I'm pretty much over it. I know I kind of am too, but I still want to let him have it. Does that make sense? Oh, Lotro. We could be having a completely different discussion this week. Yeah. It's not that we're mad at you. We're just disappointed. Come into our office. Sit down. Assume the position of repentance. Hey, repentance is going to be a good theme for today's show here in the Massively OP Podcast, episode 509. And we know it's spring. There's a lot of signs, you know, warming.
Things, sun, time change. Oh, yeah. And my neighbor running his snowblower nonstop. Wait, what? You still have snow? No, he's burning off the rest of his gas during a day because no, who would be home other than somebody recording a podcast right behind him? Yeah, absolutely. So I can. your husband was grinding beans but this is way louder it's spring break for him which of course you know doesn't line up with anything else so he's just gonna he's in miami
Playing video games while I work. Video gamers gone wild. Woo! Yeah. It's a good week. Well, hopefully, on top of all this Lotro mess, of course, we're going to get into that a little bit. A tad, a smidge, a titch. Before we get into all of that, why don't you tell us what you've been playing? Did you get anything?
I played Lotro. I played a lot of Lotro last week, believe it or not. That wasn't... I mean, I have a couple other things I can mention because I played, I actually logged into a bunch of games because I'm working on a project for something that's happening next month that I'm not going to tell you about it yet, but you could probably guess because there's a special day.
next month. It happens every year. Anyway, so I was in City of Heroes, Guild Wars 2, Ultima Online, believe it or not, Project Oregon.
glitch specifically 11 giants that that's the best version of glitch i can find and star wars galaxies i i had little mini projects going on in those games and i might have a couple of other people doing little mini projects for me in other games to, um, you guys can guess what it is anyway the other thing i did was i played some farm together too i haven't mentioned that on the podcast in a while it's not an mmo but it is multiplayer so i play it sometimes it's still in early access it's
think launching in may still but i haven't really played since before christmas so i had a lot of catching up to do they haven't trained like actual trains that you can like set down tracks and like get on your train and it drives you around it's so cute they added bunnies like mushrooms yes like you're at a little mini theme park yeah it's just like that i like that
They've just added a ton of stuff. I'm not caught up or anything. So I mostly just wanted to go in and see what they did because it seems like every couple of days they have another big patch and it's almost too much to keep up with. It's like what you want. out of early access and never get from most games. So that's why early access has a bad name.
But here they've actually earned it. They have earned every penny I paid into that early access. I love that little team. So cute. They're so cute. Excellent. So the other thing I played was Lotro and I played a lot of it. I had so much organization and shuffling and planning to do last week. And now I'm just obsessed. Once we're going to talk about the moves and stuff later, but I actually had.
ended up playing like actually playing character wasn't wasn't that the joke you know take away our game for a while makes you want to really play it makes you want it i knew i was going to come back in the spring anyway i i already had it in like my little my little planner because there's stuff from the spring festival I want stuff from like the last couple years I knew I was going to need to reroll my mariner and I needed to like get her the stuff that I had
I had deleted my old one so I could reuse the name. I'm sad about that. If I had been more patient, waited three more months, I could have gotten all of that for free. But oh well. Anyway, so I've been playing, I've mostly been playing that Mariner because I thought she was fairly safe because she wasn't like one of my existing characters. She wasn't in the middle of a move. I was not that stressed about her.
But now that everybody has moved to the new server, I've been playing her for fun. I don't even know. I'm like enjoying Lotro as like a hobby instead of like a thing I have to watch with dread in my heart. We've had a roller coaster of a week here. As you can tell. A little bit of trauma. It's alright. We're unpacking it.
We'll come back to that. What did you play? Well, yeah, Lotro as well. It was really nice after a few days to log back in. I was kind of prepared that the game was going to be down for more than a day. My prediction was more that there was going to be problems on the server side. I thought there was going to be some issues or it just wasn't ready to go and our characters would be locked up. And I'm like, all right. I've got some other stuff on deck.
and i'll just go over there and in fact that was good to have because as things turned out there was a good three days right there where we couldn't play or i don't want to say we couldn't play but you know characters locked up things you're just babysitting the transfer screen stuff like that but finally when i did get in it was really nice to uh
Be there on day one, hour one, day one. So actually getting to see Peregrine open up was really cool and seeing people stream on. And of course, everybody's got that giddy little, oh, I'm here. You know, like feeling a little bit bad, a little guilty.
the survivor's guilt that yeah they made the transfers and other people didn't and some people just rolling a new character just to be there you know just to say they did uh and then you know my kinship Finally got our kin officer transferred over, so she started to back up.
the kinship and we everybody started you know organizing and getting back in and uh that that was good and in fact i think it was a good thing that we didn't have housing activated because that would just be so much on top of everything right now so yeah going through all my characters i'm i was even doing that this morning and i still have more to do trying to find
who's got what it's like i'm discovering like all my old tree beard characters which i haven't touched for years but i invested so much time in so many not just levels but these characters are like stuffed to the gills with wardrobe and stuff stuff in their vaults and uh you know housing writs and stuff like that so it's yeah it's organization it's a big part of it but just also that sounds so fun you know what like i i would pay you to let me come on your account and clean it up
That's, I love doing that so much. I just know my head is a little broken and you're talking about that organization mess and I want to do it so bad. I know it's a problem in my head. It was really nice. I know I showed you the screenshot this morning, but finally when my tree beard characters transferred over, it did the... finally increased my wardrobe limit. My wardrobe limit has been overflowing ever since my Anwar characters.
transferred and merged into it. So I've not been able to add anything to my wardrobe for years now. And I guess that's a good problem to have, like having more stuff in your wardrobe than you actually paid for. Okay. That's kind of nice, but this is probably the second and last time this will really happen. So it's really nice to see like 200 plus pieces of new cosmetic gear pour into my wardrobe.
morning and so now i'm like uh 637 slots out of 300 is 300 the actual cap no i think i could increase it but you can only increase it like 10 at a time and like do the math about how much that would cost not gonna do that but i actually played i i've been going through my uh playing my burkler in breeland and you know since completionist i am tracking down all these quests there's so many quests in breeland and it's actually kind of fun because it's, again...
encourages me to go to parts of the zone I don't normally do when I'm just zipping through trying to be all optimal and streamlined and all that stuff. So I was all far up north in some remote little lake area. grinding on some snapper turtles and talking with my kidneys and just kind of kind of vibing on a new server it's a weird feeling but it's not a bad thing um world of warcraft um
Yeah, having a really good time. Patch 11.1 dropped. Talked a little bit about that last week. Having a really good time in Undermine, but mostly right now focusing on my Death Knight and my... warlock trying to get them geared up in season two so this is the cool thing i was not anticipating brie yeah because every time in the past in past expansions when world of warcraft's been doing seasonal event you know these seasons
where a new patch comes and they're like hey it's now season two it never affected me it was it was always like rating and mythic plus and those are two things i just don't do like end game stuff but now there's delves and delves are very accessible and i have been doing delves and so when season two came along i really wasn't thinking like oh they're going to be doing a lot of stuff to delves and they did and it's really cool so
in a way it was a bit of a gear reset because now we've got to kind of climb up to a new, like they raised the gear where the, the, standard gear cap or whatever it is so we kind of have to gear up a little bit more but what was really cool is that um the delves are set up in a way that as many dungeons they have mechanics in them and sometimes you and when you go into them like we got used to like okay this delve
has this mechanic you know you have to carry a candle with you at all times and the candle shrinks and shrinks until you find a new candle to recharge it and if it shrinks too much you get a darkness debuff okay you know like some of it's more babysitting
Some of them were easier. Some of them were harder in season one. I was not anticipating they were going to completely throw all that out and start with completely new mechanics in season two. And they're fun. They're so much more fun. And it's like new. new mechanics, new gear, new rewards. Brand, your little companion there can now be a tank. So if you want a tanking NPC, like healers are so happy right now. They're like, yes, I can just be a healer in my little delve.
I don't know. It's made me actually look forward to doing Delves every day. And I didn't hate Delves. I just got... I felt like... the first iteration was a little, it got really stale really quick. And this, this is a lot better. So that was actually very pleasant to discover. And I'm liking it. Good deal. Yeah.
So, yeah, it feels like Blizzard finally ushered the rest of us into the endgame, like, into that conversation. Dragged, kicking, and screaming. Oh, happy, opening the door. If you don't like it, I'll... Keep trying until you do. Yeah. And then speaking of Blizzard, actually... Picked up Diablo 3. I saw that on your list. Diablo 3. I thought maybe that was a typo. No. So I used to own it. And then my.
wife and my kids got a hold of my old account remember how i my world of warcraft account got hijacked by my family and so i just graciously let them have it to start a new account that was years ago like 2018 or so and diablo was on the old account and of course i wasn't like crying or anything it's like okay i played this a little bit back in the day it wasn't my thing whatever and yet um
It was on sale last week. It was like the complete edition, like all of it, the expansion, everything for 20 bucks. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Diablo 4 wasn't really doing it for me. Diablo 2 was just a little too old, even the remastered. And so, you know, maybe... maybe goldilocks we'll find a nice sweet spot we'll see and i've been actually having a great time it's just been a good such a great game it's just been a good turn my brain off and yeah go wipe out an entire room you know feel super
powerful and you know i got i i'm able to play necromancer which the last time i played diablo 3 i don't think they even had necromancers yet so that's kind of fun just to have a little army of skeletons following me around and just you know sit back and munch on some popcorn and watch all the bad guys die it's no it's not not too shabby so yeah loser doesn't care which one you play as long as you're paying for it as long as i'm in the ecosystem sure yeah absolutely and
And it was actually, I mean, it's a small thing, but it was actually nice to see. I totally forgot that there were people in chat like. people talking yeah and i'm like oh i you know like i'm getting a little bit of social you know so we're talking about like diablo 3 versus 4 why people are preferring 3 you know there's a crowd right now in fact i just read an article not too long ago It was talking about how...
Diablo 3's Twitch numbers several months ago were well above Diablo 4's. I didn't know that. I don't know how it is now, but I do want to poke into that a bit and see. Is there still a pretty strong following for this game? Are there people who went to four, didn't find what they're looking for, and then kind of re-evaluating three?
That would be really funny because that's the same thing that happened to Diablo 3. Where people were like, no, I don't like Diablo 3, I like Diablo 2. It's going to keep repeating forever as the nostalgia curve keeps moving, right? Yeah. I mean, it's happened with Star Wars, right? We used to trash all over the prequels, and now it's like, man, remember the prequels? Those were so much better than the Disney World. It's true. There's a whole generation for whom that...
That is the pinnacle of Star Wars. They're coming for Bree. Yeah, I don't know what they're... Usually they turn it off when they come past us, but maybe it was a hot pursuit. I don't know. Sorry. Title of this episode, Hot Pursuit with Bree and Justin. So much cooler of a name for her. All right, let's get into the news this week. Obviously, Lord of the Rings Online was the...
unfortunately, big news story. It should have been a medium news story. It should have been a, oh, they opened up some new 64-bit servers and everybody went over there and they're having a great time holding hands. It should have been the thing that we talk about on the podcast because we play Lotro. Not because it was the awe-consuming story of the entire week for the genre. Yeah. It was foobar. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So...
There's like a long version of the story, which I'm sure Brie could just cite you word for word here. Brie hasn't come up for air from the 64-bit Discord chat room. for like a week and i'm starting to go a little bit crazy being in that room all the time it does kind of have that effect
It was nice to have it to blow off some steam to see other people commiserating with you and getting a little bit of information. But also it became this weird social experiment. Like, what do you do when a whole bunch of people are under pressure and they're feeling? it and they're angry and they have nowhere to vent it and then they just kind of turn on each other like piranhas and that's that's kind of the sad I mean I think we held off the madness as long as possible but yeah
Anyways, it's really tame. To be fair, I'm saying it was crazy, but it was more stressful, not because people were super toxic. We are going to talk about that in the overthinking coming later this week, because I think. Toxic positivity was more of a problem than toxic negativity. But that's a whole other conversation about how communities handle this. Let's talk about what SSG did. Yeah, let's talk about it.
This is a whole transfer to these new 64-bit servers. If you don't recall why this is a big deal, this is basically where Lord of the Rings Online... They're opening up this new tech. It's going to handle the game better and they're bigger servers. And SSG just wants everybody to kind of migrate there. So that was really the point, like wanting to move an entire games community.
consolidate down to these four servers two in the u.s two in eu and they had a plan and the plan was like day one you know you go and reserve three characters if you're a vip which seemed to go okay um people didn't get their names and uh there was much gnashing of teeth and some people did and some people like brie sniped awesome names i did i lost a couple of my
my actual name but i got back some that i used to have on silver load that i lost when i moved to landreval so if you didn't get your name it's i have it yeah No, I don't. Day two is where it all started unraveling. That's when the actual, they said, okay, we're going to give you a 24 hour period to get in there, activate the transfer wizard.
Get your characters moved over. Now, it sounded actually pretty cool because you wouldn't have to do them one at a time. You can do an entire server's worth of characters and just send them through the process. The problem was... Okay, there's not a problem. It didn't work. They turned on the transfer thing for maybe five seconds. It was...
i'm exaggerating only slightly it's like a minute they would turn it on for a minute and then turn it back off yeah and whether you saw the button was a complete crapshoot And whether the button worked, if you got the hourglass, you know, and we didn't know back then, like if you got the transfer button, never close that launcher for the rest of the week because that transfer button you won't see again. It's so hard.
get back uh yeah it became a thing it just very long story short we can go back into the long story but the long story short it was a mess they were not prepared for the crush of people and they talked to like kind of obscurely that there was some tech that they tested and there was something broken in it. They didn't realize it was broken until all this transfer stuff started happening. And they just...
It was a case of a million people, or well, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, whatever, trying to crash through a door at the same time, and the door couldn't handle it. And suddenly... It was just, it was beyond bonkers. They were delaying the start of the new servers a couple of days. It went from Wednesday all the way to Friday. They, you know, even when they opened up the new servers, they disabled housing. They're trying to calm down kinship officers.
because they're like kins aren't going to get their names now because kinship... Guildmasters haven't transferred over. People have been waiting. People are camping that launcher over and over and over. Of course, they're always continually logging in, trying to get whatever scraps of information we could possibly get from SSG.
We were trying to relay a lot of that here on Massively OP. It was, yeah, it was just a mess. It was a stressful mess. I'm sure SSG, they were just... it wasn't a fun week for them no doubt i don't think they got a lot of sleep no yeah not a big studio i have compassion upon them but at the same time i have a lot of compassion for all the players that were just yeah
you know felt like they couldn't leave their computer for a good 24 hours i saw people like that can't sleep you know like they there are people at the end of like the second day just telling us tell us we're in europe tell us if you're going to activate the transfer tonight or not because we want to go to bed can you just tell us if we can go to bed and they do yeah yeah go to bed we're not gonna have to date until the morning
It was just, it was horrible. And even now, as we're talking, we're recording on Monday afternoon. Yeah, they did put the Transfer Wizard back up, but it's so backlogged right now.
probably going to be weeks until all of this gets sorted out yeah it's actually been up since friday evening yeah which is which is good man so it's pretty clear that behind the scenes they've like bolstered the queue infrastructure because initially they couldn't handle that many like even if you got through they couldn't handle all the people that got through i know this because mine crapped out i didn't even i got through that very first day and got my email
my email got my little screen that says it was everything was fine but I never did get an email and eventually someone is like yeah at this point it's not if you're not in you're not in we took the servers down it's over every time they take the servers down for patches and stuff at least last week
the queue would come to a halt and everybody who hadn't moved just fell out of it which caused extra problems because now people are like ah i went through the whole process and it didn't even work and now i have to start over i think at this point Now, like I said, they've they've bolstered the queue behind the scenes, which is why that queue is now over 48 hours long. Corey said this morning in discord that.
actually it was like around noon so it really wasn't morning that they were currently processing people who had um gotten their transfers applied for on saturday morning so they're more than 48 hours behind at this point and they have a patch coming on wednesday so i'm crossing my fingers they also have a way to pause
the cues and not lose everybody who's currently in it and then turn that back on they haven't said that yet so i don't know what's going to happen if you're signing up right now you might be screwed my second batch were done saturday morning and they just came through they should have just come through yep so yeah so that's how far behind they are the wild thing is though justin i was actually also first in line on friday because i got through on friday in 15 minutes
believe it or not i i had left my transfer window open and when they said they were about to turn it back on i just started refreshing to see what would happen and i actually got through but my second batch of characters and my husband's characters they took the full 24 hours and meanwhile more people were just piling in behind us and that's why that line is so long i still have guildies who haven't gotten through it's crazy that's great i've never
ever seen a situation like this in an MMORPG before. I've never seen a transfer fiasco this bad. Good job, SSG. Normally, it's just a studio saying, hey, we're just going to move. everybody we're consolidating servers yes we're moving them in this case it was a choose your own server adventure and that's and that complicated things they weren't ready with the tech they might have had something broken behind the scenes and then the
What I can put on SSG, I think it's fair. The communication was spotty. They did have people talking. They did. There were so many questions. There were so many unknown factors. And it was clear, like, they didn't know the answers to all of this. Like, so much attention has never been given to this transfer wizard ever. You know, and suddenly everybody's trying.
trying to unpack the mysteries of this like it's a tomb that indiana jones uncovered does which server matter what if i do it with my eyes closed like do i what if i move one character at a time we're told Don't do it. And we're like, well, that's what people who would not want me to do. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I want to chime in there. I want to agree with you that like, I mean, I was expecting this to be bad. I was not expecting it.
expecting it to be anywhere near this bad. I actually thought they would have things patched up like before they started. I thought they would have things patched up that night so that we could still do the real transfers on Wednesday. If I thought that, even having...
full knowledge of all of the disasters that Lotro's had in the past, I can sort of understand why the devs also thought, well, it'll probably be bumpy and then we'll sort it out and then it'll be fine. So you know what I mean? If I if I was that
i can understand why that they're they're that dumb too you know what i mean but on the other hand they have access to so much more information that we do not have they know how many accounts they have how many play vips they have how many characters they're the one
The ones who, you know, warned us that we probably should leave. They weren't sure what was going to happen to the old servers. They were the ones who said, yeah, land rush. Yeah, kinship rush. Yeah, name rush. You know, they created this situation and they were.
in full possession of the number of people who were who could possibly move um and also then also responsible for the infrastructure to make sure they could handle that so on the other hand i'm kind of like y'all come on you probably should have known i saw a really great quote from somebody in discord and he said i'm really sympathetic for these devs but at the same time i'm not buying the answers i'm not buying you know the fact
They don't know what's going on and they're not telling us what's going on. But I do want to say that communication is way better than it was years ago when we had so many problems with SSG. That's true. It's way better. Discord helps a lot. I'm not going to be brutal toward them. What burned me is when they did that live stream last Friday and he's like, oh, the naming conflicts isn't so big of it. That's not going to be as bad as you think it is.
you have any idea how stressed out people are that they're going to lose the name that they've had for 18 years in this game and you know it's it happened it's going to happen it we kind of knew it was but now having it happen not because
You know, you just kind of lost the luck of the draw. But because the tech, you know, that person got faster transfer than you did. And, you know, that's just how that went. That just burns. And so that was kind of a. lack of empathy on the side of the studio i think that was a bad bad thing for them to say but it was uh there were some there were some silver linings and i do want to point those out too one it really shows like
Even SSG wasn't expecting it to be this popular. It shows that there are people passionate about this game. And not just passionate, but die hard, sit through all this horrendous mess because they really... are they love the game they want to be part of this they're excited about the new servers uh the fact that i think these new servers are a big draw i think this was something people were waiting for and so they were hanging back and suddenly you know sse going hey
look at these new servers. And then people show up and the message is like, why did you show up? Holy crap. Where did you come? Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what.
what severlyn said basically he said it's my response it's my fault blame me i misjudged how many people were really going to come back and try to move this first week i just didn't see this coming and maybe if he had seen that coming then then they would have actually you know bolstered the behind the scenes to handle it but they didn't they literally didn't see that that
it kind of blows my mind on the one hand that they didn't see it but also mmo players wow you know what i mean where did you guys come from thanks for showing up seriously and and you're helping this game push forward even if you know maybe it would be better if we had staggered things a little bit better than letting you know
free players in on day one to transfer maybe maybe we should have led vips first or kinship leaders first or maybe done some sort of lottery i don't know there's like a million ways that this probably probably quarterback Yeah. I think I'm going to do a bit of that in my call on this. Yeah. There are lots of things I wish they had done and types of communication that I wish they had. I wish.
we hadn't had to wait until saturday night to find out that it was okay to log into your account and play while you were waiting the 48-hour countdown like we didn't know that all week so a lot of people were like i put my my cue i'm in the queue what do i do i'm paying for this and now i can't even play well you can play but people didn't know and that just added to the the sense of unknown and the sense of panic over what you
could do and what you couldn't do it's better now that we know more but those first couple of days people were the other silver lining yeah what else you got the memes oh my goodness Not just people entertaining each other, but Middle Earth geeks. There was so much rich material for this. I mean, of course, some of the jokes were just run into the ground. How many Sarah Oakheart jokes do we need to make about slow transfers?
never enough but there was some there was some really funny i mean funny memes they created entire like reddit threads just to document uh people you know they didn't have anything else to do so you might as well go into photoshop and knock yourself out and that was that was amusing like seeing some of the positivity
seeing some of the you know we're all in this together let's just amuse each other let's uh let's have some fun discussions right that was that was good i liked seeing that um it was just um it was a little too long and at the end of it i think everybody felt really brung out. It's nice to be on the new servers. And most people aren't on the new servers. That's the worst part.
It's been weird. Like if you if you got there early by by complete luck and you logged in like that first day on Peregrine for me, like there was nobody there. there was nobody on the server and there was nobody to talk to but i have characters on glam drink now and They're slowly starting to trickle in. Last night I was watching people start raids and putting together raids in chat. I was like, okay, we're so back. You know what I mean? It's starting to settle down.
Even if most of the player base isn't here, the foundation is ready. I knew we were back when I finally saw a little concert happening in front of the Prancing Pony. Because it was weird the first day when I logged in, I went to Bree and there was just no crowds, no people.
doing music none of that and i'm like this is supposed to be the uh the rp server and oh that's okay they got it they got it they're showing up so yeah and it's gonna be it's gonna be a little while before all this gets really fully settled it does look like it's improving uh there is a patch coming this week hopefully it'll deal with that horrible d log crash bug that is just persisting they were supposed to have fixed that last week last week yeah it did not get fixed let me tell you
eight times yesterday i'm so done with the d-log it's not great no so yeah that's there's that's all going on and we haven't heard anything about any potential compensation have we i'm sure Let me see if anything has popped in since I last looked. Oh, here. Wait, this is new since I started talking. FYI, we should be able to pause the queue when we bring the Worlds down, most likely on Wednesday for Update 43.1, so your transfers will not be lost. That's what I was hoping for. Oh, my goodness.
Is there anything else? No, there isn't anything else that you guys need to know. I'm willing to bet there's going to be some. Oh, there will definitely be compensation. I hope they're not full explanation behind the scenes. Right. And then, you know, here. have something for your troubles, because this was pretty brutal. I would like some Valars, and maybe a pony, and a whole stack of, like, Virtubos, and maybe some carryalls. i'm good i'll take all of that
I thought of you today because I logged on to one of my Treebeard characters and I totally forgot she had carryalls. And I'm like, oh, I'd never buy those. So if they just end up being. I don't. I don't use them. I don't need them. You do. I don't.
yeah i don't know how i would function without i mean i you could function without them with a whole fleet of mules i'm trying to stop doing that because you just end up spending all your time logging in and out i don't want to do that carryalls mean you don't have to do that you just the thing here's all my metalsmith mats boom in a bag now it's in shared trans shared storage and then all my characters can get to it that's so convenient it just can't be beat
It can be if you're not a crafter. Well, if you're not a crafter. yeah maybe tasks and like it was yeah it was nice to see like traceries and housing and stuff like that yeah all right well good luck and as we said the currently on the new servers they did turn off the housing so Whenever they announce that will be. Yeah, there's no ETA.
Yeah, we'll be covering that because I think they're waiting for a bulk of all these transfers to go through before they do the land rush for new houses. You and I, I think, are going to be fighting over the same house because I know we live in the same plot. I might be moving. I have my eyes in a couple different. I don't want to leave. I love mine too much.
Maybe you can live next door. We'll figure something. Oh, wait, I'm not on Paragon anymore. So my Ritz are on Glammy. Glammy and Pippin. I love the names, by the way, they came up with for these servers. Well, let's talk about an even bigger mess for an even smaller game. Actually, games. But this is something we have been covering this past month. And that's Little Orbit's MMOs. Oh, my goodness. Speaking of fiascos, right?
If these were, I was including this in today's show, and I thought if these were affecting a much bigger game, this would have been the top story easily. But the fact that it's affecting APB Reloaded and Fallen Earth.
classic or just fallen earth at this point uh means that you know the amount of people affected aren't as many but the scope of this is pretty bad so what happened is about a month ago uh it wasn't little orbits it was whatever servers they were you know the the people operating the servers they the servers went bye-bye the servers just like yeah
crash or they stop operating and he said at one point he said that their hosting partner got evicted from every data center and shut down our game shut our game off with no warning that was no warning like what Are you kidding me? So imagine, picture your MMO, your favorite one you're playing. One day, it's just not available. Not because of the studio. The studio is fine. It's the data center that just no longer can operate the game.
subletter for the data center yeah almost i don't know they didn't fully explain it and so what happened is they had to scramble and try to figure out like what do they do they can't get This isn't going to, they're not going to turn the lights back on. They couldn't do that. So they had to start over from scratch pretty much by setting up new servers. And that has become a month long process. And then monthly, monthly, manually.
Carrying the entire game to this new host and set it all back up. And that's just for APB. Fallen Earth isn't even back yet. They're working on it. I get the impression APB is a much bigger and more lucrative game for them, so that's priority. We have a soft spot for Fallen Earth around here. We do.
Can you imagine your game just... being down for a month while they try to get new servers going and it's just uh week after week we've been covering this story because we thought oh you know it'll be up in a week and it'll be up in a couple days and no this is this has been a pretty brutal month
for little orbit and their titles but to their credit the studio really has committed to doing this it's not like they just walked away and said forget this this is way too much trouble you don't know um They're getting new servers online. APB Reloaded is back. And Fallen Earth should be coming back soon. Yeah, you know, good ending to a really horrible month there. I guess so, yeah. Honestly, I wouldn't have bet on that. You know what I mean? Maybe we should have. Matt Scott is, you know.
a real one when in when it comes to keeping these older games online so maybe my doubt was just not justified but if it were any other game and any other studio of the same size i'm not sure they would have gone to these heroic efforts yeah and we've seen that not often but man there was this really obscure game that
The data center crashed. They didn't have the backup. Remember that a long time ago? Yeah, what game was that? Mirror something, Mirror 2. And then they just lost the whole game. And so one day... the players woke up and they're like well the game's gone all your stuff's gone they're not sunset yeah they can't start the game over so walk away
Oh my gosh. Fallen Earth, it's certainly not a stranger to having the whole game shut down and having a reboot. So a month is better than years we had in the past. In any case, it's a weird little news aberration. And we did want to kind of point that out because it's a bizarre thing that we've been seeing. And I'm sure...
In this past month, we've stocked up a couple new stories you're going to hear about at the end of the year, some of the big stories from the year here. That's fair. 2025, you're already pretty interesting. We're barely into March here. Come on. All right, what have we got? Some patch news. Let's talk about some big old patches coming our way here. Actually, already have landed. Thrown in Liberty got its first expansion, The Wilds of Talandre. Yeah.
Is that how you pronounce it? I don't remember. Talandre? I think it might be Talandre. I can't remember. We listened to the video and I've already forgotten what she said it was. Their GM Godspeed. I forget what she said. Sorry. Let's do Talandre because it sounds fancy. It does. And they won't hurt me too much. They don't care.
So we got a new region here to go explore, a level cap increase, some new dungeons, stuff like that. So this is the first expansion that we've seen ported over from Korea since Throne of Liberty went live a year or two ago. Right, and it's only been out in Korea for a little while too. Calling it an expansion, I don't know.
whether whether the community will come down hard on that it does introduce land and a level cap bump like you said so i think that's why they felt justified but it's not like it's a paid expansion it's it's more like just an update that you know progresses the game i don't know you decide there's a lot of fighting we didn't you didn't link this i don't even know if we're gonna link this but just not justin
Chris did a long post over the weekend talking about how the community has responded to laundry once it actually rolled out. There's a lot of fussing. I mean... MMO players, we're like grandmaster fussers over here. And so there's a lot of balance problems and people who are like, some stuff is too hard, some stuff is too weak. It's pretty typical, honestly.
So, you know, if you were enjoying the game or if you wanted to go back and you were at Endgame, you should probably go check it out. I'm not really sure it has a ton for non-Endgamers. I know there's a little bit of life skill stuff, but for the most part, the big content is for endgamers.
it's a new artifact system here yeah i'm looking down the list and i'm willing to be charitable and say yeah i i think this could squeak in as an expansion i think i might put it on my list yeah i did for what it's worth i put it on our list for big expansions for the end of the year so that's where i came down but not everybody agrees that's all i just wanted to point that out that it's not like it's paid or anything it really is a free update
That's awesome. It's good for Throne and Liberty players to have something new to sink their teeth into. But what about poor Guild Wars 2 players? Are they left in the cold brie? Are they left starving, holding up their bowl, saying, please, sir, I want some more.
Jantheir Wilds. You are getting it. You're getting it. So if you're listening to this on March 11th, you're getting it today. In fact, you've already got it because by the time this comes out, it will have launched. If you're listening on Monday, you can wait another day. I don't. have.
all of the details yet because I'm not the one who previewed it so fortunately I can't spoil anything other than what's already public because I haven't read Colin's piece yet but I do know we are getting a new zone finally you guys know we always get a zone actually two zones for the first part of the expansion and then the second one doesn't have one which is makes it really fundamentally
uninteresting to me and then the third one and the fourth one each get one a piece so here's the third one and now we're getting a new zone i'm pretty sure like they haven't they've been a little foggy about what it's called but I think it's called Mistburn Barrens and I think we're seeing like the first part of it in Bevanissos I think that's like
how they've set it up i'm not sure because i'm not sure what the little part of the continent is called and what the actual map is called but that's the area we're looking at and it's it reminds me of um reminds me of drizzle world coat I'm having the worst time talking today. Drizzle wood.
coast from ice prude where you kind of go in and it feels like a pvp zone but it's not a pvp zone you're still fighting mobs and like there's multiple fronts that you can kind of join in this reminds me of that Because it's got like these three major quests, I don't know, like dynamic driving quests that all kind of lead you to the same central endgame. So that's what it reminds me of.
There's also they've been talking up the lore a lot because there's bringing back the Mursat as like a major point. In fact, the the new mastery line is called Mursat Shadowcraft. The Mursat are like those.
How do you describe them? They're like ethereal, evil, floating dudes. I don't know how else to describe them. I think that's as good as you can get there. Guild Wars has some really... creative and unique lore that's hard doesn't really have a lot of cognates so yeah so that is coming if you already own janthier wilds it's free for you it will just open and you will just go play you
might not even need to patch because of the way the patches work in the game so oh the other thing that's happening and i might actually be more interested in this is that they are doing their seasonal um rollover for the wizard's vault so if you were waiting for
like all the rewards to repopulate and like you know then see what the new goodies are that also happens today so even if you don't have janthir wilds or don't care about the mersad or any of that stuff you still might want to pay attention to guild wars 2 on tuesday Excellent. And finally, in our news that we want to highlight from this past week, I actually probably should also mention...
That ESO got a patch this week. Fallen Banners DLC dropped with update 45. That literally happened today. Oh, we should actually talk about this. I know. Was this on our list? What, ESO? Yeah, was it? No. Oh, OK, because I want to talk about this now that you brought it up. Like I literally just wrote this. So it's top of mind. Not everybody knows what's in it, right? It's the two.
It's the DLC with two dungeons. They do these like every year. It's not a surprise. And then the base game patch is pretty small. They're pretty much just revamping the newbie zones. not newbie, like the starter zones where you first level up, right? Not the basic starting tutorial, but like the zones, the five big zones. They're like visually revamped. They look really good now. They match the style of the rest of the game. Fine. All that is really good.
But then today I realized when I was reading through it, they're not selling this DLC the way they used to sell DLC. Did you see this? Sorry, I'm writing it up and I was on mute. Justin's making us a sandwich. One second. No, instead of like they used to set it up so you could either buy it. Like if you were a free to play player, you could just buy it outright, which meant you could ignore all the ones you didn't really care about.
and then you got it for free if you were subscribed or not for free but like you you accessed it for free if you stopped subbing then you don't have access anymore that's how they did this in the past not counting the ones they just gave everybody for free right And this one is not set up like that. This one is set up where the only way to access it right now is to subscribe. They're not offering the piecemeal purchase option. And they're like, yeah, we're going to get it a la carte.
You can't. Not right now. That's bizarre. I know. Like, who would turn down money, right? Like, I don't understand this at all. Is that deliberate or did they not get it in the story time? It's deliberate. They mentioned it three times in their blog post. And they say, you know, tune in.
what is it april 10th for the when they're finally going to take the wraps off of their new cadence thing and they've strongly implied they're going to tell us what the other ways of accessing the dlc are going to be when they do that and i don't know what that means like i don't know are they going to put this on some sort of weird microsoft xbox thing are
they're gonna just not sell dlc anymore i have no idea what they're up to like honestly i should i should do some digging to see if players have figured it out yet because i didn't i didn't know about this or maybe i just missed it Or maybe this is like, I don't even think the last time we covered it, we knew about this. So anyway, it was like a revelation to me. Yes, I was in a weird place right now. I know.
it's worth worth highlighting anyway big things are happening over there and this is sort of like one of those turning points so um the other one i wanted to mention before we skip past was fractured did you did i did i link this to you Yeah, yeah. I meant to if I didn't.
I was going to transfer us into that, but that's... Oh, okay. Go ahead. Transition away. Transition into Fractured. Fractured is this MMO sandbox we've been covering for a while. It was a crowdfunding project, right? Yes. Back in the day? Yeah. and actually made it on kickstarter made money on kickstarter yeah but it's had kind of a tumultuous existence since then and especially as of late where didn't look like this game had much of a future at all
The dev team was just whittled down to practically nobody. Just a handful. Not even a handful of people. Just a few people. It was three unpaid people. It's rough. That's real rough. You know what I mean? That's not... a good sign that's a big red flag over your product but you need kind of an angel investor to come in swoop in grab you and bring you up to heaven and has that happened that has happened i mean
That's why I want to talk about this, Justin, because how often do we get good news out of these kinds of games? Like, we never get this. It's such a weird... story that like even when we were covering like we knew it was to me something was happening because yakupo galelli who is the dynamite studios boss was like teasing that something huge was coming for the game that would rescue it financially and we were like oh it's probably crypto dang it like everybody thought that i thought that
We didn't have any evidence, but like how many times does anything good happen? It's always crypto. That's the only kind of group that wants to invest in these, you know, flailing Kickstarter games. We've seen it happen. over and over we saw it happen to legends of aria we even saw it happen to crow fall like it just happens and so yeah i think people were like ah dang it But no, that isn't what's happening. Here, let me look up the name of the actual studio. Or do you have it up?
Yeah, I have it up. It's Happy Cauldron Games. What a great name. I love it. Which is one of these outfits that's actually being run by somebody, a player, who actually loves this game. And so he has apparently bought it out and is going to pay for a dev team and picked up all three of the dynamite. devs to work on the game they're they're hiring a community manager which again is not something you do for a game on its last legs
I don't know how they expect to turn a profit on this if Galeli couldn't do it, but they're doing it anyway. It's getting rescued.
and they swear it's not crypto that's not what they're doing that's not even in the in the cards they are just trying to bring the game up to what dynamite originally said it was going to be back in the kickstarter because they haven't been able to do that because they've been kicked around you guys know this and even even gamigo kicked them around for a year when gamigo was assigned to
them for a while and then there was a big old fiasco around the dissolution of that partnership and who owned what and finally dynamite got it all back but I'm astonished that we're getting any good news out of this at all. I have no idea how this game survived until now, other than the fact that these devs really like it and didn't want to give up even when they weren't getting paid, which is... No way to make a living. I hope they have some other way to make a living.
But there you go. So if you were interested in a PvP and PvE sandbox that has that kind of old school vibe, but with new school stuff in it, this might be your jam. Yeah, getting a good second chance is something I always like to see titles, especially when they have a promising idea or passionate devs that really, really worked hard on it.
Well, here's hoping this is what Fractured Online needs. And, yeah, it does kind of feel like they're down to their last chance. But, you know, this could be a really good moment for it. I mean, this is an industry where... Games are just going under left and right. Huge, big, profitable games are still getting closed. So for a game like this to have a win is just wow. Throw it on the pile of weird things we didn't expect to be seeing this year, but there you go. All right.
Folks, that is it for the news. Do we have anything in the mailbag? We do. We have several. People have sent us several neat things. This one is an older one, though, so I want to get to it before we move to new stuff. It's from Matt. He says, I wanted to follow up on a comment that... Justin made during the 506th.
podcast his comment was around solo players being generally forced to play raid content to finish the stories it really is quite true mmos assume that all players whether grouper solo will eventually end up as raiders and as we know that's That's not at all what happens. I feel MMOs should be creating story arcs that put raiders on a side story versus the main story. It's not a single player thing. It's more of an every player should know the main story conclusion, raider or not.
guys think MMOs have learned this or do you still think we're following these rules? Any other thoughts would be interesting. I have so many thoughts but I think he wants thoughts about this comment. Other than here, here. Here, here. I'm thinking my tea really needs to get warmed up because it's very lukewarm right now and I need it. You need your tea. Hmm.
I don't know if I have too much more to say other than, yeah, I agree. And that's why we've talked about that in the past. And if developers aren't... are choosing to have these major story beats happen in raids and they have to have a they should it should be almost mandatory should be mandatory for them to have a way for
a hundred percent of the players to at least be able to see or experience that story beat even if it's a lesser version of the raid or cut scene or whatever like don't leave us you know i i I don't think anybody releases a novel where a whole chapter is ripped out of it, except for a handful of, you know, 10% of readers or whatever the rating population of games tends to be these days.
A long time ago, I heard devs saying that it was something like 10%, so I just always seized upon that. But yeah, that...
It seems a little silly. And it especially does because a lot of these games and these expansions kind of build up to this major confrontation with, you know, Arthas, the Lich King. And you've been fighting and you've been seeing him and you've been, you know, doing... quests here and there and it builds up this this idea of this big bad that you're going to topple except you know you're not going to topple them because you're not a raider or you're just not part of that so it
does kind of leave you hanging and that's not a good feeling for the player base so you know at least let me go up and kick him in the shins once or twice and then he'll just topple over like a dad who topples for his toddler and go oh no you've got me yeah yeah this is this is good timing matt doesn't know about this, but on Saturday, Elliot and I got into a knockdown drag out.
argument which for me and elliot that's just a day i scroll through it we do this for fun it's we have debates it's fun but like we were we were talking about it in the context of world of warcraft because on friday world of warcraft released the cinematic for the end of the big raid for Undermined. I don't remember what this raid is called. Justin will remember.
It's the Undermine. It's called Undermine? Liberation of Undermine. Okay, it's actually called that. And I guess we're taking down Gallywix himself and all this stuff, right? And so the release of this... cinematic only like three days after the actual raid opened was like
it was a point of contention it was a point of debate and elliott and was saying you know they're they're spoiling it like they're they're putting it out as a spoiler so obviously we have to warn everybody who hasn't done the raid in the first three days that's number one But number two, the reason they put out the cinematic is because the vast majority of the player base hasn't seen this raid yet because it's only you have to.
clarify this for me but they're only opening it to like the first tier of what do they call it is it mythic plus is that the right term no no that's what's the right term there's different levels of the okay that's all i know there's different levels it's not fully released yet yes so it like unlocks for like the elitist of the elite and then it unlocks for the slightly less elite on down the line until it unlocks for
you know scrubs who just want to see the story someday you know what i mean and it takes time to get from each stage all the way down so again the vast majority of people have not seen this cannot see this realistically and really releasing the cinematic on YouTube allows Blizzard to continue doing that, to continue locking the actual in-game story behind these weird...
unlock these weird gates because technically the cinematic is already out there and you've got nothing to complain about right so i that's why i thought this i didn't pull this question up because we talked about it it's literally just the last one here other there's a couple of other questions in here but i don't think we can answer them
yet but that one is like whoa we were just talking about this this just happened in world of warcraft that is a perfect example of a game that has not learned the lesson that you know companies like yeah What do you think? I think it's a very clumsy way that they're doing that. Yeah? Yeah, absolutely. Because they did that at the beginning of the expansion. Remember when we had that head start period where people paid to get in? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
getting in early and the rest of us were waiting a few days to get into the expansion, Blizzard came out and released one of the opening cinematics that showed The Fate of Dalaran. the dalaran got trashed it got destroyed it was smashed down into the ground and we hadn't played it yet like we had no idea and it was the the pr team going oh we can just shove something out on youtube and get some more hits from it that's all this is
With the raid thing, that's not them being accommodating to players that want to see the rest of the story. You could put that... inside the game in fact they do that all the time where you could go to a certain npc and say oh remind me that that story beat i completely forgot about and they'll replay like a cinematic or you know like
They could put this into the game, this cinematic, and have it be an optional or just at some point release to everybody in the game so we're all on the same page of what's going on. It's just the PR team being obnoxious.
so i'm not against it on principle i'm just against the timing and and the venue for they're doing it through but yeah i i can understand that i'm not even sure like elliot and i were disagreeing but like i'm not really sure we disagree i think we pretty much agree that we don't like the way blizzard handles it period but i would rather have the cinematic than not but at the same time then all they've done is changed
what the reward is it's not just the story it's getting to see the story in context without having been spoiled first you know what i mean that's the reward and now you don't get that and that kind of sucks I would rather MMOs just found different ways. I really like what ArenaNet has been doing, where...
I know raiders don't necessarily like this because they want to be catered to and they don't want to have any kind of repeat content. But especially the last couple of years of reading it will do the content. like in the map in the regular map and you're taking it down as like part of the world boss and then they'll do these like side raids and what do they call them uh is it convergences I don't know. I don't do these things. But they'll use the same boss and they'll like...
change how it works. So they're getting like special mechanics and you're kind of doing something similar, but it's just in a totally different context. And I don't feel like anybody's being screwed over and not getting to understand how the. You know what I mean? And Guild Wars 2 did not used to be like that. I absolutely remember at one point getting really snarky with poor Bobby Stein, my favorite developer. And I got snarky with him on Twitter because they were they were locking cinematic.
behind that kind of content. They don't really do that quite to that degree anymore. And I bet if we went MMO by MMO we would find that most of them don't do that. Because why would you spend all that money on cinematics? And why would you spend all that money actually hiring a narrative team to make a good story that people care so much about that they would fight over it and then not leak it out?
Like you said, not share it with a huge number of people and use it as a marketing stunt. They'd be idiots. That's why I really always thought Rift had the best way of dealing with this. It created single player and dual raid. Open at the same time?
I don't know what the timing of it was, but I know that somewhere along the course of the game, they realized that, oh yeah, a lot of people weren't seeing those raid story beats. And so here you go. Here's a solo version. You're going to get some rewards, but it's just... not going to be that great but you can experience like all the design of the raid and then go through it and then see the the story as it unfolds and
I thought that's a really good way of doing it. And some people were like, no, only Raiders should see Raider stuff. I'm like, no, no, no. The Raiders are the least likely to care about this story, too. Let's be real. And that's probably very true. That's kind of the irony.
you can come up with a better reward for like whatever if you're if you're pitting all of those people and you're doing all of the hard legwork of coordinating a large group there has to be a different kind of reward that actually rewards the game being conducted honestly the cinematic was never it
So they didn't care about the cinematic. They just wanted something special. And so give them something special they actually want and give the cinematic to the people who actually like cinematics, who actually care about the story itself. Yeah, maybe I would be completely okay. if raiding really wasn't a story thing.
like it wasn't part of the part of the ongoing story it was like an offshoot a cul-de-sac something like that like it's ancillary to the main story but it's not really the culmination of it like have a culmination in the game itself i'm fine with that in fact you know to be fair world of warcraft does have a lot of huge story beats and resolutions that happen just through the campaign so the solo campaign it's not like it's completely unsatisfactory the way it used to be like to say
during wrath of the lich king or burning crusade or stuff like that if you didn't go into ice crown citadel you just didn't get the end of the story you you do get an nn to the story you just don't get the full end to it you don't get to see the bad guy smack down and so maybe you know choose your own adventure if you want to go raid and smack the bad guy down fine but maybe have a solo version maybe a delve maybe a solo raid something other
for us to do. There's other ways. That's all I'm fumbling around saying. There's other ways to deliver a conclusion a climax to your story and uh video games have a lot of flexibility in that regard so take advantage of that i why not totally so great great question we appreciate the follow-up on
on that discussion it's something people are really passionate about and that's uh yeah it's if you guys think of any better examples of how games have handled like these these big climactic fights and story beats Tell us down there in the comments. We'd love to hear about it. Yeah. And definitely, as Bree said, check out our... Sorry.
You were talking overthinking about something else. It wasn't. Oh, yeah. This week's overthinking is going to be talking about toxic positivity. Yeah. And like whether we even think it's a problem, where have we seen it crop up? Did it, you know, influence the LOTRO proceedings this past week?
All kinds of related thinking about... We have thoughts. Yeah, about how communities respond to things and whether sometimes we are our own worst enemy. And not because we're being, you know, horrible monsters, but because... We're being a little too nice or being a little, we're pushing back too hard against deserved negativity and not keeping the pressure up when we should. It's tricky. Shutting down a conversation. Just because you don't like where it's going. Yeah.
that's you know even if it's a fair conversation to have that's yeah that's those are the sort of things we'll talk about yeah um so yeah check out that later this week continue to send us in your podcast emails your questions thoughts comments anything you'd like us to talk about
on a future episode, maybe even a reaction to something you heard about today on today's episode. For instance, how Bree and I just can't talk today. What's wrong with us? That's okay. Check out the show notes. There's a link. there it'll help you through that you can also check out our patreon program of course that's on the right hand side of the site and while you're there check out the rest of the site i don't want to pat myself on the back it's pretty good
It's a pretty good site. And there's some pretty talented people writing for us. Why don't you? Yeah, totally.
So we appreciate you guys reading, listening, watching everything here at Massively OP. Have a fantastic week of playing. You Lotro players, hang in there. Solidarity. We'll get through this. It's going to be a good time being on a new... server i'm gonna get there i'm very excited he was gonna make sure we all got our people there eventually so patience just in case you're wondering we are patience my neighbors one or is uh
The snowblower is still going, so there you go. How much could he possibly need to burn off? It's been an hour. Very fuel efficient. Take care, guys. Have a wonderful week. Later, everybody.