Stalwart Locusts

Good morning you happy people in digital land.  I am having one of those mornings where I am questioning why exactly I put myself through this every day.  Not to be an intentional bummer, but this takes a lot of fortitude to keep doing this every single morning regardless of if I have something to say or not.  I am just afraid if I stop it, for even one morning I will slip back into month long absences.  I feel like I need the routine to keep me moving forward.  I would really like to get a full year of daily posts, so for now that is my goal.

I’m a Jerk

I have to say, lately I have been feeling progressively worse about myself, so maybe this is just a downer of a post.  Primarily the source of my lament, has been that I have been essentially non-existent over in Rift.  I put all this effort and time into building an amazing instance of House Stalwart over there… and now so many of us are playing Final Fantasy XIV that it has almost over night become a ghost town.  I feel like each and every one of us still like Rift and still enjoy it, we are just wrapped up in the thrall of the new shiny object in front of us.

To make matters even worse…  Fynralyl and Psynister are being their amazingly awesome selves like normal…  and ended up pushing the guild bank fund over the top and we were able to afford the third guild vault tab.  However being the absentee leader like I have been…  it took me a few days to pop in and purchase it, then forgot to give anyone access to it.  I apparently did a piss poor job of promoting them to officers, only hitting a handful of characters for each of them.  So generally I have been a pretty lousy person of late.

I feel generally conflicted.  Firstly I still love Rift and enjoy it, and want the guild to be doing awesome things.  Much like Everquest 2, Rift is one of those games that I have always cycled back to… and since the release of the game there is only a three month stretch where I have not been playing it.  So I guess in the back of my mind I know it will always be there waiting for me.  The problem is… the people currently playing it may or may not.  Even if I am not around much, I still think breaking out and forming a permanent House Stalwart guild was a good thing for those times when the guild is super active.

Stalwart Locusts

The sad truth of House Stalwart is it is really a tale of two guilds.  The first is a group of WoW players that have remained thoroughly devoted to that game since release and continue playing it or returning to it.  The second guild is the large roaming band of “content locusts”, that consume the content in a game only to move on to the next tasty field when it presents itself.  So as a result this guild is this massive amorphous war band that roams across the countryside pillaging things in our wake.  It might not be the most pleasant metaphor, but considering we now have about 30 people in Final Fantasy XIV whereas we had around 30 active people in Rift previously… it seems appropriate.

In part this is my fault, but in part this is just the nature of most “post-wow” players.  Once we dissolved the ties to one game, it changed the way we viewed games in general.  The fact that Stalwart is so large and so broad and ever changing… means we always have a group of people playing whatever game the people seem to want to be playing.  So when a new game comes out there are always a dozen or so people amped and ready to play it.  It doesn’t so much feel like we are jumping games, but more than we are just continuing the same ties we have always played with… somewhere else.

For me personally… leaving WoW changed my perspectives a lot.  Essentially I made a promise to myself that I would play whatever happened to be the most enjoyable for me at any given moment.  As a result I have played a ton of cool games, and met an ever expanding cast of characters in the process.  I now have so many life long friends that I have today, that I NEVER would have had if I had not given in to my wanderlust and experienced new worlds with different groups of new people.  But all of this said… I still feel like an ass when I am off playing something other than a fragment of Stalwart is playing.

Big Apology

I guess in part, today’s post is a huge apology to those playing Rift that have noticed the active player base in the guild shrink significantly over the last few weeks.  I don’t think any of us are “done” with Rift, this is just something that happens from time to time with Stalwart.  We find a new shiny and go off and play it together.  I have a years subscription to Rift, so I won’t be going anywhere forever, I just have so many things that I want to do in Eorzea.  So many new sights to see, experiences to experience and adventures to conquer.

I still plan on trying to marshal the troops to logging back in on Wednesday nights for dungeons or rifts or whatever happens to occur.  My hope is to single that out on the calendar as “Rift night”.  Additionally as the leveling curve winds down a bit in FFXIV, I hope to push my rogue up on the weekends… because quite frankly leveling in Rift is a relaxing experience for me.  Most of the time in FFXIV has been a LOT of dungeon running, and since I am one of two tank mains… I feel deeply obligated to all the friends that are playing the game.

This is ultimately what always complicates my gaming experience.  The feeling of constant split loyalty… since there has never been a period of time when ALL of my friends happen to be in the same place at the same time.  Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view… I am the leader of House Stalwart agnostic of whatever game folks happen to be playing.  It has and likely always will be a multi-gaming community, more so than just a single gaming guild.  As games come and go the important thing to me is the community of players that we have cobbled together.  That is what is eternal, and so long as we remain friends there will always be another opportunity to play together around the corner.

Wrapping Up

Sitting down this morning I had no intent of writing a post like this, but I guess it has been weighing heavily on my mind.  Hopefully it was not too big of a downer for the majority of my readers.  It still feels odd most of the time that anyone reads these ramblings.  I will be over in Rift tonight, trying to dislodge anyone I can from FFXIV in the process.  I have no clue at all what we will be doing, but I figure some opportunity will present itself.  I hope you all have a great week, and those of you who are playing it… I hope I see you in Rift tonight.