Video Gamers Podcast - Lost Ark Love, Bowser Goes to Jail, Genshin Impact Goofs - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Gaming hosts Josh and Paul are back with another incredible This Week in Gaming. Lost Ark has hit the gaming world and the world is enamored with the latest hit MMO. We chat some brief thoughts before finding out why Bowser goes to jail. Genshin Impact gets a gift from a young player and more in this amazing episode from your favorite gaming podcast! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This Week in Gaming. It has been a very eventful week. We have lots to talk about today, so we're going to jump right into it. I am your host, Paul. And then joining me, he has only 7,000 people in queue in front of him to log into Lost Ark. It's Josh. That is no exaggeration, man. That's twice now that this has happened to me. I can't stop playing just because if I do, I know that I'm going to have a 7,000-person

queue in front of me. And the other night, that equated to an hour wait for me to even get in the game. So yes, that's factual. The longest queue I've seen yet is 8,500. Now, I will say I tried logging in right before we started recording, and I was able to get in without a queue, which is kind of wild because we're going to go over a couple of numbers. Right now, they're currently at their peak. So it seems like they're actually handling the servers relatively well. But suffice it to say, the biggest news this week, Josh, is the release of Lost Ark, which we have been looking forward to for a very long time. I would just like to point out, for all of those people that wondered

why we kept talking about Lost Ark and going like, yeah, you guys have mentioned this before. It's like, yeah, I've heard it on the show. And then we had another little story about it. And we talked about being hyped about it. This is why! Trust us, man! Yes, that's what I'm saying. We're here for the listeners, man. Our job is to put good games in front of you or bad games in front of you and say, don't play these. But that's why we kept bringing up Lost Ark, because we were saying, hey, this is hyped right now. This is worth your time to look into. And we hadn't played it, but all signs pointed towards, hey, this is going to be into all the specifics here today we're mostly just going to cover the release and how that's gone and then we are going to be getting a full hour

long episode solely devoted to lost ark but i could not be happier to see the success of this game josh i said i felt like this was a litmus test if the mmo genre was dead because lost world or sorry new world Jurassic park i don't know what's going on now all right so yes uh new world released and it had some big numbers that quickly disappeared with lost ark i think we're seeing the exact opposite we saw people who are so excited to play that they were buying Founders Packs just to get three-day early access. The game went fully free-to-play just last Friday. There are currently, as of right now on Super Bowl Sunday when we're recording this, 1.3 million players right now playing Lost Ark. By far the number one game on Steam right now. It has more than 400,000 more users than CSGO, which is now currently number two. I cannot believe how big this game has exploded in such a short amount of time. For those that don't know, 1.3 million concurrent players is an awful lot. Wildly high. Yeah. There's a few different ways to measure games. One is total sales. One is how many people

are playing this right this minute. And that's what the concurrent players is. And it is very rare to get a game where you have over a million people playing it simultaneously. That's the kicker, right? This is not, hey, how many people are playing Lost Ark total? This is right this second, how many people are playing. And 1.3 million is a huge number when it comes to how many people are playing a game at any given moment. And it's a game that has only been released technically for two days. Yeah, it's nuts. One of the downsides is the queue system. The launch on Friday for the free-to-play, that was the actual global launch. There were some launch issues. The game was completely taken down. Instead of having intermittent issues where people

were getting kicked out and lag was so terrible that you couldn't play, they actually just took the servers down completely. I actually support that opinion. I know, or that tactic, I guess. I know there was a lot of people that were very upset, but what happened is they fixed it and they said, look, when they come up, people can play it. And it worked. Now you might have to get into a 7,000 person queue, but when you're in the game, the game is running flawlessly. I have had almost no instances of server-caused lag, maybe a tiny hiccup here and there. But once you're in, you're in. And I have to give them credit. Even though the launch was a little bit rocky, the way that they handled it, I thought was really good. Well, and it really just showed how excited everybody was for the release that there were mobs of people trying to watch Lost Ark on Twitch, but the game was down.

And so I saw that even Asmongold was doing reaction videos to old Lost Ark videos that were all in Korean. And so everyone was just craving that content so bad. But I gotta say, for the way MMOs tend to launch, this one actually launched relatively well. It was down. You could not initially log in for early access or on Friday for the global release. But honestly, we've definitely seen worse. Now, you mentioned just how many people 1.3 concurrent users is. That's the second all-time high on steam there has only been one other game that had a peak more than 1.3 million players playing at one moment do you think you can

guess the game or maybe the player count what do you think might have been the all-time high it's got to be a huge AAA title. Something like GTA 5. Something up there in that echelon of like, hey, this is one of the best all-time type games. I'll just say GTA 5. Really good guess. It is PUBG from January 2018. Now, 1.3 million people playing Lost Ark is the second all-time high, the number one all-time high for PUBG, 3.2 million people at once.

Oh my goodness, dude. That's insane, dude. That's how big of a phenomenon it was. PUBG, I mean, I should have known. PUBG in its heyday was absolutely just world-shatteringly popular, man. It really, really was. Yeah, i think i i and i would assume that you agree with me i think what kind of sets lost ark apart is the perspective and just the pace of the combat like this game compared to most mmos it's very fast The quests run very quickly. This game is almost like reading a book that has two page chapters. You know how like you always feel that propulsion to keep going when you finish a chapter of

a book. This game has quests that you complete sometimes in eight seconds at most, maybe two to three minutes. And you're kind of like working your way through these zones so quickly. It seems to be drawing people in, keeping them interested while dragging in more people. I don't think 1.3 is the highest concurrent we're going to see. I wouldn't be shocked if this still builds over the next couple of weeks with word of mouth. I think the hype is getting started, to be honest. We've been hyped for this game before it launched. I think what we're going to see is a little bit of the

Valheim effect. We're already seeing it in our Discord server, right? We have listeners that have said, hey, you guys kept talking about this. I see you guys are playing it. How do you like it? We've been dropping some hints in there about how we're feeling about the game. We have had multiple

people that said, hey, I don't really know a whole lot about this. They picked it up. And then literally an hour later, they come back and they're like, Dude, this game is so much fun. I'm having a blast. And we're going like, Right? So I think what's going to happen is we're going to see the Valheim effect where word of mouth is going to spread. And I'm with you, man. I think the hype is only going to build. Part of it is it's free to play. It's very hard to not at least give it a shot. That's one of the things where it's like, okay, well, I'll download it and I'll try it. Let me see what it's about. And then I know that we have talked to many people where this game doesn't seem

like it's a game that they would normally say is their favorite genre, or maybe they've not played a game like this. And then they try it, and they go, wow, this is really fun. And I think that's just going to continue. I think friends are going to tell friends, hey, have you guys tried Lost Ark? It's free to play. I just picked it up. I'm having a blast with it. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the coming weeks. I think you're absolutely right. And there's probably a lot of casual gamers that don't listen to gaming podcasts. They don't watch streamers. There's probably people that still don't know what Lost Ark is. Now, I will say I've been hit

by a ton of Lost Ark ads on Reddit and on websites because I don't have ad blockers. So I wouldn't be shocked if we still pull in a lot more casual people that may honestly still not even know what Lost Ark is, but they're going to start to hear about it. Now, you have been playing your Paladin Warrior so far as your main. I've been playing my War Dancer Martial Artist. I think we've both been seriously enjoying it. I also cannot wait to start playing alts and to get to know the other play styles i am just so happy to see that mmos are not dead it just shows we needed an mmo that was actually creative had something that set it apart from others which

in this case i think is mostly the combat and it it's free to play. And you know what? This game is going to make so much money off of the cosmetics in the in-game store. We already saw more than 1.5 million people ended up pre-ordering the game, buying the Founders Packs. I mean, they're going to make money hand over fist, and honestly, I think they deserve it. It's a very creative game. It's so well done. I'm with you. I don't want to spoil too much because we are going to deep dive

this in a little bit. But I think one of the main things people think about when they think MMO is grindy. And the problem is that the recent release of New World only accentuated that. I was talking with some buddies of ours earlier today, was playing it a little bit ago before we started recording. And the quest was literally like, go talk to this guy, run back, go talk to that guy. And I made the joke that in New World, that would be a 20-minute quest because you would spend 19 of those minutes running. And in Lost Ark, it literally took me five seconds. And while there is always going to be some kind of grind in an MMO, if you want to do the end game, higher end content, in Lost Ark, they make it so enjoyable to do that grind that

you don't feel like you are grinding. And to me, between the combat and the quality of life stuff, in my opinion, the quality of life stuff is bar none the best I have ever, ever seen in an MMO. I don't understand how they do it, but they do it and it makes the game incredible. And you don't feel like you're grinding, which I really, really appreciate. Yeah, I'm 100% with you there. I think it really is a special game. So for those out there who haven't tried it, I highly recommend it. It's free.

You got no reason not to try. And then our next story here this week, Josh, I'll kind of toss this one to you. But we did receive a little bit of news for Call of Duty that Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 are officially announced and they will be released before the end of this year. I got a little bit excited about this. Now, we have not played Warzone in quite some time. I think we really had our fill of Battle Royale-type games. You and I are big fans of that genre. I mean, Apex is still, I think, number two on our leaderboard. Warzone is ranked very highly. So we are fans of the genre. We definitely enjoy that. Warzone got a little stale to me. It got a

little sweaty for me. We've been playing other games. There is a part of me that still goes, man, I'd enjoy a round or two of Warzone from time to time. I just really do enjoy those types of games. And so when they announced Warzone 2, I went, wow, this is actually a pretty big announcement because Warzone is still just crushing it you know with its player base i mean go on twitch look at clips you know highlight clips any of that stuff war zones insanely popular still um so i think that was worthwhile to say hey it's it's officially been announced now they

haven't really given us a whole lot of detail yet did you ever play modern warfare i think i did but to be honest josh there are so many call of duties at this point i really honestly could not say with any certainty but i am 90 sure that i played modern warfare yeah see i was you know famously i've not ever played a call of duty game until we started playing uh black ops cold right yeah that was the first one that i ever jumped into i remember getting into that and enjoying it but every it seems like the universal thought process from call of duty fans was that modern warfare was the cream of the crop when it came to like call of duty multiplayer and i never played it so it's one of those things where i go you know i i hear that

from just about everybody i'm a little sad that I missed it because all of the Call of Duty fans says, hey, this was the cream of the crop when it comes to multiplayer. And so when they announced Modern Warfare 2, that excites me a little bit because it's like, is this going to be? Am I going to get a chance to play what I missed, except in a newer, hopefully enhanced, better version. And so that excites me a little bit as well. I don't know what to expect in that. But the fact that they actually came out and announced both of these, and they also announced that they are going to interlink. They're approaching Warzone 2 to where it's going to interlink with the Call of Duty franchise even more than it does right now. Right. Now, I am just excited to see Warzone 2 because I didn't know that they made Warzone a perfect game. They got rid of the bugs, they got rid of all the cheaters, and now we're ready

for Warzone 2. I'm just so excited. I didn't know that we got war zone one to where it needed to be josh come on how do they not fix war zone one before going to war zone two because they're it's the hype it's the hype machine man you know okay but but seriously what can they do in war zone two to make it better than war zone one other than giving you another map like warzone's not that old i don't know what they can really improve from a gameplay standpoint skill-based matchmaking paul that's what they can improve because i'll tell you this uh in a in a shooter and especially in a battle royale don't put me up against the guys that can do 500 actions a minute. And I've seen these videos.

I enjoy watching highlight clips, right? They're all over Instagram and stuff like that. And I appreciate good gameplay. But I see these people and I'm just like, this is absolutely top level type stuff. And I feel like we come up against those in every game we play. I'm not that good. Don't put me up against people like that. So if anything else, if you give me Warzone 2 and say, hey, you get to play with the other old men that are pretty good at video games, but are not sweaty

pros, that would interest me a lot more. I want to feel like I stand a chance. Yeah. The Battle Royale genre, I feel, is definitely a little yeah uh you know the the battle royale genre i feel is definitely a little tired i every once in a while will dabble back into things it's been a this is probably the longest stretch for me where i have not touched apex i have not touched war zone it's definitely been a minute and i've really enjoyed my times in halo infinite and in Lost Ark, and I'm just starting to get into some of the PvP of Lost Ark and things of that nature. So, you know, Warzone 2 is definitely something that I would check in on and give it a shot. I always appreciated the use of military electronic equipment and stuff, like having the heartbeat sensor. I thought that stuff was really neat.

So, you know, I'm, I'm curious to see what they come out with, but at this point, a new battle Royale is not going to be enough to grab my attention. I'm going to want to hear what sets it apart. Yeah.

I'm very curious if it's just a rehash or like you said, a new map or something, or a few weapons skins, I could care less at that point. I'm with you. You made the funny joke, but there is a lot of truth behind it as to why not just fix war zone and make it better yeah but i have a feeling they need to kind of refresh the the name or the brand a little bit and this is probably

their tactic to try to do that sure recycle the old code and put a two at the end of it yeah yeah it works it does Sadly, it does work. I don't know why. It's also the Madden FIFA model. Oh, man. Just add another one at the end. I don't mean this. I mean, I'm a gamer, but sometimes we as gamers are dumb.

Yeah. We do like shelling out money for retreaded old remasters, rem remakes reskins oh man okay so this next story is one of my favorite stories this week because the the the the name of the person associated with the story could not be any funnier but josh nintendo hacker gary bowser was sentenced to over three years in jail this week. Now it's, it's not a funny situation, but the idea of a person being sent to jail with the name Bowser for hacking Nintendo could not be a funnier coincidence. I love that.

Every news story actually points out instantly that this is no relation. Yeah. Unrelated to the evil, you know, turtle dragon, bad guy in Mario. Koopa Bowser not related to Gary Bowser. Yeah. I mean, the only way this could be more perfect is if the guy's first name was Mario or something.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, so this is a weird story. A lot of the stories I ran across just kind of gave you like a short paragraph, right? Like they said, Bowser was a part of a hacker group called Team Executor, and they were doing something about jailbreaking switches. And obviously, whatever they were doing was illegal. He was deported back to the United States, and he's going to be in prison for a few years. I ended up watching a 14-minute YouTube video on what Team Executor does, Josh. I still don't have a single idea because they were talking about mods,

and I cannot believe some of the wild stuff these people do with hardware, and I still don't fully understand what it even allows you to do dude i am dying paul because i read this article and then i went okay yeah guy got in trouble okay yeah they did something bad with modding these systems but what were they doing i went down the internet rabbit hole i was literally googling like yeah gary bowser hacks what are they like what do hacked do hacked Nintendo Switches do? And I couldn't find an answer. So I think what I have figured out

with my very limited brain capacity for this topic is that they are essentially launching their own operating system and letting them run whatever software they want, most problematically emulators and ROMs. So I did read in some circumstances you can actually run software from a completely different console on another console. I guess Team Executor made a name for themselves back with the original Xbox. I guess even Bill Gates had come out and talked about how impressed he was with what modders were doing with the Xbox.

But I just immediately started laughing when they said Team Executor got back into the public name because people realized you could exploit the Switch by taking a paperclip, removing the right Joy-Con, connecting the paperclip to two different parts of the right joy-con rail, entering a bunch of button combinations, and then it would restart it in USB recovery mode, which I guess is what Team Executor used to create their own hardware device that you could plug into the Switch. It used that exploit and then would let you run emulators and ROMs on the Switch. Now, the main problem, Josh, is that they have made millions of dollars selling this hardware, and that's why they definitely landed in deep trouble on this one, where you see multi-year prison sentences. Yeah, they're in big trouble. This is a huge no-no. And it's funny because one of the articles that I was reading on it said that he got fined like $4.5 million from the government, I think, for breaking the law. And then Nintendo came after him, and he agreed with Nintendo to pay a $10 million fine. And the way the article made it sound is he was like, yeah, I probably should

do that. Sorry, Nintendo. And I'm like, dude, if you got $10 million to just spare to pay Nintendo back, you've made an awful lot of money at that point. So yeah, there was definitely funds to be made. This is the thing about criminals, right? Know when to stop. If you've got this much money all you needed to do was just pocket it and just move on you know retire find a new hobby or just you know continue your modding career in private just don't you know sell it and put a spotlight on yourself the best part is is that they mentioned that they extradited him from like the dominican republic or something yeah and i'm like so this dude's living on the beach with his millions. Like that's the dream, right?

Well, and then I read that his buddy who made even more money is living in Paris and they're never going to extradite him. So I was like, oh, so like this guy should have just chosen a different country. Like why is he still chilling in the Dominican Republic? There's no beaches in Paris, Paul. All right.

And we have our final story of the week, which I really loved. Now, Josh, before I share some of the details, I got a couple questions for you. Have your kids ever bought something using one of your credit cards without your permission? No. I can only think of one time this happened in my household, and it was a complete accident. So my daughter Anna was a toddler, and she purchased Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on Vudu by grabbing the controller and pressing a bunch of random buttons. So all of a sudden one day my wife asked me, what did you buy on Vudu for $20? And I was like, I don't use Vudu.

Who uses Vudu? And then I end up going on the tv checking voodoo sure enough i owned once upon a time in hollywood now a second question for you josh how much money do you think you have spent on micro transactions over the course of your life i have bought some card packs from hearthstone and i mean that's about it so maybe a hundred dollars total okay well josh we got news this week of a dad who was able to get a refund after his daughter spent twenty thousand dollars on microtransactions inside genshin impact which was all put on his credit card without his knowledge. He did not even know until he realized he had over $20,000 of unpaid credit card debt that they were trying to collect from him. $20,000. Number one, that kid's grounded

forever. Yes. Number two, how do you not notice 20 grand being spent i'm guessing these are credit cards that normally have zero balance and you don't check the balance and then all of a sudden you start getting these notices by mail twenty thousand dollars but it's like you could spend twenty thousand dollars on a lot of garbage but the fact that these are microtransactions inside Genshin Impact, I can't think of a worse way to spend $20,000 if we're being perfectly honest. My daughter played Genshin Impact for a little while. The game looks fine, to be honest with you. I've never played it. It seems like a very well-done game. I think that there's a lot to offer there. I don't know what the microtransactions involve or what you get out of them.

Oh, I can tell you. Oh, really? It's loot boxes. This is why people hate the model so much. It's loot boxes that contain random equipment and items. And so you can't just go out and buy the item you want. You might have to buy hundreds, if not thousands of loot boxes in hopes that you're going to land that item that you're looking for.

I kind of wonder if this kid knew that they were spending 20 grand. That's the other question. Did the kid know every time you click this that you're spending dad's money? Or was this just like, hey, look, another loot box. I'll open that one maybe i'll get that sword i wanted all i know is that all of the purchases were made over a six week period so this is not like 20 000 spent at once this is like day in day out buying boxes this kid knew what they were doing oh man i just i mean i'm number one i'm really glad that he got a refund. I don't know how you process $20,000 worth of microtransactions and then go in and refund them. I'd hate to be the customer support person that had to deal with that. But I feel like there should be built-in things, honestly, into games that just says,

like, hey, are you sure? Are you okay? Right. Are you having a seizure and repeatedly hitting buy on your keyboard? Or are you actually intending to spend this money? Or aren't there like child accounts where it's like, hey, you're a child. If you want to purchase something, your parent has to go and put a pin number in to say that they authorized this. It just seems like this shouldn't happen in today's day and age.

Probably shouldn't. I'm guessing this kid had the four digit pin. Cause yeah. Anytime you try to buy something on my phone, it asks for your fingerprint or the four digit pin. So yeah, you know, I did see that several of the articles that talked about this did mention

that this is not even really out of the ordinary, that whenever you have a free toto-play game like this, they really just rely on the whales. Like, I saw this in multiple articles. They said it's not uncommon to have whales who are willing to drop tens of thousands of dollars on these games because they get hooked, they love it, they have excess money to spend, and so you might have just a couple of people who are essentially funding the entire game. Now, Genshin Impact, I mean, there's like 100 million players. I mean, the game is enormous. I'm sure they have a ton of whales like this.

So I don't necessarily fault them for thinking, well, 20,000 dropped over six weeks. There's probably 100 people who do that on a regular basis. Yeah. It's just a sad use of money. Can you imagine the conversation that you'd have with your kid? I feel like this is back in the days of the phone numbers that you could call that would charge you per minute. Oh, yeah.

Long distance. Yeah, like you leave the phone off the hook accidentally. And so it just racks up like 18 hours worth of charges at however, whatever the toll was back in the day, you know, and then your parent just getting the bill and then being like, Josh, get in here. It's like, what? Oh my goodness. I, yeah, I'm just so glad the guy got it all refunded. I guess initially they were trying to only give him half his money back. I think he recouped the second half from the credit card company. But regardless, he was able to get his money back. And for all of you parents out there, make sure you've got your parental controls set,

because it might be an uphill battle trying to get your money back on microtransactions. I may or may not, when I was a teenager, Paul, have gotten my parents' credit card, which they gave to me to do something and then never asked for it back for the next two weeks. And then since I had this credit card available to me as a teenager, I might have put gas on their credit card and fast food and other things that I was not supposed to be buying at the time. But I did get busted. I did get in a lot of trouble. And I did have to pay all the money back. So I get it on the one hand. But on the other hand, with technology nowadays, I get notifications all the time that pop up on my phone that say,

there was a charge for whatever amount. Is this you? I feel like there's a way that you should know if 20 grand goes missing all of a sudden. Yeah. I'll tell you what, I will give you props for at least buying gas and food and not just ordering 30 video games where you would immediately get caught. At least you were sneaky enough about it that you could probably get away with it for a little bit, even though you got busted. I did get busted. Oh man.

All right. Well, we're out of time here for this week in gaming. Thank you so much to everyone out there for joining us. Just as a reminder, please rate our podcast five stars and leave us a review if your podcast app allows. And also as a reminder, if you want to support what we do here,

if you like our content you wanted to continue head on over to multiplayer squad.com that goes to our patreon page where you can support us starting at five dollars a month you do get some awesome perks on top of just getting to support our show so you do get two extra episodes every week you also get our episodes a day early so go on and check that out We'd love to also have you on our Discord server. There is a link in the episode description. And I think that's it for today, Josh. So we're done with This Week in Gaming.

We're going to be back on Monday with a bonus round episode. And we're going to have a pretty big announcement. I think that's going to be a really fun episode for our people to listen to. Some would say a huge announcement huge announcement yes so we'll we'll leave it on that cliffhanger happy gaming to everyone out there we'll see you all on monday all right see everybody