching, I found old-school runescape. I had quit wow after mythic rating for around a decade. Quit during Shadowlands.

That expansion did like totally, it did irreversible damage to the game. for various reasons. I was sick of the short-form seasonal ethos of the game, devaluing any and all of my progression, sick of the only value- Thank you. I hate the seasonal model. I think it's so stupid. Expansions should be the seasons. There should not be seasons within expansions. It's too fast. Bored of the binary itemization and same elude and disheartened by Blizzard's complacency with the classic incarnation of the game.

Clearly, I wasn't the only one. Matt season, Guzoo, Caritas, Savix, and more have since begun their first steps into this beloved curated sandbox. So they're all going over to everybody is going over to RuneScape now. What about RuneScape seems to have translated for the World of Warcraft player? Wow. And why? First, we must acknowledge where these wow creators come from. Unlike myself, most of them are classic wow players, an old school 2004 incarnation of World of Warcraft.

much like the best version of the game, by the way. School Roonscape is of Roomscape. Unlike OSRS, though, this version of World of Warcraft is following the timeline of Wow itself. Yeah. Blizzard has been updating Classic Wow every few months with new patches and eventually the very same expansions that released years ago. The initial release in 2018 is now entering the Mists at Pandaria expansion and resembles Retail Wow, the modern game, much more than it does classic. Wow or Vanilla Wow, the version from 2004.

It's interesting. Wow turned into Retail Wow in the patch for trial of the Crusader. That's when it happened. Before that, it was Wow. After that, it was retail. Interesting to imagine a version of old school runescape that just kind of began releasing all the same updates, eventually ruining the game for the very same players that returned to it because it lacked those updates.

Blizzard understood and saw this as the player base continued to shrink. Therefore, they opted for the seasonal servers that remixed the standard classic vanilla wow experience. The season of mastery and eventually the season of discovery. These year-long servers run down the line of all the same patches that were released between 2004 and 2006. I think the reason why these didn't really catch on and retain a player base is because a lot of people don't want to invest into an MMO that's transient. Like people don't want to put all of their time and energy, effort, and emotion into a community and into a world that they know is going to disappear in a year. I think that's one of the big reasons why OSRS is receiving such a resurgence. It's because it's a game that has such a long tenure that people know that the time that they invest into the game now will matter later on.

Updates. The latter, season of discovery or SOD, introduced ruins and granted all kinds of player players. power in the form of new abilities and many, many old ones from future expansions, as well as reworked some of the raids and even added one new raid toward the end. It was an interesting experiment. Finally, Blizzard released the classic anniversary servers, so just vanilla classic again, for a second or some would argue fourth time. That's the first point to take note of.

These creators love wow. Even I, to a certain extent, still do as well, especially classic, a version of the game, that I think is most tangibly an MMRP. It's wonderful. Yet, regardless of your love for it, anything exceptional becomes dry over time, especially when not allowed to exist in our mind. Being fed the same thing,

as great as it may be, over and over again, doesn't foster a larger community. It pushes those sick of it away. Well, it's also that, I mean, they've re-released the game multiple times, and at a certain point, people have played this enough.

And there are no real, like people want a classic wow that has updates probably kind of like OSRS. Blizzard is never going to have like a good version of classic wow like plus until they get rid of the seasonal idea of the game. Mount becoming sick only increases in time. The repeated cycles of classic aren't getting any fresher. And next time Blizzard relaunches classic servers, chances are they'll see even less popularity.

Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I've lost interest over time. And I think another reason, too, is because I think season of discovery, this maybe is an unpopular opinion. But I think season of discovery created problems that classic wow had built into it, that those problems created the texture of the game. And season of discovery seeking to remove that texture ended up making the game worse. Blizzard has floated the idea of a classic plus. This has been a long-running desire from the player base. Instead of re-releasing the same content. Like warriors that can heal, mages that can heal. That's not classic wow. That's not the point. That's not the reason why it was a good MMO.

The reason why class identity existed in classic wow is because everybody couldn't AEOE, everybody couldn't heal, everybody couldn't tank. Why not add truly new content to the game? In many ways, SOD was experimenting in that regard. Sadly, I'm a bit concerned with this. First, Blizzard's survey that introduced this idea was filled with nothing even remotely interesting systemically. It had a whole host of quality of life features

such as account-wide collections and graphical improvements. Essentially, they were pitching retail wow features alongside what Blizzard does most confidently. Instanced content. New raids, dungeons, and so on. I suppose that's what people. people want, but I also think that this will kill the game down the line. It will, just because it's killed the game every single other time.

Classic Wow is a good game because the entire game matters. Like what you do in Stranglethorn Vale, and Stranglethorn Vale is his own, has value even in the end game because of ZG and the buffs. Every single player can take part in the celebration of killing Enyxia or Neferian because of the buff. All of these things are necessary in, in the game. order to create a cohesive MMO that matters as a collective. But the problem is that developers, I think that the guys that are making wow now, they don't understand that value. And they think

that making the game in its own segmented ways is better. And it's just made it worse. We can add new skills, new classes. However, disregarding the architecture that makes most of these things function is an issue. Yeah. It may work well for retail, but that's because the modern version of wow is competitive and singular in its vision. It has an exceptional combat system that is the sole point of interaction with the rest of the game. By comparison, Classic Wow is emergent. It wouldn't be farfetched to say that it is defined by its leveling experience more so than its end game. Because endgame in Classic Wow, the farming for pre-raid Biss and then raid logging isn't the most evocative or unique feature, leveling through the enormous, uninstanced open world,

forming groups to take down elites and brave difficult quests, finding ways to solo bosses just running through the dense jungles and open planes. That is classic wow. Yeah, that's an MMO. That's a massively multiplayer online game because you see other people. It's massive and there's multiple people. Wow, it's the definition of the thing that it's supposed to be. It's held together by emergent interactions never intended by the developers

and seemingly never acknowledged since. The interpersonal relations of managing 40-odd Raiders, the faction collusion, the war effort that saw, in my opinion, one of the best game series ever created around it. Even the collective fight paths to gather meticulously timed world buffs, these are the heartbeat of the game that aren't retained by just improving graphics, adding instance-player housing, and a new class. This survey saw Blizzard double down on things that are neat, I guess, but aren't what actually makes Classic Wow good.

With all of that out of the way, we must also acknowledge the lull that Classic is currently in. The anniversary servers are chugging along with the 100-odd thousand players still logging weekly. Season of Discovery has ended, and the modern version of Classic Wow, Jesus Christ, there are so many versions, is entering an expansion that most original players aren't likely to return to. during this i feel like i would probably play a new wow expansion if it came out just because of content for like oh it's a new game that's coming out i'm going to play the new game but like i wouldn't really expect to like fully invest into wow again just because i really i feel like ever since legion really we've just been playing the same game and i think even like in classic wow like for

example, there are items in molten core that are relevant for the entirety of the expansion or the entire game. And like in Burning Crusade, that's still partially true. Like the shadow damage necklace from Carazan or like I think grul's, what was it? The gruel's trinket is good until Sunwell, dragon spine trophy. There's a lot of examples of that, DST, yeah, exactly. And so like you have a lot of them. And I think obviously classic wow had a lot more. You know, you had talismet of ephemeral power. You had the onslaught girdle. You had

you know, obviously sulfuris, which was a legendary weapon, Thunder Fury, best example, best weapon in the game, period. And so a lot, and that was in molten core. And BWL had things like the, you know, styline's impeding scarab or Ash Condi

or something else, right? And so Classic Wow had this idea where every expansion and every patch was connected and there was like a cohesiveness of these different raids and there was a symbiosis of them. And now I feel like in retail while, you're only playing the patch and not the expansion. And I don't really want to do that.

It doesn't feel like an MMO anymore. It feels like it's like a lobby simulator where you're just on this gear treadmill that is being reinvented every other year to give you the illusion that you're doing something different. Like, I just, it doesn't feel like there's, there's anything to it anymore. Everything I said, they add into OSRS as evergreen content. Yeah, I know.

That's what I'm saying, right? Is that like OSRS has, like, they add new stuff in, but that new stuff is, it exists inside of a larger ecosystem. Same with POE. It, both examples for POE, yes. Low, people want something. and that's something, for whatever reason, is old-school runescape. Runecape and Wow have a combative history with one another.

I'm sure older players remember just how competitive and defensive these two groups were. The RuneScape versus World of Warcraft videos on the fledgling website known as YouTube were a not uncommon thing to see. The arguments at a lunch table, the friendships broken or lost, all of it laid a foundation for many experiences in the mid-2000s. And a singular truth was birthed from the din of childhood tribalism. World of Warcraft is better because it's for people whose parents are generous enough to fund $15 bucks a month for a subscription.

That's the reason. Meanwhile, RuneScape is the kids game for losers who can only get five bucks or non-bucks stuck in the beleaguered free-to-play worlds like jobless middle school peasants. At that point, World of Warcraft was on top of the world. It was reaching... Well, I think wow was it like classic wow. was so amazing for its time. It was like Halo 1. Like there are some games like, for example, uh, Super Mario 64, World of Warcraft, Halo 1 that were just such generational massive successes,

like Eldon Ring, probably another good example of it, uh, that it just totally Zelda. Yeah, there's like a handful of others to oblivion maybe. These games were just so insanely fucking good. but the problem is that while World of Warcraft I think has better gameplay than LSRS I mean by a mile has better graphics etc and it feels better to play as somebody I didn't really play OSRS a lot

but I think wow feels better to play at least Classic Wow does the problem is that that's not really something that people are going to stay invested in if they just keep getting their shit reset over and over and that's the big problem it's subscriber peak and growing

while Roomscape was undenvested was undeniably a cultural force, it was always the lesser of the two. Times have kind of changed since then. World of Warcraft's popularity, while still at the top, has waned. The game has stagnated, failing to reach a new audience. Meanwhile, RuneScape has died and been rebirth twice. Multiple times. Old school RuneScape has not only been growing, it has been thriving, especially in the past two years where the player count has almost doubled. This is thanks to to exceptional updates focusing on the early and mid-game experience and external community-driven marketing from creators and Jagex alike.

Leagues, the limited-time season-of-discovery-esque but way crazier game mode released in late 2024 saw more than 200,000 concurrent players. And now the game is reaching up those figures without the help of leagues at all. For reference, this is more concurrent players than the total individual raid logs in Classic Wow's anniversary edition every week. Wow. In July, we're seeing the release of the final part of the newest continent, Varlamour, and shortly after that, old school's first entirely new skills sailing,

which is expanding the world in ways never before seen in the game. Is that all it takes for the conversion for the wow player to give it a go? Not entirely. Yeah, it looks kind of like Azroth now. OSRS offers certain similarities in experience that are worth mentioning, like the emphasis on emergent gameplay. Emergence is when unique, surprising interactions arise from engagement with standard systems in a video game. For example, in Wow Classic, it was the coordination between half a dozen guilds to time their world buff drops for the most amount of players to make sure there are no overlaps. These are methods of interaction never explicitly designed by the developers.

They emerge thanks to player need and creativity. GDKP is the same thing. My favorite emergence system in Classic Wow was learning DyerMall tribute runs on my Hunter all the way back in 2019. Not only was it a difficult solo challenge, but selling the loot and buffs to different players was a really cool way to earn money. These things don't exist in Retail Wow. The game has been... I think his point right here is so good. Because this is the main thing that I don't like about Retail Wow right now.

is the fact that retail wow is effectively it's been totally um like all of those cool weird things you used to be able to do as a player back then have been nerfed changed or homogenized like that yeah you're always on like this very strict path and i feel like what i really enjoy about like new video games and like new uh mimos especially is being able to do really cool, weird things that you shouldn't be able to do. Like, remember, like, a New World, for example, we would do all those, like, stupid things, like killing that bear and all that?

I think that's what really makes MMOs special. Maticulously designed to be balanced and competitive. Therefore, any outlier such as this are immediately patched out. There's even a refrain popularized by players calling out this behavior. Fun detected, they say, in unison as Blizzard removes an emergent mechanic that may trivialize something. This is also, by the way, is why I criticized them removing GDKP. And in retrospect, now with season of discovery in hindsight,

do you guys see how removing GDKP ended up damaging the entire game and it caused so many people to quit? It was bad. Yep. It killed Sod. I said that's, remember Rex Troy? He's still getting stuff done nowadays. Yeah.

It made Sod 100X better, not really. I don't know. GDKP was a kill. community built so it had to die. Yeah. Happens less. The line between exploit and emergence is thinner. It is also encouraged with the existence of the wilderness, a zone where PVP is enabled and upon dying, you drop your loot. If you are not the aggressor or unsculled, you retain three of your most expensive items. And if you are sculled, the aggressor, you lose everything.

There is a tangible risk reward in the wilderness that makes it unlike anything else in theme park MMOs. It has singles areas for one-on-ones and multi-combat zones for group fights, fostering a truly sprawling and occasionally terrifying environment. It has its issues, but is ultimately a totally unique element of runescape. The open-world PVP during Classic Wow's heyday was kind of similar to this. If you decided to play on a PVP server, it wasn't uncommon to run into roving war bands of bloodthirsty players farming honor points on random people. It created season two, or sorry, like not season two, phase two of classic wow before they added battlegrounds on a balanced server was peak classic wow. That was the pinnacle

of the game. It was fucking amazing. And then as soon as they added BGs, it was pretty much dead. A hide and seek leveling experience that definitely got tiresome, but was pretty crazy. nonetheless. This system is only begotten to wilderness in old schools, so it's a bit more manageable there. Of course, in PVP, death is nowhere near as punishing in WOW as you only lose time. But the general ethos of open PVP is worth considering as a point of interest. OSRS has emergence that extends far past PVP too. It wouldn't be farfetched to suggest that the vast majority of PVE bosses in RuneScape have emergent mechanics defining them. Whether it'd be safe spotting Dagenoff Kings,

Butterflying Aca, soloing Cox, and anything. Soling what? This used to be the case whenever you would solo raids. Like, if you look back at my old YouTube channel, one of my favorite things to do was I would love to solo old raid bosses because I just thought it was really cool. Like the idea that you could do that or solo like dungeon bosses by yourself. And I thought that was amazing.

And then somewhere along the line, Blizzard just decided to, equalize everything and then that entire meta kind of just went away. In between. Even the skilling in OSRS is often thought of as an emergent experience thanks to tick manipulation being a valid method for a lot of players. It also has an effective blend of communality and solo expression. Some of the most difficult content in OSRS is solo. However, the experience of playing the game itself is a lot of lot more communal. Not in the sense that it... I think that's what the future of MMOs is, by the way.

The idea that you need four or 24 other people in order to do content, I think that is a very reductive way of making an MMO. And I think that the best example of that is actually just look at Issaqai animas. Almost every single Issaquai anime is either a person doing things on their own or a person doing things with a very small group of friends that they work in between with, right? People love solo content? Yeah, exactly. And all of those animas wouldn't be popular if it wasn't a, like, if it wasn't an aesthetic people were looking for. The man's grouping that's not. Like, there's literally an anime called solo leveling that is the most popular anime right now in the world.

Only method of multiplayer communality, just being around others is enough. Yeah. Because the game isn't linear in its progression. It's a sandbox. No zone is ever out-leveled or outright devalued. You are just as likely to see high-level players in Varrock, the second city most players go to, as you are in the Elvin City of a Pryfdenas. Oh, Mario.

Not only does this make the game feel more alive, it also creates the emergent experience of seeing someone, as soon as you zone in, wearing way, way cooler shit than you are, and giving you... Exactly. Exactly. This was something that was crucial

in original Wow. Whenever you would see somebody that was fully geared out, like you go into Stormwood for the first time and you inspect somebody with like full fucking tier two and Thunder Fury,

you're like, what the fuck is this? Yeah, it was insane. Something to aspire to as a result. This is, of course, dead in retail wow, thanks to the overabundance of cosmetic overrides,

applying Indian visuals to anyone anywhere, making it impossible to tell if someone is a badass because they cleared a mythic raid or just swiped their credit card or farmed an old piece of content while watching YouTube videos on another monitor. Classic wow, at least... Yeah, back in the day, if you wanted to look cool, you had to actually do content that was challenging.

Nowadays, anybody can look cool because of transmog. Which is like, it's like that. I mean, I did transmog contest, right? So, like, it's not like I think that's bad, but I do think that there is a certain level of value that in order to even look cool at all, it's kind of like remember Halo Reach had this, where like if you saw somebody with like the Hayu Bossa armor or like a couple of other like types of items, you would be like, oh shit, that's a real one.

Original version didn't have cosmetic override. So being able to actually see what someone is wearing, but you can see what it took away to. Of authenticity to the game world and its player base. Everything felt of that world and the items being worn gained an aesthetic value. They were recognized. The legendary armaments were legendary. That has since faded in time thanks to the repeated launches and eventual mastery of all the content,

but it did exist at one point. Because it's persisted... I think that it mainly existed as like a facade because people just didn't only know enough about the game. The reality is that the reason why a lot of people had Scareboard or Thunder Fury is because they were guild masters or officers in a guild. But, you know, it's still, it's still better than like participation legendaries that they have now in retail, right? An illusion of prestige is better than no prestige at all. ...updated OSRS never lost that. And while certain gear may be less impressive today than it

was in 2015 or 2005, new gear has taken its place. Seeing someone in Sanguine Torva or the newly released radiant oath plate armor, especially if they achieve these things on an Ironman is incredibly impressive. Yeah, it's badass. Just having that communally recognized value promotes more people to seek that recognition. After all, flexing your hard-earned achievements is being able to show off in video games matters a lot because a lot of the people that play MMOs are people that have been disaffected by the real world and they want to seek a secondary world where they can accomplish goals and achieve those goals in a way that is fair to them that the real world doesn't provide. That's another really big component to this. Like MMOs, and this is the

reason why MMOs are so popular among young guys, it's because if you're a 16 or 17 year old guy, you don't have really any avenue to express yourself as a guy, right? I mean, like, as like that guy, you don't have any like you're a loser basically and so you can play a video game and you can work hard at this video game and you can achieve something that matters and when a video game has a bunch of pay to win in it and it takes those things away from you then that entire structure is removed and so people spend so much money on prestige in real life think about how much money people spend on prodda or Lamborghinis or a Porsche or something like that, like Supreme Close. All of these things have inflated values because of what they project. And what I'm saying is that for a lot of disaffected and young people, video games provide an alternate form of them to be able to seek out that same satisfaction that they're not able to achieve in real life. Or part of existing alongside other people, whether it be in-game or not. World of Warcraft, at least right now, is failing

to offer a... That's sad? Um, you could say that it's sad, but I also don't think it's really, I think it's natural. If you're a young guy, you want to find a place where you'll be taken seriously and treated like an adult. Like, that's what you want. Like, you don't want to be treated like a kid. Like, that's what happens. It's natural. Yeah, this has been going on for thousands of years. Permanent home for its players, asking them time and time again to recreate the same characters and re-experience the same events. Yeah.

Bro, I wish Classic Wow hardcore had these challenges. Goodness gracious, man. That's not a bad. This is so cool. That's the last Batwave. I have a decent amount of prayer. This is exactly what I've been asking for forever. It's funny.

I criticize Retail Wow for becoming a fleeting, seasonal experience that devalues everything you've earned every new patch. But Classic Wow has become that too. Well, Retail Wow is, its own competitive game and it's made for a specific audience. I don't think they should change the way retail wow works. They have made their bed

now lay in it. You've decided to make the game that way. You've curated this audience of people that just want to play that game. Then just keep doing that. It obviously works for them. With every new incarnation, it resets everyone back to zero

and asks them to run that treadmill again. Blizzard is plagued by the disease of seasonality. They seem incapable of creating anything outside of that paradigm because it is the only way to foster continuous engagement in their eyes. Perhaps that's more a fault of the theme park MMO than it is of their own creativity. The Season of Discovery being seasonal in name also operated this way. It had incremental level gates, 20, 30, 40, and so on,

that acted like miniature expansion releases with a new raid, some new content, and new abilities, and other stuff. Blizzard being tied to this seasonal model was terrified of making players feel like they need to catch up to their friends, so they caught up for them. That's the issue. That's the issue right there. The moment that Blizzard started catching players up instead of letting them play the game at their own pace is, I think, the moment that the MMO aspect of the game started to recede and die. And I think it started in Rath of a Litch King, and it just got worse. Experience boosts and so on. It became so disconnected conceptually from the original classic, the original vanilla.

The experience people originally connected with that it asked them to skip it entirely. Expediting the leveling in classic is like offering Maraschino cherries as the dessert itself. It's like the rosemary being garnished by the steak. it makes absolutely no sense and caters to a demographic of players that exist antithetically to an MMO. Fucking exactly. 100%. That's what I've been trying to say completely.

A perfect line, yes. That's the way that I felt about it for a long time. That's why I said in Rath of a Litch King, they stopped, they hit a ceiling with attracting MMO players and then so they started making the game for people that didn't like MMOs and eventually the game became a game that wasn't for people that liked MMOs. The genre is defined by persistent engagement, a world that continues living. But by promoting momentary engagement for incredibly short periods of time, you create artificial bursts of popularity and then long lulls where most prospect players don't want.

want to join because it looks dead. But here we are today. Players clearly want some kind of emergent experience in a growing game. One of my favorite examples of this was actually in Classic Wow's Anniversary servers released only a little while ago. Only Fangs. A content creator-driven guild conceptualized by streaming soda poppin. It was a communal experiment. This gift must be so mad right now.

Man, that sucks. Damn, bro. I didn't even name him. A creator house like you'd see back in 2016, but done in World of Warcraft. It was a persistently running reality television show that tested the mental fortitude of all those involved, because only things was less so about the game

and more so about people interacting with one another through the game. That's a big one. That's a big one. I've gotten one item. He's gotten it, and it's good for Warrior! You've gotten every item, bro! Listen, listen, listen, listen. I'll pass if you come to my stream and rate my physique. Wait, what?

Holy... What's that a body suit? Wait, this guy is shredded, by the way. Yep. He got married recently. I followed Tyler One's journey through the Guild's rise and eventual solution. Tyler 1 is, of course, another streamer, popular for his abrasive and somewhat controversial personality and exceptional League of Legends play. Never having played classic well before, he ventured

into Only Fangs with an open mind. Only Fangs was created on the hardcore server, meaning that if you die, you lose your character. And simultaneously, the guild ran alongside a host of add-ons, or in RuneScape terminology, plugins. Yeah. created race-driven competitions. Undead, Torren, orcs, and trolls all competed against one another through this external system. There were raffles, battles, arguments, and everything in between. There's a lot of fucking drama.

Holy shit, there was a lot of drama. The second one was so much worse than the first for drama. Go from meandering around keyboard turning and sometimes forgetting to attack to running a 40-man raid. His interaction with different content creators, his fabricated drama with soda poppin, his insistence to essentially roleplay a rise to power, narrativized the entire experience. Yeah. It did so, so well that when he died, it became a legendary moment within the community. While leading a raid into molten core battling the fire elemental barren... I love the fact that everybody that criticized pirate software for roaching out.

ran away like little pussy bitches and left Tyler to die. This was the, like, I, I'm still, I'm still going off the high that I have from that from like fucking six months ago. Because I called it. I called it. I said it. Everybody said I was wrong. Oh!

And there it was. Get in, Tyler 1 was faced with a decision. Go for the kill, DPSing down the final few percent, and healing through the ALEA explosions, or play it safe. Run away. His fatal call was to DPS. He made the right call, by the way. He made the right call 100%.

Any good raid leader would have made that call, and if he had a good raid, it would have been no problem. It's not even a question. Any good player, any good raid leader would have already said that it's not even it's not even a doubt. Og, as they say, Zug the Zuggler, full send, and his shouts echoed

through the voice call, unaware that many had already begun to run, because when a death means a reset of your progress, it's every man for himself. Go back in, everybody back in, everybody back in, everybody, everybody, I'm getting heels,

big heels on me! Big heels on me! I'm death wishing, big yields on me. Holy shit. Let the bomb. Big heels on me? Big heels on me! You can't listen! They could have easily killed him here.

They could have easily killed him. Any good raid leader at any period in time, anybody knows this is a 100% stay in and finish the boss. You have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 warriors in the raid. If each one of them pressed to execute twice, this boss would be dead. Finish it. Don't want, finish you.

Finish, don't want, finish enough to fight. The boss fell. That's right. That's right. Just like Garrosh, he was right about everything and if the rest of the horde had stood with him he would still be the war chief

he was betrayed moments this felt like the end of the story and for many it was it was facilitated by classic row by the hardcore servers by the raid itself but this existed only due to the emergent methods

through which these creators decided to approach this re-release Why do we bring this up, though? For an OSRS player, it may be obvious. This happens all the fucking time in RuneScape. Not on the same scale as Onlyfangs and Soda Popin's achievement of managing to wrangle in

the egos of dozens, if not hundreds, of content creators for months was unlike anything I've ever seen, but in a microcosm, this is RuneScape's most common creator-driven element. The best comparison is Dead Man All-Stars, we're in a large OSRS content creator. It is crazy how I was right about everything.

It really is. It's sad. It really is sad. It stores up there and pirate. Yeah, I know. It's scary. I said the most humble. Well, I think that story shows my humility.

It's because I knew people could not see the truth. People would not believe the truth even when it was explained to them. And they had to see it for their own eyes. and I waited because I was confident that I knew what would happen. I was right. teamed up with Jagex by obtaining a custom server wherein 35 of the largest content creators in the game created teams of five in a full PVP version of the game.

Almost every area became dangerous. Oh, look, I got four. In these servers, all 35 creators had expedited experience rates and drops and a bit over a week of time to gear up for the finale. a King of the Hill-style one-on-one death match, where they donning the gear they've collected were put to the test against one another. That's pretty cool. The 10-day period that this event spanned was amongst the most fun in the game's history,

as following the individual and group-wide achievements and battles became so many people's day-to-day habit. The battles fought, the gear lost, the upsets, the strategies, the drama. It felt like a condensed version of only fangs buoyed by each creation. personality, loudest of which was Oda Block. It's crazy that I remember watching the drama with him and that girl. And at the beginning, I was totally on that girl's side. And then after watching all of Oda Block's videos, I realized that he was actually in fact right about

everything. It was crazy. He, much like Tyler One, is an abrasive, controversial figure with a huge. fan base. He's also one of the best PVPs in the entire game. He was the captain for the Otoblock Warriors and throughout this event, they became in some ways the focal point, the core narrative. Damn. In the draft, Oda Block recruited what was considered to be the strongest set of PVPs. They were the only ones capable of defeating the solo mission snakes, a team labeled as this season's villains. Oh. This was because they had a rather

toxic player that received a yellow card for potentially stream sniping. This was made worse by this player's previous history of less than honorable behavior, to put it simply. On top of this, many felt as though the snakes didn't have a particularly fun way of playing as they locked down a specific area of the game and farmed it, all the while taking on group fights to snowball their growing advantage. On the day of the finale, tensions were high. Oda Block broke over 100,000 concurrent viewers and simultaneously the old school and runescape streams had a collective concurrent viewership of over 150,000. Yeah, damn. To say that this event gained traction would be an understatement.

As the Warriors began their first fight, it wasn't looking good. Good players fell early and in this King of the Hill style system, the person who defeated the other remained in battle, granting the opposing team the ability to snowball an advantage. The cards did not look to be in the warrior's favor, but Odeblock himself hadn't yet stepped in the ring. As the bell rung and his character moved in, he disconnected. His entire home was DEDAst, and the competition for a brief moment was put on hold.

The Warriors, what can he do to claw this fight back? Come on, you are Oda Block. I see. No, I think this is actually a tactical decision with his sigils. Yeah, he's got the sigil of the meticulous maid. So he's got that extra 40 accuracy bonus. So he can afford to sit in this tanky Varaq skirt for some of the freezers. That's what he knows.

Was it like instantly or a little bit? Somebody did ask me, bro. It has to be because I did even start yet. I did even, I did even start yet. As soon as I crossed the border, I DC'd. Wow, that's so fucking cringe. I don't know what to do. I'm not going to lie.

I don't know what to do. Because the phone, the hot spot, just can't. It can't hold it. It can't hold. Are you able to change house? People are spamming? I'm not sure if that's fervable. Like, how long would it take you?

If that could happen, how long would that take you? I could try it. I could try it. Yeah, maybe like five minutes. I could just run to a different house. You rushed over to a friend's home. What? What?

What? What? In a keyboard in hand in an effort to continue the fight. Oh my God. However, it just wasn't the same. It is one thing to play on a friend's setup, and that alone doesn't feel great, but to do so in such a high-stakes, high-skill competition, it's borderline impossible.

Yeah, he's cooked. While he performed admirably, his misclicks were noticeable. The precision needed to play old-scu skilk-well is beyond any other MMO. So even a small change in setup create massive gaps in performance. Yep. Ultimately, the Warriors performed well, but they did not win. Their matches were the most watched and in many ways, after their elimination, that story concluded.

Damn. I bring up these two somewhat similar examples to showcase an overlap, a way to engage with the game that sometimes doesn't put the game first. This engagement uses it to uplift something else entirely, a community-driven event, a... This always was the case, by the way, with wow.

Like, if you think about all of the old wow moments, Like everybody remembers the Doom Ward Kazak going to fucking Stormland, right? Or the Serenity Now Funeral Raid or like some of those other drama moments? Yeah, that was what it was all about, man. Later design story, a personally aspired to goal. The overlap between old school runescape and wow classic isn't systemic.

Yeah, the plague. These games aren't similar. As Soda Poppin said, while watching some OSRS videos, Roonscape is the bane for Wow players. It utilizes an entirely different skill set that doesn't translate. You'd think that would be a point of a version,

yet it isn't, because the point of connection is far more important for a lot of people. Wow players might be looking for something more permanent as they currently linger in the seasonal low, a period... That's the reason why. I think that also there's another component to this too.

that a lot of wow players are now old. They're now old with gray hair. They're balding. And because of that, they don't have the same amount of time. Like, how many of you guys, really, but you either had this happen personally or you knew somebody who this happened to where you were raiding with this person

and they got married, they had a kid, or they graduated college or something like that, and they stopped playing the game. Like, I remember a very fateful, day at the end of Burning Crusade where my friend logged on and he said, guys, I have taken the intro to psychology

and my university three times to meet girls. I've been there for five years. I'm still a junior. I'm quitting because I need to get my life together. This can't just can't keep going on.

It's too much. I told this story in Legion. A guy recognized who I was talking about. It was a paladin named Talanor. He said Talanor got married. Yep. So he actually did it.

And he quit the game and he got married. He graduated college and got married. And the thing is that... The point is that a lot of people in Wow, their priorities have shifted and as they've aged, they can't keep up with the seasonal model, because the seasonal model requires consistent investment, and you can't just pick up where you left off.

Like, for example, if I wanted to go play Blackmeth Wukong again or I wanted to play metaphor refantazio again, I could immediately just pick up right where I left off. And I think that's why Classic Wow was so good. But when you're on a hamster wheel, the accomplishments that you make in the game are receding. And so once your accomplishments recede enough times, you lose interest in them. And I think that's what's happened.

OS or S you never lose progression. Like for me, like being losing progression in a video game causes me to just quit the game. Because it like it, it, it deletes the idea in my mind that I'm working towards a goal. Between when their progress finished and when they must start it all again. A point of reflection that surely has some ask, why? do I want to do it all again? To summarize the lull that World of Warcraft is in currently, as every version of the game is between releases,

has made its most prolific content creators branch out. Here's another component that he might not be considering, is that wow also is boring to watch now, because people have seen the same thing for so long, they're tired of looking at it. And people that are content creators in Wow, realize, I think that many of them want to do what chance or what Mitch or what I do. And you're seeing guys like Zaru and Pekabu trying to take steps in that direction too

to try to move out of that small bubble that they exist in. So a lot of these guys don't want to just be locked into playing World Warcraft for their whole life. And they want to be able to stream other games, but they can't do that because nobody will watch those other games. So as soon as, and you saw this with all. like Final Fantasy 14 is like as soon as I moved over to Final Fantasy 14, tons of other wow streamers did it. And the reason why is because I got a lot of viewers doing it. The reality is that streamers will follow where the viewership is and they will follow where people's attention is.

And World of Warcraft in general, content about the game is, in my opinion, based off of like somebody who's been paying attention to it. It's at an all time low. I forgot the last time that there was like a retail wow clip that I watched that mattered. And even retail wow like the fucking race to world first, I feel like it's a shadow of what it was in let's say battle for Azaroth. So it's clout chasing. Well,

it's not clout chasing. It's just their job, right? I mean, they don't want to be locked into something that they can't, that's a dead end. And so you can't pigeonhole your career solely over one game. Exactly. And so now wow players in the same way that Final Fantasy 14 was that in 2021, Roonscape now is that in 2025. So you're seeing a lot of wow content creators moving away from World Warcraft in the attempt to diversify their audience and give their stream a longer lifespan.

That's very, that's also like, and they might not say that, right? People might not want to say that because it seems like it's like a business thing to say and it like kind of makes it seem inauthentic. But trust me when I say that this is true. It's absolutely true. And you do the same thing if you were them. be a permanent investment, but it surely is interesting to see. These two old titans of the industry are still rubbing shoulders, but the balance of power might have started to change.

If there's ever a time to visit... Your mom was right. My mom was right. In World of Warcraft, she quit the game in BFA. She said, Pathfinder. I already did that. You're telling me I have to do it again. but I already did it again in Legion and now I have to do it three times

I gotta do the same thing no I don't and she just quit straight up over that that was that was why she quit the game she realized that she was on the hamster wheel school of Roonscape yeah no I don't on the cusp of its largest update the benefit of it being a curated sandbox

is that each addition is additive the game has only become larger with time it doesn't cannibalize itself with seasonal content. That alone could be something interesting to players that have become so accustomed to being cannibalized. I was one of them, after all, tired of spending months earning what became cosmetic overrides devalued by a glut of cosmetic overrides.

Wow felt like it was shrinking, not in player base per se, but as a world. The scope of the game becomes smaller. And now I feel like most people, if I watch most wow. streams like retail wow streams, they're either in an instance or in the city. There's no world of Warcraft. There's just menus of Warcraft. That's it. With every update, the amount of land expands, but the relevant content only inhabits a smaller and smaller fraction of it. It was refreshing to step into a world as persistent as my kitchen and the roof over my head. The long-form nature of old school runescape's progression

incentivized me to pursue the grind rather than recoil from it because I knew that every time I inched closer to my goal, that goal wouldn't leap ahead by miles every half year. That's that, oh my God, yes. Fucking yes, exactly. And as players have less time and as the wow audience is aging,

I think that was one of the big appeals of classic wow. is that if you took a break in, let's say, Moulton Core and you came back, your next goal would still be BWL. Even if Nax was out at that time, your next step would be BWL. It would remain, and a new goal would be added somewhere between or somewhere after. Retail doesn't offer a home, even when the developers are hard at work. A glass of bounce round, do you cave to casuals? What if I told you that this is the game that's made for casuals?

permanent, consistent, like, ongoing progress is better for casuals than a seasonal model. A seasonal model keeps them on a hamster wheel. A casual model and a permanent model keeps them playing the game for a longer period of time. Because they can come back and they won't lose progress. Do you know what really probably demoralizes casual players is when they come back to the game and they realize that everything that they did doesn't matter anymore. All of the gear, everything they worked for,

all of their farming, everything is totally invalidated, and now the game is a totally different experience. That's the reason why. On the player-owned housing system, because retail is as a communal as possible. There is almost no emergence within its body because the intent of the game

has disconnected entirely from its roots as an MMRP. There is no way. core leveling experience, no overworld organization, no coordination needed for anything that isn't small group instance content. It's a game split down the middle, a single player, lonely adventure through a barren overworld, flitting between checklist slop and the next instance dungeon and the instance dungeon itself. For those that love this about retail, the ability to hop into a game and in a weekend find yourself caught up to every

everyone else. And here's also another component that I didn't mention is that catching a player up is also overloading a new player with the amount of information and news. So like, for example, when you're playing Classic Wow, by the time that you get Fireblast, you know how Fireblast is going to fit into your rotation of using Frostbolt or Fireball. And when you get Frost Nova, it's like, oh shit, okay, now I know how to put all these together. but whenever you just start into the game and you get a boost to level whatever the fuck and you have 30 different spells, how the fuck are you supposed to learn how all those things

are supposed to fit together? Well, you don't. And that's the big problem, is that a lot of these games frontload the players with too much information that, again, is bad for casuals. So the entire premise that giving players everything really fast is good for casuals, I think is absolutely counterproductive. And I think that it achieves the opposite outcome. Perfect.

And likely why most would feel alienated by RuneScape. On the other hand, Classic Wow offers a bountiful leveling experience. The heights of Onlyfangs were never the raids. They were the journey to get to them. The leveling of Classic is for those who do it amongst the best gaming experiences because it effortlessly mixes flow state calm with heart-pumping danger, especially on hardcore servers. Old school runescape is something different.

It is a game on a separate path. Matt Season is a classic Wow content creator who has cataloged his journey into old school runescape without guides. And for those who have watched his videos have surely seen, Matt's season is pulling from game knowledge outside of his classic World of Warcraft pool because the skill set he obtained through Wow has not translated. but the appeal of slowly, often arduously... Mad Season and I used to do battlegrounds together in Classic Well.

And he said that he always liked to do battlegrounds with me because usually people would target him because he was like a popular content creator. But the one person that they wanted to kill even more than him was me. And so he could play the game and I would be the one getting targeted by everyone. and he could just play and do his own thing. And so he's like, yeah, no, invite Asman to Honor Farming. Yeah, definitely.

Moving through the world and becoming lost in the maze of systems and incomprehensible functions has evoked feelings that leveling in classic once did. Not today when leveling has become expected and understood, but back then, before the re-release, when every step felt fresh. I really think this is a great video. I was glad that I watched this,

and I think that I pretty much agree with everything he's saying. Yeah, I mean, I think that really, again, it's the entire premise, and it's the idea. Let me link you guys a video. I've never watched this guy's channel before. Theory-wise, so he only has 10,000 subs, so give him a sub, make sure to do that. And it reminds me how disappointing wow is.

Well, do you guys see my point that I'm making about how in World of Warcraft you have you have like this ever-evolving hamster wheel and people just get tired of running but in Roonscape you can walk and eventually you make actual progress so like you have a hamster wheel and you're going really really fast

but you're never going anywhere whereas in Roonscape and other games that are like that like classic wow was like that is that you're walking but eventually you get to where your destination is and I think that it's so tired of lame seasons get new gear. Yeah, eventually you'll get there. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's really, yeah, if you get off the hamster wheel, you lose your shit. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's really what it is

in general. And he admits the mistakes and was afraid. Or Ian admits he made mistakes and was afraid. Well, as I said, I mean, I was right about all my criticisms of wow. The developers wouldn't listen to me. Nobody ever wanted to listen to me. Everybody said that I was wrong, but I was vindicated and right about everything. And I've been proven right. more and more every single day. That's just how it is. Really, that's just the way it is. And I listen, like Pan Vandhi is stepping down, someone said.

Well, we'll see what happens, right? And yeah, I don't know about that. And you stayed humble about it? I did. I did. And this is the reason why I stopped, one of the reasons why I stopped making wow content is I realized that wow, what World of Warcraft had had happened is that it distilled its player base down into the people who actually like Mythic Plus,

they actually like seasonal instance grading, and this is now their audience. These are the people that now want to play the game. So I became a minority in my own game. Originally, like whenever I played World Warcraft for the first time in 2006, it was July of 2006, I think. Might have been June, but I think it was July.

I started playing the game, and I thought to myself, this game was made for me. They programmed, designed, and made this game exclusively just for me. And now, I feel like the game is made for everybody except me. And I felt like really that changed in BFA. I felt like BFA and Shadow Lames and Shadow Lames, it was no longer made for me anymore. Well, I ever try old school Rinscape.

I don't know if I would or not. I mean, I really don't know. I recall you adamantly saying people play OSRS for nostalgia. Now it seems like you understand what Jimmy was saying about the game. It's not nostalgia. It's constant. What do you think about that now? Is it just nostalgia?

I think that obviously nostalgia is really important. And I think that denying that nostalgia plays a huge role in OSRS's popularity is not true. And I feel like if you released a game like OSRS today, would it have the same success that OSRS has now? I don't think so. But again, it's the same with Classic Wow. If Classic Wow was released today, would it be as popular as it was in 2004? No, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a good game and it wouldn't do well. So, like, I think it's a matter of nostalgia does play a big role,

but the game quality has to be there for that nostalgia to really stick. And I think that with OSRS and also with Classic Wow, I think the nostalgia did stick. And also another reason why is because, the way that they've updated OSRS, I think has been very beneficial and positive. And so that's another reason. Have you heard of Brighter Shores? They've re-released it with newer graphics.

It flops. Brighter Shores is dead as fuck. Yeah. Like, I've got to tell you guys, nostalgia really goes hard. It's super important. And I don't think that enough people pay enough attention to it and respected enough.

And even if it's not direct nostalgia, there's like things that are kind of reminiscent of that. Would you say the losers of 15 years ago today in 2020? with one a new MMO like OSRS or Classic Wow. Yeah, I do think that a lot of young guys do want to have a new MMO like this that they can play. But I think that what's changed is that because you can make a living playing video games nowadays, the meta of playing video games to get something out of it or to get some sort of validation, I think that it's changed.

And I think that now games like Fortnite games like whatever the popular, whatever the popular PVP game flavor of the month is, that is the game now that a lot of young guys flock to because they know that if they play that game competitively really well, they can get attention for themselves and be successful. And so at the end of the day, it's the same impulse, but in a different direction. And so you have guys that are now, like, you know,

like that one kid that won that Boog, I think his name was like Booger or something like that, Buda, who won like $3 million playing Fortnite. And he was like 15 or 16. years old. That was insane, right? And so how many other kids that were around the same age saw that and they said to themselves, okay, well, I want to start playing Fortnite so I can be acknowledged in that same way? Well, the reality is that that's the same reason why people used to play World Warcraft. It was because they wanted to be able to be acknowledged and respected as individuals. Because when you're a kid, you're not taken seriously by anybody. Nobody gives a fuck what you think.

Nobody gets a fuck what you say. None of it matters at all. And, And so now whenever you have players and people like this that are, they're able to focus on that, Dota 2, bro. Yeah, Dota 2 definitely is another good example. Well, what I'm saying is that the proliferation of competitive in e-sports gaming has given those same guys that were like me. Like if I was a kid nowadays, what game would I want to play? Probably Fortnite.

Yeah, I would say probably Fortnite. Realistically? Or Minecraft? Well, I don't know enough about, maybe Roblox. I just don't know enough about Roblox to really say, Fortnite fell off. No, it didn't. That's crazy. You seem like a Roblox kid. I never liked, like, I really didn't. I seriously think that that OSRS moment to moment gameplay is at a high level held up much better in time

and classical all gameplay has. If anything, I'm a bigger lifelong wowsimp than OSRS. I played OSRS for only nine months. Yeah, I mean, I get it. I definitely do. I mean, like, I think that with this game, like, you just have like there is a level of Sorry about that. There was a level of like I mean this armor set I think for a good example like classic wow armor sets

were very stylized and very cool and I think that now retail wow armor sets are not like that at all they're just not as cool as they used to be I work with kids 16 and 22 and they all seem to flock to Fortnite apex and cod well the reason why is because those games are the games where you can be acknowledged for being a good player.

I think that a lot of people don't understand the value that an average that a young guy gets out of being acknowledged for being good at something for the first time in their life. And I think that video games provide that first chance for a guy to be able to do that. The thing is the armor is insanely hard to get. It's really 0.01% of the player race that have it. Well, that's why it matters. Yeah, that's it.

Reaction time is better when you're younger. Yeah, yeah, definitely that's it too. OSRS acknowledges you for being good. Yeah, of course. What point do you draw the line between people playing OSRS because they yearn for a good game design like in a past versus it's just nostalgia? I don't think you can divide the two.

I think that it's a confluence of things. People like the old school graphics. People probably also like the style. There's probably people that stick around with the game because they played it for 15 years. It's the same as WOW. If WOW got released today, would it still be as transcendent of a success

as it is now? No, probably not. And so that's really most people can't even do The Inferno. Well, yeah, I guess. What's so wrong with nostalgia? Well, it's important to understand what nostalgia is. So you don't think that the quality of the game is the one thing that's carrying it, right? It's not like your reaction time goes down by seconds when you suddenly hit 40.

Yeah, but like when you're 38, you probably are at a disadvantage against someone who's 17 whenever you're playing a competitive shooter. And whenever the time to kill in those competitive shooters is like, one or two seconds, that does make the difference. It absolutely does. Like, think about, like, I always think about this while I'm driving. Think about how much happens every second while you're driving. A lot happens in one, two, three, four, five.

A lot can happen inside of that one second. And so, like, really, yeah, yeah. So, like, you really have to think about inside of fucking, like, uh, it like a millisecond or like 10, like, you know, one-tenth of a second, basically. Same with fighting games? Yeah, definitely. The hard drive is full at 38.

Yeah, yeah, sure. You can compensate in other ways if the difference, but the difference is noticeable. Yeah, yeah, obviously, reaction time is most of your genetics. Age is not the most important factor. Well, I didn't say it was the most important factor. I said it was a factor, and it is a factor. And even the person with genetically good reaction time

will have genetically worse, will have age. Their reaction, that same person's reaction time will be worse at 38 than it was at 17, and it'll probably be even worse at 58 than it was at 38. So obviously, every single person exists on a spectrum, but that doesn't mean that the spectrum doesn't follow trends according to age. That's all I'm saying.

Age is a massive factor. Yeah, I think so in a lot of cases, except just like your hearing is. Yeah, it's a spectrum. And so anyway, I think that's one of the big reasons why Roomscape is popping off. And I think also, like, if I look right now, like what's happening in World of Warcraft today. Let's find out.

So we've got, let's see what's happening in the game and we will go, viewers high to low. This is classic wow again. Retail wow, there's only two people that have more than a thousand viewers. Again, like you just look at the game, it's just so hard to even understand. What the fuck is even going on? I'll wait for them to do something

and then you're going to see what happens, right? Well, New World? New World is dead. New World is super fucking dead. Like nobody's playing that game anymore. It's pretty much done. So, yeah, I don't think that's it at all. So the game, there's too much noise. Yeah, there's just too much happening.

There's too much stuff going on. And it's just too complicated. And we're number two on Warcraft's Directory in offline mode. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, like, that's really not a big surprise to me at all. And so my guilt was like my family Do you think Wow needs to die? No, I don't think Wow needs to die.

I mean, definitely not. But like, if you look like, just give it a second here and we'll look at like what's happening on the screen because usually this is one of the, I think they do a big pull at the beginning, right? Usually they do. Like this is like the way they used to do the fight. Okay.

Yeah. Watch what's happening on the screen. This is insane. complete sensory overload you can't see shit yeah there's too much happening look at this yeah visual diarrhea

yeah and like it's not even about the numbers being big or small like they're doing 16 million 20 million DPS that doesn't matter like if the numbers were like doing 20 or 60 DPS it would be the same problem there are just too many things

happening on the screen and too much going on in order for people to understand at all what's happening. And it's completely, like, it's completely unapproachable for anybody who's like a casual player. And like, if you compare this to, nobody's even playing the game. They're all fucking opening cases. Okay, well, let me get a better example. Okay, well, let's look at Valorant, for example. If you look at Valerant, it's very obvious what's happening in.

the game. She just shot somebody. It's simple. And then she just got shot. It's simple. Right? That's the difference is that a lot of these games are just totally fucking unwatchable. And that's the big reason why I think that a lot of people are losing interest in those types of content. The camshake when shooting. Well, what I'm saying is like even with, let me pull up another example. Let's see. We'll look at, well, that's actually just like, look at Counterstrike. I'll look at Counterstrike and we'll find somebody who's actually playing the game. Okay, so we've got, let's see, how about this guy right here? This guy looks like a guy just playing Counterstrike? Yeah, this is very, very simple. You have a guy with a gun and there's somebody

shooting him from the smoke. Valorant's very cluttered a lot of the time. Yes, I know that, but compared to wow, it's not. Extremely simple game. And so like as a viewer, in my opinion, I think CounterStrike is the chess of e-sports. I think that in 10, 20, 50 years, people will still be playing Counterstrike on Dust 2, and there will still be a big audience for it. Definitely. The game is, yeah, exactly, right?

And the reason why is because it's easy to understand. That's the other really big factor that a lot of people don't really pick up on. Gavin stays winning. Yeah, exactly. I'll be 70 years old Yeah And this is the thing

And so like you can very easily see what's happening In each of these rounds And I think that that's the reason Why a game like that is so successful And then if you compare that Like for example Let me look at some other popular games That are going on right now

Um Let's see Are there any other like actual like games That people are playing? Not really Nobody's playing video games anymore League Just pull this one up

This is still complicated, but it's infinitely less complicated than World of Warcraft, and it's also the same level of complicated for everybody. So, for example, the amount of complexity that you're looking at right here is the same amount of complexity that everybody else will be seeing also. So another big issue with Wow is that everybody has their own, everybody has like their own UI in Wow, which makes the game, even harder to approach and understand as a casual player. And so like you're watching this guy play the game,

which is going to be very different than watching another guy play the game. Yeah, the setup for it, right? And so it's just difficult to understand at all. And I'll see if this is even Classic Wow. Yeah, and you can see Classic Wow still has the same problem, but the problem is much less, much less obvious. It's a lot simpler and easier to understand. And I think that's one of the big differences

that people need to understand about the two games.