G'day, friends, there's Blister Guy and this is episode 1378, I've walked to work with Mobile House Don't Boggos. Oh, I didn't say the day. Tuesday, the, what, is it, 28th? Oh, I probably should have checked, it might actually be the 29th, yeah, 29th of October, which means the month is almost done, which, ah, frightening, which I actually used, kind of useful. I was looking last night, like, okay, I've got to play 10 games of ranked Hearthstone and I've got other things I need to do or want to do in that time, I'm just kidding, my umbrella out, by the way, I've just noticed it started raining. What am I going to do? It's like, wait, wait, the first of November happens, like, Friday, my time, I think, Friday, which Friday night means, ah, new month, which means I can do my later games there and this is all good. Sweet, great. I played some Battlegrounds last night, actually, which was nice, which was fun. Um, mostly when I say one other thing to do, obviously, is that the, the great dark beyond pre-release starts tomorrow, the pre-release brawl, ah, and I'm going to want to be playing a lot of that, ah, and I didn't feel like playing constructed last night and I needed to play some Battlegrounds. And that was fun, actually, had some fun playing Battlegrounds. No idea what I'm doing, really. What's interesting is that I don't have the Battlegrounds tavern pass thing. That gives me the choice of four heroes. The last two expansions, I haven't done that, ah, and picking between only two heroes has felt nice. I know if you're really into Battlegrounds, you're like, ah, I want to choose between four heroes, but I just have so much less information over the list. I'm like, cool, ah, this one or this one, I guess it's this one. And then I just enjoy it. I don't play very much, so I think there's some MMR buffering which puts me in the lower MMR players, and I get, like, firsts and seconds and thirds. Actually, I got a sixth last night, it's one of them, but, you know, it's, it's been fun. I've enjoyed that. I've just realised I got the umbrella out and I haven't put it up. It's fine, because it's not raining much, but probably it's going to rain a minute. Anyway, look, I didn't even talk about what this episode was called, ah, ah, fair, fair craft recap, because apparently after the last episode, I left a Y out of theory craft in my title, and then when I was making the graphic for this one, ah, I did, I failed to notice that it's a bit of a ridiculous hat pointed out, ah, in the Patreon channel, he's like, yup, yup, you missed the Y twice, like, yup, yup, thank you, you're right, I did, so I'll have to fix that, ah, when posting tonight, so, thanks, hat, and ah, sorry about that. Obviously, very distracted with everything, so, we're going to talk about how the theory crafting went, ah, at the end of last week, I played on Friday night, now, before we get tuned, oh my god, Jack, hammering ahead, that works out, ah, ah, before I get tuned to talking about theory crafting, let's just preface this with where I was at when I did it, and you can already go, oh no, was it a negative experience, I not really know, but like, I was tired, I was exhausted, and I was, I had a lot going on trying to get to that point. One of the issues there is that, Wednesday night, I'm preparing for Thursday's episode, Thursday night, I'm not only, ah, posting Thursday's episode, but I'm also preparing for Friday's episode, so Thursday, Friday, Thursday night's always quite busy for me, ah, and then Friday, of course, I'm posting Friday's episode, but I was also going to be doing theory crafting, so Thursday I was like, trying to make sure I had the thing installed to be able to do it, and it was, ah, it was a bit of, and I was like, where am I going to find decklists and planning to, what am I talking about, it was, it was just all over the place, so I was tired by the time I got to start doing theory crafting, and so I wasn't, I don't think playing very well, which is fine, ah, also, you know, when you start having a can narrow slice of players doing the theory crafting, they're often streamers and often good players, ah, and I was playing against a lot of the Asia-Pacific players, ah, some of them obviously very good, like, I played against multiple world champions, ah, so I didn't win a lot, but I won some, and also, I was just, just digging out the side of the mountain, still going, ah, how, how much are they digging it out, how much can this mountain actually survive being dug out, I mean, that's a big question, right, like, at some point is it just going to fall off, fall over like a dental accident, I don't know, anyway, well, we'll be past this in a moment, I'm sorry, anyway, look, so theory crafting, I gathered out some deck codes, ah, I went in there and I played some decks, and I had a lot of fun, and what I've got today are the decks I've played, and cards that we have not yet talked about that have stood out to me in theory crafting, which I think is some of the more helpful things for us to be talking about. First up, I think I played Quasar Rogue, now this is just jumping straight into the deep end, because apparently Quasar Rogue was a heck of a deck, I played a lot of it, I played against it, ah, people are thinking that it's the spell damage druid from Paris and Paradise, basically the, the, the drinks druid, tourist druid, and their perils and paradise theory crafting, it was like, this thing is broken, ah, and it's going to destroy the metagame, and it, and it didn't, it didn't, but after a while people did figure out how to make it well, and so the deck copped a couple of nerfs, so it's possible that this thing will be refined a lot more post-release, ah, and people will be like, oh gosh, this deck is absurd, and maybe it'll get nerfed or something, but like, it's very, it's very interesting, and many of the things that we will talk about today, ah, to do with that deck, because there's a lot in it that we haven't talked about, ah, but first, before I go anywhere, I should talk about, ah, ah, a patron, now, there, ah, have I, unlike, swarm tides, no snowpack, snowpack, that's who we're up to, I was like, why can't I see, I, I looked at it before and I was like, hang on, did I, fat finger delete a patron name from my list, that wouldn't be right, but it's no, it's snowpack, so thank you to snowpack, and all the other patrons who support the work we do here, and walk the work of Mobile Hearthstone podcast, as well as everything else I do, uh, patreon.com/plistagai, if you can afford a support, it's very much appreciated, it goes a long way to defray all the costs we incurred doing this, otherwise, you know, if you can't afford it, I wouldn't expect anyone to, who can't afford it, just tell a friend, leave a, leave a review, all that stuff, it all helps, anyway, where were we, my notes, on the thing, ah, scrolling past the cards, what do I notice, I just pasted the deck list, so I was like, copy deck list, paste deck list, copy deck list, paste list, alright, quasar rogues up first on this, we were talking about, so among us, demon hunter, this is one of the things I tried playing, that's the, ah, the crew demon hunter thing, I have no idea whether this could be a good thing later if somebody refines the deck list, but it didn't feel particularly good in playing, ah, in the theory craft, and it might just be that the deck lists, I could try a couple that I was playing, weren't particularly well refined, but it didn't, it didn't, didn't feel right, the idea of spending four miles to drop several, ah, four, fours into play at once, just didn't come together as well as I would like, ah, and it didn't happen, and it just felt like, felt like it's floundering around, and that's okay, that's okay, that's fine, ah, asteroid shaman, there were various asteroid shaman builds, there's an aggro one, try that seemed okay, ah, jump ray had a more controlling version, which seemed pretty cool, and like a jump ray deck, and I didn't really give it too much of a shake, because it's one of the things where you start, I think it was about half past eight, maybe I got started playing, ah, that doesn't give me very long, like three hours later it's half past eleven, right, and I should be getting ready for bed, oh, I should have been getting ready for bed long before then, ah, but I kept going, and like, that's the other thing as well, like, I kept going, and my brain was very hazy and foggy, and I was having trouble remembering what was going on, and I was like, I really should just log off, he was like, yeah, but you don't want to squander the opportunity to be playing with new cards, yeah, but this is not working, my brain is not working, you know, anyway, I tried jump ray shaman, and I'm sure if I had more time to play it, I would get more ripsing to enjoy it, but like I think I played one or two games of it, I couldn't get it to do what I wanted, I was like, ah, it's a shame, but it did have some cool stuff in it, um, there was also a, a couple of Libram Pelleton lists I tried, they were underwhelming, again, I don't know if it was because they weren't tuned, or whether my brain was not working very well, but it didn't seem to do what I wanted to do, I did get to do the thing where you draw, ah, what's she called, what's she called, you know, a beacon of hope, and get the old, ah, Libram's and things, and I think it just in some cases, I was already too behind, and it just wasn't working out, and that's fine, ah, now Starship Hunter was probably the deck I was having the most success with, just straight up Starship Huntery stuff, ah, and it worked really well, and it was fun actually, I quite enjoyed playing it, um, I, not entirely sure exactly what it was that I liked about it, ah, but it was a lot of fun, and the whole launching your Starship, and then playing a yelling Yodler on it to do a lot of damage to things, did feel pretty good when I did it, no idea how good the deck is, of course, that's true of all of these decks, ah, but it did feel nice, now let's talk a little about Starships, they're very cool, I love them, obviously, I love them, but, ah, they felt a little clunky, ah, to use, you couldn't easily look at what was in your Starship during your opponent's turn, you could mouse over it to see how big it was, which I appreciated, like, ah, you could mouse over it and go, ah, look, that's how big my Starship is going to be if I launch it, it's a 4-8 kind of thing right now, you know, ah, and it's like, cool, okay, great, ah, when you click on it, there's a giant launch button and an arrow button that you can scroll through what's in it and things, which is cool, but it just didn't feel very slick or smooth to do, which, I don't know, maybe they'll be able to improve that, maybe we'll get used to it, but, like, if I'm honest, I was a little disappointed with the mechanisms with which we were launching Starships, I was like, ah, mm, okay, cool, that's not to say I didn't enjoy Starships, I did, but, like, I just felt like there could have been something better about that, I'd seen people posting during the day, ah, how cool was it launching Starships, and I was really looking forward to something really quite neat, didn't see quite neat, so maybe my expectations were set too high, maybe the whole shorting is expectations of what really could have been, my brain was too optimistic on what it could have looked like, and then I was like, ah, hmm, okay, but anyway, we'll see, the other thing, which I guess we'll come up later, but I'm going to talk about now is locations, so we're used to locations sitting on the board, having a little durability thing at the bottom to show you how many more uses there, the durability thing has been moved over to the right, as if it were the health of a minion, or the durability of a weapon, which makes sense in that, that's where the weapon durability is, as opposed to the attack, which is on the other side, like the attack of a minion, so that's a consistent thing, but it just looked wrong, I was like, oh god, is my client bugged my durability things in the wrong spot, what's going on, and I kept seeing, playing locations, seeing the durability in that way as a button, this looks wrong to me, now maybe we'll get used to it, but it was intentional, and part of the reason is there's a location in this expansion, that comes off a legendary, I can't remember which one it is, we don't really need to talk about that today, but it has spell burst, the location, so as a shaman legendary, you play it, it opens this location, then when you play a spell, it remembers that spell, and then when you use the location, it plays that spell, so a couple of uses, so it's got the spell burst icon down the bottom, so having the durability off to the right, as if we're like minion health or weapon durability, least space for a spell burst icon, or other things if that's something that could be needed, I don't know what it would be, something that triggers when you play something, who knows, like at least space that, but it just felt weird, looked off, and I was like, ah, that's not right, but apparently it was right, anyway, moving on, Starship Rogue tried that, did not have much luck with it, and I don't know whether it's A.O's playing poorly, or B.O's playing instant amazing players, you'll see, the deck list wasn't very refined, but I thought I would have more fun with Starship Rogue than I did with Hunter Rogue, sorry Hunter Starship, Starship Hunter was just more fun, I don't know why, and I think part of it is going to be that you have more intentionality behind what you're building in that focused class, and so you're building things around to work with what you're doing, and part of it is maybe I was playing poorly, like if it's better because I'm playing well then maybe Starship Rogue will be better, but I was excited to play Starship Rogue, and disappointed by how it felt compared to Starship Hunter, Starship Death Knight played that, that was not as fun as Starship Hunter, but still better than Rogue, and also quite effective, and what I hadn't realised was the, what's the piece called, ah, not the guiding figure, the other bit, the, um, dimensional Kortno, the Soulbound Spire, the one that's death rattling, I think it is, into a random immune to that cost, it's not just a, ah, a pile of stats, it's a random immune to that cost, so at some point I launched my Starship, ah, and then triggered the death rattling immediately, somehow I don't remember how, but I did, and out popped a Star Graser, and I was like, "Oh, that's my reveal card!" and it didn't look right, because obviously when something's elusive it has that yellow haze over it, which I forget to talk about, I wanted to do that in the reveal, I wanted to get a piece of yellow cell effect, you know, like the clear plastic-y paper, but not clear like yellow, and so like when, when we're like elusive, like we put the, ah, the, the plastic cellophane over it, so it looks like it's elusive, but it wouldn't look the same, also I forgot to get the cellophane, and it was only once I was recording it, I was like, "Oh, I forgot to do that," so I was like, "It's not important," like, I think it would have made the reveal slightly better, but I don't think anyone minds, by the way, good, has been asking you every day to watch the video for the last three or four days, I want to watch Ulu, you choose Ulu, right, okay, cool, we made some good rhyming in there, and it's just caught with a three-year-old, so that's pretty funny. Anyway, death night Starship seemed pretty good, even if it wasn't, it wasn't the same as Hunter, also it's got yelling yodeless, and maybe that also helps with it, right? Anyway, the last deck that we want to talk about, and I've clearly alluded to this already, what we were saving for this for last, was Quasar Rogue, which people are saying is kind of the best deck in the format, which is probably wrong because theory-crafting is different, theory-crafters focus on playing new cards, oh, actually, let's talk about one other thing first, I played, I came to Maxibon, right, so a current world champ, lovely guy from all accounts, not Maxibon, is it Maxibon World Champ, or is it Pizza Champ, no, no, no, Maxibon, World Champ is a pocket train, right, so Maxibon just won a pro event recently, plays a lot while, by the way, anyway, look, Maxibon was playing Overhill Priest, which is, you know, as a standard deck that we know currently, but obviously they had some great dark beyond cards in there, because, you know, that's what we have to do. Anyway, one of the minions he played from the new expansion was Anchorite, which is a Priest, Draenei Rare, 3 mana 2/4, when another minion is over-healed to give it that much extra health. Now, when we saw that, he like, okay, that's probably a pretty good Overhill Priest, but also it's a bit slow, we also know that Overhill Priest was just nerfed when they nerfed into the ball, so they sure that this isn't a big deal. Maxibon played this against me, I like Clude, because I'm theory-crafting stuff, I'm not going very fast either, I'm not dropping huge aggressive stats and play immediately, but like next you know, he's got several Overhillie things and play and I'm like, okay, cool, all right, he's over-healing things, he drops Anchorite, I'm like, hang on, how do all of his minions have like 10 to 12 health? Like, what's happened here? I'm like, okay, well, I guess to win this, I'm not just value-trading down the minions, because that'll take forever and he's obviously actively healing them, so we just got to race it. Like, we should be fine, as long as he's not playing like, you know, a crazed Alchemist, like, you remember a crazed Alchemist, it's like that core card, I think it is, it's like the 200/22 that swaps an attack and health of the minion, it's kind of funny, nobody plays it anymore, except Maxi Vaughn played it and killed me. So I don't know what's happening there, I don't know whether that's the thing, but it's like, whoa, I got hit for 20 from a minion out of Priest, anyway, that was funny. Oh, the other card to talk about before we talk about Quasar, was Kil'jaeden, Kil'jaeden's the neutral legendary, we have talked about it briefly in passing, the 7-7/7 demon, Battlecry replace your deck with an endless portal of demons each turn, they get an additional +2/+2. So this is clearly a late game engine kind of thing that means you don't fatigue anymore, and so in some senses that's probably a good idea if you're playing like a controlling style deck. Now, in my experience, you obviously don't want to kill Jayden too early, because you're like, well, I wanted to have the good stuff in my deck, not the bad stuff, which is demons, but if you're opponent kill Jayden's before you kill Jayden, if at some point either of you is going to be kill Jayden, you need to as well, because whoever goes first, the demons are just coming up much bigger, and I got into a couple of Kil'jaeden slugfest with people, where it's like, I drop a 12/14 demon, I drop a 16/13 demon, and you're like, oh my god, where's this going? And things end pretty quickly, and it is kind of down to the luck of the draw, it's, I don't know, it's not frustrating, but it was like, whoa, oh, oh, the rain's off, this is quite intense. Whether the format is such that people are playing Kil'jaeden or not is a different story, but once somebody starts Kil'jaedening, if you're not winning the game quickly, you're gonna be losing the game, because those demons get real big, real quick. Anyway, let's talk about Quasar Rogue. Quasar Rogue is a rogue deck that draws a lot of cards, the reason it does that is because of the epic spell Quasar, which I saw in reveal season, thought about talking about it and just didn't, because I was like, surely it's just a gimmick. It's a six-minor epic spell with no type, shuffle your hand into your deck, reduce the cost of cards in your deck by three, now that's a very powerful thing to do, reducing the cost of things in your deck by three. Paying six-minor to shuffle your hand into your deck, though, so now you have no hand, that's not a very powerful thing to do. In fact, that's a very detrimental thing to do for your own sanity and health. Now, the real combo here, of course, is prep. You need to prep this out in turn four. If you're not prepping this out in turn four, you're probably losing. And that is where this deck is probably not terrific, but it clearly focuses on drawing a lot of cards, so that A, you have this combo on turn four, and B, once you've played Quasar, you can draw a lot of cards. Now, once you've played Quasar, your cards cost three less. So you can draw a lot of cards. In fact, you can probably draw almost all of them, and that's frightening. And I've played this. I think the first game I've played was this, because I'd heard about this in order to try it. I was like, wow, that was impressive. Also, like with theory crafting, the event itself, there are rules such as don't concede, let your opponent get the win if they're going to win, because maybe they're recording video content, and you know, we only have a small window which should do it, so they don't force them to keep queuing until they can get the clips they want. Don't concede. My opponents did not get that memo, and within the first 30 minutes, I don't know that I'd won most of my games, but I know I had at least three concedes, and I'm like, like, are people not reading the rules? Are the rules in English and people don't quite understand them? I don't know. But people were definitely conceding and conceding when I was playing this deck. And other people were beefing with this deck. The version I was playing was certainly not optimised. I copied it from somewhere, and I saw other people playing cards that I wasn't playing that maybe go, ooh, ooh, that makes it even better. Gosh, but there's nowhere I could find the deck list easily, so I couldn't really do much other than start butchering the list I was playing, and then, you know, just didn't have time for that. I had other decks to play as well. As side notes, I just didn't get to play any druid, and I probably should have, which was unfortunate. But again, lack of time, lack of brain clarity, just time ran out, and I hadn't done it. But this deck was nuts. Anyway, quasar, six mana. Discard your hand, well, shove your hand into your deck, reduce the cost of everything you deck by three. This is just a heck of an engine card. Once you've done that, you need to draw a lot of cards. The other card in the deck that we've not talked about, that was very good in the deck, was ethereal oracle. This is a neutral three mana two three spell damage plus one. Now, a three mana two three, those are not very serious. Plus damage, spell damage plus one, not terrific to be paying three mana to get there. But of course, post quasar, this thing costs zero mana, and it also has spell burst draw two cards. So, you're going to draw a lot of cards, and also, you're going to have plus one spell damage. Now, the plus one spell damage works because you're going to be playing asteroids. Now, you're not shaman, so you can't play all the shaman asteroid cards. In fact, there's only a single asteroid card you can play, and that's what's it called? Moonstone molar, the neutral two mana two two that shuffles three asteroids into deck. Ideally, everything going to plan. You're going to shadow step that thing, and play it again. You're going to break dance that thing, and play it again. Now, the pre-release brawl, we won't have break dance, we know that much, because it's from Festival of Legends. So, who knows whether this thing would actually be good in the pre-release brawl or not. But once you have plus one spell damage from the ethereal oracle, you're drawing asteroids that are dealing three damage to things. I did see versions with Incentius, the version I was playing didn't have Incentius, didn't seem terribly necessary. But like also ethereal oracle, and to found a knife, suddenly dealing two damage to everything on the board, like the asteroids are going to start going face pretty quickly, and you're just constantly bouncing and replaying the molar to get more asteroids. It was sick, and it was really effective. This is where I spotted the location issue, goes nignac shack from Perils and Paralyzed, the one that was like a four durability, three mana, three mana's key, it's zero. You draw a card, and if you play it the sooner you reopen the location. Okay, well that's going to be easy, because I'm going to keep drawing cards, they're going to keep being basically no mana, I'm going to keep playing them. So you draw through, you know, you're a whole deck, it's pretty nasty. Other cards of note in here, because this is clearly a combo deck, and you may have ways to survive. What seemed consistent was everyone was running Eredar Brut. Now, this, again, may be part of the fairy craft rules, which is you've got to run at least 10 cards from the new expansion. And so maybe people were just trying to find things to run from the new expansion, but Eredar Brut was a seven mana common demon, seven mana five six, taunt lifesteal, cost one less for each enemy minion. I mean, you don't want to play that on its own, like that seven mana for a five six taunt with a lifesteal. Okay, but costing one less for each enemy minion, suddenly this is, is it okay for six mana, six mana four, six mana five, six taunt lifesteal? No, you're not, you're not thrilled about that. Like demon hunter has one of those and attacks afraid of need to turn. How about a five mana five six taunt lifesteal? It's not bad. Four mana, well, it's actually all right, actually. Your opponent has three minions and play on turn four, and you get to play a four mana five six taunt with lifesteal. It's pretty good. Three mana, yes, it's a much better deal. Now, once you have quasad, and this thing is new deck at minus three, now you only need to have four minions in play for it to be free. Now, your opponent has four minions. They won't always have four minions. In fact, you'll probably have killed some of them or destroyed some of them, but this thing comes down really cheap, and you can just cycle through pretty quickly because it's there. The last one that was not in all of the lists, but when I started seeing it, I was like, this really works. It was a real rager of all things. Now, I thought most of the ragers, you know, we're talking about the original magma rager from core or whatever it was, which is the three mana five one. I think it was an elemental. I think they're all elementals traditionally. It's just three mana five one. It's a lot of attack, but not much health, right? Terrible card. And over the years, we've seen plenty of attempts to make more and more playable ragers just for fun, just for the memes, right? Like not for any real reason for it to be any good, but just because like, can we make it playable? We've seen a five two. We've even seen a one five at some point, which is pretty funny. There was the five four with reborn that destroyed itself as a battle cry. So it was like, it's still effectively just a five one, but you know, if you had a way of cheating that would be pretty funny. Anyway, this one, Urzul rager is a demon. Okay, not an elemental, sure. It's a five one, sure. It has life steel, all right, and spell burst attack a random enemy minion. Now, of course three, because it's a rager. So while your post quasar, of course, nothing, you play it, you're going to play some spells because that's what you're doing. And you just attack a minion for five. So what we have is a zero amount of five, a zero amount of spell that attacks a random minion for five damage and gains you five health. Pretty reasonable for survivability. I've no idea what quasar rogue will look like once we actually had the full launch of the expansion. We're not playing the previous tavern brawl. But I do wonder whether this will be part of it, because I think if this is a good deck and everyone's playing slow things, then quasar rogues are probably quite good. And if things are quite fast, then maybe they need stuff like Urzul rager to fight against that. So it's going to be interesting. It's certainly going to be interesting to see. Now, I'm super excited for the patch tomorrow. There are patch notes. There's things in the patch notes I could talk about. But like, I'm just not going to. It's not that I don't want to talk about them. I have other things I want to talk about. I was thinking about this. I'm like, I just miss talking about some stuff, not miss emotionally. I just skip it. I don't do it. And it's like, if I don't talk about something, it's not because I didn't want to talk about it. It's just generally that I wanted to talk about something else more. Sometimes that's myself. And we can read into that what you like. I've just realized we're almost at the train station. And I have not unfilled the umbrella. It's been all that time getting it out and then didn't use it. That's fine. There's lots of things in the patch notes. There's some card we're getting for some login event. We've got a Warcraft 30th anniversary event coming up, which is kind of cool. It's the kind of thing that will probably happen at Blizzcon if there's a Blizzcon. It doesn't seem like there's a Blizzcon. But celebrating 30 years of Warcraft, which includes Hearthstone and Warcraft Rumble. So there's probably sort of roadmap stuff going forward for all the games. Who knows how much we'll hear about Hearthstone at that time. Guess we'll see. Now, something else has happened since then that I do want to touch on because I'm a little bit passionate about this and not in the way any of you're thinking. But with the theory crafting stream gives access to a version of Hearthstone, which is a letter patch, which means some people see things that aren't publicly available yet. Now, we are told we shouldn't be sharing stuff that is not publicly available, but everyone does it. I didn't. So this is not me. But somewhere I'm saying, oh, look at these, there's some new skins and they're kind of pixel art skins. And some people like that, right? Some people love those 90s, 2000s style games that are kind of pixelated. I'm not really a fan of that kind of thing. And I feel like when I see pixel art in game, I'm going to be like, oh, it doesn't quite look right. But a lot of people enjoy it. But my first gut instinct when I saw that was, this doesn't quite look right. Turns out I was well and truly right about that. But for not the reasons that we're thinking, which is that I don't like pixel art. And that's fine. Turns out the artists who did them is an AI artist. Now, Blizzard has a policy, no AI art. Like they made an announcement. I don't know how ever long ago it was once AI was sort of a thing like, okay, yeah, but it's cool. We may use it for some stuff like, you know, number crunching and whatever else or like just figuring some stuff out. But we're not going to create content with it. The story is not going to be AI generated. The art is not going to be AI generated, that kind of stuff. Like they do use it, like they'll create character assets in World of Warcraft, for example. This is what the face looks like. This is what the myama looks like. But to make sure that the things blend together, maybe they'll use a bit of AI to make sure it blends. Which I know, I think that's probably fine. It's probably a cool use. Overall AI or large language models, which is realistically what they are. Although language doesn't necessarily work in the case of art. It's just like, I have a problem overall. And that is that a lot of it is built on stolen IP. Now, not everything is technically IP. Like if you haven't copyrighted or licensed, something you've created, is it really IP? It kind of is. So a lot of my day to day is dealt with a little bit of IP type stuff. I do contract management administration negotiation at a university. And so any agreement that we have with someone, an external entity, generally talks about what's going to happen with any IP that generates out of the project. There's two ways. There's background IP, which is IP that was created ahead of time. In other words, I'm coming in to do a project. I'm doing some research of some more. Clearly I have background knowledge. Or specifically background IP that has previously been created, either by myself or colleagues at the university. And we're going to be using it. So the agreement talks about how background IP will not be impacted by anything in this agreement. Nobody's going to be gaining ownership on us at background IP. So the agreement is clear about that. At some point it may say, we give you a license to use our background IP generally in the course of using this under what it takes to do this agreement. And then generally, there might be some IP that generates out of the project. Who's going to earn that? And sometimes the university is doing work for someone else in such a way that they get the IP and the university requires them to give us a license to be able to use it. Because the university wants to go to continue furthering research or just publishing our findings, stuff like that. And sometimes obviously we're doing the research. We want to keep the IP. Maybe it's because it's valuable, maybe not. But we give that to the client as a license. We say you can use it for whatever non-commercial purpose you want to use that kind of stuff. You get the idea, right? IP is a thing. And while a lot of agreements do talk about who owns IP, like when it comes to publishing, generally if you're getting something published by a publisher, you're selling your IP to that publisher. So if we talk about, say, Lord of the Rings, the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate owns that IP. And when Peter Jackson was at Miramax, I don't remember, wanted to make Lord of the Rings movies, they weren't buying the IP. They were licensing from the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate. They were saying we will pay for a license to be able to create an IP. Now, a lot of large language models, or AI as everyone calls it, was built upon a lot of IP with a fully copyrighted or just some stuff that someone's created without permission of that IP owner. They fed all of the stuff in that they could find on the internet. And they said, hey, we've created this thing. Now, if AI had been created to be something that didn't cost anyone anything, and anyone could just use it for free, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. But by and large, people who are creating AI are trying to commercialize that as a product, and they are trying to make money off it. Even if you can use it for free now, a bit to bottom dollar at some point, they're going to try and charge you for it. So they're trying to make money off something that they have basically taken for free, and they are probably supposed to pay for. The crux of the argument is they're like, you can't prove that we took it. Well, there's already a musical AI thing that is being taken to court because somebody figured out how to give it a prompt that spat out. I don't know, was it Hotel California? Like, if the AI thing can spit out Hotel California pretty much, note for note, then you got to assume that at some point it learned that. And you just gave it a prompt so specific that it spat that same thing out. So that's a stolen piece of IP that shouldn't have been there. So back to this art, this pixelated art came from an AI artist. And it just looks like the the Warcraft characters, as we know them, pixelated. So in any sense of that stealing IP here, it's already Blizzard IP, right? And Blizzard are paying them to do it. The issue is that this artist is demonstrated to be an AI artist. They've done a lot of pixelated art. And even if they're not claiming to be an AI artist, which I think they are, there's lots of examples of their art which prove that it's definitely pixelated. An example being a dwarf holding a hammer over its shoulder. The axe handle in their hand goes up over the shoulder and then appears to go backwards two inches down the back before coming out behind the head. Like no axe handle works like that unless there's like a kink in the axe handle. That's just how AI is not very good at understanding what it's drawing. And this guy has published that as a piece of art. So everyone's like, well, you're clearly creating AI art. Like here's a werewolf with three fingers in one hand and four fingers on another. Like even if you went like, like weird sci-fi characters having four fingers like three fingers in one hand, four fingers in one hand, maybe it was an excellent, but it's clearly AI art, right? So this guy's definitely an AI artist, right? And you can go, well, okay, they probably haven't stolen IP to do this because it's Blizzard's characters. But one of the characters from Malfurion has like some lightning type tattoos on its shoulder or something. What he's got on the shoulder in the art is like a circle. Like, that's not what Malfurion's tattoo looks like. So given everything else, it looks like this artist has submitted to Blizzard AI art, pretending it wasn't AI art, has claimed it wasn't AI art, because Blizzard do a thing that say, if you're creating art first, you promise not to use AI. And of course, it's made it into the client. Now, once this became visible, obviously, it's been escalated to Blizzard and some art people in the Blizzard departments will figure out what to do with it, whether it'll be taken back out of the client, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Blizzard, we're unaware that this was AI art until the crowdsourced internet, you know, which burning or was it which hunt brigade figured it out, and they're now going to figure out how to do it, which is a bit of a shame, but I do feel like my gut instinct is like, I don't like the pixel art, it was maybe a little on the money there. So anyway, really awful situation. The problem here is like, Blizzard can make a statement, we will not accept AI art, we will not pay for AI art, but that still makes it hard to identify it if the artist is going to lie before submitting it. And that's kind of the world we live in now. The same way people are like, yeah, I totally wrote this blog piece. It kind of reads like it was AI created though, mate. And like, there's a lot more to talk about with AI that we're not going to cover today. And like, because there are some aspects of the approach to using it that remind me of when the camera was invented. People are like, you can't take pictures with a camera, that's cheating. Like, people paint, say, yeah, well, AI does a similar sort of thing to the space, but the model that it's built on, and the people behind it who are doing it, who are basically commercializing, that bet's not as cool. And I'm not happy about that. And in general, so I tried to avoid using AI myself. I don't regret getting anyone else to use it because they're not in the same space to me. But like, I could imagine someone could try and steal everything I've created ever and use it for AI. And maybe owners of such websites as Twitter might say that the user agreement says that we can take your stuff now. So I don't know. Anyway, look, there's a train coming. I should get on that. I'm excited to play in the career release brawl tomorrow, excited to play the expansion. It's all very exciting. So follow me on Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube, Atlas the guy. Follow the podcast, waterwork.js on Twitter, and come hang out in Discord.News. We gave away lots of bundles, by the way. It was not just down the bundles, because Blizzard came through at the last minute of some megabundals, so we gave away some megabundals as well. So if you missed out, because you're like, eh, maybe you should have been in Discord, Discord. Don't be suspicious to go. Anyway, look, it's always a pleasure to have you join me for my walk to work. Good luck, everyone. And everything you do, because you're an absolute bloody legend. And I love you all. Sorry to be such a Debbie Deanna on AI at the end there, but you know how it is. We all have feelings on different things for different reasons. Train's not too full, so unusual for a Tuesday. It's nice. [Music]
