 What's up everybody and welcome back to For The Minions, the weekly show all about interesting third person MOBAs that are out there this week. We're going to cover any news and updates for ethereal, over prime fault and predecessor that we're going to get into the community poll about the popularity of the games. And then our topic for discussion is business ethics. All of this will be time stamped in a pinned comment down below. I'm your host, TheMangus, joining me as always is my friend and co-host, Jelly Knees. Jelly, how you doing buddy? I'm doing fantastic, Mangus. Happy to be here for another week of For The Minions. And with us, we've got the one and only J-Py. How's it going J-Py? Hey guys, thanks for having me. Threads of B here. Yeah, man. Well, so talk to us about how you got started with Paragon. What brought you to the project the whole nine yards? So Paragon, during that time, I was contemplating streaming and then I came across Paragon and then I said, I have to stream this game. And then I, after a few months of getting all the equipment and troubleshooting, I got it to work. And so I started to stream and not long after it went down. But that's how I came on to the Paragon scene. Who's your favorite hero? Oh, it's a tough call between Shinbi and Crunch. But I love those two heroes. I guess they main after Mangus is hard right there. That's one of the reasons I'm excited to have J-Py on here. I shouldn't be excited to converse with the choir, so to speak. But J-Py and I see eye to eye on quite a few things just from watching your videos and the discussions we've had on like Windows channel and stuff like that. I think you're a little more radical in some of your point of views than I tend to be, which is perfectly fine. And I'm excited to get into that. But let's move on now and start. We're going to start with Ethereal this week because they gave us exclusive content. And as you know, you give me exclusive content. You get bumped to the front of the line for news and updates. And I wonder how you got exclusive content. Yeah, I know. That's kind of a weird thing. Speaking of ethical business practices, should I have an undying Games employee as my co-host? I mean, hey, I've been really neutral up until this point. Okay, you have been. And you do have your own things to say. I think it's fine. I'm a content creator. I don't have to worry about that kind of shit. So Ethereal, the outcome of the stress test, the big stress test was November 20th. If you guys don't know, it lasted for a couple hours and then it went down. And it was, I mean, you can draw many parallels between the Ethereal stress test and the predecessor stress test. And it kind of seemed like the same things failed, which makes me sort of believe that it might be an unreal engine problem. Maybe I don't know. That's just no, no. I would, I would, I would love to go through me like absolutely. Let's blame Epic Games, not our fault at all, whatever. But no, honestly, it was completely on our end. It was just the back end and the database went down. And then as such, it caused the cascade of other issues to start. But we've already got, we've been in several, several multi hour meetings about how to fix it. Some of, most of it's already actually been fixed and is now getting implemented back into testing so we can get through all of that. So we're just hitting the ground running and going from there with those fixes. J-Pot, did you get a chance to at least watch any of the stress test or anything? Yeah, I was able to watch it and it seems like where they are in development. I really liked what I saw. I can't wait to see the future of ethereal. It's definitely very alpha. Like it's not a complete game as some of the other projects are. Yeah, but still, you know, it seemed like the UI was nice. I mean, like there's a lot to take in because I would see some heroes have like, I don't know, like, you know, how in smite they have some, some like, special icon stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But I really liked what I saw. I did. I would. But by the time I was able to get home and play it, I couldn't get on. But hopefully in the next time, I'll be able to get a few games in. Yeah. Now you participated in the predecessor stress test, right? Yes. Yeah, I would definitely have to get into that once we start talking about the predecessor or lack of predecessor updates, I guess. So the stress test didn't go probably quite as well as undying planned or wanted it to go. But they did warn us that they were going to keep going until something broke and then something broke to undying credit. They did try and fix it and come back with with and restart the test. But didn't work out. Yeah. And like you said, man, use is it didn't go as well as planned, but it definitely still gave us good insight and good information going forward. It wasn't like the whole thing was a failure across the board, right? There was definitely a lot of good things learned from that experience for us. I have a friend who's a developer and he says, especially with things like servers, sometimes problems only show up at scale. So, you know, when you have like all your internal testers testing it, there's not nothing that happens. And then once it has like a severe load, that's so kind of when you get to see the issues come up. It's like one of those things you can't really predict it until it's happening. But I think it's a good thing for a theory overall. I mean, that's, you know, they're getting they're they're getting the strengthening their weaknesses. And it's evolving. Absolutely. That's definitely something to take into mind, too, is what kind of broke everything was trying to queue as a group. They were allowing up to three members at a time to queue as a group. And that's what broke it. And during testing, there's no reason to even try to queue as a group. Everybody's just going to be in the same test. Yep. It's one of the things that now that we know that that was what started. That's what flipped the zero to a one and then started the cascade of problems is that that's something we can do in testing of great. Now have everybody queue up in a group of three and see what happens and and do these things we talked about on enter the ether man goose of this giving this scale of stress test helped us find more of those little things that we wouldn't have thought to test because we it's kind of when we are too close to it, right? We can't see the whole thing sometimes because we're so close. Whereas having new people come in and notice queuing as a group is a problem. The roll icons aren't noticeable. Like these are these other details that we wouldn't have thought of are great to see and get fixed now. Right. Moving on, this is something that should make Onyx Al happy. He's a subscriber specifically commented that the lanes in ethereal like iceland should look icy and fire lane should look like fire and void should be like a completely alien world. Well, void is not a completely alien world, but they have given us images of iceland being covered in ice. Fire Lane being very sort of desolate and arid and fiery. I guess this is the only way to say it, which I think is a really cool idea and definitely helps differentiate the lanes and let you know exactly where you are on their basically pretty large map. Jay, what did you think about these images? I love them. And, you know, you bring up an interesting point. I when I was watching, I can never really orient where the player was on the mini map, because I also know it's a multi-layered map. And I think that having the regions in the map be so distinct and even like opposites like ice and fire, I think like when players start to play, they're going to be able to just map it out in their minds much easier. And as you know, with the images, it looks beautiful. And what is it true that if you go on ice, there's like a movement speed buff? No, no, no. So there is no movement difference on iceland. But I would be great with a full day joke is that when you go on iceland, you start slipping, sliding everywhere. Mangoes made a point earlier because everyone loves the ice levels of Mario. Throw an underwater level in an underwater level, and you'd you'd have to try to get people don't like and gains. And to your guys's point of that ice and fire are very distinct now, but void is relatively the same. Void did get a little bit of a facelift in terms of just updating some of the terrain and trees and all those things with our own assets instead of using other assets that we found or have kind of put hodgepodge together. So it got a facelift in that regard, but it's also a lane that is going to get updated in the future. It just hasn't had that same level of update yet as fire and ice. So there will be a more distinct version of that lane coming down the road. Well, will we see these in the pre alpha? Is that is it that far along? Or is this something that we won't expect to see in the game for a while? Fire and ice will both come to the pre alpha either with its release or very shortly thereafter. We're planning on it. If it doesn't come with a pre alpha, it's going to be like the first major patch after the pre alpha is going to have the new map. So it's right there on terms of being done and being playable with all that player base when the time comes. Yeah, nothing you guys have been moving on a theory. All you guys have been making changes, just lightning fast. We're trying to work through this stuff. So along with these images, we also got some item art. The item art is, of course, gorgeous. It always has been for ethereal since for for years now. The plan to item art has looked incredible. I think these images look really good. An important thing. And I was talking about this to you guys earlier. Like we were playing Customs in Fault last night and we were doing all purple builds. It's very difficult in Fault to tell which items are purple. Like like his Eldritch Flame. Is that purple? I think it might be blue. It might be you don't know. But these images, it's very easy to know what they're supposed to be represented as, even though in ethereal, your what color your build is really isn't all that important. But it just it does denote what that build is geared for. Like like red is obviously geared for damage, whereas green is a little more geared for health and that sort of thing. Hmm. Yeah. And these these this item art is for the starting items. We talked about several weeks ago now that we would just have the item art in the works with our artists, but we finally got them back recently. And so wanted to update that and give all those out. So there's a total of seven new item arts, I believe. Okay. So the items previously that just said ethereal, that's what these are replacing. Yes. So those these are the art for those items. And then there's also one of them is not a starting item. It's Ring of Protection, which is an actual tier three ring. But the other six are the starting items. Cool. Right on. And last thing for ethereal community corner Saturday. So if you're watching this right now, it will be tomorrow. What time for that community corner jelly? It'll be at five o'clock Eastern. Now is that going to be on Twitch YouTube? What's that going to be on? It'll be on both Twitch and YouTube. It'll be live at the same time. Yep. Yeah, it'll be live at the same time. We'll go through the stress test. We'll talk about some other stuff. My camera just disappeared. But we'll we'll talk about all the information from the stress test, announce some new stuff, and potentially when the next time people can get their hands on the game will be talked about during that as well. Well, then will that be on your channel, the jelly knees or ethereal's channel? It'll be on the ethereal Twitch and YouTube. Okay. And I'll send Mango's links so that we'll have that in the description for anyone that wants to go follow those channels now so that they're ready for that when it comes. Yeah, links for all the games that we talked about are going to be in the video description if you guys want to look at anything to do with any of them. Some of them might be old and if you do click on one that's old, let me know so that I can update it. I'm certainly not going to go through every single freaking link and try it on my own because there's like 50 of them. But before we move on from ethereal, J-Py, did you have anything you wanted to say? Any final comments? On ethereal, I don't really know much about it, but I can't wait to see the next test and get to play it because I liked what I saw. It looked really interesting and it definitely sets itself aside from the other, you know, typical Parazombies by being its own unique kind of game. And so I can't wait to see how it shapes up. Right on. Let's move on to Fault. Fault finally announced the date for Patch 14 and they did so with a teaser video of FaZe. So FaZe will be dropped with Patch 14, 10 December. So we can finally look forward to that Patch 14 from them that they're gambling a lot on this patch. They've been talking this patch up and talking about marketing. And I just, I hope it pulls them out of the sort of funk that they've been in. And I think FaZe is the perfect hero to do that with. A lot of people loved FaZe. I hated her, but a lot of people loved her. And I, you know, I can't fault them for that. She's, God, they need to change. I've said this before. They need to change the name of this goddamn game. Like they are setting themselves up for failure by calling it Fault. Oh yeah, I agree. It might as well call it failure. Yeah, it's, I don't like the name either. Yeah, never quite got that, but. The interesting thing for me with this announcement is it felt, and I hate to like take credit as for the minions or even the partner panel that Windu does, but it felt like they were bullied into a corner. Like you better say something or else we're going to riot. Like, and the announcement itself didn't help that feeling because it felt rushed out and not prepared. Like, Mangus, you have a note on here about the Facebook announcement said that it was October 29th. Nope. Like that certainly isn't true. Their announcement on Discord, they had to put out twice because there was an error in it. Like it just felt like they were suddenly, they had watched all of the rants that we've gone on over the last several weeks and went like, you know, maybe we should do something. Like. Yeah, I wish that they had a more systematic way of marketing just, you know, because it's kind of like inconsistent and unpredictable and, you know, we had the Twitter post before the most recent announcement where it was just an image of the map, insert birds chirping and nature music here, something like that. But I think, you know, it would just serve them well to just have like a more consistent, you know, you can be creative and showcase it like any number of things in many ways. Even, you know, we only had one image of the map. They could have done like two or three, you know, and then just at least give the community something to chew on while, you know, they're still working on it. And then kind of screwing up with that, with the Facebook post and having phases of release date as October 29th. I think that kind of tips their hand that this patch was probably supposed to come out on October 29th. Like, and that feels right. Like from the time they said, they started talking up Patch 14, I thought it would be out before Halloween. And it wasn't. I think that, I think something went wrong. I think something went wrong and they just haven't said anything. And it would be preferable to me at least that they be a little more forthcoming with the community about that sort of thing. Like, hey, Patch 14, we fully expected it to be out by now, but some things went wrong, we need to adjust them. I think people would have understood a little more instead of everybody freaking the fuck out because we haven't heard shit from fault on Patch 14 for months and months after they initially started talking about it. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think if I can be a little nitpicky about the announcement itself for the announcement for the video, for the announcement of Patch 14 is a weird way to do it for one thing. Yeah. Instead of just releasing the video, they made an announcement for the video to come out later that day, but then it was a 30 second video, which I think they overhyped their announcement. They put out an announcement that said, at three PM, we've got big news. Great, like, and everybody's expecting something really substantial to go on, right? So they spend all day hyping themselves up. And then when it dropped, it was a 30 second video of Phase who we already knew about, a Gideon skin that we already knew about, a Twin Blast skin we admittedly didn't know about, and the release date for Patch 14 four weeks later. That's a lot of nothing to hype up that much. And it feels like it, even the community afterwards, was like super hyped up for it, and then it came out and everyone went, oh, okay, it's four weeks away, whatever. And that was just complete kill of the hype instantaneously. Yeah, they would have been better off just dropping the video, because it was a nice video, like, seeing what they showed in the video, I mean, the map looks way better, and, you know, obviously the phase hype. I would have definitely just preferred that they didn't say anything until three o'clock, and then just drop it, you know, and then catch everybody by surprise. It's that, because now, as you said, having that previous announcement to the announcement, everyone set their expectations probably higher than SMS would have liked. But, you know, the announcement itself is cool, it's great, but it does kind of suck. It's like, you know, something big's dropping, you guys got to wait a few more weeks for it. But it is what it is. I for sure thought that the announcement, the three p.m. thing, was going to be them dropping patch notes for patch 14 and saying it'll be out now, an hour tomorrow, this week, whatever. I thought for sure that that's what was gonna happen. And then so to get a 30-second video of essentially non-new information except for the release date four weeks out, I was let down and I don't even play fault on a daily basis, right? Like that's me is where that shows a lack of understanding of what this announcement was intended to do. You make a good point, because I do play fault pretty often and I've been waiting for the patch notes since they announced this patch. I've done just, just want to read it over. I want to see what's coming, you know? But I agree, the fact that it's non-new information is also a pretty big factor. I mean, like you could argue that they, you know, it wasn't just a bit, like, you know, they showcased, it wasn't just a visual overhaul of the map. There's some, you know, changes of the map where you could actually traverse in like an area where you couldn't. So you can make that argument, but, yeah, all in all, I think you're, I agree with you, Jelenius. The map aesthetics look great. I thought it looked fantastic. FaZe herself looked really good. Looked like she retained a lot of her old abilities. And then, but then you also see her link to Gideon at one point in time and enemy Gideon. And he gets stunned after he's been linked for a certain amount of time. Kind of makes you wonder if that's gonna be their sort of twist on FaZe. And then also, the voice line that you hear like FaZe and Sluggo reporting in or whatever, I did look through the Paragon Assets. That is an epic asset, that voice line for FaZe. I do not like their voice lines for FaZe. It makes her sound like a 14-year-old girl. And to me, she looks like she's mid-20s or something like that, but... Yeah, she's got, yeah. I'm not sure how I feel about this stun. I'll have to see it in action. It seems like she could be probably a really strong support. She... She already was really hard to balance in Paragon and giving her a hard CC on top of her ultimate CC, on top of a blind, on top of the health regen to her linked ally, if that's stuck. She will be the jack of all trades support. And it's gonna be hard to justify anybody else over her, it sounds like. Yeah, it could very well be the case. And one thing you get from that stun that I think a lot of people haven't quite realized, whenever you're acute with somebody and maybe you're not in comms or whatever, like if I'm supporting and I'm acute with just a random ADC, I'll pull off like a crazy stun that they definitely could have capitalized on if they would have known it was coming. But there's no way to know when Decker's just gonna whip a ball out or if Richter's actually gonna hit that hook. With this, they can visibly see that she has linked to somebody. They know that they're about to get stunned. They can move up and take advantage of that quite easily. So I don't know, it might make FaZe a little too strong like I said, she was already very strong anyway. My guess is it's gonna be that she'll link to an enemy and as long as they stay within a certain distance for a certain amount of time, they get stunned. That if they get a certain distance, if Gideon uses his blink out of there or his portal to get out of there, it would break the link and he wouldn't get stunned afterwards. So it's based on range and time, but we'll have to wait and see. It's gonna be interesting for sure. December 10th. Yeah, we'll find out. J-Py, any thoughts on the fault before we move on to overprime? I just hope that, yeah, the patch is a big hit and it revitalizes the player base with influx of new players and it's a lot of fun. I'm gonna be trying it out for sure. Be looking for you. All right, let's move on to overprime. Similar to what they did previously with their Steam wishlist competition where they had people do a YouTube short of them posting themselves adding overprime to their wishlist and then having them tag overprime. They've done this with a meme competition. You make a meme, put it on YouTube Shorts or TikTok or whatever and tag overprime. And then again, you get the $10 of in-game currency and then there's also a $100 gift card grand prize for the top 20, I think, funniest. I just think this is really creative marketing and I really like it. 100%. Yeah. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't taking notes. Like to see that the way they're doing this and the reception from it as well, brilliant, across the board. Yeah, I like it too, because it's also marketing that they're not really putting money towards. There's a marketing that you have to direct funds towards. With this, it's just kind of involving the community and having them interact with the actual game and I think it's a great move. Yeah, and by tagging overprime, like I said, you get that trending and it's more likely to be shown to people that don't know anything about overprime and then they're like, why is everybody, why do I keep getting videos of people adding this stupid game to their wish list? Let me look it up and see what it's all about. Yep. It's a good way to get into people. Oh yeah. They had some new skin concepts and their work in progress. It was like a bellica skin and like something else. Man, they are constantly generating new content for this game, whether it be just concept art or actual flushed out finished skins. They definitely have a lead on the other projects when it comes to their own intellectual property. 100%. Yeah, I watched, it's on their YouTube. In a video earlier this year, they released like a plan and they wanted to open, like they're headquartered in South Korea, but they wanted to open like another site, I think in the UK. And they announced in that video that they were close to like 50 employees working there and by the end of this year, they had a goal to have over 100 employees working on it. And that's a lot. That's like triple digits working on a game. That's how they're pumping out all this content in terms of skins and models and things like that. And when you get to the point that your game functions, your map is good, like your map is designed and relatively complete, your AI systems are all built, then those employees don't need to do as much work and you can focus even more people on the skin concept, designing skins, implementing skins, all those things. You can spend more of your money toward that aspect instead of having to now suspend money on the design itself of the map and programming and all those things. Being backed by Netmarble has been huge for them. I mean, it's not like they're being backed by some rinky-dink company that nobody's ever heard of. Netmarble is the biggest mobile game marketer in all of South Korea. They're being backed by a huge company and it shows. It very clearly shows. I'll talk more about over prime when we get to the popularity poll but how they're not more popular is blowing my mind. Absolutely. Yeah, well, I think that, well, maybe I should wait until you bring up the poll. Yeah, I guess I'll wait. No, let's get into it now. Yeah, I was just gonna say, because at first it was like, I think it had a different name other than overthrow as well, right? Didn't it have a name before overthrow? PrimeX. Well, there was an overthrow, then primeX and then over prime. Yeah, so that definitely, the name changes like many people didn't keep up with it. And it's just also though, I think the whole thing was just not being on Steam because I don't know how prevalent it is to have Steam in South Korea and Asia, but over, you know, in the West, it's kind of like where you go to game. And I think that's kind of why they're so, they're maybe not as popular yet, but I think that with all the money that they have, like, you know, advertisements are gonna go everywhere and then it's gonna change. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think them getting listed on Steam, we'd even just, I think their wish list has shown the level of interest once it's on Steam because, and I would tell you that the most of the ParaZombie followers that I've talked to and when I bring up over prime, they go, I'm just waiting for Steam. I'm just waiting for Steam. I'm just waiting for Steam like across the board. So it's, once they're able to do that and once they're able to release on Steam, we could see a huge uptick in the West for sure. Yeah. Because before it was like downloaded from the Discord's Google Drive and you would download it and then the one third of the zip files were corrupted and you download it again, just for them to be corrupted again, you know? That I went through that. Like I spent hours trying to get it working and after that I was just like, I became one of those people, you know what, I'll just wait for Steam. Yeah, you had to like open up certain ports if you wanted to go peer to peer and get this and that. Like for a while they had servers for it and that was fun, that was decent. Like when they had that 3v3 ARAM map that they had, you could just queue in and play and that was good times. But then again, they were purchased by Netmarble and they're like, all right, we're not keeping those servers up anymore. If you want to play peer to peer, go ahead if you still have the game. But yeah, we're working on our own thing now. We're starting to see the fruits of that labor. 100%. So speaking of skins, they got skins for their minions as well. If you don't know, their minions are not the Paragon minions. They designed like their own minions. I'm sure they're based on the skeletal mesh of the Paragon minions, but they have their own unique appearance. Whether you like that appearance or not, that's a matter of opinion, but they're already starting to have skin concepts for their minions like a pirate skin and like a Easter Bunny skin where they have carrots instead of swords and... Whatever works, dude. If I mean, I would 100%, if I saw a minion skin line that I was like, I love this, I would love to see this every game, I'd purchase it, no question. And I'm just wondering, if you have 10 players in a game, what if they all have different minion skins? Does it just appear as a skin that they have? Oh, that's a good question. It probably will be local. So it'll probably be based on what skin your local machine is saying that you have, and so you see all the minions that way. If that's the way that it is, that's really impressive. Is they like that? That's really... Sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say, it's the way that... It's a phenomenal way to monetize the game. 100%. Yeah, I did. And the more avenues for monetization that they have, the better off they're gonna be. Yeah, that's an as yet untapped resource as far as monetization goes, is minion skins, that's crazy. We've probably talked about ethereal has, there's gonna have familiars like little pets that follow you around that activate spells. Like that's gonna be huge for monetization being able to buy a fricking pet. But this too, this is gonna be, this is crazy. I love it. And then, but beneath the skin concepts was that the Shroyer thing, which we've talked about before, a lot of people thought it might have been new hero. I think this is extra confirmation that it's a prime guardian skin. Or that it's just fight out their new design for the prime guardian. I could see it. That's what I thought too. But having a prime guardian's, like multiple primary guardian skins could be another way to monetize that, that'd be like crazy if they could do that. Because that's, for those of you who may not know, if you kill the prime guardian and then you dunk the prime orb, you spawn like a super, or like a prime guardian in the middle lane. And yeah, it would be cool to have like a, if somebody has like an awesome skin and you see it going down the lane, yeah, for sure. I'm sure that would be, you know, that would get people to spend some money. And I think it fits even more because that's the way that their prime works. The image we got a couple of weeks ago was of the destroyer in a lane where you saw Iggy and Scorch really small in the forefront of the frame. I think that just shows that it was pushing a lane, that they were showing that aspect of the orb prime. Yeah, oh, they got a new gallery tab in their Discord. I think this is probably more of interest to creators than anything that's got a bunch of PNG files, like transparent background files of the various heroes. They got some gifts and skin, this is where I found the skin concepts and that sort of thing. So just fun new tab in their Discord. Not much to really say about that unless you guys got anything. Nope. Yeah. And then I didn't know anything about this until I was watching Jay Pie's video where he was interviewing a Predtester, talking about an overprime Netflix series. And I was like, I couldn't find, I was like, where in the fuck did Jay Pie find this information? It is in their Discord when they're frequently asked questions thing that they have. Yeah, they plan to have like a visual novel on Netflix, not like a completely animated thing, I guess, probably more of the thing where it's just a storyboard that goes along. But that's fucking insane for marketing. Yeah, it's just, you know, cause people love lore and if this game gets some traction and people invest in learning the lore, it'll be cool. It's like another layer of the game. They did mention there that that's one of the reasons why that they changed the names of the characters. It was for that project, I guess. But I just, I think it's a, you know, it's a move that takes courage because as you guys know, the recent series Arcane was massive and it's very successful. They already announced the new season, but it's, you know, that's, League of Legends is played by millions of people who are well acquainted with the heroes and many are also well acquainted with the lore. I don't know if, you know, it's even worth investing the resources, but who knows, who knows, maybe it could do really well. I personally think it's well worth investing the resources cause as you guys probably know, I'm a big anime nerd, love anime. Anything that comes out on Netflix that's anime related, I'm going to consume. I'm going to at least give it a watch. You're going to, this, if they actually do this, if this happens, it's going to give them access to a whole separate pool of players that none of the other games has. It's going to have, like, it's got to be good. It better be fucking good. But even if a tenth of the people that watch that series on Netflix, cause especially Netflix, any kind of animated thing comes out on Netflix, people look for it and they watch it. Even if a tenth of those people decide that they want to play over prime based on that lore, they're going to destroy everybody else as far as just base player base goes. Now, I think the big thing, though, is that when and if that series does come out, the game has to be free to play by then. Oh yeah. Because if it's not, that tenth of, like you said, a tenth of people that watch it want to play the game. Further than that, now that one tenth is going to get cut by another tenth in people that are willing to pay for a game that they just watched. The free to play aspects will solidify that entire tenth of the viewer base. Whereas if you have to pay money, you cut that down drastically. I think this is definitely Netmarble's influence, too. Oh, 100%. Netmarble has a few tie-ins with Netflix, like Seven Deadly Sins and a couple other different games. Seven Deadly Sins probably being the biggest one, but. It'll be interesting to see for sure. Yeah, and I'm just impressed that, you know, working on a game is, it's hard enough. You have to plan really far ahead and to just have enough to already plan like a Netflix series, that's, yeah. I mean, I'm definitely gonna watch it when it drops. Yeah. Yeah, see, I think it's weird that Netflix would take a gamble on this, because like who gives a fuck about Oberprime, right? Like we do, but we're a very, very small portion of the world's population. Yeah, but by the same token, if you said, like you said, with that Netmarble already has his associations with other properties, if Netmarble says these are really popular for you, we pull them if you don't help us with this. That's, they can, Strongarm Netflix is a bit too strong there, but they can, they can, they have bargaining chips that they can use to be like, we can just pull our series and take it elsewhere, right? And so putting a, where Netflix is doing none of the work other than the hosting means nothing to Netflix. Yeah, that'll be very interesting to see. I can't wait to, I can't wait to see some announcements on the progress of that particular project. Absolutely. Well, let's move on from Oberprime, get into some predecessor. They didn't have any announcements this week that predecessor has been very stop and go with their announcements. They haven't, they aren't nearly as transparent as they used to be, which I, which I think I really miss it. I miss their, I miss the transparency from predecessor, but yeah, like, like we talked about earlier, J-Py, you got to, you got into the predecessor stress test, the last one that they had. You just want to talk through predecessor or your experiences with it? Sure. And now obviously trying to, with the stress test, trying to get into a game was basically a lottery over 15 hours, I got three games and I waited eight hours before I got my first game and then bizarrely enough, right when I finished my first game I queued up and it was like an instant queue pop right into the second game. And then after that game, it was a couple more hours. But yeah, once you got into the game, it was awesome. You know, like I couldn't, nothing felt like out of place, everything worked, you know, it was smooth. I felt really nice and it was fun. It was fun. That, it was just a matter of getting into the game, which unfortunately a lot of people didn't get to experience. But that was, that was like my experience with the play, the stress test. Now my experience is not really comparable because I was also streaming it, so which is, you know, you wouldn't imagine that most people playing the game wasn't streaming. So I think of myself as like an outlier. You know, I know a lot of people were frustrated and upset with it, and rightfully so. I hope that, you know, we were supposed to be promised another stress test and early access release this year. I don't really see it happening, maybe the stress test, but I don't know, we're so close to the end of the year yet and they haven't announced early access. So I have feelings it's gonna be pushed to like maybe Q1 of 2022. And toward that end of getting an announcement for another stress test or early access or anything, their last stress test in July, they announced pretty close to a month earlier than the actual date of the stress test. And so if they were looking at this year, we're basically at that month mark for anything to happen this year. Yeah. It could happen, I don't see early access for the game happening this year, but possibly another stress test. predecessor to me, I didn't get to play at all in the last stress test. I was literally homeless at the time, but I have gotten to play before and it has felt by far the most polished and professional of any of the other games that I've played. Like, it definitely felt the most complete and that's carrying them forward. They have a huge lead in popularity over the other games because of the quality that they bring to the table because they don't have the quantity that the other games have. They don't have the playability. They don't have the quantity of heroes that Over Prime has had. They don't have the playability that Fault has, yet still somehow they retain that lead because of that quality. And it says a lot for how good predecessor is. I think the thing that remains to be seen for predecessor is their monetization. And this kind of ties into our discussion topics. I won't say go too much into it, right? But it's the fault. We know what their monetization looks like. Over Prime, we've seen enough content from them that we can relatively understand what their monetization looks like, even if it's just guessing at this point. Ethereals come right out and said what their monetization is going to look like. Predecessor hasn't done anything like that. We don't have any idea what that's going to look like. And I think that's my biggest fear going into some kind of bigger release for them is what aspect of that do we have to follow? Their investors want returns, right? That's the nature of investments. So it's who's controlling the monetization in that aspect? And is it going to be good for players or good for predecessor? Do you guys think that Prede's early access release will be paid? I have no idea. Probably. I think it will be. I think, because Paragon's early access was paid. People lucked out and got keys and all that, but you had to pay to play the closed beta for Paragon. Um. There's a possibility that it will be free to play. I would love it if it was free to play, because that would just give them access to a way bigger player base right off the rip. And they do have their own skins and stuff that they can that they can sell. And I'm sure people would end up buying. But will their early access be free? I have no idea. No idea. I would wager a guess and say probably not. Um, partly because they have the investors, but with the investment, with the announcement of their investors and the funding that they raised, they talked about how they have a community of over 40,000 people. If even a fourth of that turns $20 in to play predecessor, that's a huge return right off the drop. That gives you some leeway with your investors that you can say, look at this, we've already got some money coming in. But it also gives you time to develop skins so that you can fully flesh out your monetization scheme and have it be worthwhile from the jump. I think part of the issue we saw with faults in that regard is when fault first came out, there were very few skins that were fault made that could not be purchased with regular in-game currency. And so for monetization past the point of just pay to play, there isn't much that entices players that they couldn't just say, well, if I really want this Paragon skin, I can just grind for it, even if it takes me 50 hours to do so. J-Py, you've been trying to say something. I know you have. No, just that I mean, I'm with you on this. I think that I would love it if they went free to play just to have that huge amount of players get in there and experience what they've been working on. I do, I think that they'll do that probably not because they can definitely make, as Jelly Knees pointed out, they can definitely make quite a bit of money with a paid early access. In an ideal world, I would like it to be free to play but also have founder packs. So maybe the people who want to shut out money would do so and the people that don't have the money to do so but want to play still can. That's what I would like to see, but who knows? I'm hoping that this Thanksgiving will hear and we'll have an announcement from Pred, at least with letting us know, it's not going to happen this year or stress testing the month or something. I hope not because we record Wednesday and then the show comes out Friday. They release something Thanksgiving. I'll be pissed. We'll just cover it. Emergency re-recording. We'll just cover it next week. It's all good. Good point, good point. All right. Well, let's move on from Predecessor. Talk about the popularity poll. Predecessor back up to 58% and fault up to 14. A theory will down to 16 and over prime. Staying at 12. They've been staying at 12, I think, since I started this poll. Maybe they had 10% at one point in time, but yeah. All right. What do you guys think of the popularity poll, the poll results, how the community feels? I should put out there's 491 votes for this and this is coming from my community. So a lot of what I say affects these poll numbers, which I completely realized that. Man, this is the problem. All you Jaybiology go first. I'd be interested to see how it changes once Predecessor is out because fault is out and the other three projects aren't. And I would like to see how the numbers, if it grows or decreases afterwards. Predecessor has that, I guess, mysterious quality. Like nobody really knows what's going on and what they have cooking. And that definitely leaves more to the imagination. People can just speculate whereas we know what's in fault, which what I want to see is when the novelty wears off of all, I think all these projects, when the novelty wears off, where the numbers will sit. Because I think that's going to be a real test. Once they're all out in the open, running wild, how will the numbers fall? But it's a cool metric to have. It's mainly for going forward, so we can take a look back at these numbers a year from now. Yeah, because I think once they're all in the early access environment and people can play them if they want to, they're going to change. And I am curious to see how that unfolds. Yeah, absolutely. I think nothing about this surprises me necessarily in terms of the changes of where things were falling. Ethereum dropping from, I think it was 22% last week to 16 after the stress test, totally understandable. Because we saw building up to the stress test, the increase, this is just now that the stress test is over, the fall back down from there. Fault, having their announcement, boosted numbers. That tracks to me. And then Pred making up the slack. Right? Like anyone that wasn't excited about Fault, but was excited about the stress test for Ethereum, but now that's over, votes for Pred again. And so I don't think these numbers surprise me at all. I would love to see Ethereum be higher, of course, but I think it all makes sense that why the raises and drops happened. What surprises me about this? And I've been making, I've been writing the script for a video for this is why OverPrime isn't higher. Because there's a few things that people, over the years of me tracking these games, there's a few things that people always ask for. One, console. When is it going to be console? Can we see console, console, console, console? OverPrime is the only one that has shown themselves playing the game on a PS5 dev kit. Yet they're still at the bottom. Another thing is people are like, well, they're going to have to come up with their own stuff. Eventually they're going to have to make their own heroes. I want to see one of these companies make their own thing. OverPrime is the only one that has created their own hero and has shown it. Maybe the other ones have, but OverPrime is the only one that's shown it. And yet they're at the bottom. And everybody's like, well, you can't just recreate a dead game. You're going to have to make improvements to Paragon. It can't just be Paragon all over again. Fault and Pred are pretty much just Paragon. There's some minor differences. OverPrime, Fault and Pred are following the Paragon path. The path that has been blazed by Epic, and they're following that path. OverPrime is getting out the chainsaws and the machetes, and they're bushwhacking their own cores. Yet they're still at the bottom. The big thing that I could kind of surmount this all to for the Paragon, the diehard Paragon fans specifically, is OverPrime is taking monolith and injecting adrenaline into it. And a lot of people did not like monolith. And so while there definitely is a player base for monolith, I think that's the 12% we're seeing. I do not think that that player base, the non-monolith player base, is at all excited for OverPrime because of that. Because they took the worst parts for a lot of people about monolith and made that the core identity of their game and so those people are just out. Even if they were thinking about trying it, emphasizing the bad parts they didn't like about Paragon when it died is not the answer to grab those people. And so I think that 12%, like I said, I think that 12% are the people that liked monolith, that are following these Paragon successors and everyone else is just sticking to Fault and Pred because it's not monolith. Yeah, with OverPrime, you have Fault and Pred that are definitely more true to Paragon and OverPrime, they're attempting to innovate in some interesting ways. I know that the pace of the game is the most common complaint that I've heard, but I think that the time to kill is fairly similar to Fault even though it's like much faster paced. I tried to gauge how quickly the health bars would get deleted at various points in the game and it seemed pretty on par. I could see the pace of the game turning people off completely because it does definitely feel like more of a brawler and I was under the impression that it was because on their main webpage, they didn't even advertise it as a MOBA but on the Steam page that they recently released that they did and yeah, I mean, I don't know, I feel like it's probably going to be one of those games that you either hate it or you like or you love it and they're definitely the furthest, well, I think Ethereal is the most unique of all four but I would put OverPrime behind Ethereal in that regard because of the way that they've innovated, having all abilities unlocked from level one and having like League of Legends style bushes on the map where you just walk in and you're invisible. It's interesting to see how that will pan out in the player experience. For example, if you have a ranged character and they attack an enemy hero and then draw the aggro and if they just run into the bush, do they lose all the aggro and will that be abusable? I'm sure the things like that will be, you know, they probably experienced it and ironed out the issues with that in testing but yeah, I think that it will make a splash though. I think OverPrime is going to make a big splash that, you know, maybe on this show and after some time, you know, they might be the biggest part of the pie or close to half, something like that. It's an interesting enough formula they've innovated enough on the formula to kind of separate themselves and could that be the recipe for success of a Paragon successor? Yeah, absolutely. Who knows, you know, no project in my eyes has taken, like I felt OG Paragon had the potential but it never reached that formula of success and maybe OverPrime is that formula. Who knows, I don't know. You kind of hit on something a little bit there too. I think content creators have a lot to do with it as well because you have a lot of content creators out there that are very just focused on predecessor and they dismiss fault off hand as if it's a joke. They dismiss OverPrime off hand as if it's a joke. They've never even heard of ethereal and I think a lot of these guys, whether they're streamers or YouTubers, are doing a huge disservice to their community by not at least addressing and talking about some of these other games that are out there because predecessor isn't the end all be all. It's my personal favorite. But I mean, hell, back in 2017, when Core was absolutely massive, Core was like 95% of my poll and predecessor was like 2% and I was telling everybody, I was like, y'all got to stop sleeping on this predecessor game. They're going to be huge. And now we move forward to the 2021. There's people that have never even fucking heard of Metabuff and Core and predecessor is huge. Like you can't just sleep on one of these games because you never know what the future is going to bring. Absolutely. And I think actually the constant creator aspect of Mangoose is brilliant to bring up because there are definitely creators. Not only do they only prioritize predecessor, they'll cover everything. But you can definitively tell that they care more about predecessor than they care about anything else they talk about. Right. Right. They make a video on fault. If they make a video on over prime, if they make a video on ethereal, it's usually way less excitement, wave tone down. Oh, yeah, you know, it looks really cool. But when it's Fred, it's like, oh my God, Fred's doing the greatest thing ever. And it's so clear to their communities, even if they cover multiple games, which one their horse is hitched to. Like it's very clear and it's very obvious to see a lot of that sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everyone's biased. That's true. I try my best to combat that, but I fail at that often. But it's true. It's important not to just deny yourself for no reason, because these communities have a lot of overlap and people are fickle and feelings change over times. And maybe people, when predecessor first comes out, they'll love predecessor, but then they'll just one night try a different one and jump onto that one. You know, it's like, I think that we should just open ourselves up to as much experiences as we can and definitely content creators shoot themselves in the foot because you can not only introduce something cool to your audience, but you can also, I don't know what the term is. Spill over. I heard somebody, somebody once explained. Yeah, something like that. Like, you know, you interact with other audiences, other creators, audiences, they interact with you, same thing with games and things like that. It's just better, it's better overall for everybody, really. And that hits on a point that I feel like, I think you and I talked about at Main Goose last week or something, is that extends even to the company level. These companies need to stop putting blinders up and acting like they're the only ones in the in-town. Right. They, that they, everyone needs to consider everything across the board because that's how A, all these games get better and B, that's helped these companies survive because they're not just ignoring what else is going on in the world. They're actually paying attention to everything as a whole. Yeah, just to give you an example, on social media, you don't have the Wendy's social media ignore the existence of all the other competing fast food chains. They often have banter amongst them and that's just, it's like marketing. You get people to talk. Absolutely. I love Wendy's social media, by the way. It's hilarious. Yeah. The one that comes to mind was somebody asked at Wendy's, where's the nearest Burger King? And then they posted a picture of a garbage can. All right. You guys ready to move on from the popularity poll into the discussion topic? Let's do it. Okay. Oh yeah. So we're going to talk tonight about the importance of ethical business practices now this is a very objective thing or is it objective or subjective? Subjective. Subjective, yes. This is kind of a lot in a lot of ways is very subjective whether you think something a company is doing is unethical. I think the only clear cut and dry example of something unethical that has happened with all of these pair zombies is that Project Agora thing where they were faking making a Paragon successor in order to get donations from the community and they were kind of feeding upon that Paragon nostalgia to make money. And yeah, that was the only, I think, clear cut thing. But there have been other things that I think a lot of people would consider unethical. I think another one we could rope in that's pretty clear cut is Metabuffin Core because them putting out their merch store the week they were supposed to have the alpha test then the alpha test never happening and then they suddenly go, oh, well, bye and then just disappear with everybody's money. That's pretty out there. Well, I think, see, again, I don't think that's clear cut and dry. I think they really did think that they were going to be something big and then they imploded. Like it sucks, but I don't think it's an ethical issue. I think more of an ethical issue with Metabuff was how they put out that screenshot where they had accepted the PlayStation end user agreement and then let people think that that meant that the game was in PlayStation development and it was not. It definitely was not. They never stepped in and said, hey, that doesn't mean that we're developing for PlayStation. They never said, hey, we don't actually have a dev kit for PlayStation. They just put that out there and let it hang and let the community come to a very incorrect conclusion. And then you got people like me out there like, whoa, hang on, guys. This doesn't mean shit. I mean, SMS is the same thing, though. Did they? SMS has put out there that they're approved for PlayStation. Isn't, didn't they? Am I crazy? Oh, they did. They did a very long time ago, didn't they? Yeah. But basically, when Fault was first starting to be a thing, they put out that they're approved for PlayStation and they did the same thing. They haven't talked about it. They used that 100 percent. They used that to get people to pay for it. Like it's one of those things that I, on the marketing team for Ethereum, have thought about being like, yeah, great. Let me just go out and get the certificate and just put it out there that Ethereum's approved on console. Like it's such an easy, I've looked into it. It literally is an application that I have to fill out online and I get an answer within seven business days. I told you I did it with my, my landscaping business. Yeah. I got a PlayStation. I got the PlayStation user agreement with my landscaping business. It's, it really is that easy and it really means that little. Like it needs a tax ID. Yep, 100 percent. I think a big thing that Paragon showed as unethical business practices in terms of monetization is how loot box dependent they became and just loot boxes in general. Loot boxes in general, it's gummy. But especially with the way Paragon turned what it turned into with Paragon was if you wanted anything worthwhile, you had to pay money for a loot box for a chance to get the thing that's worthwhile. It was, it's gambling 100 percent. There's a reason it's becoming more and more outlawed with since battlefront two became such a fiasco. And like, and I can't say with 100 accuracy on this for all the companies, but most of them I'm pretty sure have said that loot boxes are not going to be a thing in their games. I can say for certain, a theory is not going to loot boxes. Fault I can say with relative accuracy because they're out. Overprime is up in the air and predecessor is the only one that I would say I'm the least certain about. They definitely said that they are not going to have loot boxes. They've said that past. That's from Sergeant Smoky himself. Okay, perfect. J-Py, what are you talking about? I see you're doing over there and I see you thinking. Yeah, well as far as overprime, I don't know. Because they haven't, their Q&A thing, they don't say how it's going to be monetized. I think they just, they say that it's going to be free to play. They just don't go beyond that. And one of the things that I wanted to bring up, how would you guys feel? So I came across one Reddit post where some guy estimated, you know, now a little infinite multiplayer, it's free to play. To unlock everything, it might cost about $1,035. Now, if the games were free to play, would you feel that that's a problem to unlock the skins and everything? It cost that much. I guess it would depend on what the skins were like and how many skins that $1,000, how much content that $1,000 buys me. That seems a little over the top to me, because I certainly wouldn't have paid $1,000 for a Genesis game back in 1995. When I'm paying for a complete game right up front. But yeah, man. Yeah, that's an amazing figure right there, over $1,000. But as long as it doesn't affect gameplay, I think I'm pretty cool with it. If people want to spend that much of their money on skins and aesthetics. And it's one of those, is it unethical to charge $20 to turn someone's armor blue? Sure. Is someone's going to pay it? That's on them, right? That's at what point is it not the company's fault if an idiot goes out and pays $20 to turn their armor blue? And that's where I think it gets complicated. A Valorant is a prime example of this. Because a single gun set can cost upwards of $300 to $400 in Valorant. A single gun set. And there's dozens of gun sets and they're coming out with new ones every patch. So the fact that they can get to that extent completely and totally unethical. If you're spending $400, you're the sucker, right? It's at that point, you have to show them with your wallet that it's not okay and people don't do that. It's like saying it's not McDonald's fault that you're fucking fat. Exactly. Yeah. Now, this doesn't really apply to the Paris zombies, but in Halo's case, the previous game, like all those cosmetics, to Man Goose's point, when you paid $60 you had access to all of them and now they kind of stripped that from that. But it doesn't really apply to the Paris zombies, does it? But I'm going to have to agree with you guys, you know? If nobody buys the skins, then they wouldn't make them, you know? They would change the prices or whatever. I could see some of the, like, I could definitely see Over Prime being very monetized, like expensive skins and things like that. I could for sure, too. I think one thing that I saw that I really liked out of Fault in particular in terms of their monetization and being ethical is that all of the Paragon skins that are in the game for the characters can be earned with the in-game currency. Yes, is it a grind to get enough currency to buy a skin? Absolutely. But you can do it. It is something you are absolutely capable of doing. You do not have to spend money to get your favorite skin back from Paragon. For something they did not create, that they just essentially poured it onto the character and called it a day. In the case of Halloween Bellica, literally, because her hat still does not fit on her head. But I think that is one thing that I can applaud of them is that they went that route instead of charging money for the skins that they did not even put the man hours into making. Yes, I like that approach, too. I think they did a good job in that regard. Something that I think is still too early to tell how it's going to be fully received that Halo is doing that I think a lot of these games need to look at because MOBAs across the board are implementing some kind of battle pass because it keeps players playing. It gives them cosmetics and it gets away for you to earn money every four months, the three to four months, depending on how long your seasons last. Halo's battle passes are infinite, for lack of a better way to put it, in that there is no time limit. You pay $20 for the battle pass. You will forever be able to earn that battle pass until you complete it. That's something that is huge, but the implications of are not discovered yet. For all we know, they could wait and say, yes, you can work on this battle pass forever. There's no time limit. But if you want to work on the next one, you have to abandon this one forever. And we just don't know what that looks like yet and the implications go further. But it's a good stepping stone toward still earning income for them but providing players value without needing to go extreme on it. A better way to battle pass. See, I felt that was unethical from Strange Matter whenever they implemented a battle pass from the beginning. Season pass. Season pass, whatever. It's all the same shit to me for real. Get the season zero pass. Yeah, like I understand paying for early access because you have to have money to continue developing the game. But having a season zero pass in a game that hasn't even been proven and ended up not being proven at the very first, like we've said, fault now, completely different game than fault when it released. 100%. It's fun now. I really enjoy playing fault now. After patch 13, I've looked fault. But before that, like I canceled my partnership with fault because I just wasn't creating content with the game because it wasn't fun. So Ryan came to me and was like, Hey, man, do you still want to be a fault partner? I'm like, you know what, dude? I'm not even making content for this game. So no, no, I don't want to be a fault partner anymore. So for them to have a season pass with a game in that state, I thought it was, I didn't like it at all. Me neither. I think it also gave you access to heroes a week before they were released. Wasn't that one of the details? I didn't like that, that either. That's when we talked about this before with Ravenmangus, early access to content like that is almost never beneficial for your community because all it does is single people out. Is either you're the shill who paid an extra $20 to get access to a character early or you're too poor to pay $20 to get access to a character early. And especially with Paragon, with when characters came out in Paragon, they were always overtuned. And so the feeling of when this character drops, I want to be able to play them that week earlier while they're overtuned. So I can just stomp on people for a week. Ridiculous. It's paid to win in that aspect. Absolutely. You're only winning for a week, but you're winning for a week when other people aren't because you paid money. And when all fault has, especially that early on, was their elo system and tracking how high on the elo system you were? That's all people wanted was a better way to win. I believe that's been part of fault's downfall as well as that elo system, but I think that's a whole conversation I can have on a different day. I think it's nice that you bring up Paragon and their loot boxes. Because what I kind of wanted to get to with this discussion topic is that your ethics affect the outcome of the game. And Paragon really went downhill after Steve Superville left, Donald Buster came in, started, we started with all the loot boxes where you could only get skins out of the loot boxes. Paragon went downhill from there. People lost faith in Paragon at that point in time. And it was an unethical decision to implement those loot boxes and it definitely affected the future of the game. Oh, yeah. Yeah, go ahead, J-Py. I was just going to say because how the company speaks to the community is extremely important because you could find some footage of like the creative, not creative director. I don't want to, I know his name. I don't want to say his name though. He worked on Paragon. He was like the lead developer when it was in its decline. And he, you know, he has one quote where because the community was bringing up all the time talking about switching to an item shop instead of a car shop. And he says to himself, he's like, yeah, would it be more balanced and fair? Yes, but players don't get invested in an item shop. And then he was trying to make the argument that players get invested in the cards that they collected in Paragon, you know? And it's just kind of like, people, you know, you're not going to fool people. I got invested in the card system in the fact that when I got a card that was really good. I was going to win more. That was my investment. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the example that I love to go to is there was one competitive player that played ranged carry. And you needed these tokens when the new card system came out. There was like this one. It was like, you know, you would buy that right at out the gate. The gym. And he, well, it was like, this was actually before the. Bridget 42. Yeah. So he was a competitive player. His role was ranged carry. And he never got a strict token until they created card crafting. And it's just kind of silly. You know, it's like he played all his games with that competitive disadvantage. You know, it is a bad system. Horrible system. I've talked about that, too. I didn't get a strike token until they came out with fucking card crafting in it. Yeah. I think Paragon is a masterclass in and of itself in all stages of its life from beginning to end of what not to do in terms of a lot of these business practices. There are a lot of good things throughout it, right? But the early card system, having to get the cards in order to have builds that were good than better than other people's just across the board, lots to learn from Paragon in all stages that a lot of these companies can take to heart and figure out better ways to do things. Yeah. I'll give you an awesome example of what not to do. Have your own Paragon booth at TwitchCon three or four months before you cancel the game. I don't know what that was about. I was like, I was there. I was there in person. I don't know why they did that. Wow. We were talking earlier, J-Pi, you brought up Blizzard that that's a great example of a company that used to be known for being fairly ethical and have just gone way downhill recently. And the decisions they've made, the morals that they represent are directly reflecting who plays their game and the numbers of the people that play their game. And it's not just the morality as in, you know, basic, I guess, human interaction with their employees. It's also the morality of how they implement their games. You were talking about Warcraft Reforged. Huge, huge fucking dumpster fire for them. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That company was a company for me growing up was the epitome of making these magical gaming experiences. To now, I'm never going to buy another product. It sucks. It sucks to see. It's like that, you know, that Christopher Nolan Batman movie. It's like, what's that quote? You either die the hero or you live the long enough to see yourself become a villain. Yep. 100 percent. It's like, yeah, I'm sorry, Jeleneys. No, to relate the Warcraft III situation perfectly to these para-zombies is Paragon had a lot of features, right? And almost every single one of those features was somebody's favorite thing. There's no question about it, right? And all three of these successors have to be careful because if they suddenly are just like, oh, we're not, we're just not going to include that one. There are people in their base that are going to be upset about it. And there is, they have a template that they have to build off of. And we've talked about this in the past and I've heard Windu and Bearded all talk about it as well, is having that template, you're held to the standards of something you had no control over. And it's a hard thing to be pressed against at the same time. Yeah. Well, you know, on the bright side, I think that all these games that are coming out, they all offer old Paragon fans, whether you're a fan of Legacy or Monolith or... Was it version 42? Yeah. Whatever version you're a fan of, I think that these are the games to go to and you'll find a home in one camp or the other. But you know, I think it's a great time to be a Paragon fan. Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely. On the topic of ethics, it goes both ways. The companies need to be ethical, but I think the fan base needs to be ethical as well. I think a vast majority of the fan base are open to anything, are willing to try anything. But then you got these fucking pieces of human garbage out there that will not miss an opportunity to throw shade at the game that they don't think is going to survive. They've picked their game, whether it be overprime, predecessor or fault, and then they've decided that the other games can do nothing right and their game can do nothing wrong and it bleeds into the community. And you see that on every post for any of the games. There's a guarantee you, there's on any non-predecessor game, I guarantee you there's a post on there about not as good as predecessor. On overprime, I can guarantee you it's the same way. If you're posting for predecessor, someone's going to talk about overprime. Someone's going to talk about fault. Someone's going to talk about ethereal. It's guaranteed that when one of these companies says something, there's going to be a group of people in the comments or whatever it may be that bring up that, no, this is terrible. I like the way X-game does it better. Instead of, it's one of those, if you're not a fan, stop commenting. Like I, it just, again, you can't blame McDonald's for calling you fat. You're unhappy with how this game is going. You're still playing the game. Who's really the person at fault here? If you're not enjoying it, don't play. Go somewhere else. And there's a line between giving feedback and wanting them to do only what you say. And they're very different things, but they often blur together for I think a lot of people. Yeah, the tribalism definitely doesn't help. And if you're leaving a comment on a game you don't like, that means that the video or whatever post, it has more comments, which makes it bigger, you know. That's the algorithm. If you don't like it, I think it was Eumangus that said it the other day, if you don't like it, don't touch the like and dislike button. Don't leave a comment. Don't do anything. That's how you actually show that you don't like anything. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the worst part is of the pair of zombies, we are such a small population of the gamers that, you know, any, all of these projects for all we know, they might all go under, you know, in a year or two, the same way Paragon went. You never know, the future is unpredictable. And we could criticize the games, but we should also just try to do it in a constructive and helpful manner. I think as far as ethics go, the most unethical things I've seen from any of these companies is involves communication with the community. Like we already talked about Metabuff, with their just lack of communication about that, that post and everything. One of the reasons I kind of wanted, I wanted to talk about this J-Pi is there was that recent video you posted where you were talking to one of false testers slash partners. And I personally couldn't make it through the entire video because I was getting so angry. Because it was very obvious that you were there to discuss a topic, they were there to argue a topic, so they kept interrupting you, talking over you, and just being very boorish. This person, I do like them, they're a great person. I'm not going to say their name. I'll put the video down in the video description. But that, even though they're not an employee of strange matter, that was a very poor look from that company overall. Yeah, what was the question? There was no question, I was just stating. It was a little fucked up. Oh yeah. Yeah, no, that whole entire event was really unfortunate. I wanted to have a more productive conversation you know that occurred on stream and I labeled it as a debate specifically because that's the way that I approached it. And I wouldn't say that I had a proper sit down with a fault tester discussing their ideas and things like that. And if any fault testers are interested in having like a proper sit down and a discussion, I'm all game, I would love to do something like that. But because I know with the other video, it wasn't a debate. And I do want to give fault to, you know, it's not indicative of all the hard work that a lot of the developers and the artists and everybody puts into the game. So I would like, hopefully I can create something with a fault tester soon. Because the game does deserve some, that wasn't a great indication of, I do feel it sheds light on some lesser attractive qualities or common attitudes in the fault community. But that's no way representative of strange matter. So if any fault testers out there want to sit down and talk about fault, I'm game. I would like to see that in actual discussion instead of one person being level headed and trying to discuss things. The other one just arguing everything they said. Oh, that made me angry. But it's something these companies definitely have to watch because anyone even loosely associated with the company is easily viewed as a spokesperson for the company. Right. And a tester counts as that, right? If you're an internal testing of any kind, there's a reason internal testers have to sign NDAs because it's anything they say can be counted as a spokesperson of the company saying that. And it's a very hard thing to come back from should it go poorly. I just think we've seen in the past so far that being unethical bites you in the ass. We've seen that with Metabuff and Core. We saw that with Project Agora. They got shut down pretty hard. And I think everybody else just needs to learn from that and understand that it may not be of huge significance. People mainly just care about the game, right? They don't care how employees are treated or whatever. But if it comes out that you're treating your employees like shit, people are going to be a lot less inclined to play the game. If it comes out that you've been bullshitting and blowing smoke up people's asses about something, people are going to be a lot less inclined to play that game. They need to keep business ethics in the forefront of their minds whenever they have any dealings with anything. Not a pair zombie but Project Stamina I think is another good example of that. When Project Stamina a few months ago had their giant blow-up the community definitely saw it and people were rethinking their backing of the company just as a whole because of the way that it was said that people were being treated and dealt with. And so there are plenty of examples in our direct vicinity of other games that we can look at to see this stuff. Another recent example is Streamlabs OBS. Business ethics is from the top down. It has to be done properly at every level. And there's so many examples where I read one. They asked OBS if they could include OBS in their name and OBS said no. That they don't want them to include it in their name and they did it anyway. And then the worst part, the worst one I read was there was how people create plugins and features for these softwares. They Streamlabs OBS wanted to work with one dev so they were having meetings on how it worked or whatever and then release their own version like four months later, five months later. And yeah, and it comes back to bite you for sure. That's why so many there's like this big movement now to switch to OBS from Streamlabs OBS now. Like it's recently picked up. All right, well, I think I've said my piece but Jelene's J-Pile will give you an opportunity to settle up on the topic. If you have anything else you wanted to say. No, I think I've said everything. Yeah, I feel good about it too. Okay, right on. Well, that's going to close it out. That's going to close this episode out then. We'll move on to Plugs J-Pile. I know you have a Twitch channel and a YouTube. Anything else that you want to plug? Maybe just my Twitter, I think I'm VJPile. Let me just double check. If you'd like to follow my Twitter, I just basically tweet whenever I go live. Yeah, it's the J-Pile and then Twitch on J-Pile. And then my YouTube, I don't know. It's J-Pile TV, but yeah, thanks. You're at 192 subscribers. If we can get him to 200, he can be YouTube forward slash J-Pile TV. Let's go. Let's go, guys. Let's go. Thanks, man. Yeah, so links to his YouTube and Twitch and Twitter will be in the video description below. If you want to check that out, I'll put it in the pinned comment as well. Jelly, anything to plug? Just my Twitch, twitch.tv slash Jelinese and like and subscribe to Mangus because he's been on a kick of saying it recently in his own videos, so I wanted to save him one. Hey, I have been saying it. I shied away from that for so long. Anyway, that's going to close it out. I've got nothing to plug, of course, but yeah. It was an interesting topic. I think we've already found our topic for next week. I'm going to have to look back through and remember what it was. We were talking about something. I was like, yeah, we need to save that. Yeah, we'll get into that next week. If you guys have anything else that you wanted to say about the ethical business practices, if you have any anecdotes or examples, not just from the pair of zombies and ethereal or just any other game out there in the universe that you want to talk about, let me know down in the comments below. But until then, we will see you next time.