Silent Speakers Don’t Slow Me Down

A few last minute changes in my itinerary had me stopping into two Zone arenas back to back before leaving the Denver area for the night. The first was Chipper’s Lanes in Broomfield, CO where Derrick and I battled it out with Nexus gear in a mostly single level arena with just a couple of raised platforms.

An enjoyable game, but there was nothing terribly out of the ordinary with the arena itself, decked out in a classic CW theme I see quite frequently.

However, the game experience itself was a little bit different. Unlimited base deactivations meant that I kept running back-and-forth from the opposing base all throughout the game (did we suddenly start playing Tron, lol?). 

The one thing that really stuck out to me though was that my pack was silent. No sound cues at all when I tagged my opponent. Of course you can attribute this to you a little speaker connection, likely a very simple fix and I assume the other packs were probably fine, but since I was already wearing the pack I thought it would be interesting to see if the total lack of audible feedback made any difference to my game.

Derek gave a good chase, and I could see for the most part when I landed a tag against him. It was a little tougher to discern when he tagged me. I am simply not in the habit of looking down at my vest. I was only aware of tags to my left shoulder because of the vibration the pack, but I presumed he was getting a few tags elsewhere that I was not cognizant about. At least, that is what I thought until the end. 

I had perceived this as being a slightly more balanced game than it was. He seemed to be playing well. However, even though he was the one who had informed me that there were unlimited base deacs, he was certainly not taking advantage of them himself. That became obvious when we checked the scoreboard at the end. 

I am not posting those scores because I did anything extraordinary or vice versa. It is more of an illustration of how different elements (like unlimited bases) can thoroughly change the dynamic of a game. However, as a result I have no idea how the silent pack may or may not have altered the game. Very clearly, that was the least important factor to the end result…but it sure doesn’t look like it slowed me down.

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