Hey guys, and welcome back to the Massively Opie podcast. I am Justin, and with me is my ever-loyal sidekick slash boss slash overseer, Bree. How are you doing? I'm so... so glad it's moonday. This is the last hard thing I have to do. I'm glad being on a podcast with me is a hard thing for you to do. Not a hard thing, but just, you know, the last work, work. of the day. I just need this whole weekend to be done and over. It's been a lot. You've been on a marathon. I watched that.
Yeah. You guys don't know what we're talking about. We're talking about the awards. It was awards weekend. We had our big awards debate on Friday. Justin wisely opted to not attend. Justin was working. Justin figured you guys had it. Completely in hand. Honestly, it went really smoothly compared to past years. We were done in 90 minutes. Like, that's really...
That's really fast for us. Maybe not. So you're taking in all the nominations and then kind of seeing where we come out in a clear answer and which ones we had to kind of debate and cajole and blackmail each other and all the other stuff we do. Exactly. So anyway, then I had to actually do all the awards. And right about then, you know, like, yeah, we're all done. And then I'm like, whose idea was it to have 23 awards? Pretentious website are we?
Come on. Because then somebody has to do them. The Oscars don't even have that many. They probably do. So anyway, they are done. They start rolling out on Friday all the way into January. We delayed them a week this year because the... Layout of the schedule is a little weird, but they are done. I'm so relieved. I'm a little disappointed because I still... am advocating really hard that we do an actual live stream award show and you know expensive sets and
You know, all paid. They have to pay us, right, to win. That's how it works on these awards. Doritos, right? They did it for other people. They could do it for us. That's actually Thursday. Speaking of Doritos, wait. I wasn't giving a segue into anything. That award show is on Thursday. We will be watching. I don't know how well I'll live stream it. I might just put up interesting things. Oh, I wasn't even thinking about that. Yeah, that's this week, the Game Awards.
You don't expect much if you're an MMORPG player. It's the same stuff as always. The big name games are going to get all the attention. Do they give awards or is it just trailers by now? they deserve that now it's both it's both and it sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between what's like being showcased and what's being advertised it's all very slickly done and rolled together so you kind of have to
But it can be fun to watch it. We don't really even cover the awards part, isn't it? Because I don't care. It's whatever news is announced that might trickle out of it. Yeah, it's the announcements and the trailers that are fun. yeah it really feels like everything is rushing to the finish line of this year and all trying to get it done within about a week and we know like past that it's going to be this weird wasteland so it's it says rush rush rush rush rush and then
We'll be sailing right into January. Maybe, maybe not. But yeah, like last week we had Core Punk. This week we're going to talk about Path of Exile 2. Next week, No Dell, we'll be talking about Pantheon. It's like, oh my gosh. When have we ever had three...
MMOs release you know I early access label aside three MMOs in three weeks that's crazy not often yeah that one february february 2022 when end of dragons and lost ark came out like right on top of each other yeah there was a lot that month yeah the february I have a quick story I want to share with you before I completely forget. So my son, Benji, he's really into Zelda.
Like, super Zelda mega fan. He's played almost every game. He's beaten almost every game. Although he hasn't beaten Zelda 2, so I said he's not really a true fan until he beats that Nintendo hard. So every time Christmas or his birthday rolls around, he asks for different Zelda items. I see. And so this year he asked for an ocarina. You know, that little weird... bubble flute thing right yeah so he asked for it like
You normally ask for like, oh, I want a shield. I want a sword. I want a hat. I want a whatever. He's putting these outfits together and then randomly wears them throughout the house. And we're like, okay, that's cool. That's completely normal for a 12-year-old. Go ahead. Do that. But he gets his ocarina. And it's a functional one. We think, oh, that's cute. This guy has spent the last two months teaching himself to play flawlessly on this flute.
The other day, he's like, Dad, check this out. And he plays the whole theme to Jurassic Park, the whole theme to Harry Potter. Really good, like hitting the sharps and the flats. And I'm like, how are you doing this? He's just like, oh, I just went online. I just, you know, kind of learning some cheap music. Oh, I...
You know, how cool is that? Like my son has had no appreciation for music whatsoever, but it was a video game that kind of onboarded him into music appreciation. And I just wanted to bring that up. Is it just like a little glass piccolo? Is that really all it is? but like like a flute it looks like a fruit like a gun kumquat or something like that with a couple i didn't think it was like it's got like 12 holes challenging
The hold one, I mean, the reason flute is so much easier is because it's got pads on, right? Right. And you push one finger and it actually pushes up one finger. It's kind of more like a recorder. It's like a recorder, yeah? Yeah. Good for him. That's a nice talent. So anyways, next time somebody gives you guys
guff about playing video games and they have no you know actual good effect on your life there are instances and examples of how video games do affect you in a good way and all right what you need to do is get him a youtube channel fam Gavin put all of his recordings up there. I always said he'd be a good talk show host. Take after his old man. Be a podcaster. All right. Well, I know you were busy all weekend.
I sneaked in a little bit of time to play. Okay, so tell me about what you've been playing. Last week I mostly played Guild Wars 2. No shock there. I was doing dailies, weeklies. I got my last Ascended piece that I was working on. i've been working on another um
I can say this. It's kind of weird. I've been doing the weapon skin collection stuff because it occurred to me after digging around through achievements that it was actually like almost profitable because if you collect the whole set of... i don't know what it is 20 or whatever weapons in each set they give you seven tokens to buy more weapons which you can then sell so like you're looking at
roughly 350 to 400 gold for selling those you know the things you get from those tickets which means that a set that costs less than 400 gold is at least breakeven plus you get the whole set you know what i'm saying yeah
so i've started doing this very slowly it's like my way of playing the auction hall in a game where the crafting may as well not exist and i'm having a pretty good time i've done two sets three sets i think this is my third set actually and i'm almost done i got two more weapons it's the um
uh what is it called the ley line set the one with like the blue glowy i just love how it looks anyway that's that's an achievement like an intrinsic achievement for me anyway that i've almost pulled that off um let's see i helped my husband set up his guardian finally he was running around in junk i swear some people play this game like scrubs he plays this game like i used to play this game
So you do the mom thing, like, I'm going to dress you now. I usually would make him pretty, but now I've got him set up in ascended gear. He looks awesome. He's a dragon hunter. Honestly, he looks cooler than I do. He's got like this big tall blonde Norn lady, the opposite of characters he usually plays. He usually plays tiny characters, like gnomes, like Asura, but not this time.
so it's actually kind of fun and uh let's see i finished mapping her at the hinterlands completely random um i just kind of have been picking random zones like when i have a few minutes or i'm waiting for dailies to roll again and i'll just start mapping because that's what i'm and on in 2025 i'm going to try to map everything on that character and uh on my story wise i made it to thunderhead keep um i had i had wrapped up uh the last
episode of season four but i hadn't like moved on so now i've moved on which actually kind of had a lot of stuff to it there's there's whole trial you go through with um some little mini game things with um your your dragon with aurene so now i'm in thunderhead keep justin you would love thunderhead keep yeah i had forgotten this was it like a zone it must have been a zone in eye of the north i think
I don't remember anymore in Gilgore's one, but here they've done a replica of it. It's like all caverns. It's like Mines of Moria. But pretty. You would have so much fun in it. You love those kinds of zones. Okay, so Guild Wars 2 aside, the other thing I did this weekend was Path of Exile 2. Which we'll talk about in a minute. Do you want to save that for that?
Tell me what you played other than that this weekend. Yeah, a lot of little things. It was kind of an odds and ends weekend. But WoW Classic continues to be kind of my... burning passion it's so weird because i was tracing i actually at the end of the year one of the things i do is i break out a spreadsheet and i kind of map out all the games i played that year like just color code the months and the games and Kind of just to see where the patterns were. Can you post that?
Yeah, I do. Okay, good. Biobreak.wordpress.com, the second best MMO website you'll ever go to. Plug it. Heck yeah. Yeah, why not? So yeah, I do. Not really just... because I like to pat my own back, but mostly it's just to kind of see where my...
my journey's taken me and sometimes you know when you're 12 months into a year you kind of forget about like what the heck was i doing back in january and february apparently it was trying to play all the mmos uh i was like oh yeah i was dabbling in everquest 2 and i was doing this
doing that and i did like three months of final fantasy 14 but yeah i look back and i'm like yeah i barely touched wow classic this year until like the week before they made that announcement for the 20th anniversary servers and now it's like my It's so main game. I don't understand why I'm so into this right now, but it's a good feeling. It's like when you were...
jiving really hard on Guild Wars 2 and talking about that week after week. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow fonder. Sometimes it's the nice confluence of You know, I'm ready to go back to a game, but also something really cool is happening like a relaunch, fresh start. You know, all these things kind of came together at the same time. And it just worked really well because now I have like a very passionate community, you know, still in the honeymoon phase.
of these servers, so everybody's still having fun and leveling and all that. i you know i keep dabbling i keep dabbling like i have my main which is my dwarf hunter she's only in the mid-20s it takes you know it's gonna take a while but i can't it's probably gonna take me even longer because i keep dabbling in alts
And last night I'm like, oh, you know, I should have a horde character too. Why not? And I should play a class I don't normally play. So I rolled up an undead priest, you know, just for kicks. Kind of had fun. The first time I loaded in, I don't know what layer I was on, but that the newbie zone was like over farmed. Like you could not find a mob.
you know and this was like almost a month what is it you know week weeks after you know that launch i still so i got down to a different layer and now it was better and so i i found a nice little casual guild i kind of you know fish around for that i found one and i said you know guys i don't normally beg but i'm a priest and
It would really make my early leveling experience better if I had a wand. I don't know why Wild Classic doesn't give priest wands right out the gate. They really should. And so this one guy said, oh, I'm an enchanter. Hold on. Whipped me up. I'll meet you. I said, okay, where do you want to meet? Meet in Brill. So I run over to Brill. He runs to me.
He dumps two wands on me. One a starter wand and then one for my teens, which is already awesome. And then he gives me a whole gold on top of that. He's like, I know how hard it is starting out with no resources. Here you go. Buy yourself some bags. I'm like, dude. You know, like a tear trickled down my cheek. I'm like, oh, you guys, you're so awesome. Wait, how many bags does a gold buy? It'll buy four.
Eight slot bags from the vendor. Okay, that's no joke. That's, you know, that's pretty decent for starting. You don't tend to see 10 slots dropping or being able to make those until well into, you know, 20s or 30s. So yeah, that was kind of nice, but mostly just been playing my hunter and having a lot of fun collecting the Pokemon pet.
abilities i think i'm gonna settle on a wolf because i like the furious howl ability but i know in the end like it's only temporary it's gonna once we go up into the next expansion it's these things are gonna go away so it's all ephemeral anyways um Yeah, so having a lot of fun with that. Also, Mines of Moria, as you just mentioned, Mines of Moria, it's unlocked on the Angmar server. So I'm like, oh, I got to get my butt over too.
go underground for the next few months and i was actually kind of weirdly excited about that because i like moria i'm one of those weird people that just kind of like it it's not like i normally like underground zones but i have kind of a very strong nostalgic feel uh for for minds of moria and i've done it so many times it's not it's not a challenge right yeah also what did you say you were playing i can't remember now
Are you playing a... A captain? A captain? Oh, okay. That doesn't really help that much, does it? It doesn't hinder me. I'm fine. I'm just thinking about my big problem with Morrie isn't exactly the, you know... oppressiveness of it but how it constantly makes you run like run run run run run back go back go back again i know you were just there but go back again and that drives me crazy yeah that's that's low drone in a nutshell though but
Not so much with the cap. I know that they just added a whole bunch more stable master routes. Oh, when did they do that? With this patch. This last week. Dang it. Yeah. Did they do it for live too? For retail? Uh-huh. What do you call it? Oh, I didn't notice that. Yeah. They were doing a lot of overhaul. They figured, like, they were sending a whole community up into Amoria. This was a good time to kind of do a refresh, and that's what they did.
Yeah. Although they say a lot of it, you know, some of the Stable Master stuff is bugged and they need to go back and fix some of that. So, you know, caveat emptor and all that. But... Hey, it's still nice. It's still nice to have more travel options, and I'm with you. Especially in a game where you can't fly, and you don't have... I think we should have grappling hooks. I really would love that, but that's my wish list. That would be cool.
Yeah, so nothing astounding. No major breakthroughs or milestones. I did play a little bit of Star Wars The Old Republic. I did play Retail WoW, but nothing... story-wise to really share from there. You're just having fun. Only having fun. I know. Yeah. Not even finished. Not even finished. No. I got the top ten score on all these games, but...
All right, well, let's head into the news. And actually, yeah, let's talk about Path of Exile 2, which is easily the biggest story of last week and kind of the dominating gaming experience from this past weekend. I went and whimpered to my wife only.
I know we're in a budget lockdown, but a new game came out. She's like, don't you have other games to play? Yeah, but this one's shiny and new and all my friends are... It's hard to see a game that other people are playing and it's so popular and you're like... I guess I'll just have to wait a little while. But it might actually be a good thing because also there's so many people crushing into this game that it's kind of the good and the bad. The queues, the crashes, the bugs.
Poor grinding gear over there is dealing with the fruits of their success. Well, I can tell you, I only saw one cue. when i logged in two or three times over the course of the weekend i only saw one queue and it was really fast like i was watching it tick down by like a thousand people like every couple seconds i was like okay i guess we're all getting in or they open a new server or something i don't know but
was only waiting for like 15 or 20 seconds it wasn't even enough time to gather my my wits and take some screenshots about wow how terrible is this it was that fast but i didn't even have no that's not true i had one crash one crash one cue So I didn't think it was that bad. Maybe other people in different locations had more trouble. Maybe my computer was just not trying to run it at full because I do not have a top of the line computer anymore. I don't know.
My computer's from 2016. Hey, computers are expensive. They are. And MMORPGs don't often require top-of-the-line computers. That's kind of my thought. Like, I'll keep running this until it dies. But I do need to, like... It has actual real physical old mechanical hard drives in it.
and one ssd and i'm like yeah anyways we don't need to talk about that so what um i do want to clarify path of exile to what we're talking about is early access the early access launch and it's paid it's it's buy to play Like 30 bucks is the... So yeah, normally I would say don't do this. Do not buy early access because early access is generally bad. I've never said that on this podcast a million times. I think this is a fair exception. Everybody knows.
exile one everybody knows grinding gear is one of the nicest studios on the planet they're not out to screw you over yeah any anything that went wrong they would make good on so i wasn't like at all concerned that this would be a problem so like there are some safe buys this is one of them
Personally, I think, anyway. That doesn't mean you'll like the game. I'm just saying in terms of not getting screwed over by... They're not going to abandon this. Oh, no. You're good. It's going to make it. Although I have to wonder at this point, like, are we ever going to see... an MMO launch just normally anymore, like without an early access launch happening first. A bunch of people just went into the comments to tell us that Path of Exile 2 is not an MMO.
What are you going to do? I'm just, I don't care about that. You know what? They actually have it flagged MMO on Steam. I think I even said that in a post. Like, go take it up with grinding gear. It's not, they're the ones coming. I saw on a particular Reddit, I'm not going to mention the...
name of the reddit but they were whining about how horrible year it was for mmos and every example somebody would trot out in defense of that they're like that's not an mmo or that doesn't count for this reason or that's i'm like you guys are the worst whiniest gatekeepers I've ever heard. Just...
Just like the games you like and just ignore the ones you don't. Right, by the criteria on that Reddit, nothing is an MMO. No, no. This is a place where they argue seriously that EVE Online is not an MMO. Just don't even bother. It's not worth your trouble.
a bunch of games that are in the middle that are actually worth debating and it's almost never the ones they're talking about i don't even know what i would consider this one because it has like one of those big open chats and when you go into the hubs again you're going to see tons of people they're like just standing there using the same stash you are talking to the same quiz givers so i mean it's not an mmorpg you're not in an open world a shared open world
At least I don't think we are. I mean, is it like Diablo 4 where you see other people running around when you're questing or no? I didn't see anybody. I don't think so. I think it's like Diablo 3 or almost like Guild Wars 1. so there's like a shared hub but that's in chat and that's and then a shared chat which i don't even think guilders want to have a shared chat i don't even think so they got a lot of people playing this yeah
and what did they they cracked almost 600 000 concurrent just on steam yesterday when i was looking so that's that's not shabby for a buy to play game in early access in the middle of all of i mean it's awesome with no major ip right now yeah exactly well at this point pathify yeah i know but yeah i know within some circles people know it really well but i you know outside of it yeah i can mention past
Path of Exiles to be bold. There's like a blank look on their face. I'm like, it's pretty popular. But if you're a gamer, you probably know it. Like if you're already a gamer, it's always been huge. So it doesn't surprise me that this blew up. And it will keep blowing up. Like it will keep...
going because wow i mean as they develop it they it's not done yet i mean they've been very clear about that that they're adding more it does have that end game right but i know they've got more stuff coming So what class did you roll? So, okay, so here's the thing. Originally, I rolled a monk just because I really like my monk in Diablo 3, or maybe it wasn't called a monk. I don't even remember the melee hand-to-hand person. And I suck at it.
i quickly found out you when you first create a character you get to choose where you want to go with um like the mouse like typical like clicky clicky mouse for roguelikes or if you want to go to wasd and i was like oh well i am an mmorpg player and i would go with wasd and this was a mistake my brain like went into roguelike mode anyway and it was like i can't handle both of these things at once it was it was like i wasn't making my character do what my brain thought she should be doing
Well, he, actually, because the monk is a dude. And so I got kind of wrecked by the first boss, and I was like, maybe I suck. Maybe I'm the worst Path of Exile 2 player ever, and I should give up.
And then I read that other people were having problems with the monk too. I was like, okay, well maybe I just suck a little and I should just reroll. So I made a ranger and a sorceress just to try them both out with... proper mouse control and then they were fine they had no problems first try on that boss and i was like okay i do still kind of suck but nowhere near as badly as i thought i sucked so
that's kind of where i got and i haven't gone a lot further i still want to choose between those two characters just because i really like the way you can plant your feet and fire i find that very i don't know satisfying somehow so i don't know the sorceress looked really cool like i really like the effects from from the fire and the lightning i don't know like you know how the trees in these game works that
they just kind of spawn spiral out and out of control and pretty soon your character is like this weird you know unique snowflake who has nothing in common with what you thought you were making that's probably where i will end up but i asked a gamer I asked a gamer friend at church, I said, hey, you heard the Path of Exile 2 launch? She's like, yeah, I just don't have 50 hours to figure out those skill trees. All right, that's fair.
I'm not going to figure it out. I'm going to go find, let somebody who does this for like fun, figure it out for me. And I will just copy that build. I'm okay with that. That doesn't, I don't feel bad about that at all. And I am not a hardcore.
like i love roguelikes but i'm not gonna say that i have the reflexes this is part of my problem too with the melee especially if you're playing like a soak tank it's one thing to just sit there and hit but if you're playing a dodge tank which clearly the monk i don't know what i was thinking That's going to require reflexes that I don't have the patience for. So I never should have rolled them off. This was my mistake.
But I'm excited. I'm happy for Grinding Gear. I really like Grinding Gear as a studio. Their devs are so sweet. Like, we don't have a lot of... studios in our genre or near our genre where i can unequivocally say this is a great studio you know i would trust these people to with my money with with my anything and this is one of them so i'm so glad it's doing well for them and like even their
you know small tire fires didn't become giant dumpster fires they're more like i don't like it that you nerfed the thing i was exploiting that kind of thing it's the complaints are very minimal considering it's an early access the only regret i really have is that They launch right on top of Marvel Rivals, which is also blowing up. So I know that there's some overlap there and they're not as big as they could have, but could have been. And then Marvel Rivals is having the same.
Marvel Rivals is the rural juror of video games, and I really need them to stop doing this. Netties, that was cruel. I can barely say Marvel Rivals. Marvel Marvels. Oh my god. I am sorry. Technical difficulties. Bree's standing by. cracking myself up because I can't talk anyway I really hope that those settle out and we get to see the full picture of what the population is going to look like
But I know that they were blown away. Did we talk about this last week? When they sold their first million copies, they were like, well, fudge, because now we need to prepare for a lot more people. Steve's going to have to work the weekend. Come on, Steve. But my family, we have a new baby boy. Suck it up, man. You work for us now. You know, it's actually great to see such an unequivocable success story.
toward the end of the year um i know we're we're hedging a lot on some of these other releases and you know this this year's been shaky i mean there's been some decent stuff some halfway okay stuff in terms of brand new releases but I felt really good about this one, and it's very satisfying to see what's happening with it right now. So, yeah. Good deal.
i'm excited i i want to dip in and but i know that waiting a couple weeks is not going to hurt either because they're going to be i don't think it's going to go on sale or anything like don't don't expect that anytime soon but it's just 30 bucks that was that was how i justified it
myself it's not like they're asking you know full console money sure for the game and then it's not like there's a sub either right you don't pay for expansions like this is it unless you're gonna go crazy in the cash shop You're going crazy in the cash shop, aren't you? I see you guys out there. Do they have a housing in that version?
Yes, MJ talked about it in her original preview, but it's called Hideouts. But instead of having it be like a mid game thing, it's an end game thing. She was actually kind of grumpy. She's like, fine, I'll get to end game so I can have a house.
Yes, and it is in this version of the game. It did make it in. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's not like it's... Early access means a different thing depending on which game you're applying it to. That's... they're clearly going for more this feels more like an open beta like a last beta kind of thing to me because they've got so much so many systems in place they're already prepared for people to like live here this is not just a sampling game you know what i mean you don't just
try it and leave they're expecting people to get get to end game and get into that grind centric play so and the leagues where they can kind of keep resetting things a million times and people are always on board for that so yeah So there you go. Path of Exile 2 is out in early access as they continue to shape up and fill out the game.
toward the 1.0 release or whatever they're going to call it. But you can check it out now or you can wishlist it and see if Santa brings it for you. Who knows? I don't know. I think most of our listeners have been good this year. I'm just kidding. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. I'm not gonna... I don't know. Maybe Santa will give you some... Is Santa allowed to give you... I mean, it's like filled with like demons and gore and...
The first thing you do is shank a zombie. You think Santa's pro-zombie? I think he's anti-zombie. We'll find out. Alright, let's move on. Speaking of zombies, a certain anniversary event is dead and buried. And that is not because of anything you did or I did. It's because... Zenimax got probably the marching orders to kill its 10th anniversary North America meetup event. And speaking of horrible ways, the end of the year, and I know we weren't speaking of that, but we are now.
What a terrible way to end your 10th anniversary year. I would say, on the whole...
Elder Scrolls Online has had a pretty decent year. They've done a lot of giveaways. They generated some additional interest in the game because they were giving away a whole... content packs and you know they had the new gold road expansion which got pretty decent reviews and you know they did these meetups in different parts of the world and the north america one was going to be like the last big one of the year so everybody's
Looking forward to that, especially if you were a little envious of seeing what some of the other countries and their meetups did. And then we got this notice last week that ZeniMax is pulling the plug. And, of course, they gave no reason whatsoever. yeah that's the weird part it is a little weird sneaked it out on a friday and then it's which i know you love no don't put things out on friday at all
I hate that. Daybreak's like, we used to do that. That used to be our thing. But some games do it with stuff that isn't a problem. I think it's Broadsword that's been doing it a lot lately. They'll put out all their Star Wars tour news at like 6 o'clock at night. on a Friday. It's like, dude, no one's there. No one's watching. No one's going to cover that until Saturday at best. Come on. You think it just goes through the approval process and it finally gets there?
Friday they're like get it out the door but I understand why they bury bad news it's just that this was obnoxiously bad news for no good reason and like you said there's no there's no explanation at all and so that just Let's just be honest, that doesn't mean the player base said, oh, okay, we understand. Next time. No, instead they decided to speculate all over the internet with all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories. Like they made it worse.
By not just giving us... Oh yeah, because you have one data point and then we're going to just draw that somehow to this game's getting cancelled. And I saw people just making these Batman logic leaps. all over the place and that's what happens when you don't give people enough information like just be upfront with people say oh you know i i think the rational explanation the one that
I kind of like gut says is probably true. It's like Microsoft just told them, yeah, no, we're done. You don't have enough money for this. We're not going to splurge on this. So you're not, you're going to pull it and we're not, you know, the lawyers aren't going to let you say why.
so maybe that you know we don't want to look like the bad guys we want the studio to look like the bad guys so i don't know that that kind of has a at least in my head a ring of truth but it could be other reasons too it just yeah when you don't give a reason for this it Okay. It's just compounding an already sour taste in people's mouth. And, you know, ESO players tend to be very loyal to this game. And this is kind of a kick. This is the you belong here game. That's like their whole tagline.
You know what I mean? Yeah. And so this this anniversary event, it's not just like a one time thing. You said it's it's a. they've been going to multiple countries like it's 12 different countries over not quite 12 different months it's been spread out a little bit more than that but the whole idea was to spread it out over a year and change year in a couple months and keep doing these events some of them are bigger than others
I guess the one in, was it Italy that was huge? Or maybe it was the one in the Netherlands that was huge. One of them was huge. They were talking about renting out an entire castle. I know this is the year of MMOs renting out castles because that's also what Perlidus did. But no, this is Elder Scrolls Online. So people were like, you know, Europe got the royal treatment here. All the European fans got all this stuff. And now you get to America and you're like, never. mind.
Like, that's just not cool. We're all going to meet at Long John Silver's. Come on down. Red Lobster. We'll spring for your tater tots. Wait, I like Long John Silver's. I do too. And I saw one when we were on vacation the other day. And I slammed on my brakes because I haven't seen one in so long. And I looked at my wife. I'm like, we got to go. And she's like, what? Why? I'm like, because Long John Silver. She hates fish. So that was a no go.
I understand. I'm like, I love the little fake pier that they have in front of us. And the hush puppies? Dude. No, we don't have them here either. This episode of the Massively OP Podcast is sponsored by fast food chains you forgot existed. Yeah. They come mixed with like an A&W on the side. They'll have like one long. Okay. A&W restaurants are the best. On the way up to Knoebels. So that's the only time we ever get to go like once a year. I'm sorry. Anyway, chicken and fish is good.
That's my platform. Now my mouth is salivating for root beer, and that was all your fault. A&W root beer is my favorite. Oh my gosh, why do you guys put up with us? I don't know. Okay, it does seem like I didn't do any research on this, but going back to ESO, it feels like they did kind of peter out somewhere in the middle of the year. They were doing like big monthly giveaways and then they kind of stopped. Right, they gave us a house.
Yeah, after the house thing, and they gave us some zones, but they didn't continue it through the whole year, and I stopped tracking that because I wasn't playing it actively. They were still doing them, but they were nowhere near as big. The house was a really good one. And the two packs that they gave. They gave the Orsinian one and I forget the other. Hrothgar. Was that the same one? I don't know.
Anyways, okay, so that's what's happening with ESO. So this was a real life event. This was not in game. So whatever they're still doing in game.
will continue and it's just upsetting and they said they'd continue with some of the other smaller events but it's like what what's why not us why don't we get something what the heck and that's what led people to think maybe it wasn't just money maybe it's some sort of political thing where they they don't want to make their devs targets for political unrest i don't know that seems kind of far-fetched to me
Even in our current client, that seems a little out there. Then there was some rumor about like, I don't know, something having to do with some of the community team being tart. Like, I don't know. I think I think you're right. I think it's money. I think Microsoft.
cut back blizzcon and then they're just cutting back this this is all there it's microsoft they're like laying people off left and right from these studios why would we think they also wouldn't cut back their fun budget their community budget they're literally doing it in other places in in these games so why not here too it's just Yeah. I wish they could tell us. Maybe they will tell us. I put a note in here that we're still expecting...
The big producer letter for the year usually comes in the middle of December. I think they said the 17th. Yeah, I was just going to say that should be coming up soon. Maybe they'll tell us or at least give us a little more clarity on the game's budget going forward because this didn't... just caused people to be mad that there's no event it also caused people to worry about the future of the game like what
is going on behind closed doors there were already rumors that the company was pulling people off elder scrolls online and putting them on the other game that we know they're making we don't have full details on it yet but we know what's happening they've been working on it for years now are they in crunch mode over there and so elder scrolls online is kind of being short shrifted i don't know but it's not an unreasonable idea
But they need to come clean because this is one of those player bases that operates on trust. All right. Well, let's talk about EverQuest for a hot minute here because that was another release that we had this past week. That's right.
Yeah, I know the two EverQuest games, whenever they come out with their end-of-year expansions, they're not... almost i can't even remember the last time they were like huge events that happened in the way that some other mmo expansions tend to be but they're reliable and they're dependable and if you're playing these games you're already picking them up you don't need to be sold on it
I think it's kind of nice for these communities to know that there's going to be another expansion almost every year. So it's something fun toward the end of the year. We already had the EverQuest 2.1 tents come in. november and so that one already came out that was scars of destruction and then this past week we got uh the everquest uh 31st expansion here the outer brood
which sounds like such a B movie from the fifties. I am here for it. Oh yeah, absolutely. There's this great movie called the green slime from, I think the fifties. And that's what the outer brute sounds like a sequel. So yeah, it's, it's. That sounds like a good, you know, here's a bunch more quests and things to do. And also Dark Elf Rangers, which is the big kind of tentpole thing that they added here. So get your Drist fantasies on.
Is that how you pronounce it? I have absolutely no idea. Someone, I learned this word from the internet and not from listening to it. There's an apostrophe and that always makes me sweat when it's a fantasy name and there's an apostrophe and I'm like, I don't know. I got nothing. Meanwhile, I'm trying not to pronounce almost anything from Lord of the Rings Online because they use such weird, I don't know, all those punctuation and the little happy house thing that they put over you sometimes.
I don't know how you pronounce that. I'm not going to look up a pronunciation guide. Why can't you just call... Because someone in the audience knows and is going to wreck you if you don't. You don't call a Celeborn. You say a Celeborn. Celeborn. It's Keller. Come on. That's just Latin. I think I was writing the other... day on my blog i was saying all the things i love about lotro the one thing i hate are the names of the places and not because it's in universe which is fine it's
It's kind of cool. Like, it shows some depth and some continuity. But I can never remember what's where and where's what. Especially when, like, suddenly you hit the stable master and it's like, where do you want to go? This weird long name? This weird long name? Like, I don't know where... of that is why can't you just say fire fire swamp and
darkshire and all these you know just combine two names together and i'll remember that forever but instead i've got all these weird names and i have no idea where they go that's what makes it so tolkien-y though i know but sometimes like they have one name for a region and another name for an actual city and they'll use them interchangeably sometimes in the stable masters and that gets really confusing too or the like one for the stable master one for the milestone
So they're like different ones and you're like, I have no idea where I'm going. I'm just gonna... Cross my fingers and hope I don't end up in Mordor or something like that. Daybreak is so mad right now that we just turned the EQ segment into a low-cost segment. They're like, we don't care. We're getting paid anyway. Hey, EverQuest had a new expansion. Go buy it or not. I don't know. If you're playing it... Probably should.
I wanted to point out that Daybreak has been trading instability. That's what they're selling to their investors right now. So this whole thing where they've taken all of these older games with super loyal player bases who do not quit no matter what Daybreak does.
They break clowns and they buy an expansion every freaking year. It is super stable and super consistent. It doesn't like decline slowly over time. It just stays right where it is. Lotro is fast becoming one of those games. I guess they're doing the same thing.
ddo the studio also got an expansion this year it like fills me with this weird kind of comfort and that that the games are solid they they're never going to be well but they don't have to be this is a company that actually cares about maintaining a bunch of games that all together are like wow you know what i mean And I don't mean that casually. We've just talked about this not that long ago where they were talking about their concurrency levels for EverQuest 1 are between 20,000 and 30,000.
I'm like, I would never have guessed EQ1. It was that big. I knew it was still doing fine, but that's nice. Like that. That kind of puts New World to shame. You know what I mean? So, like, they're doing great. It's not total players. It's just, like, at a time. You've got 30,000 people playing alongside you. Hey, it's almost like that's massively multiplayer. What? Yeah, I'm actually hoping that Lotra will not do an expansion next year. I think that they probably will. My concern is that...
They're getting their marching orders to do these yearly expansions, and they don't have the resources. They really need to buckle down. This year was kind of a bit of a clown show for Lotro. They kept throwing out new features, but they were half-based. and they kind of all came with the disclaimer of oh we'll fill it in more later and it's like okay birding is over here dying you know and all this like This pressure to put out an expansion every year has got to be so incredibly burdensome.
if they're also trying to do, you know, content releases and other features and trying to shore up parts of the game, you know, especially technical parts of the game that they still need to work on. So I kind of would be okay if they took a year to just, like, let's just...
get the foundation of the game a little bit better, but, you know, probably not. I wonder what the financials on that are. I don't know. Right, because, I mean, maybe part of their problem, you tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like part of the problem is they're making their expansions too big. than for what they can actually do and if they would just scale the expansions down a little bit
I think the content, like they can crank out the art and the content, the stories and all that, you know, they can do that. But if they're trying to add on to that systems and, you know, of course, every new expansion, every, you know, as to the. technical load of the game.
that on aging games that's you know like ever quest hey i'm gonna bring it back to ever quest here that's always a consideration like you know you're you're creating a weird jenga pile this giant tower of things that you know you don't
They didn't plan for back in 1999 that you're going to have 31 expansions to this game. So you've had to make it work over the years, and you hope that the new thing you add doesn't break everything that's come before it, which sometimes unfortunately happens in MMOs. I know. I like the systems, too. What I really just want is Daybreak, give them more people. Yeah. Please. That would help.
All right, well, we're going to close things on, unfortunately, a little bit of a low note here in the news. Dig, dig maybe six feet further under the grave for ArcheAge and say we've twice buried this game now and this looks to be the last time as XL Games has pulled the plug on ArcheAge in Korea.
you might be going well wait didn't it die yeah we already talked about how they sunsetted the game here over in the west um that was i don't know how how long ago was that was that earlier this year it was earlier this year yeah yeah um but So we're like, OK, but, you know, at least a little silver lining is the Korean version is still going. So if you have such a passion for this game and you're willing to cross the language barrier, VPN or whatever you need to do, you can still touch it.
Now it's basically said to do that too. They kind of encouraged people to, you couldn't bring your account with you, but you know, there are ways. it's this weird consolation prize your game shuts down but oh another version like terra and terra console is it's like it's still going but it's not quite the game you remember in any case archaeage over there in korea got
It's gone. They're still kind of working on ArcheAge Chronicles, whatever the heck that's supposed to be. They delayed it again. Well, I don't have a great feeling about that game. I'm working on my most anticipated MMOs list, and that one is flirting with being on the list, and I'm feeling less and less confident about putting it anywhere near the top 11 at this point.
I don't think anybody nominated it. For most anticipated? For most anticipated for the award. I mean, it's still in the voting and stuff. But I don't think anybody actually put it on their own list, which should... really tell you something. That makes me sad more than anything because I think if they were still calling it Archeage 2 and it still sounded like Archeage and still sounded like an MMORPG, I think it probably would have stayed on people's list. It would have stayed on mine.
But, like, what they're promising right now is, like, so downgraded. I'm not saying it'll be bad. It actually sounds more like Blue Protocol now, if you ask me. But it doesn't really sound like ArcheAge, you know? Yeah, I think I made this argument a while back that they should just rebrand it entirely. There's way too much baggage that's come with the ArcheAge that it's just not going to be a benefit to them.
And then shutting down ArcheAge would have been a total waste, right? Yeah. You know, sell it off. Somebody would be willing to run it, I'm sure. You know, this game's been resurrected a couple times or had some other iterations. In any case, you know, pour one out for ArcheAgence.
that that sandbox has had such a wild ride so promising in the beginning a lot of fans just basing incredible amounts of hope that this would meld together theme park and sandbox in a delicious buffet of options, and yet it was... mistreated and by you know players and developers and studios there's so much drama different versions of the game nothing could quite make this work the way that they had promised and in the end it's just
kind of ending with a whimper and that's unfortunately the story of so many mmos that do end up leaving it's not a grand star wars galaxies you know throw down and suddenly it's gone and we're still passionate i don't know how many people are really holding out hopes for archaeage at this point but if you were one of them condolences and hopefully you will find it nice
rogue server to play on because there are a bunch of them now if they if they didn't want to play an archaeage rogue server are there other games you would recommend that they check out it's really truly sandboxing enough Because, again, Star Wars Galaxies, you can check out one of those road servers. I think it would feel too old. And also, the PvP component is very different than Star Wars Galaxies because it's so opt-in.
I mean when Fallout 76 was adding those caravans I was like oh hey that sounded kind of like I was actually going to say New World, but I know I'm going to get tomatoes thrown in. No, I think that's a good one. Because it does have a lot of solid, and it's going to have more once they actually get their new season going, when there's actually more open PvP.
Also, maybe parts of Black Desert still have kind of a free-for-all Old West kind of feel to them. There's trade, right? There's housing, there's ganking. There's PvP, but there's also PvE. I don't know. It's really, really hard. We don't have a lot of these. Albion, maybe? Albion actually would be a good pick. But there's way more. The whole point of it is PvP. You know what I mean?
But yeah, there's other places to go, but nothing is quite the same. And if you wanted those visuals, oh, I'm sorry. There's nothing that's quite the same. And boats and sailing. It was so ambitious. I really respected the ambition of that game. jail system the jail system yeah yeah nobody's dual classing wait for stars reach maybe like wait with the rest of us we're all in this basket yeah waiting
All right. Well, as we continue to wait, what do we have here in the mailbox? Mailbag. Mailbag this week. Okay. First one up is from Yuri's. He says, do you guys feel that bad monetization practices have slowly become normalized over the years as companies continue to use it?
them or do players continue to fight against these questionable practices over the long term for instance i think of early access basically paid beta testing this was frowned upon when companies started doing it but now people mostly seem to shrug at it Aha! See? Got the Early Access thing right here! Ultima Online did it first. They did paid beta. They did do paid beta. They mailed you CDs. It's not as new as you might think. Oh my gosh. That was ridiculous.
I didn't actually participate in that, but I did hear about it after the fact. I don't know. Yes. I mean, I guess that's the... Cheap seat question, the answer for that question, yes, bad monetization has slowly become normalized over the years. Do you guys remember when Star Trek Online introduced this thing called the lockbox?
And like, it was like 2010 or 2011. And we first heard about this and we were like, what the hell is this? Get this out of me. There used to be just like a solely Eastern. You know, game concept. Yeah, we knew about gotcha games because that's what we immediately linked them to. Oh, this is like a gotcha. This is like putting in a quarter and getting out some random, you know, bouncy ball or something. But you don't get to pick. And maybe it'll be empty.
a big womp womp when it comes out who knows no people were really really upset at the lockbox and now the the idea is so normalized every freaking game has them And on top of that, the verbiage has been normalized too. Nobody calls them lockboxes but us. They call them loot boxes because once the studios said, oh, we have to make these things palatable.
they started using the word loot box. And then they started saying, well, you don't need a key. So they're not really locked. But you also, you know what I mean? Like MMOs just had the key thing is like this holdover. games like your overwatch 2 they don't do that they just drop the box and then you get the box and yay and you can buy it and whatever that's completely seeded into our games and even the fight over it from a couple years ago
When a whole bunch of countries considered legislation against these kinds of gambling, it's gambling, that's all it is. Most of that even fizzled out. like it went nowhere a couple countries did something about it and even now they're talking about rolling back sorry but belgium is not gonna save us by itself when all the other big countries in the world are like we don't care we're making money so yeah stuff like that totally normalized
early access i mean normalized but also it's such a bad idea that like it's almost self-defeating you know what i mean like we've gotten to the point where people are really distrustful of early access they expect the world from it and then they buy it And then they fall into that early access curse thing where they buy it and they're like, this sucks. And they leave a terrible review and they get a refund. And the game never has a chance to get to 1.0. It was never going to make it.
Yeah, and really get a fair shot when it does launch. I mean, there are exceptions, but yeah, it's so defeating of what they want to do in the end. And I agree. I think that'll... They're going to have to learn this lesson painfully over and over and over and over again until maybe they go, yeah, stop releasing the games before they're ready to go. And if they're ready to go, then yeah, sure. But there's like this...
I get it. A game's in development for a long time, and it's losing money every single month because it's not... You know, you're constantly spending on it and you're not raking in money. So, yeah, there's that temptation with just wanting to pull the trigger and saying, oh, you know, we can pull it twice. You know, you get early access and then launch.
But yeah, it's not, it doesn't work out as well as you might think. Cause yeah, there are the refunds you talked about and you know, you're instantly hit by a wave of bad publicity or people just go like, okay, you know, like. we now know not to anticipate this game. Like it's really not something we're excited about. And even if your 1.0 is amazing, then it doesn't matter. You've already lost all the people who were.
you know, interested in it. You know, one of the things I was looking at her awards and I was kind of thinking, I think MJ made this point, that Path of Exile 2 was no longer on her most anticipated list because it had come out. To see it? And I was thinking like so many games, yeah, so many games this year have come out and I'm air quoting and you can't see that, but I'm, you know, they've come out in early access. They come out in some way, shape or form.
they're still not fully launched, but they might one day be, but we can no longer anticipate them because now the curiosity has been sated, but it's also been sated by a half-baked game. And, you know, like... I think playing Wayfinder this year was a little sad to do because I played the launched version and I'm like, this is actually pretty decent.
It is, you know, really nice little decent game. Wish that was more like an MMO. I think it definitely has an MMO-y feel. You know, I can see why they went for what they did. But it almost felt like a... it was such a low-key launch because everybody already had you know if they were curious they had already experienced it
back you know a year ago when it was early access and it was not nearly as feature complete and it just was like and so now like i'm like oh it's a decent game and it's not really getting the rollout it should like this should have been boom you know wayfinder this is a really good game this could be a nice like you know pocket dungeon kind of
experience that you want to play when you have a few spare minutes and instead it just kind of got rolled over by so many other news stories this year and I really think it's just going to end up becoming nothing in the end. That's kind of sad because it's a good example of a decently launched game. They finally got it to that place, and I understand the studio got really worked over by the publisher and stuff like that, and that wasn't fair.
Early access did it, no favors whatsoever. And I think even Paleo is another example from last year. And I think it will become better and better and it will be a decent game. And I think I'm sure Daybreak is going to throw a lot of marketing muscle behind it.
A lot of people got their curiosity out in that first week. And a lot of the people I read these reviews from said, yeah, there's not a lot here. It's not fully baked. Yeah, it's early access. That's what it's going to be. That's what you're going to get. And I do want to answer some of these other questions. So, yes. And stepping back to answer this question of like bad business practices.
We've gone through, I've been running for Massively OP since 2010, or Massively, Massively OP. And we've gone through so many different fights about different, you know, you said lockboxes. You know, free to play used to be a huge fight. And people were really up in arms with that. There was a period of time where pay to win.
was rightfully a big fight and you know some games kind of pushing the boundaries there and so the the question like we've gone through this cycle the question's always been like how fierce does a community push back And how much bad publicity do these studios get? And how much can the studio endure and get away with that and kind of outlast the outrage? If they can outlast the outrage and know that in the long run, they'll be making some more money.
and they can kind of get away with this because it will become more normalized and accepted, then, yeah, they'll take their lumps now, and, you know, they'll make some little noises, or maybe they'll back off a little bit, but not entirely, or they'll make...
they'll back off, but they'll make some noncommittal promise to not do, not, not, not do it in the future. And, you know, then that comes back. And the second time it comes back, you're just so tired from the fight. You're just like, whatever, you know, like.
So, yeah, it's unfortunate these things kind of do creep in. They kind of do ruin games. I think the bright side of this is that... sometimes they're ruining games to the point where people just stop touching those games and they do start gravitating like there's kind of movements like a more organic movement toward games that are less scummy
and toward games that are more feature complete. I've seen this a lot in the mobile gaming community where people are getting really tired of free games that are just horribly monetized. And so they're like, no. i'm sorry 20 seconds of this for a free star right yeah those kind of things and so there's been this awesome movement in the past year like i'm just not going to play games unless i can just outright buy it
Yeah. You know, just the full game. I'll pay five bucks. Give me whatever. I just want to own the game or, you know, have the game and you have no other like no ads, no whatever. I'm willing to do that. And there's been some games that are starting to meet that need.
supply and demand supply and demand it's all about that so if there's a demand for more wholesome monetization practices and you got studios stepping up and saying hey this is our game this is our business practice it's not going to have these kind of scummy things and people really start you know it's a solid game that's of course needing to to be a factor people stampede over there other studios will take notice and it'll become
You know, like that's where the revolution is going to be. It's not going to be in people holding placards and protesting, although that has a moment. There is a there is a function for it. Vote with your wallet. But, you know, vote with your wallet in a good way, too.
I don't think all is lost and all is without despair. I have seen studios back down on some of these scummy business practices, but I've also... kind of just sighed and gone you know like you know in lotros seeing some of the stuff that's on the store years ago we would have just been
ripping our hair out going this is pay to win crap like why would you do this this is ruining the game and now we're just like okay i only have so much energy in my body to fight so many wars you know so many battles pick the battles you know that you think you can win and and don't buy that stuff and don't buy that stuff if someone else is going to be that dumb and buy that stuff you know you can only control yourself yeah
Control. Self-control. Bri, what are we talking about? It's all about impulse buying early access titles and playing Path of Exile 2. Yeah, I don't feel like that's an impulse buy. No, it's not. We've been working for Path of Exile 2 for like five years. I'm just poking fun. I agree. No, I don't have anything to disagree with there. I think you're right. That's true. It's been a long haul for some of these business models. Some of them have gone away. You're not seeing even the same...
I don't know, like, you're not getting as much lockboxing as we used to. Like, a lot of games have downplayed it. Yeah, thank goodness. Very insignificant, and they're really ignorable. I've still... Never bought a lockbox or a lockbox key. If they give them for free, I'll open them. I'm not going to say no to free. I love that Lotro lets you filter them out. It's a doable thing. Yeah.
I like the freebies from Lojo Ship. I do open those, and they're always nice. No, I was saying I like the fact you can filter those out of your inventory. Yes, and never have them drop at all. And never have them drop at all. But you can sell them on the auction hall. Yeah.
I mean, the cryptic games were super obnoxious because they would always be flashing those, you know, so-and-so opened a lockbox and got this until you figured out how to disable or diminish that. That got really annoying in people. That was like that was a nadir of lockbox insanity. And so we have come down a little bit from that. I think we have.
yeah and i think that's because players didn't like it even no matter what governments do players respond negatively to stuff like that yes they can make a ton of money but over time they lose actual players and then the game doesn't make any money so
if you're trying to make long-term investments here you want to make sure your player base loves you and one way to do it is to not treat them like like chumps like you know what i mean like marks and it's not just black boxes it's all of it it's why games when like for example they come across the pond now they're like no we're not pay to win we took all the pay to win out that's only for our home citizens you guys don't pay to win
It's like, well, I mean, that's better, I guess, but it's not good. I mean, you should probably just take it out for everybody. What are you guys doing? But it is, you know what I mean? They're making an effort. They recognize that at least Western players don't like this and they have to at least pretend that they're not going to do it.
Right. I mean, we saw a whole parade of games from Estelia to Bless where they made that their whole shtick was this was not going to be the pay to win game. And now you've got Lost Ark and Throne of Liberty and some of these other games that, you know.
were they've got a little but there's there's so much less than what we expected even 10 years ago that they've they've taken off people like that they're willing to put up with that and i gotta say if there's one negative to any of this it's the gotcha games blowing up It's stuff like Engine Impact and Wuthering Waves and all the Tower Fantasies. That one's still got... I don't even remember if that's a guy shape. Yeah, it is. I lumped them all together in my head.
as being gacha games I'm not touching because like that's like lockboxes but worse no thank you but like they're really popular because you know people really like the style of the anime games so that's kind of disappointing i feel like that's a battle that has not been won or has not even gone into any kind of retreat yet it's just getting bigger um
I hope this was a good question anyway. Do you want to do one more from Catriona? I don't. Do we have time? We don't. No. She has one about the ZeniMax thing that I just remembered. All right, go ahead. Just a final.
It's a quick one. She says, as I was reading the article about ZeniMax's cancellation of the North American Elder Scrolls Online event and rolling my eyes at statements like, it's not an anniversary celebration. It's a funeral. That was coming from players, by the way. The relatively simple question occurred to me. Why? are so many MMO gamers always so willing and so eager to think in terms of absolute doom and gloom regarding the future of a game.
anytime something even slightly negative regarding it happens we see it all the time for any and every little reason an update gets delayed slightly for some reason who knows maybe someone's kid was sick and it sets things back a little or some tech malfunction beyond their control happened
them a day or two whatever the reason was it can never just be something simple and mundane no it must be that this is the beginning of the end for that game no more updates are coming you might as well start saying goodbye saying your goodbyes now even when it's something bigger like a
layoff event or something all the chicken littles start yelling that the sky is falling and all is doom and gloom i mean seriously people sometimes shit happens and things don't go to plan it doesn't necessarily mean that this is the end of the virtual world so why do players do this why do they always jump to the worst possible explanation for everything? Why are you like this? Welcome to the internet, I guess. Fair. Yeah, so...
Yeah, I'm right with you. It's like there's people who are just willing to, at a moment's notice, throw three-year-old temper tantrums. on almost any subject whatsoever. And I don't want to use like a blanket statement because I don't think it's everybody. In fact, I really think it's a minority. I think it's always a minority of players. I think it's a minority of...
Almost anybody on the Internet that throws an immense snippet over every little thing. I think a lot of people are just kind of more calm and centered and in the middle. And they're like, OK, like I have an opinions on it and I'm not super pleased about whatever this is, but I'm. Also not going to use an all caps rant and spend my lunch break, you know, detailing why I think this is the end of all things like she was talking about. Yeah, I think we've there's a lot of.
Why did you drop this question? Because now I could go into a 40-minute rant on this subject. This is so relevant, and next week it won't be relevant. I should have read it first. It does. No, it's a good question. There's probably a lot of reasons to this. I think one of them is just conditioning. I think there's...
When we're online and how we communicate online with forums and reddits and then social media and everything like that, middle, middle of the road posts don't get noticed. And when you're doing extreme things, Oh, it's kind of funny. You know, your anger is a little funny, but again,
It's noticed. Your outrage is more noticed. And especially if a studio responds to that, now you're like, okay, now we've got to create an even... bigger snip fit next time because then then becomes this like loop of uh you know that's the only way we're gonna get you know punish the studio or get what we want to do um i
I don't. I think some studios have, speaking of pushing back, I think some studios have rightfully said on the forums, like, we're not listening to people like that. Like, if you have a criticism... You know, give us a decently worded, rational criticism, and we'll listen to that. But if it's just a, I think you all should be fired. This is the worst thing that's ever been released. Yeah, we're just not, we're not doing that anymore. Like, that's, we're not responding. to that like I wouldn't
My children started doing that all the time. I'd be like, I'm not going to respond to you. You're upset about this? Okay, let's talk about it. Let's use your words. Your feelings are valid, but... Yeah, your feelings might be valid, but your conclusion is completely wrong. So let's get to the right conclusion here. I think conditioning is part of it and just outrage culture and all this. It also is like certain quarters on the internet. That's just how people talk.
what is it what is the old saying like the happy people are the people playing the game the unhappy people are the people on the forums yeah and you know whether or not that's completely true or not it does kind of feel like it has a ring of truth sometimes like yeah you're like a jilted ex you know lover that
has to vent whatever you're angry about. I think sometimes people just have a chip on their shoulders and no matter what a studio does, no matter what a game does, they're just never going to be satisfied. They're never going to be happy.
I think I'm happiest as a gamer, recognizing that there are things I can be critical about a game. You can love a game, you can play a game and still be critical about it. You don't have to be a blind optimist, but I would always prefer to... lean toward being optimistic about the games i'm playing because this is a hobby and i'm not going to make it another big stress point in my life so um not to make this about me i'm not
I'm sorry if that is. No, not at all. She asked us. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, I... And I think a lot of people are like that too. So I don't want to say this is 90% of the internet doing this kind of thing. But it does seem ridiculous at times when people – because there's no – also no level of – variance in the outrage like it's as katiana is saying it's all like the worst of the worst it can't be like some things can be worse and some things can be better and how does the studio
How does a community manager sort through that kind of feedback and go like, okay, was this worse than the last time we ended the game? Or the last 10 times we ended the game? We need to know how... really bad this is. This is legitimately... major thing that we need to focus on and apologize for and address and course correct or is this just something where you know no matter what decision we make some people are just gonna be upset and
We need to go, okay, you know, as you said, your feelings are valid, but we're still going to go ahead with this and just kind of keep going. I don't know. What are your thoughts on this? Oh, I mean, I don't disagree with what you said. I mean, there are so many things that are... worthy of outrage and sometimes video games are really never on the list so even we get mad but i feel like outrage is not usually the right emotion like ever um
and if you're on on video game reddit yeah please just don't do that but i think part of it also is that mmo players are accustomed to losing things like we're not just accustomed to being mad but we're accustomed to having our games very slowly die and then stolen right now from under us and so when we see things that could be a harbinger of that about to start we start to like come up with these like rationalizations in our heads so that
we can push ourselves to acceptance faster. You know what I mean? Like we tell ourselves, well, I guess this really is it. Dang it. This is sucking. I should prepare for the worst so that when it comes, I don't feel so bad about it. Like I'm ready when they finally say, yep, me. maintenance mode because I knew it was coming and I can handle it. I think there's some of that like self preservation going on in our self-defense mechanism going on when people act that way.
But also, I think people just really like being mad and trolling on the Internet. So it's like it's hard to separate what's just people lashing out for clicks for hearts or likes or whatever platform you're on versus actually protecting themselves. their own hearts from breaking. I don't.
i don't know i think some of it too is that a lot of people who play mmos are smart and smart people tend to be the kind of people who are constantly juggling like values and probabilities in their brains whether they think that they think about it or not right you're if you are playing mmos definition you can type you can read you can write you can communicate you can you have enough money to have I can't read what I'm just saying having all of these things
puts you in a segment of society that tends to be fairly intelligent. And intelligent people have a weakness. And that's one of them is that you're going to constantly be fretting over things fretting over what does this mean? And how does this affect me? And do I need to change?
my behavior and blah blah blah blah blah it's a lot of times this happens in politics too so it tends to lead to dooming i mean it leads to people who know too much being really depressed and really upset and jumping to like really negative conclusions when they aren't necessarily warranted so bear that in mind also i
i mean she's not wrong people need to chill the heck out at the same time with elder scrolls though you know this was kind of dodgy and part of it is because the communication was poor coming from the studio end And that just kind of provoked the whole thing. If they had given an explanation, like, you know...
We've had to rein in our budget because we need to focus on the game, which is kind of what they said, but they didn't use the word budget. Right at the end of that paragraph where they were talking about how they needed to focus on the future of the game. If they had said it a little more clearly, I think people would have just... gone oh microsoft sucks and then gone on with their lives instead of oh my god everybody panic okay i don't know
Well, obviously, you and I are the only people playing games. So everything that happens happens to us. And therefore, I'm not concerned about it. I don't want to say that people should never be concerned. No, they should be. There are definitely times when it's time to riot. You know what I mean? No, it's time to protest and pull your money back and do whatever the thing is that would actually have some effect in your game. Most of the time, it's just quitting.
But it's not like the developers are sitting there going, all right, we're going to target Todd. We're going to make Todd really upset this week. Right. Hate that Todd. All right. That is definitely all the time we have for today as my children try to barge into my office here. We want to let you know a couple of quick things about how we're going to run the next month or so here on the podcast.
Because around the holidays, we do have a bit of an unusual schedule. So we're going to have a normal show next week. The week after, we're going to have our mailbag show. That'll be the week of Christmas. So you'll have a little extra something in your stocking, Laurel. Is that what we're doing? I think so. I'm looking at the calendar. I thought we were skipping the 23rd. Okay, maybe we're skipping that week and then doing the show the next week. It doesn't matter. I know we're skipping a week.
we can either skip the 23rd or the 30th and put the mailbag show on the 23rd or the third you know what i mean flip them It doesn't matter, really. Let's leave it nebulous. When do you think more people would actually want the mailbag? You can tell us because we're not. I would think the week after Christmas. Do you think so? Yeah, I think the week of Christmas is crazy busy.
But they're not listing on the 31st either. I really don't like the calendar this year. It is awkward and inconvenient. So... Speaking of a pastor, having Christmas on Sunday was a little bit awkward, too. But, you know, I'm happy it's in the middle of the week. It's never convenient, is it? No, and I think because it was leap year, it got shoved forward two days, right?
Anyways, we're going to be skipping a week at some point. We will have a mailbag show. There will be a week skipped. And then I think we have a roundtable that we're going to be bringing some other people. And we're still putting that together. That should be the sixth. or sixth for you guys listening early, seventh for you guys listening on the day of, and that's episode 500. I think so, yeah. Yeah, it is. Count it.
that's part of the reason i wanted to we usually skip one around the holidays just because it's so crazy Yeah, we need the time off. But that just happened to make this work out perfectly, which is hilarious. Our golden voices need the rest. Our voices need the rest. Our kids are home for a week and it's too much.
Well, we'll let the kids come on the podcast. Why don't we have our kids all get on the podcast together and they can just do a podcast. It'll probably be more entertaining, let me tell you that. Yeah, they might. All right. Well, anyways, that's about it for today's show. Check out our show notes. So if you want to send us something in, you should send it in by the 16th because that is when we are going to do.
The mailbag show. That mailbag show. That's where we're going to record it. So it's going later. It'll go later in the month is what I'm trying to say. We will try to get to as many as possible, but I know us and... We probably won't. I'll probably do that thing where we number them and then I let Justin pick numbers. That way I'm not playing favorites. But anything we have left over, we'll just get answered later in January. Believe me, we'll need it because not a whole lot happens in Jan.
All right. Check out our show notes for more information and definitely also how you can send in those podcast emails. Anything we don't use, we're going to use in the future. So don't despair there. Check out our Patreon on the right-hand side of the site. And again, thanks for listening. Hope you guys are having a lot of fun, whether it's playing in Path of Exile 2 or EverQuest or any number of.
these other games there are a lot of them reddit throwing a tantrum that works that's also an mmo there's plenty out there to enjoy Alright, don't die on bad hills, die on good ones. And we'll see you again in a couple weeks. Or next week. Later, everybody.