OnlyFangs has made 'World of Warcraft' into Twitch's best soap opera
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It has been great second monitor content for someone like me who has never played WoW.
- People know they need to get help from others. There's less bad behavior.
- You can't cheese anything, like running in to a camp to grab the quest item, letting yourself get killed, and then resurrecting.
- You find it acceptable to do side quest things like making potions and other useful stuff.
- The levels below 60 are no longer a speedrun with barely anyone else to be seen. People die all the time, and they restart all the time, so the lower levels have a lot of life. On non-hardcore, getting to 60 is inevitable.
- You have to prepare properly. Not only bringing all the consumables you'll need for raiding, also knowing what the boss is gonna do.
- Because the game is old, you get older players with old people issues like having kids. It's much more sympathetic towards life getting in your way.
- You feel an actual adrenaline rush when things go wrong. You might have 8 days played on a character who could die if you don't get out of a sticky situation. People are constantly reporting heightened heart rates. If you play non-hardcore, it's just "meh I'll run back".
But that is, regrettably, also the case for retail. You are expected to spoil the dungeons and raids for yourself by reading up on everything the bosses will do, before you first enter. Nobody has the patience to go in blind and figure out their own strategies. And you're also expected to use addons that will tell you exactly what to do and when.
That's what made me lose interest in the game. You're not the player. The addons are. You are doing the one thing they can't: Press the buttons for them. You're the input device. I hate this so much.
The main difficulty with modern WoW is not standing in the fire that kills you in less time than human reaction speed, and using defensive abilities if you're taking damage that can't be avoided.
Granted I'm cherry-picking RWF where people are severely under-geared at first, but I think it does offer a relevant microcosmic example of the state of addons in retail WoW. They're more or less required for the competitive side of most "hard" content these days, even for the most coordinated of groups.
(EDIT: I wanted to add that in no way do I consider this "playing the game for you". It still took the aforementioned teams like 2 weeks to clear Nerub-ar Palace, and the largest chunk of that time wasn't even on the last boss, it was on Kyveza)
This is an issue even in Mythic+ where missing a single kick means you likely wipe your group and if its a pug they probably all leave the key afterwards (the latter is a separate community issue, but exists nonetheless). If Blizz in the future is forced to assume that most players dont have kick addons that tell them which party member has a kick up and a timer/alert to tell you when to kick the caster mob, then theyre also forced into improving the UI to help the players know that information without external assistance. Or even better improve the mechanics writ large so that arcane knowledge is less zero-sum when you dont have it.
Mythic is probably as hard or harder now than it’s ever been. (Minus unkillable tuning of course). They’ve removed complexity that made things “difficult” in an unsatisfying way and we have lower ping now, but “add-ons do it all for you” is a silly take.
It feels barely related to D&D tabletop sessions or classic fantasy anything and more like a group Mario 64 speedrun or something.
While being “serious” became more popular in raiding over time, prior to M+ that mentality never came to dungeons. Up until its addition those were more of a go in with whatever ragtag crew you could gather together and have fun kind of thing, which has sadly has mostly been supplanted by solo content in modern WoW. There’s little content that requires a group and is low-stakes enough for the social or fantasy aspects to take precedence over the competitive ones.
For low key chill groups it's not true.
99% rejection rate and I was better geared, did more damage and died less than those who rejected me.
WoW became a kindergarten. Youngsters waiting for boosts. Meh.
Hardcore WoW is really an exercise not in skill but in not getting bored/complacent and taking unnecessary risks. Plus you have the constant threat of dying to network conditions or just the game crashing, both of which happenn. You may also have to deal with griefers. They've clamped down on a lot of this now (eg probably all mobs are leashed at this point) but it can still happen.
If anything, it's a test of knowledge of the game, like knowing how things path, know the safe areas (in the outside world and in dungeons) to reset things when things go badly, etc. Learning these in hardcore would be a painful lesson.
The only people playing this have been playing the game for literally decades and they know all this.
OnlyFangs can be entertaining content. Watch as you please but hardcore is just not for you, most likely.
Idea is to increase the stakes even further.
But the TIME you lose on a high-level character, that stings for EVERYONE. I don't think you need to raise the stakes even further. Like, why, what are you even gaining? The goal of the mode has already been met.
This is a fascinating element of the game, where dedicated players push the boundaries of their abilities, accumulating resources that are crucial for success in the toughest parts of the game. Hardcore gold farming requires commitment, skill, and time—things that not every player has in abundance. For many, accumulating this gold is a way to unlock high-end gear, support raiding endeavors, or fund their adventures in Mythic+ dungeons.
What stands out to me is how this niche has sparked a new economic layer within the game. Hardcore players are investing huge amounts of time into gathering resources, and their gold becomes a sought-after commodity. This creates a different dynamic for players who want to skip the grind but still desire top-tier rewards. It’s not simply about completing quests or leveling; it’s about mastering the toughest aspects of WoW’s economy.
The question is, how will this continue to evolve in the future? Will the demand for WoW Hardcore Gold (https://wowvendor.com/shop/wow-gold/product/hardcore-gold/) keep pushing players to go deeper into these challenges, or will other methods of progression emerge to balance things out? I’d love to hear how others feel about the impact of this shift in WoW’s economy.
People like this are going to have access to Hollywood-grade AI that they can run from their home PC using open source models soon.
Every theater kid or improviser will immediately be able to become an orc or space trooper.
The pipe dream of becoming a Hollywood actor had to go through the Instagram/TikTok/Twitch phase, but it's about to come full circle.
Creators will own their own audiences and stories rather than having to fight for a spot at the top of the Disney pyramid. They won't be subservient to Disney producers, brand guidelines, or controls.
Studios only existed because (1) distribution was hard and (2) financial capital, human capital, and logistics were steep barriers. Neither is true anymore. The indie creator studio can thrive.
The future is going to be awesome. Steam/Bandcamp for TV, film, fantasy and science fiction.
Still not enough to live off it but if you consider that literally anyone can publish music it's not surprising.
The Bandcamp is there for people who don’t want a Spotify-mediated experience.
It's a tool. The people you see using it now are the early adopters and the hustlers.
You'll see the young artists picking it up soon. I know several awards winning VFX industry folks that love playing with it, but they're afraid to tell their colleagues.
Joel Haver's use of EbSynth [1] is probably an indication of how this will be used successfully at first. Strong sketch comedy and improv performers using AI to elevate their visual presentation. From there it'll grow.
Obviously. Because if it was trained on previous VFX artist work and now puts VFX artists out of work it's a bit icky to talk about with fellow artists. But also because if they use it then more likely you are out first. Eventually they are out too, when studios/platforms/owners realize they can just use the tool directy and skip the middleman, but until then it's a charade where everyone pretends it's not happening and all is fine while house burns down.
Although given that we're talking about content set inside World of Warcraft, if this ever actually started making Disney-level money then you can bet your bottom dollar that Blizzard will come seeking their pound of flesh (and don't bother arguing that this would be foolish and self-destructive, this is Blizzard we're talking about).
for some context, some of Blizzard's previous self destructive antics:
Starcraft 2: refused to let existing Korean SC1 leagues/orgs play SC2. leagues (vast majority of esports audience) simply stayed on SC1 rather than submit
Overwatch: terminated license for all third party OW tournaments, so they could launch official Overwatch League (which then failed)
WC3 reforged: so unreliable (kept dropping games in progress, ruining everyone) that everyone just gave up
You still need to get lucky to be famous on Twitch (or Youtube) for your distribution channel and have enough influence that whatever you make, people will care about it.
Also they don't own their audience in this case, Twitch does.
I'm not sure how awesome this future is when you reference Steam, a service where we own nothing. Then Bandcamp which has been a positive force originally, but bought up by the worst kinds of companies more than once recently.
See the situation in modern indie videogames: Today a small team does what used to take a huge team a couple of decades ago, but you still have projects that have so much budget you cannot touch them with a small team, and difficulties getting good, small games to find audiences, as they need to deal with a different set of gatekeepers. You'll need some influencer, a blogger, or some social network algo, which can be gamed, to give you exposure. Success without paying is not impossible, but the easy route is through paying. And how much will people pay? More than you want.
Even in a world without physical scarcity, if you want eyeballs and clout, scarcity will still exist because real fame and success is limited. And based on who are the most popular organic-ish influencers, you might not like the kind of person who wins.
On the content front, studios have benefited massively by selling sure bets in a sea of noise: of the top 10 box office films of 2024, there isn't a single original IP, every single film is either an adaptation or sequel to prior work made long ago. [1]. I view this as part of a broader "flight towards quality" pattern in the internet age - even if there's tons of great content online (orders of magnitude more), the viewing public still ultimately values both studio curation and IP familiarity. This goes beyond the films themselves: the studio IP rights moat includes the access to famous big-name actors that fill seats, the IP rights to use their likeness, and access to their personal platforms to push the film, all of which these studios control. Even if indies can generate "a person" or "a movie", the inability to legally generate "specific people that the public knows and likes without their permission" or "specific movies set in universes they know and care about" represents moat that isn't leaving studio's hands in a world of widespread AI.
Separate from IP rights, it also assumes a hyper-specific model of how AI specialization and use will look if it's widely available. For example, even assuming AI that can generate anything you ask for, it's likely that people will continue valuing significant sound, music, and visual post-processing to augment end-state AI generations to better match and personalize a final vision differentiated from the models themselves. This means labor costs, which indies at scale would continue to lack access to. This also assumes a model of the world where AI becomes a reducer of specialization, which isn't guaranteed: even assuming superhuman production capabilities by AI, such that there is no longer any individual human input on some aspect of the film, someone has to point the superhuman AI in productive directions that map to somewhere good in the quality spectrum, and it's likely that there will be significant differentiation in human skill at this task across different domains, as one can think of the superhuman AI as a tool being consumed by a skilled collaborator, even if the AI is doing most of the work. In the event that this is the case, studios can and will continue having much bigger labor budgets to continue to differentiate themselves on quality compared to indies trying to DIY this process.
And lastly, marketing is still king. About half of a modern big-budget picture's budget gets spent on the marketing today, only the other half goes towards making the actual film. Even if state-of-the-art Hollywood grade AI means anyone can produce a shot-for-shot reproduction of any current Hollywood film, ultimately, people need to find the content in order to watch it, and even in a world with widely available AI, it's the indie's marketing budget of ~$0 dollars, versus the major studio's marketing budget of $50,000,000-$200,000,000. I would happily continue betting against indies winning this fight, especially when the low end of this market, which is already oversaturated and hard to meaningfully stand out in, is drowned out in an order of magnitude more noise from low-end AI creators flooding the space with slop.
Any recommendations? How do you find the good stuff?
It did give us chad nmplol and three arcs of the most shameless farming on the platform since mizkif's good ol' days. If people here knew how much money you can make by just flirting on stream
Friends don't let friends GTA RP.
just one letter correction:
Friends don't let friends GTA eRP
Nick has a long history of saying weird things to women that some will call creepy but others will just call "PogO farming".
I know very little about the Moonmoon situation but wasn't he planning on meeting up with his online GF (while having a RL wife) at TwitchCon?
GTA eRP lead to real life eRP during eu twitchcon streamers, and that was what broke the camel's back. the issues ran deep, it wasn't just one thing
As for the pogO stuff, Nick said it a million times: he has consent. He never farms with Emi, right?
Probably died hundreds to thousands of times in MC. The easier runs later were possible because we were gearing up every week and then eventually had tier 2
Guilds have enough resources and player skill to greatly limit the possiblity of unexpected chaos.
I tend to agree though that for "content" reasons this sounds impossible, someone will wipe the raid just for the laughs.
At launch there was zero spell damage or healing on raid gear as a stat. You might find some green of shadow wrath but items like Robe of volatile power simply did not exist yet.
Warriors, the current top damage class, had a talent rework at BWL release which introduced their main damaging ability at nearly half the effectiveness of where it eventually end up.
Throw in world buff scheduling and the game is very different from how it played at launch.
The servers came out in 2023.
That said, the type of player who plays WoW now has also changed since the original raiders entered Molten Core so many years ago. People still raid for fun, but like many things in modern society¹, you're also there to raid "efficiently."
This documentary that I watched recently called "Why it's rude to suck at World of Warcraft" is worth the watch. It talks about how raiding has changed from a fun thing that people used to do in vanilla WoW, where a guild of 40 people would put up with the weird gnome in the guild who wouldn't wear boots, to a hyper competitive pseudo-esport where players stopped tolerating that gnome player over a decade ago.
¹ trying not to sound too preachy, I personally love the "get good and keep improving yourself" aspect about WoW, and it's why I push in the game's rated arena brackets each season.
Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared
Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that all guilds used to have a weird bootless gnome-type raider back in vanilla. There were plenty of "hardcore" guilds around back then. What I meant was that there were a lot more of the bootless gnome-type players raiding back then, and they were tolerated by a lot more guilds and players in general because "that's just Jim, it's how he likes to play!"
As the documentary points out, the bootless gnome player has died out entirely outside of non-roleplay servers, because the playerbase as a whole decided that they want efficiency, speed and performance to be their #1 priority. That priority manifests itself everywhere in modern WoW.
Playing with modern Add-ons seems like the biggest difference. The gear requirements don't matter when you are playing with an aim-bot.
Also on the Add-on front. 20 years ago it felt like it was going down the path we see in tech where maximizing metrics become thing in themselves. I was a Druid healer and there was definitely pressure to spam for the readouts vs. the actual goal of making raid succeed and not letting the MT/OT whoever die.
As a non-US based player, back then we were still using modem and/or ISDN connections that would both drop quite frequently and had terrible latency.
WoW broke for me when cross-realm play was introduced. Prior to that, you gained a reputation on your server, so poor behavior was kept (somewhat) in check, and "randoms" you grouped with were therefore a) more willing to listen and follow alternative approaches, and b) worth teaching, because you knew you were likely to see them again. Complete anonymity removed the social contracts that made the game special.
I was just talking with my wife this morning about how different dungeons are now compared to back then, and how we'd be unlikely to wind up together if it were to happen today in modern WoW. She and I met while playing WoW back in Wrath; she played a paladin tank and was looking for a healer to heal a dungeon with her and her friends. I played a resto shaman at the time and decided to join them. We all ended up chatting so much that we added each other to our friend lists and started running dungeons together regularly. One thing lead to another and now we're happily married — 15 years later and still playing the game together.
I've been leveling some alts via dungeons recently, and the sense of community you get when you're in dungeons is completely gone. People do not talk to each other at all, there is zero communication. They are in and out of there as quickly as possible, no time for talking, no time for "hello."
The same is doubly true for LFR. 25 people in a raid and nobody talks to each other. If you're not at the boss by the time everyone else is, they're not waiting for you and they're going to pull. If you caused a wipe, you're going to get kicked from the group and replaced. They're just there to get loot for their alts and queue for the next wing of the raid.
There was one guy I'd group up with every Wednesday to run East Strat (this was early on, when it was a challenge for most PUGs) - he was a hunter (<Preyofwar>, if you're out there, it's been a long time, buddy) and I was a druid, so when we got a tank I healed, and when we got a healer I tanked; and, you know, hunters were intended to be group leaders, and mark + make the pulls - and for a while we made it a Thing; people would message us when they saw us come online.
This one time we grabbed a woman who mainly crafted - she'd sit outside the auction house handing out low-level bags to noobs - and had barely run dungeons before; it took some convincing to persuade her to come, and she didn't really know what she was doing (I think she was a resto shaman?). Halfway through, the assholes we'd picked up outside the instance started giving her grief in the chat - she'd wiped us at least a couple of times in a row - and she started apologizing and offering to go, and we said "no fucking way" and kicked them, and then called in favors with our guildmates to get some better-geared and more-experienced folks to help us carry her the rest of the way.
That's the sort of thing I loved about early WoW. We took the gamey side seriously - like, that guy and I really prided ourselves on how quickly we could run a group through the dungeon, and optimized the hell out of our pulls - but it was set up to remind you there was a human on the other side of the keyboard, too.
It's the best time I've had (or ever expect to have) with any video game, ever, and I'll never ever go back.
In one of my favorite fights the mages and I worked out a cool trick that I never saw in any strategy guide. Do you remember the banquet fight in Karazan? One of the bosses had pretty good spell resistance, and we suggested saving it for last. By that point in the fight I'd be helping the melee toons get it down, so my mana would be basically full at the end. The mages would totally stop casting on that boss, and aim to be at about half mana when combat stopped.
The instant we finished the mob off, the mages and I would run out the door, and I'd head up to the top of the stairs. With precise timing from a particular angle I could pull two groups of trash mobs in the next room, and make sure that they got to the stairs at the same time so they'd all get caught in my AoE. Between that spell, HoTs, and Thorns, druids could get phenomenal threat on grouped mobs. They'd hit me for a few seconds until they were sticky enough that the mages could AoE them down without getting touched. Then we'd sit down and drink/bandage, and laugh and point at the group if they'd taken too long looting.
Because no one particularly cared about their individual stats we saved everyone three or four minutes of waiting for those pulls. We were anything but an elite guild, on a bog-standard non-competitive server, but it was deeply satisfying to discover those small moments that contributed to everyone's success.
Edit: Watching Sodapoppin right now and it's nothing like NoPixel or how the article makes it sound like. He's just playing the game as he always does and is not "in character" when speaking with the other guild members. Is the RP only happening in special events? I've watched a lot of GTA RP and the improvisational drama permeates everything the players do and they never go out of character.
i always wondered why someone didn’t do a long term role play with a big group and WoW. no pixel does it sooooo well with gta5, WoW always seemed like the perfect fantasy genre setting for it.
but omg if you’re a completionist, you can really dump a crazy amount of time into keeping up with the lore since it unfolds in real time over so many streamers.
[0] Essentially, how many subscriptions/bits are bought by the community within a relatively short time-frame.
[1] https://xcancel.com/PirateSoftware/status/187464037594998397...
Currently it's hard to know[0] how much you're giving the content creator versus Twitch/Amazon.
[0] https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2024/01/24/an-update-to-several-st...
Except the host is some flashing message above the chat box showing what hype train "level" has been reached.
There's so many sketchy business models, hard to be mad at one that's completely devoid of coercion and people enthusiastically participate in
There is "I tell stories and here's a hat you can put some pennies in" and there's "I'm in a contest, the one with the most money in their hat wins". I feel like there is some abuse of human traits to extract money going on here.
But I agree, there's many wat more sketchy MOs around. In a way I have to respect this one, they make it work with so few moving parts.
he wants to make money, that’s not really an odd proclamation
Every time he's saying something obvious (basic computer science concepts) and people are pretending he's the ubergod of knowledge.
The dumb person's genius, I feel like. Something says to me there is much pretending involved.
I briefly looked at the mechanics of making an 'infinite' world server with some fellow players, something where the story line evolved but in a way that allowed new players to join and kept existing players engaged. Never allowing the 'gear+talents' overmatch that eventually befell WoW. That is a surprisingly interesting 'problem' to work on, not just from a game play perspective but from an evolutionary systems perspective.
To give an example, in our musings we only "spawn" base level mobs, but people can play the game for free if they are willing to play a mob rather than a hero. If their character survives long enough it uplevels to a silver elite, and then again to a gold elite. At gold status the player has the option of recruiting other mobs to aide it and give them 'tasks' (like protect his other mob, or give your loot to me, Etc). Eventually leading to a player designed dungeon encounter which hero players can play and get XP for as well.
As a result you ended up in a world where 90% of the content was laughably easy, and rather discontinuous with respect to the original story lines. It became this weird easy sauce thing where you raced from level 1 to whatever the bottom level was of the current expansion, and then you worked your way up from there. But things you could get later could often be applied earlier (runes, enchantments, etc) making your gear massively overpowered which was "great" for leveling if you just wanted to get from 1 to whatever.
At one of the Blizcons the devs even said it was easier to do that then to try to create content that was engaging and that everyone could enjoy.
I'll be the first to admit that this was felt more by people who had been through the whole game than those who joined later, which is why I think folks playing through vanilla for the first time are so amazed by it.