 What's up everybody, I'm the man Goose, you were awesome and about a week ago, Action Esports did a great video about the rise, fall, and rebirth of Paragon. They did an amazing job with the video and I highly suggest you check it out, I'll have it linked in the description below. However, Action Esports covers a huge variety of games so their video omitted some important info like the existence of visionary games and they had some factual errors like saying that Ethereal was a Paragon successor and some opinions and rather bold statements that I disagreed with. I don't really fault them for it, it's just a game to them, whereas, as sad as it may be, Paragon is part of my identity. As such, I feel it's necessary to offer some clarity to anyone interested in the Paragon remakes. I'm going to go through today and do my best to correct what they got wrong and try to explain why some of my opinions differ. They mentioned that Tencent acquired 48% of Epic in 2012 and indicated that that was one of the possible causes for Paragon's downfall. I 100% agree with that. They also mentioned Steve Superville leaving his position as Creative Director, which was also a huge blow to the game. However, what they omitted was the addition of Donald Mustard to the Paragon team right after Steve's departure. Donald Mustard previously worked on several mobile games owned by Tencent and we all know how mobile game monetization is. As soon as Donald Mustard showed up, we started to see more and more content gated behind loot boxes. The one that really stands out in my mind was the first Guardian thing mouse skin. Every other skin in the game can be purchased straight up with the in-game currency, however that skin, introduced maybe two weeks after old Donnie Boy's arrival, could only be attained via loot box. So if you wanted it, you had to get really lucky or pay a shit ton of money in the loot box lottery. This was eventually changed after we all cried about it, imagine that shit, Epic listened at one point. My personal opinion that the main thing Tencent did to really destroy Paragon was that they leveraged both of those moves, Steve leaving and Donald arriving. And that was in an effort to make Paragon more financially viable. Pressure from Tencent to have Paragon generate more money certainly contributed to the overall fall of Paragon. The action video also mentions the popular theory that Tencent intentionally sabotaged Paragon in order to destroy a possible rival for another little game they owned called League of Legends. You may have heard of it. This is a theory that I know many para-refugees believe in, but it's not one that I agree with. To action's credit, they made great effort to let people know that it was just a theory and not fact. Here's why I don't think Tencent would intentionally tank Paragon. League of Legends is a strictly PC-based game. Well, I guess you could play it on Mac if you're some kind of monster, but the point is it's not on any console. 70% of Paragon's player base were PlayStation players. Paragon, through a roundabout way, gave Tencent access to MOBA dollars from console players, a stream of revenue that did not and does not exist from law. They wanted Paragon to make more money. Do you really think those greedy bastards would destroy an untapped revenue source? Also I hate to say it because I love Paragon with all my heart and I only played a scant handful of League games and hated it, but Paragon's numbers were less than a pimple on the giant League of Legends ass and they only had to worry about 30% of that pimple. That was never the least bit threatened by the existence of Paragon. The next major omission is any mention of visionary games in Project Phoenix Rising. Actions skipped straight to core in predecessor without mentioning the passionate players behind the very first attempt to recreate a Paragon-like game. I understand. They're doing this video years after the rise and fall of Visionary, but I just wanted to say that Project Phoenix Rising was a thing that happened and has an impact on the Paragon story. May they never be forgotten. This one is real nitpicky, but dudes saying O-M-E-D-A is triggering is all hell. And predecessor developed by O-M-E-D-A. Some people say Omeda, some people say Omeda, but nobody says O-M-E-D-A. Omeda City was part of Paragon's lore. This is once again indicative of the video being produced by folks that know about Paragon but didn't know Paragon. They never lived on A-G-O-R-A like we did. They mentioned Fault, Overprime, and Ethereal as fan made creations, indicating that Ethereal is meant to be a successor to Paragon. Over the next few months, other fan-made creations began coming out, like Fault, Overprime, and Ethereal. This simply isn't true. Ethereal was in development months before the announcement the close Paragon was ever made. Ethereal is not now, nor has it ever been, a Paragon successor project. Undying is creating their own third person MOBA that just happened to attract the attention of Lost Paragon fans. They very strongly indicate that predecessor is the fan favorite out of all the remakes. As I've been saying for three years now, predecessor is my personal favorite out of all the Paragon successors, but I would never say that it's the community's favorite because there isn't any statistical data to support that assessment. I've been tracking the rise and fall of Paragon's successor projects for a very long time and the popularity of each fluctuates wildly depending on what new updates are out there. Core was once by far the community favorite according to the polls that I used to do. Core fell out of favor when they biffed their alpha and predecessor took over. Then Fred went into the shadows after the first alpha in 2018 and Fault was the new big thing. Overprime has had their time in the spotlight as well. The point is you can't really say that predecessor is the most popular without anything to support that statement. You can state your opinion about the gameplay as I did. I like to play predecessor more than the other successors, but just because I prefer it doesn't mean everyone else does. Fault has a significant and loyal fan base since it's the only one that can currently download and play on a daily basis. Predecessor may not have as much of a North American or European footprint, but they still have a huge amount of fans, especially in Asia. Predecessor is cross-platform. For predecessor to be cross-platform, it would have to be on multiple platforms. It's not. It's on PC and all the play tests have been through Steam. They are indeed developing the game for consoles, however, that's also the plan for Fault and Overprime. Saying it's cross-platform now is simply false. It's kind of misleading like when Core posted their end user agreement with PlayStation. I saved this one for last because it's really, really dead picky. They also mentioned that the players complained about the game being paid a win because you had to either buy loot crates to get cards or grind for them. Again, I agree. However, they also indicated that the good players could still outplay their opponents with limited card access. I guess they never heard of Deathcrawler. This is an opinion held by many that I also tend to disagree with. Yes, a much better player will destroy an entry level noob no matter what cards they use, but there's an MMR system. Unless you're a smurf, you're going to get matched against fairly equally skilled players, and in that situation, the player with access to better cards is going to win. So a new player had to either buy some fucking loot crates or get god tiered good while carrying the rest of their silver team without the benefit of better cards. This was especially bad after the three-card system was introduced because for real, some heroes just couldn't function without certain cards, and you also just couldn't counter some heroes unless you had certain cards. I'll give you an example. While Wukong was annoying as shit, I was usually able to destroy him with Richter by waiting till he had a bunch of clones up on me and then activating Thorned Yumi to redirect the damage back at him. How the fuck are you supposed to deal with Wukong without having access to Thorned Yumi? They had to literally remove his broken ass from the game because he was such a difficult hero to deal with. Trying to handle a Wukong without access to the full repertoire of cards? Good fucking luck. That shit was straight up. No questions about it pay to win. Just my opinion. That's about it for me. Give the action eSports video a watch if you haven't already. I know I just went down a list of nitpicky bullshit, but overall the video is a great source of information about the overall Paragon story. The amount of good information found in it heavily outweighs the few issues I had. Let me know in the comments below if you think anything could have been added or changed, like the video if you enjoyed it, sub if you want to. But for now, this is the mangu signing off. You guys have a good one. Goooo! Shout out to Channel Members, Foolish Blood Hunter, Jelly Knees, and Yummix4Min.