 Hello everyone and welcome back to For The Minions, a weekly podcast all about paragon remakes and upcoming 3rd person MOBAs in general. I am your host themangus. This week we've got updates for overprime, fault and predecessor and then we will of course talk about ethereal a little bit. No topic for discussion. We're trying to keep it short because we want to get back into the overprime closed beta. Ah, joining me as always is my friend and co-host Jelly Knees. How you doing Jelly? I am fantastic Mangus, I've been enjoying overprime the last several days, put far too many hours into that game. And before I introduce our guest, we've got a new special guest that will be with us for foreseeable future hopefully, Mangus' new headset, round of applause for Mangus' new headset. Yes, absolutely, really excited to have it here. But really this week we've got the Viking Jedi which is a close personal friend of mine and he's been kind of following these projects because I force him to. And so Viking, talk to us about your experience in Paragon and what characters you played, what lanes you played, that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, sure. And thank you guys for again having me. So I started playing Paragon when it was first released on, like I think I'm not sure if it came out on PlayStation first and then was brought to PC but I played it when it was on PlayStation. Me and another buddy that I had as a co-worker, we both saw it and were like, hey, that looks like it could be a fun thing. It's like a first person shooter style, you know, MOBA. And I had played MOBAs before, you know, through like League of Legends and so forth. So it sounded interesting to me. And so I got into it and I was, like everybody else, like overwhelmed with the options and like the game style and the graphics and it was super interesting, overwhelming and a lot of fun. And my favorite character from the Paragon days was, I'm totally going to butcher the names and I know one of you guys told me about it the other day, but it's the one with the turret. Iggy and Scorch. I loved Iggy and Scorch. I did, I liked all of the characters for what they were, but Iggy and Scorch, I just, it just felt silly. And a lot of times in MOBA situations, like everything is super like competitive and serious and you guys, but Iggy and Scorch just were not that and it was like almost opposite of what you would expect from, from playing a video game of this, of this style. So I was a big fan of playing that one. I don't know how, but I've never considered Iggy and Scorch as not serious in Paragon, but they absolutely were like, they were goofy as fuck. Yeah. Yeah. They were totally like the meme, not meme pic, but like the meme character of the roster through and through. Yeah. Just insane and breathing fire and he's got a pretty early, they were second or third character added for after the game line. Added pretty early in. Yeah, they were. Yeah. I think I was, I mean, I don't know for sure what the exact eats when I started playing, but I knew I was among the first players of Paragon. I hated the, the system, the card system. I was not a dude. I was. Oh really? I hated it. Well, so far, part of it is that I quickly realized as I, you know, started to try and get sweatier with it, that if you didn't have, you know, the right combination of cards for your favorite characters to play, you know, in the meta as the meta started to develop and all that stuff, you were at a fairly significant disadvantage to the people that had those cards. And so you started to feel like, well, why am I, why am I playing this character then if I don't have the right stuff? Okay. So what, what cards do I have that matches a quote unquote meta build? I don't really like that character or it doesn't, you know, or my buddy likes to play that character. Or when I go into, you know, quick place to try and figure out that character, it's already somebody else's character. And so it's just, it started to create this like me against the game that I wanted to play, but I couldn't play at the level that I wanted to play. Now, if I was just jumping in for fun and doing that, then it doesn't really matter. But when you start, you know, wanting to get sweaty and want to feel like you're competing, that was to me, a big, you know, hold back as to having access to it. If that makes sense. I don't know if I could play that. Yeah, absolutely. I love the idea of the card system and I really like how the actual card system work, the way you got cards, didn't much, so much care for it. I would have rather that heroes be locked behind something and all items be available to everyone, then all the heroes available to everyone, but the items are locked and people will often say, and it pisses me off. I hate when people say this is like, items don't matter. It's, it's, it's skill. It's like, okay, well, if you're both, if you've got two people on the same character and you're both equally skilled, who's going to win the one with the better, with the better items? So it does. It's the percentages, right? Of great. If you're both at 70% because of your character and skill level, the last 30, it comes from the item difference, right? And so that's a huge that while it may be smaller, it's still as an important factor of any MOBA. And I completely agree with you, Mangus. I think the idea of like, build your own item set before you go into a game really, really cool. And I don't think has been done well by any stretch. And I think Paragon got the closest, but because you had to loot box those cards, it just threw the whole system down the drain because there was, if you'd like, like you said, Viking, if you didn't have the card, you were just at an inherent disadvantage against somebody who did. And that just felt terrible. I mean, I think if I remember correctly, if you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, you could save up the in-game currency to eventually buy them, but it was a very grindy, slow process to be able to get there. And I think some of the cards were inherently locked behind of the chest is like the really, you know, OP ones at the time. Well, that crafting system, but yeah. Yeah. And then purchase, but it was you had to dismantle and craft cards. I also remember and it wasn't it didn't affect me a lot. But I remember on the forums that I was part of that they ended up like nerfing something and through that nerf, it was like, but I just spent 100 plus hours grinding for that build. And now you just nerfed it. So what was all that time for? And then I know that was a big, you know, poo poo feeling for people. Absolutely. Well, let's move away from this card discussion, get into the updates. Overprime, that's probably the biggest news. News right now, the closed beta is out. All three of us have been playing Jelene's thoughts on overprime so far. I mean, I've got 36 hours, I think, into the most recent tests so far. So I put I put time, man. I think there are initially there was very few differences between the last test and the in the new test. There they fixed the mana problems, which they won, right? At first it didn't feel much different, but then getting more games in, you definitely felt that you could cast more than one rotation of your spells and then still have mana left over afterwards. Death timers, they increase the death timers that they go up to a much higher cap rather than I think it was 65 seconds in the previous test or 80 seconds or something, which when you hit that point, the game stalled because there was no increasing increasing downside for the enemy team if you killed them. So I think that's a huge improvement for them. I've had worse performance this time around with the random frame drops. So I don't know if that's something they changed or whatever is going on there. Though the game still looks great. I'm still having fun with it, honestly. Like, I think that's the biggest thing is I clearly have put 30 something hours into it already and I plan to put more in before it ends. I think that's the biggest thing is out of the three games right now. This is the one I've been having the most fun with playing consistently. If I can get I know, like the first day we we all played and I've never heard anybody so happy with the game. The truth, like you're having such a great time with it. But now that you have some of the hours into it, because I know you've been playing quite a bit now, like your overall thoughts on the over problem closed beta. Well, I'm happy to report that I've got jelly beats. I'm at 46 hours played. No, honestly, it has been fun. I've dabbled in a lot of the, you know, Paragon spin offs, if you will. And they all have their pros and they all have their cons for sure. And this one does have both of those things. But I feel like for me, there's a lot of quality of life things that for me when I'm looking at, like, you know, this style of MOBA, what it needs to be able to capture an audience, you know, that's currently only option is might. And, you know, if you want to be a player in this, you've got to do something that that that organization's or, you know, doing, but better and to be able to compete and I think and make a name in this space. And I don't know, overprime has a lot of those quality of life things. If you're brand new, you haven't, you know, to farming to, you know, what lanes should I go to? All it's all there on a HUD, you know, farming is relatively easy. You get a notification on your little health bar that will execute. It goes from 50 damage to 100 damage, you know, so you will kill that minion and guarantee yourself some farming experience. You know, and it obviously caters a lot to the newer, you know, players. And maybe there can be some iteration of changing that for a competitive scene to where, you know, farming becomes a skill set. But I think it lends itself to, you know, introducing new players to this style of MOBA, which is kind of difficult. I mean, it's all skill shots. It's not so much any point and click, which you might be used to if you've played like, you know, a Dota or League of Legends where I press button, damage goes out, you know, and it's going to hit somebody. For this, you're aiming just like if you were playing a first person shooter and or a third person shooter, you know. And so I think having some of those quality of life things in this game and for me, the pacing of the game is insanely fun. Things feel very active. The two portals on the side to where they can be, oh, they're in right lane. OK, so I don't have to worry about them. Well, no, they can be coming through that portal for people strong and they do. And all of a sudden, your happy little self that was just farming, you know, and trying to get stacks or whatever is now, you know, very much ganked and dead and or you get a really cool, you know, one before situation where you outplay them and get to yell in comms and talk about how great you are. So those things have been the most fun for me, as far as at least the fun and the pros aspect that I really enjoyed the quality of life. The skins look amazing. The game overall feels great. I've been running it, although I do have a brand new rig. I've been running it on full high. I'm running out like 200 frames. I don't really have any issues for the most part. And it's yeah, it's really, really good. But if we want to go into cons, I can do those two. But the pros, I'm having a lot of fun. And I think that's the biggest thing, despite the cons, is that I am more times than not having fun playing the game. Oh, yeah, go ahead. What are the cons? I mean, so current cons, I think are, you know, the matchmaking in it to itself is kind of tough. And you did a video on this and I was, I agree a lot that, like, you know, the whether they have an internal MMR or not, you know, for this play test, I think they should. I think it would help new players not get put into a lobby with people who are, you know, you know, paragon, you know, vets or forty six hours into the game. Yeah, you know, people like me who spent forty six hours and have been grinding and, you know, spending my extra free time learning about all the itemizations or learning about how, you know, farming works or pushing lanes or, you know, vision and all that stuff. If you're bringing you to the game and you get put into a lane with, you know, our three or four or five stack and we just, you know, poop on you for 10 minutes until you can surrender. That's that's not a feels good, man. And so I do think matchmaking is a big one. The other thing is the quality of which you get put into your matches. So like, you know, there's no current system. And I don't know if they have plans for one once the game's launched to pick your role beforehand. I don't necessarily think that, you know, you need to not have an auto fill, you know, happen to make sure that you're getting people into lobbies fairly quickly. But I think it should be at a reduced rate to an extent. You know, using League of Legends as a as a representative, when you play ranked, you pick your your your role that you would like to play in the game. It's going to try and put you into a lobby with people who are matching your roles. But if push come to shove, if, hey, we don't have enough people that want to play this other role like jungle or support, those are the typical two that have the lowest play rates, you're going to maybe get auto filled into those. And hopefully you do your best or you can get somebody to switch with you or do something like that. Is it fun getting auto filled? No, it's not. But it does make an overall better feeling for most of the games that you're going to put in. If you know that I have a really good chance of getting the role that I like, especially if I'm in a duo or in a trio or in a quad or whatever. And, you know, or even if you're that single guy, if you're the one that gets put into a group of four and you're just automatically relegated to the positions that they don't want to play, that probably is a feels bad. I mean, it hasn't happened for me because I've been in mostly lobbies, but I'm sure that other new players have felt that. And so those would be some of the cons that I would say that are, you know, there. I do think that there's some other things that they can add in for, like, you know, getting new players as part of like a tutorial, you know, like jungle pathing. What do these things do? What does that do? I also think, and this to me, it would be something that was probably a little bit of a big ask, but I don't think any MOBA does a good job of explaining how the basics of macro work in this in any of these MOBA style games. Like, if you go into a game that looks really cool, you saw it on Steam charts or you saw it at the top of the and you're like, man, that looks like a really fun game. I want to get into it, but I've never played this before. If there was a tutorial telling you like, hey, look at this guy sitting in the in the bush there. He could be ganking you. That's, you know, or whatever. Like, or if you're playing as a jungler, hey, do something like this is a basic path and now you want to try and make your presence felt in the side lane or do this. Those types of things just it doesn't have to be over the topic and even be a video that people can skip if they don't want to. But like giving players who are new to the to the genre or new to a game, especially in a game like this, which is already, I think, going to be asking a lot for new players, giving them an opportunity to learn a little bit more of how the macro works is, I think, paramount to to helping the success of all of the long term gaming and growing and getting a healthy player base. I think what's helpful with overprime, too, is that there isn't that much macro, to be honest. Like I've been telling people over and over again, like, don't die for a tower. Like a lot of you'll see like experienced mobile players like, I'm going to exchange my life for this tower. That is never a good trade in overprime because nobody gives a good goddamn about the towers. And the minions, the minions are there to shove lanes or wave management. The minions are there to give you gold and to deal damage to enemies if they overextend. That's what the minions are for. They're not there for you to manage and have them push. The thing with overprime is the way I try and look at it. Like fault and predecessor are both Paragon remakes. They're both successors to Paragon. Overprime is its own thing. Like it's its own game. Like I can't really they're using the Paragon heroes and everything. But it does not play like Paragon and a lot of people don't like that. And that's fine. Like if you went into it, you're like, you know what? I don't like this style of game. Then I'm cool with that. What I dislike is when people come in, they're like, well, this isn't anything at all like Paragon. And then they just shit on it. It's like, well, yeah, it's not like Paragon, but give it a try. Maybe it's still just a fun game, which I think it is or else I wouldn't have played it so goddamn much. It's a fun game. Like I was really been enjoying my time with overprime. I was a little disappointed that there weren't more changes from the last CBT to this CBT. I expected more heroes. They did mid CBT switch up and add Narbash, which I was saying over and over again that they needed more supports. And so it's nice to see Narbash in. But with the skills that they have, I would think that they would have more heroes and everything in. I don't know. Not a lot of bugs or anything. I've experienced a few, but not a whole hell of a lot. It's been a pretty, pretty stable beta test balances all over the place. Items suck, but it is a beta. They've got time to fix all that shit. We do need to bring that up so that they know that they need to fix it. But yeah, I think I mean, the balance before the patch and the balance after the patch, granted, I haven't played a game since the patch has gone out, but just looking at it. I think they definitely are making the right moves towards a bigger sense of balance. But just based on the changes that they made. But like you said, the itemization has to be more fleshed out. There needs to be more items. There needs to be more niche items. So items for assassins, items for carries. It can't just be the same eight damage items. And great, each of you have your pick of these eight items, right? But that's something that they can definitely do. And those are easier to implement than new heroes. So if that's one of their bigger issues, I'm more OK with that. Um, I think a big thing, though, that you both touched on is minions. And that like in man, you said you went further in saying is the the minions are not there to push. The minions aren't there to do any of those things. And I do think that that's a detriment to the game. I do think that and Viking and I went into it like a two and a half hour custom game testing the limits of what where they go, how they work, how they function. And basically what we figured out is early game minions will build and push up onto that first tower. But past 20 minutes, roughly of the game, I would say even earlier, depending on when you get the first turret down, like, I mean, if you if you are hard pushing, you know, like the carry lane or even the solo lane or something like that, to try and get early presence, it that you just don't it will stall right outside of the first turret. So like, eventually it'll get to a point where it's just stuck there. And it's just like, OK, so either I go up there and try and break the freeze, put myself at a situation where I'm, you know, vulnerable or, you know, it just stays there as a semi-advantage that the waves are always slightly on their side. Likely. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, between 15 and 20 minutes, they turn into this stagnant, they will not push a lane no matter what you do type of feeling. And that means games that go past 15 to 20 minutes take an eternity to end because because you don't have minions that you can do anything with, you only ever have six, maybe seven minions going under a tower with you. And when they die as quickly as they do, you really only have four minions. It feels like that you can actually do something with under a tower or under an inhib or under the core either way. The patch did help that slightly in terms of changing how damage works late game for helping those pushes. But the minion waves themselves still do not build and push after the patch. And I think that's a huge detriment to the game. One of the things that when we did our test was the minions pathing itself, they will they path really weird. They'll sometimes like the melees will skip other melees to go and fight ranged minions and vice versa. The the siege minion will sometimes just go up and decide to tank for everybody and will just die. I mean, if we even tested it as boring as it was, we just put the game on and let it see what it would do as far as pushing. It was so inconsistent. It was like, you know, and I know in a lot of other mobs, it's fairly similar that sometimes one minion wave will gain a slight advantage over another and it will, you know, create a pusher. But for this, it was like vastly aggressively, sometimes way off. Like it was just really, really weird and kind of all three lanes can be different, too. Like it's not even consistent. Not even the game is consistent. It's like lane to lane changes completely that one could be pushed into their tower, one could be pushed into yours and one could be sitting dead center and it's just it makes no sense at all. And it got to the point, too, where we were talking in in comms. We're like, OK, so we got the first three turrets down. Like, you know, what do we do now? Like, because it's like, OK, well, if we try and push up, then they're just going to collapse on us and we don't have enough vision or we don't have enough. So what do we do? OK, well, let's go after one of the main buffs. Well, there's no punish for them to match us at Prime buff, for example. Like we wanted to try and get the prime and, you know, to end the game or to gain an advantage. There's no punishment from the minions being pushed up for them to come and answer us and take a team fight that they might win or lose. But and even if they lose, the Prime buff doesn't always necessarily end the game for you. It just means that you're going to get a chance to push with it if you have enough members. So it does that from that point, it does start to stagnate around that like 20 minute mark where you're just like, OK, how do we end this game? We had this huge early game advantage. We gained all the gold we got the experience. We've been pushing them around, but now we're giving them a chance to catch back up, which can have its benefits of having catch up mechanics of, you know, and punishing bad plays by the team that's ahead. But this isn't this isn't the adversary gaining advantage through smart play. It's the game preventing you from being able to end games consistently. And I think that is a major concern for them. And it's not even games that it's like super even where it's like 20 kills to 20 kills, right? And so you're pushing back and forth on each other. You could have a game where your team is 60 kills and they have five and you still can't end the game because minions and there's no sense of urgency to get those in hibs down from the map itself. Right. It's completely on you and your team, five manning and in hib, usually with a team member tanking a couple of shots to then push that thing down or getting the prime buff to then do it for you with its radiant damage, because that's the thing. That's the thing that takes in hibs more often than anything is that explosion of damage when you dunk the prime buff. Yeah. Yeah. The game's about getting enough kills to take an objective and then that's it. That's what the game is. And it pisses me off when people are like pinging like, oh, defend right lane. They're like, I'll give fuck about that tower. I'll give fuck about those minions. Like they're going to stop like come to this team fight so that we can kill three of them and then grab prime. You know, yeah, there's not an active person pushing a lane. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Not really. Yeah. And I would say even even then only a few of the champions can really threaten to do more than just get a wave pushed up to an in hip and then, you know, actually do some damage. And so from that perspective, yeah, again, it's just like, OK, it starts to feel I don't know how much you guys play to this, but it starts to feel sometimes like heroes of the storm where you end up just five manning as a mob running around and trying to, you know, eke out advantages doing side games. You know, whether that's at the the coin to turn black buff or, you know, trying to do the prime. And those between those two, you know, neutral objectives, that's where a lot of the team fighting ends up taking place. And you can maybe eke out an advantage, but it's usually not a very lasting one. And I also think not to change the subject too much, but you guys mentioned itemization. I won. I like most of the items and the way that they function in the game currently. I do think the items themselves are good items. I do think that there should be some more of them. Like there's very few tank shredding items. So if you are a tanky character and you build a lot of health and a lot of armor and magic resist, you're very, very, very hard to kill for most of the characters. So from that perspective, it's, you know, yes, they need to do a lot more from from an itemization standpoint. The thing I noticed while doing some testing for figuring out like, you know, gold revenue, and I spent like probably three hours doing this yesterday, trying to figure out itemizations. It takes a lot. And I mean, a lot of gold to be able to get to three or four items. And unless you're the jungler who has consistent farm, if the enemy jungler is on stealing your farm, like a jelly knees does, it's really, really difficult. It's no, I mean, stealing the other jungler's farm, not you stealing. No, no, no, it's fine. Not that you don't do that. It's cool when I'm twenty two kills and zero, you know, I could take whatever I want. Thank you very much. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, that's that's true. He'll sometimes he'll come in, do a gank. And then you'll be like, oh, by the way, I'm taking your side buff because I need the mana. Oh, OK. Fair enough. Do your thing, jelly knees. But yeah, no. But with that, like, you know, it does take a lot of gold to be able to get to what I would consider, you know, relatively powerful with the items that they have. So there's I think there's a couple of things, either they need to increase the gold that you generate from from the minions, or you need to lower some of the prices of the items themselves to make it to where because I think if items became a bigger issue for more of the characters, because minions aren't a good consistent source. If the begin when you talked about the wave management, if you somehow got a wave pushed up and it's just frozen now just outside of their inhibitor between the first turret and Enhib, it's really difficult for an AD carry, for example, to walk up there to try and get additional farm. So what ends up happening, the AD carry needs to go somewhere where they have a wave pushed up into you. And but that's also usually the mid lane and there's tends to be three or four people there. And it's like, you know, so you start splitting gold, splitting XP, and it becomes a very difficult, again, unless you're a jungler to consistently get farm and consistently get your items to where you can make a meaningful impact on the game. If I look at damage charts, a lot of times it's usually one or two characters that's just really high gold and really high damage. Everybody else is kind of very low at the bottom. And that's to me because they just didn't get enough resources to be relevant in the game. And so I think if they, again, fixed either the items costs or the gold that you would get for minions or fixed minions in general, you might be able to get like those more consistent, you know, 30 to 40 minute games, you know, if things are kind of even or going back and forth at a good pace or those 20 minute games where you just stomp the crap out of them because you played the game better. Mm hmm. Yeah, 100 percent. Let's move on. Now, we already talked about the balance patch on the Darbash edition. They've been releasing their Hall of Fame, which is like the top 100 MMR Elo, whatever. I'm I'm happy that they haven't made it to where everybody can look up their MMR and Elo because I think that was a huge mistake that Fault made and I kind of don't like that they're doing the top 100 either. But it has generated a lot of interest in the game. Like people see that and they're like, well, where's mine? That then they start looking into it. Like, where am I at? We're also thought it was freaking hilarious that the last Hall of Fame, like 85 through 90, we're all porn stars, which cracked me up so bad. You know, that was a five man. You know, that was a five man. I'm looking like Heather Brooke. What? That was like Riley Reed, Sasha, what? Yeah, it was pretty funny. So what do you guys think of this Hall of Fame posting mid CBT? I mean, when the first one went up, I 100% was on there looking for my name. I was like, I've played enough games and I've won enough of them. Like, where am I? I'm on here somewhere, right? And as I got further and further down the list, I'm like, I'm not this far down, am I? Like, I'm not 99 am I? Not even on the list. So it feels even worse. But I think, I think you hit the nail on the head, Mangers. I think it's good that they didn't announce it to everybody. Like, go check where you fall because that turned fault super, super, super competitive overnight. But I think it's cool that they're kind of having like a leaderboard of sorts to keep things interesting. And they're updating it consistently to see where people have shifted in that leaderboard. I didn't even know there was a leaderboard to be honest. So now I want to know where I'm at, if I'm at on the list. Wait, would I have gotten a notification if I was? You would have gotten a notification and no, you're not on it. I'm going to tell you that right now. Dang it. What's your name is a porn starring game? No, apparently. It's not. All right. They wouldn't let me have my name. The other thing they've been doing, which I fucking love is they've been releasing a list of banned players for both toxicity and hacks. 100 percent love it. A lot of companies are too afraid to do this because they don't want they don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Apparently, this is fairly common for Eastern companies to do this. It's great Viking, go ahead. What do you what do you think of this stuff? I'm a huge, huge fan of it. The only bummer I will say is that you get like I've seen already a few what I would consider repeat names. It you know, it's Hacker 101, Hacker 102, Hacker 103. So it's obviously the same guy or maybe a group of people that are, you know, getting on there. But to me, even if it's you still are finding, you know, hackers in the game or people who are using exploits or whatever, it's as a player, it's at least encouraging to see that there's some proactivity in that regard. And you get a real sense like, hey, we are taking this serious and we are in a play test, taking it serious. Like it would be really easy. And I know what's happened before with other play tests of similar in similar genres where they're just like, it's not our main focus right now. Please let us know that it's happening so we can try and address it later. But, you know, more than anything, they were just happy to have players that didn't care. And in this case, it seems like, well, we want players who are playing our game and using it for, you know, an opportunity to grow and learn and do all those things. And that's super encouraging. I think it's great. And I know it's, you know, a lot of eastern game companies do do this, but, you know, this is at this point is being, you know, projected to a Western audience. And I think at least for me, it's super encouraging to see those kinds of things. I love it. I want more. I want to know more about it. I want actually ways, if anything, hey, if you see this kinds of stuff, they might be using these types of hacks, report it, take a screenshot, you know, something. Because at least then, that way, you're having a proactive community. Because in like, for example, I'm gonna use League of Legends again. They tell you, yeah, please report hackers, but it's so hard to tell, like, you know, is this guy scripting or is he just really good? Is this guy doing this or is he just really good? And so you start questioning yourself and if you're questioning yourself, you might not report it. Or you're reporting it and saying, you know what, Riot, you figure it out. Or, you know, hey, Game Company, hey, you figure it out. I'm just gonna report this guy because he kicked my butt in lane, blah, blah, blah. And I just, you know, that's not a good, that's not, it's not, it's very toxic feeling. And I think right now, this just feels like, hey, these guys are at least on it. And I would like to know more about what it is I can do as a community member to assist, you know. And I've seen, so there's another game in Naracah Blade Points, it's a Battle Royale that's again made by an Eastern company but is decently popular here in the West. Something they did that's interesting with bands is if you report a player that was found hacking, they actually give you a cosmetic or your in-game character that you can use. That is, you only can get if you reported an actual cheater. That's actually pretty cool. That is such a cool idea to incentivize reporting bad play, like actual cheaters, right? Because false reports are gonna happen no matter what. So whatever. But instead of your players feeling like, well, what's the point in reporting this person? They're just gonna go make a new account. They're just gonna do, actually incentivize a normal player, law-abiding player, for lack of a better way to put it, to do it by giving them a cool cosmetic. Not even like, you get purple, right? It was like a golden bow or something. I was like, yes, I want that thing. Where do you report everybody, right? Like go down the line. But I think that's a cool idea. And it's among the similar vein of like confirmation that your report went through and actually led to something happening and seeing a list of basically a public hanging of these people saying like, you all are you, you're all bad people, right? Like it's, I think it's a really cool idea and I wish more people would do it. Yeah. Stunt was telling us in Discord, he was telling us that this guy was really toxic and using racial slurs and just like the whole nine yards. And it wasn't maybe two hours later, the list comes out and that guy that Stunt was talking about was on the list. It's really nice. A lot of people that are like, oh, the report doesn't do anything. The report doesn't do anything. This shows you that it does. That it does do something. And by the way, I don't know if you guys have seen anybody hacking yet, but it's pretty freaking obvious when somebody's hacking. It's... Your video is perfect. I was just gonna say, I haven't seen anybody in any of my games. I've definitely seen some like questionable stuff, but I'm also, again, I'm an old school mobile player at this point. I feel like, and so I'm always like, maybe that guy's just really good at using their character. But man, he was really hitting every shot. It was really kind of good, but no, the guy full on like... Lasers and... You're gonna get him in there. And I still stand by, I think it would be really cool to see a mage or an AP-80 carry that looked like a mage sitting there shooting out lasers. I just thought that that was a, not in an overpowered way, but balanced, similar to the Colts, super shots where he blasts off like, you know, four burst shot or something like that. But I think it would be fun to see like a mage that's like more of like a shotgun mage or something like that that's out there getting in people's faces and pew-pewing at them. Yeah, it was pretty funny. Yeah. Something I do wanna point out that wasn't on your list, Mangus, but I just thought about it is the comparison from players from their first to their last one. The last test. Yeah, that's a good one, because a lot of people, yeah, then go ahead and check it. So their last test, they had an all-time peak of 5,700, and I think it was 5,701 was their all-time peak in players. Their first day, they tripled that all-time peak, which I think is incredible, like amazing for them to see that three times the amount of players got on at one moment to play their game on the first day that it came out. And it was a Thursday for us, no less, right? So that's a weird day to have your peak go up, right? I mean, I can point to one big difference as to why that might be. I logged in this time. Oh, yeah. Everybody just wanted to play with Blacking Jetta. They were like, I love Vikings, I love Jettas. Let me play with this guy. I wasn't there for the first one, so, you know, the numbers were a little down. I apologize, but I hear this time, you know, bringing in the player base. No, but it is really cool. Yeah, I mean, that's huge to see for them. And I can't wait to see after the test what their numbers are for accounts created and players that logged in throughout the whole thing because they've had a slight decline throughout of actual concurrent players at all times. But that initial peak or that initial hit of the game coming out, right? You're always gonna have slight variations of that after the fact. And even after the dropping, like of course they dropped off after that first one, but their peaks afterwards, like days after it released, were higher than their original numbers. Yeah, no, they do a really, really good job of keeping players engaged. I think releasing a hero halfway through was a great way to bring people back this weekend. Especially in our bash. Yeah, because that was a big person for a lot of people. Yeah, he's a huge fan favorite, I think. And they just needed the support too. Well, and a tanky tanky, CC heavy mage type support, like he kind of has the whole package, right? And so I think good on them for sure. Like they've done a good job this time around keeping people engaged, getting more players involved, the whole nine. Yeah. Are you guys ready to move on to Predecessor? Yeah, these are. All right. So Predecessor's big news this week was they released a roadmap to Early Access, which detailed a list of stuff that they want to do prior to Early Access. And there was, I wouldn't say there was anything new on it. The only thing new is that we now know that they are creating their own brand new hero. So there's nothing really new here, but it was nice to kind of see them do it as a roadmap. It's all stuff that we knew that they were working on, but yeah, you guys had stronger opinions about this than I did, I think. Jelly, why don't you kick it off? I mean, so the big thing that they start with on their post is their revamped UI. They go over the roadmap in general, but then when they break down each thing, they go through the revamped UI. This, I can't, not gonna lie, it is better than what they had in their last test, but in my opinion, marginally so, right? That it's, they got rid of like 5% of the things that were the problem in their last UI, and then we're like, see, look, it's better. And I understand it's work in progress. I understand this was probably done very quickly since their last test because it was not that long ago, right? But I feel like there's significant improvement that can still be had on this UI that I hope to see for them going forward. There are a lot of little details in there that like they're throwing in there as a way to keep people on the hook. Mangus, you and I talked about several times in the past of predecessor putting out content, but it's not, it doesn't mean anything, right? It's information, like you said, nothing new that we didn't know was coming already, right? Other than that they're working on their own characters, which really was an assumption to begin with, because they have to at some point, right? So it was just a matter of when, not a matter of if. And the biggest thing is they don't give any time frames. They don't give any estimate of anything. And when predecessor went dark for eight months already, and then they kind of like, here's an update, and then potentially go dark again for who knows how long. It's just this weird, like uneasy feeling for me looking at a lot of this information. Yeah, I think, it is, I don't want to put out exact dates, but I would like to know a ballpark at least, because they are an established company with a lot of fucking money now, like, I'm willing to cut some slack to somebody that's, like what predecessor started as, which was just straight up really small and independent developer. Like I don't expect shit out of that. I would expect some kind of timeline out of this, like is this by the end of the year? Like just at least something like that. Super general would have been fine. Yeah. That's not even here. Yeah. It just feels odd. Well, I mean, they talked about console, which they've been developing for console. We knew they were developed for console, but it's nice for them to reiterate that they are, because that's like people's main concern. MMR, player onboarding, the camera field of view, which is something I kind of complained about a little bit. Projectiles, which I didn't have a problem with myself. And the new heroes, it's supposed to be a vampire hunter. I think it's just Vala from Heroes in the Storm actually, because it's just like a little handheld crossbow. That's what Vala does. She's a vampire hunter with two handheld crossbows, well, a demon hunter with two handheld crossbows. So maybe we'll just get Vala. Yeah, I'm cool with that. I love that. I love that. And Diablo III, that was my favorite, that was my favorite was the demon hunter class. Very fun class for sure. So what did you think about this predecessor roadmap, Viking Jedi? Okay, so I want to give a little bit of context. So I'm brand new to predecessor. I've not really been a big follower of theirs or anything like that. So when I obviously knew that we were going to be talking about it, I wanted to at least do my due diligence of reading up on it, see what's going on. And so from my fresh new person's perspective of looking at their website in this road to early access, it was, I was confused a lot, to be honest. I mean, I'll touch a little bit on this. The spelling and grammar errors are rampant, you know? So that was odd to read in general. But when I, and some of the stuff was fine, like, oh, we're gonna do a UI overhaul. We've got new heroes. We're coming to console items. You know, we want to work on items. Like all those things like buzzwords, they sound fine. Like, hey, we're working on an MMR. Cool, love that, absolutely. I want the camera adjustments. Sweet, not sure what the cameras were before that, but if there was a problem, I'm glad you're fixing it. But as they start going into like the things that they are working on, like the biggest one for me that stands out is that they said that the UI is the heaviest part of their game. And I'm just, I'm not a programmer. And so maybe I'm wrong and somebody in the comments can tell me that I'm dumb and I don't know what I'm talking about. But it just seems odd in a third-person video game that the heaviest part of your game is the part that for the most part stays stagnant. It shouldn't really be that complicated. So it just seemed weird to hear that. Maybe I misunderstood and again, someone in the comments can tell me I'm dumb and that I don't know what I'm talking about. And I'll, I'll read it. Oh, they will. You're talking bad about predecessor. They'll tell you. So again, I haven't played the game. I'm just fresh looking at it. It just seemed, it just seemed a little odd from that perspective. The one thing I will touch on is projectiles. I, so in some of the other ones, so like fault, I'm not a fan of the way that the projectiles felt in fault. So if predecessor had some, they just felt weird. Like didn't the speed of them like didn't always match like the visual. I know they've updated a lot of that stuff in fault. So if fault guys don't come after me, I know that they've updated that and it's probably gotten better. But initially that was something that felt weird. It looked like, you know, you had like a laser going but then the shot would hit or sometimes vice versa. It looked like the laser hit but it didn't register a number. And so you kind of always, and I have noticed this in over prime sometimes too, you'll put out a shot and the thing doesn't quite go off. And you're like, wait, am I actually doing damage or am I not? And that's obviously in a game where landing your, your, your skill shots or landing your autos is a big part of your success in the game. Having the projectiles not match your expectations for I did, you know, oh, a good one is Gideon sometimes when you do his arm throw for it just looks like you got this, I'm gonna do it. And then it goes, it doesn't feel, you know, like I pressed button, do thing. It doesn't, it doesn't feel that way. And so if that was something that they found as a problem in predecessor is that it didn't always feel like it should when you did the things, it is encouraging at least that they addressed it. And that's the other part I'll leave off on is a new person looking at their thing in this road to early access, at least they're aware of it. That's encouraging for anybody who maybe wants to get into the game or if you are already a fan of the game that they are aware of their issues. They are aware of the things that at least ones that they're talking about in this and they're making active, not very well written but active, you know, attempts to address those concerns. And so at least, at least from that perspective it is encouraging to saying like, hey, because there's lots of game companies out there that are just like, no, our game's fine. You know, field of vision is fine. You know, this is fine. This is fine. We're not worried about console. We're not worried about this. We don't need the new UI. It was, it cost us, you know, $200 million to do this UI. We're not changing it. At least they're saying like, hey, you know what, we heard your feedback. We're going to make it, you know, efforts. It would be encouraging, obviously, to either get like an idea of, you know, hey, we're gonna, after this, you know, chunk of, you know, fixes, we're gonna do another, you know, play test or we're gonna do, you know, or we're shooting for, you know, quarter four in 2020 or God, 2023 or whatever it is, still feels like it's 2020, man. This pandemic is just totally messed with my timing. But you know what I mean? That would have been encouraging too. But again, at least from a new person's perspective, somebody who's not into the game, at least it looks like, you know, they're trying to do something. But again, I did watch some videos on like gameplay. The game looks cool. Some of the abilities are super neat and interesting. It looks like it has an opportunity to be, again, you know, a competitive environment, which I think when you're playing a MOBA, that's what you want. You want it to feel like you have onus and have an opportunity to show skill expression. So all of those things there, the basics for what makes a good game and a competitive game available to your players, I think is there. And obviously it sounds like they've got a lot of fine tuning to do to kind of get the rest of it there, but they're saying that they're gonna try and do that. So hopefully it becomes a success. I hope that answers your question. It does. Well, predecessor I think has the most potential to be the one that I will play, like hardcore for the most part. Like they, I've always been a huge fan of made of studios and predecessor itself, but as time has gone on, I have lost a little bit of faith in both the company and the game, but it is nice to see this roadmap at least to know that they're working on some of the stuff that a lot of us had complaints about. And the new heroes too, like some people looked at like really deep into some stuff. It looks like Aurora and Mora Gash might be coming really soon. And like Aurora especially is just a huge fan favorite that would be really nice to see in any of these games. Mora Gash can go fuck herself, even though she's my main at fault, but. Oh, speaking of fault projectiles, I meant to say while you were talking about that, something really off-putting that I just discovered at fault like a couple of weeks ago, Sparrow when she basic attacks, the sound of the arrow hitting the minion comes before the sound of her like bow releasing. So she'll be in the lane like, but then when she's attacking minions like, crack, crack, crack, it was like, what the? Really? I remember actually speaking of Sparrow in fault. I remember, and I'm curious because I haven't played it in a while, but I'm curious if it, and you could tell me is when she would do her attacks, her whole upper body wouldn't move. And it would just look like this weird like glitchy arm moving the bow string back and sending out autos or your spells. And when you would take her to run around and she's all like super stiff like this the whole time and like you would try to do, and it just looked like just no normal person would, I mean, even if you are strong enough to consistently keep the bow, you know, pulled back like they show in all of these games, like even in Over Prime, she has the bow cocked the whole time. Like, I mean, your arms must be getting tired, dude. Yeah, but a magical string, come on. Seriously, but at least in Over Prime, like her animation is fairly fluid and it matches her attack speed, by the way, I tested this, like as you get her ramped up in her attack speed, hey, I think that's important. It should look like, you know, when I'm pressing buttons, it should look like I'm pressing them really quickly. And hers did match, which was a nice quality of life thing again, from a graphical standpoint. But yeah, it was funny and fault. She just looked like a stiff person, just like this over and over. I don't know if that's still the case, but it was. Yeah, but the sound and projectiles should be very fluid. You want your players to feel like they're actually doing stuff. Speaking of fault, you guys ready to move on to fault? Let's do it. Not many updates for fault. They just released a list of the top Gideons by Experience. Fault tends to go fairly quiet whenever any of the other games are doing anything major, which is smart. Like, why waste your time on marketing when everybody cares about Over Prime right now? Like, nobody gives a shit about fault. But this was, I don't know, it was a fun thing to release. The thing that got me is like, was it Seven Heaven, 7-Eleven? Seven Heaven, is that his name? The top Gideon? I've faced that guy in lane. Like, that's not fair. I shouldn't be up against that guy in lane. Now they just gotta put out the top Morgash and see Mangus at the top and then it'll be fine. I'm definitely not the top Morgash, but. Well, if you're the only one playing, then maybe you are. I don't know, there's plenty of people playing Morgash. And then after my video, there's plenty of people playing T-Og Morgash too, which is kind of fun to see. Everybody's zooming around the map. Yeah, I completely agree with you, Mangus. I think this was a cool thing to have. It was kind of out of the blue for them because they've never done anything like this before. And I think Gideon was a weird choice potentially of the first one to do. Maybe they looked at who's got the highest play rate of our current player base and just use that one. But okay, it's a good thing to keep information going out. Keep posting something that they have, whatever it is, 22 characters now that they can go through and for each one, now they have 22 posts of this same type. Yeah. Anybody, you guys got anything else? Fault? Nope. All right, let's talk about ethereal a little bit. Viking Jedi, did you play ethereal? I don't remember. I did, yeah, so I was part of the play test team for a little bit as a tester. Okay, right one. Yeah. So what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on ethereal? Oh, boy. Don't be afraid to offend Jelly, and he's just go for it. No, he's not. Me and Jelly have actually talked in length about this. And so despite efforts, I think that the... So when... I won't talk about my time actually in the testing environment because I don't think that would be professional. But what I will say about the actual gameplay is that there are moments in the game that feel super cool. Like, you know, there's something... Just from a cinematic standpoint, some of the way that the characters move and stuff like that, like, you know, lying in and some of those things are just... I hadn't really seen anything like that in a, quote unquote, paragon spin-off. The only thing you have kind of as a reference point for that would be in Smite, you know, whether that's like, you know, I don't know how much Smite you guys play, but when you see Thor go up in the air and then he comes crashing down, that's a pretty cool thing to see. Like, oh, man, that was pretty, you know. And so seeing, you know, in this environment, seeing some of those, you know, dramatic moments happening and being useful in game. Like, it wasn't just like, hey, this is a cool ability that does nothing for you in game, but it looks really cool to take a screenshot or whatever. You know, it does actually have value. I like that. I am not a fan of the map. I don't like the idea of the three lanes being completely split off from each other and you have to like, either jump down or take portals or something like that. That just, it made it, when I was playing, it made it feel like I'm a lot of times on my own island. I didn't feel like I was connected. I didn't know what my jungler was doing. I didn't know what my offlaners were doing. And even with communication where we're all in comms, it still didn't feel like it was as fluid as I would expect in a MOBA where you need to be successful at a MOBA. You need to have communication. Like, hey, I'm in this area and I'm coming in to do this thing. A lot of times was like, hey, Viking, I'm coming into your lane, you know, do some CC or something to, you know, I'm like, oh, okay. I also don't like that the pace at which things would get changed were very times felt disconnected from what the game itself needed. You know, there were certain times in the test where there's a known overpowered items or a combination of items and people would just abuse them in lane and just, well, that feels bad to go up against unless I'm also trying that. So the idea of like branching out from what the playtest has determined is the OP build. It does, it's not a feels good moment. Stuff like that. So it was, graphically, it was fine. It looked good. And I think a lot of these ones that are using the old Paragon assets are already working with what I would have considered pretty good graphics anyway. Like, you know, a lot of the unique assets that come with Paragon was why Paragon was, I think, fairly successful in the first place. People liked the aesthetic of it. It wasn't cartoony like a lot of the other ones are. It felt, you know, real, it felt visceral. You could feel like your connection to the characters. And I still think that's present in ethereal. I just felt like a lot of times that the direction at which the main people on the ground and the people that were, you know, making changes and the communication process would have a lot of breakdown. And it was, it felt, you could feel it in game. And that's why I bring it up. Cause you could feel the disconnect with things in game. And that's just, again, my personal take. I mean, obviously other people will have their own opinions on it. But there was also the, and I'm sorry if I'm talking too long, but there was also like, you know, the minion aggro was another issue in that one. You could set up a huge massive push and it do nothing. It could feel just like somebody will come into the lane, clear all the minions, super easy. And it's like, okay, well, I just spent like five minutes getting a cool push and here comes jelly knees. Just gonna, in two button presses, just wipe out all my hard work of pushing up this lane. Okay, cool. Thanks. Yeah. So it's for Talos. Exactly. So those are, again, in my limited time that I got to, and I was happy to be part of it, by the way. It was a lot of cool experiences. The people there, most of the like 99% of them are very nice. They're very passionate people. They're all trying in their own way and from my perspective to make a good game. You know, it just seems like sometimes it's, you know, directionless. There's no Sergeant giving orders. You know, it's like multiple Sergeants giving three private orders. And I felt like sometimes that would create issues, especially for the privates who are like, wait, which Sergeant do I listen to? Or which Sergeant's actually making decisions here? So it would muddy the waters in game. You could feel the disconnect from what felt good. Does that make sense? I hope I explained that well. Makes sense to me, yeah. Yeah. We're both military, so. That's true. It's true. Yeah, I actually kind of like the feeling of each lane being its own individual little world that I'm in. But I mean, it's nobody's ever going to create a game that 100% caters to what you want. But of course. So I kind of like that about ethereal. But yeah, Joe, you have anything to say about ethereal before we start wrapping it up? Not directly. OK, right on. Well, let's move on to plugs. Let's start with Viking Jetta. You got anything to plug? YouTube, Twitch, whatever. No, not really. I mean, I do have a YouTube and I do have a Twitch, but I very rarely go live. And I haven't uploaded a YouTube video in I think a year. But if I do get to be a counterpart to more content like this and doing more things involving whether that's MOBA styles or other stuff, it's more fun when you have friends, you know what I mean? And other people who are in my interests to do this kind of stuff. So yeah, I would be totally down to start creating more content. But more than anything, I'm just happy to be part of the group and have my opinions heard and feel like it matters. Well, here's my idea. And I read this past you a little bit, but I've compounded it. I've expounded on it. Oh, OK. Viking and I are both kind of at home a lot because we're both disabled veterans. But wait, so what you're saying is both of you are at home waiting for me to get home every day so we can play games. Yeah, pretty much pretty much. I know that that's what's happening. I didn't say that. So my idea is we go to like both Steam and Epic Games and they have like a bunch of free games that are co-op. I said we play these free games that are co-op and then give let people know, give a review of these free games. So because anybody could play a free game, right? You don't have to pay for it. I think that would be a fun thing to do. Like we could stream us playing it on your channel and then we could record a little podcast and post the video on my channel to be a good time. I'm totally down. I'm always down to play more games, even if they're free games that are garbage. As long as they're not like, you know, like, you know, boyfriend simulator, 3,000 or something like that, you know. Oh, I think there's the first choice. I was going to say, what? No. That's the content I want to see. Yeah, exactly. Two vets playing boyfriend simulator, 3,000. That sounds like the greatest time of my life. Actually, if you know what that probably would be really good content. So I take that back. You know what? That's the first one we'll get right on. We don't even know if this game exists. And no, we don't. Although I did not to go too far off. I did watch Asmongold and play e-girl simulator or whatever it's called. It was so hilarious. It was not what I expected Asmongold of all people to play, but here we are. It's 2022, you know, things happen. Jelenees, what do you got to plug? Just you and I, Mangus, going to be doing some casting for the tournament going on for overprime, starting tomorrow as of when this comes out. Yeah, it should be super fun. I'm super jazzed for it, man. Yeah, I think it all week. I've been like driving the car. I've been like, oh, when it goes over, like casting to myself about fake scenarios going on. So it's going to be so hard to use their overprime names, though. It's going to be so hard. I got you. Don't worry. I've got it. I've been trying for all week. OK, good. As a viewer, I mean, obviously, so those of you guys who don't know, the three of us typically are grouping up with another friend of ours, Convay, to play the game. I was hoping that we would put together a group to compete in the tournament, but then they both came out and they said that they're going to be casting it. So I was a little heartbroken that I couldn't get a chance to flex our skills in the tournament. But I am so amped to see this game played at a quote unquote competitive level, right? Seeing people who are organizing teams, hopefully, you know, taking it serious, you know, maybe putting in extra hours, working on strategies and what they come up with. But I do have a question for you two. Who's going to be the color commentator and who's going to be the play by play? Oh, we know man goose is the color. There's no question about that. I mean, man goose and I talked about it in my head. I was already like, and he's color and I'll do the rest. I love it. And where were we going to be able to see that at? What channel am I tuning in to be able to make fun of you guys? Well, also, you know, enjoying some competitive overprime. So that'll be twitch.tv slash jelly knees. And then I theoretically man goose, I think you're probably going to put a vod or something up on your channel or something up. But yeah, if you want to watch it live, it's going to be a jelly knees channel. Yeah, what about that? Do we know any details as far as like how many games the players are playing? Is there like a best of three? Is it a best of one kind of tournament? 16 teams, single elimination. So it should be fairly short. So we are like three hours, which is very good. There's no prideful. It's just it's just for fun with the last overprime tournament that they did before they pulled down the servers. But they had games that went ridiculously long. I hope that's not the case of some. I do think and I know we touched on a lot and I want to go back to it necessarily. I do think there are opportunities for organized teams to end games efficiently. The hard part is in the pickup game environment where you don't always have a reliable team member or somebody who's brand new and doesn't know. And the ping system, while I think is pretty good overall, doesn't always convey exactly what you're trying to get across to somebody who's not in comms with you. I do feel like right now, most of these types of games are always going to feel better if you're in comms with people that you're playing with. But yeah, so it'll be interesting to see if these organized teams are able to actually close games out. And I would consider a normal game time of like 30 to 40 minutes if it's going back and forth. But so I'm excited from that perspective at least. And hopefully that gives the dev team a lot to work off of like, hey, in this competitive environment, we're still getting our plus long games. We've got to figure out a better way to get our players having onus to end games. This one big team fight led to the ending push. That should be there because that's what makes these types of games super fun, and especially from a competitive standpoint. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Bangus, what about you? What do you got to plug, my friend? Nothing. That's going to wrap it up for this week. I know what you have to plug. Your new headset. Show it off for everybody because it won't last long. It's not going to last long. I break my headsets so fast unless it's that cheap shitty one that has survived for fucking like eight years now. But anyway. If you're a true fan of For The Minions, you've seen like five or six headsets at this point through the lifespan of like 80 episodes in a life. So it's really not that long. But that is going to wrap it up this week. Thank you all for coming out and viewing. We really appreciate it, but this is the For The Minions crew signing off. You guys, have a good one. And man goes special shout out to channel members. I bloodhunter jelly knees. Meow mix for men's stunt. Raven and Blastoise King.