You're listening to the starting to the starting zone, a podcast about World of Warcraft and the people who play it.

And now, here are your hosts.

Well, hello and welcome to the starting zone, the podcast about World of Warcraft and people who play it. Today is July 27, 2025, and my name is Spencer Downey. Thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the podcast.

I'm joined today as always, but my co-host Jason Lucas.

Jason, how are you doing on this fine Sunday?

Oh, Spencer, hello. I'm doing well.

It is, we're in a really weird state of wow right now because, man, two is it's really over i think in in most

people's hearts but it's still here and we're waiting for patch and we still have as we

record this another week plus until patch and then another week after that until season so we're

in the space in between patches in a way.

And I'm having some weird, just emotional reactions to that.

A couple weeks ago, we talked about how, you know, when the patch day came down,

I was like, oh, man, this is kind of too early.

This is inconvenient.

And it's disruptive to the schedule in a lot of ways.

And that remains true. But I was kind of like dreading it. I was like, man, I wish it was like another month out or at least a couple weeks. And now it is totally flipped around. I'm, I can't wait to play patch and to get into the new season. And I wish that it had been out already or was coming out this week or whatever. Now it's not early enough.

So I guess just in the span of last three weeks,

I've been both sides of the wow player who can never be happy and can be pleased by the dev decisions.

It's all just me, just rotating around.

I do feel as though the entire atmosphere around the community changes when we are this close to a patch.

And so there's a double-edged sword, as there always has been, of saying, hey, the new content's coming out in the next four weeks or three weeks or whatever that is.

Because you just see this dramatic change in how people approach the game. And a lot of people do the, okay, I'm going to take a break. If none of what I'm doing going forward here matters and I don't care about or already have all the rewards that I've been looking for for this season, then I'm just checking out for a couple of weeks. And then suddenly it's like, well, where did everyone go?

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