Howdy folks! Another long-winded fuckbag here to clutter up the forums and complain about how long it's taking to make this game from scratch. Call me Lex.
Where you from stranger?
Southern New Jersey, though I work in Pennsylvania and hope to move there eventually. (Spoiler alert posting from work plz no fire me)
What drew you to Star Citizen?
...honestly? Quite a few things. I guess the first hook was that it's a crowd-funded space game and I'm an idealistic science nerd. I liked the idea of a huge open-world PDE space exploration sim, and had had some fun experiences playing on private Freelancer servers and on EVE Online. I like how relatively transparent RSI has been about the development process (though I do recognize that they use a lot of it to fuel their own hype train). I got bored of how few options there were for gameplay in Elite Dangerous (you can shoot shit or ship shit, and shipping shit is infinitely inferior to shooting shit), so the fact that RSI keeps branching out into other gameplay options like resource-gathering, medicine, science, etc. is reassuring in its own way. And I'm not going to lie, the visuals are really pretty omgg dem greephix.
What do you look forward to most in Star Citizen? (PVP, Exploration, etc)
PVP in a support capacity. I have more money than sense, so I dropped the cash for an LTI-Endeavor and am looking forward to playing Space Hospital for whatever group of chucklefucks wants to make the most explosions. When that gets dull I also own a Connie and will probably end up modding it for exploration.
What was the first game you remember playing?
Cerebrally I know we owned an N64 in my youth, but I don't really remember playing anything on it. Flashes and pictures come to mind, but nothing of real substance; I can tell you I owned DK64, but if you dropped me on the central island-thingit I wouldn't even be able to tell you which one was the first world let alone what the different kinds of bananas were for or why I was covered in peanuts.
The first game I truly remember playing was a little Korean MMO called Ragnarok Online. I started playing on a free private server back in 2005 (god I'm fucking old) called RaiRO, hosted by the same people who made the 8-Bit Theatre webcomic. It wasn't an enormous server by any means, but the attachment to a relatively visible webcomic meant the server always had a couple hundred people online - which meant the guild-vs-guild War of Emperium actually meant something. Which meant guilds meant something. I ended up joining up with a guild called The Turks, which was probably the best decision edgy-teen-me ever made. I was expecting to find... well, honestly, in retrospect I don't think I was expecting to find anything. I joined a guild because I wanted to have fun in WoE.
What I found was the first real online community I'd ever experienced.
We were organized. We had our own forums, we had our own TeamSpeak, at a time before either of them were really dime-a-dozen. We drove each other to get things done, to keep grinding away at the millwheel that is any Korean MMO - and we supported each other through it, even if it was just providing an ear to rant at or another set of fingers to mash buttons for hours. Even if we had already done it ourselves months ago. Especially if we had already done it ourselves months ago, because we knew exactly how much it sucked, and we remembered when some guild elder or three had leapt down in the trenches to help drag us through it.
And we shared... everything. Weapons, armor, resources, sure - but those were just pixels. I knew more about those players than I knew about my own family. I remember listening to Alden as he vented about the hardships of being an openly gay man in Quebec in the early 2000s. I remember finding out Selim had disappeared for a few days because he was smuggling his family out of Cuba in a speedboat. I remember Andy Golthim coming back from deployment with a busted leg - and pitching in with his ridiculous round-the-clock leveling sessions, since there was literally nothing else he could do while he healed. We were a family.
I played more of that game than any other game I have ever played, before or since. Even after RaiRO folded, even after the guild went their separate ways, some of us stayed together across a whole mess of private servers for the next several years, and when we finally ran out of those I ended up hosting a server of my own for awhile. I lost years to that terrible MMO with its awful 2d-on-3d graphics and its atrocious Korean grind-a-thon gameplay and its 0.01% drops, and honestly? I would do it all again in a heartbeat.
I still miss those chucklefucks.
What other games do you play?
I used to be big into MMOs like DDO, FFXIV, EVE, ST:O and a few others. I lost touch with most of the communities I used to be part of in the mad "I need a job" rush post-college, which is largely why I don't play those particular MMOs anymore. Playing a familiar MMO without the people you used to play with... just reminds you that you're lonely.
How did you first hear about Test Squadron and what convinced you to join?
I remember reading about TEST back when I was playing EVE for a little while. I remember watching several of their propaganda videos during... I want to say "the Goon war," but if I know anything about Goons it was probably Goon War 3 of 975. I honestly don't remember which. I had wanted to join up then, but I ended up folding from EVE shortly thereafter because I was getting close to graduating, and I kinda took a break from the internet in general around then (my grades were starting to buckle).
I've only recently felt secure enough in my job and my finances in general to consider jumping back into MMOs, so I figured I might as well do this right and get in on the ground floor. TEST is big, TEST has staying power, and the community seems pretty open and cheerful. Hopefully my Endeavor comes with enough band-aids for when you all get yourselves blown up.
Picard or Kirk?
Picard, without question. He was a better diplomat, a better scholar, and a better representative of what humanity could become. Kirk was all about "going with your gut," about emotion and charisma... which makes for a great bar storyteller. But I'm not sure I want him as the unofficial representative of the Federation, flying the flagship, negotiating peace.
Where you from stranger?
Southern New Jersey, though I work in Pennsylvania and hope to move there eventually. (Spoiler alert posting from work plz no fire me)
What drew you to Star Citizen?
...honestly? Quite a few things. I guess the first hook was that it's a crowd-funded space game and I'm an idealistic science nerd. I liked the idea of a huge open-world PDE space exploration sim, and had had some fun experiences playing on private Freelancer servers and on EVE Online. I like how relatively transparent RSI has been about the development process (though I do recognize that they use a lot of it to fuel their own hype train). I got bored of how few options there were for gameplay in Elite Dangerous (you can shoot shit or ship shit, and shipping shit is infinitely inferior to shooting shit), so the fact that RSI keeps branching out into other gameplay options like resource-gathering, medicine, science, etc. is reassuring in its own way. And I'm not going to lie, the visuals are really pretty omgg dem greephix.
What do you look forward to most in Star Citizen? (PVP, Exploration, etc)
PVP in a support capacity. I have more money than sense, so I dropped the cash for an LTI-Endeavor and am looking forward to playing Space Hospital for whatever group of chucklefucks wants to make the most explosions. When that gets dull I also own a Connie and will probably end up modding it for exploration.
What was the first game you remember playing?
Cerebrally I know we owned an N64 in my youth, but I don't really remember playing anything on it. Flashes and pictures come to mind, but nothing of real substance; I can tell you I owned DK64, but if you dropped me on the central island-thingit I wouldn't even be able to tell you which one was the first world let alone what the different kinds of bananas were for or why I was covered in peanuts.
The first game I truly remember playing was a little Korean MMO called Ragnarok Online. I started playing on a free private server back in 2005 (god I'm fucking old) called RaiRO, hosted by the same people who made the 8-Bit Theatre webcomic. It wasn't an enormous server by any means, but the attachment to a relatively visible webcomic meant the server always had a couple hundred people online - which meant the guild-vs-guild War of Emperium actually meant something. Which meant guilds meant something. I ended up joining up with a guild called The Turks, which was probably the best decision edgy-teen-me ever made. I was expecting to find... well, honestly, in retrospect I don't think I was expecting to find anything. I joined a guild because I wanted to have fun in WoE.
What I found was the first real online community I'd ever experienced.
We were organized. We had our own forums, we had our own TeamSpeak, at a time before either of them were really dime-a-dozen. We drove each other to get things done, to keep grinding away at the millwheel that is any Korean MMO - and we supported each other through it, even if it was just providing an ear to rant at or another set of fingers to mash buttons for hours. Even if we had already done it ourselves months ago. Especially if we had already done it ourselves months ago, because we knew exactly how much it sucked, and we remembered when some guild elder or three had leapt down in the trenches to help drag us through it.
And we shared... everything. Weapons, armor, resources, sure - but those were just pixels. I knew more about those players than I knew about my own family. I remember listening to Alden as he vented about the hardships of being an openly gay man in Quebec in the early 2000s. I remember finding out Selim had disappeared for a few days because he was smuggling his family out of Cuba in a speedboat. I remember Andy Golthim coming back from deployment with a busted leg - and pitching in with his ridiculous round-the-clock leveling sessions, since there was literally nothing else he could do while he healed. We were a family.
I played more of that game than any other game I have ever played, before or since. Even after RaiRO folded, even after the guild went their separate ways, some of us stayed together across a whole mess of private servers for the next several years, and when we finally ran out of those I ended up hosting a server of my own for awhile. I lost years to that terrible MMO with its awful 2d-on-3d graphics and its atrocious Korean grind-a-thon gameplay and its 0.01% drops, and honestly? I would do it all again in a heartbeat.
I still miss those chucklefucks.
What other games do you play?
I used to be big into MMOs like DDO, FFXIV, EVE, ST:O and a few others. I lost touch with most of the communities I used to be part of in the mad "I need a job" rush post-college, which is largely why I don't play those particular MMOs anymore. Playing a familiar MMO without the people you used to play with... just reminds you that you're lonely.
How did you first hear about Test Squadron and what convinced you to join?
I remember reading about TEST back when I was playing EVE for a little while. I remember watching several of their propaganda videos during... I want to say "the Goon war," but if I know anything about Goons it was probably Goon War 3 of 975. I honestly don't remember which. I had wanted to join up then, but I ended up folding from EVE shortly thereafter because I was getting close to graduating, and I kinda took a break from the internet in general around then (my grades were starting to buckle).
I've only recently felt secure enough in my job and my finances in general to consider jumping back into MMOs, so I figured I might as well do this right and get in on the ground floor. TEST is big, TEST has staying power, and the community seems pretty open and cheerful. Hopefully my Endeavor comes with enough band-aids for when you all get yourselves blown up.
Picard or Kirk?
Picard, without question. He was a better diplomat, a better scholar, and a better representative of what humanity could become. Kirk was all about "going with your gut," about emotion and charisma... which makes for a great bar storyteller. But I'm not sure I want him as the unofficial representative of the Federation, flying the flagship, negotiating peace.
