The Next Thing I Know Episode

[fishbang]

Last Thursday is now available for download (http://ingamechat.net/audio/IGC20090409.mp3).

We’re paring back to a single episode per week starting just about now, so in an effort to sync distribution with production, we’ll give you a week-old piece of IGC today (which is typical), and a relatively fresh one tomorrow. There’s more than enough to talk about, but we’re speculating and ruminating a lot without the hard facts and solid press we’re sure to be swimming in after the E3 season, and our studio time has been further eroded by other people’s useless commerce.

So it’s two-ish hours once a week now instead of one-ish twice, right? You won’t notice much of a difference what with how we’ve been running things, with the exception of a more consistent lineup of our studio friends, and the subject matter of our show not being quite so far behind the times.

[Iron Past]

Hey, that's cool. At least it's less strain on you guys (= more game time ;)). For my tastes, I always liked the longer one episode a week model better anyway.

[Count Elmdor]

I have an interesting counterpoint to James' new-mmo-smell phenomenon.

I started playing WoW in the last few months, and as you can imagine, it's almost a diametrically opposite experience to what he's describing. I play the game pretty much 100% solo, with very, very little WoW-specific knowledge (as in, I don't read a lot of the forums or use a lot of database sites and stuff). Most of my gameplay know-how for it comes from my years playing FFXI--I get stuff like how tanking works and other MMO fundamentals.

So I'm now a level 42 warrior (Orc), and I'm having a pretty good time just getting out into the world and discovering how things work, but I'm almost forced to do it all alone for (what I'll refer to here as) a "pure experience." Everyone else in the world at my level is on their umpteenth twink, and I'm just some jackass noob. I don't really want to bother other people with my noob questions, so I mostly just bumble around and figure stuff out on my own, every once in a while looking up something on WoWwiki or Thottbot. I play on a PvP server, and 9 out of 10 encounters I have with Alliance guys +-5 levels of my own, I get fucking rocked.

That's all well and good, and I play pretty casually and really enjoy it, but what really sets off to me how infinitely clueless I am about the game is my guild. It was my brother-in-law who got me to play in the first place, and immediately upon jumping into the game I was grandfathered into one of the top hardcore raid guilds on the server, just as a social member. So I'll be out in Stranglethorn jacking tigers for tiger fur or whatever, and I have huge in-depth discussions about raid progression flying by in the chat box. This stuff is as far over my head as the moon, it seems.

So this is what you get when you're four years late to an MMO, I guess. I'm going to have the newbiousity pounded out of my pretty well by the time I hit 80, I'd wager. I don't know if I really ever want to be a hardcore poopsocking raider, though. I just kind of like to wander around the world and see what there is.

[Iron Past]

For some reason, something you guys said prompted me to say that I have a copy of the military version of First to Fight (http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/920176-close-combat-first-to-fight/index.html) (maybe something about Six Days in Fallujah?). If I remember correctly, the only real difference was how you dealt with your fireteam, in that you had to do precombat checks/inspections and they could be on drugs, so you had to know the signs of it.

A couple buddies opened theirs, but mine is still sealed. I guess I could post a picture when I get home; I always thought it was cool because it was a special military-only version of a video game, even if it was pretty mediocre.

Edit: Here we go:

http://i42.tinypic.com/nvsegx.jpg

http://i40.tinypic.com/mbpqgx.jpg

Not that you were really talking about it, but from my experience using games to train was always incredibly stupid, at least for combat stuff. That includes the ISMIT (http://www.marines.mil/units/mciwest/mcasyuma/Pages/2007/NOVCONTENTSORTED18.aspx), which projected life sized images onto a giant screen that we fired on from properly weighted rifles that had CO2 canisters to simulate recoil, and gave us exact feedback on where we hit. It was all very unrealistic, and the weapons felt like toys; it didn't do anything to improve proficiency and the only good thing was it was indoors (I was stationed on Twentynine Palms, so yeah...).

Anyway, it's kind of a dumb thing to be proud to have, but I suppose I was more Semper Fi than I thought.