 Hello everyone and welcome back to Four of the Minions, the weekly podcast where we talk about the various third person mobas out there. What we're going to do is talk about the updates for each one, I'll have those timestamped in a pinned comment in the description below, then we'll talk about the poll results for the most popular game out there right now, and then we'll move on to our topic of discussion which is the pros and cons of being first. I'm your host theMangus joining me as always is my friend and co-host Jelly Knees, Jelly how you doing? I'm doing fantastic Mangus, happy to be here for another Four of the Minions, and with us we've got the bearded Wolverine, welcome bearded. Hey, thank you guys, thank you, I love the fact that I'm here, so. And we love the fact that you're here too. Explain to us like where you're coming from in terms of like the Paragon, how you started playing Paragon, what your character was, Lane, all that good stuff. So I ended up getting a PlayStation 4 when I was in the Navy, and when I got it, it came with Uncharted 4, but I never played Uncharted 3. So I'm the guy that I had to do things in order, I played Uncharted 1 and 2, and it didn't have the money to get Uncharted 3 yet, so I needed a game. So I was like, well, I'll get in the PlayStation Store, I'll get a demo that I can just mess with here and there, because it's the PlayStation 4, it's, you know, I want to see this cool graphics, you know? So I was going through and I saw a full game, and I'm like, what? So I clicked on it and then I watched this preview, and I'm like looking, I saw this big orange guy jump in the air, like, what the fuck's going on? I'm like, what is this? I'm like, this looks pretty fucking badass. And it was a Kool-Aid commercial. It's free. What is with you and Kool-Aid references? Oh, yeah. Big orange guy. Go ahead, beard. Sorry. Sorry for interrupting you. You're good. You're good. No. So I downloaded it, and then I started playing it, and saw this badass Murdoch looking guy. Let's jump on him, and I realized that towers hurt, so, you know, it took me a long time to realize that. I never put a ward down. I don't know. I think, I should go look at FaultMat, FaultMatress, Paragon, that was agorad.gg, and see if I can find a stat and see any wards I actually placed, because I probably, I could probably count on my one hand, maybe, maybe two, how many wards I placed, because I didn't know what a mobile was. I literally had no clue that I was playing, what I was playing. So I'm one of the very few that actually preferred version 42, because of the card system, made it easier for somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. They can just focus on the actual game and trying to help the team with the objectives. They're not worried about going to the item shop, like, okay, what do I build here? You know? So I enjoyed it, but it gave me the ability to see the game and understand the game and realize what I do enjoy as a MOBA. That's where it all started. I think that story matches quite a few people, like if it's a free game and it looked gorgeous and it's like, well, I'm going to play this, even though I've never played a MOBA before and then this is how people got hooked on MOBAs. So let's move one here down to the news and updates for Predecessor, sorry, but we got nothing this week. There was nothing at all coming out of Predecessor. So hopefully, hopefully they got their heads down working on something or other. Wolverine, you're the guest. What do you think of Predecessor? I like Predecessor. They get a really smooth game. It feels great. You know, when you join the game, you're running around, playing everything, motion, the anim, ability, sorry, motion, everything feels great. When they first, I first played it, their time to kill was way too fast. Like, it literally was just death ball. Like, it wasn't even a MOBA. Literally was just, hey, everybody just go and then we're just going to shove lanes. And like, there's no laning phase at all. This last stress test, I got to play a couple of them. I was thankfully they brought me in for the little creator, you know, content they did so I could do some recordings and put some content up for them that way. I had played some games there. It's definitely feeling better. There's definitely more of a laning phase. It's getting there. So I think that's more balancing needs to be done. But I think they definitely got a game there for sure to come out once they finally get ready and figure out their server issues because that stress test was pretty bad. Jelly, any thoughts on the processor this week? I mean, if Omeda wants to reach out to us and give us something to talk about, I think we'll be open to that. Yes, let's go. I'm sorry, not Omeda. Oh, MEDA. Oh, MEDA studios. Man, I miss the days, the early FTM days where my process was to just contact Smokey, like I would just contact Smokey personally, have a chat with him. Maybe we play some Hearthstone or something, bullshit around a bit. And I'd be like, Hey, man, you got any, you got any updates for this week? Can't do that anymore. You got to grease the palms there. You got to get serious business now. They're a serious business. I can't contact the creator directly anymore. I got to get to marketing. I mean, you know, don't start at Steve, start at Smokey. Go to Steve Super, he's lower than he's lower than start to Smokey. You got to work your way up the ladder now. All right, I'll do that. I'll do that. Speaking of famous predecessor people, I firmly blame that that fast TTK, especially with ADCs. I blame that on RGSAs, I think. Because yeah, Ace was an ADC man. He was like, was he an ADC man? Yeah, he's like, he's got to got to hit hard as fuck early game. I think I blame that shit on him. I thought I saw stuff about him being a seven rock guy or whatever. But no, I also did a lot of rate ADC, too. OK, I didn't follow a lot of the content creators. I started, you know, with some of the smaller ones are trying to find builds and not even know it. Because when I watched YouTube, you know, at a younger me age, Paragon, a me age, I was just trying to find builds. I wasn't doing the whole subscribing. I wasn't doing the liking. I wasn't doing the comedy. I didn't understand the algorithm. I didn't. To me, that's just somebody giving me content. Thank you, you know, but I was, you know, just taking it for free. You know, like wasn't giving any of the sport to it besides the view. So I know I've seen some of those, you know, people do that, but I wasn't paying attention to who it was. So maybe I did watch, you know, an Ace video, but I didn't know if it was who it was. I was watching then. So I had no clue who was the big guys or the these content creators until after Paragon fell. And I started following people like man goose and British and, you know, the other ones just kind of like, Hey, here's the updates, you know, the four of the minions was huge because, you know, Phoenix rising, you know, like was huge, you know, coming out and sad RIP. But yeah, well, the views are good enough. But for you guys watching out there, if you want to hit that like button, subscribe and leave a comment. You're most certainly welcome to do so. Let's move on now to a to ethereal jelly. You sandbagged on us. You knew this was coming. I mean, I got to do something. I know you can't. People to go watch the community corner. I knew stuff was coming. But yeah, so we they had their community corner last week. Skifter and I were both the hosts of that went through a bunch of changes, a new myth and also announced the stress test that's happening on November 20th, which is a Saturday. So all people have to do is just sign up for their newsletter on the website. If you click register on the top right of the website, it takes you to where you need to be to sign up for a stress test, which is super exciting. And then on Saturday, we've got the two of you and a bunch of other creators all doing the extra life stream for charity, which will be great, too. Magus, that that newsletter, you're signed up for. How how is that? You've read a few of them, right? I've read zero of them. I watched the last end of the ether. I remember you bringing it up because I don't know. I don't ever check my emails. You're like, do you have a newsletter? I signed up for it, but I don't check my email. One of you and I are a good team. I send the emails. He doesn't read them. It's fine. I support their Patreon, but Jelly has to like hit me up and be like, hey, did you see this on Patreon this week? Like, no, I haven't checked it yet. Like, I'm paying for this, but I'm just going to ignore it. I got to make sure someone reads my post. OK. There's plenty of people who read them just not. Yeah. Yeah. Shad's definitely one of them. I can guarantee it. Oh, absolutely. Let me make them like four times. He's got a bunch of different accounts that he reads. So, yeah, I mean, that's huge, huge news. Definitely. Finally getting the stress test for a theory. Oh, I don't know how many people are going to be able to play. Like you said, you guys are just going to go until the game breaks. So we don't have any idea how many people are going to be able to get in. But that is really good to see because people have doubted a theory for a very long time now and for a good reason. They've missed so many alpha dates, but we're finally getting something. And this is coming from Jelly. So I trust it. Right. No, trust it. And if I suddenly disappear, you know that something's gone wrong. Well, I mean, it says a lot to that. They must have a lot of confidence in their game, you know, because they're allowing, you know, me, man, goose and a few others, you know, to come in here and actually stream this game, you know, and actually put out, put it out there like anything could go wrong, but they're confident enough in their games that they're allowing us to do that. So that says a lot. It says that they were already prepared for it and they didn't announce it until they were prepared, which is something we've talked about a million times. I wonder where that came from. About each and every one of these companies. Yeah. No, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I'm excited for it. They're still coming from the testing. Right. We've been testing for five, six months at this point already that we've gone through and removed a lot, almost all of the game breaking stuff, the crashing, all of that kind of stuff. So now it's ready, kind of ready for that next step of getting people like content creators, getting people to do stress tests, like really push the game to its limits. And try out new off beta stuff because Jelly seems to think that Telos is not a support. And I think that he is. When did I ever say this? You made fun of me when I said I was gonna go Telos support. I make fun of you every day. Okay, that's true. You both have very credible comments there, but I was there. He said, Telos, you're like, what? Seriously? Don't give him a confirmation on this. I'm glad we brought bearded on. I'm sure you are. To settle our marital disputes. He's like the poor friend in the corner. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, Jelly and Mangu's bicker. Where are you going at this point? So yeah, register for the ethereal stress test. Finally get on Saturday, which is the next day after this post, I'm posting these on Fridays. Watch everybody playing because it's gonna be a blast. You get another taste for how ethereal is. And you get some other, because we're obviously Jelly and I are both ethereal fanboys. And I think, I think bearded is turning in the one as we go, but you're gonna see different creators and get their take on it. They may have a, they may be a little more critical of it. I know I'm certainly critical in my own right, but you know, the more the merrier, the more opinions you can get the better. And since the last gameplay that's been shown, there have been dozens of changes of things that people are going to see and realize that it's progressed in a long way since that last gameplay came out as well, right? And if you, if you do watch any of the streamers that are doing it, you know, put, put some feedback on it, what you think as a viewer of what it looks like, because that's just going to help, you know, undying games, you know, improve the game even more. So just commenting on that streamer, Hey, this is what I think so that streamer can then go back and report, you know, to the undying games, you know, team and let's say this is why I got a bunch of people in my, in my chat saying this, you know, and I'm sure that a bunch of you will probably be hanging out in some of those chats and you know, with the viewers as well, right? Yeah, absolutely. Should be, should be a good time. We're excited. I'm, I'll have fun no matter what. I'm going to have Talos as my support, so I'm good. As long as you have me on Malayo on your team, you'll have a great time, I'm sure. Yeah, yes, yes. I was on the other end of that. I don't want to be into that. I don't want to be into that. If you've got Jelly playing Malayo on your team, you're good. Otherwise, you're screwed. It's like super Calari Countess boy over there. So let's move on from ethereal. Let's talk about fault. Here's the thing with fault. I would not have known there were any updates whatsoever if it wasn't for bearded. So like if I was doing this on my own, I wouldn't have found any updates at all. Did you, did you see the update today? No, no, no. There's no update. They just announced the winner of, they announced the winner of the, you can see it on my screen, the Gideon skin. They know what happened. I don't know, four or three o'clock. I don't know. OK, it is on their Twitter post. Have you got a phone? Man, that's a little crunch in the nuts, especially if you won that skin and then you can't even use it. It was posted in their Discord from their Twitter bot or whatever. It is Twitter feed bot at 426 PM. So a guy named Thomas Hardy. Well, congratulations, Thomas Hardy, for getting a skin that you can't use. Wasn't that one of the Hardy boys? If you read, I think it was. I think it was. Is he actually the Hardy boy? Why aren't they using him to endorse the game? Yeah, shit. That's the marketing scheme. We just figured it out. There we go. That's marketing. Once 14 finally happens, we got it, guys. So, but that's not the only thing they they didn't announce it. They literally made a developer came in and made a pin message in Gen Chat and the message read, the mastery system is not going to be based off of how many games you played, but the experience system that is affected by match time and how you play how you played 30 matches is probably the average it'll take for a mastery as long as you are playing average or above average in most games. So that's going to be how you accumulate your master's skins. Yeah, exactly. Mangoes talk about your age that you're going to finally be at when you get these master's no, I'll be I'll be 60 before I get. Unless unless you're playing Decker mangoes, in which case, you're going to do it in like 10 games because you're always killing the carries killed. Oh, yes, I do. I don't know anybody who knows that. Yeah, you don't know any carries that I might often support still their kills a lot. Oh, yeah. Oh, so yeah, again, some more. No, no version 14. It's cool that they confirmed the mastery system and that it's only going to be around 30 games if you play play about average. So I mean, I guess that would be like 15 wins, 15 losses sort of thing. But you know how else they could have confirmed that? What are you post? Putting out patch notes for patch 14. Yeah, that too, that too. There was one other thing that was, again, confirmed only by a gen chat pin. And that was a one of the founders came in and says that they are yeah, we have one hero coming out with with the patch. So when patch drops, that's the way I'm reading this, one year coming out with the patch on patch drops, we're getting a hero who that maybe we don't know, going by the teasers we've had before, we're most likely to be phase, right? And then he said, then he said, we start planning on continuing to add heroes, heroes, oh my gosh. More often, like we did at the start and that was in parentheses. So I don't think it's going to be every other month like they were doing it. But, you know, we'll see. I kind of feel every other month. That's what I take from that post, at least. Yeah, I kind of feel about this, this kind of stuff and about it kind of really any update that comes out of them right now. It's like when when Overprime makes updates, people are like, yeah, but when steam or like, if you put out updates for any of these games, right? Yeah. But when when's it all in PlayStation? Like nobody nobody cares. Like right now, I don't care about any of that. I just want patch 14. Yeah. No, 100 percent. And that's that's the thing is like nobody would be asked about patch 14 if they didn't talk about patch 14. Nobody would ask an Overprime about steam if they didn't talk about well, I guess, no, that people would be asked about steam because you need a good client to actually put the game on, you know. But I mean, but nobody it wouldn't be asked at the astronomical amount that it is if they didn't bring it up and say, hey, this is what we're doing. And then just nothing, you know. And it feels weird that they're doing it via pinned messages in a gen chat instead of making it out, making it turn them into announcements. If you're going to say something, say something, right? Do right. Don't do this weird a half. We do something else on Twitter and then pinned comments and gen chat. That's just kind of weird. Right. Make these announcements global. Make it that everybody knows. Right. So at least if I'm looking for an update today, I can feel partially satisfied and that I heard something. Right. And even if even a few cases, let's say I because I wasn't gen chat when these happened. So I was there and I was able to read it like, OK, sweet, got it. But you could easily just take that now pinned message and put it out there to the people through everything other social media, like here you go. This is what was talked about today in discord gen chat. If you want more information like this, faster than what you got it now, come hang out on our discord. You know, and then it's like, there you go. But yeah, nothing was done. It's just a pin message. I'm again, truly hoping that we're going to look like idiots and that it's going to release between now and Friday. But I don't think that's going to happen. But I hope so. My favorite saying that I don't know if it's ever been said before is don't get your hopes up, but never give up. Hope. Mm hmm. How is that your favorite saying if you've never said it before? I don't know if anybody else has said before. OK, I've said it before. It's like my my favorite thing that I just made up. No, I'm sorry. I like that, though. I like that. Yeah, that's good for sure. Oh, all right. So let's move on from fault to overprime. Overprime continues to just blast out update after update after update still. We still don't know when they're going to come on to steam. We don't know. We know that they are working on PS5. We don't know when we don't know anything about PS4. We just know some about PS5. But man, yeah, again, they did a tech art demo. It was just kind of another video on their part. Did you guys did you guys see that? Yeah, I did not, actually. Well, I know Jelliesaw because he broke it down and like discovered different. He broke it down. Jellies for a moment. Yeah. And like looked at their screens in the corner to like see what other heroes are being added and stuff. Leave it to me, man. That's what I do. I look for the little details. What you're wanting me to look at. I'm going to look away over there. Let's figure out what's over there first. But yeah, I mean, so on the side screen, you could see the Unreal Engine, the Unreal Engine open and saw what characters and what abilities they were working on in the little viewport that they had open. And from that, you can see Aurora, Boris, Countess, Chimera, Serif, Shinbi, Steel and Greystone all on that one screen, which, according to their website, none of those are in the game yet. Some of those we've seen before that they've removed. But according to their website, none of those characters are confirmed on their site yet. Right. OK. I think the biggest one for me to see on there is Boris because the others we have, we assume that they're going to keep the kids relatively the same, right, right, that they're or they're going to have their identity at the very minimum. Boris didn't have that when Paragon closed. He had abilities made to be sure, but he wasn't released. And so it's they could go completely a different route than what we've seen with Faults and create a completely different identity to the character than what we know. His kit when he was in overprime was very similar to Faults kit because I think the animations are there for his different abilities. So it's kind of some of that stuff is kind of obvious. I think his cue was a charge, though, where he would charge at somebody. And then if he hit them, it would stun both him and the person and do a bunch of damage to them. It was like a really long, fast charge. And then his his ultimate in overprime, I knew I didn't like because it was just Steel's ultimate. Yeah. And then Steel, Steel, remember, he had instead of the. Instead of the bank, he had like a kick. You kick people in the chest and slow them down. So they do have some different abilities for him from what I've seen already. I don't know how that's going to change upon final release. Yeah. And theoretically, their character is going to come out alongside in somewhere in the mix of these other characters, too, which we know nothing at all about. Yeah. Yeah. Unless she's got a shield and a chainsword. She's Hera and Yin mixed together. There we go. That's what we needed. And they're going to call her Nancy. No, I forget what her name was. That kind of moves us on, though. They did have their hero name polls. My God, overprime has been oppressing the shit out of me. Like their tech demo, like the before and after of Gideon's ultimate, like Gideon's ultimate, after they did the new particle effects, it looks like a real event horizon. Well, I've never seen a real event horizon, but you know what I mean? Like, I've seen computer models of an event horizon, and that's exactly what Gideon's ultimate looks like. It looks really good. Like everything they've done, that tech demo looks really good. However, they did this poll to rename the heroes because people don't like the names for their heroes. But the names, the choices they gave for some of these heroes were like, what are you guys thinking? Like, for Gideon, like your choices were like Daryl, Cosmos or Travis. And it's like... It's almost like they're trying to point you, hey, pick Cosmos, please. Like, we're just going to give you these two off the wall ones that just don't make any sense. Please pick off the Cosmos. But we all know that, you know, walking dead people are going to pick Daryl. Like, they just want to have Daryl live again. And they're hoping that he's going to get a crossbow that he can shoot with his, you know, like, come on. If his name is going to be Travis, though, we need like a trailer park Travis skin that we can have him use like random stuff. It's it needs to happen. I was looking through the names for a lot of these the heroes like Bellica, like Ellen or like whatever. And it's like, it's just people I went to high school with. Like, that's what these names seem like. Some of our good like Revenant, who they're calling Vaughn Rover right now. One of his options was Shade, which I kind of like for Revenant. I think that's OK. Just interesting. But for Kalaria, it was like Katia, Kayla, night slasher or like. There it is. Oh, there we go. Your camera was out of focus that whole time. Oh, was it really good? Yeah. I wanted it to be. I think that's the weird thing, man, goose, that you bring up is killer slash as a name alongside someone named Ellen. Yes. Like, like who's on your team? I've got Ellen killer slash. What? No, that's just. Skud, night slasher, Daryl. Yes, I just had the skud name as a Murdoch like main. Like I cannot stand it. Please change it. I knew I'd get rid of Skud. I want something else. I'd rather have Daryl, please give me Daryl. At least Daryl seems to be a cop. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with my cameras. Just be quiet. Maybe it'll. Put your hand in front of the pole. There you go. I just had to smile. Maybe it's focusing in on my teeth. There it is. All right. So if you want to vote on those hero names, go to Overprime's Discord. It'll be linked in the description below and then you can throw in your own two cents. They haven't they haven't done all of them yet. I'm sure they'll do all of them eventually. Did they at least give you an option tab where you could write in your own names? Unfortunately, I should have done that at least because I'm pretty sure that people would get a little bit better option than Cosmos Daryl Travis. Like the name of the raptor in fault. Isn't it Reggie Reginald? That was yeah, that was pretty stupid to that. I mean, it's among the same lines. Like of you've got like Bone Slasher and Reggie. Like. Oh, God. Other other stuff coming up from them. They updated their work in progress. They got like a steampunk skin for Narbash. It looks like they're working with steampunk skins for a lot of the heroes. If you look up, there's like a steampunk skin for howitzer as well. And they're called the Narbash drum, by the way, just just drum. Perfect. But it's a pretty cool looking skin for drum. Yeah, a lot of the skins that we've seen them working on look incredible. Like just the concept arts that they've shown are amazing. I would buy those skins 100 percent. Yeah. It's not just like actual 3D modeled skins for a lot of these. The howitzer skin that one was I was a Lego. I don't know. I think I had like a Legos on it, whatever. Like I had like at least the little dots that Legos have for. It was a pretty bad ass skin, like orange and the bright colors. Everything I liked it. Yeah, that's a cool shit going on. And just today, they were talking about they're going to start marketing via YouTube Shorts and like TikTok and stuff, which I think is a good move on their part. Mm hmm. Oh, yeah. They're definitely at the point in their development where that they can get short clips like that and put them out everywhere and make it really easy to blow up. All right. Anybody do you guys have anything else to say about it? We're proud for a move on to the popular type. Oh, no steam steam one steam one. We got steam punk. Now we just need steam. Exactly. Or maybe we got punked with the whole steam. Oh, yeah, maybe. Well, wait, what if you use tin foil hat idea right here? Uh oh. What if your steam punk skins are going to release with their steam clients? Oh, that would be amazing. That would be a brilliant tie in. I'm just saying that would be great. I would love that. All right. Overprime devs, I need you to reach out. We're taking our 10 percent with that idea. Thank you very much. Oh, we started this again right on. We get to do this with all the games now. Exactly, dude. Perfect. I was on this episode so I get like five percent of that, right? Oh, no, you don't get jack shit. You get five percent of the 10 percent. OK, don't worry. That's fine. That's fine. Still something better than the jack shit I was getting from this guy. All right. Let's move on to the popularity poll. It hasn't really changed a whole lot. Um, cred at 63. It was like 62 last time. Faults up to 14. Ethereal at 13. Overprime 11. I imagine after all the news coming out of ethereal and overprime, those are probably going to shift. Fault may shift after version 14. But, um, yeah, Fred hanging strong, I did change it up this time. I put looking for what are you looking forward to? I put fault version 14. So that's I think that up their votes a little bit. I think it's only right that they ended on 14 percent per version 14 expectations. So it's that perfect synergy. I love it. Yeah. Fred, though, Fred's still leading the charge. And I think rightfully. So I've been a predecessor fan since the very beginning. I think they've been doing things at exactly. Not not always exactly right, but they've been doing things really well. You know, fault's great in its playable and it's fun. But when I've played, Fred, I have preferred it over fault for game play wise. Yeah. I. I wish you would have been you could have continued doing the four dominions for that time being because I would have loved to see how much that stress test did affect them, though, because I think the numbers would have reflected if we really if we were still doing that pie chart for that time and then that stress test, see how those numbers would have changed that. I'm not because they're obviously you see they're still leading, right? So I'm not saying it would have made them not leading, obviously, but where they would have went from because they would have been high at that time and then they had to have taken some kind of hit from it. Yeah, I imagine so. I imagine it would look a lot like when Cor missed their original alpha date or whatever that was going to be. And the numbers kind of dropped pretty hard afterwards for a bit of time, and then they just disappear off the face of the earth, which is another thing. But but after they missed that, it kind of like you saw a decline in their numbers almost instantly, that everyone was suddenly jumping ship to something else in terms of what they were excited for. Yeah, people jumped on the predecessor right before that. And then when the alpha just, you know, the game play just wasn't there. They dropped it right back off again. Yep. And and, you know, predecessor did their jobs, you know, they list they went, you know, went back in their cave and just got to work and then came back out with that next alpha, you know, however, was it a year later or whatever, you know? Yeah. And then came out and it was a lot better, a lot better. That was the smooth game play. That was the first time I played. I didn't get to play the first one, you know, which it wasn't. It didn't look that fun to play. Anyways, but I was watching some streamers play and stuff of that. But like it's they did their job, come back and really polish that game right up. You brought up core. The their last announcement I remember was that they're going away from the Paragon remake. Yeah, but they were still trying to make a game, right? Was are they still going to a third person MOBA or we have no clue. They just said they're going to their own way. It's still supposed to be a third person MOBA, just with their own IP, their own heroes, their own map, all that, their own assets, all that. So really that announcement, we haven't seen anything out of them. So who's who's to say really where they're at or anything? Eventually, 2023, we could see core added to that that pie chart again. Possibly, possibly. I mean, their their discord is still active and everything, right? They're doing something over there. Just don't know what it is yet and without any real confirmation. I got burned by core a couple of times, so I'm real leery of reporting on anything for them until I see some concrete evidence. I understand that. But yeah, that kind of dovetails nicely into the topic for discussion with a processor being the first to ever have their alpha, the pros and cons of being the first because they were the first to get out there, but their product wasn't really up to snuff. And it kind of hurt them in the short term. However, they were able to take all the data and improve from there and kind of go go down dark and come back out even stronger. So that really sums up a lot of the pros and cons of being first with something. What do you guys got this who wants to go first? Jelly Beard, who wants to go first? I'll say I'll let bearded go first. I guess. All right. All right. The. You said pros of being first is you get the information right away. You know, like you get out there, you're able to when you're getting data for your own game, you know, however it is. But you're also getting information from the community and the community is there because the community is excited. It once this flame of excitement for these games, you know, go it starts to wear down a little bit. Then that last team is not going to have much of a flame to go off of because everybody's like, OK, yeah, we've seen this before. This is nothing new or nothing that exciting. We've already been doing this for two or three other times. So first is a benefit there. But then you also have you're the one you're the front runner. Like anything that has that's negative happens, it's magnified. You know, you you got to take take the hits and try to move forward. Yeah, absolutely. I think fault really showed us that as well as the first game to a more open release, more open, consistent release. Right. They showed us that if your first impression is not top notch, then people will write you off a year on at least a minimum. Right. People are still saying that from because fault was the way it was on release that they still won't play it. Even though the game has come leagues and bounds since then. Yeah, it shows that like being just because you're first does not mean you're the best does not mean you're going to survive, succeed, whatever that may be. And those people with that mindset are obviously wrong because it brought man goose back. So I think it bring man goose back. I mean, I think the big thing and all I know all of these companies are having these conversations, right? And and I can say a theory, especially even though it's not one of the Paragon remakes, the conversation comes up in the 3D just as a 3D MOBA space in general, right? Having fault overprime predecessor and ethereal, all relatively in similar development states, right? You're releasing four three dimensional MOBAs into the market at relatively the same time. There's competition out the wazoo more so for the Paragon remakes because they're competing with each other even more directly. But these companies are also having the same conversation of what are the pros and cons of releasing now versus waiting for Predator drop their next stress test versus faults drop their next patch, what it's measuring those differences to try and find when the most optimal time is to do something and whether it be a release and announcement, anything. Oh, no, 100%. And they the other negative about being first is everybody, those other four other three competitors out of the four, they get to see what you did wrong as well. And then they get to learn from that. You know, so you're not the you're putting it out there and they're going to see the backlash of everything that happened. However it is, you know, or even if it was acceptably great, greatly like, OK, that's what they did right. We need to do that and multiply it. How do we do that? You know, so you kind of have to, you know, play with your cards close to your chest and try to move forward strategically, you know, which this is the part that I'm OK with fault and what they're doing it and taking their while on these big patches is because if they just released them out in these smaller patches, you know, or quicker patches, then there's going to be more issues and then it's just going to be more negative comments or whatever. If they so they just take, you know, 13 came out. All right. To the problem is probably is in my opinion, everybody hyping it up, you know, mainly like the mods and discord are hyping this up like it's the best thing ever when it's all like 13 was all back end information. So to a casual gamer, they're not going to see what that is, you know, you know, and or the only way you're going to see it is if you played it in the beginning like mangoes did and then be like, yep, I'm not liking this. And then you come back after 13 is like, oh, this feels better, you know, you could feel it maybe, but you're not going to see at the difference or whatever. You know, so you hype it up too much and that's the issue. And but if you hold it to your chest and you don't hype it up and then you release it and when people see that huge like, oh my gosh, this is this was great. They were holding like, oh my gosh. And then you don't even you don't even have to say how long it took you just like, all right, yeah, we've had this whatever, you know, here it is. You know, there'd be people like, oh my gosh, they hold that I would what else they have, you know, and then they're going to keep wanting more. But and I think. Big con that some of these companies have to fight as well, with the exception being fault is that when these things predecessor stress tests, their most recent stress tests as an example, they were dark for months, right? They didn't really say anything, didn't really do anything, right? Come out with a stress test and it fails the way it did. You also have this massive con of then what have you been doing with your time, right? And it's the community perspective of like, you went dark for eight months and we saw no changes. You added a hero and the game didn't even work. What have you been doing? Right. So you can take your time and not be first, but that also has its own caveats and back and downsides as well. Yep. And not that that's a right mentality to have necessarily either, but it's the one that the community is going to have a portion of the community is going to have. Oh, no, definitely. I think. Yeah. Yeah. Cause go ahead. Well, some of the, some of the pros too, like with fault being the first to come into early access, whenever something like that does happen with predecessor, like people get the itch to play Paragon, they try to do that stress test. They can't play. Maybe they go play fault instead because they can, or they see like all this development going on for overprime. They want to play overprime, but they can't, so they go play fault because fault is playable. They, the first ones to come into early access. I think another big pro for fault being in early access for so long is they've already worked through and dealt with so many bugs to that game. Like beard was saying, I hated the game at first and then by patch 13, it was good. If you think these other games are going to come out and not have a bunch of bugs and a bunch of stuff that needs fixed and they're going to have to go through that whole process that faults already been going through. So fault, that kind of puts them a step ahead of the others, maybe not overprime as much because overprime was out and playable for a vast majority of this time. Just not, not as many people were playing it. But, um, yeah, processors going to have to deal with that. I have full faith in their team. Their team, like they obviously can make a very smooth, well running game, but they're still, they're going to have, whenever they get that many people in playing it once, like open those floodgates for early access, they're going to have to deal with the same stuff that fault has already dealt with. So we'll get to see. Hopefully Amazon doesn't get DDoS again. What's that? Hopefully Amazon doesn't get DDoS again. Yeah, no, that was very unfortunate for for Strange Matter. The thing is, like, and you know, that's like, like, so as being known as the Strange Matter White Knight, you know, and not that I, it is what it is, but like people don't understand that. People don't, they look at that like, oh no, SMS fucked up. And it's like, that's not on them. Like, it just was, like you said, it was unfortunate. It just, are you, if they would have waited another day, everything would have been great, you know, it would have went smooth or not. It would have been still some issues, obviously, but it wouldn't have been as bad as it looked, you know. So yeah, it was unfortunate, but with predecessor and what they got going on, like you said, they went quiet and they came out, they had a hero, but like the game, besides the time to kill and a new hero, it really wasn't much more to it, you know, it felt good, but it felt good before, like it, you know, like, okay, you know, thanks. But yeah, it's just, I think there was, there's more that could have been done there. And another thing that I didn't, you know, it's communication. These communities with their, the communication, like I, I was sitting there kewing up with not knowing what was going on during the stress test. All right, waiting. All right. Well, hey, there's obviously some issue, which is fine. We knew it was a stress test. That's the whole point of this, right? But we were still waiting for communication, like what's going on, you know, like, and then it was, was the biggest thing that I was noticing throughout that entire stress test was, yeah, the thing didn't work. That's fine. It's either is or it's not. There's nothing I can do to change that, right? And there's nothing that really they can do short notice that they're not already doing. Yeah, their communication, their lack of information to people, their lack of telling anybody what was going on for essentially 24 hours was pretty shocking. Like it was just kind of like, yep, it's not working. We're working on it. And that was it for a full day of people just trying to queue and trying to queue and trying to queue and trying to queue. And then even when they did decide to kill the servers and just call the stress test off, their announcement was like, yes, this was the problem. But by the way, shiny new characters we're going to have in the next one. Like it was it was more of a diversion. Yeah, it was a diversion. Perfect. Of like, there was an issue, but let's divert our attention over here to shiny new characters. Like that concerned me greatly. I was like, no, no, I want to know more about that. Yeah, give information, give something that gives your community ease about the problem that was going on rather than just divert them to something else. I'm worried because with that situation what happened, I'm thinking, OK, they told the community, hey, you're going to be able to stress test this. We're hoping for 24 for 48 hours, right? That weekend, right? They gave an end date. They gave a time like, hey, this is what we're doing, right? And if we crash before, then great, we found what we saw we wanted to find. But like they obviously weren't planning to crash that early, like that soon. Like there's people who crash instantly, like that 30 minutes in. Yeah, I know people who were like sitting there in stream like queuing up for nine hours and nothing was happening for like they didn't get a game it, right? So and and they were in there right away and they were pretty much in the beginning. So it wasn't it wasn't what they were expecting there. And so to me, that says there was something bigger happened, right? So I'm thinking, OK, we're going to come back a month later and we're going to do another stress test because they need to think that that was a issue, but you didn't even get to test the servers. We have yet to test these servers. Because that wasn't there was no way you had that many people in there that the servers like, all right, that's what happened because they even said they were bringing a mince, you know, slowly, but it was 30 minutes in, it was crashed. Like, so that wasn't another. There was no way it was that it was something else going on there. Bring in, you know, so now we need to start. All right. Well, a month later, we'll do another stress test and we're still how long that how long was that? That was three months ago at this point and and still no nothing was nothing's being said. The hay were, you know, all they said it was in their announcement that we're going to need your help. You know, that's yeah, the update is where we need more testers, but that's not that's not the stress test. That's not the community stress test. That's testers going in there to test the game and maybe find bugs or whatever, you know, do whatever or they're testing. Well, that's what you guys talked about last episode wasn't as the the difference with the computers. Like it wasn't a wide range of of PC qualifications, right? But it was it wasn't ridiculous. Like I made it sound like it was ridiculous and I didn't really mean to it's not they're not asking for ridiculously high specs. But yeah, the like they did not include the thing that got got me was they didn't include stuff that you could have played Paragon on. I would expect that if you could play Paragon on that computer, you should be able to play. Right. But at least low settings, right? Like if you lower everything down to minimum and then you should still have a playable game because you're right. It's the same assets, this very similar map to Monolith, a lot of these similarities and things, yet the the specifications are higher than what they were for Paragon's recommended settings, no less. Right. So they've done a lot of good stuff for optimization to like, kind of forget his name, their map guy. Fringe. Yeah. Fringe. He's so fucking funny. But he's done so many optimization things like instead of like outcropping a rock, instead of that being eight different assets smushed together, he made it one asset so that there's less polygons actually trying to render one screen. So they've done a lot of great optimization things. I would think that you need like a less powerful computer than was needed for Paragon to play predecessor. So I don't know. And I think that's you brought up an interesting point bearded is after that stress test, I know a bunch of us had the conversations about it, the community was talking about it. Everybody was like, OK, their back end failed. That's one thing. Fix the back end. Then they announced another stress test. They do something a month later, a month and a half later, because it was basically guaranteed that they if they wanted to do a stress test once, they didn't get their information. They need to do another one. Yep. And we just heard nothing. And that that to me as well signals something bigger than what they told us happened. I think I think Brux broke it. He slammed his his things down and that's why they announced him like, well, guys, we were trying to keep it a secret, but he broke the server. So here you guys go. Exactly. Yeah, something I made that I think was a definite pro for them is they reached out and started trying to find investors, which no matter how you feel about that, they they were able to get a lot of money for people that may have invested in something else. So they've got a pretty good chunk of change to work with. I I so. You're right, that is. Good. And if that's the route, the route you want to go, then, yeah, like you awesome, you'll be able to get people to invest in your you obviously were able to sell them something. So that says the game is good in some way, right? But I just don't like, especially being an indie dev company right now, and you're already taking a game that was already tried by a triple A company and it failed because they weren't able to capitalize on whatever they need to capitalize on. So now you have to take that and try to fix their mistakes and get better with it. Not only are you doing that, now you have to pay the people that are looking over your shoulder because they want their money back because that's going to happen. They're not just giving you, hey, here you guys know, we like this game. It's all yours. You know, they're going to want something back and that's kind of the problem that Epic had. The Epic has your big wigs like, hey, I'm sorry, but Paragon's not making money and we want money. Give us money. So let's do something about this. And that's why Paragon pretty much failed. So you've got to start doing something to kind of generate income. And if you're not doing to generate income, those investors are only going to wait so long. You know, that's where I think faults in the better spot because it's community driven and you know, taking that situation and they're not. There's there's nobody looking over their shoulders for that situation. It's just a community. I mean, a community company pitchforks all they want, I guess, but they're still going to want to play the game. So and you actually brought us something that I haven't thought about is we've really only seen what one new skin out of predecessor to if you count the Severog skin. And how if they're going to be a free to play game, which they have not charged the community any money, right? They don't have skins that we've seen to then generate that revenue to then pay their investors back in any way, shape or form. So and what is their monetization scheme is basically what I'm thinking now is is we haven't seen that month, that monetization aspect like via skins, which is what you see for most MOBAs. Where do you go from there? And and bringing that up, where was the Murdoch skin stress or stress test? That was one of their skin. Why are you not promoting your skins? You know, yes, it's a stress test. I get it. It's not actually it's not alpha player or whatever, but that's still a promotion. You're allowing people to stream this while little you're just going to get. Hey, that's something we made. Why wasn't it out? Why wasn't able to be picked? I think I think they have that skin and I think they have many more. I think they do. Oh, I do. I do, too. But like you already had the game in you had at the last alpha. It's not like you like you did something to take it out of the game. The Jailer Murdoch skin. Yeah, the Jailer Murdoch skin and it's bad ass looking and it's reactive. Like why not allow people to play with it? Even if you're not going to allow skin selection, make that the base skin for Murdoch. We all know what Murdoch looked like. Make the Jailer skin, the one that everybody sees. So when the game comes out, then they go, oh, that's the skin I really want and purchase it. Yeah, because you get to play with a reactive skin and you're like, oh, it's reacting. So then when the game comes out, like I kind of have it. I remember playing that one on the stress test. I got to have it free, right? Yeah, that's the exact concept is the first taste is free. They get to let you feel the skin out and then be like, OK, yeah, I do really want that and buy it. Yep. Maybe they're finally, finally going to listen to me and implement in game advertising for a lot for their monetization. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is all sponsored by Monster Energy drinks. There's like Monster Energy drink stuff all behind or prime. Oh, that'd be amazing. He has a big scratch. What if you end up listening to it? Ten percent. I definitely get my cut. You guys, you guys realize the only reason Jelly disagrees is because that's what a three is going to do. So no, no, no, no. Oh, man, I got I got to go. Oh, and breathing down my neck now. Can we get a Victoria's Secret skin for Malaya? Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Let me let me get on that for you. Sponsored by Oh, wait, that's just her old skin before they added to it. Shit. So back to the being first and some of that, like, I think that a way to explain it is when you're in first, like, I feel like you have the in a gaming perspective, like you have the the catch up mechanic is applied. You know, if you if you ever played racing games, you know, you get so far in the lead and also next thing people start catching you, it's like there's no no getting the other, you know, that's what happens when this situation being in first, you have it gives everybody the ability to catch up to you if they take advantage of what they see and how they're doing their game. So right now, Fault has a bounty and the other ones can come and take that bounty. Yep. Yeah, it's one big game. Elite Frog. All right. So so Fault, you need to get in a helicopter and go sit on stadium so nobody can get to. But yeah, I mean, I mean, there's like like we've been saying, there's pros and cons to be in first and pros and cons to be in last. But. Where I. Another thing I just want to make clear is like none of it really matters right now, like none of the polls matter or anything. What matters is when they're all full release, you vote on mangoes is pulled on what game you want. Yeah, make sure you. But none of it matters. For real, like, like I said, yeah, like Jellies alluded to it a couple of times, like it's been a roller coaster of popularity for these games. You never know if like three, four, six months from now, which one's going to be on top, which one's going to be everybody's going to be loving. And we certainly don't know two years from now, once they're all full released and on console and all that shit, which one's going to be ahead. We just don't know. And even though the scary thing with these indie companies, right? And that's where I think overprime and pred to have a slight advantage is even if fault and ethereal takeoff and are the number one spot of these four games, them being indie developers, if they don't get funding, they could just eventually keel over despite being the best game. Yeah, they could just be out of money and say, like, sorry, we're just we can't and that's just it. I think that's that's a reason why fault needs to get out there and be first, because if they're going to continue going with this community driven approach, then our community funded, we'll say approach, then you need to get out there to where you can market to the new community, because if there's only so much money that these 150 people are going to be able to put into this game, you're going to need more than that, you know, to put money into this game, right? It doesn't matter how you could put three 30,000 skins in there. We can only afford so much, you know, with the money we got. We can't. We won't get all 30,000 skins. It doesn't matter what you put into this game. We're going to need more people to play this game. So the faster they get out there, the faster they get their name out there to the rest of the community, you know, this community they're trying to grow from, whoever, you know, Paragon Community, you know, I don't care Overwatch community, pull from everybody, you know, start pulling from everywhere, cast that net out and bring people in the faster they get to that, the better for them if they want to continue this community funded situation. And that that's a that's a topic in and of itself, the pros and cons of community funded versus investor, investor backed back because I mean, we've already seen with overprime some of the cons because they had to change the names. That was that was net marble wanted them to change all the names. So now we have Daryl instead of Gideon. Was that but was that I wasn't there because I mean, I think all three of them went through an issue because there wasn't. A there was a misunderstanding of what was allowed with the epic assets, right? So all three of them, but something came up that they they eventually all got approved because even even then I got I was told not too long it was after 13 I was told, hey, you can tell your community that we're going to release all Paragon heroes. And it's like in my head, I'm like, weren't we already going to do that? Yeah. But now it's official and come to find out. I don't know. I don't like it's all hearsay. I didn't know there was no dev that came and told me this or anybody in that situation. But there was something going on that with the epic release assets like what was allowed to release and what wasn't allowed to release and something to do with the heroes. And then finally, the the epic finally decided, yeah, it is what it is. Go ahead and do what you got to do. So the way I understood that is overprime change their names so they would avoid the legal backlash that was going to happen if epic would have kept pushing. But now that epic's not pushing anymore, even essentially, in my opinion, change those names back, but you've already changed them to revert them back would just kind of make you think that you made a mistake. And it would look bad on you. You know, so I mean, what I've been told officially from overprime is that that was that was a decision to change those names. It could be for the reasons you put out. Right. You just said, but it was net marbles thing and that like, again, I don't want to get into that because that's on topic for a whole another day. Yeah. Let's wrap it up. Jelly, final thoughts, pros and cons. The biggest thing for the pros and cons of being first is it's a double sword. Being first can bite you just as easily as being last can bite you, right? Like it doesn't matter. It's about execution and reception. Those those are the only two things that matter, right? First, last otherwise, execution and reception are the two things that are going to make or break the games. I agree. I agree. What you need to do is out of all these can all these games that are making, you know, all four of them, you need to listen to the community because no matter what, no matter if you have investors or not, the community is what's going to make the game survive, right? You got to you have the community to play the game. You're going to be able to continue doing more. You know, you obviously have to grow the community more to get more funding. And however, that's going to work out. But listen to the community. If you don't listen to the community, you're going to have issues huge. So community is the one to talk to. I'll just say that if you're going to be first, make damn sure that it's a good first. And if you're going to be last, make damn sure that you're coming in last with something great. Yeah, they're all going to be competing at some point in time. I wish it wasn't that way. I really wish that they would have all gotten together to produce one game from the very beginning, but that shit ain't going to happen when they are never going to merge. So don't even ask. Right now we got the three. It's up to us to pick which ones we want. We'll see which ones succeed and which ones fail. Maybe they'll all succeed. Very highly doubt it. Maybe one will succeed and the others fail. We'll see. I don't know. What I think is ethereal is going to succeed on its own. One of these pair zombies that are going to go off on their own. That's my personal prediction. But I don't know. Let's go about wrap it up. Let's talk about some plugs here. Bearded. What do you want to plug, brother? Just my twitch, you know, the bearded Wolverine twitch.tv.twitch.tv slash the bearded Wolverine. I was like trying to say a whole like bearded tag that I don't actually have. I don't know why I even said that. But yeah. What was that motto one more time that you always say? Don't get your hopes up, but never give up hope. There you go. What about you, Maygoose? Anything to plug for yourself? On Bearded's channel, we do the fault partner panel where we talk about fault every Friday and then it comes out on Windu's channel as a video. So if you want to see more bearded and we both get pretty pretty toasty for that one. So we get a little wild. Have a fun time on that one. Yeah. A little less professional. Jelly, anything to plug? I'm actually going to start at streaming again pretty quick here. So let's go. Yay, we're going to have jelly streams back again. So it should be exciting. I miss the jelly streams. So Marvellous Monday is coming back then. Yeah, man. All right. Let's go. All right. And that is going about that is going to wrap it up for this week. Thank you all for joining us. Really appreciate you coming out and we will see you next time. Man, goose. Shout out to channel members foolish bloodhunter jelly knees me all mixed for men and stun.