Hi, it's Luke from Out of Darts.
Today I wanted to tell you about a really great trip I just took.
I have been missing nerf games like crazy.
It has been a real downer to not be able to play as much these past couple years.
I finally got up the courage to take my first flight and travel for a game,
and I made it all the way out to Atlanta, Georgia, to play with the well-known nerf YouTuber Drac.
Drac is very much a part of my origin story when it comes to this hobby.
I would not be doing this without him, no matter how you hack it.
He did the video on my original HIR-ricane prototype, and that got a couple million views.
I think it's probably three or four million views now,
and that really spiraled me into this nerf hobby, ultimately full-time.
So, when I finally got the chance to go out and visit
and see how a different coast plays, I had an absolute blast.
I got to hang out with Drac and some of his amazing employees.
He's got a really good team there over at Foam Pro Shop.
It was really fun to compare and contrast the differences between my shop and theirs
because while we do similar things, we're also doing a lot of different things.
Drac does a lot of Arcane builds, which are his top-tier,
really high quality, beautifully and thoughtfully put together blasters.
A good example is he sells a Lynx that's got
anodized bars, and it's got a custom catch that they've printed on SLS as well.
Pretty neat stuff.
It was really fun getting to see how somebody else organizes
their shop, their workshop, their studio, and I even got to jump on a livestream with Drac.
This hobby, as much as it is growing, is still really small, so it's nice to see and meet with
and collaborate with other YouTubers, and Drac is definitely an old-school nerfer.
When I joined this hobby, the Stryfe had just come out, and things were already starting to ramp up.
It was a time period where you really couldn't get motors very consistently.
I remember the Shark 130s went up, and just like a day later, they were totally unavailable.
You’d chase things down a rabbit hole
and have a really difficult time trying to actually find the parts you need.
Fast-forward to today, and 3D printing has taken over everything.
Drac’s shop, just like my own, involves a lot of 3D-printed designs.
We even sell some very similar designs, and that's okay with me.
ultimately I think the more of us that are doing this, the bigger the hobby grows,
and as Drac always likes to say,
“Rising tide floats all boats.”
One of the coolest parts about this trip was the actual gameday.
I got to play at a game called “COSTOH” with an “H.”
If I ever figure out what the acronym means, I’ll put it down here.
I probably should have asked that weekend, but it was a whirlwind, so I didn't get to it.
This was an old-school NIC war, and “NIC,” for those who aren't familiar,
is “Nerf Internet Community.”
It’s really just a terrible name for the hobby in general, but 15 years ago, that was the best that
was used, and it was a really common name for that part of the hobby.
At the game we played, you couldn't have magazines,
and you couldn't have hoppers -- at least not hoppers in the rival sense.
So, all the blasters were pretty much traditional PVC hardware store blasters.
Now I was a little skeptical getting to go out
and play this because it's so different from my play style.
The rate of fire being so much lower and the FPS being higher is different than my normal skillset.
This game was hosted by none other than Chicken, who has been
in the hobby at least as long as Drac, or if I’m not mistaken, longer.
Someone's gonna have to correct me in the
comments because I met a lot of old-school nerfers that weekend.
It was really humbling because some of these people have been
doing this twice as long as I have if you can imagine that.
It was pretty awesome.
Chicken was kind enough to also supply a few blasters for me to play with.
I got to play with a Rainbow Pump, a Rainbow Pistol, and I think a Snap or a Pump Snap.
At the games, there were also PVC bows
and a variety of other blowguns and other homemades as well.
Additionally, some people played with blasters that
were pretty much current blasters but modified to suit the gametype.
This included one of my favorite current springers: the Lynx.
The version that Drac [used] had a hole in the back where
you could load a single round at a time and then use your Lynx just like normal.
I also saw a Nexus Pro with the side completely cut out of it so you could
hand feed a single one into the breech.
It was really fun seeing the innovation and clever workarounds to the “no magazine” rule.
We played a variety of standard game types, my favorite probably being the seize the balls game.
I also really enjoyed the control-the-points game.
I think they had a slightly different name for it, but it was a lot of fun.
When you're playing with these
Rainbow Pumps, it's quite a bit different than playing with a normal blaster.
The one I was using had about a nine-shot capacity.
It's prime-fire, but each time you've got to rock the blaster down to load the RSCB.
It really changes your gameplay because it's not fire, re-aim, fire, fire, fire.
You really are taking a new shot every single time you pull up that blaster.
In the beginning of the game, I actually thought that they were pranking me
because my blaster kept exploding in my hands; just everything would come off.
Then Aiden was kind enough to come along later and use some old-school techniques of just carving
little slits in the side of the PVC to make the PVC parts fit nice and tight.
After that upgrade, I pretty much only had problems with a worn-out catch.
Even though these blasters are old school, they definitely still have issues here and there.
Now part of that might be that a lot of these blasters were reconditioned just for the game.
Others might be just prone to this from the beginning.
A good example was one of the blasters I use -- a rainbow pump, the sear (it's essentially
a nail or a screw). Over time those wear down and eventually doesn't catch very well.
So, I would find myself in the middle of combat pulling up,
priming the blaster, and it would fire at the ground because it didn't catch right away.
Ultimately it was still a lot of fun, and I had plenty of good tags and
got tagged out plenty more, but it was a really enjoyable way to play the game.
These old-school blasters, since you can only fire one dart at a time,
it really slows down the gameplay, and you have to think really strategically.
Additionally, reloading these inline hoppers,
there's a ball valve, and you've got to drop one dart in at a time to reload.
While you're doing this, you can't fire because
that chamber needs to be pressurized in order for the blaster to function.
This really meant that you had to make these reloads really strategic and make sure that
someone else on your team was actually covering you and taking care of you while you were playing.
In the end, I had an absolute blast playing out at the SENC.
It's one of the oldest nerf clubs, if not *the* oldest nerf club.
I actually don't know the history there,
but they have a very good turnout and a really wonderful group.
I felt really welcomed, and I hope to get out and play with them again soon.
Normally I attend all of the large games that I can get to each year.
I'm really bummed I won't be able to make EndWar,
but I know you will all have a blast out there without me.
I will leave the link for EndWar down in the description,
but I would also love to hear from you:
What other games am I not aware of should I get to, especially in the US?
International travel is a little bit questionable at the moment, but I would love to
make the effort to get out to more games in general across the country.
If you've got a game that you're interested in having me out to
or you think I would be interested in visiting, put it down in the comments,
and we'll make sure to read those and see what else I can get out to in 2022.
Thank you so much for watching, and thank you, Drac and your whole team, for having me out!
It was really a pleasure.
Just world-class nerfing out there.
Until next time, I’m out of darts.