[HN Gopher] OnlyFangs has made 'World of Warcraft' into Twitch's...
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OnlyFangs has made 'World of Warcraft' into Twitch's best soap
opera
Author : GeoAtreides
Score : 103 points
Date : 2025-01-03 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| cbsmith wrote:
| It's like an unholy mix of The Guild, Critical Role, and Leeroy
| Jenkins.
| pluc wrote:
| I forget the name but there's a similar thing about GTA RP on
| Twitch that's pretty entertaining.
| episteme wrote:
| NoPixel
| ics wrote:
| Also "Grand Theft Hamlet" which I learned about during the
| trailers at a recent visit to the theater.
| austindrama wrote:
| ah yes, GTA RP, that broke one marriage (moonmoon) and one ten
| years old relationship (nmplol).
|
| 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
| 45y54y654645 wrote:
| There was some love triangle drama between a GTA RP streamer
| and Chandler Riggs (Carl from The Walking Dead) that
| eventually ended in Chandler never returning to RP again.
| IIRC someone stole someone's girl, don't remember who but it
| caused a lot of bad blood.
|
| Friends don't let friends GTA RP.
| austindrama wrote:
| > Friends don't let friends GTA RP.
|
| just one letter correction:
|
| Friends don't let friends GTA eRP
| jmyeet wrote:
| Yeah, I wouldn't attribute GTA RP to the nmplol break up. If
| anything, that came down to he wanted children and she
| didn't. Also, Malena's mother is (last I heard) seriously ill
| with cancer and that has a way of putting things in
| perspective.
|
| 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?
| austindrama wrote:
| commenting on streamer drama on main, eh. couldn't be me
|
| 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?
| echelon wrote:
| This is the future of entertainment, it just isn't evenly
| distributed yet.
|
| 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.
| nxobject wrote:
| To be honest, record labels are doing a fantastic job still
| impoverishing artists even in the age of Bandcamp. I don't
| doubt that Disney/ABC will plow some venture capital into a
| machinima venture, too, in the same way that the the Big Three
| have/had stakes in Spotify.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Do you actually use Bandcamp as creator? I am friends with a
| music band and they say their label/distributor provides much
| more revenue than Bandcamp.
|
| Still not enough to live off it but if you consider that
| literally anyone can publish music it's not surprising.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Sounds like we are about to get a bunch of AI slop garbage.
| Every time I watch streaming now I appreciate the studio system
| more and how it at least attempted to create something of
| quality. So much now is like reading a novel that didn't have
| an editor.
| echelon wrote:
| > AI slop garbage.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=SY3y6zNTiLs
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| It also lowers the bar for new entrants. Probably the same
| thing will happen like everything else: we'll end up with a
| few really good things, vast majority will not be worth our
| time, and discoverability of the new good things will be
| really bad.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > love playing with it, but they're afraid to tell their
| colleagues
|
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> They won 't be subservient to Disney producers, brand
| guidelines, or controls._
|
| 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).
| blibble wrote:
| > 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
| pylon wrote:
| Replace Hollywood/Disney with Twitch and nothing is different.
|
| 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.
| officeplant wrote:
| >The future is going to be awesome. Steam/Bandcamp for TV,
| film, fantasy and science fiction.
|
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| Steam is amazing because Valve are benevolent dictators. It's
| easy to forget that we don't actually have any rights. I'm
| afraid of what happens when Gabe leaves.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| It's exactly the opposite. People are drawn to the top .01% of
| content creators and ignore the rest. The distribution on it is
| as bad as it always was.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| Making creation cheap just means that the control goes to
| whoever can bring in eyeballs. So it might not be a studio not
| making you be able to create your vision, but an algorithm
| deciding that they want to boost someone else and not you.
|
| 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.
| fardo wrote:
| I think this optimism is extremely misplaced, as I think things
| are likely to get substantially less evenly distributed. It
| seems more likely we'll have a future where indies more
| successfully drown each other out in a sea of noise, while
| major studios continue to enjoy massive moats of content and
| marketing.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2024/
| toofy wrote:
| it really has been incredible to watch. the whole main crew
| behind this really are genius.
|
| 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.
| singingwolfboy wrote:
| https://archive.is/7j4cF
| internet101010 wrote:
| OnlyFangs making it into Rolling Stone is pretty irie 'mon (The
| troll race all RP with Jamaican accents).
|
| It has been great second monitor content for someone like me who
| has never played WoW.
| Thaxll wrote:
| The only catch is that if you want to live don't group with any
| of their member...
| Kiro wrote:
| I've watched a few OnlyFangs streamers and didn't see any
| roleplaying. I thought it was just a normal Hardcore guild.
|
| 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.
| prophesi wrote:
| I'm actually surprised this other tidbit of Twitch news didn't
| make it to HN; PirateSoftware's record for longest "hype
| train"[0] was broken by vedal987 and his AI Vtuber creation,
| Neuro-sama, on January 1st. He amassed tens of thousands of
| subscriptions, with PirateSoftware hoping to win the title back
| on April 1st[1] (which, in my opinion, is a weird proclamation
| considering it's directly asking your fans to give you a lot of
| money).
|
| [0] Essentially, how many subscriptions/bits are bought by the
| community within a relatively short time-frame.
|
| [1]
| https://xcancel.com/PirateSoftware/status/187464037594998397...
| nemomarx wrote:
| I guess it's kind of like hoping for a new record on a charity
| stream? Works for GDQ right?
| prophesi wrote:
| I suppose! Honestly, I wish it worked like Humble Bundle
| wherein you have a sliding scale on who gets your money; the
| platform (Twitch/Amazon), the streamer, and the charity. I'm
| personally subscribed to PirateSoftware and GDQ because I
| don't want to see ads and hope a few of my bucks make it to
| them.
|
| 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...
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Hype for the sake of hype? What are they hyping?
| sandspar wrote:
| Young people want their generation to have its own "thing".
| Hype trains make them feel like their generation is unique.
| qqqult wrote:
| least cynical HN commenter
| sandspar wrote:
| Why do you believe it's cynical?
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| Imagine $FOOTBALL_TEAM fans vs $OTHER_FOOTBALL_TEAM fans,
| except instead of their fervor being a minor factor setting
| the general mood in the arena, it's the actual competition
| navane wrote:
| Directly asking your fans for money under a guise is now prime
| entrepreneurship
| Pesthuf wrote:
| Are you a gigachad who's up for the "give me all your
| money"-challenge?! I'll even say your name on stream!
| yapyap wrote:
| > with PirateSoftware hoping to win the title back on April
| 1st[1] (which, in my opinion, is a weird proclamation
| considering it's directly asking your fans to give you a lot of
| money
|
| he wants to make money, that's not really an odd proclamation
| lordnacho wrote:
| Well worth trying WoW Hardcore by the way. Permadeath changes
| everything:
|
| - 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".
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| I think I'll stick with Path of Exile. Not a fan of the
| Blizzard scene these days, lots of toxicity. Some say PoE is
| toxic but at least you aren't forced to interact with anyone
| there like in WoW. Playing hardcore to avoid toxicity isn't a
| selling point and sounds like a futile cope to me.
| dantillberg wrote:
| Or if raiding with permadeath sounds a little far out, a more
| achievable goal might be to get to level 20. Someday I'll make
| it.
| Pesthuf wrote:
| >- You have to prepare properly. Not only bringing all the
| consumables you'll need for raiding, also knowing what the boss
| is gonna do.
|
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| No modern addon lets you play the game for you, except maybe
| Hekili which displays your optimal damage rotation (but even
| that's a massive crutch). Addons such as DBM and WeakAuras
| all provide information that can be learnt manually with
| skill/experience (and some top players use minimal addons),
| but by design can't control player actions. It's more about
| reducing cognitive load.
|
| 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.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I'd push back slightly on the idea that top players use
| minimal addons. During every RWF push, almost every top
| team has a dedicated resource solely for the purpose of
| making custom WeakAuras for different parts of each boss
| fight. During the last cycle, I think I saw Max call for no
| less than two or three dozen breaks just so folks could
| make sure their WAs were in sync and on the right version.
|
| 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)
| minimaxir wrote:
| Mythic raiding/RWF/literally the best of the best is a
| massive outlier. Blizzard themself didn't seem happy
| about Liquid actually having to develop custom WeakAuras
| for that.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Oh I totally agree that I think its not great for the
| game in terms of balance. As a dev, I do enjoy being able
| to make my own custom addons, especially as a healer. But
| I think a push towards less addons in the game will help
| its casual accessibility big time.
|
| 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.
| tyre wrote:
| Not a chance in hell you can clear mythic simply pressing
| buttons based on add-ons. There's a huge learning curve and
| skill requirement until you're overgeared. Otherwise you'd
| see PUGs getting CE when most can't reliably clear heroic
| until late in the patch.
|
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| For modern WoW, even in dungeons (M+), if you can't follow a
| perfectly executed "script", nobody is interested in grouping
| with you. You don't really need a stack of addons but an
| encyclopedic knowledge of maps, mechanics, strats, affixes,
| etc and the current meta is the norm and expected.
|
| It feels barely related to D&D tabletop sessions or classic
| fantasy anything and more like a group Mario 64 speedrun or
| something.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Totally agree with all of these points. I will roll a new toon
| on an era HC server every now and again when I'm bored with
| current games, just because it does feel like a new experience
| for me every time. Trying to figure out the safest routes, best
| quests to grab, non-death skips to get to easier leveling
| experiences (my favorite is one that gets you to darkshore by
| way of menethil harbor), etc.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Let me save you some time: it's not. Hardcore WoW is _strictly_
| a streamer mode.
|
| 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.
| tyre wrote:
| It might not be your thing, but there are a lot of non-
| streamers who enjoy the thrill
| rKarpinski wrote:
| Clearing MC like that sounds impossible. Even if everyone was
| familiar with it by practicing on non hardcore servers they won't
| have the gear they need. Are people even clearing
| Scholo/Strat/UBS on hardcore servers?
|
| 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
| minimaxir wrote:
| Classic has essentially been "solved." The main barrier back in
| 2004 was not difficulty, but knowledge, organization, and
| tooling. Modern "retail" WoW is orders-of-magnitude more
| difficult to offset those improvements.
|
| Guilds have enough resources and player skill to greatly limit
| the possiblity of unexpected chaos.
| vardump wrote:
| Scratch all that. The main issue in 2004 preventing hardcore
| mode would have been server stability, or the lack of it.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| On the other hand, MC is the most "solved" out of all the raids
| at this point though in terms of mechanics. The most
| experienced folks can low-man it with 10-20 people using
| mediocre gear (as long as they have some fire res). And its
| something that casuals can pug these days as well, I've hopped
| into a pug myself on an era realm with mostly blues as a resto
| shaman and was fine.
|
| I tend to agree though that for "content" reasons this sounds
| impossible, someone will wipe the raid just for the laughs.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| It must have been nerfed then. No way you could do this back
| in 2006 vanilla wow.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Players are a lot better than they were two decades ago.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I was playing back then in 2006, you absolutely could. I
| don't remember any 10-man groups at that time, but people
| were absolutely doing this with mage-heavy comps with 20
| people. And then after Stormcraft Sandbox when all the
| private servers began to explode in popularity, you had the
| ability to run back every encounter as much as you wished
| to speed up the learning curve, test/learn new strats, etc.
| brailsafe wrote:
| It's important to remember that perception of difficulty
| was different then, which is why classic _can_ seem pretty
| dull to a modern player. If you know very little about the
| game, have mediocre tools and varying skills within the
| group, poor coordination, it 'll be much harder.
| Mechanically it's nothing too interesting, it was just very
| involved time wise, and consequently much more immersive
| long-term.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Naxx has already been cleared hardcore:
| https://www.pcgamer.com/wow-classic-hardcore-squad-clutches-...
|
| The servers came out in 2023.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I find it oddly satisfying that 'classic' or 'vanilla' WoW is
| still so valued. I really enjoyed playing it. It is the high bar
| in my book for balance/humor/gameplay/story.
|
| 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.
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