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S2 Ep148: Talkcast - March 2021
73 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about Magic: Legends, what they've been playing recently, tease an upcoming episode, and dig into the news in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction and Opening Banter
00:00:01
Speaker
you
00:00:28
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Ah, you know, a little here, a little there, a little bit everywhere, you know. Right. You're a little here and a little there and a little bit of everywhere. Yes, it is pure mental chaos from here on out. That's fair. It's the scatterbrained, I think is the term. I gotcha.
Video Game Logic: Shotguns vs. Reality
00:00:53
Speaker
I guess it's better than physically being everywhere.
00:00:56
Speaker
Oh yeah. Cause I was about to make an analogy to like a shotgun cause that's scatter shot. But if I got hit by a shotgun, I would physically probably be many places. Yeah. I think that's fair. At least with the video game depiction of shotguns. Um, I guess real life too. Cause that is, I think where shotguns came from.
00:01:19
Speaker
No, they made that after video games. They're like, this is pretty cool. Have you come up with this? What's really funny is, I guess, what's not funny at all is that video game shotguns are like purposefully they're always close range weapons, right? They're like, what's the effective range on a shotgun? It's like five feet or something like that, right? For balance reasons.
00:01:44
Speaker
But in real life, people hunt birds with shotguns and things like that. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever that the effective range would only be like five feet. You're looking at blunderbuss territory. Video games never evolved beyond that.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah. So it'd be hilarious. Real life guns were made after video game guns and they were like, why did they work so far? They removed that one limiter in video games. They were like, we don't need to make it go only five feet. The first variation of it, it actually just went five feet and then physically just dropped. Yeah. Like the gravity just increased to that level. That always tapers at five feet.
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah. That makes sense. Which is why you have to stand six feet apart from people. Save from shotguns. Interesting.
Audio Recording and Editing Woes
00:02:39
Speaker
Assuming the shotgun is at their, at the level of their face. That's where the barrel is. Yes. Make sure to wear your silencers while out in public. Um, no, that's pretty funny. As a, as a brief aside, did you ever as a kid make the dart noises? Um, the dart noises, what do you mean by that?
00:03:01
Speaker
Like you pretend to have like an imaginary blow gun, you go... You pretend to like dart people in the neck or shoot something off the distance while you're in the car. I think so. Now, not to, not to alarm you, but I'm staring at the, uh, the audio spectrograph at the bottom here and mine is just zooming by like real fast and yours is going like pretty slow. Is that at least inverted on your side?
00:03:30
Speaker
What do you mean by zooming by? I see them going at the same rate. They're going at the same speed for you? OK, I don't know what that means, then. So if we step into science for a moment, or physics, time. For the most part, I think we expect that when a second passes, it's a second for all of us. But I'm just seeing myself record
00:03:54
Speaker
Way faster than yours. One, we'll brag about it. Two, who has the edit this week?
00:04:03
Speaker
It's me.
Food Talk: Meals, Groceries, and Preferences
00:04:04
Speaker
That's why I'm concerned about this. I'm sure it'll work itself out. It's funny because you started speaking and I see your spectrograph coming by. Since I started this sentence, I'm now passing. I'm going back in time to before you started speaking if this is visually correct, which can't be possible.
00:04:29
Speaker
I mean, I can share my screen if you want, but it is pretty standard for me. I would just be, I'm just, I'm curious like what this turns into.
00:04:42
Speaker
If this was an incidental intro into death loop, perfect transition. I just talked about that one, though. The more likely case is that if this is something wrong, my voice is just going to be really squeaky. That would be great. Yeah. Or it would just make me sound like an ogre, if you slow both of them down. Hello, jerk. It's a good thing I got the edit.
00:05:11
Speaker
Uh, so speaking of death loop, we already talked about that. So yeah, sorry about that. I won't talk about it again. What is this dark? Oh, close one. Um, yeah, these are top casts. We usually talk about whatever shotguns and video games, uh, real life corollary.
00:05:33
Speaker
modern weapons in general. Real quick interruption, blatant interruption. Yeah. What have you been eating? We haven't done that in forever. Uh, so we just got groceries. So I haven't really eaten much of those yet. We, um, the wife made, uh, some chicken, um, like dinner panini things, which are pretty good. Got some, uh, sweet potato fries, which you can eat. She can't eat just like normal potato fries. Um, that was pretty good.
00:06:03
Speaker
It's nice to have like home cooked food sometimes. Versus just always delivery. Yeah. Like everything else that I could describe to you would be something related to delivery or going out to get food, Taco Bell, Wawa, all that. Don't get me wrong. Wawa though. Yeah. I recently had their brisket again. I don't think I tried their gyro.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah. I got a hoagie, but by the time I got home, I lived like six minutes away. I looked at it just from like the wrapping outside. I'm like, oh, this is a juicy boy. Yeah. One of my problems with Wawa hoagies is it's, let's layer it all on top of stuff and not try and like close the hoagie. Don't close the loop. And it's just like meat juices fucking everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. And their briskets especially.
00:07:00
Speaker
I think bad for that. It's just no packaging can contain, right? They need to just like wrap it in a shopping bag when they answer to you. That's good stuff though. But yeah, mostly that stuff recently. We kind of have a
00:07:23
Speaker
We have a litmus test for when we need to go grocery shopping and it's like, have we just only gotten like food to go like for the last however many days and like when a meal comes around or we're just like, what should we order instead of what should we eat? You know, that's usually the test that we have to get more food. Yeah, it's not bad.
00:07:47
Speaker
I feel like my thing is I'll order food when I just don't want to eat what I have. Like I have enough that I could survive for like a whole week, but it's, this meal's boring to me. That meal would be boring to me. So I'm like, eh, spice it up. Yeah. No, for sure. Um, I have no such, uh, refined taste or, you know, palette. I'm just like, Hmm, food.
00:08:12
Speaker
That's it. Start getting some really cheap ass stuff. Find the cheapest per pound. Flour is going pretty cheap these days. Powder soylent. It's pretty cheap. But you do have to balance laziness. So we get to drink soylent, even though there's probably like $2.50 a bottle. Because who has time to literally mix a powdered beverage? Crazy. He quietly raises hands as a part of his dinner.
00:08:41
Speaker
Yeah. No, that's fair. Protein can be good stuff. Peanut butter in particular, really good source of protein. Guys, it won't be on next episode. That is my one weakness. Also anything sharp, anything that moves too fast. Right. And peanuts. Peanuts the worst of all, though. Probably the bunch, right?
00:09:05
Speaker
Well, Peanut's like the most common thing. Not usually like handling knives or around bullets or anything like that. Right. So Mr. Peanut, like armed with a knife is really just your worst nightmare. He just like coats the blade on his shell and he's like, come here, boy.
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, if you stab me with that I would super die. Yeah, better not to. Or would my anaphylaxis seal up the wound? Oh. Depending where you stab me, maybe. Yeah, that's...
00:09:41
Speaker
We'll have to reach out to the medical professionals that listen to the podcast to ask if the inflammation comes from being stabbed with something you're allergic to. I apologize for making this a weirdly violent intro. Yeah, that's all right. This is just a violent podcast.
Magic Legends: Gameplay and Strategy
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, fuck you, guy. Gonna stab you in the taint. Yeah, that's how they get you. Speaking about stabbing somebody in the taint, the first thing we were going to talk about, or I put on the list today, was Magic Legends, which is a game I think I put on the list to talk about earlier, but we
00:10:18
Speaker
just throw a bunch of stuff on a list. There's no guarantee we're going to get to it. And if it seems like we tend to not actually touch on it, right? It's like a to do list. Yes. Right. But but in real life to do to do list, you accomplish nothing on it and you push it all to tomorrow. So slight differences. And this we just push most of the stuff off and never cover it. But this one's interesting to me. Have you seen Magic Legends at all?
00:10:47
Speaker
No, I was actually going to ask about it. I assume it is based off of Magic the Gathering, the card game. Yes. Is it still in a card game type format or? It is a universe action RPG akin to Diablo. Oh, so like isometric RPG we're talking about. Yeah.
00:11:07
Speaker
All right. We have some movement downstairs because I really like isometric RPGs and the magic, the gathering lore in that universe is really fucking cool. The different planes and planes walkers and a very rich backstory. Yeah, they basically like Wizards of the Coast, obviously also in C&D. And they're just like, how do we just make more money? OK, let's print a source book for Ravnica. There you go. Done.
00:11:36
Speaker
We already had all the content. We didn't like make anything. Just give us money and people are like, sure. Yeah, we like it. And I'm like, you can't use this crap in this campaign. I don't know what a mushroom answer or something is. Nobody, nobody's getting that. It was a druid of the circle of the sport. Druid was actually what I was thinking of for the nerds. But anyways, magic legends is a deck building.
00:12:01
Speaker
action RPG where you have like four abilities that come up. I don't think they're always all active. I'm not exactly sure what the system is. And then there's five classes. You also have like an innate ability that's always available, something you could do like a basic attack or like an auto-attack and then you're innate. And the way it works is you customize a deck beforehand
00:12:26
Speaker
and you draw those cards into your four ability slots and you go through fighting stuff using those spells casting those spells that are on the cards at which point it goes to like your discard pile or whatever and the slots on cooldown and when it's finished cooling down you draw another card from your deck so
00:12:49
Speaker
Basically, we were talking about another game. I'm not going to be able to remember the name of it, where you run through a level picking up cards and casting them for effect. I like Magic's implementation a lot more than that. You can actually build your deck to be like, hey, I want this many copies of this ability because I think casting Fireball on a group of enemies is going to be really good.
00:13:10
Speaker
But I probably should have some self-healing or something in there. So I'll throw in these cards. OK, so it's like Diablo, but everything is really based around how you build your deck. Yes. Because your RNG is based on how you tool the deck. Exactly.
00:13:25
Speaker
And I did see some synergies, so you might have certain spells that catch enemies on fire, and then another card does double damage to enemies that are on fire. So you're trying to rotate through your available slots to cast more of these things with synergies while managing the actual action gameplay of a Diablo fighter.
00:13:46
Speaker
Interesting. I'm watching the trailer now in the other monitor. Yeah, it looks pretty Yeah, it's I think like as far as feedback is concerned It's a bit a little more janky than something like Diablo 3 Just because of the nature of having all of these abilities and rotation. They can only have so much like haptic feedback But not by much
00:14:11
Speaker
It still looks pretty clean, pretty good, pretty action-packed.
00:14:18
Speaker
And the progression is a gear that drops. There's not that many gear slots, but they could modify what your abilities do in some ways. So you might be swapping out gear pretty frequently. And then you can get spell fragments to actually upgrade cards in your deck. So if you're like,
00:14:42
Speaker
I love I really like throwing fireballs, but I want to upgrade my like fire elemental summon. Then maybe like spend your spell fragments on that. So do you I guess two things you have like a library of cards to your account or character that you can choose from?
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly it. I believe you can just find new cards too. I'm not exactly sure what the card acquisition system's like, but from the UI when I looked at it, it literally just looked like a magic deck builder thing. And the deck had a name. It was like, is it whatever? I'm like, okay. Is it bullshit? Yeah, I'm familiar with that one.
00:15:23
Speaker
Also, I assume there's not mana or the mana equivalents might translate to cooldown. There is mana. Oh, OK. Because the only reason I know this is because there's these things called like world modifiers. So there's multiple difficulties. Normal, hard, expert, and massive, which is kind of funny to call the hardest. I don't know. But each one you go up, you get better rewards. But there's more like...
00:15:51
Speaker
The enemies are tougher, do more damage, have more health, whatever, the Diablo scaling. But then there's also world effects, which in Diablo, I guess, be akin to the fact that they can have more affixes, like these ones are lifelinked, these ones have chains, something like that. And these world effects, you can craft yourself and then use four runs to increase the loot to get better stuff. And one of these affixes was
00:16:20
Speaker
You don't do regenerate mana over time. So I think man is just like a pool, like an MP or whatever. Um, but you generate mana when you do basic attacks. So if you use that sort of like world modifier, um, you have that limitation. You can't like kite without attacking at all. Um, but you get better rewards for using it.
00:16:44
Speaker
Seems like there's a good variety of gameplay for this.
Game Trading and Economies
00:16:49
Speaker
What color of magic have you been drawn to the most? Like the one time I made you play magic? The one time. So the one time I played magic was black. I think it was black-white was the deck I made. Good man. So the five classes here all kind of have some sort of
00:17:07
Speaker
basic magic association. So there's Geomancer, which is like stone and lava melee. There's something called Kavu. I don't know what that is in Earth Elementals. Mind Mage, Beastcaller, Sanctifier, and Necromancer. And like Necromancer was basically the first deck. I'm just, I mean, obviously I'm an edgelord, so.
00:17:28
Speaker
That's baseline. It did seem like, so when they announced Sanctifier, there was mention that it had support abilities, and this does have up to three player co-op. So I wonder to what extent they might do some Trinity stuff in there. Have some characters build your deck more supporty, group hug, basically in an actual co-op setting, perhaps. One person doesn't deal damage if it helps everybody. Yeah. I mean, that would be cool. There's a lot of potential.
00:17:56
Speaker
I realize it's the fad to deal with cards, like have card-based games now. And Magic is probably like, okay, we're just going to keep making what we make. But I mean, it does lend some interesting space. You're just like, oh, here's a buff.
00:18:12
Speaker
Like here's maybe I put a card in my deck that's just like everyone else draws cards more quickly for like a minute or something like that. You're just like, okay, let's ramp it up and like burn this for a boss, right? And then just dump abilities or something. I don't know.
00:18:29
Speaker
So it seems like from that rant that you're like pretty stoked on it. Honestly, it's interesting. It is interesting. Um, I think I, and actually interesting, not in a that's interesting podcast or something. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I do like magic. Um, I like a good isometric RPG and the fact that it has co-op, uh, it makes it much more palatable, right?
00:18:54
Speaker
They actually had trading too. They mentioned that you could, I don't know to what extent you could trade, but they said you could trade the world enchantments that make the modifiers to the world to get better loot when you're doing a run. And if you can trade that, it would kind of be weird if you couldn't trade other things. And so that's got me asking questions about like,
00:19:19
Speaker
It's always weird balancing act for, hey, can we give stuff to a Smurf account versus, hey, my friend just started playing the game. I don't want to have them start out with like basic ass lightning bolt. Can we give them some things so we can play together and have a good time?
00:19:37
Speaker
It's much easier to just disallow trading entirely like MTG Arena or Hearthstone. You're just like, how do we balance the economy? We make it so you can't interact with the economy besides the company store, right? Yeah. And that's not intrinsically wrong, but I do get more interested when the game's like, hey,
00:20:00
Speaker
We're going to allow players to trade this stuff, and we still have a way to make money. It keeps you more engaged, I think.
00:20:10
Speaker
Like even back in the days of when I played WoW for like one week on my cousin's account, I was actually checking the marketplace to like try and find better gear for my troll hunter. Yeah. Because I'm like, well, what are the odds I'm going to get this on a fucking random drop or Diablo? Holy shit. I would look for lobby names for specific items all the time. I'm like, I need this, please.
00:20:35
Speaker
Did you offer your trade? Yeah, I remember those times, but yeah, otherwise it's like a weirdly single player experience. I mean, obviously this is still multiplayer. It seems like it's instance of you have up to three, but still being able to act with other people in the hub world makes it feel more alive and more of a community.
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It'll, it'll be interesting to see where they go with it. Like even Diablo three had like, they initially had the market, which nobody, like the actual cash shop where you could put stuff up for sale and then Blizzard would just take a cut. And that was not super well received. Um, and it was, and that people were making a lot of money off of it more so than Blizzard was. So I mean, like, I mean, the Blizzard never took like a hundred percent cut, but the way it worked was like,
00:21:25
Speaker
I played at lunch and there's a really good ring drop. Someone had like a really high stat ring drop for affixes that people cared about.
00:21:35
Speaker
I realize I should maybe describe affix, that's just stats on the item. So like if you really cared about attack speed and crit, for instance, if that's what were the meta stats, it wouldn't make it a valuable item. And the maximum you could sell stuff for was $200 US dollars. And those things were selling for $200 US dollars. I think Blizzard took like 20% or something like that. It was crazy. There's legitimately people just,
00:22:02
Speaker
like not in a sweatshop somewhere, farming Diablo items to sell for money. Yeah. And again, it's still wild for me to think about anything like Bitcoin or e-currency or outside of the standard. This is how you make money. 925, the only thing we were taught growing up
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah. There's a possibility for, oh, I'm going to go play a game to make money. And this is like before streaming was a thing. Fucking nuts.
00:22:33
Speaker
No, it's crazy. But yeah, that did get removed and they had to rebalance the economy because right now the way it works in Diablo is items become untradeable, I believe, after a period of time. I mean, like the latter season. So I think right now the way it works is you can't just trade items above a certain rarity unless those people were with you in your world when they dropped. And then there's like a 24 hour cooldown or whatever. Now,
00:23:04
Speaker
You could talk about that change, I think, on its own because I sort of think it was beneficial because they also just ramped Magic Find up like a ridiculous percentage when they did that. Well, I think that's fun. If there's like the odds of somebody playing it. Like, let's say we were in a party together and you found a really good cast the item and I'm playing a caster, you're playing more of a bruiser. Yeah. It would make sense. You'd be like, hey, I found this item that you can use. Here you go.
00:23:30
Speaker
Yes. But if it's high enough that I could always say like, oh, Jake signing off for the night, I'm gonna just play another hour. And I could theoretically find that with good odds. I'm less peeved about it. Yeah. Because otherwise, I just feel like RNG just didn't favor me, it favored you. But you don't really have a benefit for it. And now it's just kind of moot.
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah, they kind of did like, they did loot shaping in a way that didn't exist in the previous games too, because like when the game launched, like anything could drop for anyone. And after they upped Magic Find a bunch and they like removed the shop, they also made it so if items drop, like 90% of those items are going to be class items for your character.
00:24:12
Speaker
I partially like that, but then I guess I would encourage leveling up with another class. Yeah. If you wanted, oh, I want specifically necromancer items, but I can't play my paladin anymore because they're not going to find that shit. Yeah. Like you could find items, generic non-class specific items like rings or whatever that are still good for different classes.
00:24:37
Speaker
You know, if you're playing like witch doctor, you're probably going to find weapons that, you know, it's like summon more toads or whatever. Witch doctor said, I don't know. It's been years. Witch doctor was like the really shitty necromancer in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, that's, I think one of the reasons necromancer specifically was announced earlier. Yeah. Well, is it added? Well, I thought it was in DLC and Diablo three.
00:25:04
Speaker
It might have been. Oh, yeah. Was it the last expansion? Oh, yeah. It was DLC. It was standalone DLC. That's right. I was about to Google it, but you're right. Everyone's like, we like the Necromancer. They're like, hey, any druid fans out there? They're like, that quiet. Nobody plays Wereberry. Get out of here. Got a short pause. Jared was coming back for Diablo 4, but Necromancer did make it into 3, finally. At last. Niko Man Man Man was my Necromancer's name. That's great.
00:25:34
Speaker
I really miss Diablo era cause that's where a lot of my peak, uh, young guy gaming was. But man, I hate how Blizzard is company just generally shitty in my opinion. But then also on top of that, they'd like to polish too many edges.
00:25:53
Speaker
Like if you look at a Wows in MMO, it's too smooth and simplistic and I wouldn't go as far as FF14 if I was getting into MMOs. It's just very palatable, almost too palatable. I have a little bit of that edgelord in me myself. I'm like, give me something where they say fuck, you know? I'm just looking for something a little bit off the beaten path, I guess.
00:26:15
Speaker
I get that. I think there's a certain elusiveness to something that is subversive or disrupts the norm for a game. Something that it's like, I don't really know for this mechanic, but it's so weird, right? Like that I can respect that you put it in your game. And Blizzard basically as a company doesn't do that. They try to perfect genres. Like you could argue forever about their success within that.
00:26:44
Speaker
But that was 100% what they did with WoW. They're just like, take all the good ideas from all these other games and then put them in this polished, perfect game.
Blizzard Games: Nostalgia and Community Appeal
00:26:55
Speaker
And even if it wasn't polished and even though it wasn't perfect, they incorporate all those good ideas to make an amalgam, a homunculus of MMOs that is really approachable.
00:27:14
Speaker
I don't think that they're going to stop doing that anytime soon. I mean, obviously the Warcraft remaster was like, not that. And was that by comparison? So I don't think that's the answer either. Right? Like, no, definitely not. But I don't know.
00:27:36
Speaker
They still came off the back of a lot of good things. And people even to this day, even to myself a little bit, are still riding some of the coattails of nostalgia. Right.
00:27:48
Speaker
I mean, I don't consider myself necessarily a Blizzard fanboy, but I am a bit of an apologist, because like... Starcraft 2. I mean, Starcraft 2 is still just a really good game, like just really good. All of the campaigns were really good. Overwatch, I think like even like people's opinions on loot boxes can change the impression a bit, but like for the value, I've played it more than any other shooter, I think, besides perhaps TF2.
00:28:14
Speaker
Um, and again, well, TF2 is kind of cheating because we all had that game when we played it like as a teenager, right? Or it's just like, you didn't have the option to go buy another game. Yeah. You had an online game. You played all the time with your friends. Yeah. You, you had one group of friends on vent and you got on and you played whatever fucking game it was. Hmm.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yeah, I'm fine with that. But like, using Overwatch as an example, it's one of the few shooters I play because I play with people. If you wouldn't play it, I'd never fucking play it. I don't care about it. It's more for like that social interaction because it's too
00:28:59
Speaker
cartoony and vanilla. I like the character diversity. It's really fun. But for me, like, there's not enough going on with it. Whereas I know how fucking generic Call of Duty is, but Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2, holy shit, played so much of that. Right.
00:29:22
Speaker
I mean, I feel like I shot my argument in the foot immediately. I don't know. I mean, I was going to shoot it in the other foot, but like I can get where you're coming from though. Like they're very, very different games, right? Overwatch was almost, um,
00:29:39
Speaker
Almost original, I guess. No, it was actually original. I would give that to them. It was actually original. Again, it's very palatable. You could show this to your parents and be like, oh, that seems fun. You could show it to a kid or anybody and they're like, oh yeah, I see the appeal. Right. They'll be like, I don't know that Tracer emote has her showing off her butt a little bit. Call it Blizzard, get that out of the game.
00:30:04
Speaker
I was just referencing like the launch controversy where she had an emote or whatever that was taken from the game. It was not bad. It was not bad. It wasn't as bad as Minecraft, Steve.
00:30:14
Speaker
No, that was nothing that bad. That was reprehensible. Shame on you, Nintendo. But the... I mean, it was just... I think it was good value, right? And it does say something about the game that our group of friends who has played, for the most part, all of these other shooters, has picked that as the community shooter, right? It could be something else.
00:30:40
Speaker
Um, but I honestly think that if it wasn't overwatch, it probably wouldn't actually be a shooter at all. Right. Yeah. Cause like we had like a very specific group for things like destiny for people who wanted to grind out stuff or do some PvP or do raids. Yeah. Whereas a lot of people who are on overwatch and much more, I want to shoot stuff with friends. Yeah.
00:31:04
Speaker
And it fits that really well because TF2 is fairly dated, similar type of game, but outside of LAN parties, nobody's like, hey, let's do this. Yeah. And Left 4 Dead 2, limited party size. And again, dated. Yeah, I played Left 4 Dead 2 out a lot. It's harder to do that. It's just like a nightly game anymore, I think.
00:31:30
Speaker
So I don't know. I think it's pretty successful. The thing Blizzard does do that I like is even though they do round off all of those edges, it makes the game as a whole very approachable. It's hard to find like, here's a group of people that absolutely just would hate the concept of Overwatch.
00:31:50
Speaker
And because of that, it's a really inclusive space. Like we run into toxic people still because there's toxic people all over the place. Oh yeah, all games. And there's no escaping that online gaming. It's just, it's cute now. It's like, somebody's upset, that's adorable. And it's less prevalent in Overwatch, I think, even though the threads still pop up to it for it compared to other like games, because people actually get in trouble when they go off in Overwatch, right? Yeah.
00:32:20
Speaker
most of the time it feels like now. I think it's above 50% of the time. If I report somebody for really going off, like I actually get feedback saying, Hey, we took action against someone you reported. I liked that. That's the thing. Again, this feeds back into the being involved in the community. Cause like in the old days of just, I played a game. Hey mom, somebody yelled at me. Okay. Stop playing the game. Like there was no, there was no recourse at all.
00:32:46
Speaker
But even now, playing Dota 2, not sure if you heard, they have this thing now called Overwatch cases. It's called Overwatch, yeah. I'll get one like, oh, so-and-so was reported for feeding. Here's some clips from their game. What do you think?
00:33:03
Speaker
And nine times out of 10, well, out of like the few I've actually looked into, it's, oh, person's not that good at the game, but didn't go out and explicitly fuck up multiple times. It's like, they seem to be learning something or be uncomfortable with a hero. Right. But someone reported them. Yeah. Because they say like, hey, that person is wrong. The person who was reported is actually probably in the clear.
00:33:30
Speaker
And the person doing the reporting either just lacks awareness or they themselves were toxic, right? Yeah. And nine times out of 10, they're probably toxic. Yeah. As somebody who's played Dota and still plays Dota, you're right. Nine out of 10 people are toxic and the last one's feeding.
Moderating Communities: Challenges and Experiences
00:33:46
Speaker
It kind of reminds me of when I was a lot younger.
00:33:53
Speaker
urban dictionary it's still around but it was more of a thing for a while there was a spike of interest and i did like uh editor review on urban dictionary so people would submit terms and stuff like that and i'd go through and be like this isn't a real term this is this could be real this isn't a real term um i did that for like a brief period of time before i realized like
00:34:14
Speaker
Everything's a fake sex term. There's nothing else on every dictionary. Yes. So was this time when you were in around middle school or high school? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Everything that I learned about sex, quote unquote, was like during that time, all those crazy positions that were like fucking made up and it's like, who would do that? Which it's a lot easier to spot now looking back, but at the time you're just like, huh, I guess I just,
00:34:43
Speaker
I don't know. And I guess that's what people do. Yeah. It's like for this position, you need to be at the event horizon of a black hole. And I'm like, I don't really know that much about black holes. So I guess a proof, you know, I would hate to keep a real term from showing up on this site. Yeah. No, it's pretty ridiculous. I thought of like three, but I'm not going to list them on this podcast. That'll be my other podcast. That's fair.
00:35:14
Speaker
There was a couple I really liked. It was like a Star Wars definition. The definition was the tale of the dysfunctional Skywalker family. This is like before, I guess, the prequels or whatever. But I was like, that's concise. That's pretty good. Even the prequels fall into that.
00:35:32
Speaker
I don't know. I'm not going to go through urban dictionary terms, but I think like community review can be good for that though. You just get some no lifers to just like sit at their computer and do it forever. And you just don't take the key is to not take one person's opinion, right? You're not just like let one person actually be the decider have multiple decide.
00:35:53
Speaker
That's, in general, how things are done with talking actual quorums. If I said, hey, Jake, you're being an asshole, and you have value in my opinion. I don't care. But if three people in our friend group said it, you'd be like, oh, that's probably an actual thing. Be like, how much is Dave Payne these days?
00:36:14
Speaker
Not that much. But yeah, in general decisions should probably be made by a group of people versus one person who has a very one sided view of things. Yeah.
00:36:26
Speaker
And that's why I'm going to check out reviews and stuff when Magic Legends comes out before I spend all of my life savings on loot boxes or whatever the game is. And I'm going to wait for it to play it before I even look at it. That's probably fair. Most games I like to have some degree of fee. You definitely get some credit. I'm not taking that from you. But I like to have at least one or some friends check out a thing that I'm kind of on the fence about.
00:36:55
Speaker
If I'm gung ho about it, I will not wait. I will pick it up and be that person. I think I really easily get three for this, though, if it's free to play, especially just like three people drop go. I didn't realize it was free to play. I didn't realize either. I'm just saying if it is magic, I'm going to I'm going to spend five dollars on a cool cosmetic in that calling it now. It is free to play. It apparently launches on March 23rd.
00:37:22
Speaker
That looks a calendar. Oh. So that is, that is two days after this podcast comes out. Bye now. Bye now. Yeah. What do you mean it's been playing recently, by the way? I was just, I just wanted to thank our first sponsor. I wish, I wish I rolls were audible. 37 minutes of content. What if I've been playing, uh, loop hero and satisfactory.
Loop Hero: Gameplay and Discovery
00:37:53
Speaker
We picked the one that I want to talk about. Sure. What a good joke. Um, so yeah, I saw you started playing loop hero. I think I watched you play for like an hour on discord and initially it was linked to me. It didn't seem that appealing, but then watching you play and seeing like the simplicity, but also seeing like the.
00:38:17
Speaker
the cute styling and how like, again, very simple, but entertaining it was. Yeah, I got a little bit hooked just from watching. Yeah.
00:38:27
Speaker
No, it's it's very difficult to like genre put it in because it feels kind of like an old arcade game, both like in pixel style and music. And it's like new retro is probably the way to put it. Right. Like it has some of the fidelity of all of the new graphics and and music, but they like.
00:38:50
Speaker
It's just tailored to look that way and sound that way. They still have like the modern trappings of a new game. And, um, I don't know. It's, it's, it's difficult to like go into a lot of detail about it. It's like you get cards by killing enemies and you spend those cards to like rebuild the world. And then that changes the enemies you encounter and the terrain you pass and your character stats. That makes sense. There you go. That's the game.
00:39:18
Speaker
And then you fight a boss, usually at the end of the loop.
00:39:22
Speaker
But what's fun is you can kind of tool your deck and get passive upgrades as you make progression in the game to help your runs. But the run literally is just a loop. And then depending on how you spend your cards or where you place them, it will affect your run. Yeah. So if you build rocks, which give you more max health, cool. If you build 10 rocks, it's like, all right, we're going to spawn a goblin camp.
00:39:51
Speaker
because you're taking the rocks and other stuff like that. So things will get harder per loop, but also as you place things that give you resources, nine times out of 10, there'll also be the drawback of having enemies. But usually you want to kill enemies. So it's like this fun balancing act of
00:40:09
Speaker
Will I not die this run? Like if you never place any cards that would add enemies, then you would only ever face slimes, basically. But they become really difficult slimes at a point. Every time you're working on a circular track, it's not like a circle, but a loop.
00:40:29
Speaker
with a campfire. And every time you complete a loop, the enemies get stronger. And you have to place so many cards to get the boss to spawn in. You're filling a boss meter at the top by placing cards. So there's an actual strategy to try to place as many cards as quickly as possible so that when the boss spawns in, it's weak compared to waiting several loops for it to get stronger. But you're getting stronger, too. You're getting equipment.
00:40:57
Speaker
you're getting better stats through placing cards. Also, every time I play it or I talk to somebody, I learn a little new nuance mechanic or way to cheat the system. When Jake was talking about the boss, when the boss spawns, it also gets bonus health and damage based on how many liches, temples, tiles are around it. So that'll spawn on the campfire. But if you place items around the campfire, hey, the restructure is here.
00:41:27
Speaker
those Lich's palace's tiles can't spawn. I'm a fucking genius. I was talking to Slug the other day and the other Discord, and I was like, hey, what's a good way to farm this item? He's like, oh, once you build a mountain range, which is you build nine mountains or stones in a square formation, and that transforms, oh, destroy one of them, then place another rock. Congratulations, you just got 12 more of that resource. I'm like, holy shit, I never would have thought of that.
00:41:57
Speaker
Huh. Interesting. See? Jake just learned something and he's been playing more than I have. So that's a really cool thing about the game is it has these unique little interactions that you discover or find out from other people. Yeah. But it helps manipulate your run. Yeah. So part of that discovery I think is really fun for me at least.
00:42:15
Speaker
It took me a while to beat it. I did actually ultimately beat it. Oh, nice. I haven't beaten the second thing yet. That's fair. So I have strategies I know are really good, but I don't think that they're necessarily the best strategy. Well, actually, I do. I do actually think that they're pretty close to the best strategies. You're perfect. But you can build your character in several different ways.
00:42:42
Speaker
And something the bosses often do is they'll introduce, each of them has a mechanic that will be particularly punishing if you did not expect it. So the Lich's Temple, for instance, each of those temples that gets placed gives them 5% damage and health, I think. It's damage and something else.
00:43:04
Speaker
And so you can build around that and just make the boss weaker. There you go. You've got an advantage that can help you get over actually fighting this guy that hits pretty hard. But there's other classes for the main character that can completely change the way that you play the game too.
00:43:25
Speaker
And I don't know. Maybe we should have an episode on it at some point. I feel like I feel like I could talk about it for a while. Yeah, there's a lot of little nuances there that we could delve into. Sorry, I was just trying to ask about your life. You never called me your father anymore. You never called me your father anymore. Please don't ever do that. But no, it's kind of the
00:43:53
Speaker
It's sold really well, Loop Hero. Five million copies.
00:43:59
Speaker
Not that many, but at least over half a million, I think, when I saw the sales. Yeah, it's overwhelmingly positive. If that sounds interesting at all, pick it up. It's 15 bucks retail, not without a sale. I think we got it for 12. It was on a sale, I think, when it launched. I think even at base price, it's worth picking up.
00:44:24
Speaker
But it's not absolutely perfect. I do have some gripes with it, but those are minor compared to how good I think it is overall. Tune into the app for the episode. If you want to hear me talk about the story, you don't want to hear me skip that episode writes that on backlog loop here. Question mark.
00:44:46
Speaker
Right. Man, those are all really good topics, like nice, easy to transition into topics.
Tech and Gaming: Availability and Marketing Issues
00:44:55
Speaker
Nothing like how Nvidia released the RTX 3060 graphics card. And one thing they did that was interesting because cryptocurrency mining is
00:45:05
Speaker
like terrible for computer parts availability. Yeah in that it's nobody we know really has anything outside of like three people who tried really hard and spent the time. Exactly and probably knew a guy and probably gave like a handy in a parking lot or something like that in order to actually get the details necessary to find out where
00:45:27
Speaker
like a graphics card would show up. I would not accuse any of our friends of doing that. I would accuse some of our friends of giving handies and parking lots. Hands down. Either. Please. Please. Hands down. No. But I would I would accuse some of our friends of knowing people that did at least so. Anyways, Nvidia was like, hey, let's try to like get some of that gamer rep or whatever gamers rise up, I guess, to by making it so
00:45:57
Speaker
There's a rate limiter for hashing on these cards. It would impact the 3060.
00:46:03
Speaker
or the 3060 and another card that's coming out that's going to be like higher range so that it's more difficult to mine Ethereum, which is like the hotness right now. One of the hotness. One of the newer e-currencies. Yeah, because Bitcoin is getting increasingly more difficult to mine out of design of the system and the currency, but Ethereum is still more profitable.
00:46:29
Speaker
And they're like, great, here you go. And then they accidentally released a dev driver that just completely disables the protection against hashing. And they took it down quickly. But the driver is still out there, which means it's permanently out there. And they accomplished nothing. Well, yeah.
00:46:57
Speaker
Why were they specifically trying to do that just to, I guess, increase availability for other people who are not mining? Yeah, it's there's more than just a perception. Like, so they were literally accused of having paper launches when the RTX 3000 series came out, which is the term where it's like,
00:47:18
Speaker
We say that the release date is going to be this date, but we don't actually have any supply. And there's multiple reasons that there's less supply, obviously, the global pandemic impacted manufacturing. But the other issue is just people were buying pallets of these graphics cards to use for cryptocurrency mining. And so people who wanted to just build one computer had a much harder time getting these cards, and they'd have to spend twice the price on eBay.
00:47:48
Speaker
So Nvidia is like, let's earn back some goodwill, right? By being like, you can't mine with this card nearly as well. Let the gamers have this one. And then they released the dev driver. Whoops. It really feels like.
00:48:09
Speaker
at least for the past year, year and a half, a lot of things have been very first come first served, where if you're in the know about something, you immediately have advantage. So obviously there's the case of these graphics cards, PlayStation 5 is another one. Fucking vaccines seems to be another one that's really not literally getting under my skin. I'm already good temporarily, but like- Right, because they get out of your skin.
00:48:37
Speaker
But my thing, I looked into through work. But everyone else I talked to, they're calling around trying to find like, oh, will this pharmacy do it? And some people can just call and get it in. And that's awesome that they can. I want everybody to be vaccinated. But at the same time, for the people
00:48:56
Speaker
who want it needed, but then don't have the option because they weren't awake at the right time or online at the right time, or just it didn't pan out exactly in the timing. Yeah, bullshit. Obviously much more so with the vaccine than electronics, but. Right. Graphics card matter just a little bit more. Just a little bit. It's close. It's close.
00:49:18
Speaker
I'll take Corona if I can get us through. A lot of people probably will. Two weeks at home? Yeah. We'll be playing my games. I'm not spending, you know, $1,700 on the $700 graphics card or whatever nonsense it is. It's pretty crazy. But even if you remember back to, you guys went to MAGFest one year? Yeah. The year that Critical World did not show up. Oh, I'm sorry.
00:49:48
Speaker
No, I'm not bitter enough. That was a side time. No, I'm just kidding. It was just funny because they showed up the year before we went. We showed up one year. And then I was like, I don't know, it was kind of really draining or whatever. And then they showed up again. I was like, OK. That is how that goes with Magfest. But thank you, Mr. Mercer. Magfest also. Matt Mercer.
00:50:11
Speaker
I did meet him for what I was worth. He signed, I got a book that you guys got signed for me. So that was nice. I really appreciate that.
00:50:20
Speaker
But even Magfest always had a notorious, can we actually get hotels? Because you had the Magfest lottery. We'd all message each other around the time that the site was going to be up and try and get in and have one friend be like, for the group of friends, can we get a hotel room? How many people do we fit in there? Because with conventions, especially multi-day,
00:50:43
Speaker
It sucks to be fucking miles away. You have to get a taxi. Or even if you're just like a hotel down the thing. Because you don't have to like haul all your stuff. It's just, it's much easier if you're at a thing to be able to sleep at the thing and have a room to go to. If you're like, hey, too many people want to do it. But again, like a lot of those lottery systems are just like, hey, did you lock in? Cool.
00:51:10
Speaker
I mean, a lottery would actually be more fair. That was part of the issue. They've had variations of the implementation for hotel booking. A lottery was one of them. Because Newegg actually did lottery for graphics cards. They're like, hey, if you get a ticket, you can buy some of the limited stock that we have. And what's funny is that's way more fair than competing against people that are using bots to instantly buy things as soon as they come back and stuff.
00:51:39
Speaker
I don't know. I wish there's more availability for a lot of things in general. And it just sucks if you're on the end of, I wasn't able to get thing because I wasn't getting somebody. One other guy bought all of them. Who bought all the vaccines and the PS fast.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah. On the other side of the coin is just an aside I thought was funny while I was looking at this. MSI, MSI, which is like a hardware manufacturer, they published a blog for one of their laptops talking about how good it was at mining cryptocurrency. And I'm just like, this is an evil act. So anyways, the world's fun.
00:52:25
Speaker
Do you ever see those commercials for gaming computers or just gaming setups in general? Alienware is one of them. There's another one that's like gaming is the future or it's not Alienware, but it's another like, why the fuck would you name it that? Right. Game stop power to the players.
00:52:47
Speaker
How do you take those? How do you react to those as a gamer? I mean, so pretty much anything marketed toward gamers is super cringe-worthy. Yeah. There's not really any other way to put that, I think. I think that's usually the case. If you've got a food and it's marketed toward gamers, it's not healthy and it's cringe-worthy. If you've got a drink, it's not healthy and it's cringe-worthy. Yeah.
00:53:09
Speaker
If you've got a game, you might be able to market that towards gamers without going crazy, but anything else it really feels like, we don't understand this group.
00:53:21
Speaker
but how are you doing fellow kids? Right. Yeah. It's always, I felt like I've had this running theory mainly with like beer commercials. A lot of the beers that I've enjoyed drinking, you don't see fucking commercials for. Like you see it in a store, you'll see it at a restaurant. You're like, I've tried it. I like it. I know what I like. And a lot of it is just like reputation or word of mouth. Right. So like for the games, I feel like you could just have a trailer and if people were interested,
00:53:51
Speaker
People jump on the bandwagon, simple as that. Nobody's making any specific like, hey, check these out trailers outside of really high budget AAA games where they want to get an outside demographic. Yeah.
00:54:07
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think I've ever really seen a trailer for a game that I cared about. That might just be true. Sorry, on TV. Or outside of E3 or other type of award shows or gaming conventions where it's meant to be displayed. Exactly. I've never seen a trailer for a game that I cared about. Hot take. Don't check around in the year stuff, Blues. Thanks.
00:54:34
Speaker
Um, yeah, basically if they have that much money that they're trying that hard, like, I don't really care. I don't like the feeling of- World of Warcraft actually was one of the first ones. They had it in office spoof.
00:54:46
Speaker
Yeah. And they also got like celebrities in there. Like remember when Mr. T was like, I play this tauren or something. Yeah. I play a female night elf. Just like, okay, Mr. T. Yeah. I didn't hate those, I guess.
00:55:08
Speaker
I mean, let me buy the stuff that I want. Don't try and sell it to me. Cause as soon as somebody starts to say like, Hey, do you want this thing? I immediately get like, I kind of pull back.
00:55:21
Speaker
Instinctively. I mean, you could take any mobile game advertisement and then just like wash it down the drain, right? They're all like within the same vein of repetitive, never actually showing gameplay because it's a phone game. There is no gameplay. Like just show animations and stuff and call it a day. Jake, we can edit this out, but Raid Shadow Legends is one of our sponsors. Oh, no. Are they a mobile game?
00:55:49
Speaker
I only play Raid Shadow Legends when it's an advertisement in front of a YouTube video. I play it even when I'm pooping. Especially when I'm pooping. I actually like to kind of just, you know, focus, concentrate, not be distracted by the material world.
00:56:10
Speaker
I don't. I need the material world to distract me from the immaterial world. Emotions. Oof. That could be its own episode too. Emotions.
Creative Outlets and Podcasting
00:56:25
Speaker
The episode. Stares distantly through monitor. Yeah. Also staring distantly through the monitor.
00:56:34
Speaker
I had a couple other things. Some of these I'm going to drop points I didn't care about or cared less about. We played Dying Light 1, had an episode on it. Dying Light 2 is apparently, it was announced in 2018. So that was a while ago. Wow. We did talk about that briefly. It might've been just out of the tail end of one before two was even announced.
00:56:57
Speaker
Yeah. And they were supposed to release it in 2020. Ooh, that's a little while ago. And they lost the lead writer. Sources were calling the development total chaos. And the studio disagrees and says they just announced it too early. Boom.
00:57:13
Speaker
Here's the evidence. Put this put this right next to Cyberpunk. Just be like, boom, Cyberpunk 2077. Boom. Dine Light 2. One of those significantly bigger for many more people than Dine Light 2. But just don't announce your game so early. Stop doing that. Hey, guys, I have a new podcast coming out. And six months. GBD. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be funny, though, if you actually follow through on that. You just have a different podcast in six months.
00:57:43
Speaker
I mean, I've talked with people about possibilities and other things just because I think people like to have creative outlets and this is like a fun one and it's not super crazy to do. Right. It doesn't require any skill or effort. Yeah. Talent. We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.
Closing Remarks and Listener Engagement
00:58:33
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? We're just back from technical difficulties. So our recording got paused in the middle. We lost ourselves. We made sure we didn't lose everything. That's it. I don't know what we're talking about. Yeah, me neither. We can probably end it here, honestly. Sure.
00:58:51
Speaker
All right, well, if you guys have any ideas about how better to end a podcast, topics to end on, things like that, you could send those ideas in to soapstonepodcast.gmail.com. Or you can join the discussion on Facebook, where I don't know. That's facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast, though. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Unless there's technical difficulties. Yeah, I actually don't know anymore.