Dosed

I can't even get on the site at the moment. I'm assuming it's due to the sheer amount of traffic. Oh edit: I got on eventually. I'm gonna wait a few days until I make any decisions though

Something that I find utterly fascinating is the origins and necessity behind certain gaming phrases, specifically played at a competitive level or in a multiplayer setting. For example the use of "ding" in most MMORPG's nowadays to describe leveling a character up which originates from the noise made in Everquest when your character advanced a level. Or the gradual phasing out of letters of the word "congratulations" to "grats" to "gz", simply due to laziness and ease. I find it really interesting to see these popular phrases bleeding over into other games and genres, and then discovering where they came from and why they're used. I guess this probably stems from my interest in general etymology, and may be connect to the fact I'm a fucking massive loser. Has anyone else got any words they particularly love using or know that have an interesting back story? Or even ones they just made up right now (because I have foresight and a vague understanding of how these forums/the internet works)?

I always assumed that "woot" came from the word "WHAT!?" as in displaying disbelief at something amazing or bad happening to you in a game. A lot of my knowledge comes from WoW tbh so stuff like "LFG" (Looking For Group) and "WTS" (Wanting To Sell) would always slip into my conversations with my friends whilst playing other games. But I guess they're simply just abbreviations, rather than actual interesting words themselves. I always like "tank and spank" as a term for defining boss fights as simply standing there and slowly whittling away their HP, although it was an incredibly boring fight I thought the term was funny. Also, a small piece of my soul dies when I see people use 1337speak in a completely sincere way.

Wow. Frobnicate is just bizzare. Yeah, Tegan, I've read that entire comic before and it is a swirling emotional torrent of love, loss and triumph. Another of my personal favourites has got to be "gank". I have no idea where the actual word comes from but it just has such a vile onomatopoeic sound to it, and is a fantastic way to describe just utterly destroying another player.

Urghhhhh. I've just been listening to the podcast and boy is it a beautiful thing, it's a really nice celebration of his life and it's kind of inspiring to hear all these lovely things being said about such a wonderful man. I just don't know how they do it without just completely breaking down.

Oh and I also read something by Paul Auster, and boy did that read like a big ol' bag of shit.

I did this a while a go with my brother and I thought some of you might find this mildly amusing. http://vaultinhabitant.tumblr.com/post/53462518181/i-tested-my-brother-on-his-map-knowledge-of-world#notes Ex/Current WoW players will find this SIGNIFICANTLY more interesting than those who have not, are not and never will play WoW.

The whole trailer looks pretty nifty. I was pretty dissapointed with GTA IV so hopefully this will give me all those warm gushy feelings inside, just like the good ol' GTA days.

Ahhhh damn it, this fucking blows. I just saw it on Facebook and my jaw literally dropped. The Giant Bomb cast is never gonna be the same without him, assuming they continue it in the same vein. Urgh. Damn it.

This might not be the most interesting kind of answer or something that's even entirely relevant to this topic buuuuuutttttt I've just realised after reading your post that I have no idea what books I'm excited for. Actually, it goes further than that. I couldn't name one single book that's coming out soon, never mind one I'm interested in. This might sound a bit stupid but where exactly do you find this sort of thing out? I've been far too stuck in olde timey authors to even notice any contemporary stuff tbh. I don't want that to come of as pretentious as it seems, I just mean that I've literally never really took much notice in contemporary authors simply because no one's really personally recommended me stuff. The last new book I read was Wool by Hugh Howey after it "blew away" critics etc, but I was pretty let down with the whole thing in the end that I probably won't pay the sequels any attention when they come out.

I pretty much used to listen to any gaming website that did any kind of podcast. I've since refined my tastes a bit and become a wee bit more selective. I practically only listen to gaming ones apart from Coffee Break German/Spanish which are 15-20 minute language learning podcasts, and I think they do a French and possibly an Italian one too. Gaming podcasts include Giant Bombcast, Podcast Beyond, Gamers With Jobs and PC Gamer UK. Previous posters say they don't really like the Giant Bombcast but I really get the sense that these guys really love working together, and when they get into their little skits I can't help but laugh out loud (lol, one might even say). I do however still have trouble determining who is talking sometimes, as is the case initially with most American podcasts I listen to. I wouldn't normally feel the need to defend my love for Podcast Beyond, but this site is less than favourable to anything IGN related. They basically filled the gap when the Thumbs left my life for a while and Colin, Gregg and Andrew have now become another podcast I feel a part of. I basically listen to the PC Gamer UK podcast out of patriotic duty to the Queen and our great nation, but mainly the Queen. I used to listen to the Destructoid podcast too but it just became insufferably awkward and ridiculous I just had to give it up. Jim Sterling just doesn't work for me.

Yeah, I've done it before in the US and it's best thing I've done with my life so far (along with going to university). The difference is I'm on my own this time, in the US I was travelling with 2 other friends, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I've found it's just as much about meeting other WWOOF'ers as it is staying in specific farms/places and meeting the hosts. I'm kind of taking a scatter gun approach to life at the moment by just throwing everything out there and seeing what happens.

I'm doing this thing atm called WWOOF'ing where you essentially work on farms in exchange for food and a place to stay. I've done it before in the US, and I'm doing it right now (as I type and breathe) in Germany for a couple of months. Why? That's an incredibly sane response. Because I have no idea what I want to do with my life and picking up basic German so I can study it along with Spanish when I return home can't be a bad thing, right? I might try and get into translation work for vidyagamez... I dunno. Anywho, here it is: http://mywwoofingtrip.tumblr.com/ Also, Lacabra I watched the video (even though I've obviously never played the mod, and I've barely touched HL2) and it always fascinates me to see how pieces of work and art come to fruition. It's also weird to actually hear someone from the forums speaking.

Dire Maul... poor you. Coincidentally, Dire Maul was the first server I played WoW on. My friends and I ran a casual raiding guild called <The Imba Party> that ended up clearing Kharazhan two weeks after it was formed, quicker than <Exorcism>, a guild I'd spent 2 years with. I also love how WoW had the ability to just have these areas and environments that hold all these personal little stories for you and your friends, the time you were ganked here and the time you 3v1'd a bunch of guys there. Fantastic. Emergent narrative personal story creation relevant player-driven funness. I also just remembered that a friend has (I'm assuming) the only Warlock pet Imp in the world to literally be called "Imp" as he convinced a Game Master to change it and then the GM couldn't figure out how to change it back so he just left it and kind of ran away.

I was surprised that no one had mentioned WoW any earlier in this discussion tbh. Karazahn is probably one of the best experiences I've ever had in any game. The boss fights were so interesting and unique, compared to the MC fights where bosses (and trash mobs) literally had the same skins etc. It was the first instance where I really felt we were actually going exploring and adventuring, rather than just trash, trash, boss, trash, trash, boss. The Chess boss and the Theatre boss(es) stand out in particular. Zeus, while I never read much of the lore and was definitely guilty of skipping every quest log text wall, I still found the world itself really interesting. The cities (well the good ones e.g. SW and Ogg) had so much character. And I totally sympathise with the idea of never going back again, it's just not what it used to be, as much as that makes me sound like a crotchety old man. They literally have made the game way more accessible (as in there's no more attunement quests, no Pala/Lock mount quests, Hunter Legendary weapon quests AFAIK), and oddly those obtuse, esoteric quest lines just made the game more compelling. There was a real sense of toughing it out, and a tangible idea of risk vs. reward that I just don't find in the game anymore. Twig, I remember grinding for gold at Tyr's Hand pre-TBC and the world PVP there was fantastic. Although there was a really bad Alliance to Horde ratio, in which Horde outweighed us like 3:1 or something. We changed servers when there was a merger and got a bit better, but then Nihilim/SK Gaming (one of the world's best raiding guilds, or at least in the EU) moved over and so a lot of other Horde guilds followed too. It was still fun seeing "famous" WoW players and beating them in Arenas. Also, most of my friends have gotten back into it and I simply refuse to. It's like heroin to me, I had an hours played count of around 4,000 hours across all my accounts/characters, although admittedly a lot of that was spent AFK etc. P.S: If any of you were guilty of watching machinima I met the guy that made Tales of The Past, and it was actually his cousin that got me into WoW in the first place. P.P.S: I tested my brother on his map knowledge of WoW and these were the results - http://vaultinhabitant.tumblr.com/post/53462518181/i-tested-my-brother-on-his-map-knowledge-of-world

I'd have to say my favourite game of all time is World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. The expansion just gave the whole game a new breath of life. After trudging through Molten Core countless times, wiping in AQ and BWL a bajillion times (we weren't a great raiding guild... we had 10 Pala healers in 40 man raids), and the game just generally being a bit dull Pre-TBC it was like some sort of revelation (and revolution) when they finally released the expansion. Plus the game play in general was fantastic. The sense of accomplishment after downing a boss that you had literally spent days attempting to defeat is just wonderful, and I think it's something I attempt to chase in any game I play to this day regardless of genre. I think it has something to do with the age I was at when I started to play these games too, I was probably around 14 years old and I played until I was 19, and it was an amazing feeling to grow and actually understand the game a lot more as I became more... urmmm intelligent I guess. Of course any MMO is only as good as the people you play it with, and luckily I played it with all of my best friends from school. We would come into 6th form the next day and discuss ganking that arsehole of a Rogue who was camping the blood elves I was grinding mats for. WoW's also somewhere I became fascinated with individual game's vocabularies and secret languages, in case you couldn't tell by the last sentence... For instance Frenetic Pony's use of "teching" when discussing Smash Bros meant I instantly had to look up what it meant even though I have no interest in Smash Bros. Honorable mention: Pokémon Red because Pokémon cards, and movies, and anime, and discovery and Pokémon. And I was about 8 when it came out. NOSTALGIIIIAAAA.

Not really sure if this counts as anything in particular that I'm doing but I'll give it a shot anyway. Would any fellow reader be interested in purchasing an Xbox 360 with a bunch of relatively old games and/or a Tanglewood TSB59 with an amp and a reverb pedal? Please note this once in a life time opportunity applies to UK readers only as I'm not dealing with over seas shipping shite. Cheers.

That is quite beautiful. I think I remember reading the specific post on TGC's forums about a kid that had a parent (his dad, I think) recently pass away and he played Journey to help him grieve. I could totally understand using a game to numb yourself, or to try and ignore the pain of loss and grief.. but to actually feel like the game has helped you deal with some of those feelings, and helped you to move on in any way at all after such a monumental loss, is astounding. I'm not sure I could ever have the second type of experience with a game tbh. I'd probably just use them as a black hole to make time pass quickly (much like I do now, only without the horrendous pain of grief) so I didn't have to concentrate on grieving.

Scars fascinate me but every thing else in this thread has grossed me the fuck out. So I'll just list my scars because I don't feel comfortable sharing my multitudes of stories about shitting my pants. 1. Tiny scar on my right hand middle finger where I fell through a roof and a piece of tile went through my finger chipping the bone off the end. 2. Small scar on my right thigh where I fell out of a tree and a stick went into my leg. 3. Another small scar on my face where I clawed my face as a baby and the scar kind of grew a long with me. 4. Various different sized scars on my shins from skating when I was younger.

"I said — and I'm known for these things — I said there's something amazing inside. Something life changing," Molyneux said. "... We could give you a piece of advice ... we could say, here's a wad of cash. But it needs to be more meaningful. It needs to say more about the effort." "It is the ability to be a digital god," Molyneux continued. He really has no idea when to stop. "Digital god"? I mean boy would I be pissed if that was my ultimate prize. Sure, the profit share part of it will be life changing.. but it's hardly enlightenment. And how aren't they just giving him "a wad of cash"? Unless there's more to this prize it seems like they essentially are just giving the money and sticking him in a game.

Welcome Ryan! The exact same thing happened to me not too long ago, both in terms of ditching my consoles for an ELEET GOD RIG and rediscovering The Thumbs. Yeah, their humour reminds me of conversations I have with a good friend. So much so in fact I often show him random snippets of the episodes without much context and he still pisses himself laughing. There's nothing quite like switching on your mobile digital MP3 playing storage cellular device and hearing Chris' "IIIIIIIIIIIIIdle Thuuuumbs", although I do wish he'd do an alternative Christina Aguilera version and throw in some extra notes for no reason e.g. "IIII-E-O-OOO-AA-IIII-EE-IIIIIIdle Thuuuumbs".

I lol'd. I was initially quite skeptical about Destiny but then I realised I never really played the Halo series for the campaign anyway, so if they can nail the multiplayer then I might have to give this a look in.

Hey Fellas and Lady Fellas, I'm just starting to play Dota 2 and I was wondering if anyone would be up for a few matches or so to help me get into the swing of things? I've played a few times with friends but they're not always up for playing at the best of times.

Hey ladies and gents! My ID is Dosed - http://steamcommunity.com/id/Dosed91/ I'm up for playing Day Z, DOTA 2, Orcs Must Die 2... essentially anything I have that is multiplayer.

I think Pokémon Red sticks out in my mind in terms of a sense of discovery because before I had played the game for the first time I had no idea who any of the pokémon were, what they looked like, what level they evolved into their next stage, what moves they would learn etc. I still have fond memories of being genuinely ecstatic over a pokémon evolving because I had no idea what would happen. I'd probably find it difficult to have a similar experience nowadays because I played that game when I wasn't as personally interested in the industry as a whole (I must have been about 10 when they first came out). It was also really interesting because all my friends were playing it and we were discussing and discovering new stuff all the time together, we had no idea what was going to happen next. I think this is probably where a lot of the crazy rumours about this game from, such as the car near the boat having Mew hidden under it or some shit, because the game had such a well developed sense of a new world that people were just rabid to explore it (or at least I was.) I'm also a huge fan of the "No Love For Dad" thing that's going on.