Guild Wars: Yeah, I'm Done
Okay, so at this point I haven't logged in for nearly three weeks. Haven't even bothered to run the setup program after a rage-uninstall (Some people think the height of ragequitting is Alt-F4. I call these people pussies who don't know how to throw a real, epic hissy fit. Until you quit out, yank the game off your harddrive, and scrubbed the disk space over to obliterate every last trace of the .dat file you haven't really hated at the game properly. I do this about once a week even when I'm having fun with the game. I've gone so far as contemplating lighting the case on fire to exorcise the evil demons but I've got too much other crap I'd need to back up first to go through with it.) And I'm really not inclined to at this point.
I gather one of the consequences of my little walkaround is a trail of drama left in my wake. My e-wrist, for example, is smarting. So, at this point, I'm thinking I'm left without a guild and without many friends in Guild Wars land.
News to me. Although I can't say it's really surprising given my past history and all. You'd think people would learn by now but I really have to concentrate on paying attention to how I'm affecting other people. That I can and usually do doesn't necessarily mean I always will. And, when I stop caring, well, it can get ugly. Anyhow, I think I have some damage control ahead of me and apologies to pass around but they'll keep until tomorrow.
As someone once said to me, “You don't really leave Guild Wars so much as you don't log in. For a couple of months.” So, I'm sure I'll be back sooner or late (You never know. I'm not really excited about GW:EN as I have no desire to play the game until the bitter end. But things change. Including, sometimes, opinions.). But for now, I've just lost whatever it was that drives me to keep playing. Really, it's been the ATs that I'd been holding out for but, at this point, the prospect of finding a team to play with and doing all the things I'd need to in order to even get back up to playing speed just leave me unenthused. But I don't want to leave any unintended bad feelings (Because, really, as far as I'm concerned there aren't any. I decided to stop playing for the moment but that doesn't mean I bear any ill feelings for the people who still are. That does mean I've quit my guild by inactivity if nothing else and I suppose if I'd been intending this I'd have given some kind of notice but, well, I wasn't planning on leaving, just taking a few days off and real life intervened.) burnt bridges laying around because I just might be back.
Anyhow, if you want to know the bitter details, I suppose I'll indulge. One night or the other I was, again, staying up way too late just so I could get in some games with people I knew to be halfway decent. We got into yet another discussion about builds and characters and roles. Nothing that anyone who's played the game seriously hasn't gone through hundreds of times. But with the way I'd been feeling I realized that, well, I wasn't having fun. I was just going through the motions. Practicing, training, trying to get better, and all that, in the hopes that some time in the future I'd be enjoying myself. But, at the moment, I wasn't. So, I quit. Quit the team, quit the guild, quit the game, throw some things around out of frustration and resolved to take a few days to get my head straight and cool off.
At the time, I think, I told myself that I was just going to quit the guild because that was the only way I'd finally get off my ass and find a better fit for the ATs. OoX and the wider Xen of Onslaught alliance is a fine guild and all. But it's never really been the best fit for me. Just wrong timezone and wrong culture – inward looking when I want to get out and about in the wider GW PvP community. And after the CT (Hell, during the CT, we barely scraped together six people for our last match, if memory serves) we had trouble getting teams going. Nice people and some good friends but I was ready to move on. It's one of the mistakes I was hoping to avoid this go-around – staying too long in a bad situation. But, you know, it's easy to stay and hard to leave.
As the saying goes about MMOs “You don't stay for the game, you stay for the community”. When you're part of a guild, especially the small and tight knit groups that form PvP teams and guilds, you're a part of a small community. Along with that come not only actual responsibilities but a sense of responsibility towards those other people. You don't want to disappoint them. You log in for those people. You practice for those people. You keep going when you don't want to because you're part of a team and you don't want to let the team down. It's peer pressure, really, and, for me, it means that once I'm part of something I'm very reticent to say, “Yeah, things aren't awful or anything but I really need to find something better for me. Best of luck to you but I'm moving on.”
Anyhow, a few days turned into a few weeks and, well, going cold turkey is one way to kick a habit. Maybe not the best one but it worked in this case. I still have some thoughts sitting around unfinished that I'll probably get around to saying so there's probably another Guild Wars post or three lurking on the horizon. But, yeah, I'm done.
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3 comments:
I'm thinking I'm left without a guild and without many friends in Guild Wars land
Rationalizing will get you everywhere, in your own mind at least. When I came back from vacation there was a guild invite out to a Mr. S. Rex dated 4/11 from Aya and it's still there.
Sadly, OoX seems to have kinda disintegrated, so maybe you're not missing much.
I'm wondering how much of your frustration is being caused by the two-week restriction.
I was membered in two guilds before I left on a trip for a week, so I figured that no matter what, I'd get to AT on 5/1 when I came back.
Of course, when I did get back, one guild had exploded due to e-drama and the other had reformed.
Figures.
As for what you said about XoO's culture, I'd have to agree. I figured that after my RL friends' guild blew up, being in a GvG guild of some kind would be better than floating around guildless in gwp. As it turned out, being in XoO for those three months didn't help the PvP social interaction that was recommended by various top players for breaking into PvP.
I suppose that since Blame's posting quite a bit and presumably getting some well-known guests, there's some networking going on. I only wish this had happened back when I was around.
there was a guild invite out to a Mr. S. Rex dated 4/11 from Aya and it's still there.
Huh, well, that's something positive. Like I said, I literally haven't logged in since...4/11, I guess, and no one's tried to e-mail (or call) me so I wouldn't have known.
Wouldn't expect me to be using it any time soon, though. Seriously, as soon as I fire up the game again I'm just going to get sucked back in. I'm not kidding when I say I'm addicted.
Sadly, OoX seems to have kinda disintegrated, so maybe you're not missing much.
Yeah, it's been steadily falling apart since the CT ended so that's not exactly surprising. Really, you only had five or six people playing semi-regularly at the best of times.
I'm wondering how much of your frustration is being caused by the two-week restriction.
Not much, really.
It's more frustration at the everything else involved in guilding up and taking part in the ATs. practicing, showing up night in and night out, the bickering, the drama, scheduling around a tournament. Not to mention the simple act of going out and finding a guild, applying, auditioning, getting to know new people, getting comfortable, working my way into a playing position. Reading forums, watching observer matches, catching up on the metagame shifts, and so on and so forth. All so I can play a few matches my team might or might not win and maybe not embarrass myself during them. Compared to all that, cooling my heels for a few weeks isn't much of an issue.
I'm tired/frustrated/bored with the "player skill" grind. And I need some time off the treadmill. I know I'm never going to play my way into a top guild this way but, really, I'm just out to relax and have some fun.
As for what you said about XoO's culture, I'd have to agree...being in XoO for those three months didn't help the PvP social interaction that was recommended by various top players for breaking into PvP.
Right. It's a very closed micro-community. The impulse is to look inwards instead of outwards. When you don't have enough for a group you look in the alliance first, and so on and so forth. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. As a closed, insular, protected community it's a good place for people to feel comfortable. But if you're looking to get better and move past the level that XoO is currently at it's not ideal.
I mean, I've been above that level, I've been below it. Been part of top 10 guilds and ones that barely think about PvP. And, yeah, the kind of social networking that's lacking at XoO is really, really important. That network of friends and associates helps immensely. And a lot of the top players and guilds are there simply because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. With, of course, the right skills to exploit the opportunity. That's, you know, how I got into the test, got started at TGH, at Guru, with Fianna or iQ or dozens of other places. Not because I'm that much smarter or more talented than the average person but because I was known by the right people.
Anyhow, it's a problem that XoO isn't unaware of. And one I'm sure they'd like to fix - there's also the whole PUG thing they were trying to get going which would presumably connect them with a lot more people if/when it worked. But, you know, with a group that large there's a certain amount of inertia. And a distinct sense of "us" and "them" that leads to resentment for people who leave the group or who, say, guest someone from another guild over someone from XoO.
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