Bye. Welcome back to the Massive EOP podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Sunny D. That's right. Delicious, sugary flavor. Oh my goodness, that stuff had like 400% sugar. We're not really sponsored by Sunny D. this podcast is brought to you by those little squishy wall climbers that you used to get in in your cereal boxes and you would oh they still make those yeah yeah
I just figure every week we'll just be sponsored by some weird, you know, Tang or something. I'm shocked to find out Sunny D still exists, but it does. It's kind of disgusting. Yeah, no, it's not good. Don't drink it, for God's sake. There was all these products that were sold to us because it looked healthy. It had this healthy veneer, but there was more sugar than soda. Health adjacent, yes. You're better just feeding your kids like Smarties or something than having them drink that.
But anyways, no, no, we're not going to get into a candy discussion again. I don't know why I did that. This is Massily OP podcast episode, what, 494? 494 or something. It doesn't even matter. No one cares until we get to 500. I'm going to be honest. in there are you calling from a walkie talkie i'm justin with me is brie uh we're a little punchy but that's the way things should be on a good monday uh and we have you know
Just nothing to talk about today. So we're just going to kick back. There was no news this past week. It was as dead as January for some reason. And so we're just going to... Talk about, I don't know, knitting patterns. Candy, I mean, duh. It's right there. Bree's household delights that she's crafting for, I don't know, what do you do for, I don't know, I'm not going to ask you that.
Tell us your latest household project. No, actually, tell us what you've been playing. Did you get any good gaming time this week? I got a little. I've been so busy, Justin. At the end of the year stuff, I start to drown right about this time every year. If you go back and listen to the podcast in November, I start to get a little crazy. And like any drowning person, you take down everybody with you. at that chicken crap I'm doing my best here no I mean this is like the only way I get any like
I don't want to say off time, but like slightly less work over Christmas is to do it now. But that means doing it now, which is, you know, the part nobody likes. Me reaping, me sowing, that whole meme, right? That's, this is, this is both. So anyway, I've been super busy. I did get to play a little of Guild Wars 2 last week, but I didn't get to what I wanted to. I wanted to try the Star's Reach testing. They had one in the middle of the week on like a Wednesday, and I was like, um.
jobs we have jobs and then they had another one on saturday and it was like it's 60 degrees in november and i'm going outside sorry i love you guys but not that much bye go touch some brown grass yeah Look, there's no sun and no pollen. This is the best time of year for me. I'm taking advantage of it. It's kind of nice when it's actually light outside. Yeah. I like it. Yeah, and then it gets dark at 430. But, you know, you do what you can.
so um and when i also wanted to play brighter shores and i'm quickly uh learning relearning that what i write down for what are you playing every week is more aspirational um and i don't actually have time to do any of the things that i actually want to do so i did
get to that either i installed it okay but i didn't get to play it it's still on my list i do actually want to play it i just didn't have time what i did do like i said last week i played some guild wars 2s but i'm pretty much kind of in like dailies only
doing going through the motions of dailies right now waiting for what we're going to talk about later which is this week's patch which literally launches tuesday so either the day of that you're listening to this or early if you're an early listener so Kind of excited, kind of not excited for that. We can talk more about it when we get to that segment. Did our podcast invent early access before MMOs did? No. Through our patron program? No.
Let's not call it that because that sounds terrible. It's the same thing. It's just like a day early. You guys are really just beta testing for it. Oh, gosh. It really is early access, isn't it? Yep. No. So yeah, I thought it would be fun to talk a little about the dailies because I don't really have anything else interesting to talk about because the dailies have actually been really engaging me a lot lately. Like how many do you do a day?
Okay, so there are, what, you have to do four, but one of them is just logging in, right? and then when you get that fourth one done you kind of get like the fifth bonus then there's a couple more is it five or six every single day and i skip them actually i think you get more if you turn on your pvp dailies but
I'm not doing PvP in Guild Wars 2, so not anymore anyway. So I don't turn those on. So I'm guessing you get more or at least more of a variety if you have both. I just have the regular PvE ones. So they're broken down into dailies and then there are weeklies. which are really lucrative, but do definitely take, you know, an afternoon or two to get done.
And then there are like these quarterly ones that will take a long time to get done, but they're even more lucrative. I love this system. I actually really like the Wizard's Vault. I did not think I would. They introduced this with Soto last year in 2023.
hadn't paid any attention to dailies in years like i remember the first dailies that went in ages ago and i really liked those but that was like before achievements in the game were like the content you know what i mean like they were they were just like side things and now i feel like the achievements are almost more important than everything else you can definitely glide across the game just map just do basic stuff but like most of the content is buried in the achievement system it's like
right under the surface. I love that because it means that the game scales really well for casuals all the way up to hardcore. I think it's great. But it also meant that the dailies that they've had until the Soto patch just didn't appeal to me at all. They were just, no, that just feels grindy and unrewarding. I don't really even want to log in every day and get my freebie. That wasn't even worth my trouble.
But this system has completely changed my mind because I think the rewards are much more lucrative. They really are. They're giving you mounts. They're giving you gold. I mean, you can buy gold with your points. You could buy... like literally everything from your um your wardrobe uh what are those called the wardrobe unlocks um whatever those things are called can't remember um
There's just a ton of stuff in there. Mystic coins, which are worth a ton of money. Skins. Just... whatever you want instead of being locked into okay well here you know every day you log in you get this one thing everybody gets the same thing
on that day that they log in and big deal you know and half the time it wasn't worth your trouble here it's like everything is a point system which means technically you could just log in every day do nothing else get your 10 astral acclaim and then after a very long period of time buy a thing
Or you can game the system a little bit, actually follow the weekly system and... just have more astral acclaim than you could possibly know what to do with i don't even really do the quarterly stuff on purpose i'm just focused on the dailies and the weeklies and i've basically bought everything
like aside from like some of the junkie skins i knew i would never use or like there's things in there that just are a waste of money for me a waste of points for me but everything else i mean i'm literally at the point where i'm like crap what do i buy i've got I got to spend something because I'm at the cap. And that happens to me like every week.
i like this system a lot i like that it introduces variety i like that it introduces choice i like how simple the dailies are while the weeklies are slightly more complicated and definitely require some planning um like you know sometimes it'll be like you have to kill this
specific boss which means you're gonna have to actually do a modicum of research to find out when that boss spawns and actually show up because everybody else will be there too but the game's not gonna tell you make it easy on you so i don't know i'm having really fun a lot of fun with that i don't really like dailies as checklists as honeydew lists and games i find them i mean they're chores they can easily fall into the chores trap but this
feels more like content when you're done with everything else. And in some cases, you get it done while you're doing everything else, which is even better. Hats off to ArenaNet on that one. I'm really pleased with the way that the whole system has shaped up. I would like to see them put way more cool stuff.
in the the shop in i'm calling it a shop but it's not the vault so that you can actually use your points on it because i don't think there's enough cosmetic optionary yet but that's pretty typical i mean of of mmos in general they they want to adopt this seasonal system that you know lots of shooters and arpgs have but they don't really like
monetize it very well and i think they could be monetizing it better not not just you know i realize it's not monetizable but like just in general guild wars 2 doesn't monetize very well and this is sort of like another example of how they've created an incentive system
that just almost isn't enough for a lot of people. But it is for me. So anyway, I'm just complaining. I really just want more cool stuff to buy. We'll talk more about monetization for Guild Wars 2 when we get to that segment because that is... A whole other game. What about you? What have you been playing? Well, I... Yeah, speaking of dailies and stuff, I...
I sometimes felt like I was getting into not a trap, but I felt like I was just trying to stay on top of all the stuff I needed to do every day in like World of Warcraft. And, you know, it's nice to have a lot of stuff to do. And it's nice to feel.
like it is meaningful it is you know it gets you gear it gets you know some good currency or things you need but it's also robbing you time that you could spend on the one-shot stuff the yes so i i was like you know I started to feel like the pressure of the fact that I had two full zones on just my main character, never mind my alts.
Two of the four zones I had not even touched yet in terms of all the quests. And now we've got the new zone coming next month with Siren Call. And then they're talking about, as we'll talk about in just a minute, with Undermine coming in January.
february and i'm like oh crap you know like i want to get this done and so this is the reason why i did it but i i took a whole day off last wednesday like i i told my boss brie i'm like i'm not even coming in today and then i proceeded to come in like 10 times but he did he didn't even go away like come on you're mad at this uh it's it's so hard to downshift but i did actually i did play a lot that day
My wife and my kids were just like, well, just leave you alone. You do what you want. And I went for a long walk and touched a blade of grass. I'm like, I don't see the appeal. I'm going back inside. I'm going to go play my video games.
Yeah, I actually I just said I want to at least like chew through as many of these side quests as possible just to feel like I get it done. And I got like I thought I was going to get two zones done. I got one, which was good. And that actually shows you there's a decent amount of content in these.
you don't always see it on the map because of course you know quests lead to more quests leads to more quests you never know how long some of these chains were but they're also you know pretty good storytelling it was really nice actually i was doing hollow fall and that's the super pretty indoor slash outdoor cavern thing that they've got with a giant glowing crystal that's really cool in the ceiling so yeah it was fun so I did I've been kind of
I said, well, I want to keep the ball rolling on that. So my new thing in WoW is when I log in, instead of going right to the dailies or right to the weeklies, I make a point like do three quests first. Just three side quests. And that way, you know, if nothing else, I'm making like a bit at a time. Like that's 21 quests a week. That's 90 a month. That's not nothing. And that way I should stay on top of at least with one character, the curve here.
Justin, that used to happen to me in Lotra all the time. Like I'd log in and I'd be like, well, I got to log in all my characters and sort their inventories and do all their tasks. And I'd finish it. It would take me like two hours. And that was my time. And I guess I'm done. Like, no, no, no. This is not tenable.
I was just talking with my son the other day about time management or actually I was talking about money management, but this really does kind of translate to time too. So sometimes when we're given a big chunk of money or we're given a big chunk of time and we're not used to that.
we kind of fritter it away instead of using it for one big significant thing. You know, like you give me 200 bucks and I'm like, well, I'll go spend a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit there. And then you realize, oh, I could have actually bought one very nice thing.
that i normally can't buy but same with the time like sometimes we just fritter our time away in the mmos and on one hand it's relaxing it's not like a complete waste and you know you're having you know you're filling up some relaxing time but if you want to actually make progress You don't want to feel like you're spinning your wheels or staying in a zone way too long. You need to kind of kick your own. Exactly.
tires a little bit. He's talking to me. I get it. No, I'm talking to myself. Yeah, actually, speaking of Lotro, I spent a good chunk of time as well in the new expansion in Legacy of Morgoth. The first zone is just really pretty i was not i you know they kind of drilled in our head this is going to be a desert expansion and yet the first of the four zones is more like the nile
region in egypt kind of a little bit like that a little bit like a lot of things it's not specifically like a ripoff but a river valley is a river the busway is going to be loaded with foliage every time yeah it doesn't matter where it is so you got a lot of greenery a lot of mangroves a lot of palm trees a lot of this giant winding river which is just beautiful i posted last night a picture of the the milky way star you know the the sky box at night is just so breathtaking down there and it's
way different than it is up north in Eriador. So it's actually been good. I mean, like the stories are good. I'm kind of, you know, slowly... I'm puttering my way through as I am want to do. Elliot and I are very far ends of the spectrum when it comes to how we approach expansions. He is all business. I will get it done within three days. You know, got to do it, which is fine. That's fine for him.
no judgment for me. I just, I, it's not just, I don't have the time for it. I don't want to do that. Cause I really, it's the only time I'm ever going to be able to go through an expansion the first time. And I really do want to. kind of poke around and take my time and not feel like i'm i'm trying to rush uh myself for the the purpose of like an article or something so
I've told him to slow down before, and he's like, no, Bri, I like this. This is fun for me. I'm like, all right. I love that you can both exist in the same universe and get just as much enjoyment out of it. Yeah, so again, there's no judgment to this approach. It's just...
That's very, very... diametrically approached opposed to where i go so yeah it's kind of really nice to have that and of course we're looking forward to next month uh you know the moria expansion uh unlocks for my angmar character so i've got it head underground for a little while and do all that stuff as well and yeah
So that's pretty much what I was doing. And I was playing WoW Classic, but then we got a certain announcement, and that kind of threw a wrench in my plan, so I stopped playing WoW Classic, because I'm going to play WoW Classic again, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But...
Actually, so the reason why, let's segue into news, because my whole Wednesday off thing and why I ended up coming back into the office was the fact that Warcraft Direct was happening. It wasn't even in my mind that... that was the day and i'm like oh yeah i should probably like sit down and watch this whatever this piddly little thing they're doing like they can't even be bothered with blizzcon they're just doing a little 45 minute live stream turns out they should do 45 minute live stream
every year instead of blizzcon because that was honestly i'm not sure you're wrong yeah nice compact like get all the big announcements kept us you know not a lot of filler with phil spencer coming out and talking about xbox for an hour and a half and you're like dude just go i want to talk about world of warcraft for a while it was also a lot really fast like it was really hard to cover it in
Usually you were live time. I was like, forget it. I'm like a whole thing behind at this point. That kind of sucked. But on the other hand, I'm glad they didn't waste our time. Yeah. Actually, I was halfway through. I wasn't going to write much of anything. And then the news started coming out. I'm like, oh, dude, this is like a column. I need to get on this right now because thoughts happened.
uh let's really quickly we'll recap you probably know a lot about what's going on they talked a bit about uh the warcraft one two and three that they remastered one and two and that's not now out along with like patch 2.0 for work poor poor warcraft 3 um you know some people like it okay it's single player with some multiplayer and so we talked a bit about that uh warcraft rumble is coming to pc so they started a beta test for that
um hearthstone is doing some sort of weird crossover with starcraft i don't even know what that's about they're calling it a mini set but it's like huge so i don't even know why they're calling it all it seems to do is shine a spotlight on the fact that they've abandoned Starcraft. I know. and yet you're kind of like well they haven't forgotten it so that's not a bad thing um yeah so there's there's small stuff like that at the same time we're just like come on get to the mmo uh
And so we're going to skip over WoW Classic for just a sec. We're going to leapfrog right over that because we'll get right back to that. But we want to go into World of Warcraft. So what they started talking about, what we knew, which was Siren Isle. patch 11.0.7 coming next month and looks...
Cool. It has some stuff. It's like a mini zone. It's not like a full-fledged gigantic zone. It's just kind of a little playground with some interesting mechanics that are happening. But then they started talking about what everybody expected the big... used to be which is patch 11.1 and everybody's going like what's going on there was some some bit of data mining some rumors and it turned out a lot of those rumors were true that we are going to undermine which is this you know long.
rumored expansion area for, you know, an underground goblin zone. They've talked about this in Warcraft for years and years and years and years. And so everybody kind of always wondered, when are we going to undermine? And we're going. We're going to go there.
it does it looks really cool it's very goblin-y if you've ever done the intro goblins did you ever do that yeah oh yeah oh my gosh yes yeah i love the goblin but i didn't play horde very much it was more like well i'm gonna go check it out and make a newbie and run through the whole thing but then that character just sits in limbo forever but i love you It's, I don't know. It's gaudy. It's like Las Vegas with explosions.
Yes, like gnomes with no filter, right? Yeah, no filter. Yeah, I like that too. I love the gnomes, don't get me wrong, but there's something just very chaotic about... the, the goblins that are a lot of fun and yeah. Um, so undermine looks. like crazy it's like this giant just it's an assault of on the eyes in the best and worst ways it's just so many colors and lights and neon uh so a giant new zone it will be a no-fly zone
So they're not going to let you fly, at least at first they were talking about this. I mean, it's underground, so. Yeah. You'd just crash into things. Well, we've had this expansion. We have like three zones underground that we're flying. Maybe I'll let you unlock it later. Maybe. Well, I think why they want to do that is because they talked about these new car mounts that everybody's getting. Okay. Which everybody's calling like Mario.
you know like warcraft cart you know mario kart uh where you're not only going to get a super fast car but you can actually customize it not just visually but how it handles which i thought that's i think that's a first for world of warcraft but are they like are they like on like griffin or like raptor you know what i mean like where they're on like a set
hook where they you can't move off of them or no no you can drive everywhere they're real mounts yeah they're real but you can only use it in this zone so it's not going to be something you can take out i'm picturing like a roller coaster car Yeah, if you saw the video, it's like these weird jalopy things. I didn't get to see the video because I was too busy desperately writing things down.
I don't know. It looks kind of nuts. I think they have to specifically design the zone for incredibly fast cars going everywhere, so the roads have to be wide and stuff like that. I don't know. This sounds very un-World of Warcraft-like, and I really like it.
I'm okay with that. Like, it actually got me really excited about the next zone. It really, not just that, but everything they showed us, like a new dungeon, new raid. So those two things are also coming with the zone and a whole bunch of story content. I'm like...
This is, like, it's a sizable, like, it's almost a mini expansion in a way if you count, like, the car thing as a new feature. But... yeah okay you know like that's cool and it's it should be coming out very early next year so january february is sort of where the road map oh yeah we got a road map by the way
of 2025 that's what i was just looking at so don't don't they have to pack a ton of content in right now because we're not getting midnight until 2026 is that right here's the thing they changed the roadmap a little bit from warcraft direct because there was um at the end of the year they were so
okay let's go through i need to back up in order yeah yeah so going through this roadmap we have two major patches next year so went through all of 2025 and so there's 11.1 and 11.2 but there's also four interstitial uh i don't know what you call them like the half half patches like smaller stuff little bit story a little bit of this and that and so they've got four of those so two big patches four smaller ones and that's that's all nice stuff uh but in addition to that
Late summer, they're going to have an expansion reveal for Warcraft Midnight, which is the next expansion. And you might remember from last year's BlizzCon that Chris Metzen starts saying, yeah, these expansions are going to come a little bit faster than you. normally are used to we're normally used to one every two years and so that kind of people going okay what's the cadence on this going to be and at the end of the year there's kind of this symbol thing at the end of the day
That's not what that is. Okay. Then they changed it. Oh. So that kind of goes into the next part of this where we're going to talk about housing. I know you guys all want to talk about housing. So it changed from this like weird little hearthstone symbol to an actual like Warcraft with a little house on the top of it symbol.
for late winter next year. And we know that the housing is coming with the expansion. So this means either at the end of next year, we're getting midnight or the end of next year, we're getting it like a pre-patch with the housing. yeah i would expect a pre-patch to be on there first there's no way they're gonna give up the whole cycle of a pre-patch right i mean they get so much mileage out of it they'd be crazy to do that but in any case it's it's definitely like that brings you know
Midnight, like within a year and a half of War Within. Right. Okay, well, that makes more sense. I mean, two years is a long time. It is. Also, that makes sense, too, because now there's two, like you said, two interstitial patches between each large chunk of content, and then this, you know, 12.0 would be the next one.
so i think it's the end of this this direct thing and they give us a teaser trailer for war oh housing yeah as soon as he said the word home i was like no no you say see here i'm over here i'm barely paying attention at that point because i was just writing up stuff on oh yeah undermine this is cool you know so i was writing about that and this
trailer starts playing and i thought it was like going to be a story thing like they were just teasing a bit of like my mind wasn't clicking over into housing until that i wasn't i wasn't watching i was listening so the mug came down and he got me i was like no way and i stopped what i was doing like that that has to be a tease he did not just pick that word out of nowhere right yeah
So it's a pretty short trailer. It has a guy like this Alliance guy coming into his house, walks past a number of trophies. There's like an Ixious head on the wall and there's a training dummy and some other recognizable things. There's a lot of little Easter eggs here.
sits down and he plunks down a mug and it says home sweet home and then it says your next adventure begins at home warcraft midnight and later like within an hour you know just to clarify things blizzard on the forum said this is talking about player housing there's nothing else like This isn't a fake out. It's not a euphemism, right? Yeah, this is actual housing. It's coming to World of Warcraft. So better relate to the party than never. I mean, yeah, we've been teasing them a lot.
I mean, this game is 20 years old and you're just now getting housing. And I mean, we had housing in 1997 in Ultima Online at launch. Guys, guys, come on, Blizzard. and yet so happy to see it finally right it's also hard to complain that yeah we're finally getting it
That was at the top of my wishlist. It's been at the top of a lot of people's wishlist, especially as kind of us World of Warcraft players are looking over at you Guild Wars 2 players and feeling a little burn of envy going, oh, they get a cool house. And oh my goodness. Like, the second this dropped, everybody's just like, what? Oh, no. That's so awesome. Why can't the next expansion be here already? Now we have to wait a year plus. But still, it's going to be really cool to hear more about it.
They were very, very stingy on details. They did some interviews. The interviews basically boil down to, we don't want to talk about it. Stop asking those questions. We don't want to talk about it. Please, please don't. And I read like three of them and like there were some interesting like little tidbits of it. I think that they really wanted to kind of impress upon people because they created this problem that their housing situation is not going to be Garrison's viewpoint.
know and of course world of warcraft players that's kind of you know especially if that's your only mmo that's your only point of reference for housing and so you go like well that that was kind of a bust and you guys stopped supporting it and you know like It took us away from the community and all these other criticisms. I think you and I kind of like.
garrisons i i did not i did not mind garrisons at all i actually liked them i could understand what people were complaining about and i also have to point out that's where i crashed out of wow in the middle of was that legion no no that was So I crashed into well in the middle of that. I gave up, but it wasn't really Garrison's fault. It was like everything. So I think I tagged you on the way out. You were on the way out and I was on the way in.
But yeah, so they have to kind of reprogram a lot of people's brains going, this is not going to be what you thought it was going to be. And then convince people that they won't abandon them because I think that was half of the problem. It wasn't just that people...
were disappointed in the way garrisons worked, it was that Blizzard didn't support them after Draenor. In fact, started reducing the effectiveness of everything in her garrison. Did they really? I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. I didn't remember that. Two expansions after it, people were still figuring out ways to make money with garrisons. And Blizzard came in like, oh, you're having fun? Having fun. Fun police.
So they took that away. That's the second episode in a row where the fun police have crashed our podcast. They seem to come a lot. Yeah. So, yeah, they said... They're going to be talking about it more early next year. In every interview I read, I read like three or four of them. They did stress like we're going to keep supporting this. We're going to keep supporting this. Okay, good. They have to. You can't just put something. This is going to take such an incredible amount of.
dev resource to make this happen there's no way they can afford to abandon it oh but the potential oh the potential for this not just in what you could do in your house but how many housing types there will be um how it affects the loot table across the game. And of course, as we, you know, the cynical little voice in our head goes, and the things they'll be selling on the cash shop.
If they're wise, I'm sure this is a lot to do with it. I mean, they've always said it was going to be too hard. But when Microsoft says, yes, and now money, please, you're going to come up with a way to do that. And housing is definitely a way to do that, as all of the other MMOs in existence with housing can.
tell you especially elder scrolls online nobody sells housing stuff like eso and look at that the fact that you know this we're still in the middle of this one expansion and we're already talking about like everybody's talking about the next expansion the hype is already going and i i don't think it's going to slow down from here so i hope it doesn't tank undermined and then there's season three stuff i mean i hope not it does
you know kind of like stole a little enthusiasm away like personally because i'm like yeah oh yeah i wouldn't mind midnight being here like tomorrow at this point but yeah no i'm i still want that other stuff i am so i don't want to play this i'm not going to play this but i am so excited for the next year of talking about housing.
We'll have so much to talk about. Yeah, a lot of comparisons. It's going to be so exciting. I'm imagining an EverQuest 2 style of instance housing where I can have that door in Stormwind I've always wanted. That kind of thing makes me giddy, even though I know I'm probably never going to play this. But still, it's cool. I had a lot of my guildmates were all talking about different housing systems and other MMOs that they played. Of course, Wildstar just got brought up all the time. You bet.
I do wonder, are they going to go full out? Are they going to give us all massive instances where we can build anything? Or is it going to be the typical, well, very curated, very, you know, isolated experience where you've got a little house and that's it.
You know, a little house would still be acceptable to me. It would. Anything is better than nothing. But give your players creativity and tools to do amazing stuff, as we're seeing with Guild Wars 2, and they will astound you. And that'll be a... That'll be a source of continual creative joy, you know, going forward. You're giving players like Legos to do fun things with. And in World of Warcraft, it's such a no brainer.
Yeah. Where we've only been able to express ourselves in like our outfits or our pets or our mounts. Right. Now we've got... the potential of something far far greater and that's why this is so exciting so yeah so that that was uh warcraft direct ended up being i think at least from my perspective a lot bigger and more substantial than
i i was anticipating same yeah and that was good and we're not even done there's more yeah so let's talk about let's let's hop back and talk about wow classic because that was another thing of course they're this poor wild classic people are juggling so many different balls
so many different variations of the game why not toss another one on there so they talked about okay they talked about season of discovery it's it's wrapping up but it's actually going to be they're adding an extra phase on it that they hadn't talked about before so they're creating some brand new content, some brand new endgame instance stuff for Season of Discovery, which is pretty cool. They talked about how, yes, we're getting Pandaria Classic. That'll be the next step for...
the regular WoW Classic server. So I think that hits like maybe next summer, next fall. Are Classic fans excited for this? Not at all. Some people, yes, but most people are like, we're just...
If you're playing classic, a lot of people just kept jumping back into classic era. It's too similar now to the retail game that you might as well just be playing retail. And the fact that, of course, we were playing Pandaria Remix for... four months this past year i don't know why they did that i don't know there was also some hints by the way
i don't think we talked about this in any articles but there's some hints that ian has a castus dropped that we might be seeing legion remix next um that might be in the works but it's not definitely not confirmed okay so something to keep your
your eye on uh so yeah so they got let's see so wow classic moving on to miss a pandera classic and then they said oh yeah and then we're going to be launching fresh servers because that's something a lot of people have been asking for for a while so they're going to be launching 20th anniversary wow classic servers or as they also call debris wow classic classic
Wow, classic, classic. I couldn't believe it when they said that out loud. I was like, you know, you can't unsay that, right? Because now we're going to call it that forever. I think they're actually kind of okay with it. They kind of say it with a smile. It is, that's so supremely adorable. I love it. I hate it, but I also love it.
It's classic and turtles all the way down at this point. Yes. So, yeah, new fresh servers actually coming this week to WoW Classic. And so some interesting things about it. These are mega servers, so they're not going to be releasing back in two days. 2019 where they initially did wow classic and they released like scads of servers and they were opening up new ones all the time the plan is just like one pve one pvp and one hardcore server
And that's it. Maybe per region. There might be one over there in Europe as well. One set in Europe. But that way you don't have to really worry about where your guild is going. And when it shrinks down, they don't have to worry about closing servers. That's right.
Yeah, they can kind of scale up and down. They said the tech has gotten a lot better, although expect queues the first day or two. We'll see how that goes. A couple interesting rules, a couple changes that are happening. They're enforcing faction balance on the PvP. server which is a very good idea so if there's too many alliance characters then you'd just not be able to roll alliance characters for a while until is it for rolling or is it for logging in rolling it's just for rolling
I think it's rolling. That's a great question. I think it's definitely character creation. it's not something where my mind went to but yeah that's i mean it just seems like oh that seems really hackable because if you were really evil you'd go and you'd roll characters on the other side and then never play them and then
i mean you have to convince a lot of people to do that i'm sure there's like a grace have you met pv peers they are really crazy yeah but nobody wants like a server where 95 of everybody's on one faction and then i don't disagree you're you're not wrong nobody really wants to win by the
much you want to win by just enough that you can feel good about yourself but still also never have any risk right now you're 60 60 40 maybe so the other thing coming with the the classics these new classic servers um Dual specking is going to be in. We just found out that. That's something that didn't normally come until, I think, Burning Crusade, but they're going to bring it in earlier. They're also going to nix any GDKP. Not going to be able to do that.
kind of the guild killer of some of the older servers and they don't want that here um they're going to be let's see what was um they're going to be allowing for like oh they removed the buff limit So that's something from the old vanilla WoW that was always really annoying to work around on raiding and stuff. You can only do like 12 or 16.
something buffs and debuffs uh some some other nice little small small uh quality of life changes oh yeah that's what i wanted to talk about new looking for group tool is going to come yeah what what exactly does that mean have you read
Yes. Okay, tell me. Because instantly my mind went like, oh, are we getting, you know, like Wrath looking for group? No, it's not that system. But it's also not like the really... horrible old vintage system that they used to have and people would create like mods just to get around it basically it's like taking those mods and kind of creating a system so what it does is it just allows people to post through the ui like i'm forming a group for
this dungeon i'm forming a group for this quest chain and then people can sign up for it and then the group can assemble through that it won't port them but it will allow groups to pull together through that interface and so it should be more robust than what they had for prior for classic but it's not going to be like i press a button and i'm going to get thrown into a random group for a dungeon but i like pressing a button i do too i'm not against that
Yeah, it's a little bit more work, but it's definitely better than screaming into Ironforge. Speaking of that, there's going to be a new services channel too. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yep. Oh, there goes somebody wants to mow their lawn right now. That's nice. So yeah, anyways, new classic servers are opening up Thursday. I didn't say that before, but there you go. That'll be happening this Thursday evening.
I think. Sweet. Yeah. Good for them. Let's move on in the news. We got some patches to talk about. Let's start by talking about Guild Wars 2. And I'm going to take a drink while you tell us all about what God spawned.
yes yeah they barely just took the wraps off of this thing like was that literally on the 12th it was it was six days ago we didn't even know what this thing was called we knew it was coming and we knew like the bold outlines of like what would what content is coming just because they've given arena has given us maps and like roadmaps before this is like the first post-launch big content update for yeah
So Janthier Wild, as you all know, is broken down into four chunks. The first chunk came out in August. Second chunk is coming out literally on the 19th. And then there are two more next year before the cycle starts over again with the next expansion cycle. basically just quarterly updates right but you get them by having bought janthier wild so they're technically part of this expansion you get me so this one is called god's bun
Unfortunately, it does not have a lot for me because it does not have a new map. It does have a new story. It picks up the story, right? But it is primarily aimed at endgame.
group like raiders dungeoners type type right because it's got a new raid the first one they've had in five years i think they said and it's got a new convergence which is one of those like mega raids um sometimes you can you can do them like manually but you can also like do them on a cycle with servers and they kind of take some of the bosses from
the first chunk of janthier and then turn them into fresh content which i thought was actually pretty clever of arena net but i think that could also get old really quick so we'll see that's it's not really for me This is what happened to me with Soto last year because it was the same kind of setup where that second drop comes and it's like, oh, there's almost nothing in here for me. I will wander off. But this year I'm hoping it will actually be better because they.
Well, last year they did this too, but I didn't pay any attention. This year, of course, I am paying attention. So they're doing, they're changing over the wizard's vault again. They changed this. the same day as the expansion chunks come out so if you've been treading water like i have waiting for something to do now you'll have a whole bunch of new rewards to go for and there's like there's no content in the game it's just a
This isn't really for me. But if you're a raider, man, this is definitely your part of the expansion. Show up. Because if you show up and you play these raids, this raid, then ArenaNet will make more. Just put it that way. Good deal. Yeah, there's we got more another like an updated roadmap, I guess. So we know there's still more stuff coming. We know there are I think it's two more zones coming. Right. Not not.
this time but like map three and map four coming in spring in the early summer i guess it would be um so yeah there's there's more stuff it's just a matter of you know Whether you actually like non-map expansions. That's what this is all about. I'm excited, Justin. Mostly because it's just something new. And it'll bring a bunch of people back to the game, I'm hoping. You know what I mean? Like it infuses everything with energy, even if it's not really for you. I like that they named the batch.
I like it when, I know we've talked about this before, but it immediately says, oh, this is something you need to pay attention to. Oh, like, because they call it God Spawn? Yeah, it just makes it sound significant, like not, this is patch 2.1, yeah, whatever. Yeah, they've never really done that, have they? They're almost kind of touching back to the old Living World season stuff where everything had its own name.
They kind of are still doing that. They've just structured it like underneath a little bit different. I actually like this system. Again, I really like the consistency of it. The living world was always kind of scattershot and messy, and I never knew when anything was happening. And here it's like... I know within about a week or two when everything is happening in this game now, and that makes me feel way more comforted about its future, right? Sure.
So I had a question that I was kind of asking myself earlier today, which was, if I couldn't play... If you wipe the board of all the MMOs that I'm currently playing, if I couldn't play WoW, I couldn't play Lodro, just was not allowed to play those right now. What MMO would I play? and immediately my mind went to Star Wars The Old Republic. Like, that would be...
I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm kind of ready to go back at some point, or that's just where my mind would go. Like, that would be a happy medium. But I thought it was kind of interesting that we actually had a story from this past week on SWTOR. In fact, a new... patch it's coming next month and that's what everybody's been looking forward to i'm sure for a while now that they're under broadsword the the pace of these patches it's been slow over the past few years it's not broadsword's fault
Just smaller teams, smaller resources. I was going to say just the opposite. We should actually write down like... put a calendar together of updates because it seems like since broadsword has taken over we've gotten way better comms and like slightly more stuff maybe each yes we're not getting like mega expansions anymore but i feel like we're getting more faster
Maybe I'm wrong. No, no, no. I would agree with you. I would agree. The last couple of years of Bioware, it was like, oof, oof. Or maybe we're just, maybe I'm just being more sympathetic because it's more of an indie studio. I don't know. I want to actually look at the numbers, look at the calendar. As Bree does that, we can check out the fact that they did a little preview here of update 7.6. They're calling it Galactic Threads. It's coming. Early next month, however
Not all of it's coming early next month. They're kind of dividing the patch up because the narrative team said that all the assets or whatever they're working on for the actual story won't be finished in time for the patch. Why they're not delaying... The whole patch.
And just drop it all at once. I don't know why they're not doing that. But they feel. I think it might be just because it's tied to. PvP season 7. They need to get the next season going. And so. They're coming out earlier with. Like a new layer. boss some events some nice visual improvements
Across the board, some older zones are getting a nice bit of facelift. And as I said, PvP Season 7, Life Day coming back. So there is stuff coming with 7.6, but the actual story is delayed and they're not giving... They say it might come later than a month or maybe later than that.
Yeah. In any case, there is more coming for you, Star Wars The Old Republic fans, and hopefully you'll have some new story to play for Christmas. That would be nice. Yeah. In any case, that's what's going on there. Good for them. All right. Well, Bree was all hands on deck, not just for preparing for end of the year stuff, but because we had all the financial reports this past week, like so many of them. And I think you handled a lot of them. I think I do because I...
I hate making poor Chris do them. He just, I can tell he's giving me a look from across the States. He doesn't want to have to spend an hour digging into this crap. Well, so I asked you to kind of bundle them up. And what are some of the highlights? Was this Q3 or Q2? This is technically Q3. So this is, what is that? July, August, and September.
usually there's a couple of like embracers is technically q2 they have they have a slightly different schedule sometimes it's really imperceptible like it's it's not clear what they are but most of these are definitely q3 um yeah okay let's dig in i have i have five of them loaded The first one is Pearl Abyss. This was definitely their Q3. They're not doing great. They're messy, Justin. I've been very frustrated with Pearl Abyss over the last couple years. It seems like...
Eve Online is actually doing okay, maybe even better than okay, definitely better than I would have said it was doing a couple years ago. Eve specifically, I don't mean the spinoffs, I mean Eve Online specifically. In fact, I saw Nosy Gamer actually posted that they just... Just hit their highest concurrency of the year following the Revenant expansion, which was last week or the week before. I forget. So they're doing good.
I can't really complain about that. They're actually kind of flat for the year, which is pretty good for Eve. No real complaints there, but Black Desert has been struggling. I'm not really sure I understand entirely why. I would definitely point to... struggling in terms of sorry in terms of revenue we're not getting like player counts or anything i just mean in terms of revenue revenue um
contrasted with prior quarters. And I'm not really sure, like I said, why it seems like mobile is still doing okay. Console is still doing okay. PC is still doing okay. But they've definitely slowed their role when it comes to content. And I wonder if that has something to do with it. And they definitely seem to be splashing out on marketing, like we literally saw them rent out a castle in France to introduce their big expansion this year. Okay, but to be fair, we did that with Mass Elite.
We did. I just didn't tell you about it. I sold the golden yacht and I bought a castle in France. Yes. No, I didn't. The Wi-Fi is going to be horrible. So I'm not entirely sure what's going on. I kind of wonder if they're just borrowing, like they're still working on Crimson Desert, which they're again, just not really giving tons of information on. They've been putting out like, again, a slow drip of like trailers and stuff throughout.
the year at various conventions um but they they're not even being clear on like whether it's going to have multiplayer even though originally it was announced as like a sequel to black desert they've kind of clawed back almost all of the multiplayer stuff they originally said we were going to get
even sure that when it launches it will even be something we can cover which is wild to me but i also suspect they're spending a lot of their budget on this instead of on black desert which is a bummer because black desert used to be maybe still is but i'm not sure a top five mmo in in the genre so
that's kind of a bummer i i hope it bounces back i hope they can come up with something to make it bounce back but i didn't really see a whole lot this year it gives me a lot of confidence that they're gonna like push crimson desert out and then go back to actually making black desert huge but
I don't know. We'll see. That's where they are. Nexon had a really good quarter, actually. Nexon has had a really good quarter for like the last, I can't even remember the last time they had a bad quarter, which is weird because just a couple years ago, the founders of Nexon were trying to sell it.
And couldn't get the money they wanted for it, so they didn't sell it. So I kind of figured that they were in trouble. But no, they're actually doing great. A lot of it has to do with Dungeon & Fighter Mobile in China, which finally launched out there. But also MapleStore.
is really carrying its weight in fact they called out global maple story specifically as being a really good money maker and that's us hi like that's that's the western version of of maple story which is completely split away from the korean version so they're like on their own development arc now. And apparently it's doing great. So that's a really good example of a company figuring out
It might be better to have two teams to serve two audiences instead of trying to make one game that serves no one. And they're actually making that profitable. Please learn from them because this is, again, a really great quarter for Nexon. Plus, they've got some other shooters and stuff coming. Mabinogi is getting that port to Unreal Engine 5. They have a ton of things coming. Nothing that's like a true MMO.
rpg that's going to get traditional classic mmo fans happy but they are still making money and that means they're still supporting the mmos that you know we care about so yay for nexon EG7 is next. EG7 actually had an okayish quarter.
I should really clarify that. Daybreak had a great quarter. EG7 had an OKish quarter because Daybreak had a great quarter, which is really lovely news. Maybe not unexpected because Daybreak's end of year quarters are always better than the beginning of the year because they backlog. so much of their content for the year into these quarters. They called out Lotro specifically. I don't know if you actually read this one, but I was kind of excited in the Q&A.
jiham is basically talking about how load here i'll even say lotros uh no i didn't quote it anyway he was talking about how the opening of the legendary servers um
was huge for Lotro and made them a ton of money and enough that they're probably going to keep opening legendary servers. Like, I'm not sure this is going to be a once every two year thing. If this is how they're going to make money, if they can constantly bring people back for this, I mean... you guys are all sitting in the audience going well duh because classic servers have been like popular for
10 years more than that probably at this point so no real big surprise what what surprised me was that it's it made a big enough splash that the president of the company the ceo of the company was going to tell investors about it that always shocks me because lotro doesn't usually get a
So good for Lotro. Also, DC Universe Online got some kudos, which was really nice to hear because DCUO appeared to have been doing kind of bad over the last year. They used to be like... daybreak's biggest money maker not even close way above everquest and then they had some struggles they've had a couple of rounds of layoffs they didn't make their original target for getting out on xbox and on ps i'm sorry xbox xs and excellent how do you
say that i don't even know i don't want i don't listen to enough tech tech podcasts and um playstation 5 now they are outbound both natively not just you know ported over so I guess that worked because Ham was basically saying, yeah, you know, they're doing fine now. They have stabilized with a new leadership team, which by that he means all the people they poached from the Star Trek online team when Cryptic was offloading people left and right.
I guess that's good. I was worried about DCO for a while there. Now it doesn't seem like there's anything to worry about. The last thing to point out with Ichi 7 and Daybreak is that they confirmed that H1Z1, they're making a new H1Z1. They said this a couple quarters ago. Yes, they are still working on it. It is still in pre-production.
saying, yeah, you know, we're working on other things. Oh, I didn't mention Polly. One of the things I'm working on is probably palea rather because they bought singularity 6 earlier in the year this is old news y'all know about this but apparently paley is actually doing very well it got mentioned a couple times too as being a big contributor toward daybreak's finances and i'm sitting here like
Really? Because this is a game that won't even admit it's still in beta. What is happening over there? They've been up again. They've had layoffs, several rounds of layoffs also. So I didn't really think they were doing well, but apparently Daybreak sees a lot of potential there. Maybe they got the company. song. I don't know, but apparently they're still, it sounded like they were kind of hoping to launch it on console and then, like, it's on Switch, but it's not on the big consoles yet.
so i have a feeling they'll probably like do their official launch on pc when they launch on console also i'm not sure those consoles will put up with the same kind of beta shenanigans but we will see that seemed like what he was getting at but he didn't like give a confirm definitely launching in blankety blank so keep an eye on that for next year and then also yes the h1z1 game probably getting delayed because they're working on paleo now that was not something they
foresaw back when they you know were first talking about the h1z1 game and they kind of sounded like they bought paleo like kind of on a lark so i think we all lucked out there i love to see daybreak back in its old form um buying up beleaguered mmos and saving them that it warms my heart i know so that that's good daybreak doing great um and we know there's more coming because
uh the one i request um everquest one hasn't launched its expansion and lotros expansion wouldn't be counted in this yet because that was all from before um october so Right? I'm right about that. So that also means no EverQuest 2 expansion. That wouldn't have been out yet either. So a lot of that money, they should have an even better Q4.
which makes me calm down a little bit for the future of our game so the future of like lotro especially because that's what you and i play right so i love to hear that my games are not sucking so speaking of sucking and seesaw I'm so sorry. That was a segue right there. Yeah. Bravo. NCSoft didn't have a good quarter. I know you guys will have guessed this because we've been covering. NCSoft has been having problems for a while now.
Part of it is thrown in liberty, but it's also other pipeline issues. Just in the last couple of months, they've been laying people off, although they're calling them voluntary resignations, voluntary retirements, that sort of thing. They're paying people, but...
Yeah, they're cutting things back. They've shuttered a bunch of studios. I want to say I saw six at one point, really trying to like feather things out and move things out. So it's not one conglomerate. It's just more like a bunch of sub studios. It's just it's a major organizational restructure that they've been undergoing because they are losing money right now. And that is not something investors want to see. I think the most disturbing thing for me here was.
guild wars 2 of all things because guild wars 2 put in a very crappy quarter and i wasn't expecting that so again this would have been um August no July August and September like leading into the expansion which came out at the end of August right generally those are pretty good quarters for Guild Wars 2 and Guild Wars 2 has had very high quarters since the early 2022 really since since end of
dragons they've been maintaining decent revenues every single quarter so this one was kind of a dip I mean it wasn't terrible or anything it's not like oh my god everybody panic it was definitely not as good as I would have expected I would have expected a nice bump A lot of people on Reddit and other folks are claiming it's because that money won't be realized until next quarter. I don't think that's true, but maybe it is because of whatever is going on at NCSoft right now. I just don't know.
I'm a little worried because I don't understand that number. There's really nothing else to say for it. I thought that expansion was really good. It was marketed well, but... On the other hand, as we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast, Guild Wars 2 does not do a good job monetizing itself. You must monetize. And for whatever reason...
We've talked about this so many times in daily grinds and overthinkings. They don't sell things people want to buy. I know that they do sell some things that people want to buy, like they'll put in the, you know, the student outfit, the little Lolita outfits, the... funky tattoos and those things you can tell they sell really well because they disrupt the gold and golden gems market dramatically you can see it like it's they'll put that up on a tuesday and
boom, those markets will take off because people are hungry for gems now and they want to buy these outfits. But like, I don't think they're doing a good job the rest of the time. It's like... One of the things we've talked about is when they launched Jantheir Wilds, they didn't have a huge passel of spears on the cash shop ready to roll. They just didn't do that. They added one spear like a couple of weeks later. It wasn't even good enough to buy.
Why would you do this? I don't understand why you are not trying to take my money. Please take my money. And they did the same thing with Soto last year. They gave everybody a skyscale and didn't put any skyscales, not even their old skyscales, in the cash shop. What are you doing? You're leaving money on the table and I don't understand why.
i sort of hope that maybe this is one of those quarters where they put out an expansion and learn from it like learn from the fact that they could have made a ton of more money that quarter and they just didn't they really need to invest in their art team in their mesh team whoever is in charge of this please please please mark it a little harder because it's such a great game
it just needs more money and that's how you're gonna have to do it because that's the only way you do it there's no optional sub you're only paying 25 a year for the expansions that's just not enough they're gonna have to come up with other ways and they have it they're just not utilizing them so i'm complaining about this
There are other games in NCSoft's portfolio that are not doing great either. I don't want to even say Guild Wars 2 isn't doing great. It's just not doing as well as it was in the end of Dragons era. That's really all there is to it. NCSoft has a lot.
of chaos to clean up um keep an eye on throne and liberty uh they didn't actually give numbers on that yet again so that's what the third quarter in a row we've gotten no numbers but i will say that one of the uh executives i think it was the cfo on the call Yeah. He specifically said that. Oh, let me find it. I want to find the exact quote. Dang it.
We're having technical difficulties on the podcast. Here we go. I found it. He said that... throne and liberty's early access packs have surpassed its internal projections nc soft's internal projections which was like pretty much the only thing they said about throne and liberty which shocked me but like that i don't know i that it stood out to me because we don't have any idea other than
Knowing that 3 million people showed up to play the free-to-play part of the game, we didn't really know whether it was making money, whether those people were paying, whether the global audience was going to stick with it. Apparently they made some nice money on that global launch. Whether that's going to have follow through, I don't know. We still don't really know.
you know in numerical form how well the korean launched it the other thing was they did pretty much announce ion 2 that is definitely happening but it kind of sounds like they've downgraded it from mmorpg status a little bit
They didn't actually call it that. But you know how ArcheAge 2 is kind of ArcheAge Chronicles now and they've taken out of like the big raids and the big PvP stuff that you expect out of that kind of game. Yeah, NCSoft is pretty much doing the same thing to Ion 2. they're they're talking about progression and co-op play instead of competitive play which as we're pointing out here that's not how ion worked ion was like hardcore faction pvp that the whole game was structured around it so
I don't know. It's a pretty long way off. What did he say? 2025? So, you know, who knows what time that probably won't make 2020. Let's be real. It's NCSoft. They're not going to make that. But still. Something to keep an eye on if you are an Ion fan or you want to see what the next big thing that isn't a lineage game from NCSoft is. But I'm just, I'm worried about NCSoft in general. I hope this is enough to sort of, I don't know.
i have a bad feeling about all of it i don't i don't like it i don't want to think about ncsoft anymore fix your stuff you see this is this should have been a good year for ncsoft this should have been the kind of year we got to the end and we're like yay ncsoft game of the year because you gave city of heroes a license
for homecoming and instead we're just going oh no nc soft oh oh no you know what i mean i'm kind of sad about it okay the very last one here is actually embracer and this is one that they reported for q2 um so this is their most recent quarter is their financial their fiscal fiscal q2 i guess um yeah embracer is not doing well y'all know this embracer um has had struggles for like the last it's been a year and a half now and i'm really only watching it because of
the remains of Cryptic because all of the Cryptic MMOs are still ensconced underneath Embracer. Embracer itself is doing very poorly. He didn't have a great quarter, but we've been keeping an eye on... deca games which now is in control of neverwinter star trek online and champions online and even those games don't appear to have had
a great quarter now it's not it's not broken down they don't break it down by game but they're constantly talking about their back catalog which includes all of those mmos and their back catalog didn't do very well because i'm guessing they're not supporting them very well right now because they're all in the process of being moved to a new studio and
The whole thing is very frustrating. Embracer is just, you know, slow moving train wreck. And if it didn't affect MMORPGs so much, games that people really, really like, like Star Trek, I don't think anybody in our neck of the woods would really be paying much attention. But here we are. are. And they lost what?
21 percent yeah 21 percent in sales across all of their back catalog which includes those games which is like whoa what their back catalog used to be like their flagship you know what i mean that was where they made a ton of money so i don't know what's going on i don't know like maybe the our games made money and other back catalog games just dropped off the face of the earth i don't know without a breakdown again something to keep an eye on um
Especially since this year, we lost Cryptic. Cryptic seems to have basically been completely gutted. The whole thing is just beyond upsetting. I'm so sorry. Really, almost everything I just talked about was bad news except for Daybreak. What's happening? 2024. What in the world? But that is it. That's the five we covered that I feel like covering again. Done.
Numbers, numbers, numbers, business, business, business. Yeah, I know it's not that much fun, but I like to at least pay a little bit of attention to what's going on in the industry because these things actually do affect our games, right? This is not, you know, some...
completely detached hypothetical scenario. Especially as we're getting close to the end of the year in one of our, you know, columns that we tend to do is healthiest MMO and that this plays into a lot of it. Like if the studio is not healthy, then, you know, your game might be in trouble. That's not.
you know just kind of how it is your studio needs to be making money it needs to be you know solid it needs to be investing not just in the game but in its own future uh so there's there's a lot of different
thermometer points like you can take this temperature all over the place and go okay how is it doing here here and here and the finances are a big part of that and so right you can't always look from quarter to quarter and like say oh no this was the worst quarter ever everything is gloom and doom no because
stuff is cyclical and some quarters are just weak compared to their you know sometimes i launched a thing last year but i didn't launch a thing this year but we're still making plenty of money we're just not making money well it's it's all relative i understand but a lot of people really don't understand how the industry and the the the line between the money goes in and the game comes out they like
completely are lost on like the mid part and then they get they don't understand when things happen when the game sucks or when the game tanks or when conquered gets pulled off shelves or you know what i mean or when devs start quitting and why does the game suck this year when it didn't suck when it had you know even less money, well, a lot of it is buried in these investor calls and they're not fun. But anyway, I'm rambling.
All right. Let's ramble about something else. Well, actually, we're going to have to wrap things up, I think. What? Are we done? Oh, my God. We really are. We're not going to get to mail. We had a lot of news to cover this week. Oh, my gosh. Yes. So, obviously, I was facetious earlier. It was a very...
Very big, thick news week. And I'm sure it's not going to really slow down, at least for a while, as we head toward the holidays. We've got some MMO releases. We've got some expansion releases. We've got some... updates like you know star wars like we just talked about or guild wars 2 so you know a lot it'll keep getting crazier and crazier until we kind of hit this magic point in december where pantheon is coming
wow classic classic yeah a lot of stuff so we'll stay on top of it until things suddenly just stop and then you will have massively op to read because that's when all breeze end of end of year stuff really helps to fill the gaps when there's no i hope so because it is exhausting yeah i know i know i'm sorry
All right. Well, and what you guys can do if you're sitting out there going, Pri, how could we help you? Well, you know, being civil to each other in the comments is always a very helpful thing. It's 90% of it. There you go. You could also send us in a podcast email.
really nice. If we get those, we're going to put them in a big bag, a lot of them, unless we need them from week to week. And we're going to be doing a podcast email show pretty much, I think, toward the end of next month. It's just kind of a nice way to wrap up the...
year and we want to talk about the things you want to talk about so small questions big questions whatever you want to do send us in a podcast email there's a link in the show notes another way that you could help us out of course is our patreon program it's right there on the right hand
side of the site you can decide if you want to financially help support us toss in a few bucks a month whatever you think you know massively op provides for you and you want to help us out in return it doesn't go to waste there there is no castle There's not a yacht. It is just... purely invested in his writers in the tech and everything that's going on and on over these past 10 years yes it's almost been 10 years bringing you independent mmo journalism they said it couldn't be done and we
We said, what's that? We're doing it anyways. And we did.
There's so many independent sites now, and I feel like we helped pay the... I know we weren't first. I know there were a few before us. I mean, if people wanted to make a statue of us, sure. Yeah, no, I'd take that. They could go for it. We'll have... brie and well her statue will be her looking inspirational standing on a golden yacht obviously no but your statue will be you looking inspirational but you'll be standing on a lot of like a step stool because it needs to be tall enough
That's fair. Yeah. All right. That's all the time we got for today's Massily OP podcast. Thanks for spending in the last hour plus with us. We hope that you're having a great time wherever you're gaming. Check out the site. Interact with us. Drop in some fun comments. Drop in. Tell us at the end of the week on Saturdays what you're playing on Sundays. Some screenshots and one shots and other ways that you can participate as a community. Of course, start out your day.
with a good full cup of daily grind. Yes, we've got a question every morning, and we'd love to see the community interact with those questions. Remember, at the end of the year, we keep score. Whoever gets the most comments on, you know, like if it's my post or Ellie's... posts or breeze posts we we kind of have bragging rights like oh they like my daily grind yours got two
He's laughing, but I actually go through the daily grinds and I pick out the interesting ones of the ones that got a lot of comments. And then I always look for the one that has like two comments. And it's almost always mine. No, I've gotten some bad ones. And then I put that one.
up to like a wall block it's like yeah where there's like three people who showed up and they're like this is a dumb question why'd you even ask it sorry i thought it was a good question but it's never coming up with 365 questions every year
Hey, you know, I have one more thing. There's a lot of people who are answering them on social media, especially on Masked On and especially on Blue Sky. If you're not following us on Blue Sky, you totally can do that. We are there. We are active there. Here, I'll even look up our thing. It's massively OP. That's where we are right now. Trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Yeah, it's not pretty.
That's okay. You know what? Like I said, we'll probably do our own domain at some point, but I haven't. I want to see how it shakes out. Social media is in such a weird time of transition right now, and I don't know who's going to win and what's going to happen. So we're just going to see. We're going to have our figures in all of the pies. Yeah, well, some of the pies. I'm telling you, we need to go back to being a live journal. Don't tempt me. Myspace. Massively Myspace.
That actually kind of does have a nice ring to it. All right, guys. Have a great week. We'll talk to you again next week. Later, everybody. Bye.