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S3 Ep210: RSS - June - Ian (V Rising)
82 Plays3 years ago
MINOR SPOILERS: V Rising
Join Dave, Jake, and special guest Ian as they talk about V Rising, survival PvP mechanics, and feng shui in week's episode!
Intro:
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
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Join Dave, Jake, and special guest Ian as they talk about V Rising, survival PvP mechanics, and feng shui in week's episode!
Intro:
- Pit People (It's Us!) - Patric Catani
- TUNIC (Original Soundtrack) - 50 Flux Is On / Lifeformed × Janice Kwan
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest System
00:00:54
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going today, Dave? Deflect targeting Ian. Ian, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me. It's good to have you. We'll have you back in the future for the people out there. You have ideas.
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, definitely good to have you back on. We've got, I think, a pretty good, a strong core of participants that we try not to harass too much for episodes, but I think we've got a system now.
Podcasting Challenges and Humor
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, ever since the harassment lawsuit, you have spoken with me less, but I'm not sure if this is strictly in the terms, but fame is too low a price.
00:01:44
Speaker
I just send you please and all caps. I never say no. Please. I beg you. Podcast stuck. We need content. Everyone else is busy. No, we actually have a rotating list of individuals, so we try to harass.
00:02:05
Speaker
Uh, a single person less, and this is more, um, fair because regardless of how, which, which people are our favorite people, we make it through the whole list. Right. Um, but it also has the advantage of if someone happens to be busy.
00:02:21
Speaker
and not willing to, and or not willing to spend their evening or, you know, Saturday afternoon, um, helping us create content that we do not reimburse for. There's, there's no advantage paid in exposure. Yes. Yeah.
The Quirkiness of Web Domains
00:02:41
Speaker
Which is why we started recording video. Exactly. And we don't publish that. That's important.
00:02:47
Speaker
That's up on the Patreon friend who is interested for a nominal fee. You can. We switched to only fans, actually. Oh, that's news to me. I mean, it's the new hotness. I think it's been around for a while now, but HTTPS slash the new hotness. Yes. I don't know what that website is. Oh, I was implying OnlyFans was in the URL already. Oh, gotcha. OK. All right. I was going to say.
00:03:17
Speaker
That's a little risky, just the name jumping random websites. We don't know what they are.
Gaming Experiences: V Rising
00:03:21
Speaker
Yeah, we endorse this for our listeners. This website that we have not vetted ourselves. I'm going to assume it's .com. I mean, it's HTTPS, at least it's secure. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be resolving. So I think we're good.
00:03:40
Speaker
I guess we misdirected anybody and the network traffic. Yeah. I'll make sure to register this earlier today. Two thousand five hundred dollars. Any websites we mentioned. Yeah, I had to check to see if like anybody plausibly could purchase this and then I don't know. Are we on the hook? Not that many people listen, but for like two and a half thousand dollars, I don't think anyone's going to fulfill the joke. Yeah, that's a lot of money for a one off joke. Mm hmm.
00:04:11
Speaker
But it would be a really good joke. True. I'd feel the need to reuse it if I was spending that much money. Yeah. Well, you would almost be obligated to continue to mention this website if a fan actually just bought it for $2,500. It doesn't really matter what they put on it either, right? Like how you keep restating the price is like, hey, just no. This is the amount. If you choose to buy it. And the domain bursary is. It is an option. It's like. Yeah.
00:04:41
Speaker
This week's podcast sponsored by the new hotness dot com. Yeah, actually, that's a much better idea. Give us the money as part of a sponsorship deal for whatever you want to peddle. Don't buy this random domain. So we're going to sponsor bikes now because peddling. Ah, OK, gotcha. What are what are the people who ride bikes competitively called cyclists, I think?
00:05:11
Speaker
Pedalers. Completing the joke. Our quality is really low right now. We got to bump up. How are things going? What have you guys been up to?
V Rising Gameplay Breakdown
00:05:30
Speaker
I'm pretty well. Dave and I lock eyes as we play Silence Chicken. I looked at him.
00:05:40
Speaker
and he looked at me. My time has been well the last two, three weeks. I typically get pretty listless in between video game releases that I'm like, well, I guess I'm going to recycle Starcraft and the Knights of the Old Republic. But this week and the week before, I think myself and a few other people have been mainlining V Rising pretty hard.
00:06:09
Speaker
like a lot. Yeah, I know Dan brought it up to me the other days like how much time have you put into this game that cost $20? And according to steam, it's 82 hours. So we're approaching Elden Ring levels of engagement.
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's like, you know, almost a mainstream, I'd say mainstream JRPG. Right. Yeah. I think persona was like 110 hours for me, like the non DLC version of it, the original release. Yeah. I'm getting close to the third semester. Yeah. That's how are you? I mean, obviously you're liking it. What is it? Exactly. What do you enjoy about it that's sustaining your time in it?
00:06:54
Speaker
So for the uninitiated, V Rising is the newest kind of indie early access darling, you know, flavor of the month type deal. And it's a game about vampires and you play a vampire recently resurrected and you explore a map, kill enemies, farm resources, build castles and dominate the countryside.
00:07:16
Speaker
And it kind of mixes this Diablo top down combat system with survival crafting, base building management type thing, where you are
00:07:33
Speaker
killing difficult bosses for their blood, bringing it back to your castle to fuel greater expansion and crafting and armoring so that you can continue the loop to kill bigger and harder bosses.
PvE vs PvP in V Rising
00:07:49
Speaker
And even though it's not the way we've been playing it, we've been mostly playing it in a PvE cooperative style, the game is also being pitched as a PvP
00:08:02
Speaker
consistently online type thing, similar to Rust, where you drop 40 people into a map, you let them clan up into little groups, they build their castles, and instead of just fighting the environment for resources, they compete with each other and blow up each other's castles and stuff. And it's not something I've experienced, but I've pitched it to a few people that, hey, when we're done being friendly with each other, do we want to jump into a server and see if we could ruin stranger's days? Right.
00:08:32
Speaker
So is the server you're on currently just fully PV and you'd have to switch servers to go to PVP? Yeah. Yeah. We're playing, um, we're doing the kind of local lazy hosting where, uh, when we were playing, uh, together, uh, we would pick one person, uh, in this case, war chortle and force him to open up the hosting so that other people can just join in on his local save. Uh, but they launched in early access with.
00:09:00
Speaker
Dedicated server support out the bat and and a service set up to pay them money to host their server for you So they they pre-planned their financial strategy
00:09:14
Speaker
It's better than having like three up and then just hoping to get on for something that's more massive multiplayer.
Game Balance and Replayability
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah, they I played like twice in the second time was like for one minute, but I was telling Dave earlier, I think the game's actually like from what I played basically excellent. I was just kind of stressed out and there's a lot of people on and it was a rough week and all this stuff. So I got behind, but I do plan to go back and play it more. The combat actually reminded me even more of like
00:09:43
Speaker
Like Diablo is the go-to if you've got like a hack and slash isometric, but something like Guild Wars sort of reactive combat or New World, like where, you know, there's a deflect move, right? You're like, okay, hit this button at a specific time. So it's a little bit more action oriented, like dodge things and all of that.
00:10:09
Speaker
And it's really good. From what I played, the game was just incredibly polished. The fact that it's early access is a surprise compared to the quality of the usual early access game, which is quite a bit lower. Yeah, I'm actually quite
00:10:29
Speaker
Impress with the level of polish. We were discussing it the other night and I don't think I've ever played an early access game that was as complete as this game because Hades was not complete when it first came out. It was polished. Everything that was already in the game was polished to a shine, but it wasn't complete. There were still things they were adding. This is. I would if they tomorrow announced that it was leaving early access, I wouldn't bat an eye.
00:10:59
Speaker
Right. I know they sold 500000 copies within the first week and within two weeks they'd hit a million. So they made their money. I was going to say it's very much in the Valheim space. The difference being, like, I feel like Valheim, it had a lot of content. OK, I'm going to talk negatively about Valheim for a second. It had a lot of content, but it hasn't like maintained that velocity.
00:11:26
Speaker
at all, and it was clear what was missing,
Survival Mechanics in V Rising
00:11:29
Speaker
I think, when you went through the game the first time. Consistent combat and interactions with things. Yeah. Yeah. For one. It didn't feel like it was done. And the negative thing I'm going to say about Valheim is they really haven't kept up on that since it was pushed. Yeah. They released. There's been a couple updates, but mostly teasing new areas. And it's been like a year. So low velocity.
00:11:56
Speaker
I think it is worth noting that the world in Val, there are two different games. The world in Valheim is absolutely massive. We've all been there where we're on the boat for 10 minutes or five minutes of solid of sailing to get from one continent to another versus the rising has something of a surprise, a handcrafted map. There's no procedural generation.
00:12:21
Speaker
They built this map. It's 100%. It's always this map, no matter whose save you're on. Right. And to get from, you know, the top left to the bottom right corner might take you five to 10 minutes. But that's it. You've traversed the world in five to 10 minutes. If anything, it's a knock against the game. It gets very samey going through the same world over and over again.
00:12:44
Speaker
Right. But maybe they'll have some plans to add like new maps in the future. Like if they have the core gameplay down and people are liking that, they could just kind of expand options like, oh, we'll do the more the more difficult map, the larger one, bigger challenges. Yeah, that would be more PvP based if they went that route. I do think they're going to have to add any sort of procedural generation at some point.
00:13:11
Speaker
Because the way the early game works, and Jake can back me up on this, is there's two spawn points, one on the east side of the map, one on the west side of the map. All new players enter through these graveyards. They're dropped into the main map and they have simple tasks like get bones to make swords and acquire stone and wood to make small barricades and hovels to live in before you can really expand.
00:13:36
Speaker
But your your kickoff points for expanding and learning new things is to kill bosses. And the bosses have dedicated arenas. Some of them wander, but most of them are in a specific location.
00:13:50
Speaker
So assuming server launches, 20 people all jump in on the same day, every player is going to be funneling towards the same location, which means there is going to be some game theory going on. What's the best place to build castles? Can I actively build a castle right in front of a spawn area to screw over new players? Can I build a castle in a place that deliberately limits other players to get to high loot
00:14:18
Speaker
places and is there a way to defend that and unless they start adding some randomization all of this will be decided within the next three weeks because if gamers have learned anything it's optimizing something the fun right out of it right without randomization of some sort the meta will be established it'll stick like that and the game will slowly stagnate adding randomized maps or procedurally generated maps are going to make it so that okay we can't just pick the same location every time things are going to move
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah. I at least like the bosses resource nodes, things like that. I mean, the common way I've seen it done in other games is you have like a template tile basically where something could spawn here. Right. I say the way I've seen it done. We've all seen this in every game like that has procedural generation. Um, and then you just, you're like, okay, well, this one's copper. That one was a boss. There's whatever then small, medium, large tile for different types of nodes. It doesn't seem like too crazy.
00:15:16
Speaker
to implement it, but I don't know what their system's like. I didn't actually realize it was all static. I thought some of it was procedurally generated because that would definitely cut back on replayability if there's, like Diablo has Rift maps for their kind of like in-game content, where it's just like, hey, all right, well, you've seen everything in the overworld. Hit this button and get more of the same, like more content, but it's procedurally generated this time.
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, it very much seems like it's all the all the main locations on the map are the same. Like this will always be a militia encampment. This will always be an army barracks. This will always be a church. But the trees, the rocks, the the mineral nodes, those are scattered. You know, those, on the other hand, pop up randomly, semi randomly. OK, but.
00:16:10
Speaker
You know, the if you're looking for copper and there is a location called the copper mine, the copper mine will always be in the same spot. The iron mine will always be in the same spot. And these are like the one stop shops for OK. I don't want to mine all day, every day. I'm going to go and get a whole bunch at once. Right.
00:16:30
Speaker
I guess Diablo II kind of did that back in the day. Mingrin was single-player content. You could have multiplayer instances, but the maps are all laid out the same. But I guess there was map RNG for which quadrant it was going to be in. Yeah, Den of Evil.
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, things like that. Like it can always be a little bit different for where you had the exit for like the Rogan camp man and other stuff. But it was still one of four and it was static for what you went through but then where you had like mob spawns and other things that was random unless it was kind of like a fixed enemy boss. Right.
00:17:06
Speaker
I don't know. I still think RNG is a little bit better. I also like, like, I'm sure as you guys do as well, Roguelikes and it's going to be different every time versus, Oh, I'm going through the exact same shit. Like when we played Monster Hunter, I know Jake would go through and just do these routes of like, I'm going to hit all these nodes, gathering nodes, kill these insects, all that stuff.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I like being able to farm too, but I think like if the rising was a different game, the static map might be fine, but it's a survival game and it's like multiplayer survival game. What's the survival aspect of it? Is it just managing? Oh, I need to have enough food or health. Like what are the resources you have to maintain?
Defense and PvP Tactics
00:17:52
Speaker
So really it's not even, I guess survival might not be the proper term. It's just it's always tapped on with these games. The only thing you really have to maintain is blood obviously vampire game. You do feed and your blood slowly depletes over time.
00:18:09
Speaker
But the blood actually is an interesting mechanic, because every enemy in the game has two statistics. A blood type, which is like warrior, rogue, brute, scholar, worker, blah blah blah blah, as well as a potency, which is a percentage from 1 to 100. And the type and percentage, the potency of the blood determines, buffs your character, gets for as long as you have that blood in you, and you can only have one at a time.
00:18:39
Speaker
So, you know, let's say you intend to go fight a difficult boss and you find on your way there a very strong blood potent warrior so you eat him. Now your melee attacks do more damage for that boss. Maybe today is a farming day. You eat a worker and you get resource yield when you're farming. I know scholars buff magic damage.
00:19:04
Speaker
Rogues give you more dashes, cooldown reduction, things like that. There's actually a little bit of, I don't want to say science, but like strategy to what you're going to eat on what day to what you want to accomplish. But most of it is crafting and gathering to kind of build this castle. I really can't understate enough or overstate enough, excuse me, how satisfying it is to build
00:19:32
Speaker
structures like they really let your creativity go when you're building these castles and it feels good. They've really nailed the aesthetic.
00:19:41
Speaker
It's kind of like, um, that's like, don't starve without the starvation. It's just, I guess it's just don't, but like, um, the stuff that's locked behind your advancement is new tech, better gear. It's basically like something like the MMO grind, but you know, a little bit more concise from what I saw.
00:20:06
Speaker
And it's clearly, and this is the next point I wanted to discuss, it's clearly intended with PvP in mind, right? Like, because your active opposition, there's no active opposition to your castle. Like, it's not besieged. You're not doing like horde days or anything like that. So it really seems like players are supposed to be like the active aggression against you. And then the difficulty when you go out is fighting these bosses.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, it seems that there's definitely a split. There's two games here. There's a PvP game and a PvE game. And the way we've been playing it, none of those things are a concern to us. It's sprawl the castle out as much as you want, put it in high traffic locations so that we can get where we want quickly,
00:20:54
Speaker
and build, but if it wasn't a PvP setting, like you don't want to be in the middle of the road where someone can see you. I know I've encountered multiple items in game that are like, yeah, you use this to blow through stone walls or to transform into a golem and destroy an entire castle by yourself. It definitely seems, it really does remind me of Rust.
00:21:20
Speaker
Like early rust especially what we've used to play where it's like, okay someone has built this castle and they're very proud of it I'm gonna invest a whole bunch of resources to take it from them And you actually can steal castles from people You can just take the ownership
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah, so there's items in the game that are expensive to make that are like keys. And depending on the tier level of your castle requires a different level of key to interact with it. And the keys being higher up the tech tree, more difficult to manufacture, more resource intensive. But for what I've seen, there's a heart to every castle. And if you can access it and you have the appropriate key, you can destroy the heart, at which point the castle begins to decay.
00:22:08
Speaker
Or if you have three of the keys, you could just take possession of the heart and suddenly the castle is yours. Jeez. Which it includes like all the plot of land it's on, all the structures, all the resources inside the storage, just it's yours now.
00:22:25
Speaker
Jesus. So how does that work for PVP if people are offline? I know with Rust it was just, it sucks to suck. But it also had like building decay. So if you weren't online for two days, your walls would become very soft and then just disappear.
00:22:42
Speaker
So the way it works in this game is it's rough. When you're offline, you're asleep. If you log off anywhere, your body drops and you sleep on the ground. If you log off in a coffin in your castle, then you're part of the castle. They can take your character. I don't know how it works, actually. I was wondering that. I wonder if it just kills you if you're in the coffin when they take possession of the castle.
00:23:12
Speaker
This is a reference for Guilty Gear people, but like Gold Lewis just picks up your coffin and starts fighting with it. I'm from Area 51. But. Oh, my God, my brain just short circuited on me. I forgot where we were going, because now I'm thinking about Guilty Gear.
Castle Mechanics and PvP Strategies
00:23:29
Speaker
No, that's fair. We were talking about the offline PvP. But as Dave said, for decay, so your castle heart, it runs on blood essence, which you get by killing any living enemy in the game.
00:23:43
Speaker
And you feed it and it slowly kind of churns through it Now I say slowly because I've been playing on a server that literally only runs when I'm online. It's it's personal server but if it was like
00:23:58
Speaker
persistent and I was just logging into the server, I would have to be much more diligent in feeding it because I might give it 200 blood essence, which takes me all of two seconds to get. And it's like, oh, yeah, you've got eight hours worth of blood to fuel your castle before it begins decaying. And it's like, oh, that's eight hours of gameplay. That's fine. Versus I dumped 200 essence in in a persistent server. And it's like, yeah, your castle is not going to decay for the next eight hours. But log on tomorrow and feed it again or else someone's going to take your stuff.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah. But at least it's scaled for the second, right? It's scaled for the expectation of real time. Yeah. As, as I am approaching like an end game state, I know myself and Warchortle are trying to race to the finish this weekend because he, both of us have off and his kids have left for his grandparents for the weekend. So he has the house to himself and I'm also at the house to myself. So we both want to see who can finish it first.
00:24:55
Speaker
That's fair. Thank you for taking the time out of your race to record this. I think of it as grandstanding. I could prove to him that not only did I beat the game before you, I had a podcast about how good it was. The ultimate flick. Ian just pressing up on the deep hat at this point before the final smash. Show your moves and then Falcon Punch.
00:25:17
Speaker
To give perspective though, my tier 4 castle, like my big highest end game level castle, has 11 days worth of blood stored in it. So even if I had built this castle on a persistent server, filled it with blood and left, it would run for 11 days before it begins to decay. Now someone could try and still break down my walls while I'm not here or do something to manually, you know, actively attack the castle, but passively it will exist for the better part of two weeks.
00:25:48
Speaker
Is there, following up on that, is there mechanics around limiting the PvP windows? Or can someone just walk up, destroy your walls? Like, okay, I'm just gonna, you know, switch my sleep schedule one day and end this person's entire career. So if, again, haven't played it as a PvP game, but it looks like
00:26:12
Speaker
Your attacks like your manual attacks with your weapons and spells and all that can't really damage structures. But there are items in the game like the earliest thing is you can get like explosive boxes which say they destroy walls. I've never tried to destroy a wall with it. But they say they destroy walls. Maybe they only damage walls and you need multiple ones to blow through a wall. I know later on you get high yield explosives which specifically state they destroy castle walls.
00:26:42
Speaker
So you could use one of those maybe to breach a wall. And then finally, I mentioned the golems earlier, there is an item that takes a lot of resources to craft called the golem heart and you place it in the world and then for four minutes it charges up and makes a server wide announcement that it is charging up.
00:27:05
Speaker
hot show with an icon on, I think even it said that it marks it on the map for people. But once it's complete, a person can interact with it to become a golem for like five minutes that is just able to tear through walls.
00:27:21
Speaker
I'm just going to look at Jake and say Conan Exiles. Yeah, it's literally Conan Exiles, the gods. Yeah. Which is fine. I mean, all of these games are used the same ideas and try to accomplish. There's so many problems with the open world survival PVP genre that I'm really curious how they solve these.
00:27:42
Speaker
So you mentioned destroying walls. Do you know anything about the interactions with, say, the things people care about? Because walls could be relatively easily replaced. But what about chests on the ground, coffins? You mentioned there's an item if they actually want to destroy the heart, which makes it sound like the people who are already established on the server are just going to shut everybody else out because they probably have the resources to kill their castle hearts. Yeah. So there's two addendums here.
00:28:12
Speaker
First addendum is I don't know about other structures getting destroyed. I would assume that you might be able to blow up like crafting buildings or like chests and stuff like that. But of course, the goal is to take the heart. Why destroy when you just straight up steal? Yeah. And the second thing is that part of the gameplay loop is turning
00:28:38
Speaker
NPCs into vampire workers like servants.
00:28:44
Speaker
And the process by this is usually find someone with a blood type, enemy type, and potency that you like, charm them, lead them back to your castle manually, and then stick them in a coffin for an hour and a half, and then they rise as your minion, upon which point you equip them with equipment, and they patrol your castle until you send them away.
Comparisons with Other Games
00:29:07
Speaker
Gotcha. And it occurred to me, I was having the discussion with Dan,
00:29:11
Speaker
That not only if you invade a castle and its entire constituent of servants are in place that would be a tough nut to crack. Some of the high level servants are not only do they stat check you because they have a just gear numbers.
00:29:25
Speaker
Early enemies will just run at you and hit you or shoot arrows at you, but some of the late ones are like little mini bosses on their own right, like with mechanics. I know clerics can buff each other, give shields to everyone around them. It's very possible to build a castle filled to the brim with servants that are just obnoxious to fight and make you not want to be there.
00:29:49
Speaker
Gotcha. There's actually also Conan Exiles had that approach. They had like, you could get mercenaries basically for your archers on the walls, things like that. So taking some similar approaches, I'm glad to hear something like that though, because I've seen plenty of games that have no, they're like, all right, we're going to do open world survival crafting PVP. And they're like, all right, how are you dealing with offline PVP?
00:30:12
Speaker
We're not. You just do it. If someone wants to log in at 5am and ruin multiple days worth of effort, they can. It's a really, really hard problem to solve. Yeah. I know when we played Rust years ago and we played it fanatically.
00:30:35
Speaker
I know it was, it had to have been incredibly disheartening to just wake up one morning, log on and like, oh, everything I've worked on for the last two weeks is gone. And you're dead. I'm dead. All my stuff's gone. And my building that I built is destroyed or demolished enough for everything to be taken. Yeah. Um, I guess it's highs with the high, take your lows with the low. Cause I know there was a few days where I was the one ruining someone's day and I'm like, this is the best sense of power is unlimited.
00:31:04
Speaker
Mm-hmm. They're not even fighting back. They're just executing people on the ground. It's like going away for vacation and someone has just like opened your apartment and just taken everything from your fridge and like pissed on your bed. Yeah. Like you just you literally weren't there to do anything about it. That's that's why it happens. And in this analogy, your vacation was actually going to uninhabited people's houses. Because I knew when I get back, my stuff was going to be gone. You got to got to take these mini water bottles.
00:31:33
Speaker
It's one big ring topology of people who are burglars but also in the process of being burgled. You just hope that you're stealing from someone who is more affluent than you used to be to recoup your losses.
00:31:48
Speaker
Exactly. I don't miss that whole set up. Like I enjoyed PvP. Like when we were under duress, it was nice to like coordinate stuff and like plan a defense and try and shoot somebody or attack when they like breach the door versus coming back and you're like, I lost the game. I didn't know I was playing.
00:32:09
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a, I'm a big fan of either, um, sorry, my leg is going, I'm sorry, gotta move it. Um, either, uh, opt-in PVP or, um, limited opt-in PVP. I was gonna use the word consensual and then it just seems wrong. I don't like that as much. I'm gonna use opt-in instead.
00:32:28
Speaker
So in EVE, they do limited opt-in PvP. If you have a big player-owned station, you have all your structures, all your ships, stuff doesn't just vanish when you log off, you're probably storing your well-being in this station.
00:32:45
Speaker
You don't want people who are just like six hours ahead of you to be able to wipe it out no problem. So if you supply it with a certain amount of like certain resource, if it's attacked and they do enough damage, which requires like some, they actually bring dangerous ships because you probably have like turrets and things like that defending it and they got to overcome those outer turrets.
00:33:07
Speaker
Then it goes into lockdown and that lockdown duration will be based off of the amount of this resource that you put in it. But what that basically does is you get a mail like to the entire corporation. The attackers know, the defenders know, hey, this is going to leave lockdown explicitly at this time. And it might still kind of suck if you're a nine to five adult and you don't really want to like, you know, come on late at night, but at least you get for warning, hey,
00:33:36
Speaker
At 2 a.m. on a Wednesday, there's going to be a battle. And if the attackers don't show up, you're just like, well, great. The lockdown window, which is like relatively brief or whatever, expired. We'll just refill it with this resource, log back off and go back to real life. But more often than not, the attackers do show up, the defenders show up, and then you get actual PvP content.
00:34:03
Speaker
And that's probably the best implementation I've seen so far as to not just screw over offline people, but also reward attackers. You're not disincentivized to be the aggressor. You're just making a commitment. I think the best one that I've experienced was the Amazon MMO from a few months back, New World.
00:34:27
Speaker
I've heard of it. Rest in peace, maybe. Long remember. Seriously. But one of the better things they did is the game worked on, you know, there was a faction system where there was three factions. Don't ask me for their names because they were purple, green and yellow, and that's all I remember. Those were their names. Yeah. And then each faction could have like guilds, you know, or groups or whatever you want to call them, clans. And
00:34:53
Speaker
When a clan took possession of a territory, everybody in the faction gained benefits in that territory, and if you were in the clan that owned it, even more benefit. But if someone was to attack you, their faction did enough missions in your territory to build influence, and then they took the fort in that territory and claimed it for an hour to declare war, at that point, once they ponied up the resources to try and take it from you,
00:35:21
Speaker
It went to the defending faction beforehand. When you own territory, you get to set time windows that you are available to defend. OK, that's actually really cool. You schedule that ahead of time, and it's like three hour windows. I think it splits it into like eight three hour chunks. You say, oh, these these are the three hours that I want to defend. And then when the opposing faction declares war,
00:35:49
Speaker
it looks at the server list it says okay what's going on in these time slots picks one that's open and it's like all right this meets all the requirements the war starts at this time in this location and then each side has a war board that you volunteer you put your name on it and then the attacking clan picks the top 50 they won and they basically draft 50 people the defending clan drafts 50 people
00:36:16
Speaker
And then it sticks them in the area and it's like, go murder each other to your heart's content. Whoever comes out last wins. Put them in an instance. Yeah, not even an instance. Or is it actually in the world? It's in the world. They just throw up an invisible wall around the fort. They're like, the only people that are allowed in this are people that have been drafted. You get the best. A couple of random people T-posing. Yeah.
00:36:41
Speaker
That is really cool system though, as far as like, obviously nobody wants to get stabbed. So like the attackers just want to attack. And if it was up to voting on the attacking side, they would choose an inconvenient time for like, Oh, is this a, an Eastern server? Let's do something in like some really weird hours, drink some monster energy and just fuck them over. Cause it's inconvenient. But if it goes through the defense to vote for when they want to defend, you can't just inconvenience them out of the blue. It's like, Hey, we want to organize a time to kick each other in the balls.
00:37:12
Speaker
They have to be advantage to defender versus Eve's advantage to attacker. It's the thing is I'm not even sure if it's an advantage to the defender because it's like the defender could say, oh, we're going to set a super inconvenient time for anyone to attack us two in the morning. You know, if you guys want to take our territory, you got to wake up in the middle of the night.
00:37:30
Speaker
But the defenders would have to wake up in the middle of the night too. And they don't want to do that either. So in practice, it looked like everything basically happened between 4 and 8 PM local time anyway. So it looks like everything ended up getting relegated to prime time hours. Yeah. That's cool though. That makes sense. That's a really good implementation. I didn't see it only.
00:37:56
Speaker
The only thing I saw wrong with that PvP didn't have to do with that. It was mostly that once you establish a territory, you set the taxes to gain money to reinforce the territory. This is the infaction PvP I'm talking about. It got really nasty. People got really, really intense with each other and like being like, well, you know, this clan is even though they're part of our faction, they've been running this for so long and they haven't done anything with our money.
00:38:25
Speaker
So we're just not going to sign up for any wars. We're going to let someone else take them and then we promise we'll take it back. And it got like. Weird and intense and personal people like personal attacks and chat. The toxicity came out real quick.
00:38:42
Speaker
Because in the case you're describing, if you want to actually be the owners of the territory, an opposing faction needs to take it first.
Social Dynamics in Gaming
00:38:52
Speaker
There's actually an incentive if you're that egotistical or you want that control to let the opposing faction win. You draft like really shitty people. Well, they don't even have to. Yeah. And Ian's description, they're just not even going to the fight. Yeah, I think I want to say it was 50 people. Maybe it was 100.
00:39:11
Speaker
Oh, so you could do unbalanced teams then for the fight? Well, no, no, not even unbalanced team. Well, if not enough people sign up for the war, then, you know, if there's a big faction like the factions were roughly equivalent in size, but let's say it's a big guild versus a small guild, each can draft from their whole faction.
00:39:29
Speaker
But if one guild, if the defender is so unpopular that no one in their faction backs them, sure, maybe they'll have the 15 people in their guild who want to defend it, but no one else is going to come help them and they will lose. And the other people who didn't volunteer maybe just want to retake the territory and control it. So yeah. So then you go through like a I want to say it's like a three or four day cooldown period where no one could declare war and no one builds up influence or prestige and then it unlocks again.
00:40:00
Speaker
And then suddenly the numbers start to jostle around and it's like, all right, we're going to put forth a concerted effort, but this time we're going to we're going to rule. We're going to do so much better. And this cycle isn't going to repeat a week and a half. We promise. Right. Literally like revolution into dictatorship. That's actually a vacuum's across the map.
00:40:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That's actually like for for good and bad both points like a hundred percent reminds me of Eve just like the player politics and the people turning against each other likes a lot of the news stories for a new world after it came out the following weeks for like Somebody betrays their faction takes all of the money from their guild and literally just switches colors It was crazy. Yeah, I mean these these sorts of like
00:40:50
Speaker
Storymaker games games that you that stories come out of you know rust was one because I always talk about the time it was AJ I think it was AJ Dan and I we invaded a man's house Which literally involved us talking to him in like voice chat from outside his front door as he cussed at us and told us to go away Well AJ built a tower next door to his house and then jumped onto his roof and killed him and
00:41:15
Speaker
You know stuff that sticks with you and New World and Eve have that kind of like whole company versus company conspiracy thing going Yeah, I know v rising has something interesting to kind of pivot back there You're not There is no limit to what castles you can enter whether they're yours or not if someone leaves the house with the doors open You could just walk in and take their stuff
00:41:44
Speaker
And there are ways to even get around this. You can shapeshift in the game if you kill certain enemies. You can shapeshift into a wolf, a bear, a rat, a bat. But the rat is interesting because it makes your character model very small. It doesn't put a placard like a player name above it unless they hover their mouse over it.
00:42:07
Speaker
And there's already PVP videos on the internet of people hanging around castles as rats with glowing red eyes. That's the only thing that changes them from the actual rat item or enemy in the game is slightly glowing eyes. They hang around the castle in bushes and then when someone leaves they zip in through the door, take as much stuff
00:42:28
Speaker
Stays a rat in a corner. And then when they come back to open the door again, sneak out with it. Liberal rat tactics. Yeah, it's the dumbest thing. And yet it's so entertaining because it's like, yeah, I could break down your wall or you could just leave the door open and I'm going to sneak in and out.
00:42:49
Speaker
That's really cool from like a defense perspective because once you realize that exists, you're going to become paranoid about rat checking any doors. If anything goes in, maybe it's like a dust mite. What the fuck was that? Go on lockdown. Pan the camera both ways. Check the outer door for rodents before you leave. We're going to deconstruct every room to see the floor.
00:43:13
Speaker
You use, like, white floors to, like, increase the visibility of rats. Well, I'm glad we talked. We kind of brought up floors here because there's actually something I want to pitch to Dave because I think it's going to be the thing that Dave finds the most interesting because there's a dichotomy in the way Dave and I play crafting games. Oh, I hear this from Ian's description. Minecraft especially. No, because I'll put myself on the bad end.
00:43:42
Speaker
When we play survival crafting, Seven Days to Die, Minecraft, anything where we have to build a base, stock it, and then live inside of it. I tend to build the Utila Cube. It is a square structure with all my boxes, crafting stations, and resources around the perimeter so that I can get to anywhere I need to be quickly. It's very much the slime mold approach, the easiest, most efficient path between two points.
00:44:10
Speaker
Dave actually cares how things look. He has a kitchen. He's like, oh, this is the kitchen area. This is the storage area. This is where I do the crafting. Not me. It's just one big area. The rising forces you to do Dave's approach. Yeah. Let's say the smelter. The smelter works by turning ores into ingots. If you put it in a room with a covered ceiling, it works 25% faster.
00:44:41
Speaker
If you put it in a room that has four walls around it and has a floor type that matches it, like forge flooring, and only has that floor type, it gains a 25% efficiency bonus. All resources take 25% less. So this forces you to actually make rooms for specific jobs. Oh, this room in my castle is the forge. This room here is the library. This is the workshop. This is the alchemy room.
00:45:11
Speaker
And it actually forces you to build something that's not the Utila cube. And this kind of forceful approach to decorating applies to everywhere. Like you could lay down carpets and you move faster on carpet. So if you want to move, you want to mimic in real life at that point, move faster on carpets. I mean, maybe if I got socks, I'm sliding all over, but.
00:45:39
Speaker
I like how I keep describing this as cool. So I'm imagining this from like a PVP. It's interesting. It's neat. Like from a PVP perspective, I would argue the intent is probably for if you're going into somebody's castle, how do I need to find X and get out before they get back? If maybe they're not there.
00:45:59
Speaker
So having an approach like that really forces you to say like, Oh, hey, this is the smelting stuff. This is the room delegated for something else versus having things in a pile and having people essentially guess about what it is. I won't say if you like doing the cube though, it really, I assume like, do you feel like it's a pain in the ass to have to like change up your approach?
00:46:22
Speaker
No, because it's incentivized. It's not like there. It's not only that there's a mechanic for it. It's the way it's positioned. It's not. I'm not being penalized for making the cube. I'm being incentivized to do the castle. The carrot. Exactly. It's the carrot, not the stick.
00:46:42
Speaker
so like and it's huge like you don't think of it like as huge until it's like okay i need to make a thousand stone bricks how much does it cost well 10 10 rubble per stone brick well now it only takes seven and a half rubble per stone brick i have to go out i have to mine less or i have to go acquire less bone duster and it
00:47:02
Speaker
it adds up and it makes for some really stellar designs because at first it's like okay I guess I'll make a three by three room I'll fill it with some smelters and call it a day and that's the first step and the second step is oh well this wallpaper matches the flooring and I want the iron candelabras because we are in a forge it doesn't make sense to have wood in here and at that point you've gone full tilt interior decorator but for vampires
00:47:29
Speaker
I didn't think it'd be at the age of 31 that I finally understand what have the carpet match that drape actually means, but it's for the forging bonus. Yeah, it's for forging bonus. I just didn't get it back then. I still don't get it. All right, so I have one last thing about the rising. Apparently this is the rising episode, but that's fine.
00:47:55
Speaker
So going back to literally the definition of the genre, we've talked about a lot of the PDP aspects.
00:48:03
Speaker
I don't particularly care about PvP in these games. And that's led to me not caring about these games that contain PvP. But this has so many interesting PvP aspects, like the boss fighting, the progression, the castle building, all this stuff. If they would have not had PvP and they would have had horde modes or defense or like
00:48:28
Speaker
challenging raids and stuff like that. Would you think the game would be better or worse for it? It's really tough to say because for me, I honestly do think there's two games here. And in fact, they released in one of their first hot fixes, like one of their first things that people were like, oh, here's our feedback. How do we respond to it? They're like, OK, here's the dedicated single player mode.
00:48:56
Speaker
where it's like drop rates are slightly different, amounts for crafting, like all the sliders have been tuned more towards a single player experience. So they obviously, they see that people are playing the game solo versus PvP. And I think that maybe in the future, it wouldn't be a horde mode specifically would be interesting.
00:49:20
Speaker
Um, you know, actively every, you know, seven day, 14th day defending the castle do six and a half days for a car for infringement purposes. Yeah. Legally distinct. Um, I think it would be really interesting as long as it doesn't replace what's currently there. Um, I think it would be great.
00:49:41
Speaker
Because the game has, it definitely, I mean, I've put 90 hours into it and I know AJ's put 90 hours into it. I haven't seen Dan's play time, but I'm sure he's at least higher than 40. And we've all mostly played single player because we can't agree on a time to all get on at the same time. So we're all enjoying it very much as a single player experience.
00:50:05
Speaker
And I guess maybe it's three games in one, a single player experience, a cooperative multiplayer experience, and a competitive multiplayer experience. And we could vouch for it. It's great single. It's even better when you're playing with a bunch of your friends because you can really power through the tech trees in the castle building when you're designating tasks to each other. Can the castles be shared? Yeah. If you're clanned up with somebody on a server,
00:50:34
Speaker
they can build, tear down, access your chests, build their own castle that you have access to. It turns into very much a network of vampire conquest. So it's like the Rust permission for opting in for like, oh, you have access to this door? Very much. Yeah. Once you're part of the clan or the guild, I can't remember how it phrases it, you very much have access, the same permissions that they do.
Community Strategies and Server Dynamics
00:51:03
Speaker
Um, it's even easier than rust or I think you had to like actually set some passwords and permissions to different items. Yeah. The only caveat or criticism, I guess, is you, once you accept someone, they have full permissions, the exact same permissions you do, which means if they want to delete your castle heart and then run away, they totally can. Yeah. The Eve problem. Yeah. So I guess social engineering is a thing even in vampire society. Mm-hmm.
00:51:33
Speaker
But I do, I'm not fibbing. When I've kind of blown through all of what single player has to offer me, or cooperative has to offer me, I would like to jump into one of these Discord run PVP
00:51:49
Speaker
and the servers are limited to 40 people. And you can futz in the server settings with like maximum clan size, max player count, stuff like that, drop rates, all the, there's sliders for everything in this game. But by default, what they're kind of aiming for is a server size of 40 people maximum, a clan max size of four people to a clan only,
00:52:19
Speaker
so that there are 10 different groups on a server or, you know, maximum running around against each other. So ideally, you should never be going up against an overwhelming force of, you know, 30 people on a server of 40 people, 30 of them are all on the same side. There's issues there, though.
00:52:41
Speaker
Right because two two groups are fighting the third group watches on the side Well, well, I mean see that's the interesting approach is like maybe this is like Starcraft 88 or like Groups of two right or something like that where but there's a bunch of fights. They're like, okay We're not gonna hit the northwest base because they've left us alone. Let's hit these other people Oh, these other people are getting real strong. Let's gang up and take them down but
00:53:05
Speaker
Imagine there's a big discord with a bunch of people and there's like 30, 36 people in the discord, you know, and they all go make their own clans with four people per clan. And then they're like a non-aggression pact to everybody. The first group of newbies that joins this nuke them into existence. You know, the ritualistic shaming. You absolutely could.
00:53:31
Speaker
I feel like that wouldn't be the worst, though. Like, if we're going back to what you said, like, this is like a story based game. Imagine being like the four people go like, oh, it's a server and then they're all lined up outside of your castle. You're like, and then this happens. I mean, I'll go find a different server. Like, you're not going to essentially burn a lot of your time. But yeah, I guess I guess the danger here is that they play the long con.
00:53:58
Speaker
where they leave you alone for two or three hours. And then on the on the first, you know, month, they're like, by the way, all your work gone. We've agreed. Server, get out. Yeah. My example is also contrived. You can. What's the word for like working cooperatively with your opponents? Crap. No, there's there's a word for it like it's a negative validation.
00:54:26
Speaker
Oh, it's a it's like a negative connotation in sports or something like that. You know what I'm talking allusion collusion. Thank you. How do I forget that one anyways? Yeah, colluding with your opponents, social engineering, you're never going to get away from that. But the setup you've described in sounds really useful for like a tournament run or something where you do have like a larger community and you do want to play.
00:54:52
Speaker
you know kind of almost like one of those arcade or ts type games or something like that where it's like we are going to subdivide and then go for it i think it's gonna it's gonna share a space funny enough with these rust servers that reset you know every week and a half or every two weeks yeah as well as remember those old minecraft servers that were like
00:55:13
Speaker
big pvp servers with the separated into quadrants and then the after you know so much time the walls would fall and then suddenly well you had a week to prepare now figure it out right i think it's going to share a lot of game space with them and that people are going to like if this game catches on and sticks if it sticks around and develops a hardcore fan base
00:55:35
Speaker
that people are going to say oh I've been part of this server for a while now everyone there's 40 people on the discord oh on this date there's going to be server reset everyone hop on and enjoy the first few hours of zaniness before we settle back into patterns
00:55:52
Speaker
Because I knew a guy a few years ago I worked with who played Rust really big, knew Rust, and he lived for those days. Like, he would build for two weeks, and he's like, alright, tomorrow server reset, that's when life gets chaotic and fun again, and then we settle back into patterns.
00:56:08
Speaker
if I get almost like a tournament. If I get stomped out and I lose traction and someone gets significantly ahead of me tech tree wise, I become outgunned. I just don't play for a week and then I catch the next server reset to see if I'm the guy this time around.
00:56:24
Speaker
Yeah. Same idea with like seasons for Path of Exile or Diablo or, um, the ladder competitive. Yeah. It's the ladder system. Just catch it the next time it comes around. And as long as that turnaround time isn't long, I could see this game developing a hardcore fan base that just sticks around and you know, they play it.
00:56:44
Speaker
When they're on top, they play real hardcore and they care about the game, but oh, I got knocked out this time. I'll just catch it in a week and come back and we'll see, see how we are then. Almost like a long form battle. Royale. I was going to say that's four people seem like the, the microcosm instance of that. Cause you're starting fresh and then trying to outlast everybody. Yeah. Small squad tactics and things like that by limiting how many people could be involved in one client at a time.
00:57:14
Speaker
I'm just trying to wrap my head around doing something on that type of timescale. Because outside of the PvE instance we've done of seven days to die, I can't imagine preparing in a game for more than like an hour for something in the future. There is more of a buildup to this one. But there's also sliders, like Ian mentioned. So you could accelerate everything for a PvP context. Yeah, I know that.
00:57:39
Speaker
one of the sliders was like, what kind of game type do you want to like, what kind of world do you want to generate? And the things that were the options were like classic PvE, classic PvP. And then there was high mid tier PvP and PvE, which is, oh, we just unlocked all of the first tier of progression automatically. Like, you guys, you guys can build all first tier buildings, you know, you don't have to go fight the guy to learn how to build a forge, you know, it's straight off the bat.
00:58:07
Speaker
And that goes all the way up to maximum tier three play or tier four play. It's like you just start the game with all the recipes. So maybe that maybe there's a developed fan base for that where we only play high tier PvP. Maybe it only lasts for a single night where everyone starts off at max level, runs off into the world, techs up as fast as physically possible, and then tries to murder everybody else.
00:58:35
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's a much more positive interpretation. I mean, I still probably would favor the PVE stuff in the end, but I've been shifted on the slider. I think the game could be good in its current state, even with the focus on PVP.
00:58:51
Speaker
I mean, like I said, I've played it exclusively as a PvE type thing. I haven't even touched PvP. And I am thoroughly just enjoying it because it's kind of a last hurrah on the subject. The bosses are very well balanced.
00:59:09
Speaker
Um, the early boss fights are, you know, wet noodle fights, you hit boss, boss hits you, maybe try and dodge the big obvious telegraph. And then later ones have, like, mechanics, like, this guy summons prisms on the ground, and he fires giant kamehamehas of light at you. But if, while you're dodging, the light hits a prism, it will automatically redirect to where you are.
00:59:31
Speaker
Or this is the Necromancer boss, watch them as they summon waves of ads at you. One boss would hit the ground to make icicles fall and you had to dodge them, but then they were persistent cover for you. But then he could also run to one, pick it up and throw it at your direction, which would explode for massive damage. Like the boss fights got varied and interesting very quickly.
00:59:55
Speaker
Yeah, those are like dungeon fight mechanics from like Final Fantasy 14. Yeah, exactly. Like they they wear their inspirations on their sleeve for a lot of stuff. And I think they've taken a lot of the good and they've left a lot of the bad in the trash. Nice.
01:00:14
Speaker
All right, well, that's the first segment of the podcast that you're raising. We'll go on to cover the rest of it. No, it does sound interesting. And like I said, I plan to come back to the game. I'm not even going to mention the game. I've been playing a lot recently, so I'm not even going to start. That's an excellent episode. Yeah, I do plan on coming back to it.
01:00:39
Speaker
And it's looked good. It's good from people streaming it. And if you're out there and you're developing a game right now, I know we have a huge indie game developer community that listen to our podcast, Soapstone, released on Sundays. And
01:00:57
Speaker
Like for those people who are out there, get your game along as far as you possibly can before you push it to early access. Cause holy crap, from a PR perspective, early access does a lot of tanking for you. If there's deficiencies in your game and it's not overwhelming.
01:01:13
Speaker
Early access is enough of a psychological mitigator to say that could be improved in the future. We're going to keep a positive mindset about this. We're going to get this done. And if your game is already 90% of the way there, it shines in the early access space.
01:01:30
Speaker
So don't, you know, be like, all right, I have an idea. Apply for stream, Steam Greenlight, which isn't even a thing anymore. But like, yeah, get it as far as you can first, cause VRizing is gonna make bank. And they have already. But yeah, I know personally, when you come back around to it, I know that our friend Justin downloaded it, Shane has downloaded it.
01:01:57
Speaker
Um, I'm not sure Mike might have downloaded it. I have this vague image in my head about maybe checking it out. Yeah. I would love to play with a different group of people, like specifically Dave, Justin, Mike, you, I think that would be a fun time around because ditch some of the, the more experienced people. So I could be the experienced person and do my best to forget everything I've learned.
01:02:23
Speaker
Uh-huh. You got to play casually. You got to do the zero-two task. Be like, anybody need wood? I can go out and chop wood. Whatever anyone wants me to do, I'll do it for you. But no, I think it's something you would like, Dave, especially as long as people don't skyrocket away while you're not around, like what we did to Jake. That was on me, though. I literally didn't show up on some of the dates.
01:02:52
Speaker
it was a matter of herding cats because we had like what seven or eight people and we were trying to get people together at the same time but when it turned out that was difficult we were like all right maybe not all of us need to be around and so some people got left behind and i think that's why no one's playing together anymore
01:03:09
Speaker
Like you said, they're herding cats, but also these types of games, we've consistently had this issue come up. We've talked about it amongst people in Discord of, oh, somebody wants to play and make more progression and somebody else doesn't want to on a Minecraft server, for example. There's that disparity of interest levels and like, well, you've already done so much while I wasn't here. I don't feel like this is my town base anymore.
01:03:33
Speaker
This isn't my world. It just changes it. Yeah, there's a very big disjoint in between the player experiences. That is the risk for these social games where like the tech tree is such a big part of it, is you come back and like Terraria is another game, you know, similar to that, where it's like, hey, you didn't play this week because you're on vacation. You probably play if you're on vacation. Who doesn't play video games when they're on vacation? This is why we take vacations.
01:04:03
Speaker
But you're so far behind, oh, we can either just give you everything to catch you up so you can play with us. That sucks on the receiving end also. If it's content you hadn't seen, because now your trajectory of progression is you're just being carried, right? You didn't see the content, you didn't fight the bosses, you didn't get the loot. Or you're perpetually behind.
01:04:26
Speaker
or you're behind, which is just as bad. So it's a lose-lose situation. I would say the defending factor for Minecraft is people could run off and do their own things. So if somebody showed up and they're in full diamond armor, but you're screwing around with alchemy, you don't care. What does diamond armor get you? Do you take less damage? I'm going to throw fireballs at people. Yeah, I shouldn't be getting hit.
01:04:53
Speaker
We could use this to pivot to the ultimate social game Sea of Thieves because it's zero vertical progression means you can jump in at literally every time
01:05:01
Speaker
I'm going to make an argument against that and for the Minecraft approach, because I really like the disjoint of responsibilities. Like if Jake likes alchemy and I like go and be in unga-bunga, going in a cave for two hours, I can supply materials and he can supply me stuff. So he doesn't have to go do a thing he doesn't want to do. I don't have to do alchemy, which I never want to learn. And we can essentially like trade amongst each other and build our own community around that. We'll trade healing potions for iron.
01:05:28
Speaker
Cause it's not everyone's on the same progression track. Yes. That's the massive difference. Um, so yeah, the more shared progression you have, the more risk there is people would fall behind and the more you have to kind of exclusively meet at the same time.
01:05:46
Speaker
This is kind of an allegory for life. Surround yourself with people who have different skills and abilities than you. But if it's interests like video games, surround yourself with those people.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:06:02
Speaker
Thank you, Ian, for coming on. That was my segue. Thank you for inviting me. Post it on Sundays. Yes, for coming on the podcast. To be the soapstone podcast. Spelt S-O-A-P. I wonder if people just pick this up on ham radio sometime and they're like, man, I should circle back on the internet and find it.
01:06:27
Speaker
Where would you be able to find this on the internet, Jake? Well, if you are an intrepid listener, would like to embark on our adventure, join our collaborative social group, you can do so. Well, I guess the way you would do so right now is facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. But if you have ideas for adventures, you could submit those to soapstonepodcast.gmail.com.
01:06:53
Speaker
Unfortunately, I realized that the actual link to the podcast itself is not something we ever mention. So I don't have a bit for that, but it's on audio boom. If you search soaps on podcasts on Google, you'll find us. But yeah, hopefully you've already found us if you're listening to this. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night. Thank you.