Hello everyone and welcome back to For The Minions Episode 25, the weekly show where we talk about some of the spiritual successors of the Paragon. This week we have our news and updates as always, a little tweak to the poll results. We're going to talk about, you know, this was your first MOBA Paragon, and then we got Tech Time with Ruba. The topic for discussion we're going to be talking about mirror matches and how much fun they are. And then after that we're going to talk a little bit about sustainability of each game. I'm your host, the one and only Mangus, joining me as always is Mandy Mal. How you doing Mandy? I'm doing great, as always. And as always, we have another fantastic guest host for you guys. This time we have Karina Nebula. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started in Paragon, favorite hero, all that good stuff. Yeah, hey guys, Karina Nebula, that's my gamer tag. I'm a game design student at SCAD, it's an art school in Savannah, Georgia. When I started playing Paragon, pretty, I mean right at the beginning really, and kept playing, kind of petered off a little bit, but I'd say I played mostly monolith, but you know, I experienced a lot of different eras.  Yeah, yeah, that's the spot. Yeah, I had a great time when I went to Savannah, Georgia. Yeah, I like it a lot. Who's your favorite hero? Definitely my favorite hero is Gideon, for sure. He was the top of our poll whenever we did the poll of whose favorite hero everyone was. I think he's pretty original, like one of the most original characters in Paragon, really. You think so? I think so, I mean. The ranged rock that just dropped straight down instead of... Yeah. Yeah, and then the portal, the portal, definitely unique, especially with everybody else being able to take that portal. You don't see that a lot, that's for sure. So let's move on to news and updates. This week, we're going to be talking about Metabuff and they released, they actually released this last week. You may have seen the Bridex video about it. It's a video about Severog using his abilities, not about Severog. It was just a video of Severog using his abilities. There was no storyline to it. They didn't. But it, you know, I would, like Bridex said, I would kind of prefer to see him on the map, like, you know, maybe two people going against each other. But it did show that they are still working on the game. I think that was kind of a lot of people were wanting something from them, a little bit of something to let us know that they're still going because they went very quiet after they delayed the alpha. So they actually, I mean, at least they gave us a little tidbit, a little something to snack on while we wait for more news from those guys. So what did you guys think of the Severog video? Mandy, do you want to go first? Sure.  So it was nice. It was nice to see they're working, obviously, which you know they're working, but it's nice to, to see a little, a little snippet of that. So it was cool. It was good to see. Yeah, I like seeing it too. I mean, any news is good news. And seeing his actual weapon, his hammer or, yeah, that was pretty cool. Yeah. Not like the site, but yeah.  Good stuff. And then Karina Nebulae, you wanted to discuss the HUD and the, the heat map that is kind of an interesting thing that I think was a little overlooked from their proof of concept. That was their final video, the proof of concept. And you guys, I don't think you can actually check out, check that out anymore. I think they took it down, but they may have left that one up. I'm not sure. But yeah, what did, what did, what'd you have to say about that? Yeah. Like when I saw it, I was like, wow, this is really cool. Like it's, you know, for me, I want something better than Paragon from these games, you know, it's not, it's not just sort of like a copy or trying to make it similar. It's like new and they're trying to make it better. So I think that's like really self-evident that core will be better. Yeah, if you guys don't know what we're talking about with the heat map, they, they actually mapped out where your mouse goes normally while playing a game like like Paragon or any kind of third person sort of game.  So they definitely put a lot of thought in behind their UI and behind a lot of those, the things that they do. And that's just kind of a cool thing to see from them. And their, their HUD is, of course, going to be completely customizable.  And another thing, like I really liked the alt tokens and, you know, it's, it is like the first time we've seen the HUD. So it's not final. And like you're saying, it's customizable. So I think those are all really good things. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love the idea of a customizable HUD. I think that is definitely a way to please the masses because that's, you know, one thing that nobody complained about because you can, they can't complain about something they can completely customize. So I like it. And then, uh, again, Karina had another great idea. Let's discuss some good comps based on the the 15 heroes that are that are currently in the alpha roster. And, um, it that's a cool thing to do. Like what what what kind of comp would you would be your comp? Let me know down in the comments what comp you think would work best with the 15 heroes that made above has Karina. I'm sure you've got something something worked up. What do you what do you think? Well, for my first pick, if we're doing it draft style, I would pick Gideon, me, I would be playing. And then for my support, I'd say Muriel, just because I really like her all where she can teleport or fly. And then for the ADC, I went with Twin Blast just because I think he's a solid ADC. You know, you can't really go wrong or if you know what you're doing at least. But for jungle, I would pick Kalari. And that's partially because of my brother. He's also a Paragon player or he used to be, but he loved Kalari. So picked her. And finally, for top lane, I picked Greystone because of his alt, because if you don't know how to deal with Greystone, you're not going to win. So. Yeah, that's a very good point. Maybe who would you pick? Um, I really liked that was a really good one there. Karina, I think I would have to go Sparrow as my ADC. And as much as I loved FaZe, I would probably take Muriel as my as my support as well. Because if someone knew if you had a good Muriel, you had a good Muriel. So that was I would I would take her. Let's see. Jungler, I think I would go. Oh, my gosh, I just lost his name. You lost it or can't remember it? I can't remember his name. It's my husband used to play him all the time in the jungle. He was like, he had the mask and the Chimera. Chimera, there we go. Thank you. I totally lost his name. So that always worked well when my husband and I played together and he was Chimera. So I would that's kind of just is like my pick. I want my husband to be my jungler. And then I also like Gideon, but and then I also like a Greystone as Offlane. So that was a good one, good pick. I think it kind of depends on how you want to play the game. Like you've got early game comps, you got late game comps. I prefer late game comps. So I think what I would go with, I would go with Big Daddy Bash for my support and Sparrow as my carry because she's a, you know, she's not so good early game, but she is a monster late game, especially combined with Narbash, keeping people slow down inside the inner fire. I think it was called was her ultimate. And then I would also go Gideon mid lane. But for the jungler, I would pick Severog because Severog, again, you get into the late game and he is an absolute monster. And then Offlane, I do think out of all the options available to us, I do think Greystone is the best Offlaner just generically. I mean, people can, of course, play other off, you know, it depends on player skill, but I think just generically, Greystone is probably the best Offlane choice for them. So and also Mandy phases off the table. She's she got replaced by Decker. So which that's kind of a you didn't know that happened. No, we covered that on the show. Oh, yeah. OK, yeah, I did know that I knew that phase. And no, I'm no, I'm can't remember names. Mandy, you cursed me. You cursed me with it. It was a phase and Kwan got replaced by Fingnau and Decker and Decker. I remember now that I could I didn't know if I wanted Big Daddy Bash or Decker. But I think I would prefer Big Daddy Bash for my support. Again, it's kind of like what you were saying with Muriel. If somebody played Muriel, they were a good Muriel. When people played Narbash, it was because they were a good Narbash. So right. You guys were all including people like you knew and stuff. I didn't do that. I kind of kind of feel bad. Mainly because I don't have friends. So I'll be a friend. Thank you. Thank you. Not Mandy, though. No, don't be. Moving on to Omeda Studios and they've been putting a lot of work in. They've got they've got Murdoch's kit pretty much done and they've moved on to Gadget and trying to try to perfect her stuff. One of the kind of the interesting things with Murdoch is they they they changed his kid his kid around a bit. They they baked his knockback and a buckshot kind of like it was in on Monolith. And so they took a shield away and replaced it with a passive ability, which is shots fired.  So but the way they're indicating that is the the color of the wee woos. Whenever whenever your shots fired is off cool down and your next shot will be that, you know, long range projectile, his his back lights up with, you know, the blue and red flashing lights, which I think is a cool change. And it also sort of introduces a new thing for them. They didn't have any passive abilities before in the when they first released the alpha. So that just shows that they do have the ability to put in passives, which is, I think, a very different thing than doing active abilities. I don't know. What do you guys think?  I did see a little bit of smokey stream and watch, you know, watching him. I'm OK with the change as long as it's like easily like it's easily explained or it's, you know, you can tell that this it's changed. It's not the same as long as everybody knows it's cool. I didn't play a whole lot with him. So I my opinion means diddly squat. But I kind of I kind of liked the shield when the little bit that I did get to mess around with him. So but I'm sure the change will be, you know, I mean, the the knockback from the shield is baked in the buckshot now. I think the reasoning behind it was there were they said their their their balance team, which is what, you know, headed up by our GSA's and I think Ruba and some of their mobile consultants had some say in this as well. I think it was several. But anyway, what they were saying is Maroc seemed to be more focused around a like close range combat with all the abilities that he had. And they wanted him to be more long range. So that's why they gave him shots fired as opposed to the to the shield, but they still baked the knockback into his to give him an escape to make the knockback into buckshot. Makes sense. Yeah, once they explained it, it made a lot more sense to me when I first saw it. I was like, I hate passives, but it did make sense after they kind of covered it a little bit. And then moving on to ethereal, not a lot of news from them. They're just they're taking their old website down and putting a new one up. They talking to Owen, he does not like that website that they currently have at all. I think it's a great website. It looks beautiful. Everything functions well. Everything seems to be where it should be. I don't know what's wrong with the old one. But if they're going to put up an even better one, then cool, I guess. So yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like, I can only imagine if, you know, something's going to be better. Right. I don't know how it's going to be better than what they have now. I mean, I think definitely out of all the companies, ethereal definitely has the best website right now. But, you know, website doesn't mean anything. I would rather have a functional game than a website. But yeah, we're really looking forward to ethereal. And I'm hoping to get some new lore up on their website. I love ethereal's lore. And then I think that's all about you. You guys have anything we want to say about ethereal? Yeah, I do. Before getting on this show, I didn't really know much about ethereal. And I was more excited for a pred and core. So I did a little bit more research. And the thing that I'm I'm like most excited about that game is the flying class because it wasn't that like that's like brand new. So and, you know, the lanes on the top of the map, I think that is pretty interesting. So I'm definitely going to give it a try now that I looked it up. So yeah, that's the thing with ethereal. Most people that a lot of people seem to mistake it as either core or predecessor on the surface. But once they realize it's a completely different game with all kinds of different stuff, they seem to be pretty attracted to it and for good reason. Like I always say, that's the one I'm looking forward to the most is ethereal. So can't wait for that to come out. And yeah, the Sky Slayers do look cool. Paragon Epic actually did have flying heroes planned for Paragon like down the road.   I guess Muriel sort of counts, but yeah. You couldn't direct where she flew really. I think Epic actually had like a full like you could control their flight path.  Yeah, totally counts. Totally how did that ultimate go again? I don't remember. We didn't really have anything for Phoenix Rising this week. So let's move on to Karina. You want to talk about merch for each company? I think that's a great idea. I think we were we were discussing this before we started up the show. As far as making money before you have the product out and they do need to make some money, I think merch is probably the best way to go because at least you get something in return for your money spent, if you know what I mean. So have you guys bought any of the merch from CORE? I think CORE is the only one that has merch out right now. Yeah, I bought one of the colorful CORE sweatshirts. I think it's blue. Yeah, it hasn't made it to my house yet, but I did buy one. All right, yeah, those those look really cool. Yeah, I think there's leggings, too, that are like similar look. But yeah, I'll leave those to other people. Like me. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. I did order a hat. Oh, you did finally order one. I finally ordered a hat. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I want a hat. I want leggings. I want it all. That's the problem, though, is I want all of it. So I have to I have to decide which I want. I'm still I'm still a little unsure about that jacket, though. That jacket looks way too X-Men to me. Yeah. What's wrong with that? X-Men are out. It's it's all about Avengers now. Come on. No, no way. Give it the program. Do you guys have any Paragon merch? I do not know. I wish I did. I do, too.  Not at all. Yeah. I've seen that. Who is it? Is it Nabori hasn't had a hat? I really would have loved a hat. But also I would just love to have a physical copy of the game. I know that would do absolutely nothing, but I just want a physical copy of the game. And I don't I haven't looked online. Like sometimes I'll browse through if I'm at a game store. Also, like, what are the chances that somebody, you know, like has one, but I'm sure they're not going to sell a dead game. So, yeah, I was talking to Rubo about those hats because they gave Rubo a hat while he visited the epic headquarters. Yeah, I think that's how Nabori got hit. He was saying that it's like the most uncomfortable hat ever. It's like they just got a hat from a store and then like stapled a big metal thing to the front of it. He's like, dings into your forehead. Oh, no, I would love to have one. I just wouldn't wear it. I guess. Yeah, I probably would throw it on a mannequin head. There you go. Well, that's good to know. That makes me feel a little less bad about not having one. Well, that does bring up such a good point, though. They did not like when Fortnite came out, DKT was talking about this on his on his channel.  You couldn't watch a YouTube video without a Fortnite ad running in front of it. However, there was nothing for Paragon. Like you had to like happen to fall into Paragon. Like you just what did they do? They did nothing. They there was no commercials. There was no ads. There was no YouTube ads. It just they didn't promote it at all. They wonder like why it didn't succeed. Well, you didn't tell anybody about the game. Yeah, and it's crazy to think. I mean, look how passionate the community is. I know exactly. It's it just doesn't make any sense. I guess they just didn't know what they had. Until it's gone. Until it's gone. Let's move on here before I embarrass myself some more to the poll results. The poll results, the poll that I ran this is last week that I ran this was was Paragon, your first mobile. I was kind of curious about this. Seventy five percent of you said yes, twenty five percent said no. I thought that the number would be high. I didn't know it was going to be that high. And I think that actually that kind of ties in with the fact that you know, seventy seventy percent of Paragon's player base was on the PS4 and there's not a lot of MOBAs on the PS4. It's really only smite. So I think I mean, there's more now. But I think that probably has a lot to do with it being a lot of people's first MOBA and maybe it was your first MOBA. Karina, it was not yours, though, right? No. What was your your first? I think it was League of Legends. I'm pretty sure. Oh, really? OK. Yeah. Yeah, it was my first. But just because it wasn't your guys's first, you guys are actually the minority. I'm the majority here. Mandy, don't ask me. He's been saying that to me all day. I think maybe that number is so high because of the amount of Paragon players that are from the PlayStation and like there really aren't many MOBAs on the PlayStation. So maybe that's maybe that's. So for this week's tech time, it was actually pretty lengthy and very tech heavy. So what I did was I cut it down to a little under ten minutes. If you're into that sort of thing, then it's, you know, a lengthy tech time is awesome. But if you're not, people's eyes sort of glaze over and they drop out of the out of watching it. So we're going to keep it down to a little under ten minutes. And we're going to keep going with learning how to implement the assets into the Unreal Engine. So if that's something you're interested in, stick around for tech time. Hey, guys, welcome back to tech time. Last week, we covered how to get Yen loaded up into the Unreal Engine. We covered some some y'all things, some camera angles, making sure she's not just burning straight at the camera. And we got her in the Unreal Engine and move around.  So I got Ruba back and he's going to show me how to fix that stuff in this week's tech time. So Ruba, take it away, my dude. Oh, welcome back, Morgus. I am very excited. We're going to get we're going to get some better animations done. So last week, we covered the player character, which is one of the blueprints covered or included in the the Unreal Unreal assets. I was going to say Unreal and Epic at the same time. Epic Unreal assets for Paragon heroes. So the new thing that we're going to use this week we didn't cover last week is the animation blueprint, which is another kind of piece of work. What's the best way of explaining this? So the best way to think about a lot of features that Unreal Engine does is it gives you lots of it's called boilerplate, but it's like basic things like how players move, how characters move, how animations work. They're like pre prebuilt recipes like. What's the best analogy?  You can once you have that recipe built in, you can then use it for all sorts of different recipes. So if you want to make lasagna or macaroni cheese or anything like that, you can use those kind of prebuilt recipes to pull it all together. So we're going to go and we're going to jump into the animation blueprint, which is one of the other kind of set pieces. So if you want to escape Morgus and then down the bottom in the browser window, you should see the orange one, which is the Yin anim blueprint. Got it. And if you double click on that bad boy, we should get a nice empty window. OK, so when you first come in here, it can look a bit daunting and a bit weird. There's two, well, there's kind of three main parts that we can play about with when we're doing the animation blueprint. And one thing you'll notice as well, if you hover over the little window at the top left and zoom in, you'll see that Yin's default skin comes in. That's fine. It doesn't matter. It doesn't impact what you're doing. If you've selected a different skin and the engine and the character, it'll go back to that. So don't worry, but that lets you kind of see and preview the animations. So the things that we're going to be interested in and talking about this week. So the first thing is on the left, you have just below that image. You have two graphs. One is called the event graph. And one is called the anim graph. We're going to go into the event graph very, very briefly just to give you a quick look of what happens in there. So you want to double click on that, Mongoose, if you then switch to the event graph. OK. So this is the default epic animation event graph. And if you're interested in like learning more about this, this anim graph, also this event graph is very basic and a lot of all the secrets like orientation warping, speed warping, distance curve matching, a lot of that like fancy tech that Epic used to drive the animation in Paragon is not here. This is like bare bones. Like all you basically need to get things running in the engine. So if you zoom in on some of the some of the boxes, Mongoose, so the ones at the top handle is kind of set up.  The first one is that one covers attacking. If you go down and you can kind of you can right click and move around. There we go. So you've got one there that tells you if you're in the air. So that's kind of used for the jumping animations. You've got something there for saying the speed and so on. So these are like all the logic that drives the animation. So there's no animation in here. But you've got like, what's your roll pitch? Yeah, what's the old that this is used for leans. So when you kind of lean into moves as you're running, that this basically calculates what your lean is tells you if you're accelerating set as full body is used for certain animations. So some animations are the full body, like like when Yin does her whiplash, whatever it is, the cube and she would target. That's a full body animation, but some animations are what's considered upper body. So it's so that you can do things like run and attack at the same time. You don't have to do animations. And then before that, that one's used for animation. So this is like all the logic and you use this to drive your animation. So the actual animation itself is going to is controlled on the left and the other graph called the anim graph. OK, so this is actually good. This is this is probably one of the way one of the reasons that I recommend that if you want to dive into this, you want to use the power gone stuff. This is the anim graph. And what it does is it basically builds up all the animation using like logic and gates down the bottom right, where you see the little man running on the anim graph. Yeah, that's your final animation pose. So this is what you see in game and everything that follows from the chain above, even though like the the boxes that you've got their mongers, they're they're like broken up into sections. They actually feed into into each other. So the last little box there with a little man on it, the one above it, you see in the box above, you've got the one at the very end. It's just a little pose that then gets carried on to the next box. So that saves and then kind of passes on. So these are all the layers that build up the animation. The one that we're going to dive into is at the very, very top left. And it should be called the ground locomotion. So you see there we have ground locomotion. This is this. This is what's known as a state machine where we can control the animations we go into. So if you double click and go into ground locomotion, this is the these are the animations and how they're driving and what these are called. These are called states. So when you're moving your character around, think of this like him, like logic as it flows through. So you start off an idol and if you double click on the idol button, this shows you the animation.  This is the one that you play if you go over to the right hand side of the screen and where it says asset browser up and to the right of it. Up and to the right of it. Right there. There we go. OK, so this now shows you all of the all the animation assets that you've got. There's two types will not cover the two types this week. But just know that you have normal animations, which are the green ones and the blue animations, which are called animation montages, which are like ways that you can kind of capture chunks of animation and put them into billies and stuff. So, for example, if you click on play idol combat on the left, just give it a little left click. Yep, hit delete. OK, and then you click compile at the top left. You'll see. Oh, she's just the tipos again. She's gone back to tipos and that's all folks. That's the tech time. No, no. That's basically what happened last week, when you had your tipos in, so she didn't have an animation driving her. So at the moment, our hands stood still doing nothing.  You can pick mongoose. You can pick any of the green animations on the right there.  Oh, you know, oh, at least a kill, man. You haven't seen half of these. Right. Oh, that's cool. OK, so double click, all right, man. That's fine. I was going to say, if you want to double click, you can go into it and you can kind of get a good looking feel for it. And you can see her doing her seductive hand and it's just called want to play. Interesting. OK. But yeah, you can do that. And if you close the the the the animation at the top, so that's about up. Yeah, that's the one. If you want to put that in, you can just pick any of the ones on the right and drag it into the left. And drag it in the free space. There you go. That's going to drop in. There we go. You can move it to the side a little bit, so it's out of the way. And then to rig this animation in, all you have to do is then just drag the two little men together. So if you drag from the animation, the couple of little man, there you go, drag it in there. There we go. Yeah, I'll hit compile. There we go. I did a thing. You did a thing. So you have replaced the idle animation with that emote. So now if you were playing your stood still, all that is going to do is just going to stand there and just do that with whatever it was. Oh, right on. So that's how this works. So what we're going to do is we're going to go fix for side to side motion and get that done. So I've probably said you can you can leave that idle animation and if you want or if you want to, you can fix it. It's your choice. That will just leave it in. Hey, guys, I'm going to cut this off right here and I'm going to split this segment up into three because it is quite long and it's more a lot of code and everything. And if you're not into that, it's not all that interesting. So I'm going to try and keep these a little under 10 minutes. So let's get back to for the minions for now and we'll pick this back up in next week's for the minions. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed tech time with Ruba, but we are going to move on to the topic of discussion for this week. This is brought to us by Karina Nebula and I love it. The fun of mirror matches and why they should be allowed in casual play. So what we're talking about here is a lot of, you know, a big problem with the Paragon is they didn't have a draft and you could always have mirror matches. And, you know, that's not always a good thing, especially for competitive play, you need to be able to counter pick and, you know, take picks away from certain people. However, it can be fun and I hope they keep it in the casual play because it is a great time whenever you're going up against somebody that's playing the same hero as you and you get to match skills with them and see who's the better Richter in my case. And sometimes I was not the better Richter. So, Karina, you kind of brought this up. So why don't you why don't you get into it here with a Gideon, I suppose?  And it's just lots of fun to just be super evenly matched and also, like, as a new player, you sort of learn how to play your character. If you're watching someone else who's better than you, it's sort of helpful. God, that's a very good point. I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Yeah, that is an excellent point, because, yeah, there were many times where when I was first learning to play Sparrow, if I happen to, which it was a little different with, you know, playing Carrie because you didn't go Carrie versus Carrie often, unless you were in a team fight or something. But I would check out, you know, the Sparrow's deck and see, OK, what's she working with? But there's also that when you did get in a team fight or you happened to, with my case, be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I went up against another Sparrow, when you did get that kill, you always get that little bit of like, oh, yeah, I was the better. I was the better man. So kind of the dangers of that sometimes, though, like whenever I'm playing like any game, if I die or if I'm going if I'm doing poorly, I try to assess like, what is it that I'm doing wrong? What could I have done differently? Like, how could I have played that out a little bit better?  And it's very hard to think, well, very hard not to think, well, if my team was supporting me like their team was supporting him, I could be kicking his ass, you know, that's that's a trap to fall into right now. Because usually your team is doing the best they can. So you should just keep doing the best you can and acknowledge that maybe you aren't the absolute best at whatever hero that you picked. That's another thing too. That's another pitfall that people fall into is they'll get thrashed by somebody that is obviously better than them. And then they like they'll make it their mission to kill that person throughout the rest of the game. And that is such a terrible thing to do. Because if they beat you once, they're up in card points. Now they're up in skill and card points.   Exactly. And then you kind of like you take your eye off the prize too, you forget about the the goal of the game because you're focused on I got to get my revenge. So yeah, it's definitely a pitfall to be wary of. That especially comes into playing mirror matches. Like, like, do I kill this tower? Or I can I can kill that other Richter. I can get him, you know, not just let him get away. Because just put your team like you're off chasing that other Richter and they're getting popping over top of everybody because he's uninterrupted, ulting on their heads.  Like you got a kill on that other Richter, but your whole team died for it. So exactly. Yeah, that was always the case or a tower. Yeah, a tower went down. All right, guys, anything else add to the to the topic? No, I don't think so. OK, we're going to move on to a second topic this time. We're going to be talking about this is a topic we've discussed a few times, but I think it's worth bringing up again, which is the sustainability of the games. And like, how are they going to sustain themselves? I think pretty much every single one of these games plans to be free to play. That seems to be the most popular business model nowadays. So ideas, Karina Nebula, what do you got? I think that if the games are different enough, then they both can succeed and, you know, be sustainable. But I kind of see it going more like one will eclipse the other. People will adopt one over the other. But, you know, if they're too close to being if they're too close to the same game, basically, that I think that would happen. But if they're different enough, then I think both can survive. OK, yeah, I think I misunderstood the the topic here. That's what that kind of brings up another point, too, because as I mentioned in the video, I just I just did a meta and made above aren't the only ones out there that are making Paragon like projects. I don't cover all of them. Some of them, I think, are worth covering. They just don't want to be covered yet. So the thing with that is, though, then you're splitting everything three ways. And even it doesn't matter how much how different it is. The more these games come out, the more of the community is going to be split in the less chance for any one of them to succeed, I think. But everybody certainly welcome to try if they think they can make something way better than core and way better than predecessor, then I say go for it. But it's a it's a weird thing. And then like visionary, they're they're different enough to where I think they can be sustainable on their own. We haven't seen anything from them in forever. So that's kind of a hard call to make. But I think if they if they've continued along the lines that they were going, then, yes, they they could succeed outside of the other two outside of made above and made of studios. And then I think undying with ethereal has the best chance of just completely separating themselves and gathering their own audience. They kind of they were never trying to be a spiritual successor to Paragon. They just sort of looked into this prebuilt fan base of third person Bobas. They just happened to be making a game at the same time that Paragon died. So I think and as far as as far as monitor, monetarily sustaining themselves, I mean, it's going to have to be really either you're going to have to pay to unlock the heroes. That's one way to go with the free to play bottle. Like you have a rotation of heroes that are free each week, but you can pay to unlock certain heroes if you happen to like one hero. And then the other thing is cosmetic items, which is probably the big one. And I think is it's something that these it's not as important as gameplay right now, but it's something that all these companies need to look into is making sure that they could produce skins and maybe even weapon skins and all this kind of stuff for the hero so they can sustain sell those skins and sustain their game. What do you guys think? What are your feelings on like founders packs? Like, yay, nay, you like them, you don't like them. I don't see anything wrong with founders packs as long as they can prove that they have a working game before they offer the founders pack. And then I think I think a theory was doing it the right way by offering a paid access to their alpha. But after that, it's going to be free to play. And and even that that paid access, they're not they're not going to. That isn't something you could pay for right now. Like, they're not offering that right now. They're going to wait until they can come out with a gameplay trailer and prove that the game works before they offer that sort of kind. I guess you could be considered that a founders pack. It's the exact same thing. So yeah, I'm actually surprised because I am the Chiefsgate gamer herself. I actually like the idea of the paid alpha because it's a good way to you're you're going to get. I don't know how to word this. You're going to get a good crowd, basically. Like if someone paid to get into it, you're going to most likely get really good information back from them. I guess not that you you don't with a free alpha, but you're going to have people that are really passionate, obviously, about the project that we're willing to pay for it. And it's a good way to make a little make a little cash, you know, and help support your game. So I like it. I would I'm I'm in I'm down and I'm cheap. So yeah, like I didn't I didn't really think of it like that. So, you know, now that you say that I'm I'm more more. Yeah, I'm having a little bit of connectivity issues. Oh, no. All right, it seems to have smoothed out. OK, I think that's going to let's go to wrap it up for the topics for discussion. Let's move on to plugs. Karina Nebula, you got anything you want to plug? You got a Twitch stream YouTube channel, anything like that? Yeah, I have just started streaming a bit of Sea of Thieves with my brother, who I mentioned earlier. So I have the same name on Twitch, Karina underscore Nebula. So if you want to watch me play Sea of Thieves right on, I'll link that down in the description below. Cool. I'm excited to check that out. Maybe be in a big streamer now herself. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. Twitch affiliate, Twitch affiliate. Oh, just yeah, just happened. I'm still a baby. I don't know what I'm doing. Still trying to get everything set up, but I sure do appreciate everybody who has clicked that follow button.  I can't even express it. And yeah, I got nothing to plug. Well, like, well, I'll be probably streaming one of these games at some point. So yeah, hopefully. Hopefully soon. So that's going to be it for this week. I'm glad you guys could all come out and watch. Just like I said, my last video, just do your own research on these companies. I mean, if you watch for the minions pretty regularly, then you've got a lot of good information on the big four, as I call them. But if anything else crops up, just, you know, be a little skeptical and, you know, do some research, find out a little more about them before you kind of throw a whole hog in on them. But I think that's going to be it for this week. This is the Four of the Minions crew signing off. You guys have a good one. And then go. All right. Mandy, give me a sound check. What's going on, everybody? Welcome to Four of the Minions, blah, blah, blah. Cool. Karina. Hey, guys, my name is Karina. Just a regular old Paragon player. All right, you were a little quiet. Why don't you try again? I just turned you up a little bit. OK. Hey, guys, Karina here. I'm here to talk about Paragon. OK, cool. And let me do one. Hello, everybody. My name is Mandy Mel, and welcome to this video. Don't ask me.


Welcome to MIT Supply Chain Frontiers from the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Each episode features center researchers and staff or experts from the field for in-depth conversations about business, education, and beyond. Today, center researcher and instructor David Carell speaks with Dr. Angela Aquicella about ghost shipping and freight transportation. The two explore cost implications for businesses and consumers and the psychology that may lead to these so-called ghost lanes. Take it away, Dave. Today, we're delighted to be joined by a CTL family member, so to speak, Angie Aquicella, formerly a PhD student here with us and now doing really interesting and amazing things in another part of the world. Angie, thank you for coming. And could you maybe describe the position you're holding now and what brings you back? Yeah, absolutely. So as you alluded to, so I did my PhD here at CTL, all in freight transportation procurement. And now I've moved across the Atlantic to Europe, so I'm a postdoc now at Tilburg University in the School of Economics and Management and doing a lot of the same similar kind of how do we improve procurement and transportation services, but now learning more about the European market, trying to make sure that we can do some interesting work and understand the differences between the US focus and the European markets as well. Excellent, gosh, well, thank you for coming back and sharing some time with us to let us know what you've been working on in your latest projects. I think our theme for this discussion is spooky things in Halloween and your recent work on ghost lanes. So as I was getting ready to talk to you, I read one of your recent interviews and you had a sentence that really jumped out at me. Ghost lanes happen at a frightening rate. So in the spirit of our Halloween theme, what are ghost lanes and what's so spooky about them? Yeah, so short answer is that ghost lanes are freight lanes that are contracted to motor carriers, but which are never used over the course of the contract. So maybe a little bit of background for our audience members that aren't thinking about freight procurement as often as I do. So when companies, we'll call those shippers, they procure their freight transportation services with motor carriers. These are the trucking companies that move goods over the highway. These shippers spend a lot of effort and time finding the right providers for their distribution needs at the right price. And that's because transportation services are an incredibly important piece for shippers to get their products to their customers or to their retailers to get products on shelves on time and undamaged. And so transportation is going to directly impact customer service, shippers reputation in the market and ultimately sales for the shipper. The problem is that these procurement processes can take months, sometimes six months when contracts are only in effect for about 12 months. So you're really doing this process just to kind of start it over again halfway through the contract length of that year. And so this procurement process, it involves shippers working with dozens or hundreds of carriers. Those carriers submit bid prices for hundreds or thousands of lanes within that shippers network. And then the shipper needs to sift through all these bid prices and deciding the carrier for each lane. The problem here is that that process, as I said, takes so much time. The size, the cost, the complexity of that process is directly driven by the number of lanes that that shipper is procuring. And that's why it takes so much time and effort. So getting back to these ghost lanes and kind of what's so scary about them, we have these lanes that are included in the procurement process, but we don't end up actually using them. So essentially we're wasting all these efforts, right? And to give a little kind of stat on why it's happening at such a frightening rate. So we looked at a large dataset of many shippers procurement outcomes. We looked year to year industry to industry and found that across the board, about 70% of lanes that are procured in a given year end up as ghost lanes in that year. So that's 70% of the procurement process that didn't actually need to happen. And that's why it's a particularly big problem that a lot of shippers and carriers, in fact, have not put a whole lot of thought into as we found in talking with a lot of industry folks. Wow, gosh, until I was learned about your work on this project, I had no idea or wouldn't have expected that it would be such a high percentage of ghost lanes. I wonder, for people who aren't familiar with the lane terminology, could you kind of describe, does that mean like Boston, Chicago is something that doesn't get freight from a shipper or what would a ghost lane look like in an example? Yeah, great question. So essentially, say I'm a shipper that I have product to move and it's gonna go from, yeah, Boston to New York. If I expect, I forecast my demand for the next year and I think I'm gonna have say 10 loads per week and I say to a carrier, I'd like to contract you at a particular price. Then that carrier is gonna expect to get 10 loads per week. What's gonna happen in a ghost lane situation is that carrier expects 10 loads per week and then for some reason that demand doesn't materialize. Say that endpoint in New York didn't end up having customer orders that we expected and so that carrier is never gonna be called upon to actually use its capacity and so this is what we're calling a ghost lane, a lane that just, we don't have volume on it. Wow, so thinking about the impact of that and keeping with our spooky Halloween theme, if we think about what makes movie monsters scary, to be scary they have to be threatening someone. So like the shark from Jaws is threatening the town from Jaws or Mike Myers in the Halloween franchise is threatening the family and everyone's scared of the specific threat that the monster poses to a specific community. Could you describe if these ghost lanes are haunting our system, who are they a threat to? Who are they hurting? Yeah, so essentially they're hurting everyone. For shippers I mentioned, right, this procurement process is very cumbersome. It's complex and so this piece of that, those administrative costs are hurting shippers. More than that for the shippers, we actually modeled carriers behaviors year to year and found that carriers that are receiving higher frequency of ghost lanes in one year end up having higher contract prices for that shipper the following year. So actually shippers end up having to pay more for as a result of ghosting these carriers and to put more numbers around it, for every 10 percentage point increase in ghost lanes that a carrier sees in one year, that's gonna result in a 1% higher contract price from the carrier to that shipper the next year. So there's real numbers here. And that's in particular on high volume lanes, these important lanes for shippers. They're seeing higher contract prices on their important lanes within their distribution network. So that's the shippers perspective. If we take the carrier's perspective, as I said, it's hurting everyone. So not only have we wasted carriers time and effort in bidding on these lanes during that procurement process and expecting to see business on those lanes, they've also expected to see revenue generated from those lanes. So that's gonna not only hit their expected revenues for the year, but they've also very often they will, carriers will plan their networks around contracted lanes. So if they're expecting to make capacity available from that, say Boston to New York lane and then they have a New York to Chicago leg for another shipper. If there's no volume materializing from Boston to New York, now they're stuck with trucks in Boston that they need to get to New York in order to then get to their next leg in Chicago, but they're gonna be moving empty. They're not gonna get paid for that movement. And so carriers actually will have to either have much higher, what we call deadhead, right? So we have much higher empty trucks on the road, which is of course a problem in terms of sustainability and things like that. But it also is gonna ultimately interrupt their network balance and their operations, right? So we kind of have these compounding issues for both shippers and for carriers. So kind of short answer, we should all really be scared of ghost lanes. Do you think so? I hadn't thought about how much it hurts the shippers, but that is so interesting how your research points out that they pay a higher rates for having ghost lanes in their system. And then carriers, I certainly understand how, they don't wanna set up for business they don't get. Do you think there's a potential that consumers are also haunted by ghost lanes? Yeah, I think so. I think in a lot of senses that cost is gonna have to be trickled down to the consumer. We see that a lot with as transportation costs go up, we see shippers often noting how their transportation cost escalations impact their under all, their kind of under lining budgets. And so as a result, we will end up seeing probably higher prices for consumers as well. Gosh, so now that we know to be afraid of them, I wonder why do they occur? Is it a glitch or is it a ghost and machine, if you will, that's causing this malfunction to happen? Or is it deliberate? Is it part of shippers strategy? Yeah, I don't think anyone's being malicious. If that's the overarching story, I don't think anyone's being particularly malicious. I do think though, that it is a strategic choice for the shipper and this comes from what I'm calling a coverage strategy. It's in response to demand uncertainty. Shippers don't necessarily know when their customer orders are gonna come in. They have to plan their networks a year in advance. So they need to be able to figure out how to cover the risk that's gonna be incurred because of uncertainty. And especially because shippers wanna make sure that they have contract rates on file for any demand that may materialize over the next year. So they end up setting up these contracts on lanes, even if they're not sure if they're gonna materialize because they don't wanna risk being exposed to more volatile spot markets later on if that demand does materialize. They also use this procurement process to vet their suppliers. So they wanna make sure that if demand does end up materializing that they're gonna be working with a carrier, they know that that carrier understands their business. They understand their facilities. They have those payment processes set up. So essentially they're using this strategy to make sure that if there's potentially volume that's gonna materialize, we're gonna have it covered. And so for shippers, as I said, it's not malicious, but it is a strategic choice to make sure they have some availability and some certainty to kind of reduce their risk going forward. If that makes sense and it's a truly interesting example of how problems arise from rational actions. No one's really behaving irrationally, but they're introducing a problem that affects all of us. Now, cue the music, let's be ghostbusters. Let's try to find the ghosts. Does your research tell you anything about which lanes are likely to be ghost lanes? Yeah, yeah, so that was, I think once we realized how frequently this was happening, we wanted to say, okay, is there something we can, can we identify them at that procurement event before they even end up as ghost lanes, right? So we built this predictive model that took in characteristics of lanes before they're procured and said, can we identify if they're likely to become a ghost lane that year, right? The first and most, you know, the strongest indicator for if a lane is gonna be a ghost lane in a given year is if it's new that year, meaning it was not included in the procurement event the previous year. And we actually found that 85% of ghost lanes were new that year. That's a huge amount, right? And so, and that's kind of back to my example earlier as, you know, maybe that Boston to New York lane, that New York customer was new in the distribution network, they, you know, or it was a new warehouse that didn't end up having the orders that we expected. And we procured it just in case so that we had a rate on file, we had a carrier that we could count on or we think we can count on, but those orders just didn't end up coming in. So first, the highest, the strongest indicator is if a lane is new. The second one was if a lane was procured the previous year, most of those lanes were actually ghost lanes the previous year as well, meaning we procured them, but no volume materialized on them. So we have these ghost lanes recurring year to year and we're not maybe looking at what happened last year in last year's procurement event and incorporating that into this year's procurement event. We're kind of just seeing what we had in our network last year and including it this year. And then of the rest of the lanes that were ghost lanes, most of them were very low volume, which also indicates maybe we don't need to be procuring lanes that are very low volume, maybe we can be more strategic about the way that we procure them. So I think the main thing is the, whether it's new or ghost lanes the previous year and then the next thing was about how is a lane defined? So we also found that lanes that are defined at higher geographic aggregation levels, so region to region or zip code to zip code as opposed to the actual facility address to facility address, those higher geographic aggregation lanes end up being ghost lanes also more often. And what we see what's happening here is that often when we aggregate uncertain demand across larger geographic areas, we're aggregating multiple facilities to help smooth out potentially volatile demand anyway, but what we're really seeing is that say a region that we define in the procurement event has three warehouses that we're trying to smooth the demand over. We're also defining lanes at those warehouse addresses as well, so we're actually duplicating lanes. We have address to address, but then we also have higher more aggregated geographic regions also defined as different lanes within that procurement event. So if and when demand does materialize, the shipper is going to those more granularly defined lanes and not using those more aggregated geographic area lanes as well. So really what's happening here is duplication of lanes and those higher aggregated demand volumes don't end up being used as often, so they end up as ghost lanes. Gosh, interesting. And I don't mean to cross the streams here, but to make another Ghostbusters reference, you know the classic line, who you're gonna call? So you know what the problem is and we know it's a big one. It's a big marshmallow man coming for our city of consumers. How do we solve it? Well, what is your research point towards potential solutions in the space? Yeah, well to answer your question, who you're gonna call, I think you should call your local freight transportation researcher and ask them for some help on what to do. But you know, in all seriousness, if there's one thing that we can do, I think we identified what types of lanes end up as ghost lanes, those new lanes. I suggest removing those from the procurement event. I said it was 85% of ghost lanes are new that year. If you flip that statistic around, 95% of new lanes in a given year end up as ghost lanes. So that means only 5% of new lanes actually materialize. So I'm saying let's throw all of those new lanes out of the procurement event. Let's either procure them later on in a mini bid if and when that volume does materialize or just cover them on spot if they end up being low volume. But then we asked, okay, well, if we do that, what's the effect? How effective is this coverage strategy anyway in covering these 5% of lanes that do actually materialize? It turns out they're not performing well anyway. So this coverage approach isn't really really covering those 5% of new lanes that materialize well. So we looked at carrier acceptance rates of those 5% of new lanes that materialize. They end up being about 73%. So meaning 73% of loads that are tender to or offered to our contracted carriers end up being accepted. And so a large percent end up being rejected. And often shippers are stating in their service level expectations, we want somewhere around 95, 99% acceptance. So 73 is way below what we want. And as a result, shippers then end up paying for higher priced backup or spot options when carriers are rejecting their loads. So we looked at, on top of that, okay, so we know carriers are rejecting loads on these new lanes. Well, of the carriers that are accepting them, what was the contract price for those lanes? Do we at least have something competitive in place? And we actually found that, no, in fact, the contract prices for these new lanes are far too high. In fact, they're 13 to 40% higher than spot prices for those lanes at the time those loads are materializing. So we're way overpaying for those loads that materialize on new lanes anyway. So as I said, I suggest taking those new lanes out of the procurement process, but every shipper's business is gonna be a little bit different. So as I was saying, I think we need to take a better look at what happened last year in the procurement event. Each shipper, what lanes did and did not materialize, why? How did we make decisions about how we defined our lanes? Things like that. And then use that very strategically about what lanes should we actually include in the procurement event this year, and what can we carve out and maybe get rid of some of the excess that we didn't need? And maybe even more importantly, as I said, that the size, the cost, the time of the procurement event is driven by the number of lanes procured, but by freeing up a lot of that time from the lanes that are not important, we can actually be focusing our attention on procuring the important lanes, the higher value, higher volume lanes, and maybe get better, make sure we have better agreements with our carriers. We've spent more time on those important lanes rather than lanes that are very unlikely to materialize. So keeping with the theme and maybe stretching it a little far, but thinking about sort of classic monsters and movie monsters, in some ways, all monsters are just exaggerations of the things that we as humans fear in ourselves.  Vampires can be seen as send-ups of our tendencies for vanity and avarice and cheating death. Mummies, you can think about sort of pointing out our fear of our own mortality, which is a long way to build up to asking you, do you think there's an undesirable human trait that ghost lanes as a monster exaggerate or point out to? Is there a dark side of humanity that the ghost lanes you discovered point out? I knew there would be a philosophical piece of this conversation knowing you, so I think that's a really nice kind of question to take a step back and understand what is the human behavior that we're seeing in this behavior, right? And I think it comes from our preference for known costs now over kind of unknown costs later on. So we're downplaying the significance of kind of guaranteed upfront risk or cost. In this case, it's the, as I'm saying, the administrative costs of running the procurement process. And then we're kind of overemphasizing the unknown or the perceived or the potential costs later on of in this particular setting of searching for carriers and or relying on the spot market. So it's kind of this perception of, I prefer the devil I know versus the devil I don't know. I know I'm gonna have these administrative costs now. I'm willing to incur those now. And that way later on, I don't have to deal with it. That's one, I think a second one is also that we place value on flexibility in the face of uncertainty. So this is kind of a way to hedge our bets, right? We wanna make sure that we have as many options open later on, again, kind of just as in case. And we actually have seen this established, actually really well established in management research. There's a really interesting controlled experiment where we actually saw that, I didn't do this, others had a very smart research has did this, but they found that we're actually willing to knowingly over invest upfront in order to keep the door open for flexible options later on. So we're seeing that these behaviors that we're seeing from shippers is kind of a natural human behavior. We're willing to incur known upfront costs and overemphasize that known versus the unknown later on. And in this case, right? In the specific context of transportation services, it's those administrative costs sifting through those bids, loading the carriers, the prices, all of that into our transportation management systems for every single potential lane, even if it may not materialize just to avoid that unknown costs and that volatility potential later on. What hasn't been studied, and I think that's what was really interesting here, is we place value on flexibility, but does it actually pay off, right? Is, are there costs to that flexibility? Are there costs to that tendency to rely on the known knowns versus the known unknowns, so to speak. And I think in our research, we got to explore that no, I don't think there are costs and I don't think it is worth it to have this coverage approach to stick to the knowns that we know. Gosh, that's really interesting. So if I take that argument and sort of stretch it out over the horror movie argument, the ghost lane can be seen as sort of a manifestation of shippers own aversion to uncertainty. Yes. I have it too. I hope we all do. I understand. Gosh, thank you so much for all the great work that you've done contributing to the Frey Lab during your time here and where you're going to next. And thank you for spending the time with us today to share your most recent research with the broader community. Always a pleasure to be here and it's great to be back for just a little bit. All right, everyone. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this edition of MIT Supply Chain Frontiers. My name is Arthur Grau, Communications Officer for the Center. I invite you to visit us anytime at ctl.mit.edu or search for MIT Supply Chain Frontiers on your favorite listening platform. Special thanks to Pawel Fesuch for the music Something Scary is Behind Us on freemusic.org. Until next time, everyone.