Tooth Fairy Tactics & Dragon Drama VIP Lands on Space Tomatoes!

0:00 hey everybody welcome to the space tomatoes podcast i am your host lx and i have my co-host here mr havoc hey havoc how's it going hey man it's going great glad to be here feeling all right today i am i am good good we have a special guest again today vip hello welcome to the show hey glad to have you going good it's good to be here yeah glad to have you so you were what's that i was gonna say so what what do you how was your day today did you do anything special anything fun anything interesting not really typical wednesday i um i work in a dental office i put uh i help put braces on i'm an orthodontic dental assistant so yeah i'm pretty knee deep in taking braces off usually all day Wednesdays. It's fun.

1:20 I enjoy it. I get to work like 37 hours a week, get Fridays off. I like it. I've been doing it like 20 years now, so I'm kind of just in that, just gliding right on. Sounds like a pretty good gig. Yeah, for sure. Not a bad gig at all. So what team are you on now in War Dragons? In this current moment, I am teamless, actually. Oh, wow. Yeah, I retired. I retired once before, but it was for like a month, so I don't count it as much as this round, which was about four months without logging in at all, which I would say I was pretty proud of because I played since I started playing in spring of 16.

2:15 So my first dragon mythic dragon was sage and I got it because it was just pretty. It had the vines and the flowers on it. And I was like, yeah, I like that. So I ended up with that and had no idea how to fly it whatsoever, but it was pretty. So that was, that was the most important part. So I played eight years with no break at all. so I was kind of ready at the end for a while to take a break because as much as I love the game in it in itself it's a you know very time consuming game if you want to make any sort of you know progress big big jumps in progress if if you want to do that you're either spending money or you're spending hours and hours a day in the game.

3:04 And so I was ready for a break. And it's actually been pretty nice. But, of course, somehow there's a hook stuck in me somewhere that still has that little pull that can pull me back in. And so, yeah, I will be on a team shortly. I'm just kind of waiting for the new season, which is shortly. So we are making some plans to come back. I'm not too far behind, so I'm pretty optimistic that I can come back and get back into the swing of things and catch up relatively quickly. So I'm excited.

3:45 Do they make it a little bit easier these days to catch up when you leave for a little bit? I think they did just with the merging, the ability to merge towers now. and the breeding, I think, with the discounted tiers, depending on how far back you are, you can catch up in breeding a little bit cheaper than in the past. So I think it is a little bit easier to catch up now. It kind of just depends. I think if you reach a certain threshold, though, if you're trying to play competitively, that it's going to take multiple seasons to get caught back up. If you don't have a lot of resources saved up, et cetera, et cetera, It's a grind game to get those resources back. So I've just been lucky enough that I, toward the end, wasn't really playing as much.

4:29 So I was kind of saving resources and not using them before I quit. So I was lucky enough to have, you know, a couple thousand chests saved up and rubies and all that good stuff. So I should be able to jump right back in. I just got a little bit behind in breeding in my tower. So just got to take the time, you know, and grind it out. You're pretty much an endgame otherwise. I'm pretty close, yeah. I think right now end game is 210, I believe. No, 205, I'm sorry, 205 right now. And I'm like 193s, 190. I'm one of those people that's like level locked, and I have been for a while where I'm like currently I'm 688, and I think for like for the next tower level I need 195s, I need to be 689, and then it's two levels for every next two levels.

5:17 So I need to get to like basically close to 700 to be able to get max towers now. So it's that chase of building 100 towers to just get those levels, which is kind of crazy. But that's where I'm at. So it's the chase. But again, they've made it a little easier with the they've also I don't know if you guys heard. They've they've made a bar to where you can do like 10 levels at a time for the first like what, 30 levels where you can use 2 million at a time. wood to level them up so at least it's not one level at a time so you save a little bit of time as well so that's been a big help yeah i would i would argue that's pg's best uh change in the last five years honestly i remember that and the claim all button the old days before they had the uh the breeder you had to click each each breed individually for every token man that was forever yep i remember that it was uh it was rough yeah yeah 2016 you've seen a lot of changes too i'm sure oh yeah for sure i mean when i started i mean it was it was pre-atlas um so a little on my story like i came in uh i don't even remember why i downloaded war dragons honestly i think i've always i've been into medieval and all that stuff and i saw dragons that looks interesting and downloaded it and um you were probably watching the game of thrones like everybody else at the time no no actually no no i actually just did that last year i binge watched it in like two weeks

6:52 like i was addicted to it after i mean it was like pretty much all i did in all my free time it was it was pretty bad but um it took me a while to jump on that bandwagon surprisingly enough i was like denarius what's that i have no idea now i know i think like every other person had that name in the game for a while yeah for sure and it's it's so funny to think i had no idea for all that time but when i started um i started off on like this little gold team but at the time gold was actually fairly competitive i mean not competitive but it was active very active and um i started on a team fire team alpha and that was my first team it was led by a guy in the army That's why it was named Fireteam Alpha.

7:35 And he pretty quickly had to get deployed and couldn't lead anymore. And I very quickly found myself in leadership. I would say within the first six months of me playing, I was an officer. And he left the game and I took over Fireteam Alpha and became leader within six months of playing the game. So I was still trying to figure out the game as well as trying to figure out how to lead a team. and we were growing pretty steadily at the time. And again, this was pre-Atlas, so we spent a lot of time just warring and doing XP runs on Andy with Ember and all that fun stuff and met a lot of good peeps along the way.

8:20 And at some point, I would say in 2017, I met Morlin, who was the leader of Rebel Dragons. and we very quickly became friends and she helped me out I remember we got gang warred by like six or seven teams at one time and before Atlas that's what we did right we gang warred people and I was just completely overwhelmed and she's like hey I'm gonna pop over there I'm gonna help you run this you know having to just figure out like getting waves together it just was absolutely ridiculous so she came over she helped me and we bonded really quickly and decided to merge. And so I merged into her. And so I became Rebel Dragons for a long time.

9:03 We ran together pretty tightly for some years. So that was a lot of fun to just, I think that's probably one of my favorite things in the game because I'm not that typical player, right? Like my entire notion of War Dragons has always been leadership and building teams. And so that's always been like my enjoyment of the game. I kind of hate the game like I hate grinding I hate like learning new dragons I hate change so it's it's been a wild ride in that regard but I've just had so much fun like meeting people and just learning how to grow the team itself politics suck but just the inner workings of a team and making it feel like family has just been like the ultimate fun in a game I've ever had so leadership is definitely the the gift that keeps on giving because uh especially when somebody turns it over to you i i've had the same experience and uh it's definitely a different perspective coming from just playing the game to having to manage uh a team full of you know 49 other people and man you know have them do what you want to do yeah who didn't catch that's a good analogy that expression was used quite a bit yes especially in atlas especially in atlas in the beginning days especially man it was it was rough raid starts at this time we're going to be hitting this castle five minutes after the time people showing up hey are we still doing the raid yep yep we're there now

10:39 or you'd be like hey don't go to these coordinates this is a swap don't defend lines start moving you're like i said don't move not move so we learned the lesson that just don't even post the cords like just don't even post the cords they see cords they're gonna go oh my gosh and then the whole like uh don't hit list versus hit list that was always like I learned the lesson just give the hit list just don't even say who to hit just only hit these people that's it just hit these people and of course that never really works but wasn't for the lack of effort yeah it happens you know I mean it's just that was one of the things that was most maddening I think about being in leadership was literally just the people and consistency and and like the worst is for us we had one player and i kid you not like we would be under attack for two days and this person would show up and be like hey guys we're under attack and we're like we've been literally tagging all we've been you know online we've been in game we've been doing everything we can to tell everyone you know please come defend and then this and it's like constant with this one person from my understanding still going on today so yeah sounds about right sounds about right but I um we got to learn Atlas together we were part

12:12 of the second rollout Rebel Dragons was so at that time we we rode on Dreadside for quite a while in the beginning of War Rebel Dragons political career in Atlas that's where I met Lumber he was kind of a mentor to us at the time when he was on Equilibrium. And we, I was part of the group of people who actually put world domination together. And for anybody who's non-political and doesn't understand what that is, world domination was the minions, we used to call ourselves the minions, the minions of the Dreadnought side. So Dreadnought had its own entity and didn really coordinate with smaller teams outside their 5TA but obviously we had to choose a side right Everybody had to be on a side So we chose to conglomerate under the Dreadnought name which they seem to be okay with but they just didn't deal directly with us. So it was more like, I don't know if you guys remember like Chad from Scorch Reborn, Curly from Outlaws, who else was in there? And then they, we got voted.

13:23 So we got to vote in a handful of kind of the smaller team leaders into the world domination chats with some of the mentors from the Diamond teams who would then kind of help us organize ourselves. Right. So in the beginning days, we started off with, I want to say, roughly 40 teams, maybe 30 to 40 teams in the beginning days. Chaos Crew, Shaw Happens, Yin Yang Twins. Who else? in the beginning it was oh what was their name later it became it was sal from sal from cornfed crew oh yeah cornfed crew yeah we ran with them and um so my relationship like for example with shaw had developed before alice we were all friends because we came from the same league and kind of like yeah you want to be in a 5ta together cool cool cool so we all kind of got together and then kind of got ushered into that and sha and i kind of shared duties together on the world domination council and that for me was like the epitome of chaos in an alliance because at that time there was thousands of teams in the game still and i don't know if you guys remember western flank but western flank was kind of its own little entity to the side with like i guess Semper. It became Semper, basically. It was like Fiery River and all of them. They were a big entity in themselves, and they kind of broke down and came over to world domination. So at one point,

14:54 like at its peak chaos, world domination had over 300 teams in it. And it became virtually impossible to manage that many teams, right? So we tried, and this was pre-bot era. So at one point, I feel like that was another huge shift in the game. But at that time, that was when the website was created by, I wish I could remember her name. I just remember she played on coconuts. But she came up with the original idea for the website where everything could kind of just be, because we had a lot of spreadsheets back then. It was a lot of spreadsheets. So to just kind of like have one place to go to, to kind of see all the Alliance names and where everybody belonged, because that's what it was really all about back then was just keeping everybody figured out and organized, like who is enemy and who is not.

15:47 Like that was a huge thing. So that was the beginning of my understandings and like Atlas and politics and like learning just how everything worked. And that was probably I want to say 2017 to 18. And then eventually, you know, World ND imploded and kind of everything kind of people went to different entities that all kind of broke down. But Rebel Dragons, we got outed, actually, by Dreadnought itself. So we were friends with Digital Chaos.

16:27 They had given us castles. And so it was kind of like, you know how it goes. So we wouldn't give Dreadnought passage to one of EQ's last castles. And it was just because I was friends with Lumber. I couldn't do that to him. So we had to kind of take the punishment for that. So we were kind of outed and no regrets, no regrets whatsoever. But, you know, it was a change of culture for us and just learning a new way of life outside of our alliance. We had only alliance we had ever known. So that was an adventure in itself as well. But all a learning experience.

17:08 when Dread kind of before disbanding even kind of just said we're the alliance thing, we're not doing it anymore, we're going to you know, our TA's going to fight other TAs and we're just going to stick to this principle that was a huge shift in the game and the way Atlas started, you know, the way Atlas worked and it was a pretty big shift I think especially for the smaller you know the lower league teams i think uh that umbrella kind of disappeared you know what i mean and it became uh yeah that was the beginning of the breakup of the mega alliances for sure it took a little while for it to completely break down but i think that's just due to the amount of teams that have disbanded since then um you know but it's a lot different nowadays than it was then i mean back then that was the era of 50 million true braids right like even the Japanese alliances.

18:11 I probably feared them more than anybody in the game back then because I can vividly remember waking up at like 8 in the morning just to check in and do a quick little egg run, say hi to everybody on my way to work, and here comes like 15 million troop raid from, gosh, who was it back then? Who was the big Japanese team back then? Not the one in, not them, But the other big Japanese little umbrella, there was another team that was really big back then. Shoot, I can't remember their name now. But they had a bunch of teams that would, it was like 15 of them on any random day that would run together. But, man, they would come in just absolutely loaded.

18:54 And they knew you were asleep, so, like, they knew they could get away with it. So they'd just come in, you just bubble. Like, you had no choice but to bubble. But it was absolute chaos. It's crazy. and serious serious organization skills right i mean they were on point as far as organization and planning and well the thing about japanese that scared me were their bases like they copied each other's bases and they were just brutal man they would defend like nobody's business it was and they still i mean the japanese teams now still have a very very same similar kind of outlook to having very defendable bases they have very good very good but i still i'm still a little scarred from that to this day like no no stay away so you were uh one of the leaders on warren for foresters or we all call them we um how long were you leading that team for um not for very long actually so we'll take it back a little bit to rebel dragons we befriended odin the previous leader of of war enforcers not the original because he took it from somebody else but he was leader of war enforcers when we met and we were actually enemies when i met odin and then very shortly after was when we were kind of outed from our 5 ta on dread side and we found ourselves in a position where we didn't really have a lot of options so we kind of made an option

20:25 so that was when I was part of creating Integritas which was kind of a later alliance that was created by Royal Road and Lumber and several of us that was back when Yellow Brick Road was still around and Hot Tub Party and Mythic Force was interested in joining us. So we created a new 5TA with Rebel Dragons, War Enforcers, at the time Yellow Brick Road, Servitoris, and somebody else. So we were a pretty solid TA, and we created that alliance with Royal Road Digital Chaos, And that very steadily grew. I don't know if you remember Integritas, but we grew to probably we took a lot of DOA teams when they started to break down over there.

21:17 And people were unhappy with the mega alliance kind of whole outlook. You know, seeing an alliance of like nine teams just being very active and very, very offensive, that appealed to them a lot. So we had several teams, Sheep, a bunch of other people came over from DOA and that took off. But I didn't actually join War Enforcers. At some point, we decided to merge with War Enforcers. Rebels Dragons did. So we did that in the midst of all of that and became a pretty solid roster. Because as much as War Enforcers was a good team, they weren't really organized yet.

21:59 They were active in Atlas and had some good players. But they kind of had to have things mature a little bit more on the team. And so that's where me and Mori came in. We were very good at team management and kind of making a team feel like a home as opposed to just a team to come play on. So we merged there. I can't even remember what year that was. I want to say like mid to late 18. And I don't know if you guys remember, but we went down. I want to say we went down in history as getting our butts whooped by the most amount of teams and War Dragons ever. because like maybe not the most, but we're definitely up there in like the top five, in my opinion, like the most epic battle weeks ever.

22:44 And that was War Enforcers Appreciation Week, which was being planned over the course of our merger. So people were watching us. They knew that we were merging and they were watching and planning. And when I say it was like 30 to 40 teams that planned this, all dread side. and it was when Semper was still intact and I believe Dreadnought had disbanded at that point because this was after, because they went, if I'm not mistaken, Dreadnought disbanded like right after Royal Road did because they're like, well, our biggest enemy's dead. Pretty much nothing left for us to do so we're peacing out. But I think Empire was still around at that time. So it was still, Dominus was still intact but I think Dreadnought wasn't in that battle.

23:30 But it was them, Semper, Dragon Alliance and that little European group, True Valor and that little group. I mean, everybody was in on it because Rebel Dragons had a pretty good reputation. Mori and I were pretty nice to people, whereas Odin was pretty disliked in general by most people in the game at the time. So I kind of overestimated how much people hated him, I think, because we had several, Rebel Dragons had several castles in mixed areas that we never had issues in before. But the moment we merged with Odin, they became an issue.

24:12 So we were getting attacked on, I want to say we had total maybe like 15 to 18 castles. We were getting attacked on about 11 to 12 of them throughout the entire week by 40 different teams. And we lost several of them. I want to say out of 12, we probably ended up holding on to like two, maybe, at the most. So we got our asses handed to us for sure that week, and we lost a lot of troops. And I probably lost a pretty big majority of my sanity that week. but we survived as a roster and as a team and it kind of made us stronger at the end of all of it and it was just absolutely epic like it was so crazy i'll never forget it was our first big battle on a t4 because we were holding a t4 right next to top gun and they were just uh dominus semper everybody was just using that passage and we held that t4 that was like the one that we like held on to at the end and uh we gave it our all and we i think we put up a pretty good fight and uh never want to do it again but it was it was an epic week for sure for sure yeah i certainly remember a number of epic weeks as well um on the other side yelling at odin and and yeah and yeah yeah i remember that i will i remember one week specifically yeah the one the one fire t2 area

25:42 yeah i think there was in totality but it is what it is pixels you know the end of the day i have no animosity towards anyone right it's a game it's about domination and you know that's what goes on um yeah i remember that week though you were you were pretty upset with this that week You just like go away We like no we want the castle Well you know we were we were seriously outmatched beyond outmatched and there was no you know, big alliance anymore. So it wasn't like, you know, we'll just call in the people that are matched with the people attacking us. It was, we're just going to have to deal with it, you know? So I was really upset with ghost. I remember cause we, it was a different team that own the castle and ghost stepped in and took the castle i'm like what's going on why does he have the castle and so he you know started messing i've known ghost a long time like pre-atlas we were we were all friends shah and ghost and oh yeah um ghost can be quite the bully i don't know about that but yeah i guess ghost can definitely i mean character builder Yeah. Gosh, I haven't talked to him in so long.

27:00 Definitely a side of Ghost that gets, yeah, yeah, for sure. But back to the question you had asked me before, I became leader of war enforcers way after the fact. So Moreland was the first to retire, and Odin was the leader for quite a while until about 2000, I want to say 2000, gosh, like when COVID hit, everything kind of starts to blur together, right? So it was after COVID that I became War Enforcers leader. Odin took a break from the game, and I had to kind of make a choice of whether I wanted to, you know, kind of disband.

27:46 Because Odin was the big face of the team and was, I would say, arguably kind of like a celebrity in the game, right? He's like the most monetized content creator that War Dragons has seen. So he was kind of the face of War Enforcers. And I will say, you know, a lot of people hated Odin, but I don't think they truly got to know the real Odin like some of us did. And he is a lot of what people think, but he also has a lot of good qualities as well, which is what kind of balances it out. And I think one really good quality he had, which made war enforcers a really good team, was his ability to know when we could win a fight and when we couldn't. So a lot of the time we got heat because we ran from fights from Dominus or teams that we knew were just going to completely rock our world.

28:33 Like we wouldn't sacrifice our team's troops in a battle we know we couldn't win. But if we knew we could win, we just went absolutely just hands down wild. You know, so that's why a lot of teams hated us because we were very good with numbers and he was pretty obsessed with ratios. Ratios got brought up quite a bit among our peoples because that was what drove the guys that ran with Odin was that, you know, kind of swinging your dick mentality where it's like, huh, look at our number. Look at our Katie. You know, it's amazing. It's better than anybody else's, which I would argue at one point in our career, it was pretty good.

29:17 so after the semper war a lot of teams disbanded from semper obviously fiery river etc etc and angels demons was one of those teams that decided to pack up shop but harsha former leader of ad was really interested in a merger with us and this was within six months of our merger with Rebel Dragons. So I was a bit hesitant because I'm like, we got a solid roster. Like we don't need a merger. And Odin's like, yeah, but like, do you see these players that want to join us? Like, how can we turn these down? You know? So AD had a very good crew of players and they brought in what we had always been missing, which was the Asian crew. We had a lot of American Euros on our team at the time. I think maybe at the most, maybe three Aussies in Australian or Aussies and Asian time zone. So we were pretty weak when it came to that.

30:16 So when that happened, we merged with them, brought in maybe 15 people or so, and it just skyrocketed us in every aspect, like organization, PVP, Atlas numbers, just everything just skyrocketed after that. And we, we rocked it for that year that we were able to keep it together before Odin retired. And then I had to kind of decide what I wanted to do. And a lot of people left after Odin retired. But I somehow managed to do another merger and keep it together and kind of go for a couple more seasons. So that was kind of the end of War Enforcers.

30:56 But we, man, we were top team when we retired. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no question about it. It took a lot for us to get there, but we made it. But aside from War Dragons, what do you do for fun? I paint. I'm not really great at it, but I've found some comfort in just sitting down and staying still and learning something new. Because I had never, I'm not an artist by any means. My daughter, I have a 13-year-old daughter. She is an artist. She's very good at what she does. She's very good at drawing. but I do just never had it never had the natural talent for it but I just decided you know what I'm going to give it a go and so I've I think I've gotten okay I do landscapes pretty well but don't ask me to draw a portrait because it's not going to be good but you ask me to draw like you know an ocean with a sunset I can give you a run for your money so but aside from that just kind of hanging out with my close peeps and animals.

32:03 I love animals. So I volunteer at a local animal shelter once a week just to go take the dogs for walks. Yeah, that's about it really. How do you keep from taking them all home? Because I would have that problem. I know, I know. And I did at one point. I actually had three French Bulldogs and the German Shepherd and a cat. So, yeah, it got a little out of control there for a while, so I had to kind of take some steps back. But it's hard for sure. I bet. For sure. It's hard. But I figure, you know, if they get to get out just, you know, one more time a day, if volunteers come, you know, it's better than nothing, you know.

32:53 The cage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that would be a tough one for me as well. I think I, every time, every time I end up, you know, one, I just, it kind of breaks your heart. You know what I mean? But I also have a full realization of what, what I can actually take on and what I can't. For sure. And yeah, I can't take on, you know, 30 more animals. Well, depending on what kind of animals, but you know, if I won the lottery, there'd be telltale signs. Okay. Like I'm just saying, right. Yeah. That was an acre property and a hundred, a hundred is all rescue.

33:36 Yeah. I don't know if you, you ever followed the guy, Lee Asher. I follow him on Facebook. I've been following him for years. He started off in his RV with just a couple of dogs and he would just travel around the country and go to different shelters and he would pick out shelter dogs, take it out with him, let him live with his pack, and he would re-home them along the way. And eventually his following got so big, I would assume, and part of it may be like his investments, like cashing in some of his 401k, whatever the case is. He ended up buying like 200 acres out in Montana, I think. And he's just living the dream of any like dog rehabilitator, you know, animal sanctuary person.

34:18 And he's got just hundreds of dogs in his pack now and has, you know, just farm animals and horses and alpacas and just, like, has a whole, like, part of the house for the cats. And, yeah, he's just living the dream now. So I'm like, I wish that was me. That's my dream. Yeah, that's a lot of animals to take care of. but he's got a whole crew you know like okay he's able to hire several several people to help take care of them so it seems like a pretty well-oiled machine because he doesn't just take like animals he takes the ones that nobody wants the ones that need medications the ones that are old the ones that are blind like he takes he has several dogs that have the hypo where they can't really walk straight the something wrong with their brain he takes those dogs he has several of those dogs so he takes the ones that people don't want that's pretty awesome yeah yeah my old rottweiler had i can't remember the medical term for it but it's it's known by a nickname of i want to say it's sailor's disease or something like that um which same thing you know she'd swing her back legs and kind of walk like a drunken sailor i guess it's the thing with it and uh Yeah, that was kind of a bummer, but, you know, she did well for a very long time.

35:42 So, yeah, it was good. I had my soul dog. I had to put down an 18. So that was pretty sad. Yeah, I had him 15 years. But he had one of the hardest things in my entire life. I was playing War Dragons at the time. And, yeah, it was it was really rough for sure. but now um but now uh we've um i guess war enforcers has decided to come back for one more round because why not so is that your your new home potentially that is my new home potentially yes so uh i've been retired four months but the entire time i've had people kind of when are you coming back when you're coming back when you're gonna i'm like never i'm never coming back. Don't do it. Yeah. But, you know, just talking to the people that still play that I'm, cause I'm still close with a lot of people. Um, you know, they're just like, we need some excitement. We're all bored. That's like the main consensus I'm getting from all across the board is people are just bored. And so I'm not sure what exactly we're going to be able to do, but I do you think we can bring back a little bit of excitement to the game because you know a little bit of hate can go a long way sometimes you know it can it can get you to that next level which is you know can sometimes be understanding and you know that kind of um what's the word just having

37:19 that um that view of being more um educated I can't think of the word right now off the top of my head. Just being more educated and being able to find fun where there really isn't any, I guess, is the best way to say it. You know, you just make it your own fun. Because unfortunately, I feel like PG has kind of stopped listening to their people. You know, for a long time, they did. It felt like, or at least it felt like we were being heard. And now it's crickets so we just have to kind of be creative and make our own fun yeah so they don't they didn't actually put in place another community manager right so they just have what devs every once in a great while pop into the discord and and like give an update do they do they ever like i don't know respond and and like have conversations or is it just kind of crickets in general? I mean, since I've been retired, I haven't really popped into too much anymore.

38:25 So I honestly don't know. But when I retired four months ago, it was pretty much, you know, a graveyard. So I wouldn't expect it to be any different. But it's just kind of sad because, I mean, they had a great idea going. Had they just kept the people in there to keep kind of evolving it, I feel like they would have done a lot better with it. But people just got bored. I mean, it's the same events, the same thing over and over again. So it gets kind of repetitive and mundane after a while. So like I said, I'm not coming back because I love the game itself. I love the challenge of building a new team and bringing people together and seeing what we can make of it You know if we do well we do well If we flunk we flunk We've done both at this point.

39:10 So it could go either way. Yeah, and there's still a lot of camaraderie, I imagine. And so, okay, so big question is, is Odin coming back too again? um well maybe we should get odin on here so he can uh answer that for himself but one i'm hoping we have him on the line uh i'm asking him for friday it's currently for everybody seeing this is currently wednesday the 14th of may you won't see this for about a a week or so i'll try and get it out in about a week uh like editing and right I have a silent partner in editing.

40:01 My equipment's just not good. Sorry. Yeah. That's, that's yeah. Yeah, no problems. But I mean, I'm, I'm hoping, um, last time I retired, I was gone for maybe a month, maybe six weeks at the most. And, and Odin brought me back the last time cause he, he wanted to restart war, uh, war enforcers the last time. Um, so it's, it's the roles of reverse this time. This is not our first rodeo in this situation, but, um, I'm hoping so he's been really busy with work and stuff. So I'm not sure how full-time he'll be back but i think he'll at least come and hang out for a while and we'll see if we can kind of i mean come on man we were all working full-time while we were doing this stuff you can do get to although he's so hard to like to get to multitask that was like one of the things that made him an absolute awful leader like he would he would miss four out of five quests but he would be online 13 hours a day like you could tell him 15 times to do a quest and he'd be like okay okay okay and then the time comes and you look and you're like he's the only one that hasn't done his quests so and i'm sure he meant to as well yeah and and not to me i wasn't meaning to be disparaging at all right i mean school is definitely the workload you know so yeah i'm really excited to have him on because like like you said right you know i don't

41:35 know about the monetization and whatever that to me is is what it whatever um but the fact of the matter is he he put out tons of content and you know in the beginning he was probably one of the the reasons i ended up staying playing war dragons because i i couldn't figure certain things out and he would put out videos and really kind of lay down this and that and use this combo kind of when you want to time things and really was immensely helpful. And I remember, I remember telling him so at one point, like, you know, just some useless plebe sitting there telling someone, but whatever.

42:20 Very influential. So I'm glad to have him on, you know, and it'll be really cool to see how he's doing and what he's been up to and what he's planning for war dragons. If he's going to try and take over the world again. Yeah, I'll let him answer that. But we, you know, I'm fortunate to have built a relationship with him outside the game as well as several people. So, you know, even throughout our retirements, we still have each other's number and still stay in touch. And so I'm really thankful that him along with several others, you know, we have each other's number. We know each other. By the way, my name's Casey, and that's been one thing that since the beginning of my career, I insisted on all of my members calling me by first name.

43:03 It was just part of how, you know, it kind of, it felt like my family. And so these are my friends and my family. So, you know, don't, my name is VIP, but call me Casey. Like anybody who knows me in the game and we're actual like friends in the game, they call me Casey. So, so feel free to call me Casey. but you know I stay in touch with several people still and he's been one and so I text him I'm like hey thinking about coming back he's like really so yeah we're trying to get him back we'll see we'll see if that happens there's probably a little bit of hidden excitement there from his side I would imagine for sure yeah he won't say it out loud but I think he's he's thinking about it for sure alright Maybe we'll find out a little bit more.

43:54 Maybe he'll give us a little tease or something for what's going to happen or what may happen or what plans are. For sure. For sure. So I noticed you've got some artwork there on your arm. Yeah. So, yeah, that's my tribute to my love for dragons. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, I got that. And then I don't know if I'm going to be able to show you guys this one or not. Let me see. Which shoulder is it on? Let me see if I can actually angle the camera so you guys can see. You might have to edit some of this. But I'm dedicated, guys. I'm dedicated here. Hold on.

44:35 Can you see what that says? Oh, we suck. Awesome. So I have it branded for life, okay? So I'm 100% loyal to my war enforcement family. That's, that's pretty epic. I actually considered getting a YY tattoo at one point. I told Odin he needed to get one too. I'm like, see, now I am the official war dragons leader of all time. I'm the best. I got the tattoo. I can't show you my dreadnought tattoo. They'd have to kill me. Sorry. You really got one?

45:15 You really got one? I can't tell you. You know, that was one thing about Dreadnought that just always intrigued me was how secretive everything was. Like you had to sign an NDA and yeah, it was pretty crazy. And blood, yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I 100% believe it. I can't confirm or deny that. I 100% believe it. definitely definitely little actual blood from each member you know went through a DNA profiling to make sure you know there was nothing off you know yeah I've heard stories they're like the Illuminati or something I heard a lot of stories too and I always wonder if they were true like somebody told me that they had to like people on dreadnought had to do like weekly check-in on call and like check in with the leader, the leadership and tell them like, you know, how you've been and what you're doing and how active you are and stuff.

46:16 I'm like, wow, like maybe we should start doing that to do like monthly progress reports. So how are you doing as a member on our team? No, we didn't do any of that stuff. They would, they would send the private jet out to the regional airport and we'd have to fly into headquarters, you know, once in a while. No way. No way. It's like this island with this volcano on it. It's like in the shape of a skull. It's pretty cool. Wow. Had a little hydra tattoo on it. I would have paid money to go through that. Something like that. Fun place to visit. I wouldn't want to live there, though.

46:57 No? No. But don't they have sharks with laser beams and stuff? Yeah. there's like yeah a moat around it yeah that sounds like the island from shark girl and lava boy right yeah yeah we could yeah everybody always you know look let's let's be honest dread was panda that's it it was just panda with like one of those 50 devices and just that's how i imagine the current team in atlases right now at the top i won't say the name but yeah there's always a team like that there there always will be in every game doesn't matter what game it is if you play it and it's it's that kind of a battle you know conquest type of game there will always be a top game top team and you know to some they're going to be the most hated team to others they're going to be the most loved and you know it's just one of those things it's human nature really well i mean back to what i said before you know i feel like bots were a huge game changer in this game like huge huge huge huge it gave it and it's like you can look at it from different angles because it gave an advantage to regular teams that didn't have an advantage before but then i also think that it gave such an advantage to certain people that it put them on steroids and kind of made it almost

48:27 impossible to beat them you know so it's kind of sad because i i really wish they would go back to just no api just bring it back to old school like i think a lot of people would be more inclined to hold castles and play the game if there weren't these huge advantages for people because the bots have kind of grown into this really sophisticated thing that you know if you are educated enough and how to use these bots, you can see teams coming before they even come. You know, if you have your bot programmed to certain teams that you know hit you, you can watch for them staging. You can actually, you know, tag certain primes.

49:10 Like if there are certain people you don't like, you can watch their every single move and torture them and follow them around. Like it's just gotten to a point where it's just overkill. Like I feel like if they could just simplify things and take it back to old school, I feel like a lot more people would have more confidence in playing and feeling like they're not going to always be sniped or counter sniped or you know because I feel like there's a lot of that going on in the game nowadays that's why there's so many pirates I kind of I'm kind of I'm midway on that with you so I think some of the more advanced functionality like what you were talking player tracking things of that nature yeah that that should be locked down in my opinion right it's it's an advantage that someone with the right technical aptitude can take full advantage of and really is unfair to people that just don't have that technical aptitude on the flip side being you know we were you know sapphire too so we weren't diamond league we weren't in that competitive level and we didn't want to be right that wasn't where we wanted to play but i remember atlas for a good while was just the most frustrating thing in the world because we'd get hit and then by the time you log on and everything else you're either bubbled or you're almost losing your castle and having the bots be able to say hey people are coming or because you could you could monitor a gate right so here's the gate this is the only way they're getting into this area so if we monitor

50:43 this and we see alerts on that then we can get on in time to defend and i think that's a crucial piece of it really it should agree to the game really but it's not um but yeah i think there's a there's definitely room for bots to have a place in war dragons not to mention player stats and things like that you know as a leader being able to look at new applicants where were they where did they come from what's their lifetime their monthly their this week medals kills etc that's another piece that I think is really relevant to teams in general, right? I agree. Yeah, and it definitely helped kind of streamline a lot of what we did in leadership, you know, like you said, just being able to, instead of having to ask them and hope that they're telling the truth, you can kind of see how active they've been in the past few events and, you know, what their base, you know, stats and all of that. So yeah, I mean, definitely helps a lot in that aspect. But again, you know, you have those people that will take advantage of certain things and kind of make it to where it's like you know giving themselves that advantage that other people don't have because they're able to use that technology to their own so If it were me, like, cause you have to pick one or the other, I would pick just go old school. Like, let's all just duke it out. You know, I think you're going to have a lot less teams scared to fight and a lot more

52:15 teams unable to hold castles because they don't see it coming. So I know it won't happen, but it's just always been. There's room for that, but I'm going to also, I'm going to say one thing on this and I think some people probably disagree with this, but you know, if you were to remove the API, I think that's fine, but you would definitely have to reintegrate the delays. You could not have 30 second, you know, delays as a maximum, because then it's just like, it doesn't matter at that point, you know, just some big team decides they want an area. It'll be gone before anyone even gets alerted. For sure.

52:55 So. A hundred percent. We were all kind of freaked out when that, that change was announced. Oh, I know. Yeah. It was supposed to, you know, increase, you know, the livelihood of Atlas. And I think it kind of did the opposite, you know, you know, unintended consequences are kind of a. Well, I think the whole thing back then was and I would agree at one point castles were really hard to conquer. You know, before they made the changes with the primes, you remember back in the day. I mean, I can proudly say that I've conquered a castle when the rule was still one troop could block. So I would we would be fighting literally hundreds of one troop fucking trappers being thrown on castles.

53:40 Like I can proudly say I've conquered castles in that era. So, you know, these days it's not as hard to conquer a castle if you are even remotely active as a team, depending, obviously, depending on who you're trying to take it from. But, you know, if you're if you're going after a team that's has the same activity or lower than yours and you're a pretty good team, it's really not rocket science. You know, I think they kind of went overkill with it. I think they could have implemented maybe a few changes, but they they kind of took it to a level where a massive teams ended up disbanding after that. Cause I think people were already kind of overstimulated in the sense that Atlas is 24, seven, you know, when in those 10, 12 day, you know, it's, there's no break.

54:28 So just that continuous cycle gets really hard on leadership. It's, it's also the whole, you know, it's been a complaint of mine since the first time I entered Atlas is the whole concept of cool downs, right? Like I get it. you need to have some kind of a way to make this relevant, but 12 hours, like literally you're glued to a screen for 12 full complete hours. That's stupid. I'm sorry. I mean, even if you look at T2s, let's say you have 10 T2s and six of them get bubbled in a day, that's three hour cool down a piece. Yep. That's 18 hours of cool downs. Yep. You become somebody's target and your castles are getting bubbled every single day.

55:09 It is a literal side job for somebody who's having to deal with that. Oh yeah. Which is why a lot of teams, that's why you go into Atlas now and you see empty T4s and empty T5s everywhere. That's why you see a lot of pirate teams, because quite frankly, it's just too much work. Especially if you get in the wrong person's eyesight. The payout isn't there either, right? There's no, the incentive for holding castles is pretty much gone. Like oh we going to you know if you don have any castles you go you know or you only have one or whatever it is you go down to gold one prims Okay I mean there should be you know Yeah now they to the point where they punishing people for not holding castles in Atlas I think, honestly.

55:55 They can't give incentives. Yeah, I think, honestly, that's the wrong way to go. I mean, obviously, right? Carrot first, you know, stick later, right? Yep, it's not an incentive to keep people around, that's for sure. No. Are you sure you want to go back? well I personally you know don't really care to hold castles like that's not on my agenda of things that I want to do so there's a pretty good likelihood that war enforcers will never hold castles again um multiple multiple reasons for that that we won't get into but um you know I'm perfectly okay with being a pirate I can I can go out with my gold one seizure and kill troops and get kills and glory so i'm good with that so i mean mostly at this point what they should probably do is revert the map back to the very first release of atlas with that many castles and leave it at that because right now there's just there's you want a t4 just go take one it's empty there's like 50 at least you know so reduce the number of them make them more valuable and incentivize players to actually hold a castle.

57:12 Just one, you know? Yep. 100% totally agree. Is it possible to use that data to find out how many players are still left in the game? 38,036, I believe. Oh, okay. Wow. Has that gone down? I would imagine that's a lot less than it was at its peak. Yeah. Is there any way to go backwards and look at that information? Or is it just current information? I don't know about that, but I think when we were at the summit, they threw out that they had well over 100,000 players. Oh, wow. Well over. And that was active, real active players. What does active actually mean? You log in once every couple weeks at least, minimally?

57:54 Day. Every day. You log in every day. You do your tasks. You know when you get your activity, right? And you get the little, are you, I don't remember what it was, very active, active, whatever, active players. So they were using that metric, and that metric means you're logging on, you're doing it multiple times per day, you're using chat, you're competing in events, you're doing whatever, the task list of let me get back to active from not active, right? so yeah well over a hundred thousand of those which would indicate probably something like 500 000 plus players that in totality and i think it's yeah 38 000 i want to say 38 036 i'm pretty weird with numbers but i could have some transposition going on one of the people on my old team actually is using the api to look up like up teams you know teams with number of castles number of kills just basic stats right and one of them was the players in the in the game right it's an open field for api so yeah it's definitely i feel like a lot of the people that are playing now aren't really playing competitively anymore there's a very small pool of competitive teams out there because i think a lot of people are just have gotten very complacent and or scared to fight anymore because the numbers are just so small.

59:25 Nobody wants to disband anybody and nobody wants to make anybody mad And so I think that another reason why war enforcers just need to come back and remind everybody it a war game Let fight I recognize the German Shepherd whine in the background. There's no mistaking that. Yep. I miss that a little bit sometimes. Yep. That is her. Kalia, open that gate. Let her in here. She's losing her absolute mind. i'm sure everybody would like to see her yeah we have a very antsy german shepherd wanting her her moment in the spotlight kalia she's another one we're still trying to make the decision whether to get another one or not it's it's it's a tough call to make you well how many do you have two we we've always had two we have zero right now oh okay she's a she's an only dog but she gets along with males but she's just not a big fan of other female dogs come here sit down there we go she's beautiful she just is so come here come here come here sit stay stay stay come here there we go

1:00:55 she's so like oh my gosh come come here come on yeah that's because I didn't take her for a walk today she's like so hyper right now come here what's her name again maybe if I sorry what did you say I was asking what was her name again Watson like from Sherlock Holmes alright yeah very cool now I can get her to stay still because I have the toy drop it drop it yep yep okay okay okay this begs the question how do you play a war dragons while dealing with a german shepherd i know right well it's all about just exercising them you know that's why right now had i taken her on that 45 minute walk she wouldn't she wouldn't be quite this wild but i think it's just because she's she's like um excuse me ma'am you have not exercised me today that's the one big thing I've learned about especially German Shepherds. If you keep them exercising and on a routine, they're pretty chill but the minute you take them out of their routine, they're like oh my god, like they freak out come here come here sit there we go, stay

1:02:26 there we go now maybe you can see her, there we go stay oops you know, look at the camera, show them how pretty you are Stay. Does Watson watch TV? She will sometimes. If it's got other animals and stuff in it making noises, she'll watch it. But if it's the news or something, no. She likes Paw Patrol. I actually put that on for her one time and she's watching it like, wow, what are they doing? Ours used to like cartoon movies for some reason. Really?

1:03:06 Yeah. Mine liked watching TV pretty much all TV But if you put anything like you know action movie or sports on or something like that she went absolutely berserk And would try and attack the TV. Yeah, not good with a 110-pound Brotweiler, but, you know, it was interesting, that's for sure. That's funny. Ours really liked Zootopia for some reason. I don't know why. Oh, really? Yeah. that's pretty awesome that is all right so i think we're getting pretty close to wrapping it up here so the one question we like to ask people from war dragons communities if you had one person only one just one that you would want to give a shout out to who would that be in the war dragons community that's a hard one because like i said before there's been just so many so many good people that I have worked with throughout my leadership career. So many officers that I've worked with that I've met and several of several people that I still stay in touch with and consider friends outside the game. So it's a hard one. But I am going to go with my oldest friend in War Dragons. Her name is Chrissy, aka Impossible Pie. She is currently running Fire Team Alpha right now, my original team that I left her back in 2017. And somehow she survived and I didn't.

1:04:41 You know, I went the hard route. I went competitive and just went balls to the wall. And she's just kind of been slowly just going along and she's still slowly going along and hanging in there. So I just want to say, Chrissy, I appreciate you. I love you so much for just being a good friend and loyal and sticking to your word and being one of the best people I've ever met in the game. She's been an absolute pleasure. And, uh, she actually is from Australia, got married to an American last year and came to visit the States for the first time and made it a point to come to Ohio so we could meet up for the first time. And so we went up to, or she was in, um, up North about two hours from me.

1:05:26 So I drove up there and got to hang out with her and see her in person. So it was pretty cool. She didn't meet her husband on the war dragons, right? No, he plays another game. Um, I can't remember the name of it, but it's a really popular PC game. Uh, craft world of warcraft world of world. Is that what it's called? I think so. I'm not familiar with it. I've never played it, but I've heard that name. He's one of those guys. They met on Twitch, I think, doing streaming and stuff. She would be a fun one to get on here as well. She's a complete character. She's amazing. I love her.

1:06:06 Shout out to Chrissy. Bring her into the green room. She's interested. We'll grab her and bring her on. All right. Alex, you want to take us out? Yeah, no. We really appreciate you stopping by. We'd like to hear your story. Love seeing your German Shepherd Watson. That was pretty good. We definitely appreciate you coming by. I love being on, man. It was great talking to you guys. All right, everybody. I guess that's it, right? You got something to say? Yep. Well, you know, hey, if you like us, give us a thumbs up. If you hate us, give us a thumbs down. Leave a comment. I don't care. Do something. Do the thing.

1:06:46 And most importantly, wherever you are, whenever you're watching this, Have an amazing day. All right, people. Peace. Peace out. Take care. Bye, everybody.