Clown Dragons, Data Goblins, and the Tomatoverse

0:00 Hello everybody, welcome back to another another bling bing dang dong, there it goes, see? I just can't do it right. Welcome back to another episode of the Space Tomatoes podcast. We are not potatoes. Well, maybe a little bit. Thank you for joining us today. If you like us, give us a thumbs up. If you don't, give us a thumbs down.

0:41 Leave a comment. Be interactive. Engage. Do something. I don't know. I'm your host, Havoc. I can't even talk. What is wrong with me? I'm your host, Havoc. And with us, we have our other host, LX. Hello. Hi, LX. And today we have a special guest on Tyrex from the War Dragons community. See, I got to do a lot of editing already. Just roll with it. It's all good. You're human. Right. From the War Dragons community. He not only plays the game, but also has worked with the API to develop a website for some player stats, etc. And we'll get into that, as well as being the author of a book, an actual book.

1:24 Welcome to the show, Tyrex. Welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Our first accomplished author. I'm impressed. Yeah. Even to me, it's still new. Every time I hear that, like, published author, I get, oh, yeah, me, I am. Yeah, yeah, still new, but you didn't forget, so, yeah, great stuff. How long ago did you write the book? When was it released? I started writing it three years ago. it was published two years ago and the reviews have been not bad okay now i'm being cocky sorry but really the reviews have been not bad so happy with that all right well very cool and then so you play war dragons how long have you been playing war dragons i started playing war dragons on the 8th of February 2016 at 14.27pm and I'm going to tell you why I know that please do, I'm curious I would like to know I've always loved dragons I have another website about dragons and not gaming dragons about the, I'm going to say the real dragons that we all on one stories and legends i've had that site for like 15 years now time does fly and um like i said

2:55 dragons who doesn't love dragons um so every every game that i see that has dragons i'm i'm drawn to it i'll give you an example brother of warcraft something like 20 years ago i started playing and i said i need to have all the dragons i never kind of accomplished that but i was very close very very close uh so yeah as soon as i saw world dragons which was in february 2016 i just of course of course oh and i get to fly the dragons not just click a button and as you know at the time everything was manual even though you have auto right now which is a love hate thing that i have with auto as i'm sure many people do it it was all manual it was good so i started collecting dragons here simple i mean not simple it's been what nine years now Yeah, not simple.

3:48 Yeah, for sure. For sure. And so currently you're actually on my old team, Yan Yan Warriors. Welcome to that team. Hopefully you're liking that team. It was my home for a very long time. I actually ended up in an officer role. It was a very temporary thing. I was going to fill a spot for someone that was, you know, maybe a week, two weeks, I don't know, whatever. And suddenly time does fly. Yep. I'm enjoying it. It's a good team. The leader's a little sketchy, but besides that.

4:31 To be quite honest, if I'm playing a game and some people are not sketchy, I run away. I have to be in the middle of characters. So, yeah. Well, that's a good thing. So what's your favorite dragon of all time? That is a tough question. However, I did think about it. And I do have a favorite dragon that is not even a recent dragon. It's not even a good dragon. But it was my favorite. Sage, the green thing. And I'm going to tell you why it was my favorite dragon. most of the dragons you play you play play them for like 20 30 50 levels and they're all you know disposable when i played sage i think i was something like level 80 ish and sage was my best dragon until i was level 250 so it was a lot of time uh eventually of course it started sucking and i had to get rid of him her but it stayed with me for such a long time that i have a deep connection to sage so even today every time i see bo hi yeah it's it become a friend so many hours you know oh yeah for sure i think uh as far as the dragons go what's interesting about this is we we talked about this quite a long time ago years and years ago and in a hunter hunter chat everyone refers to it as scary hunter chat because if you went off topic even a little bit

6:04 boot you're gone so um yeah it was 100 on topic all the time hunters only but we were talking about the whole gender of dragons right like oh you know this one's a boy this one's a girl whatever there are i know one i there may be one other but there is to my knowledge one for sure and only one dragon that actually has any gender description in it and that is how is that and it does say it's a her and it shouldn't have in my opinion with all the with all the stories of dragons i compiled to my website there should never be a gender because as far as i know gender in a dragon is not correct because dragons can be whatever sex they want you have you can have men laying eggs you can have females doing men okay so it is wrong i don't know if it's wrong right i just feel it's wrong it's not a he it's not a she it's a beautiful entity it's a it's a thing it's not a but yeah yeah only one the lore is is certainly all over the place on that yes i I mean, we now have clowns, but I didn't want to talk about it.

7:22 But it's irritating to look at a screen and see a dragon defaced with a clown's head. That's just the word I can find for it. Defaced. But okay, moving on. This is a recent edition of the game, I'm guessing. The new season, the theme is Carnival. So you have clowns, you have dragon clowns. Sorry, I think it's an insult to the dragon lore. Putting a face of a dragon with a clown, or a clown on the face of a dragon, I'm just looking at it and like, no. More so than like pumpkin heads and pirate hats and all that other nonsense that you put in there a while back?

8:10 A little bit more. And this comes from a discussion that was on Discord last week, of course. Everything in Discord ends up in a row. There are a lot of people that have fear of clowns. I don't have fear of clowns. My wife does. And I know that it's one of those things that it strikes hard. Someone on Discord said, okay, but then you have to think about fear of heights, fear of... I get it. People can have fears of basically everything. but putting a clown on a dragon's face and on the loading screen i'm sorry i've seen weird stuff this come on my i was playing on my ipad and the wifey looked at it and she looked at me and i said okay i can't play near her now i have to spend the full season hiding from her because it affects her it disturbs her yeah i know some people have fear of other things but fear of clowns is is bad and dragons with clowns it's also bad so i have nothing good to say about this that's it and rent over yeah i suppose supposedly could have made it more carnival like and less you know big time big top you know tent type of a carnival thing you can have the carnival theme without making dragons look as scary as this.

9:38 I said scary. I wanted to say fogly, but let's go with scary for the people who fear clones. But yeah, don't like it. Yeah. We should do an episode where we dress up in clown suits, Alex. Just go for it. Alex doesn't. Come on. A little honky nose. I'm good. No? Come on. Maybe next year. Yeah, maybe tomorrow. Stormtroopers? Darth Vader? I mean, come on. No? Maybe. Just no. Just no. Not after hearing the story about how Ark was sweating his butt off underneath his mask there. So, nah, I'm good.

10:20 Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. All right. Yeah, so, yeah, I don't know. You know, no dressing up for the podcast? No mask? I'll wear a bandana or something. nah that's lame i'm too old to hide my face man yeah if you if you wear a bat okay well we could do this we could do the uh what was that that uh movie where they they wore blindfolds because if you didn't have your blindfold on then they would get you or something like that bird box we'll just blindfold ourselves bird box that thing with sandra bullock maybe that was it yeah i don't know but we can do that we'll just do a blindfolded podcast a movie with sandra bullock that i haven't seen i think it was no excuse no i think it was a netflix original thing that's back when i still watched movies i haven't watched movies in a while i just kind of yeah i don't know not interested all right all right well anyway sorry for the delusion there i just thought it might be fun whatever um okay so you you have a website developed right yes website my main website with all the stories and legends about dragons is called allaboutdragons.com and when i started doing this that we're going to talk about i decided to put the water dragon statistics as part of the allaboutdragons.com website so now the statistics are publicly available

11:55 they have no ads i don't want any money from this and it's stats.allaboutdragons.com because the domain is mine for 15 years so i just use stats and it has some i think interesting tidbits of information because when i started playing the game i know that the pg war dragons website had some data boards and i kind of enjoyed looking at the leaderboards like one day i will be on the top 1,000. And suddenly there's nothing. After a couple of years, they abandoned it. And the catalyst of all this that I've done, roughly one month ago, I was waking up.

12:36 I had my coffee. I started playing. I saw that I was attacked. The usual stuff. I click revenge. 500 billion defense. And I thought, is this the best defense in the game? There was no way of knowing. I had no way of knowing. And so after the coffee I said there must be a way If there is a way I find a way I even went to line and i asked in the channel does anyone think that leaderboards no one gave a damn people told me oh the bots already have that no the bots don't have this the bots have information about atlas movements there is nothing that tells you the top 10 defenses in game from the 41,000 players.

13:24 There's nothing that tells you top attacks from the 41,000 players. There is not even a... Who are the oldest teams? Which teams have won the most number of wars? Who is doing the best on the weekly... That's me. I shouldn't talk about that. But, you know, things like that. So I started compiling data, raw data. from my iPad to the PG servers, there's information going back and forth, right? Yeah. Is it encrypted? Yes, it is encrypted. Is it encrypted in a way that I can't access it? No. I didn't even need to do anything illegal because I would never.

14:06 Let's not talk about the level 80s with maxed out places again because we know they exist and it bloody sucks. I found a legal way to between my iPad and PG servers start analyzing the traffic the data because you know you have raw data it just means numbers and then when you massage the data to information and information is power so I was able to two weeks I was able to start getting data all the players, all the teams even all the atlas coordinates but i don't want anything to do with atlas because there's too many politics so right now it's just the statistics of everything i can even tell you that the three best years regarding new players uh in world dragons were 2016 17 and 18 however 2025 is looking like it's going to be the fourth or third best year ever in new players so the game's not that. You guys need to un-retire.

15:11 I'm trying to convince you. You're able to actually go back historically and look at the numbers then of how many people were playing at the time? I don't even need to do that because in every player's account, there is a column there that says, when did you start playing? When was the last time you played? So, like I said, I started gathering data. And as soon as I have all this data, let me see what I can do with this data. I can tell you that from the 41,000 players total, players that have played in June, like recently, 33,000.

15:52 So you can immediately see, oh, 8,000 people never came back. Things like this. I love information. Information is power kind of thing. The difficulty was to, okay, I have all this data. What can I get from it? probably nothing. I got leaderboards. I got top 10s, top 20s. I like charts. Sue me. So I started compiling everything that I could with the data that was available without doing anything that would piss PG off. In the beginning, I didn't know how they would react to me checking the information for all the players every 90 minutes, which I am doing.

16:39 But I try not to affect the servers. I've tried to gentle caress the data without just barging in like a stampede. But in the beginning, I was afraid that they might not like it. So I even left my previous team and I said, look, I don't want to do anything that might affect the team. I'm going to leave and then if everything is okay, I'll come back. I never did. But it doesn't matter. I was trying to do the right thing. Simple as that. Now, I know a lot of things about the API because I created an API on the developer's portal. Oh, what can I get with this? Almost nothing.

17:20 This API is slow. It's not in real time. It's really, really outdated as soon as you look at it. So I found ways. There are ways to get the data more reliable. PG is caching the data. So if you ask for the information of, you know, 200 players, it will give you things from three hours ago. Is it enough? Probably. I wanted more. So I found a way to disable the cache and get live data. But I can't do 200 at once. The server explodes. I can only get 10. So instead of taking 10 minutes, it takes two hours.

18:00 You know, PG never did the game for this data gathering. I get it. Some of the things, like the example I just gave, I'm doing things at 200 players, everything works. Oh, I want real data, new data. Boom, server explodes, and it keeps exploding. Now, we all know, we all geeks know that PG is using Google Cloud. Google Cloud doesn't explode like that. pg didn't want to do a resilient api if it explodes it's because one they don't care one they don't want to do anything about it i'm fine with that that gives me a challenge how can i get the data for 200 people without exploding the server fine it doesn't take two seconds it takes five minutes fine i'll do it anyway and that's what i've been doing trying to caress the data in a way that I'm happy with the data without pissing PG.

19:01 I have a question about that data a little bit. In perusing that data, is it easy to spot cheaters in there? And if so, has PG just been ignoring that fact for years and years just because they don't want to deal with it? Yes. Regarding the level 80s with maxed out bases, we've all seen them. They might be cheaters that PG knows about and doesn't care, cheaters that PG doesn't want to investigate, which means they don't care, or they might be internal PG test accounts.

19:42 I've been a developer in the past life. I had many accounts for myself to do things that people didn't want me to do. So I thought when I saw a level 80, whoa, what is this? This is a PG account. or a pg's family account oh you give the account to your niece oh i'll go play here's a boom boom level 80 max uh 205 yeah go have fun it might be that i'm not saying that it's a cheater 100 right it looks like it but one thing i can tell you it's pretty easy to spot i have the information on everyone's defense and attack and their level and their xp i have everything if i have everything of course pg has it for way over 10 years doesn't necessarily mean that they pay much attention to it and in their defense actually in their defense they probably don't have a trust and safety team they have all the people in support that we already know about because all the tickets are from two or three people for the past years.

20:49 And I'm guessing that they don't have a trust and safety team. There was some guy two months ago that told me, oh, give me money and I'll give you rubies. And this is fishy. I'm going to report this person. I reported him or her. And the template answer I got from PG was, oh, we're going to look into it. He's still there. And you know how I know he's still there? Because I can see all the accounts. He's active. kiyoshi oh yeah but you know i know that there wasn't a ban here i know there wasn't so what are they doing regarding trust i don't know not much yeah i think so you've got there are a couple right i i was fortunate to go to the dragon summit um which pg you know this was more heyday kind of pg time um they flew a crud load of players out to san francisco and you know put us up in a hotel and we had you know um basically you know um i don't know a conference if you will with different breakout sessions amazing swag yep only there was there was a lot more to it than just that right we got face time with the developers with product managers with you know the the uh you know community uh folks that they had um so we got a lot of a lot of good

22:19 information and things of that nature um it was all of course nda etc but the the thing that that really came to is they wanted they wanted more flexibility in the game they wanted to be able to make changes in the game however you have to remember they purchased this game from someone else the game is fairly old and when it was developed it was developed in one of the oldest uis available for gaming at the time and so it is terribly coded it's impossible to unweave everything and make it so it could be stably modified and um i think as part of that api is a an afterthought it's an it's a complete and total afterthought so you're bolting an api onto something that you know i mean what 2015 apis were kind of like yeah right so what did you do with an API in 2015?

23:27 Not a whole lot. For those of us that aren't like supercomputer literate, what is API actually? Because I have no idea what it stands for. API stands for, let me put this in the simplest way I can. If you have data in your server that you want to make available for other people, you create a communications layer that allows for everyone to query your data and in the simplest way possible. I'm not going to say, oh, it's a programming interface. Yeah, that's the fancy wording for it. But it's just that you have data here. You have people here.

24:07 People make questions and you give them answers. That's what an API does. APIs can be simple. This one is pretty simple. Like Havoc said, this was done like with Band-Aids. And I still see a lot of data that refers to ship skill, sailors. I mean, there's stuff there that it was either for Atlas, the original game, or it was done for something else. But it bled through the years and it's still there. It's unused. A lot of things are unused on the API, which is a shame. They could have used it for new stuff, new features.

24:49 but i think that they made a couple of updates to the api two years ago and they just left fine if if it works well does it really work i would say that it kind of works it's just a little bit uh 2010 it feels like 2010. i still love dragons i still play the game of course but could be better i also know that pg had like 150 to 200 people five or six years ago and now they're barely 100. I'm not going to mess with the politics and whatever. I know that War Dragons was making $1 million per month in Revan. Probably not now.

25:30 So you have to deal with all of that. It's popular and now it isn't. Actually, like I said, this year has been good, but you never know. I think the whole Game of Thrones thing helped push it at that period of time. They just kind of hit upon the lightning in a bottle thing. And, you know, once people found out about it, that's, you know, everybody was watching that show at the time. I think that had a lot to do with it. Yeah. Who doesn want to hatch an egg of a dragon I mean well why wouldn you sitting there you know what is it you know 10 years now um i played starting i think in 2016 might have been 2017 but you know a good amount of time and and you know like lx likes to say it's two left turns two right right turns in your home you know what i mean they're they're i think they had the opportunity to really make this something that would have kept that traction.

26:35 But the cost of unraveling the code and putting it into a new UI that will allow flexibility was something that they just didn't want to invest in. It's an interesting thing because I loved the game. I really did. But it just got boring. You know, it's the same events on the same schedule. It's just constant, the same thing every day. And yeah, the opponents change, but, you know, the feature functionality is, you know, what's new, right? I mean, the dragons are essentially the same wireframes with just different skins on them.

27:19 So it's the same thing. the spells are largely just recycled, tweaked, tuned, modified slightly, and there you go. It's a new spell. No, it's the same this, but it's called this now. But it's easier to do everything now because you have auto attacks. And remember back in the day where you had blue, red, red, blue. Oh, mage he has blue, so I have now everything is white. It's not even hard. it's just everything can be oh come on i mean it's it's not everything like a hundred percent but it's so easy white white white white they shouldn't have had the necessity to dump it down to make it last you make things last with new features that attract new players or bring back old players just continuing the same thing it's just yeah and then clowns I need to stop talking about clowns what do you mean they don't put new content in it they've had new currencies like every season so far haven't they it's the same mechanic of the game you don't even need to change the code that much it's just put a new graphic you call it something else and it's already done so it's really not new and one thing that I need to whine about is the randomness of the game I love a game where you have to

28:49 grind let's go back to World of Warcraft there was a very specific dragon, the time lost Protodrake, that was so random it appeared in a random place at random times four days that I barely slept I wanted that thing and lo and behold one day, 4am boom, I got the dragon You know, that is grinding, but as soon as I had it, I was showing it off. Everywhere I went, oh, man, I got this. In here, you have sequences. Everyone puts the sequence in a spreadsheet so that everyone has the same things. You never get to have anything new or different.

29:30 Everyone knows exactly what's... Come on. I know that the random number generator is not an easy thing to do for a developer, but I've been a developer and it can be done. It's just not that easy, but it can be. I mean, you could go with a pseudo RNG. Here's the issue. I'm happy with pseudo RNG. The issue with doing a true RNG is this. The drops are largely crap. So if you have a random number generator and out of a thousand of them, four of them are good drops, you are going to have people that literally never, ever, ever get a good drop. ever ever in the game so you have a sequ fixed sequences and people feeling spreadsheets i can't be happy with that because you know it's vulgar everyone has the same i i get it i had to grind in many games to get that one piece of gear and sometimes i didn't have that one piece of gear and I, oh, F this, I'm going to come back next month.

30:35 I get it. But if a player can't endure that, then don't play. Go play Farmville. Get out of here. You know how to fix all that, right? You just put it in a $100 pack that you can buy for real money. I knew you were good. And now you have a web store, but you can't buy Elite on the web store. You can just buy what they want you to buy, even though it's good for them. They get more money than the app stores. But look, even the web store, now that I spoke about the web store, they give you a free thingy every day. Fine. But, okay, they did that to get more money. So why didn't they put all the packs that they have in game on the web store? For me, that's like project management 101.

31:19 If you're going to buy here, it's best for you and for us. Go here. But you only get to buy half of what we have there. What? Who thought about this? it's just, you know, silly. You're bringing back bad memories now. Cause like I, I, I remember, cause I had one of the older accounts that I could pay for the, the regular in-game elite with the rubies. And then they changed it. No rubies, just money. Yeah. And then like everybody was angry that, Oh, well, that guy can pay with the rubies. Why can't I pay for the rubies? And they came out with the Atlas, which you have to pay for. They, they never had that option in Atlas. So I guess they were kind of thinking ahead in that, that area.

32:00 yeah there are caveats yeah so you said you said there were 41 000 players now when it's been like a month or so that it was at 38 000 so it's gone up by 3 000 players this year not even this year in the last couple months or so the total as of not today not yesterday as of 46 minutes ago is 41,350. Like I said, some of these are inactive, but this is the total. And the total for 2025 is now 4,337, which is pretty good.

32:47 The top three years, 2017, 8,000. 2016, 7,000. In 2018, 4,500. So we're catching up with 2018, which was... So, mate? Then, you know, you have all the shit years, like 2023, 1,720 players. It's like bad. But this year is going really well. Maybe people are just reinvigorated by listening to our ramblings. So, Pocket Gems, the residual checks can be mailed to our post office box. All 20 of them. All 20 of them. Yeah, so you hear that, retired players, if you're looking for a reason to come back to war dragons first don't but if you if you were there's more players joining now so there's more stuff to do with other players they help them build character you could you could absolutely help them build character it's building character yeah right so so how long can you um actually like have an account inactive because I have not logged on since my team disbanded.

33:57 It was, what, four years ago now? Is that account still there? You tell me your account and I'll look it up. Because I don't know if they erased your account or if it's still there with the last seen date of 2018. I don't know. But if you tell me, I can look it up. LX460. I'm going to look for all LXs. Probably not. There's LXs galore. There's too many. There can be only one. LX.

34:38 Is it LX460? 460, yeah. 460. LX460. Nope. you have been removed eviscerated what about me I've looked at all the Havocs I just don't know which one is you because there's more than one level 693 and it's just H-A-V-O-K just that? yep you're gone too yeah yeah my guess is if there's no activity for a period of time like zero activity they age it out and probably six months I would say they just if you read download the game like and go through like the sign in I mean because you can use your email and like forgot passwords I don't know like or do they just purge it completely as of right now it's okay good you could test it No, I'm good.

35:51 If you still remember your email, you can try it. I've had the same email for 20 years now. Come on now. 2003. You know you want to know. Nah, I'm good. I can help you with that. We can talk later if you want. We'll talk later. My database is... I'm curious because at the time, I was in a chat with the developers in-game. They were looking for ideas of things. And that's where the idea for the Diamond 1 and Diamond 2 split came from, was that chat. And I asked the developer how many attacks I did, and he could tell me that number.

36:32 At the time, it was almost 80,000 or something. And that was early in the game. I'm like, no way. How many hours have I spent in this game? And he told me, and I don't remember what it was, but I was amazed. And regarding the attacks and defenses, successful or not, They stopped tracking. Oh, they did. I can see data, but the data is here for like, I don't know how many years. Oh, okay. And it's not continuously updated as it should be. You know, that statistic, I would love that statistic. How many times have I been attacked? How many times have I successfully defended? How many? They have the place for it. They have the code for it because there are some values.

37:13 But then suddenly, meh, screw this. We're not connected. Like you said, on their website, they used to track that stuff. And it was interesting to me. It was like, how many times has Dodo been used in attacks this week? I don't know why I find that interesting, but I find that interesting. How many chunk waves have actually happened? I mean, it's useless information, but I find it curious. I do have... I like useless information. I do have another question for you. You've been playing it. Do you remember that dragon Pog that just would show up? It was like a cartoon-looking thing. It was purple with polka dots. A small one, yes. It was an avatar.

37:54 It wasn't actually a dragon. It was just an avatar that they would give you. It was an avatar. Was it pink or something pink-ish? Yeah, it was like purple and pink, I think. So it would just pop up in somebody's game, and they would tell you that you have to do some kind of in-game action to make it appear, but they would never tell you what it was. And I never got it. I don't know what it was that made it appear. I think players became frustrated because no one knew what to do. And then one day they just... Yeah, and then it was gone. Because it wasn't that funny. I mean, it was funny, but no one knew what to do. So, yeah. That was the right decision.

38:35 Yeah. I always wanted flimp, though. I did have that one. I did do all that garbage. that you had to refer 20 people or something. And they had to get to level 50 or something. Exactly. I started creating alts for myself, but I stopped at like five or six, because you have to do a lot of levels. It a chore I be curious to know how many people actually had that stupid thing I mean it was pretty much useless but It was cute though Really cute No, it was just like I like the grinding ass. For whatever reason, I just enjoyed that.

39:18 I figured not many people are going to have this thing because it's a pain in the neck and it's not worth it at all except to say I suffered through that garbage. That's why I barely slept for four days to get one single dragon. Exactly. Rare. No, the grinding is what separates the really hardcore. It's not the money. It's not what you buy in store. It's how much you grind. That's my take on it. Again, my opinion, my two cents. I enjoyed that part for whatever reason. I'm not really sure what that reason was, but that part appealed to me. because i wasn't like a super good flyer so probably that's why i excelled at that part of the game you were really good at flying warriors come on now i was better at that evoker the first one yeah dude i was great with that thing yeah a lot of people got that thing down now that's the whole thing of a good player needs to be able to fly a hunter. If you only fly sorcerers or warriors, you're shit.

40:31 Come on. A dragon is a dragon is a dragon. It flies. You pilot it. If you do what you're supposed to do in my book, you're good. Not in my book, my book, but the expression in my book. Yeah, we got to talk about your book. But what you will find, and this is a truism right is all of the top flyers the people that are the best in the game every single one of them without question flies hunters almost almost exclusively not you're not biased no it's not it's not a biased thing i mean just look when you get someone that comes in and smokes your base and just just gone right i mean literally when you see like the most devastating thing come into a, you know, your loading screen, it's going to be a hunter. It just is. Now you have to be good at that. You know, you have to have timing down perfectly. You have to understand, you know, your ammo, you know, clip, right? Your magazine, whatever you want to call it.

41:37 You have to understand which spell to use when you have, and placement is key. So this is where a lot of people get frustrated with hunters and it is frustrating getting placement and shot placement is one of the most key components of a hunter right and once you get that shot placement down it's really hard to go to any other dragon class it really is because you're just like i'm you know i'm waiting i'm waiting i'm waiting whereas with a hunter you just go in and like you know 20 shots go and the tower's gone it's instantaneous you know what i mean um so yes a little bit of bias no question about it um they're they're warriors are fine sorcerers are fine invokers are fine if you can fly them well then that's great however the top flyers will always be flying hunters as their their primary right um now again this is not exclusive sometimes a warrior comes out that just is a tank and just goes through everything yeah you know at that point sure they'll probably bring out warriors too but they're still flying hunters you know if i'm doing something really really important and difficult i'll fly a hunter but if i'm just attacking a beast by some pve to make some gold i'll just put a warrior on

43:08 hotto and just go and kill stuff oh yeah just tank it tank it let it do its job it you know they no in no way shape or form am i belittling anything hunters are extremely frustrating i would argue less so now than they were in the past in the past the learning curve is is deep yeah but for a good hunter the learning curve is it's it's incredibly steep you have to have some dexterity going on with your hands you have some carpal tunnel yeah yeah exactly able to count you know all those all those highly uh fry skills you have to be able to count yeah and simple math which you know i mean i don't know how i got away with this but i i managed to sometimes you know But yeah, it's a different beast.

44:01 And the thing about them is they don't handle getting shot or they didn't used to. Nowadays, they're way more capable of that. In the past, you'd take one super shot, maybe a regular and a super shot. You're dead. You're gone. It's done. There's no, let me just take this to the face so I can kill this other tower. You're done. Dead. Now you have some good shields and you have good energy recovery yeah it's it's more accessible to fly a hunter now yeah yeah but they they are frustrating they they really are you you can really just lose your mind you're flying a dragon it shouldn't be easy that's that's my take on i'm i'm biased look dragons you want to fly it take your time the dragon should should take its time to know you and you should no you're a dragon yeah it takes time it should take time yeah i like that lore part you shouldn't just oh that's good no it doesn't work like that yeah so on on your book so your book is called hacking through time it's by the i'm assuming a nom de plume pedro b correct okay um and some people actually online i shared the cover of my book and they just went to mental oh hacking we can't talk about look you you you ignorant piece of just because the word hacking is there i'm not condoning

45:35 it i'm not teaching it hacking historically wasn't what people see it as today right hacking from the bsd the berkeley system design universe did you read my book because i speak about that and the book is about 40 years ago and i started my career as a unix sysadmin so hacking was what we all did yes you had to course of action in our daily lives yeah you know four years ago a hacker was a thinker and i say a tinkerer because you wanted a hacker in your team geek now you say the word hacker and people online are like oh this shit is illegal no dumbass i'm talking about the evolution of society and what was 40 years ago it's not the same thing now you have state-sponsored actors and hackers this didn't this didn't exist for years ago there was no criminal mindset 40 years ago but that's when the words originated so the same word evolves its context in society evolves and now it's it's a different thing so this is not even a fiction this is my story about my professional career and even before that hacker then hacker now what the hell happened and what might or might not happen in the future let's not talk about ai I don't want to hear about AI.

47:07 I work in cybersecurity, so I would never condone hacking. So I'm talking to the guy that said online that I can't talk. Yes, I can. It's what I do for a bloody living. It's to defend the companies I work for from these people. So, yes, I can talk about it. But, yeah, lots of things changed. Well, and there's a vast difference between, you know, in the world of, you know, what today's terminology terms, hackers, there are two very distinct and separate factions, right? And they're known as the black hats and the white hats. And you can probably guess, but just in case, the black hats, bad guys, the ones everyone thinks of when they hear the word hacker.

47:52 White hats are the ethical hackers. They're the ones on the security teams at large organizations that do things like penetration testing. How can I get in? Can I get in? If I can, how do I fix this so the black hats cannot get in? right but historically hacking was typically a a you know a star x right um asterisk what's star x right a unix linux bsd type of a term that you know you would hack through stuff and i remember at one point working for a company i won't say the name but uh in the comments in one of the codes one of the code bases one of the engineers had wrote in the comments you know this is here to hack this particular feature function for this reason and we were working with a company that was going to oem things and they saw this code and they're like oh you have to take that out that can't be in there it's a literal comment about you know we're hacking this feature to to make it work and and but yeah the term had become so you know uh so bad or viewed so poorly that even a comment and a piece of code gave people you know you know yeah i just hope that all the people that see the word hacker or hacking and throw a fit

49:30 are as secure with their passwords and information as they like to be aggressive towards people that openly talk about hacking because i talk openly about hacking was i ever a hacker no then i did some things that were considered gray hat maybe just out of curiosity um but i never did anything illegal except on diablo one in 98 i was banned permanently but that was just me being stupid i deserved it and you know it was bloody hell 27 years ago um what did you do wrong besides get caught uh uh-huh you just said it yeah i got caught shooting people on the city on top where you can't have a gun i had a gun and i was shooting people yeah everyone knew about it There's a guy shooting.

50:22 You can't even. Yeah. I found a way. But yeah, nowadays, and I think that you can't just hide the hacking discussion under the rug. That's not good for everyone. The first ransomware attack, I wrote about it on my book. I ask people, when do you think the first ransomware attack happened? People tell me 2005, 2010. No, it was 1989. It was done with floppy disks. it was the AIDS virus some bullshit 36 years in we are still vulnerable to ransomware so we're not doing that great so talk about it I tell everyone talk about it, know what it is the best way to defend against all of this is to know what it is don't hide it, don't think it's taboo it's happening every day, every time so I'm not going to say embrace it I was that close but I didn't but there needs to be an open conversation.

51:21 It's about the shit. It's like the shit API. It needs to be discussed. It shouldn't be hidden. The API, okay, we discussed some of the reasons. That explains a lot. I wish they had the time and resources to do better. Probably not going to happen, but yeah, it is what it is. And I still made the statistics website with the shit API. I think wherever there's a system in place, people are inherently going to, Well, certain people are going to try to find a way to exploit that system. I mean, it started back even in the late 70s. They used to put a whistles and Captain Crunch cereal and people would blow the whistle into a telephone and get free long distance calls.

52:02 So, I mean, blue box, you know, that. hacking too i would think freaking i also talk about that okay i'm i'm not telling everyone to but yeah all of that you know the 70s the 80s they were so so foundational in what is today hacking but you know those little things yes i i made a couple of free phone calls back kevin mitnick man the legend i had a free kevin t-shirt you know shout out of course shout out to mitnick my my old sub to uh 1600 i miss those days those were those were fun i mean all the people from all the bbs's i ever logged in with yeah yeah yeah we're talking about really old technology by the way for anyone younger we didn't the internet was was bear i mean it was there but it was more of a project at that point and what we would do is log on to bulletin board systems which were kind of like ascii forums if you will you can you could have mail and you go into a group and you can chat with other people more akin to an irc server really if you think about it um but yeah i mean those days were great and the tone man that modem tone yeah and the modem commands because you had to fine tune the modem i mean nowadays when people tell me oh the internet is slow shut up you don't know what slow is okay 300 characters per second

53:38 which was my first modem that was slow oh yeah this this is not slow but don't even don't even think about it so yeah of course the api is not fast but again i'm biased yeah i worked i worked for a company that that did some of that somewhere around here i have a lexan coded chip uh from a 9600 mod modem i remember those days that was that was you know smoking fast it was fun you had to fight for stuff yeah didn't just get you know tick tock and youtube and facebook and all that no you had to when i first logged in on what is now called the internet you had like a list of sites there was no google there was no nothing in the beginning there was a list and it was like a two-page list of websites and then we know what happened but it started like this and you know i kind of miss it i'm not gonna lie i miss it yeah it was fun you you did a lot more thinking about what you wanted or what you needed before you went to go get it.

54:45 Nowadays, it's kind of like instantaneous. Let me just go grab a few images, this video, and it's all there. Back then, you would really have to think because an image, just a picture, could take 10, 20, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours just to download. And all the while, you're watching it kind of like appear on your screen, just line by line by line. and so you know there was a lot more i think a lot more thought given to your activities uh when when you know your your uh ability download was your your scarce resource you know and then the resolution wasn't that great either it was great man come on we had like you know i think it was fun that's that's it like almost as fun as 28 pixels and stuff i mean it was just insane i feel like i missed out on a lot of that computer stuff because i never really got into the computers the closest i did the hacking was uh i had one of those uh oh um game genies for the nintendo oh yeah yeah you hacker or the they're the up up down down left right left right code that was you know most hacking i did if you try that in war dragons maybe your your dragon just just i should yeah i should have tried it you guys know what you're doing maybe you guys should develop like war dragons 2 and put put the original one out of business yeah like actually

56:22 just start from the ground up and build one i mean you can use the information and everything contained in the existing game but start from the ground up and build one on a new ui if you're seeing this kind of resurgence of players and it's literally turning out to be the third best year for player adoption that's a pretty clear sign that it would be maybe a good time to update you know there's a market for it absolutely and I know a lot of developers and you're giving me ideas. If you need anybody to handle your public relations on your game forum, I know a guy do you yeah does it start with a j no me oh yeah i don't know if that's a big yeah i'm good i'm good at public relations i promise guaranteed money back guarantee so so your book uh hacking through time is really just and i apologize we did talk about reading the book but i'm already behind on one book that i've been promising to read for a year now well this podcast was supposed to start out as a book club and uh it didn't really work out yeah well not a book club but we were going to start with a book and we will do that episode one day

57:53 and you know hey many people told me that people don't handle physical books anymore okay fine there's an e-book version too extremely cheap so cheap that amazon almost didn't let me sell it at that price because you know amazon gets a 40 really and i wanted it yeah and i wanted it cheap And they said yeah it can be cheaper than this because yeah we have our i like i i wrote the book i selling the book you getting the cut you're getting everything ah but we print it we do the logistics yeah the ip is mine you sell it 40% I prefer the physical copy myself e-readers hurt my eyes maybe it's just a matter of finding the right whatever but I like a book one of my favorite things about books honestly the very first time I get a brand new book is to open it I stick my nose in it I like the smell of the books they smell good smells like Amazon printed do you have on your website can you buy the book that cut out the middleman or do you have to like exclusively go through amazon unfortunately yeah self-publishing is expensive if you talk me online or on discord and don't say anything stupid i can just give you a copy

59:28 because i i didn't write the book to to become rich really and i don't even know how writers do it i wrote the book to dedicate it to my mother she died two years ago three years ago and you know i took a year just at home write the book for my mom that's it so if you say something on this word i'll give well i can't give you a physical copy but i can share you a copy of the well that's nice yeah i'm not gonna get rich not like this well to get rich you're gonna develop the game and then in a couple years you can sell it to a chinese investment company and then just bail out and then we can uh do the whole aircraft carrier uh farm thing there you go there you go i like i like plans right yeah they they won't sell us an aircraft carrier which is sad I have Tissads.

1:00:24 There are other options. You can make a floating beer can island or something. Yeah, apparently all the warships they send to they send to like I think there's two companies that they send these things to and they are mandated for salvage. Nothing else. Can't even make reef. Almost as bad as FedEx trucks. They destroy all them too. Do they really? Not from FedEx. You can buy a FedEx ground truck, but you can't buy a FedEx regular truck. They destroy them all. Same with UPS.

1:01:06 You can't buy one of them either. I did not know that. I wonder why. Because they don't want people running around impersonating the company, I guess. I don't know. since we've been chatting, three new players. Yay. I know it's not much. I also have a chart with the players yesterday, for example, 26 players. It's not much, really. 10th of May, 79 players. It's not much, but it's one of the best years. Just because I'm nosy, is there any way to see a revenue stream going to a company like that? Or is that just private information they don't want you to have?

1:01:55 I mean, whether they want you to have it or not, can you get it? I know that War Dragons was making $1 million per month. But I never saw the data. It was just a news article that I read, so I believe it. And even if they had that data, they wouldn't put it in a place that would be accessible. And I wouldn't hack anything to do it. You can probably get a fairly good idea of that through a number of business analytics sites. Yes. You can check the company and then you can check all the data that they are mandated to send, taxes.

1:02:38 You can do the math. You can get the reporting. And there are sites that do analytics on them, but they're business sites. So you're going to spend a lot of money to have a subscription to be able to figure that out, unless you already have one. So, yeah, unfortunately, there it is. I don't think they're publicly, are they publicly traded? Because if they are, that number will be in there. But PG is owned by... Tencent. Which one is it? They're owned by Tencent now. Tencent. So you would get Tencent's reporting, which probably would not break it out by division, and PG would probably be a division of Tencent.

1:03:21 Correct. I'm looking at the Tencent holding stock share, which is pretty healthy in the past. Tencent bought up a lot of stuff, didn't they? But they don't separate. Yeah, they've bought up a ton of small gaming companies. it's at 24.84 percent in the past five years so wow props to them they're doing well but they're not going to tell us which is the pg part yeah which are the winners and which are the losers they're not going to not going to put that out there i i do i do miss the early days because like um i remember when the very first season they had like if you finish the season they would actually give you a code to get a t-shirt like i mean it ain't a big thing but that was pretty cool that is yeah and then like there was a bunch of people that uh because i was doing the podcast at the time and they're like hey i don't want this shirt and they'd give me the code and i had like half a dozen t-shirts i started giving them away as prizes and people enjoyed that you can wear those no way they don come they didn come in my color I like this green It nice He has a thing for green shirts although he does wear desert camo tan as well.

1:04:39 It's not camo, it's coyote tan. Okay, but it's the same color. It's basically the same color. It's a different name for the green color. Yeah, it's a green tan. It makes it super easy reaching the closet if everything's the same, right? I hear you. Make sure the neighbors think, man, that guy wears the same clothes every day. They can think what they want. Yeah, there you go. There you go. I want to read this book now. I might go on Amazon and get one. It would be good. I can share the e-book.

1:05:20 I don't do e-books. I don't even have a phone. I have an iPad and that's it. But I really don't like reading on it. It's like $12 on Amazon. I think I can handle $12 on Amazon. Yeah. I've wasted money on other stuff more than that, I'm sure, over the years. Happened to me all. You played War Dragon, right? Yeah, dude, I even bought a couple packs over time. And every time I did, I'm like, man, that was stupid. yeah i mean i've known people to spend a lot more like of that one million per month i think i hung out with a couple people that are probably provided about half of that nice guys though really nice guys yeah between between jl and harv you remember harv between those two i can't even imagine what that total bill looks like over over their career i i just it's probably mind-blowing most people would just be like it's it's impressive i think i'd rather just have the cash but you know like hey if that makes them happy yeah yeah yeah i'd take the cash too if you have the income money spend money on farmville really i've seen people spend money on farm oh I actually played Farmville when it was on the computer way back.

1:06:52 But then one day I was just sitting there and I'm like, why am I doing this? This is stupid. There's absolutely no point to this whatsoever. And then that was the end of that. I mean, what is the real point of anything? No, there is none. like you know i mean the war dragon thing you know you get your alarm going off at 3 a.m so you can get up for three minutes to do the the pvp so your team you know stays in first place but then you get that's that's only for the achievers club yeah that's the grinding thing i guess you know like you like i don't even know if any of the teams in d1 now still do that i just don't know really there's probably there's probably a handful but i i don't think the whole roster of d1 does that man by any stretch slackers yeah you know it's it's not what it used to be man d1 d1 is and no offense to the d1 teams but d1's a lot less scary now than it was in the past in the past you just didn't don't you know don't touch the people with nukes that that was the the the idea right just don't do it it's bad i did that once so did i ever tell you that story like my my old team somehow we ended up getting in the same league uh in d1 for some reason i thought it would be funny i declared a war on dread it didn't end well that's awesome

1:08:24 my team was so mad because like when you declare and you lose you lose like more egg tokens that way so they were not happy they're like why would you do that i'm like i don't know can i just ask did you know what you were doing uh yeah no i thought you know i just thought i was kind of being funny but it was i bet it was fun for them yeah i mean you know it i i enjoyed the whole lc talk thing that that was part of the uh appeal for me i i like it i like getting people all twisted up and stuff and you know getting you have discord for that now right yeah that was before they could block me they had to listen to me back then now discord you can you can have block you can have ignore the possibilities are mind-blowing i mean i have so many people ignored and blocked i don't even know what to pick oh this guy ignore oh you blocked it's amazing you can do a lot of stuff with discord and personally i like the forums i've never been a big fan of discord um myself i you know i use a similar app uh i personally like the look the feel and the flexibility of it more than discord which is telegram but you know that's that's me i i just think it's cleaner it's it's smoother it's it's everything discord could have been but never was telegram has bots too

1:10:00 i kind of ported my bot from discord to telegram just to understand can i do this yeah doodle and i also use signal and slack and line because people don't get out of line i don't know why it's dead but people are still there so line's one of those things that's just going to hang on forever and one of the things that's really nice about line is just super easy you don't have to know anything you don't have to be you know conscientious about settings or anything like that on the flip side because of that you people can come in and nuke your room and cause problems and you know everything else because they just no permissions but it one of those things just super easy we set up a chat it works everyone can join there no hiccups no problems um so i get it but yeah line's definitely not like it used to be it's very quiet speaking of the forums um are they out there somewhere like people say once something's on the internet it's like out there forever are they archived anywhere or is there any way to access those? No, because the time machine did not archive the forums and if the time machine did not archive the forums, the forums are lost forever.

1:11:16 Really, archive.org did not archive the forums. Probably because the logon requirement would be it. So only pages, well, no, because it was all publicly accessible. to see it on archive.org. I really would have. I think I already looked for it and didn't find it. I could have been... I'm going to check it out. Well, hello. Good morning. Good morning. I do get another question for you. So, we've all seen in movies where hackers, they just pounded away on the keyboard.

1:11:57 What are they actually doing? pounding away on the keyboard. And then they say, zoom, zoom and enhance. as much as I love Hackers the movie from 1995 because of Angelina Jolie that movie is so unrealistic I mean the things the movie is talking about are kind of real but the way that they're portrayed for the noobs out there every single movie is bullshit every single bloody movie is bullshit and unfortunately or not i've been in places and i've seen real hackers a real hacker might be a guy older than me sitting next to me on the tube the stereotypical hoodie no no i've met dangerous people that i would look at them and say this guy could be my uncle he looks normal no they're not they're very knowledgeable and very criminal so yeah it's not as easy for example so yeah lots of movies lots of hollywood no for example the other guy here he's got that black hat on i don't trust him he's silent he's guilty I can't see any

1:13:32 wayback machine or archive.org for World Dragons. Talking about all this hacking, we might actually get our first blue box YouTube warning this time. And maybe, I don't know. Is that one of those keywords you're not allowed to talk about? No, I don't think so. I think nowadays they're fairly limited to things you're not going to say. Yeah, physical stuff, I think, is really, and that's not something that's a topic for discussion on this particular podcast. Building seven of the World Trade Center. Oh, Jesus.

1:14:12 That's going to get us one. Speaking of things that... We're not doing that, dude. This is the wrong audience for this particular session. Anyway. I have a poster of New York there because I lived in New York so yeah very cool we can go down that rabbit hole next week right we can do that on our own we don't need help for that one alright well I think we're getting close to time to wrap it up so I'm going to ask you the same one question we ask every guest from the War Dragons community and I'm going to throw it at you as well pick one person one person only that you would give a shout out to from the war dragons community anyone from the war dragons community yep it would have to be because of the art contest that was done last month or two months ago i would have to give a up doing the whole oh crap i can't stop looking at this because there it's so complex and so many it's amazing but i was so mad i can't stop looking at this i was mad but i'm thankful because it was amazing so yeah ghost i couldn't stop humming that song all day it was in my head see yeah don't

1:15:47 whatever you do if you're on channel uh well i don't want to say that either but i'm gonna say it anyway sorry ghost um there's one on there called baby cert if you would really really like to to yeah just i don't know if you're really into earworms go click on that video and uh You'll have a great day. I won't. I won't. I'm doing it. Ghost Rider 419 on YouTube. Absolutely. And we'll throw a link up for Ghost as well.

1:16:28 All right. Well, hey, thank you so much for joining us for today. And like we said at the beginning, folks, give us a thumbs up. Give us a thumbs down. Leave a comment. Engage. Be interactive. And hit that subscribe button. Or don't. whatever. And most importantly, wherever you are, whenever you're listening to this, have an amazing day. Thanks everybody. See ya.