Episode 2 of the Witty Ranter podcast has been posted over at VirginWorlds. This episode featured (host) Adam from Troll on Fire, Brenden from Another Here, Mike from Hardcore Casual, Darren from The Common Sense Gamer, and myself.
In an effort to differentiate itself from Shut Up We’re Talking, create wild topic drift, and generate the maximum number of unsupportable statements and too late moments of mental “What I should have said was…” anxiety, no topics were divulged by Adam in advance of the show.
In fact, the exact recording time and date as well as the method to be used to record the show were kept secret until the very last minute. (I had to log into EVE to find Darren when the secret “Go” code was issued.)
Once we arrived at the secret location and were able to remove our blindfolds and begin recording, the topics were:
1) RMT Will Pwn You – Brenden opened up with a rant about RMT, micro payments, gold sellers, Chinese farmers, in-game ads, and how they are all here to stay so just shut the hell up with all the whining and get used to it. The panel then went on to explore the different sorts of ways companies could dun us to play their games, why some companies are favoring certain methods over others, and, of course, the inevitable “What Would Blizzard Do?”
2) Honor the Old School, For They Are Your Betters – This was Adam’s turn to rant, and he went off on new players these days who bag on the MMOs of the past that built the base on which today’s games stand. We spent a few minutes on that then veered off again to World of Warcraft, the great MMO magnet that draws all attention. Highlights from that trip include who plays WoW, should we bother comparing WoW to other MMOs, is WoW too easy, are current WoW players looking for an MMO that is more challenging than WoW or not, and do players who leave WoW play other MMOs at all? No consensus was reached on anything except that the world will be a strange place when WoW is old school and that you young punks should stay off our damn lawns!
As usual with this sort of podcast, it was a lot of fun to do. We had some issues at the outset getting the recording going, but that was more because Adam was used to dealing with people who knew what they were doing than anything that he did. So when I showed up, I put him off his stride completely. When he started up about “Audacity” and a “multi-ender” I thought surely I was on the wrong show. Still, we muddled through, though he had to go buy and download some software, so I might only get invited back if I become a show sponsor. (Who is the sponsor?)
And, with a little editing… okay, probably a lot of editing… the show sounds very good. I’m just sorry about that Skype beep towards the end, which was me sending out a message that I had to go read a bed time story. Ah well, at least he managed to edit out the other four.
You can find the show on iTunes and here.