Love Jesse and his enthusiasm especially after the official end of the podcast lol

I love Jordan and Mike, and I hope that WoW makes the changes they very much want and they can enjoy playing again, but Jesse and I are on the same page. I kept a side eye on WoW stuff and watched the Blizzcon news, but even Metzen couldn't get me to consider playing again. And honestly at this point, I couldn't tell you what would. And that's not a bash; it's just how it is. And Jesse really does have the best poker face. Stone cold.

The phase shift on 2:04:45 is why I love Jesse lmao

Jesses poker face is unmatched

Wonderful discussion, level headed and entertaining. Also I love the bonus chat with Jesse. The way he asks the questions and keeps the perfect straight face, kudos my man :)

Back here again for Jesse's Pokerface

Okaymage hit my biggest pain point with WoW. An mmo's continuing existence is reliant on getting new people to try their game, and the impression I get is that it fails a lot in that aspect. That might not be true, but that is what it looks like. Ultimately, in the position Blizzard is in, trying to focus your marketing and your messages to bring people back is probably the best business move they can make, but that is another example of focusing on short term gains over long term sustainability. Eventually, the list of potential players they could draw from will dwindle as time goes on. People buy houses, get kids, new jobs, and other responsibilities. As morbid as it sounds, the will eventually grow too old or pass away entirely. The new player experience has certainly improved over the years, but it's not great compared to its contemporaries for so many reasons. Just like Okaymage said, it's a topic that could be its own round table, and I would love to see that discussion. I don't believe that mmos or even wow specifically can't appeal to a newer generation. The possibility exists, but first, it is a problem that needs to be discussed and acknowledged can be acted upon.

Yo, VOD squad! Where ya at?

The whole section with Preach recounting the current WoW story and seeing Jesse look more and more hopeless was absolutely hilarious. That way of doing story is so bad, that I can't believe anyone would think this would work.

It is my dream in life to have Danuser’s job security. Like whose dirty secrets does this man have that he can fail so miserably and still have a job?

Very happy to get the details on the Blizzcon issues. I had figured they'd just lost the internal people who planned it and the new ones hadn't been given time, but an outside company makes so much sense with the timeframe.

Incredible poker face JC! Great show guys, thank you!

I've been away the last few days, so I missed both this podcast and GG's latest 2-part MSQ session. I was tempted to jump straight to the VODs, but I am SO glad I watched this first. The WoW convo was really good, and Jesse post-podcast was top tier.

1:03:20 Minor quick correction. We have known the Dragon Isles existed since at least Vanilla. They were on the map, but weren’t (conventionally) reachable. There was supposed to be some Old God shenaniganery there, but that seems to have changed? Also a super sick kraken-shaped temple.

Listened to the podcast as I was ferrying family all over the place today. It was a great listen. And then Jesse highjacked it and it was still great. So much fun.

Love how Lost is always brought up as an example of "an unplanned story going off the rails", when the reality is that the worst seasons of Lost were produced during a writers strike so there were zero actual writers behind that trainwreck. A more accurate takeway would be, "do not let the money people get ahead of the creatives that make things actually good".

Jessie took this exactly where i wanted it to go in the end lol

Preach said "lottery" and it reminded me I haven't checked my numbers yet, brb saucer (>'-')>

What a crew! Looking forward to the listen!

29:23 I love how that line perfectly sums up Jesse's thoughts on not only Star Wars, but WoW as well. I'm really hoping that whatever the WoW writers plans for the upcoming expansions will end up being great. I'm curious to see how their new approach to the narrative focused side of WoW will affect all the other aspects of their game.

The Jessie Cox take over

Pandaria is the one expansion I would like to do in classic and might get me to resub.

What a fantastic discussion. I got into WoW right before the Pandaria expansion and had a lot of time leveling solo first on Alliance and then on Horde, doing all the sidequests. I stayed until Legion and then just gave up because it became not fun. I watched the announcement and gotta say, I'm intrigued to get back but so many good points were made in this. Like, it needs to be FUN. There needs to be a reason for people to want to login and do "side" stuff. There's so much fun stuff on FFXIV that just makes it a lot of fun to randomly login when you have a moment and there's always something to do, even as a soloer. I'm with Jesse. My trust with them is on an all time low, so I'll wait and see how it goes, but I also do miss it, so I hold hope that they'll come back with something fun with the new content. 🤞

Enjoyed the podcast a lot, hopefully we will ger another one wirh the same lineup in the future and you can talk about FFXIV? ❤

This was an excellent listen.

Still to this day, I find it so crazy that WoW doesn't have an equivalent to level sync for old content. Maybe I don't play enough other mmos, but that feels like such a base, core feature of an mmo as big as WoW

Wait until Grinding Gear gets to the last zone in Endwalker. There’s an Easter egg to a novel that is buried somewhere in that zone.

Jesse at the end is just *chef's kiss*

"buying novels to get the story" -insert Pyro rant here-

When Preach mentioned at 1:15:00 about the giant sword stuck in the ground in WoW, and compared it to Mjolnir in the MCU, I was thinking that a more apt analogy would be Eternals in the MCU where the movie ended with a giant petrified alien colossal entity in the ocean, and future stories basically did nothing to address it. Sometimes games just set up way too much stuff and never really come around to addressing all of it because stuff is being made up as the writers go along. For example in FFXIV we still don’t really have an in-story explanation of how 3 ascians managed to avoid getting sundered by hydaelyn.

Jesse became the stonehead emoji 🗿

Work was so busy I didn’t get to sneak in during this. Can’t wait to VOD it tomorrow since it’s double GG (HA!) day.😊

Wait Jesse Cox worked on excuse me sir? I did not know that. Only knew it was a colab between airdorf and some other group

Funny, this episode is why I now started playing WoW for the first time in my life. Despite the awful reputation it has for being hostile to new players. Some of the hostility is definitely there, but it's not that bad. Then again, I'm not playing retail.

Blizzard desperately needs more energy on stage. Metzen can’t carry it all forever

Thank goodness for Jesse, especially the "I don't care if it's more like FF14, why would I go back to it just because of that..." EDIT After all of it:Also, holy *crap* did Wow steal sooooooooo much from ff14, so casually mentioned. Like how the hell would you go back to it when it HAS BEEN desperately stealing so much and throwing it in already....?

Awesome podcast bruh ya should expand your audience to other MMO's like GW2 !

Hot take: Lost was just the millennial version of Twin Peaks.

the talk on McGuffins breaking Kyle is hilarious to me because I remember getting a heart from them on a comment I made back when they were at the end of HW or middle of SB asking when we'd get a wall for them.

All star crew

the comment about thors hammer vs the sword was great but now marvel is doing the same thing with the man and the ocean just not being a thing

Nooo I missed the live notification. Oh well, VOD squad it is ~

I have to say I will NEVER play poker against JC Masterful

Blizzard has consistently been utter shit at storytelling in Warcraft. They can tell a great story but they have no idea how to tell it, much less tell it well. Beautiful world building, awful storytelling. Bless FFXIV. Not without it's problems, sometimes a tad glaring but damn is it absolute leagues better in that territory.

Any time Jesse or Preach mention the sword, I feel like I'm being gaslit, because I remember having to use our artifacts to purify the corruption of the sword. I remember varying groups in Silithus vying for the blood of Azeroth shed by the sword. I remember an entire expansion dealing with the blood shed by the sword showing up elsewhere, with frequent visits to a facility with its entrance right next to the sword. In other words, I remember dealing with the sword! The sword isn't GONE, but that was never on the table; we had an entire opening experience in Mists about how removing huge thorns sticking in the sides of living things can have consequences far more dire than the thorn itself. We dealt with the sword, and I don't understand why people are still obsessed with it.

When it comes to narrative, sometimes I feel like MMOs tend to write themselves into a corner almost akin to DBZ where it's like, "Okay, you saved the world. Now what?" and with that comes a continued escalation of power or perception of such that either doesn't make sense or risks the player throwing their hands up in frustration. So while I get the whole "You're the hero!" trope can be compelling, it almost feels too relied upon en lieu of creating worlds where we're more a piece of the puzzle than the solution. How games go about straddling this also goes on to vary, where we obviously get the divides of things like WoW vs XIV in their narratives, quality, feelings of finality, reasonable dangling threads, and so on. Like, to hearken back to the DBZ reference, WoL may as well be UI Goku while someone like Thancred mas well be Krillin. Now, when you compare Thancred to the average citizen, of course he's powerful and justifies his own degree of respect and awe, but then when it comes time to introduce threats, they always have to be a threat to the WoL, which automatically makes the remainder of the cast bystanders or regulated to handling trash and lesser baddies. And of course, as expansion go on, you get that aforementioned escalation where the gap continues to grow. Sometimes you might get a new ally and it's like, "Where were you when...?!?!?" or there just conveniently being a threat that could've individually rolled the world if they chose to act earlier in the narrative. And sure, some of that's RPG logic where endgame zone mobs could basically destroy civilization if they chose to migrate, but sometimes there's a point where you can't just hand wave the logic and have to do something to justify the gap. Similarly, this is where a lot of the disdain for Zenos takes root, as he winds up being the lazy anti-WoL with a cardboard personality we know the cast can't do anything against and even the moments where the WoL fails against him is forced by a different sort of RPG logic. All before he got his own personal power up with the Shinryu stuff, but then we suddenly rise above. Overall, there's a point where you can't just keep shoveling "epic" down the player's throats before it just starts looking like Guren Lagan absurdity. Yeah, I know some people like that kind of stuff, but it's not convenient to world building and essentially dehumanizes everyone who isn't integral to the plot in the moment. Throwing in a Mr. Satan comic relief fish out of water here and there won't resonate with everyone, either. Honestly, this is a source of big hesitation with what's in store with Dawntrail. Sure, we're all kind of joking it's the FFXIV beach episode with what's been shared of material so far, but I think we should know better at this point. Yes, the board has relatively been reset with Zodiark off the table, solution to tempering, and other things I can't/won't spoil out of respect for the boys, but that dynamic of epic and scale still exists and I feel like we're going to have a lot of disappointed people if it turns out the Mamool Ja King is really the big bad and what was on the tin was ultimately taken at face value. Messing with a tribe of beastfolk is small potatoes compared to offing the Elder Primal. We can even argue we've done that plenty of times already relative to earlier Primal dispatches. So, there's gotta be some kind of swerve, but how much will the cast truly matter in terms of handling it? Will we just get another swathe of open world zones that become useless once the MSQ is done with them? While I'll stress everything does have a shelf life and I'm not a fan of trying to unreasonably prolong that, I'll always assert that one of XIV's biggest weaknesses is that they don't even really try in an attempt to bolster interest in their instanced content. Irony of ironies, the linearity and mechanical predictability of dungeons winds up further sabotaging that shift because once you're bored of those, there's... what? Of course, this line of conversation risks treading on that whole "XIV IS DYING!" clickbait rhetoric, and my intention isn't really to do that or even imply it so I'll cut myself off. I just think there's a difference of the "play other games" and not being shackled to a game due to grind and having things for people to do if they do want to stick around that's not exclusive for the forever insatiable hardcore crowd that no amount of development could ever hope to placate. So, while WoW may be trying to push a formula change, or as joked, their own A Realm Reborn moment, I feel like even XIV needs some formulaic shakeups that will probably never happen. Some things are mechanical, like maybe addressing net code or other pre-ARR skeletons in the closet. Some things are social, whether engineered by the game mechanics or genre purity zealots. Thus, I sit here with that awkward feeling that while XIV might be the best MMO on the market right now, that chasing of better just doesn't feel there short of maybe some superficial graphical improvements even if I don't think the game is "ugly" now despite its age.

Should have had nobbel on this as well, preach is the worst with lore

A good thing to do when doing a WoW podcast is maybe getting people who are actually playing the game and involved with the game, none of those people even care about what is going on!

I'm the weirdo who really didn't care about mage tower that much. I did the same thing I do with FFXIV relics - I review how they look and then decide if it's worth my effort. I think the only class I felt was worth the mage tower was monk, but I did not have a monk at max so leveled one just to do mage tower. LOL I may have done it on mage, but I didn't do it on my main because I just didn't like it. I just won't make the effort for a mount, weapon or anything I don't really see myself loving or using a lot as a transmog. I don't even care about the bragging rights. At 1:30:30 "As Ion put it to me"... yes, that is how Ion put it, but people had complained about this and stated it themselves - he was just repeating what he or his minions had read online regarding WoW dailies. He didn't care then and he only cares now because it is likely affecting his and other's bonus pay. Timewalking raids and dungeons are horribly tuned. They do the bare minimum of tuning and they are buggy AF. It's a big crap shoot on whether you will be successful even with people doing current higher end raids. As for Wow-killers? The games never labeled themselves that - disgruntled fans did.

So some context for the story complaints Preach brought up. 1. All of those moments happened over the past year, patch by patch. Yes, some of those quests were behind Renown which can turn people off, but they were campaign quests and highlighted as such. Is it dumb that they had a barrier, sure even if that barrier was inconsequential, but the idea was episodic storytelling. 2. Wrathion was with us through the entirety of the Zaralek story. I don't think you can blame them for you just skipping pieces of the MSQ and you being confused after. Same with Vyranoth. I would have loved some more in between than what we got, but she and Alexstrasza does get expanded if you do all the story. 3. The cutscene prompts at the portal are for a refresh because there are these gaps. Complaining about them is like complaining about "last time on the Mandolorian". If you skip the middle of the season, you can expect to be confused. Y'sera is dead. In Shadowlands she is reborn and bound to Ardenweald in the campaign. In the Ohn'ahran Plains story we plant the world tree seed, again, from the Shadowlands campaign, but the Primalists find out and attack. We end up needing Ysera for a specific way to break the siege, but she's tied to Ardenweald. So we chat with the Winter Queen and swap her for Malfurion as a placeholder until the threat is dealt with. Q'onzu is a chaos god, all they want is change. Jesse, saying that they never wrap up anything when you just haven't seen it is bullshit and you know it. You just commented on this with asking about Nozdormu 2 weeks ago. I'm sorry, what? No one knew or cared about the Dragon Isles? The place that has been theorized to be an expansion since THE BASE FUCKING GAME?!?!? Just because you don't know or care about something doesn't mean the rest of us do. Not going to argue much on the raid end cinematic because that was definitely some rough as fuck writing. The idea is really cool but dear lord did that needed a rewrite. I think it demonstrates the point I want to make though. The ideas and big picture have improved a lot, but the writing really needs to step up. Gear and its associated philosophy in WoW vs any other game is such a big topic.

I'm sorry but did Jesse say "I played 14 hours a day 5 days a week, I can't do it again" who said WoW wants you to play that much? Like play 2-3 hours every other day like must people.

1:47:40 wait what? My guild raids required full flask uptime since BWL (and we were a profoundly shitty guild). Full raid flasking was absolutely the norm before ICC.

I must express how incredible it is that WoW's story is so incredibly terrible that I've converted to a Sargeras supporter. At least OG Sargeras who just wanted to wipe the universe completely clean. Not restart, not reshape, not salvage, just erase. It cannot be saved, let it burn.