[00:03] drama floating around and quite a lot of news to talk about. But that's of course pretty massive quirk that's driving a few people mad. And the big wigs developer has decided the Blizzard's add-on limitations are more just add-on
[00:16] able to feature that Blizzard explicitly called out as being unwanted. But also at the end of the day, Blizzard's limitations have often not really good things as well though, like as an example repair costs actually being
[00:32] looked at. Pretty damn fast as well. So welcome back to the news and this time welcome back to the news and this time it's last minute patch 12.0.7 changes. feedback on updates coming too fast. They've seen the stacks of evidence of
[00:47] patches becoming too buggy. And I have to wonder if this time they've maybe decided on a solution. Now let me explain, right? It may seem like a simple choice where you have option one, go ahead as planned which will keep
[01:00] everything smooth, but will risk another busted patch. production I mean, not necessarily for us players. But maybe there's option two, delay the patch which is safer, but would throw all of their plans and team
[01:14] allocations into chaos. Maybe what we're about to see though is a third way, a third option. So patch 12.0.7 will launch on the 16th of June. That's eight weeks after 12.0.5 launched just as planned.
[01:28] But they're adding in a major twist here. One of the major patch features is coming later. And not just like the next week, it's a whole lot later. You see, in the official announcement for the patch, Blizzard said that this patch's
[01:41] story is coming for another massive three weeks after launch on the 7th of July. That's when we'll see the campaign involving Zul'jan and more of the build up to patch 12.1. So we're going to be waiting a while for that.
[01:54] question is why? Now the obvious thing we're all thinking of, me included, is time gating, right? Most of the time, whenever someone mentions time gating, they're imagining Ian and Holly, I don't know, smoking a cigar, rubbing their
[02:07] hands together, looking like Scrooge McDuck over a big pile of gold. I mean, the logic almost speaks for itself, right? Delay the content by almost a month, which will push loads of people to, you know, roll their subscription
[02:20] over for an extra month to do all of that content. I guess in theory, it's almost like asking double the price for the same amount of development work. Now, you could call that technically true, but I think blatantly tricking
[02:33] strategy in the long run. And that's because while we can totally logic out that you could time gate, and you could probably earn more money in the very short term by doing that, well, if you do it too much, there'll be nothing in
[02:46] the game. People will just wise up and then leave. We've seen that enough in the past, and let's be real, there's a patch every 8 weeks. I don't think we really need to be stretching out our content. And that makes me think
[02:58] something different may be going on. So, let me explain. Overall engagement is a bit more of a relevant thing. And the longer you drag out a patch, the less you stack stuff up on top of each other, right? Then, if people are a lot less
[03:11] stressed about having to do a whole lot of stuff at once, maybe they'll take their time and engage with the game a little bit more overall. If everything's available at once, it can end up feeling like a huge blitz, and people will feel
[03:23] really quickly. So, you could say that this way, everyone's got something to take their time with, so the story can come out a little bit later, and no one will really miss out. Or so I would say, because 3 weeks isn't
[03:37] time. So, here's a second theory, and I think it may be the actual one. What if this content is just not ready? I mean, it's all up in the PTR, so it is quite literally written and playable and
[03:51] all of that, but when you're playing it in PTR, you don't get final cutscenes, and it does make me wonder, maybe they're not ready yet. Maybe Blizzard needs to buy more time to finish that stuff up. It's possible. At this point,
[04:05] it's pure conjecture, but I don't think it would be completely insane. But there is another possibility, and it could be they need time to change some things. We know that this leads directly into patch 12.1, so there's maybe a
[04:17] last-minute changes to the overall Zul'jan storyline. Could sound a bit insane at this point, but there's actually some precedent behind this. At Blizzard clearly didn't know where they were going with Alleria. And at the end
[04:31] of the expansion, well, they added in the recap version of The War Within campaign. And when they did that, they actually added in a bonus line from Alleria to the leveling campaign. It's during the scenario with her and Anduin,
[04:45] and she talks a little bit more about her destiny turning to the void. So, it's not unimaginable that they want to shore up some dialogue, maybe based on how 12.1 development is going. But 3 weeks is a long time, and the reception
[04:58] from PTR hasn't been that bad. I'm not going to spoil what I was able to learn, you don't worry, but I'll say most of the criticism has been fear for where we go next instead of issues with 12.0.7 itself, at least from the story front.
[05:12] mean, if they were going to delay anything to dodge bugs and get more development time, I'd expect it to be either the showdowns or the raid, and not the usually quite simple story. So, I think we can probably rule that theory
[05:26] out. There is another idea, it's not as sexy or dramatic. It may just be timing. You see, 12.0.7 story is basically the setup for patch 12.1, so shifting those two things to be a bit closer together probably does make sense. I mean, at the
[05:40] end of the day, the whole us going and doing some questing with Zul'jan and his uncle isn't really tied to, well, showdowns, which are basically us taking all of the baddies of patch 12.0.5 and
[05:53] ex-legion worlds and knocking their heads in. Perhaps it makes sense that after we've done that, we then get ready more thing before the next segment. Some of this could be Blizzard testing a
[06:06] it's been a bit quiet lately with the WoW news. The Xbox event last Sunday would have been a great chance to get a whole bunch of eyes on WoW's next big happy to hold off on that. So, what if this story delay is to create a shorter
[06:23] 5-week wait? I mean, think about it. For the past while, we've almost known way too much about patches and story ahead of time, right? I mean, at worst, a patch can almost feel over by the time it's launched because everyone's
[06:36] expectations are priced into the community, and we're just waiting for another 8 weeks. As an example, 12.0.7 was announced 30th of April. That's 7 weeks from announcement to release. Maybe Blizzard cutting that time period
[06:51] actually feeling like announcements and prevent that kind of awkward thing where, as soon as a patch drops, within a week, we already know loads about the next patch. We maybe even have a PTR build, and that does make the current
[07:06] game feel a bit less important. But, at the end of the day, it is still a 3-week people really care about the topic of time gating. That's why I'm happy to devote a good bit of time in this WoW news episode to this story. So, whatever
[07:19] getting clearer that they are getting quite comfy spreading their game out across the calendar. I'm not entirely sure if that's the best pressure to play. On the other hand, less exciting patch days. And I
[07:33] certainly have to say the experience of logging in on a big new patch day, filling a weekly bar within a few hours and sort of feeling like there's nothing else to do, well, that doesn't really feel great. And yes, if there was a new
[07:46] campaign that took two hours and was just done, well, it's not like that would keep you going playing content for ages, but maybe experiencing a big slice of story would make patch day feel just a little bit more like patch day. But
[07:59] you know what? My standing advice is still to not really plan on playing well a lot during patch day or the next few days after cuz there often are bugs and generally you'll have a better time if you wait till they're fixed. So, because
[08:12] of that, it's hard to know what I think about this. Anyway, that's enough time. I've time gated the other segments of this video too much, so let's talk about this video too much, so let's talk about the add-on war.
[08:25] a mixed bag to say the least. We're on the other side of the drama, I guess, whatever restrictions Blizzard have imposed, but that has not stopped some faithful add-on warriors continuing to wage war and doing so in the form of,
[08:40] well, software engineering, which is pretty rad. Now, last month, it was Mini CC in the news for finding a bunch of insanely specific custom workarounds to track friendly player cooldowns. That actually made it a staple of Mythic Plus
[08:53] with it approaching 3 million downloads despite being brand new. Which, you know Does kind of tell you something about people playing World of Warcraft that an add-on can just explosively grow that quickly when it's mainly being used by
[09:07] the M Plus community and not even at the very beginning of a new season. It's kind of impressive. But this month, it's Big Wigs who are in the spotlight. Whenever Blizzard added their own raid timeline feature, one of their goals was
[09:19] to make people respect spell names again. They even called that out directly in this huge post that they made to the WoW UI development Discord back during the alpha of Midnight. Basically, simplifying spell names, in
[09:32] their view, removes a bit of a knowledge check from the game, and that pushes them into making casts faster and more deadly. And that's basically because the renaming of the ability makes that whole thing way lower cognition, meaning that
[09:47] Blizzard's only real way to test you then ends up being on the reaction time. could agree there is a middle ground, and to only have the extremes would be a bit of a false dichotomy. But it certainly shouldn't be a surprise that
[10:00] both BigWigs and DBM have managed to hack that functionality back in. So, if you want, you can ignore all the flavor. In raids going forward, you will be able to rename spells not to something that's just a more
[10:14] simple thing to read, but instead to an instruction of what you should do. In BigWigs, you can even export config so that your guild can make and share custom ones. Like DBM's example here, which signals out Bob. As an example,
[10:30] you could have something like Steve, bubble this stack with a fully voiced countdown. You could actually do that again. So, it's interesting that UI devs have gotten, in a way you could say, so brazen about pretty much ignoring
[10:44] Blizzard's statements and add-ons. But of course, Blizzard made statements. We all assumed that Blizzard would make the technological changes necessary to make their statements, you
[10:57] know, the rules. But they didn't really do that, did they? Now, 12.1 does have UI updates on the road map, and it is a major patch. I think that regardless of this add-on discussion, we are long overdue improvements to things like the
[11:11] damage meter, as well as just about everything else. So, I'm expecting a long list of changes when the PTR lands, and I would not be surprised if Blizzard shipped more restrictions as well, or at least did something to address the
[11:24] add-on situation publicly. Because if they don't, they are kind of just waving I'd like to think that if Ion is going to lose his war on add-ons that, I don't fight. Who knows, maybe there'll be
[11:38] another manifesto dropped in the PTR. That would be fun if nothing else. But realistically, I think we've sort of settled in to how Midnight feels to I think people at Blizzard are just crossing their fingers and hoping that
[11:50] most people won't feel the need for add-ons anymore. And to be fair, that is exactly how our guild feels. Which is a reminder, just cuz something's interesting and newsworthy doesn't mean that it's the
[12:02] end of the world. With that being said, let's talk about equal right to repair. No, this is not a Louis Rossmann video, but we are going to talk about repair but we are going to talk about repair bills in WoW.
[12:15] talking about for ages. This time around though, they've managed it in just a few though, they've managed it in just a few weeks. So, repair bills are kind of saved. So, a while ago, right, WoW Head investigated the rising repair costs. We
[12:28] did a bit of a follow-up to that. And as it turns out, well, repair bills have been massively inflated. And the major culprit is actually the scaling of upgrade levels in the game. Myth gear can cost you over 200 gold per wipe,
[12:43] which, as we worked out, I think this is one of our greatest contributions to to science and humanity, it's actually more expensive than wiping with actual toilet paper. Yeah, WoW Token really lets you do some
[12:56] fun things with currency. Now, sadly, that bit of the scaling is not what Blizzard have fixed. Progressing and plus or mythic grade is kind of still going to bankrupt you. But the good news is, you'll all be bankrupted fairly. You
[13:09] see, one thing that people noticed uh when digging into repair bills is that it's a massively biased system. Durability goes down during combat for everybody, but it also has a chance to drop whenever you land a physical attack
[13:22] with a weapon or get hit by or block an attack. Which does make quite a lot of sense when you think about it, but it's kind the entire history of the game, repair bills have secretly been a tax on two
[13:36] types of player. Those with fast weapons like rogues, or perhaps tanks, especially tanks with shields. This whole time, prot warriors using shield block have actually been basically tapping into their gold as a bonus class
[13:50] your rage, but you've also got to manage your gold. Now, one player actually mapped it out to be an extra 25 gold per dungeon just for using shield block to block a bit more. Kind of funny, but now it's something
[14:05] that Blizzard have fixed. Weapons and armor no longer take extra damage from combat events, which is less immersive, I suppose, but I think it is good. It means that everyone should have roughly equal repair bills assuming similar gear
[14:19] levels. Unless, of course, you know, you you die way more. You're still going to be paying the death tax. But, the issue of, say, our myth gear and wipes when you're wearing myth gear being really
[14:32] expensive, well, that is still a bit of an issue. But, hey, we'll come in. Just wipe less. It's a skill issue. But, at least with these changes in Azeroth, death and taxes are both relatively
[14:47] fair. Now, this patch is coming out next week. There is a shitload of stuff in it. It really is humongous for a 0.7 patch. So, don't let one bit of content coming out 3 weeks later like ruin the whole thing for you. There really is a
[14:59] to know about everything that's in the patch, simply watch this video next.