Four months later and it’s here!

The Zybez podcast (NSFW)! Before you scurry off to listen to it, please keep in mind that you get directed to an upload site that displays porno ads on it! But that’s okay, the voice of the Jay36miles is sooo dreamy that you won’t be able to help yourself. I hope you detected my sarcasm there, because if you’ve already heard the first episode you’ll know that this guy sounds ultra creepy.

Normally, I’d say “Well, it’s just their first podcast..give them a break”, but considering this has been in the works for MONTHS, I can’t spare them the benefit of the doubt. The podcast is terribly edited. Rather than inviting all of the guests for a live Skype episode, it seems like they told a bunch of random people to record themselves reading a pre-written message, then cut their audio file into the main podcast. Awful. Awful sound quality, awful content.

Let me separate this into categories of awfulness in hopes that someone from Zybez will read this and improve from my criticism.

• Content: The content is the defining factor on whether or not a podcast is going to be good. The Zybez podcast talked about a few things, “Should Children be Subjected to a Curfew to Prevent Against Crime?”, clans, a “monster competition”, and the IRC channel of Zybez events. See what I just did? I listed the contents of their podcast, aka Show Notes– something that they didn’t bother writing themselves. Firstly, most people who are active on RSC already know the clan news. RSC is the hub for clan activity and people don’t need to hear the results a week later. Secondly, what’s with this thing about children’s curfews? I like the idea of having a discussion prompt, but all they said was “check out our thread on it!” and they never listed where I could find it. Thirdly, there was almost no talk about clan chat. I’m thinking that this might be because the podcast was recorded weeks before then, possibly months. Zybez, you have a huge clan community, use your brains and host a discussion on the clan chat and spare everyone the boring crap about the IRC channel or monster competition.
• Quality: As I said, this podcast seriously lacks in quality. None of it is geared toward Runescape fans, just Zybez fans. Why would I want to listen to a podcast about the going-ons at their forum? I rather hear interesting discussion on Runescape-related things. The audio quality, again, was awful. I don’t know if native speakers of English had this problem, but I had an extremely hard time understanding them. Their words seemed really rushed and the volume was too low. It was difficult to pay attention to the disjointedness of the whole episode.
• Length: Thee minutes and thirty-five seconds may fly for the “Quick Grammar Tips!” podcast, but people want something that they can be entertained by for at least a half hour. You have to consider that many people play Runescape whilst listening to a Runescape-related podcast. Recording such a short episode is almost completely pointless.

Here are my suggestions, Zybez. Listen to an RSBANDB podcast. Notice the good sound quality, the lack of porno ads (or even ads for that matter) on our download page, the seamless flow of the episode (as it’s done in Skype), and the content. You guys have a lot to learn and, frankly, this episode was worthless.

Edit: Apparently, the second link is actually full-length (45 mins). I’ll leave it to Brad to pick up my slack and talk about it.