Yeah, there's that well-known phenomenon in the...
film industry where january and sometimes february is like the dumps the dump periods where they always dump the really terrible movies that you know they made and everybody's super embarrassed about and you know there nobody goes to the movie theater so just just you know offload them every once in a while like you get a breakout weird breakout hit like i think um my big fat greek wedding came out in like january or something and suddenly it just blew up but yeah
Mostly it's like that. In MMOs, it has its own yearly rhythm, but it kind of feels like we're in a weird dead zone right now the last couple weeks. News is happening, but this is my excited face. Get the good news going. Get the good launches and expansions and revelations and all the stuff we know they're working on, but I think a lot of these studios are just kind of ducking their heads down.
gearing back up from the the holiday break nobody look at me nobody look at me which is weird because we have had some big mmos come out in january and february before we have said like you know blade and soul and dcuo and my gosh that february in 2022 was like the biggest month we've ever had i know but it was like insane how much stuff we got and now it's yeah it's not that we're not getting anything it's just that it's a lot of it's bad
Yeah, we've moved past the leftovers from the holidays. Now we're treading water. Speak for yourself. I'm still trickling a few of those out. I still have one more leaderboard. It's the worst performing daybreak leaderboard we do every year is kind of a gag. I couldn't think of a good day to put it out, so I just keep kicking it down the road. Yeah, I think I did leaderboard for a while.
You probably did. We kicked it around a lot. Yeah, when it was our first thing, and I get really tired of trying to figure out poles all the time. I know.
It's work, people. It's work. Coming up with new daily grinds. I cannot tell you the writer's block we sometimes get when you stare at that blank field. And I'm like, I got to come up with two more questions for this week. I have a huge bin. Someday I will just pass my bin to you guys and say, is there anything in here you want to do? Because I'm never going to get to it all. I have like two years worth of stuff.
I try to be proactive, like if a little thought sparks in my mind during the week, I'm like, oh, go right away, you know, right away over there, jot it down, otherwise you're going to totally forget it. Yep, you will. I do this all the time. Well, welcome back to the Massively OP Podcast, episode 502, the Whiners Royale here. Is that right? Is it 502? Yeah. Or is it 503?
Wasn't last week 502? You know what, guys? These numbers are just too big to keep track of. Let's just start over. You just confused somebody really bad. They're like, oh no, I meant it. Welcome back to the Speaking Massively PO podcast. Episode 503. I'm Justin, and with me is my editor, always looking over my shoulder and making sure I did it.
no i'm just look i'm i'm come unstuck in time and i need to make sure that my life is regulated by the podcast number otherwise i've i'm lost i there's that other phenomenon where you do something so routinely so many times sooner or later you just badly mess it up and you know like what why
What did I do? Last night I typed the word genre instead of the word genre on Blue Sky. I was roundly called out for it, but I told the person who made fun of us, don't worry, the intern has been sacked. It was me, though, so there's no intern and there's no sacking. It's just one of those things. How many times have I typed the word genre and that was not to be, apparently. No.
oh yeah if anything being a professional writer teaches you just how badly you deal with words and yes i get that all the time last night i had to look up camouflage i can never put the you that's a hard one yeah i want to put it later in the word and it's like nope earlier i'm like no don't thank you
All right. Well, what have you been playing in online games lately? Oh, boy. Let's see. Mostly this past weekend I've been playing Guild Wars 2. I guess that's not really a surprise. Well, maybe it is because I kind of wasn't playing too much of it for a while there over Christmas. But now I'm back. I'm back, baby. I'm like working toward my project where I'm trying to finish all the explorables. Like I started kind of at the beginning. So I did.
Brisbane Wilds last week. I'm not going to necessarily get to one every week, but it, you know, it's something you can knock out in like a couple of casual hours. And like, if I do one a week, I'll get done. You know what I mean? It's like one of those mental things where I don't have to do it all at once. I don't have to, I just need to do it regularly. And just the act of doing that makes me want to play more Gilberts too, which they know that's why they have dailies, right? But I did do that. I did my dailies and I did my weeklies yesterday. Was that yesterday? No, that was Saturday.
i don't even remember like i crank cracked cranked them out by accident because i mentioned this in what are you playing my husband's been playing a lot of the drizzlewood coast meta which is like the big you know meta zone that came with ice brood it was what episode
I don't remember, like three or four. I think it might be four. And I've never done that. Like I've done the beginning of Ice Brood and I was like, this sucks. And I didn't keep playing. And I will go back and play it someday, but I haven't. But he wanted to play it because they've done that revival thing where they're giving like bonus points and bonus experience and bonus rewards for doing like whatever the thing is that they're trying to aim you at. This next couple of weeks, I guess, is Ice Brood. So everybody in the freaking game is in Dizzlewood Coast right now. So my husband went and it looked really pretty. And he was like, this is fun. And, you know.
You should come. And I was like, okay, fine, I'll come. So a couple of hours later, I was having a really good time. So I ended up doing that for a large chunk of my Saturday too when I wasn't doing Explorables. So yeah, I'm really having fun back in Guild Wars 2. The other thing I wanted to mention isn't technically an MMORPG. It's more like a gaming thing that maybe other people will like. I've been kind of trying to figure out ways to make my...
computer feel less like work i've talked about this before i have this problem you probably have this problem also where you work all day sitting here at your desk and then
it's like yay i've worked my eight or nine hours now it's time to play in the exact same spot using the exact same devices and it's really hard to like break yourself away from that and like shift your brain into like no it's fun time now so i've been trying to come up with ways to do this and um i was thinking maybe i would like try to like overhaul my steam client because you know how you can like import games into your steam client and make it like show all of your games nice and pretty and
as i was digging around looking up how you do this and how you actually import the images which you can't apparently do now i stumbled into a reddit thread about something called playnite p-l-a-y-n-i-t-e which is supposed to be the amalgamation of play and unite and it's basically an open source totally free no ads none of that crud
like platform for like adding every game you own into it from all of your itch io and gog and steam and epic and all that stuff and anything random you've got all plugged into this one thing with metadata from some third-party website that people maintain and images and so i was like all right i'll try it it's pretty it's pretty ui i'm i'm a sucker for this and about an hour later i was like well
My life is sealed. I have this and I'm going to put this on my laptop now and I'm putting this on my kid's computer because it basically makes my computer now feel like a console. It looks like when you log into your PlayStation and it's got all of your pretty games lined up and there's a swirly background and the music and it just feels totally not like my workspace anymore.
That is what I spent a large chunk of my yesterday setting up once I realized, oh, this could be a game changer for me personally and maybe for other people. Obviously, this is not sponsored because it's free. It's like you can go download it for free. I'm sorry, say that again? Say it looks a bit like GOG Galaxy. Yeah, yeah. No, it looks a lot like the Steam thing when you've got it set up in little CD cases, like the little cover images where they're vertical as opposed to, you know what I mean? I bet it's a lot better optimized, though.
it's nice i'm really impressed with it so if anybody else is out there looking for a way to make your computer feel like a console or at least feel like a gaming system instead of like the place you work all day try it out give it give it a whirl there's like there's they've got a patreon they have like modders there's reddit there's a discord like once i realized this was like a whole ecosystem i've somehow managed to never hear about i was you know what i mean they said they had mods so i was like what
Really? Can I mod this too? Yes, you can mod this too. So it's really cool. I'll have to post up pictures or something. It's not new or anything. It's been around for forever. But I think it kind of blew up in the last couple years as like Steam Decks and like those handheld devices kind of took off. And people were like, yeah, I want mine to look pretty. I want it to feel like, you know, like a third party console, even though it's really just kind of like Windows. So anyway, that's the other thing I did. Really cool.
Really cool little platformy thing and totally customizable. Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited. This is so dumb. I know it is. No, I mean, a couple of months ago, I spent a lot of time modding my Windows 11 to look like Windows XP. Oh, my goodness. Really? Because I miss that look. I miss the personality of the old, what did they call it? Arrow.
uh that aqua futuristic i know they have a specific term for it but i've long since forgotten this yeah i i kind of miss i i'm a little tired of the super flat iconography that we see everywhere and and the logos and just you know sometimes in sound just fun to dip totally also when xp
performed so well right it was so slick it wasn't the prettiest thing in the world but man it ran yeah and then you know and people apparently i watched a whole video on it they said yeah there's still a significant number of people still using windows xp yeah even though it's not supported security holes up the wazoo about that the u.s military still uses it which is probably not a good thing because it's so expensive though yeah yeah
Maybe update your software there, sir. Yeah, you know. So what have I been playing? Yeah, what have you been playing? All the things. Yeah, Lotro, you know, as you were saying, I was kind of nodding along with that feeling of just completing zones. You know, in Lotro, I finished up a full zone clear of North Downs last week. Oh, wow.
North Downs is no joke. That is a huge zone. It's sizable. There's a lot of quests. I did enough to get all the deeds done. I didn't do every single quest in the area. I love the last deed. The last explorable deed is to go all the way south into this giant orc encampment. It's just layers upon layers of fences and gates. The very last explorable is all the way in the back, which is...
totally easy if you're super high level and they won't bother you i everything was sort of just like green to me so they were still aggroing so i i was this little suicide you know just running in there kamikaze hobbit go all the way all the way to the back i had you know dozens of these giant orcs behind me and trolls and stuff and i got all the way to the back and i got smashed so quickly but i got it i got it okay yeah
uh so yeah that was that was fun and um yeah i'm still going through the new expansion i'm in the third zone and it is it is good times it is the third zone is not eye candy it's like you start going into it and you're like oh it kind of looks like greece it's easy on very very mediterranean um but once you get through the first town everything past that is like this giant dead forest like all the trees are bone
dead and apparently there's been this plight that man brought through like some of the evil armies brought through and just killed all the trees everywhere all the greenery okay thematically it's cool for a you know oh i gotta quest through this for the next several dozen hours i'm like oh this is what i gotta look at so yeah that's uh that's where i'm at but the stories are really good
there was one story that started so i don't really want to spoil it but it started very benign and i'm like oh okay i'm gonna go get some things for the guy and then and then i come back and they're like oh the guy is gone wait there never was that guy who was that guy you know like and so you're like okay now there's a mystery now i'm intrigued and so you kind of put on this task and uh apparently he's tied to like this kidnapping and he's like you start thinking like this is a serial killer he's like graduated from killing animals to killing people and you're
like oh my we're getting dark no it gets darker than that it gets so much darker than that and i'm not as i'm saying i'm not gonna spoil it but there's an instance at the end i was just like holy crap what is this and um and then whatever that was disappeared is like a to be continued at a later date and i'm like ssg what did you just do y'all have been watching too much dexter it's gonna need you to
get off the scary it's something it's like if suddenly dexter you know knock on the door and satan shows up like hello oh my god uh yeah yeah yeah so yeah there's there's stuff like that there's some really good story beats in these uh in these expansions so i just encourage everybody you know keep keep plowing through there's some really good good writing in the last several years i will get to it months from now i will i swear
It'll be there when it's there. In World of Warcraft and retail, I'm just kind of, you know, I'm kind of playing the waiting game for 11.1, but I was starting to work on my druids kind of a little bit behind, and I like her, so I'm giving her some attention, some love, gearing her up a little bit more and trying to clear up her quest log, trying to figure out what I need to do. And then I realized this morning, and...
And you'll have sympathy because we do this exact same thing in Lotro. I realized I had all these reward tracks I'd maxed out.
from the expansion and i had never gone over to the vendors to pick up all these rewards it's shopping time it's shopping time i haven't done it yet it's like it's on my to-do list for today it's like oh that's gonna be fun i need to go hit up all those vendors and see what cosmetics and mounts and this and that and yeah i've i actually did good i got all the way through season one of the delve thing and i'm like
pat myself on the back i never thought i'd do that so yeah there's that uh wow classic just continuing with my hunter um i'm in the late 30s but i'm kind of taking a break from hardcore leveling and questing i'm kind of doing a catch up on my professions um you know engineering takes a long time to level so i'm doing some farming runs and running around wetlands all the way on the edges trying to get all the the nodes and stuff like that and
you know, occasionally killing slimes because back in the back of my head, I remember back in vanilla that slimes had a very small chance to drop a slime pet. And I'm like, oh, if I can make that happen, that sucker will be worth so much on the auction house. That'll be a mount unto itself right there. Oh my gosh. It's so much grinding. You can be grinding for weeks. Oh yeah. I'm not doing it like intentionally grinding. I'm just like, if I see a slime, I go out of my way and I just pew pew it. But I've got to,
my son my eldest son is a big dinosaur fan and so of course you know jurassic park jurassic world those franchises are his bread and butter and you know the the dinosaur the vlasiraptor blue in that those latter three movies he's he loves blue and so i tamed a raptor and wow classic and i named it turquoise so you know cousin of blue yeah i showed him i'm like look i i tamed a dinosaur for you he was like
Why'd you call it turquoise? You can't win, can you? Nope. Nope. Nope. Not at all. And then played some Fallout 76. Had a really good time just ambling some really weird quests. Found a...
bizarre nightclub that was fully operational but then there was this whole drama that happened i think i think is actually a quest that's leading into the atlantic city dlc um so i'm not probably going to continue to pursue that but there was some really nice npc scripting that happened and so i was like oh i'm pretty impressed you know bravo bravo yeah good job yeah all right so let's get in
to the news do we have to because it all sucks we could just go right to the mailbag and i would be totally fine i don't mean sex i just mean it's all bad news it's not it's not yeah i looked over the list of news i'm like there's gotta be something fun here nope not really no
All right, well, let's start with an MMO launch. Yes, we actually had, I think, the first MMO launch of 2025. If we're going to count early access releases as launch, whatever. If they're charging, I say, yeah, but whatever. A new game on the scene, The Quinnfall, or sometimes we just go out Quinnfall. That was really annoying. Like, even their PR would sometimes drop. I know, back and forth. And I know our game page sometimes had it.
Sometimes we write these articles. Anyways, The Quinfall, a title that was announced a couple years ago, I think from a Turkish studio that came out and said, hey, we're making this MMO. And it was one of those projects that immediately raised a lot of flags because they were promising everything. Like, the biggest world you'll ever see and you'll do all this stuff. And then didn't really do a whole lot in terms of follow-up. You know, every once in a while there's like a...
half-hearted post and there's there's some images that were posted on social media but it was not it's not really been generating a lot of community hype there's you know there's questions around it so now that they've released it and put it for a what is it twenty dollar price point if you want to check it out a lot of people well not a lot but some people jumped into it and um obviously the
the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive people love this game of the year 10 out of 10 would play again no it is it is a wreck it is not good at all yeah i don't i don't really understand what they were thinking
i thought i i don't mean that flipply either like if it if it really wasn't in the condition to handle a few thousand players i don't understand why they went into early access it's not like they haven't been running tests because they have right they hit beta like a year ago or something closed beta was last year so like they had to know they were going to run into these major tech problems but yeah i think i think um
even if that hadn't happened there was like you said there was a lot of suspicion and drama around the game especially when it first got announced because people claimed that they were using like prefabricated like store-bought assets and they claimed that they had pictures of their studio that were like literally stock photos which was like oh what's happening here using ai yeah and so like you know it's almost like
it's such a small game that it's almost not worth like pursuing any of that stuff because most people aren't going to play it anyway. But like, I don't know. I don't, I don't want to shit talk in indie, but at the same time, y'all, you know what I mean? Gotta be honest. I mean, it's not, we didn't need another one of these games.
if this was if this was like august or june or something and we'd have like real news this might not even be a blip this might even be kind of a mop-up thing um maybe maybe not i yeah i don't know a lot of people who were honestly looking forward to anybody who's looking forward to this i also don't know anybody on our staff who was even interested in buying it like i don't even think it it would be worth chris's while to go in there and stream it for a few hours i just don't
Just to get his blood pressure up and get an angry review out of him. You're right. Let's not do that to poor Chris. I don't see why we would do that. You can look at the videos, look at just the Steam reviews, and realize this was not ready for primetime. I don't know what's going on at the studio, why they needed to push it out, but if it's not ready, it's not ready. Yeah, reviews aren't good. There's been server restarts. They're just...
it's it's janky and weird and yeah and just kind of stepping back and looking at the elevator you know like what's your elevator pitch here uh initially it was like the biggest mmo universe ever made i'm quoting they said that yeah yeah but i mean since then they really haven't pushed that and and they haven't really pushed out a vision for the game and i i hammered this because it really frustrates me when
Games don't. MMOs are risky. They take a lot of work to do right. But at the same time, you do have to differentiate yourself. You do have to kind of give people a reason why they should come and play your game instead of the comfort gaming food that they're very already well entrenched in. And yeah, you're going to always have, you know, people will always check out the new thing.
to get them to stay to get more people like you have to have a huge critical mass of people coming in because you know they're gonna have a huge bleed off uh you know they gotta have something and this game really just never put something out there that said here you go um you know like book of travels might
This is not a perfect one-to-one analogy, but anything like that. But that game at least said, hey, we're trying to be different. And here's what we're offering. And we're trying to do something and present. The visual style will be different. The immersion will be a little bit different. The much less combat system. They had a lot of ways that they were already setting themselves apart. So people sat up and took notice. And they were kind of on board with that. The Quinnfall never really did it. And in the last two years that it's had to build up to this point.
early access it's never really made the case to the mmo larger genre like why it even matters i don't think we're even going to see this game last past the halfway point of this year i really don't yeah no i mean i think all of that is fair including the comparison to uh to um book of travels it was just the first thing that popped no no it really is because because yeah i i think that's fair and truthfully
uh i really i really feel so bad laying into an indie here but yeah we have so many games like this already i think if they were you know if they're trying to be archaeage which looking back through our coverage i think that's what they were trying to do they were trying to be like an mmo survival sandbox with all of the like sandbox stuff that you would get out of something like archaeage or ashes of creation or whatever
But like, there's no way you can actually do that. Even in an asset flip game, there's no way you can actually get those systems in at any high quality in two years, not on an indie shoestring budget. So like, I don't know. I saw some people comparing it to the day before, the MMO version of the day before. I'm like, okay, I can actually kind of see where that's the vibe here.
nobody wants that vibe like this seems like the kind of thing that would have come out like five or six years ago that would have come to kickstarter you know what i mean we had so many of these kinds of games and they never went anywhere so i so so i'm scrolling up my mmo timeline because i'm just curious like what has come out in january's in the past
yeah decade you see like when the last time we had a genuinely good january launch now last year we had power world and i know that's not an mmo but that did come out in january and that kind of just like came out of nowhere and blew up in a huge way so that was
Kind of a weird anomaly, but in the MMO space, either there's been no launches in January, which several years they didn't really have launches. Some years where it was just closure after closure. 2017, which had both Asheron's Call Games, Landmark closed shortly after. But the last time we had a really good launch in January was Blade & Soul. And that was 2016.
So January is not maybe not the best time to shove your game out. But, you know, at the same time, maybe it's if you had a really good game, you would not have much competition. I don't know. I don't know. Wizardy Online. That was 2013. Oh, my. DC Universe Online. OK, that was 2011. That was 14 years ago. I know, but that's how far back I have to go. It's not a good month.
Because everybody's just come back from Christmas. There's, you know, people are just now starting to wear up the, you know, the creation engine. And they're planning ahead for spring now, right? It makes sense. You know what was the biggest one? Here's the biggest January launch I think we've ever seen. 2007 Burning Crusade. Oh, that's right. Because it was delayed. I remember that. Oh, my gosh. I remember.
traipsing through the snow and ice in new mexico so that's how you know that's how you know it was uh you got the frostbite scars that's all right well we don't we don't have to dunk on quinfall anymore and i don't want to i feel bad for it but at the same time it does look
It looks exactly what it looks like. That's what it is. I don't know why you'd play this when you could go play something. If you really want an early access game that has cool stuff in it, Pantheon and Project Oregon, there are so many of them. Just go do that. Some of those have been out for a while, so they've added and tested and refined. Right. Yeah. Okay, well, leapfrogging from one.
disturbing story to another uh let's talk a little bit about unchained entertainment uh camelot unchained studio here uh i'm sorry that was formerly this is why it's throwing me off because in my head it's always city state entertainment um so they're now unchained entertainment yes okay when did that change last last year maybe like the end of 2023 beginning i missed the memo
It hasn't come up a whole lot. I haven't really talked about Camelot Unchained. I've not done a story on Camelot Unchained in a long time. All right. So what we're talking about here is Camelot Unchained studio here has laid off about 24 out of its 55 staff members, which is about 40% here at the beginning of the year. Sometimes January has another...
Kind of real downside in the MMO industry and video game industry, which is a notorious month for layoffs as budgets and things happen. But especially it hits really hard when it's much smaller studios and especially a smaller studio that's trying to make an MMO and another game that both have not fully launched or come out at all yet. So this is really concerning, especially because we have been watching Camelot Unchained for.
well over a decade now um and i'm waiting for it to come out and it's been in sort of a beta but then along you know along the way they announced the second game this final stand stand ragnarok which is what is it like a battle royale yeah it's kind of i mean you're not playing other players it's co-op okay i don't know what to call it okay it is it feels like a mobile yeah
with like like a boss rush almost almost like tower defense like if tower defense were an mmorpg it's confusing and i think that's part of the problem why they had a hard time marketing it now we did reach out to mark jacobs right and i did as soon as i read this on linkedin that was literally the first thing before i even started writing i emailed like hey what's going on figuring maybe they would tell me something on or off the record i have not heard
anything which i actually find extra disturbing i have no idea what's going on all i can do is speculate and you know read what other speculation we have and read what we have from from andrew megs who's um the form like you said the former co-founder of the company who left on good terms i need to point out it wasn't like it was a spicy thing but obviously he's still connected to a lot of the people who worked there because he hired them like they were his friends and he's trying to hire them now so um yeah i
I think the initial assumption, my initial assumption when I saw this was, okay, well, we could all see that Final Stand Ragnarok was failing. Like, this is not a secret at all. If you go and you look from the second or third time they launched it into early access, it might have been a nice game. I thought it was a nice game, but it did not have any uptick whatsoever with the online player base. It hasn't cracked 50 players concurrent since. It just hasn't.
They were putting out updates and stuff all last year. And a couple of weeks ago, I noticed them say that they were postponing their stream. And at the time I was like, oh, maybe somebody's sick. I won't think about it again. They'll crop back up next week. And then they didn't. And then this started coming out. And I was like, OK, so they must have come back from Christmas and decided maybe they were nuking this team.
you know the people he had contracted to work on this game i realized he's jacobs has always said that people working on this game were also kind of working on camelot because a lot of the content that went into fsr was also going into camelot so you can decide whether that's but they were directly working on fsr at least so my assumption was that maybe he had
cut the people who were working on that game that that game was being written off they were going to give up on developing it since it wasn't actually taking off and that they kept people to work on camelot unchained itself which was supposed to have its like playable slice out last by last summer by the end of last summer was was their goal ahead of this launch that's supposed to happen by the end of this year we did not get the playable slice last year i we even pointed this out i pointed this out when i did my like round up of all of the uh
kickstarted stuff at the end of the year of the year in December I pointed out we were supposed to get it and we didn't um I don't know what that means I you know I if they're not going to talk to us I really don't have any other information other than speculation and what's what's leaking out on LinkedIn um I just assumed I guess that
they just weren't ready because i didn't really think they were going to be ready i think a lot of people were like oh that is really fast for a game that's already been in development for a dozen years right there's there's no way they can pull that out fast enough to get it out this year um so i think i think i had already kind of given up on that being the real timeline but i don't actually know i don't like we don't know there's speculation on discord right now that maybe one of the investors pulled out um
That would actually surprise me a little because we had been told last year that the investors were well aware that there was a strong possibility that FSR would not work and that they were really investing in the engine and Camelot and they were in for the long haul. But people lie all the time. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if the investors lied, you know, had got cold feet somehow and decided to screw over.
mark and the devs but i don't know i'm just speculating again we don't know and there's a there's a lot of stuff out on youtube right now it makes my head hurt because some people are willing to speculate a lot further than that and draw conclusions that are very awful and i don't like them and i don't even want to engage with that but until we get a statement from the studio which it doesn't really owe us but it definitely owes its backers without that i like i'm not even really sure
that it's worth jumping to conclusions. You know what I mean? Yeah, and I think you just need... Exactly. Where you stopped is where I would stop to and just go, yeah, we'll wait. Wait and see. But it should be said, like, this game has been under one of our stormiest future banners for many years now. It's always one of the contenders at the end of the year. We've been... There was a period of time where I think people were really hoping for it, and then when...
The tide started turning against, you know, seeing this as a strong, viable possibility for the near future. You know, people were jumping ship and kind of like, I don't know. It wasn't like it didn't even pop in my mind last year when you asked for award nominations for Stormy's future because it already feels like, I mean, again, not to be mean, but this is like a half sunk ship. Like, I don't know what they could do to really get Kamala unchained.
out the door and then out the door to the point where it's a financially viable well-functioning you know solid game with a long-term future i maybe you know like things weirder things happen but it's you know the odds are not in its favor right now and this definitely is a very worrisome development yeah to see
Yeah, I mean, like, all the games are having problems. All the companies that need investment are having problems right now. So, like, if you were already struggling, like, it puts you at an even bigger disadvantage than, you know, the, like I said, the Star's Reaches or the Ashes of Creations or Pantheons even of the world. You're already at that disadvantage. So, yeah, I'm sure that they will tell us something at some point. Tell us, meaning the players, at some point.
i mean oh my god somebody's gonna leak something you know what i mean like megs wasn't really leaking he was just passing on what what he knew and trying to get people placed but somebody if they were actually bad blood there would be leaking so that i don't know that makes me think that maybe yeah again i'm i don't want to go down the speculation train here i should i want you yeah i want you to explain
What the heck happened to New World? Well, see, like, it really is just a train of, like, bad news this week. I don't like any of this. Did they discover their feet and they got a gun and then they just started shooting their feet? But what happened? Yeah, they took their ice gauntlet and just wrecked their own toes. Oh, my goodness. So, yeah, last week was supposed to be a big week for New World, actually, because they finally launched Season 7. It was supposed to have those PvP season servers.
You know, they were hoping to use them to revitalize the game. I forgot about those. See, it completely got drowned out by the drama. Yeah, but I'm also not like a PVP. That's a cool. Yeah. Yes. Well, even if you don't care about PVP, it's like free for all PVP kind of thing with like faster leveling and like it's like really hardcore crafting. So like there and like special items that would like drop when you die. And so there was like reason to PVP. It wasn't just, you know, a free for all just to see how many.
kills you could rack up. There was actually a reason to do it. It's not a terrible idea. I know Tyler has a piece coming this week where he's like, you know, they kind of screwed over. You know, if you're not interested in this, don't get too excited because PvE isn't having a great time right now either. But, you know, even if you're not into PvP, you could still say, well, you know what, this is something they needed to do to try to get eyes on the game, to try to make it interesting to streamers, to try to get headlines. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. It's just one season. Maybe next season we'll have something for other player groups.
fine but um was it thursday we found out or friday i can't remember what day it was now basically overnight they put in a patch um after the season servers had been open for a day or two and it turned out that that patch sort of
unflagged all of the season servers so originally they're supposed to be like locked servers right so if you rolled a new character in these servers they weren't getting like people rolling and moving in from other servers it was supposed to be like a fresh start right just for pvp and so they didn't want like the economies from the other servers and the
whole finished characters coming in because obviously that would just completely destroy the servers welp since they unflagged those servers by accident that meant that people could indeed transfer to those servers bring their high level characters bring their money bring their loot bring their gear bring their everything and so some people did
And so we woke up that morning and people were like, what the F? This is a disaster. The servers are complete chaos right now. The markets are through the roof. People are running around ganking people. Newbie, it's just a complete train wreck. And we were just like, are you kidding me? Amazon, really? Like, they have such a bad reputation.
And they have for years now for having these patches that just somehow managed to break something every time. I don't know if it's a lack of funding, if it's a lack of QA, if they just have to get these things out, whether or not they're finished. It doesn't seem to matter how many times the lead devs come forward and say, we know we screwed up and we'll try to do better next time. It's still always a freaking mess. And it's just completely.
demoralizing for the player base because they know something will go wrong and don't even play in the beginning because who knows so you know by mid-morning i guess they had come finally come out with a statement that says you know we know what's going on we see what's happening and we've locked everything down while we try to figure it out in the end they moved all those characters i think they i don't know if they deleted them or sent them back where they came from they
suspended all of the accounts that had jumped in on the transfer frenzy. So there's different sanctioning going out to some of those accounts. Supposedly, they've managed to pull some of the economic damage off of the servers.
But they didn't actually do like a complete rollback for those servers. And so there's some controversy over whether they ought to have. Either way, it's just like it's one of those PR hits that just keep coming from the world. It's just so awful. At this point, it's like they're trying to give me a top 10 list of horrible ways that New World has bungled this. Yeah. It's got to be more than 10. You get 100% get a P10 out of this.
This is the sort of stuff we used to laugh at, and rightly so, at Bethesda. What they would do with almost all... You would cringe knowing a patch was coming out. That should be a time of excitement and joy and anticipation. Instead, you're like, oh no, oh no. Please just leave the game alone. Just walk away. Just walk far, far away. This is... Yeah, it's a cluster. It's an interesting...
i don't know from from the outside like i'm you know i can munch on my popcorn but at the same time i i feel for these players i feel for the game i a lot of people like yeah yeah new world and like the devs and are rooting for a win and rooting for this game's future and it did not need this right now it did not need uh especially we just haven't seen
at least I haven't seen, maybe you can correct me, I haven't seen a lot of upward trajectory ever since Aeternum, like in terms of good news, anticipation, excitement. It feels like people are kind of holding on to hope, but this might have loosened a couple more fingers. I think that's fair. The roadmap, I think, helped people perk up before Christmas. Okay, yeah, there we go. Those are promises, you know what I mean? It wasn't even like a particularly nailed-in roadmap. It was pretty fluid.
So either way, I think people were just happy to get anything. Happy to be here. You know what I mean? Any kind of communication would be great. On the back of that roadmap, however, they do list all the ways they're going to break the game. No, I should have had to flip it over. Yeah, you got me. All right.
Another thing that's happening, of course, and it's pretty typical. Once MMO has been out for a little while, there are server merges that usually happen because, of course, when games launch, unless they have some amazing mega server technology, which honestly, in the year 2025, they really should at this point. But they don't. A lot of games just open up scores of servers and you have dreams of.
oh man, these are always going to be full and we will be eating on the fattened calf from now on. But, you know, the way MMOs go... tourists come tourists go and your royal population is a lot less than all those servers so server merges are pretty typical within the first six or so months of mmo launches especially pretty popular ones like another amazon title here thrown in liberty which came out last year got by the way the massively op game of the year award pretty popular
Not perfect, but, you know, it was a strong MMO. But it's not in terms of population going to always stay right up there in week one. So they are emerging servers. Long story short, they are. What servers are emerging? Don't know. They are somewhere. They're talking about how they're going to be doing this. They're going to start. It's rolling out over several phases over the month of February.
But I don't think we have a specific list of which servers are going to happen. I think that's coming out this week. So you're going to want to pay attention because it's going to give you transfer options. And you're going to want to stay on top of that. Otherwise, they might just move you. And you will probably not like that result. Yeah, they're letting everybody transfer where they want to go first before they actually merge.
So you have the opportunity to go to an existing server. Otherwise, you're getting pushed into this newly created server that's a combination of the old servers. And people are really happy about this. I will say that when I was digging into this in the last couple of weeks, people are really glad for this. They really did open way too many servers. They always do. So this was necessary. And I don't necessarily see it as a sign of doom for the game.
if we get another round of server merges in a couple of months then i'll start to get really nervous but like this like you said this one is pretty pretty uh normal and i want to say with throne and liberty too like earning liberty
also had some major tech problems last week it's just they got totally overshadowed by new world they had their new uh lunar new year stuff come out was that wednesday and instead of like launching like an hour or two before launch they was like oh that didn't go well we're gonna keep the server down another hour oh another hour another hour and like it didn't come up until like nighttime like for us eastern time so it was down basically the whole day
And of course, you know, big old round of server compensation, player compensation for the outages. It's really gotten to the point where I don't even know why they I hope they're just preparing the compensation ahead of time because they need it. They need it every week. This happens to Lost Ark all the time, too. They'll be down for a couple extra hours. Every single Amazon patch for every single game goes haywire and requires compensation. What the heck?
like honestly it's flabbergasting to me i'm so spoiled playing guild wars 2 because that's the game doesn't even go down let alone not not come back up compensation is just not a thing it's just you know they'll have an outage like once every like six or seven years and then it will be like so it's such a big deal they'll have to do dev blogs and completely explain what happened or like uh i'm i'm like flabbergasted at it honestly it's just that's just not normal
and i don't know why it's normal for amazon i don't see this out of ssg i don't see this out of daybreak i don't even really see this out of blizzard all that much every once in a while the servers get kept down over long but like not every single time
Now, I know I wanted to add this speaking downtime and compensation, because last week we talked about my mentioned how Marvel Snap was down. Yeah. The whole TikTok ban. And then over like late last week, they announced compensation for those two days of downtime. And they went all out. I have not seen. This was by far the largest compensation package I've ever seen from any studio, period.
It was enormous. And everybody's jaws were dropping because we thought, oh, they're going to throw a handful of currency or whatever. This was definitely a...
concerted effort to woo people back because i think second dinner uh this really rattled a lot of people's faith in the game and like you suddenly can completely go down in the studio so yeah the the level of compensation especially they're giving stuff to everybody around the world but if you're in uh us and your game went down for two days and you had an account you are going to be getting a ton of stuff like worth people are trying to tally it up like how many hundreds of dollars of
stuff this is it's a lot this is months and months of progress and currency that you would gradually earn and stuff like that so you know there that that was the little good news i got like i went like yes please i will take the free stuff that you're giving me for two days of not being able to play my game and please take my game down again for two more days you're gonna keep doing this so no no you want your game to stay up you want the stability obviously but
I wouldn't hold that against Second Dinner. You know what I mean? I think it's hard to get mad at them over it. I guess there were some conspiracy theories floating around that claimed they knew. It's like, I guarantee they didn't take their game down for two days on purpose, guys. Think about that. Just think how much money they lost in two days. Yeah, the monetary. They took a huge hit over that. They definitely didn't plan this. Okay, calm your conspiracy theories.
Even so, I have a hard time getting mad at second dinner over it. It was one time. We all know what happened. It's political at this point. It's not even really about them. That's not something they did as an unforced error compared to something like Amazon, where it's like, come on, that's all y'all. You literally run AWS. What is going on over there? I think I'm just holding it up as a good example of if you're...
as as what you should do for compensation like if you're gonna do a good compensation package you know maybe err on the side of being super generous because i'm sure we can all come up with examples of compensation packages that were basically like here's some fireworks here's here's enough tokens to buy yourself nothing so yeah
Okay, maybe we might be looking at SSG with some side eyes just a little bit. Sometimes they've given out incredible gifts, but their compensation is often not tops. It'll be like an ugly mount.
It's like, thanks. Well, I think Fallout 76 once, like, they gave out some store credit, but it was not enough to buy anything with it. Oh, no. There was, like, one thing you could buy in the store, and it was, like, this cheesy letter-carrying satchel, and they're like, wow, did you get your satchel? Boy, did I. We're so excited. Yeah.
But at the same time, if Amazon were giving out that level, the Marvel snap level of compensation every week for every game, they'd put themselves out of business so fast. Yeah, this really was extenuating circumstances. It's every week. It's every patch. Oh, my gosh. The drama. Is it over? Is our list of bad news over yet? Our list is over. Let's talk about some mail. Thank God. Okay. All right. I'm picking one at random that's a little short. How much time do we have here? We got 10 minutes. Oh, okay.
Hmm. Hmm.
Okay, how about this one from Sam? No, not Sam. Okay, how about this one from Scott? And we'll do Sam first. If we are all actually living in a simulation, it'd be basically a gigantic MMO. If that's the case, how did you or the person playing you split up your starting skill points? Did you go for a lopsided glass cannon build? Or was it more evenly distributed like a jack of all trades? What talents and abilities did you choose? Have you played following the meta? What you thought you'd be growing up, maybe? Or did you break out and do your own thing?
is there any way to answer this question without sounding pompous I'm in an existential crisis right now So before we start, I'm going to tell a story. When I first logged in in my very first MMO, when I did not know anything about MMOs, I logged into UO and I made this character. And if I recall correctly, she had like tailoring and like musicianship and like maybe something else hiding or something. And for those who don't know in UO, when you take musicianship by itself.
you doesn't do anything uh you you actually needed to take all of the other bard skills to actually make it go you can't even really level it you know particularly well unless you stand by another musician who's actually doing it right and
Needless to say, that character was complete trash, couldn't really function at all, and I ended up having to re-roll her into something that made sense. And I often feel like my real life might also be that poor Taylor Bard hider because my skills don't make any kind of coherent class at all. I am definitely not the meta. Do not copy my character. I don't know. You're one of those high-powered CEOs of your own company.
oh you're funny yeah that's good put that on my resume i think you got more than you think you do but yeah i don't know it's kind of interesting like there there are skills that you learn and there's talents that you have or natural natural abilities and right and things and some things that just kind of develop later in life if if i'm an mmo character probably somebody you're a priest
yeah well yeah but i mean like literally you're a priest you're a healer you're a soother of spirits yeah somebody was tossing around stat points all willy-nilly so i remember the early days of mmos you could easily just oh yeah wreck your character yep that'd be a fun mmo uh daily grind question like could you intentionally create like the worst character in your game like
Can you botch? Is it even possible? Yeah. Yeah, you'd have to, like, what game could you, like, DDO obviously comes right in line. Petless Mastermind. Yeah. Those people exist. They're out there. Wouldn't that be fun? If you could do that and then somebody else is doing it and then you swap characters and you, like, play this for a week.
cursing the other person the white elephant exchange of mmos my charisma would not be high uh not naturally charismatic person oh i don't think that's fair well in terms of like standard dnd charisma where like you charm people and oh okay i know what charisma looks like i i can identify like that's as an introvert i spend a lot of time observing people so i observe
good charismatic people and they're there's something about them and you do get a little bit envious like a man i wish i had yeah it looks like magic when people do it my dad does this i've always been watching my dad my whole life going i don't know how but everybody in this room wants to talk to him now and i just i want to leave the room and he's like lighting it up i don't know how he does it it's magic yeah absolutely i mean it
it depends on your perspective too like what what do you think is a successful person is that somebody's tall and naturally like physically beautiful somebody who's super charismatic somebody who's you know gets gets all the money and gets all the power and gets all the materialism is somebody who just is simply content and happy with their lot in life like it that and that's probably the track i i've gone down like there there's things about me i wish i had a few more inches on me i'm sure you do
too you know like short people we look at tall people and go yeah wouldn't mind wouldn't mind being up there a little bit more wouldn't yeah um and some people go well you know you're you're short but it's okay i said i bumped my head my husband bumps his head on his car on the car we have to like buy our cars yeah so it could be worse i'm not even joking i got in a fight in third grade or not i beat up a teacher in third grade what
Oh, yeah. So I well, I had a bit of a temper when I was growing up. So when I was in third grade, I had to we our elementary school was attached to the high school and the junior high was a completely separate location. So every day I had to walk through the high school.
to go to where my mom, who was a teacher, would pick me up and we'd go home. And so I'd have to walk through the high school every day. And I got really self-conscious because I was a tiny little kid walking. And all these high schoolers probably completely meant well. You know, oh, you're a cute little kid. But I heard the word little over and over again. And just as a short person, really started to get under my craw. And one day I got out to the place where you wait for the cars. And this guy came along. He's like.
Hey, little guy. And I lost it. Like, I took my lunchbox and I started whapping his shins. I mean, I was doing great. I'm not going to do any serious. It was a teacher. So I got called into the principal's office the next day. And they were trying to kind of nail down, like, what set me off? Like, why was I upset? I was just like, I don't like being called short. And the principal just stared at me for a minute and went, it's okay to be short. There's good things about being short. I said, name one. He said, and I think I stumped him because he paused.
He said, you can go on submarines. I have never forgotten that. Is there a height limit on submarines?
He could think of as short people have a better life on submarines. I'm like, I'm not going on submarines. So did you? Well, that's the important question here is did you then become a submarine? Yeah, obviously I'm a submariner. That's where I'm recording this from. Every time we come to surface depth, we do the podcast. Right. Yeah. The golden yacht. What is even the question? I'm on a weird tangent here. I think we're supposed to build a character paper doll and template based on our real life. I think that's what Sam was jokingly getting at.
couch potato skills yep they're pretty high nerdy reading skills yeah i think yeah you're a priest and i'm a bard that's what i think i got i got my music skills i got some some oratory skills i've got some historical research skills i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm a bard but not like a super svelte bard like just kind of like a normal human bard
Svelte Bard? Yeah, I'm not like a super sexy, elvie kind of fantasy bard. That's not what I think of when I think of bards. No? What do you think of when you think of bards? I don't know, just somebody cool in a tavern with a big loot or something. I'm more like that. A fancy hat. A slightly disheveled troubadour in an inn somewhere. That's me. Yeah, I think the easy answer, at least from my perspective, is that...
And a good reason maybe why I choose MMO characters like this. I'm kind of a jack of all trades. Yeah. I don't see myself truly excelling in a lot of places. I've trained and become better at things. I'm better as a public speaker than I ever used to be. I'm a much better writer than I used to be. And in large part, thanks to Bree and Massily. Oh, stop. Yeah. I'm a great flatterer. Yeah, I noticed that too. Charisma plus one. Faction plus three. I got, you know, my nose is nice. No, anyways.
No, but I think I've got a lot of skills in a lot of areas, but none of them are, you would say, like right there on genius level or super talented level. Like if this was D&D, none of them would be a 20. None of them would be right up there. But there's, you know, so I got, you know, I dabble. I got, you know, a lot of little things, a lot of little areas. And I'm pretty happy with that because it creates a life for me that's varied and interesting. And if I was, I always think of different.
tracks i could have taken down in life and if i had gotten into a profession where i was like sitting in a cubicle doing one thing every day i had no agency over my projects i would maybe go insane like i have a lot of agency over both of my both being a pastor and being a writer i have a lot of say in what i do and it allows my creativity to come out allows you know me to kind of shape and
i i always work harder wherever i'm passionate at so i want to keep that so yeah that's probably where i what i say you know but i i know i know the priest thing is really easy to go to but in terms of like mmos a priest is often killing people yeah yeah it turns out you're a shadow priest that's what i meant so you don't go around with the big mace and yeah i see what you mean that's at least today right
When I think of Priest, I think of the World of Warcraft Priest. And then I do think of somebody in a robe, but I guess that's not really you either. I do have a robe. I don't wear it. I've worn it twice. I feel it's kind of pompous. Some people like it because it's a sign of office and it does kind of harken back to academia and stuff like that. But I don't need a badge of office. You just respect the person or you respect what I'm doing or you don't.
I also think it just makes me look like I'm a short guy wearing a moon moon. Maybe I shouldn't. You know, you're a tall guy and that that robe doesn't look quite as dorky. But for me, it's yeah. This is all about fashion for Justin. Justin's got issues. No, I don't. Not a big chip on my shoulder. Yeah.
It's an interesting question. It is, actually. When you really sit down to think of it, how would you translate your actual skills to a video game? And the answer is, we just got killed at level one because we definitely would not survive a fight with a giant rat, you know? No, I wouldn't. You look at, like, those zombie movies, and it's a fantasy for a lot of people. Like, what would I do in that situation? And I'm like, I'm...
Do you know how much effort it takes to kill a person? Even if it's a zombie, that's a lot of physical effort. I don't have a gun, so I'm not going to suddenly have knife and sword skills I've never had before. Maybe I'll grab a rolling pin and try some experimental bonks on the head, but no, I would be a horrible killer in terms of MMOs. Unless I had magic skills in that case, yeah, great.
awesome i'll use those all the live long day but i haven't had those yet so maybe that was a fun question honestly i liked it thanks sam that was cool all right and you learned something about me beating up teachers in the third grade that you never knew i feel like maybe people should take you more seriously now because you never know I am a threat to everybody who's about two feet off the ground, but that's it.
all right that's it for today's podcast and we'll ask you maybe in the comments we want to see your stat sheet how would you break yourself down as an mmo character what would your class be i know we've asked that in the daily grind before it's always fun or alternatively you could send us in some more podcast emails it's always a good way to not just send us news tips if you see some really important mmo related news we need to know about that we do try to stay on top of it but sometimes things are always happening and my
go on escape our notice but not your notice you are on top of stuff so send it to us through the podcast or it's through those um the tips button at the top of the site where there's a little thing for tips but you can also use that to send podcast emails so that's why i'm mentioning that you also want to check us out on patreon we have a patreon program for those among our audience who want to financially support massively op they believe in what we're doing and want to see us continue so absolutely keep on doing it or else
The seal gets it. Yep. We got a club to its head, man. Don't make us do it. Somebody right now is writing us a nasty letter. He's cute. We named it Phil. We feed him. We love him. Someone will get mad. Someone always gets mad. It's not even a good seal noise. I could do better. Nope, that's not good. Anyways. This podcast is off the rails. That's it. Can you do animal noises? Absolutely not.
I had a girlfriend once who could do an amazing turkey noise. Wait, what? She could do the turkey gobble. And it sounded so like a real one. I'd ask her at every opportunity. Please do it. Please do it. That is wild. I can do that thing where I purr in the back of my throat like a cat. Can you guys do that? I can't do that. Can you trill your arse? Yeah, I can. Yeah, I can't do that.
yeah i'm jealous but it's not the same see there you go so i don't know how that's a cantrip right there somebody is clipping this stuff you know you know someone's clipping this stuff to mess with us they're just gonna put it on next week's podcast she will trill all her r's it will be terrific i can't do it yeah
All right, guys. You take care. Have fun. Enjoy your games wherever you're gaming. Keep on. And, you know, of course, participate in the site. There's a lot of ways you can participate. You know, one shots and WREP and daily grinds and yeah, all that. That's all I got, man. I'm out of here. Later, everybody.