The Empty Throne: Guild Wars and a Guru Named Rex

Okay, this is something I’ve been putting off dealing with for, well, a long time really. But, well, when I started this blog I decided that I was going to cling to my anonymity. It’s the smart thing to do according to all the advice and guides I’ve seen because it’s a lot easier to shed a pseudonym when you need to than to duck behind one when you have to, basically. And it’s not like I haven’t used one before. I’ve been on the net and in games for a long time under one handle or another. I’ve got a list of them just sitting somewhere and I even add to it from time to time. But, well, some of them take on a life of their own. Like my current one – it doesn’t mean much to anyone else, really, but the name “Sausaletus Rex” has some meaning for me. And that’s because it’s one with history. I plucked it out of the air one day but I ran with it. And I ran pretty far. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I indulge in a bit of reminiscing about the last time I went by this particular moniker.

I’m just saying because I might get a little misty eyed and, well, that’s something the Saus just wasn’t known for. Emotional, sure, but all weepy and sentimental? Never. Anyhow, the last time I used this name was the last time I made a big splash on the net – relatively speaking, anyway. So it was natural for me to come back to it. It’s also the name of the e-mail account I used to sign up for my Google account oh so long ago – the one I forgot I had until I decided to go with Blogger - and I don’t ignore karma like that. But, well, the last time didn’t end well and I’m absolutely someone from my past second life, so to speak, is going to pop out of the woodwork and call me on all the poor ways I acted.

Anyhow, the story of just how I came up with the name is one that will have to wait until another day – it’s a long and convoluted one that I probably should tell in its own right, after all. But just how I came to be using this particular name. One day I stumbled across the Guild Wars open event and was rolling up my first character. I rolled up more than a few and like I said I have a little list of all the names and tags that I’ve used that I pull out in situations like that. Not that I have it written down or anything, I just mean I remember and I reuse what’s worked before. And I know what names have worked because those are the ones I remember. But the thing about Guild Wars was that it was completely shard-less. Not separate server populations or anything of the sort, you were going to log on and play with everyone. But that meant you’d have a lot of people running around wanting to be named “Legolas”, say (Or, well, this was a while ago so the big thing was “I’m Rick James bitch” in numerous permutations. The crazy thing was a lot of those players turned out to be pretty decent people, go figure.), so in order to accommodate them the developers made it mandatory for each character to have two names – first and last separated by a space. That way you’d get “Legolas Blue” and “Legolas Red” and “Red Legolas” and everyone would be happy. Or at least not completely pissed off. Reserving and claiming names was a big deal back in the day for that game because you wanted to make sure that none of the millions of other people playing would be using the name you really wanted. Anyways, this was a problem for me because most of my favorite names tending to be short and sweet. The only one I had with two was, well, “Sausaletus Rex”. So that’s the one I went with. And, well, the open event was a blast and I ran that character over every inch of the game I possibly could. I have this thing about missing the end of things like open events and launch dates and the rest so I wasn’t around when the timer ran out and the servers switched off. But the only reason I wasn’t because I feel asleep at the keyboard from exhaustion after a solid week or so of non-stop gaming. A shame because I missed this:

Ladies and gentlemen, you're staring into the face of pure evil. As anyone standing around during the close of the last preview event before release found out.

I’ve never been really comfortable with goodbyes so I wasn’t all that upset. But, well, the point I’m trying to make is that the game was that good. I couldn’t get enough of it. And after I exited the demo for the final time and the glow from the screen had faded, I wanted it back. I play a lot of games and I’ve learned to sample them out with demos if I can because that way I’m usually not disappointed. And, well, if after I get done with the demo I’m shaking and wanting to play more that’s when I rush out and buy the game (Which works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve been burned by expecting the rest of the game to be like that little slice but, well, in that case I just consider it paying the developers for the fun I had during the demo and move on.). But Guild Wars was still in testing and it wasn’t going to be released for months. Almost a year, actually, passed before it came out but I just couldn’t wait. So I bookmarked websites and signed up for forums and got involved with the community. And, well, when it came time to pick a name to use it was natural to pay homage to that character I was hoping to get back to one day. The one that’s still sitting on my Guild Wars account even though I’ve remade him more than a few times – if you see Sausaletus Rex roaming around Guild Wars, well, that’s me because no one else can use that name, I claimed it fair and square.

And I made well and sure that I claimed it because I didn’t want anyone else running around with that name. Because, not to brag or anything, but at the time the game first came out all the work I’d done in the community made me a big enough name that someone trying to mess around with me might actually have done that. No, by that point “Sausaletus Rex” had gone from being just a nickname to being a brand.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, though, because the story of how that came to happen is really the story I’m trying to tell. But, well, like I said I got involved with the community. I posted things, I answered questions, I read articles, and everything else people in such fanbases tend to do. And I like to think I did it fairly well. Because other people seemed to think so and I’d soon made something of a name for myself. I never really realized it until one day I logged into one of the big forums at the time (The Guild Hall. It’s still around to this day, of course. I just couldn’t say how big or important it is to the community because I’m not really involved with it.) and the one that I happened to be most invested in because I posted there the most. It wasn’t the only place I posted at but, well, when you’ve been around as many forums and sites as I have you come to realize that each one has their own unique identity. It’s not really planned but it’s shaped both by the people running things and the people who frequent the site. And I happened to like TGH because it was a little more bareknuckled and a bit more sophisticated than the others. The people I most liked to discuss things with – the smart people who weren’t afraid to back up their opinions and throw an elbow or two – posted there. So if I had any home in the community it was there. But I was just one of the faces, so to speak, lurking on the boards. Nothing special.

So, anyway, one day I log in and lo and behold there’s a private message from one of the people running that site asking if I wanted to be a moderator. And, having been involved in that sort of thing before and having run a site or two of my own since, I know that such people are constantly searching for help but, well, at the time, I was more than flattered. I wrote him back and told him I’d have to think about it for a bit. Mainly just to buy myself some time to think and consider the implications. Because, honestly, I was just trying to keep interested in the game and, well, I’d gone and been noticed as someone in the community who had a certain something. Since I’m pretty modest and unassuming, it always surprises me when people recognize my talents because I don’t think they’re all that much. And, well, I was having a pretty rough time of things at that particular moment so a little recognition in a venue where the only thing that mattered was what you said and how you said it gave me some much needed confidence.

Obviously, I accepted eventually and, well, my fears came to pass and becoming a mod did change things. I’m exactly the wrong person to be given authority because I’m the sort of person who realizes just how to abuse it. I mean, I know I seem calm and rational and I am most of the time but there’s this anarchistic destructive streak in me that’s just compelled to knock over any house of cards sooner or later. It’s one I manage to hide very well but, man, letting a person like me mod a forum is like letting the inmates run the asylum. No, though, I didn’t abuse my powers, I don’t think, I used them. And I was very careful about it because I could see just how much trouble I could cause if I wasn’t responsible. So I was responsible. And when I had to flex my muscles I did – I think I developed more than a fair reputation for being the “black hat” who’d crash down on things. I just tried to make sure they were the things that needed it. And, yeah, it felt good putting out flame wars with my own brand of napalm. Just like it felt good to have people constantly asking me for help and advice. I’m sure I got more than a little carried away but that wasn’t really what I was worried about. What I was afraid of was that when I was in charge and on the watch for people posting and saying the wrong things that my time as just another poster on the boards would be over. It turned coming to TGH into a job and not a hobby, in so many words. Just one I sure wasn’t getting paid for.

So, I was more than a little burning out and one thing or another happened that I won’t go into because, well, it was secret at the time and I’m not really trying to bad mouth anyone or anything here, just rehash a difficult time for my own self. So, anyways, being a mod at one of the biggest sites around took up a lot of my time but it also opened up a lot of opportunities because not only was I able to join Guild Wars as a tester, I was also able to talk to a lot of the other people running the other fansites. They were, in a sense, competition and being the competitive sort I am I wanted to run them out of business and make TGH the greatest Guild Wars fansite ever – and I tried my level best – but it was a friendly competition. And I got to know several of them quite well and even came to consider them friends. Never an easy thing for me, making new friends. I’m always worried I’ll get hurt in any relationship which makes it very hard to start them. So, anyways it came to pass that a few of them found themselves no longer wanted at their site. For whatever reason the people running the place decided to turn it over to a new team. And, well, that made me upset because these people were my friends. But everything worked out alright for them because they decided to start their own fansite. And, well, when they asked me if I wanted to take part I could hardly refuse.

So, we put our site together and gathered up some other likeminded individuals to help run it. And, well, for one reason or another I neglected to tell the people at TGH about it. So, long story short I got fired. Persona non grata. And, well, that left me in an odd spot because our new site was still a while from launching. As was the game. And all that energy I’d been devoting into things at the Guild Hall (And, well, all the bitterness I’d been brewing because I wouldn’t have agreed to help out my friends if I hadn’t been unhappy and looking to make a switch.) suddenly had no where to ground themselves. I was left for the first time in months without a site, without a project to really work on. Except, of course, my new site. And, believe me, I went to work on it. You see, I’m a bit weird in that when I get disappointed or suffer a setback I don’t back off. No, I maybe pause for a bit to get over my sadness and then, well, then I work twice as hard to prove everyone who ever doubted me wrong. It’s not exactly the healthiest of attitudes but, basically, I don’t get mad I get even. And I was – entirely unjustifiably looking back on things – more than a little mad at the people running TGH. You can imagine how things get when nerds start to argue. And, trust me, there weren’t nothing but nerds all around the community at that time – myself included. So, anyways I decided that I was going to grind the Guild Hall underneath my heels and laugh when they fell to pieces without me because they obviously had no clue just how hard and how much I’d worked at holding that place together.

I was, of course, completely wrong but, hey, it lit a fire under my ass. And I worked and worked and worked - harder than I ever did at TGH - at making the new site into something that people in the community would like. Into proof that, yeah, I wasn’t just imagining that my efforts meant something. That I was, in fact a good mod, a good admin, and, dammit, a good person who could succeed at something, anything. Just…one…thing. Just once in my whole miserable life. Just once, just to prove to everyone that I could. Like I said, not exactly the healthiest of attitudes but it worked for me. I wrote things, I designed things, I tested out stuff, I recruited people, I did things I never even knew I could. Like, well, lead. I’m not sure it happened but I became some kind of leader in that clubhouse. People listened to me. People respected me. Above all, my friends trusted me. And I’d like to think I gave them plenty of reason to. And, again, I never even really knew I was doing it – I was just chugging away as fast as my little legs could carry me. Just to keep up with my friends who were some of the smartest and best people I’ve ever known. I didn’t realize I was pulling everyone else along just as much as they were carrying me. And, I’m sorry but, dammit, I never really told them how much they meant to me when I had the chance and I’m always going to regret that. See the thing is, I’ve always been a writer deep down or at least fancied myself one. And, well, writers get taught you don’t tell – you show.

But my track record there is pretty poor, too, but we’ll get to that in just a bit even if I have to pull out my hankie and take deep breaths until I calm down. Anyhow, the idea behind our site was that we were going to focus on quality not quantity. There were plenty of other Guild Wars sites at that time so if we wanted to have any traffic whatsoever (And, oh yeah, did I ever) we needed to find our own particular niche. A reason for people to show up and come back again and again. The name recognition of the various leading lights around the community we had going for us would only carry us so far. But these people were my friends and they were my friends because they were hardworking, intelligent, and caring each in their own way. Between us we had vast knowledge of, well, many things but the common thread was the game. We decided that the way to go was to create a repository for that knowledge. A database, if you will, that people could come to and add to and interact with and, well, it’s no accident that guildwiki – the Guild Wars Wiki - eventually became associated, somehow, with the site. It’s the same basic idea we just focused more on articles and forums rather than an encyclopedia of things. But, well, we called the site Guild Wars Guru and we took that as a mantra and a mission statement. Gurus, after all, are teachers at heart. And that’s what we, I’d like to think, wanted to do. Teach people about the game, educate new players, and help the so-called experts including ourselves learn a little bit more. That was enough to get me sold on the idea, anyway. And I set about pouring as much learning about the game as I could out of my skull and onto the electronic page. In one way or another. We built the infrastructure in the early days. Set up boards where people could ask questions, wrote guides, installed lists of skills and maps and the like. And you can be damned sure that I wasn’t the only one working as hard as I could – and just that extra bit beyond that – to get things ready.

We threw open the doors to the public. Did a bit of advertising on various other boards and chatrooms and the rest. And, well, slowly but surely we started to attract a crowd. We got people registering on our forums, posting how glad they were to see us starting over again – even me. Which surprised me no end because I’d been acting like a huge jerk at that time and figured that I was going to be nothing more than the black hat again. And, then, well strange things happened. This lowly little startup forum got noticed. The developers pt a link to us on the official site, gave us special recognition. The hits kept climbing. The users kept registering. People would e-mail me or PM me out of the blue about this article or that post they’d like to put up. Sometimes they even said my own weren’t all that bad. And soon enough Guild Wars Guru wasn’t just the newest arrival in the community it was one of the major stopping points. We were getting as much if not more traffic than all the other fansites. People new to the game, people who’d been hanging around forever, they were all helping us to grow and grow and grow. I was beyond thrilled.

For a while anyways because if you were around me then (Sorry.) you’ll know that I just couldn’t keep the effort I was putting into things going for long. I burned out more than once. And threw some pretty bit fits along the way. Quit the test, threatened to leave the site forever, nuked the hell out of threads that annoyed me and taunted the poor posters who crossed me, that sort of thing. I was, after all, still the black hat. The admin/mod that people hauled out when they wanted someone to swing a hammer or two. I was happy to do it because I told myself I didn’t care what people thought about me – just what they thought about the site. And if I had to play the villain to make sure that things ran smoothly, well, it’s not like I don’t enjoy pissing people off. And I’m more than stubborn enough that I don’t like losing to anyone at any time. Even when it’s over something as meaningless as a thread or some arbitrary rules I pulled out of my ass. And, truth be told, I wasn’t having the best time. I was happy that things were going so well. But, being the twisted and messed up individual I am that just means that I was completely expecting them to fall apart somehow and crash down on top of me someway. And the longer it took for people to realize that everything was wrong and it was all my fault because I hadn’t tried hard enough the more nervous I got. The more I tried to make everything perfect. The harder I pressed. It’s not an unfamiliar storyline with me. But people like to see the classics played out time and time again, you know.

Somehow I stuck with things, though. I took a break every now and then – some announced, some not – and some of the things I’d promised to get done fell through. But I hope I never let anyone down. Not at that time. Whenever something had to be done, I tried my best to get it done. And, looking back, I think I did more often than not. But, then, the unthinkable happened:

Guild Wars got released.

And, well, just take a look at this image from Alexa (Which I completely did not check religiously at the time at all. Cross my fingers and everything.):

And, well, you might not see it thanks to the scale but let’s zoom in and highlight some things:

That first spurt (labeled A) is around when the site launched. We hit a good size for a Guild Wars site at the time pretty early on, as you can tell – keep in mind Alexa only bothers to rank sites if they’re in the top 100,000 of all websites. That level’s about what other sites were doing around that same time. This next period of expansion and the resulting plateau is when we really start to hit our stride and blow past the other fansites. Others experienced similar growth but we had among the best – and growth is what really matters among the people who track these sort of things because it’s a good measure of potential. And this (labeled B) marks the days when the game entered retail. And this pretty much sums up my reaction:

Because while our forums had barely edged over 100 members at one point and would struggle to reach 1000 in the previous era we soon found ourselves with 3000 people in the blink of an eye. And they were still pouring in through the doors. Strange people, people who’d just bought the game and had no idea who was someone to listen to when they posted and who wasn’t and who filled our boards with post after post – asking questions that any idiot with even an ounce of knowledge about the game should know. And why were my boards suddenly crawling with the very sort of ill-informed and ill-prepared trash we’d been carefully weeding out from the very start? We weren’t trying to be the biggest forums, just the best, and the fact that our high-standards had drawn so many people spoke volumes, to me, about the sort of people who were going to be playing this game. Now my boards were turning into the sort of swamp of idiocy and mediocrity I’d worked so hard to avoid.

And that’s when it hit me. Guild Wars Guru was the first fansite listed on the official Guild Wars site under the community section. When people went there and, like I’d done oh so long ago, went looking for a site where they might get some more information and even a friend or two – well, we were the first site they’d see. Not only that, the first forum that anyone would see when they first came to our boards was what we called the “Q&A” forum. The place for people to come and ask whatever question they might have in the hopes that some other poster might have the answer. And, well, we had a bunch of people hanging around the boards who’d been primed over the months we’d been in action to answer them. As many times as it took. In as much detail as it took. Pointing to all the resources we had sitting around if they had to. We got linked, we got browsed, we became known as a good spot to go if you had questions about the game. And it drew people in teaming masses. The forums would slow to crawl, the servers would melt in their housings, the site crashed more than a few times. We had to turn off signatures. Then searching. Then some other technical stuff I don’t even remember. Just so that things kept running. We had to put in ads and scrounge up funds and everything else to keep the site afloat because we were still just a small startup, at that time, and not a member of any larger and more profitable network of fan sites (I wasn’t really involved in the business of things. Because, well, I can hardly handle my own accounts and I avoided any sort of financial commitment to things like the plague. But I couldn’t help but hear and notice things and there were a few tense moments. From what I gather, the financial situation eventually righted itself and the site’s doing fairly well for itself. Maybe not lately because just like the game people have been fading away but that’s only to be expected in any game like this. There might be another peak if things go well but as newer and better games get released or people otherwise tire of things the population dwindles. And the popularity of any fansite is tied to the game it’s supporting. Sad but true.)

While this was all going on, of course, the game was going live and I was getting my first real chance to play it in a while. I’d quit the test over one fight or another and stayed away from the preview weekends for one reason or another, after all. And testing the game was never really playing it – not for myself, anyway – not for me. So I was trying to reconnect with the game that I’d enjoyed those many months earlier. The one that had started me on the whole mad ride in the first place. And between trying to level and gather things and keep the site from turning into a complete and utter mess I’ll have to admit I couldn’t handle it. And something had to give. I’ll never be sure if it was my dissatisfaction with the way the game had turned out or my anxiety over the impending failure of everything I’d worked so hard on with the site that soured me on things. But sour I did. The game wasn’t fun. The site wasn’t fun. The people who were my friends were busy with their own things and their own issues. And now that we were all actually playing the game it was growing rapidly clear that we all had different ways of enjoying it. We started to drift apart – if only in my own mind.

And, well, I hate goodbyes. So I quit. And I never said any. I was just another name on the boards, after all. And just one more player in a sea of others. When I stopped posting, when I stopped playing, I could just disappear behind that anonymity and disappear into the shadows of the internet (The point labeled C is around when I left. As you can tell from the graph, I wasn't the only one. But you can also see the site - and the game it's linked to - recovered around when the first expansion was released.). Sure people tried to contact me and all the rest but, well, since I never checked those inboxes tied to just one of my names they might as well not have. With the benefit of hindsight it was a completely stupid move on my part and one I’ll go to my grave regretting. Because it meant that I never had a chance to thank everyone for everything they did for me. But, then, I knew that if I did and heard just what I’d done for them I’d never be able to slip away. So, at the time, I thought the best thing to do was just cut the cord and be done with it.

So, you might be asking - if you’ve managed to navigate your way through the twisted mazes I make of the English language, that is – if there’s so much baggage to the name “Sausaletus Rex” (and I’ve only just scratched the surface, really) just why did you decide to use it again when you started this blog? Isn’t that just creating a self-fulfilling prophesy that’s going to lead your down the same road of frustration, defeat, and despair that’s gong to end in you storming away from this very blog in a huff? You say you believe, somehow, in karma and aren’t you carrying forward with a bunch of the bad kind?

Well, I hope not. My biggest fear now is that this blog’s going to turn out like all my other projects and ventures – half-assed and half-finished. But, see, before I settled on a pseudonym I picked out the name of the blog. And that’s the Cult of Evolution in case you haven’t noticed. Now, I’m no scientist and I’m not going to argue the details of genes and rNA and all the rest with anyone (Well, not now anyway. No promises if the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s invisible tentacles happen to touch me in a different spot tomorrow.) because, to me, evolution is just another metaphor. And it’s one that means that slow and gradual changes can add together and build up into something new. Maybe something better, maybe something worse, but something different and a thing that can’t really be understood until all the steps of the transformation are complete. Since I’m once again not very happy with where I find myself and, as always, unsure of just where I want to wind up, that sounds like a good deal to me.

So that’s why I picked good old Rex out of the trashheap that is my life. That name means something to me. I ran it into the ground last time. But that means there’s one thing left: Redemption. One step at a time.

Yeah, feels good to get that off my chest. Rex means king, in case you haven’t figured it out just yet. And now, the king is back.

The old king is dead.

Long live the king.