The Elf and Dwarf

Some notes on this week’s podcast:

•  Shout outs to our friends Shanti, and Chris and Daktari.  Now can someone please tell us which direction toilets turn south of the equator?

Topic for the week was on the Valentine’s Event “Love is in the Air” currently running through Thursday of this week.  If you need more help then Adeldia could give, then here’s the link to the Thottbot article:  http://www.thottbot.com/?qu=9028

In the Found on the Forums we talked about girl gamers and why it is that some women in particular are afraid to group outside their comfort zone of immediate friends and guildies.  If you have an opinion please shoot us an email and let us know where you’re coming from.

Adeldia’s Animals of Azeroth was a talk about the fact that there seem to be two highly divergent lines of animal body plans, one with 4 limbs and one with 6.  She spent some time on this so if you’d like to know more, or some links to more information let us know and we’ll get those posted.

Our email bag was mostly full of emails asking “How do I find RPers?” so that will be next week’s topic.

A news flash though, and it didn’t make the podcast, but our friends Garnil and Pamine set out to form the guild “Sterling”.  It will be a light RP guild and quite possibly a good place for rookie RPers to start out.  We’ll keep you posted.

And as one more preview resource here’s the LJ community for WoW RPers:  http://community.livejournal.com/wowrp/

 And again thanks to Great Big Sea for the opening titles to the show.

Music provided by:  Great Big Sea - A big thank you!

This week’s shoutouts:

• Welcome to WoW Lady of the Falling Couches and Mistress of the Mt. Dew!
• Chris - Keep sending us the email!

This week the hunter pair spend some time talking about Role Playing.  First they talk about the non-role-players then a little time on what various role players are looking for out of the game.

The Found on the Forums segment talked about how Ebay will no longer be allowing listings for real life goods in game.  Though he admits to having bought gold in another game in the past, Rorlins has seen the error of his ways and the dangers of putting real money value on fake stuff.

Adeldia’s Animals of Azeroth segment is mostly about the peculiar predator to prey ratio in the world of warcraft.

And the show ends with a short discussion on Valentines in WoW and some requests for votes at the various portals:

To support the show feel free to vote for it at:

• iTunes
• Podcast Alley
• Digg

Also, all money donated to the site in excess of our monthly operating cost will be donated to the American Cancer Society.  At the end of the month we’ll let you know how much was donated in the names of our listeners.

First our shout outs:

• Congrats to Rico over at Treks in Sci Fi on reaching podcast #100!  Great job and hope you continue doing such a good job in the Trek community for another 100 episodes!
• To Savu, our healer for our (failed) Gnomeragan run; hope you and your boyfriend worked things out.
• To Reid, for again with the “free stuff”, and for having such a good sense of humor about Adeldia’s pouting
• To Qay, Goldsong, and Garnil for helping us finally finish Gnomeragan.

The show opened with a review of the poll from Adeldia’s LJ community Girl Gamers, and a short discussion of what they had to say on the topic of “becoming a gamer”.

From there we discussed some hypothetical cases to consider to help spark some ideas as to how to get your other half into gaming.  Case 1 was a case of two people dating.  He played WoW and she was a Live Journal/ MySpace type but not a gamer.  Case 2 was where She was the gamer (only an hour a night) and he played FPS’s.  Case 3 was the “classic” case of the WoW widow and her absentee husband.  As we said in the show if you’d like to weigh in with specifics that you might try in each hypothetical case, or if you want to disagree with our takes, please shoot us an email (theelfanddwarf@yahoo.com).

We summarized the show with some ideas to consider and as promised here’s a short shopping list to help you get going if you need it:

• 3d Pet Vet
• The Sims 2 (don’t forget the pet expansion for those animal lovers)
• Sim City (always a classic)
• Animal Crossing
• Kingdom Hearts (who doesn’t love Disney?)
• Final Fantasy X (Adeldia would watch Rorlins play this for hours; she said it was like watching a movie)
• Bejeweled 2
• The WoW 14-day Trial (proven in at least one case to work)
• Desperate Housewives the Game (we have no direct experience with this but it looks cute in a campy sort of way)
• Zoo Tycoon or Zoo Tycoon 2 (both good for the animal lover as well)

We also want to thank Ryan, Brandon, Lehcar/Amaril/Ayntigone, Chris,  and Daktari for the emails this week.  Bradon’s proved to be especially fun to talk about.  Please let us know how your efforts to find in-game love go with your out-of-game romance.  Here’s a link to get you started with those native “dating” customs.  Lehcar’s note was also nice to add, as it showed that, yes, you can get your wife into WoW if you let her come to the game on her terms.  Likewise Daktari’s email also illustrated the power of proximity.  Chris thanks for the suggestions and Ryan, fear not, for Role Playing is our topic next week.

Thank you for the emails again, and if you’d like to send in a comment we’d love to hear from you!  Just drop us a note at theelfanddwarf@yahoo.com

Next week:  Role Playing 101 - Who are the Role Players?

Here are some notes on today’s show:

 Shoutouts went to:

• Reid of the Blackwater Raiders server.  /cheer from Rorlins for the spurs.
• Stormclywd and Loudinn also on BWR for teaming up on a Dead Mines run.
• The members of the Pillage Idiots over on The Scriers for letting us into the fold Horde-side
• The people at Red Knapps for having such good food including Deep Fried Pickles

The show was intended to focus on how to get your wife involved in online gaming (or girlfriend, or husband, or brother etc).  In the end most of our energy went towards talking about signs that maybe things aren’t ready for the two of you to be playing together.  Included are discussions about signs she’s not a gamer, some of the reasons she’s thinking of shying away, and some things to be sure you’ve considered before asking her to join you in the World.

In giving you an update on our characters, Rorlins and Adeldia are now up to 32, but are having to share our attentions as Contesa and Brethinn find their way to 20, and we have rolled up new characters on The Scriers to join Rorlins’s High School friend and his guild.

We have also come to the agreement that the Stockades suck.

Some notes from this week’s show:

Shoutouts:

• Garnil - He’s starting his own guild called Sterling.  If you’re on BWR check him out.  He’s got good leadership potential and his guild sounds like its going to be a quality group.
• Pamine - for teaming with Brethinn and Contesa and showing us that Mages Rock!
• Findor - A little “back at you” for saying ‘hi’ to us in game and complimenting the show.
• Qay - Welcome to our addiction!
• Amakire - Just a little “hi” from the pair travelers you met in Stormwind.

The show focuses on what we think are important considerations when planning to play an MMO as a couple.  We discuss where the boundries are, why everyone has different boundries and other issues.

We also had some email to reply to, specifically some email from Toraxus who found our show by way of the Weekly Murloc forum.  If you haven’t checked them out they have a great show on WoW issues that can be found at http://www.theweeklymurloc.com/ , so check them out!

Our music this week was from Wally Pleasant who has his own site at http://www.wallypleasant.com/ and has some really funny and well written work available for purchase there.  Please give him a little support.

Next week’s show will be on “Getting Your Significant Other to Try WoW:  Do’s and Don’t’s”.

As always feel free to email us ideas, suggestions, comments, or thoughts to theelfanddwarf@yahoo.com

On a technical note:  If you’re having trouble streaming from the website you may also download the file.  Most media players will stream the audio as it downloads.  Not sure what’s going on here but it could just be the length of the show this week that’s causing the problems.

Note we are also on PodCast Alley now! My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-197503fc7d82788d7f8b8057531352a5}

Here are the notes for Show 1:

In this ‘cast we share that our next show is going to be focused on couples ingame and couples out of game.  Do you make characters that are romantic or just mesh well?  What are the expectations?  If you’d like to share your thoughts before the show to give us some perspective on your take, we’d love to hear from you and will use your email as part of our discussion.  Our email is theelfanddwarf@yahoo.com

In this, our first ‘cast, ever, we introduce ourselves and discuss how we got into playing the World of Warcraft.  We talk about our time playing MMO’s, how we met (it was a real life meeting first), what draws us to various types of games and what turns us off to others.  We share our experiences in UO, EQ, The Sims 2, EQ again, EQ2, DDO, CoH, NWN and finally WoW.

As this was our first ‘cast we had no emails to respond to, and we have just (since recording this episode) started to keep a “shout out” list of people we want to say hi to as we go along. 

We also introduced our characters in game but for those that want to say hi to us in game here’s another list of who we are in the world listed in order of play time:

• Rorlins Grimshot - Dwarven Hunter (29) (R’s)
• Adeldia - Nightelven Hunter (29) (A’s)
• Jenizel Fitzgiggle - Gnome Warrior (19) (R’s)
• Brethinn - Human Priest (16) (A’s)
• Contesa - Human Warrior (16) (R’s)
• Lennya - Nightelven Druid (9) (A’s)
• Lemily - Gnome Rogue (3) (A’s)
• Yet-to-be-determined-Horde-character-on-Argent-Dawn (R’s)

The rest are all on Blackwater Raiders (RP) server.

I (Rorlins) also want to apologize for the sound levels as the show goes on.  We are working with some software not really meant for multiple simultaneous voice recording and as such are having a tough time with balancing.  I’m still learning the software and am not totally sure how easy/hard it would have been to find and boost one voice and tone down the other back and forth throughout the show.  If anyone can recommend a well priced (free) package that does automatic balancing or anything like that I’d love the advice.