Marvel Rivals pt. 4: Heroic Expectations

The Direct Edition and Moose discuss various aspects of the upcoming game Marvel Rivals, particularly focusing on server issues, monetization models, and character comparisons to other popular games like Overwatch and Fortnite. The hosts delve into the intricacies of managing server capacity and financial constraints while balancing player satisfaction. They also explore the potential difficulties with destructible environments and speculate on monetization practices, emphasizing their support for purely cosmetic payment models. Additionally, they share their enthusiasm for the latest character trailers and offer insights into potential gameplay dynamics.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

I'm stoked. I'm excited. Man. I do worry about server issues though. Oh yeah. Every game that kicks off is becomes this popular. So to speak. Is it? It happened with Helldiver, it happened with it's, I can't think of a game, but there's so many games that it already happened with, and I don't know if they've done the alpha and beta tests and stuff like that, but. 

Is there any, is there really any way to, to prepare for like your servers to be overloaded? So the unfort the unfortunate part of all that is that. You can absolutely, if you're hosting your services through like Amazon Web Services and things like that, you could totally pay to provision way more servers. 

You could be like, okay [00:03:00] this number of people have it wish listed and multiply that by one and a half times because of streamer hype and stuff. And rent out, that many extra servers on the back end to help deal with the influx of players. But the unfortunate reality of doing that is, you really have to be on top of, one, one, okay, never mind. The biggest issue is you don't want to overshoot that number. You don't want to have oh, out of 100 percent possible saturation of your servers, you only have 75 percent and everyone's having a great time. You're now paying for 25 percent extra, server overhead, and that's costing you, a cool one and a half million for the first month because you're doing it on a month to month instead of a contractual type thing. So you definitely don't want to overshoot it. That, that presents problems all itself, but, if you undershoot it, you're going to have the ire of the entire community oh my god, these guys had so much time to prepare, they knew how much hype there was, what the hell's wrong with them, and then they're going to have to start renting out the servers [00:04:00] anyway which arguably is better for their bottom line, because now they're like, okay, this is exactly how many people are hammering our servers day one, expect that number to die by, whatever metric over the next two weeks, purchase this many servers and allow the queue to go this deep. 

It's a balancing act that unfortunately revolves heavily around the financial side of it. You're almost in a better position having a queue and eating the first two weeks of servers bad, publisher bad, conversations online for your bottom line sakes. Yeah, okay. I can see that because they claim to have 60 server, a 60 server tick rate. 

They said it was going to be. And I don't know what that meant or if that would be enough. I'm trying to remember, God, it's been so long. Tick rate is a huge deal. And I forget effectively the tick rate is [00:05:00] going to end up being the, in a broad sense. Don't come at me people, actually, don't come at me with that, I'm doing a broad overview here for everybody. 

But effectively the tick rate is I click to shoot gun shoots on my screen, gun has to register the shot, server side, server then translates it to the person getting shot, their client has to register it and reflect the damage. It's that traversal time of information that, faster tick rates, are going to be less of a time between. 

Actions hitting the server and being reflected to everybody. This is a very broad generalization of tick rates. And a lot, I know Apex ate a lot of crap. For that early on, because their tick rates were bad, and people were like, oh, server desync issues and stuff like that, where it's oh, I definitely hit him. 

He's no you didn't, server didn't think so at least, and bought a lot of crap for that. And Counter Strike had a better tick rate than this, and they're [00:06:00] running on an old ass engine, it's a hard, it's a hard battle to get right, because the thing is, the better your tick rates are and stuff like that's more that's more money, that's more money per server to get that kind of throughput, that data throughput capability for X number of players, you're paying for that better tick rate as a developer. 

Yet another balancing act. Okay. So that has less to do with that has more to do with like transfer of knowledge between players and less to do with would there be any crashes on Friday or will we even be able to get into the game on Friday? And everybody downloaded. Okay. Yeah. That's definitely, those are two big battles. 

That are somewhat separate. At the end of the day, it still is, it still falls on server capacity and server capabilities and stuff like that and overall bandwidth, either input output bandwidth of the actual, the drives, on the servers and as well as the internet capabilities of [00:07:00] however many, server farms, you're hosting this out of, I would assume that you would have a U. 

S. West, U. S. East cluster for people to connect to, Asia, EU, Oceanic possibly, South America possibly, to host out of, and they're probably going to end up using something like Amazon Web Services, most people do these days, to make sure that they can canvas the globe and have semi local servers for everybody. 

But, again, how much you want to spend on that, On a game, you have no idea how well it's going to perform its first couple of months out of the box. It's like almost you rather it underperform and then you can get more instead of overperform and you're paying for what you're not using. 

Abso absolutely. It sucks. It sucks in bad PR that you know, oh yeah, server issues, dsy issues, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But let's be real, especially in these days, how many [00:08:00] people that are gonna be absolutely slamming the servers this Friday, how many of them are going to be playing come January 1st, I'm gonna say. 

60 percent on and that's that's a hopeful estimate. 60 percent of the people that are slamming the servers on Friday are still going to be playing next month, and then, and that's nothing against the game or the developer or anything like that. That's just how it is these days with any game, they're like, oh, okay, that was fun. 

And then there'll be back for the season pass, season one pass drops. I'm like, okay, cool. And then they'll come back and then they got another battle to fight with the servers, but. The number is going to consistently go down. There's not really many events in a game like this that, you're going to start at the biggest peak, your first couple of weeks are going to be the largest peak that most game has ever gone. 

Most games are ever going to see. And then that's it. Yeah. And then you'd be lucky to have half. A year from now. This is how it goes. Yeah. You gotta predict that. Yeah. We [00:09:00] saw it with Sea of Thieves, we saw it with Helldivers and it was like, oh yeah, when they launched, there was that. 

A slow server, a lot of people you're running into, and especially with Sea of Thieves. That first week of Helldivers was a nightmare, dude. Oh yeah. That was officially crazy. But even with Sea of Thieves now, it's almost barren seas until they do another launch or Another mission update and then you see it like spike up again big patch servers are slammed again How it goes any anything with a seasonal format? 

That's gonna be the ebb and flow that they have to plan their server deployments around 

so true, so I know we talked monetization a little bit and it still scares me I would say because It's these are, [00:10:00] it's like the Marvel universe like has, it's hard to imagine especially with the movies and stuff that's come out, like somebody who hasn't heard of these characters or any gamer who doesn't want to play these characters. 

So I'm still a little worrisome about with it being this popular and somebody not wanted to pay for the power, so to speak, or pay to win. So to speak, in, in this manner. Yeah! That, that was a curiosity of mine, Is this going to be a thing of, okay, you're a free to play player, then you get these 8 characters per week on a rotating basis, and then you get the currency in game to unlock them, or you can just outright buy like character packs and stuff, or like a supporter pack that unlocks the current ones, but any future ones are going to technically be DLC. 

And That model, luckily, has died out lately in [00:11:00] game, so I'm I'm hopeful that it's going to be a thing of everyone's available, but the good skins, that's what you pay for. And then that's it. That's a model I can get 110 percent behind. Or that'll pass for or you can do an event, main event for, or a story for and get the skins. 

Cause I know they're going to do the battle pass angle which I feel like it's still a type of monetization, but they have to make their money some way. Oh yeah. Yeah. As, as long as it's like the new costumes aren't spiking the power levels of Holker or. Or Iron Fist or whoever, then I can pretty much deal with that. 

Yeah. And that's, if your payment model is purely cosmetic, more power to you. Okay. Top with the caveat of if your game is free and the only things you can pay for are cosmetic, you have my full support. Now there is also though the very trying to think here the very turgid waters of [00:12:00] okay you can't pay for power directly oh, your ultimate like hits 5 percent harder with these like gem boosts and stuff, things like that, which I did, if they do that at all, I'm uninstalling like just period flat day one, if you can pay for power directly at all, I'm not even, I'm not even humoring it, but, There is the problem that some games have encountered with skins where it's okay the base skin is this like bright flamboyant thing, like very comic and animated and it stands out, but this one DLC skin kind of has like a brick pattern to it and blends in with the environment. 

It's not big, but it does obfuscate the silhouette of the character and. That is, at the end of the day, that is a huge thing to a lot of people, especially if you're competitively looking to play this. Having skins that obfuscate the silhouette at all, that's a big no. We hope that they don't do that. 

But that's something, something that, [00:13:00] speculation, whatever, we'll just have to see if that's the route they go, and if they don't, cool. If they do. Be very vocal about it so they change that shit and don't kill their game. Yeah. There was one thing I skipped over. We started talking about it and we jumped to another another subject. 

And that was when we were talking about the comparison and to Overwatch. A lot of the things that I've read, it was this character is like this character, but with add ons or such and such for example, they were saying like the Punisher was like a mix of Ash Widowmaker or Bastion and he has a zipline like Widowmaker. 

He has the, because the Punisher, he's able to switch between three different styles of weapons. Yeah, he has like a shotgun for close combat and I don't know what type of gun, but he has another gun for mid range and then his, when he goes OT, he brings out the Gatling guns. [00:14:00] Yes. And isn't there Oh, you can get the Gatling guns and the rocket launchers, combine it, like firing them off at the same time, like just absolutely blasting AOE damage. 

Yeah. No, I do. I do that a lot. There's definitely the Overwatch comparisons because, it's a hero shooter. You can only do so much innovative, there's a limit to the innovation in a hero shooter. Let's be honest, but. It's definitely some solid comparisons. 

Yeah, the other one I heard, Black Panther, it was like Genji. Scarlet Witch was like Moira and Kitiko. I can't remember. Kitiko and Hela had a, they compared them to. Yeah, but I wasn't familiar with Kiriko. Isn't that God? I'm gonna get I'm gonna get lampooned here Isn't that Psylocke's name? 

Oh, no Psylocke's name is Kwanon K W A N O N Oh, [00:15:00] that's okay. I was like, K is K. Oh, obviously he's curious. Don't worry, Moose, you're not gonna get lampooned. I'm here. I got you. I got you. If I get it wrong, I'm gonna get lampooned. 

It's I don't know a bunch of people's names in real life, much less comic people's normal names. Last thing that I have is, I was looking for, I was trying to get like the good, the bad. And, make it well rounded but, we are a celebratory podcast and we do like to celebrate our nerdy stuff. 

But, the last thing that I had that there were some people who wasn't really a fan of the destructive environment. And, or the way that the environment is scaled, because if you take the characters like rocket and Penny Parker, they have a wall crawling ability, but [00:16:00] there are maps that have like ledges and they won't let them crawl over those ledges. 

That's what it looked like! Okay, I was watching the Spider Man trailer and I was like, why isn't he crawling over the lip of the museum looking building? Like, why is he and he looks slow as hell doing it. They can't climb over that? From my understanding, that hasn't been fixed yet. Now, that may be different when it come Friday, but in all of the videos I've seen, and I watched them up to two days ago, videos that were, like, loaded two days ago, It was saying that they didn't have that ability to, with the wall crawl ability, they couldn't climb over the lip of the ledge. 

Oh, okay. Oh that's going to be a not a lot of people are going to like that. So hopefully there's a fix for that. The second thing was when the environment is, when it's destruct and it falls, some characters are having a hard time traversing that [00:17:00] fallen landscape. And then after it falls, it regenerates quickly to a point where if you're healing, if environment is destroyed and it falls and then you have a wide open, like wide open plane to heal your team and then instantly regenerates and then it blocks off the rest of your team and then they die. 

God, okay, yeah, that yeah, that's, it's gonna be hard to balance around, because I'm a massive fan of destructible environments, especially in a competitive game, where it's just okay I was peeking this corner, there's no corner there anymore, I can't peek that corner anymore, I need to find another corner, But the fact that it interacts with like reversal type characters like Spider Man and stuff like that, where it's oh, yeah, no, they blew that wall out of that building. 

So he ain't gonna be getting behind us anymore. I love that idea that adds [00:18:00] a tactical layer to just blowing stuff up, with a purpose instead of just being cool eye candy. I like that idea, but if it just regenerates. I'll be very honest. I can't tell you whether or not I want it to not regenerate at all, or if I want it to regenerate slowly. 

Very honest, I don't know which one I would prefer. And I almost prefer slowly because if if everything ends up being destructible, then you just have a wide open plane and everybody going at it. Is that what you really want? Yeah. No, you're right. And then all of a sudden it's just like a flat terrain. 

Everyone just like picks, hey, pick somebody with mad explosive power and just level this flat. And no one has an advantage. No that, that would suck. So I don't want that. They can easily put it in universe explanation for kind of piecing it back together as Marvel after all, they can just be like up daughter Galactus swoops in and she's [00:19:00] Nope, this won't do. 

And then just starts reversing time. I don't know if that's something she can do, but I know she's powerful, but I fried out. I don't know exactly what her powers are. I don't know if there's some shit she could do if she could do that. That'd be really cool. She's just shows up in the sky box like this won't do. 

And then just brings, starts bringing it back. Buildings back together and stuff at a certain, like percentage yield of environment, destructive, like something internal that you don't, you can't see. That'd be cool. Yeah. Like an in universe explanation. I'd like that . Okay. Yeah, I could take that. 

That would that. Like I said, that would be awesome too. Yeah. Like anything with a good gimmick. If you can give me a good enough gimmick to where it's oh, that makes sense, or that was quirky and you didn't cool and stuff like cool. Yeah, I'm sold. You absolutely sell me as long as it makes sense in universe go hard 

That was everything that I had moose anything [00:20:00] that we didn't touch on that you would like to discuss. Only that Black Widow trailer dropped 32 minutes ago. Oh, fuck! I just pulled up my, I just pulled up their channel real quick while we were talking and then I was like, oh wow, this is brand new. 

Oh, she's Widowmaker. It's like fresh. Yeah, is hot off the presses, folks. As we're, so you know exactly when we recorded this, the Black Widow trailer just dropped. 

All right. Oh, she's a, he's like a Black Widow with close quarters combat, okay. Oh, does she have a chainable pistol or something with the punishers? She's got like a roundhouse kick. If they get up on her, she can just yep, and just roundhouse kick you and gain some distance. 

All right. All right. Judo chop. Yeah. Oh, and she's got a, oh my God. Okay. So she's got a [00:21:00] grappling hook and like a pistol, a sidearm, pistol and a knife. There we go. So that's the both worlds with when they showed her in the trailer, I thought she was going to be a type of sniper scope almost like she can look down the scope. 

I don't see anybody else like able to do that. Yeah, no, she yeah, no, she absolutely she's got snipes. But, she also, it also shows her getting flanked, and and she just hits him with a roundhouse kick, then grapples him back, and then like sidearm pistols and knifes him that's kinda dope. I gotta say, that's kinda nice. 

Look, I stan. Alright I gotta go watch the trailer, now that I've thoroughly spoiled it. So Moose, is there anything you want to plug? Anything you want to shout out? Let the people know. Ah, yeah, I don't have too much going on these days. I'm embroiled in World of Warcraft and doing raids and stuff like that. [00:22:00] Like the old days. I haven't really, haven't made much of a presence of myself online these days. 

So let's shout out come at me in Marvel Rivals. 

Moose, I appreciate you hanging out with me, chatting it up about Marvel Rivals. It's always a good time. Definitely would enjoy having you back whenever we have something else to discuss. Yes, very much. So I do love to draw, but we're going to go ahead and get out of here. Good people.