World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 135 of 139

Bad Launches

August 26, 2013August 26, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… it is the beginning of another work week and I still feel sore as hell from the weekends adventures. The odd thing is my thighs are killing me… and I am guessing it was from all the random times I had to squat down to take a shot throughout the wedding festivities. I still need to sift through the photos and cull it down to a final set of “wedding pictures”. As I just reached up to scratch my forehead… it appears that the sunburn is starting to peel… so I have that itchy mess to look forward to over the next few days.

Pre-launch Problems

The above animated image pretty much sums up my experience with the weekend pre-launch of Final Fantasy XIV a Realm Reborn. Essentially I got to play a bit before the wedding madness started on Saturday morning, and then at almost every point afterwards I received some form of an error trying to log in. Essentially I think all of the issues encountered can more or less be chocked up to the poor infrastructure we have seen at various points during the other tests. Almost everything about this weekend could have been reconciled if they had the forethought to include an actual login queue system.

Sure there is a sort of queue that exists, but the highest number in queue my friends and I have seen is somewhere in the 400s… which leads me to believe that the queue is limited to something ridiculous like 500 members. This leads to the very fun process of spamming a character login only to get the ubiquitous 1017 error stating the world is full. That is hands down the most frustrating part about the whole experience. It seems like complete blind luck as to whether or not you are going to make it in.

Bad Timing

Ultimately another large portion of the failure that was the FFXIV head start, was the fact that they were holding it entirely over a weekend in North America. Normally pre-launches begin on a Thursday night and continue on through Friday… at which time they can begin to see what the scaling issues are going to be like and adjust accordingly. Holding it on a weekend essentially means that all infrastructure resources in North America are closed for the weekend. I feel as though if they could have thrown a few more servers at this issue a lot of the problems would have been resolved.

Instead the game team and infrastructure resources are operating on a significant time lag. An example is that Sunday evening… at what would be 8:30 am Japanese time… they managed to stabilize the JP servers. As a result I was finally able to roll a character on the Japanese network of servers and at least spent a little time before going to bed playing around on Ultima. My friends think that this morning we will see the EU/NA servers stabilize similarly. I still question whether or not they actually care about customer service, but that is part of a much larger issue.

Bad Launches

So far this is probably the worst game head start I have experienced. Normally when a game launches, we get a few blissful days of stability during the head start as only the pre-orders get to play… and then can chill out for the first day as the servers burn around us knowing you already have characters that are pretty far into the game. Quite honestly this is the first time that I can remember ever experiencing large periods of not being able to play the game at all… during a head start weekend. Lots of head start experiences have been riddled with lag or other issues… but the game was at least partially playable. During the entirety of the weekend I got roughly 2 hours of gameplay.

One of the things I found interesting however is that while talking to friends over text and mumble… I did not realize just how subjective a launch experience was. For me I herald the launch of Rift as quite possibly one of the smoothest I had experienced. However talking to one of my friends… he remembers tons of issues during that launch. This lead me to crawl back through my forum posts and blog posts from the time… and I literally found no mention of any issues brought on by the launch. Did I just not notice the issues because I was enjoying myself… or did I really not experience the problems that he had made note of.

So this makes me wonder… how many of the bad launches I have experienced are purely subjective? For example, I considered Guild Wars 2 an extremely solid launch since it was playable for me the entire time… albeit I spent most of that time on the overflow shards. However the simple fact that we could not really play on our “real” shards made it an extremely frustrating experience for certain other players. Do they consider that launch a failure… whereas I consider it a pretty solid success? Additionally I struggled with massive amounts of lag during the SWTOR launch, but my friends consider that to be one of the more successful launches to date. It felt like a rocky start to me, and as such I got extremely frustrated by it.

King of Bad Launches

So far the two worst launch experiences I have played under are both from the same company. World of Warcraft has gone down in history as the rockiest start. I can remember the game being more or less unstable for a solid month. I remember almost always being able to connect to play the game… but functionally the server side lag made it next to unplayable. There were times I could level without issue… so long as I never attempted to loot anything I did not already have in my inventory. Likewise the launch of Diablo 3 was essentially an unplayable mess for the first few weeks and constant error codes. I had far less forgiveness in me around that launch, because after the rocky wow start… they should have had better preparations in place for another blockbuster success.

The thing is… at the launch of WoW more or less the gamers dealt with not being able to play the game… because it was in so many ways leaps and bounds ahead of what else was currently on the market. It was “worth” waiting for. I feel like companies simply do not have the luxury of time to fix their problems. I posted a complaint about the Final Fantasy launch over on G+ and immediately people brought up the failure that was Diablo 3. Gamers tend to hold a grudge against the games that floundered and while some of them will develop a short memory and return to your game happily once the issues are resolved, there is a certain percentage that will never again trust your company.

With these catastrophic infrastructure failures… I feel as thought Final Fantasy XIV has roughly a weeks time to fix everything and get the servers in a relatively permanent state. The roughest part is the fact that this is occurring during the pre-launch and we are not even seeing the final launch day crowds. Right now every one of these frustrated players has the opportunity to log into amazon, or green man gaming and cancel their preorder. I know of a handful of players who have done just this. The rough reality is that other than the Final Fantasy diehards, the title is just not good enough overall to make the masses wait to play it. There are way too many other games on the market, and many of them without the subscription fee.

Wrapping Up

Here is hoping that the next few days see massive improvements in the stability of Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am extremely disappointed and this probably goes down as the worst pre-launch I have experienced. The next few days will determine if it can compete with Blizzard for the worst launch category. Hopefully they can throw enough hardware at the problem to fix it quickly. I hope you all have a great week, and that you were able to get in more playtime than I have to date.

Open Data

August 16, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people. I am mostly conscious today but feel like I am coming down with something. While it has not fully hit me yet, last night I felt relatively horrible. It is one of those mornings where I have been staring at the blank screen for ten minutes… finally comprehending that I am supposed to write something thoughtful or interesting. It is mornings like this that I question my decisions in life… and why in the hell I ever decided to do this blog every morning thing. However I shall persevere and push on… and try and be thoughtful and or interesting or at least something other than comatose.

Armory

I am addicted to armory systems. When I am playing a game that has them… I happily check up on literally everyone I meet just to see exactly how they are doing things. I am not a terribly competitive person by nature, but I love peering into the inner workings of other players. I have learned so much from sifting through the specs of other players. Additionally when I have gotten a good drop, I used to sift through the profiles of level appropriate guild members, to see if any of them could use it as an upgrade. If they could I would send that doodad off in the mail, because I would always rather an item go to use than end up as pocket change when sold.

The funny thing is… I thought EVERYONE liked Armory systems. I made a comment yesterday about how much I wished that Rift had one… and immediately got a couple of responses from twitter talking about how much each of the players disliked them. One player took the stance that they had never seen any good come of them… and that in generally they only served as a point for players to trash talk or tear down others based on their gear. The second player said she liked to keep her spec and gear secret, that she felt like it gave her an edge in PVP.

I guess I can see both points, but they are also both foreign concepts for me. Firstly I rarely if ever pvp, and when I do it is on a lark and only to help complete some world event or guild quest. I am pretty much anti-competitive and want everyone to just get along and work together towards some glorious common goal. That said I can also see how if you do not have a protective bubble of guildies surrounding you… how you could get exposed to players that want to pick apart your gear and “call you bad”. I’ve always found armory systems to be amazing diagnostic tools that provide easy access information sharing of how exactly a player is out performing you by so much.

Open Data

I think the king of all armory systems exists in Everquest 2. The odd thing about it… it was built by a third party developer. I have a friend that works in the tools division of SOE, and I can remember all these early attempts to make a reliable and excellent mobile application. Ultimately they decided as a company that they simply did not have the manpower to adequately support an extremely detailed data visualization and armory tool on all available platforms. So instead they shifted their focus and made an amazingly intricate data service. This would allow third party developers to build the ultimate armory application for whatever platform they chose to. The end result I feel was a master stroke, and they have provided better access to data than any other company out there to date.

After the data service was released, EQ2Wire a long time supporter of the community and the best news source came along and released a truly phenomenal armory system. Essentially it provided full access to everything you would care to learn about your character. In fact in many ways it provided more information about your character than you could actually access in game. It had all sorts of nifty auxiliary functionalities like lists of all the dungeon maker items you had collected, or all your spells with the ability to create a shopping list for reagents to upgrade them. When EQ2 did a massive reworking of the AA system, they offered the ability to look at the previous version of your AA profiles so you could easily see just how exactly you had specced your character.

So when I say that I would love to have an armory system in Rift. This is the system I would most like to see it patterned off of. I would love them to take the data they already provide about the game to fan sites… but roll into it all the information about the players and serve it up as an active data service. Hell I would even devote development time towards working on an armory system if one decided to pop up and turn into a github project. Likewise I am sure lots of other people would devote their time to it as well. It would be awesome to return to being able to scour the guild roster to see who can use an item, or who has an amazingly artful spec.

One of the nice thing that EQ2 did when they rolled out their system was adding the ability for your to go off the grid of sorts. When you check that box, your character information becomes cloaked from the data feed. This would satisfy those players who want to keep their spec and gearing close to their chest, for PVP purposes. A scenario like this is the best of all worlds since it would finally allow me to integrate an armory system into our guild website. I have been working on a social roll-up page that lists various pieces of meta data from our forum profiles in one place. So I have been able to integrate WoW Armory, and TSW Chronicle… but am missing the game we are playing the most often… and as such is what prompted this whole line of discussion.

Redeemed

Several of my friends are super devoted to League of Legends. For the League E-Sports crowd, I am going to sound like a complete moron… but my friends were watching whatever event was going on last night. I pay about as much attention to e-sports as I do to traditional sports… which is absolutely none. This was a funny realization for me, because I feel exactly the same way while watching both. Zero interest in watching someone else play a game, regardless of what that game is. I guess I get bored watching other people do things that I could just be doing myself if I cared enough to do them.

All of the talk of League however made me want to pop in for a bit. I had some RP sitting in my account and Riven is probably the cheapest I have ever seen her. I have been told multiple times that this was a champion I would probably like a lot. Previously I would say my three favorite champions were WuKong, Garen and Darius… all of which have an extremely similar play styles. Essentially I seem to be unable to get into any champion that is NOT a top lane bruiser style champion.

I fired up a quick 1v1 custom game to put Riven through the motions, and man… I have to say I love her. I have never gravitated towards female avatars in any game I play… I just find an inability to really get into playing them. However I had already found at least one female champion that I really liked… and that was the super murdery Vi. I can now add Riven to that list. Firstly she is another champion limited only by her cooldowns much like Garen. I really love that style of gameplay, as I hate having to watch my mana bar… and I think in many ways that is why I love Garen so much. Additionally she has an extremely high sustain, especially once you throw a bloodthirster on her.

She is kinda like my perfect fusion of WuKong with his insanely ganky E-Q-W combo that lets him hop in and bash things then sneak away… with my love of Garen and his complete lack of resources to fiddle with. I still suck horribly at League because I am diametrically opposed to its click to move control scheme… but when I play Riven I feel like I suck a little less. Additionally her combination charge/shield attack is extremely awesome at getting out of jams… like getting too close to a turret… which I may or may not do way the hell too often. At least I can add one more champion to the arsenal of ones that I really enjoy.

Wrapping Up

Well this has rattled on long enough… and I should really be getting on my way. Here is hoping that I get to feeling better, and that I really am not coming down with something. I figure it is likely just allergies as it has been all summer. My boss is out of the office today… which normally folks would think it is a good thing. However in my case that just means I have to fill in for him when a crisis arises. I really hope no crisis arises… I could use a nice and chill day. I hope you all have an excellent one, and that it begins an amazing weekend.

Bank Overflow

August 15, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people. Today is a day for rampant forced cheeriness because quite honestly I feel like crap. My sleep patterns have been off for the majority of this week, and it has left me completely drained most of the nights. Last night for example I wanted to do many splendored things… but ended up slumped at my keyboard fighting sleep. Hopefully I will adjust to the environmental changes, like my wife starting the new school year… but whatever it happens to be it is a pain in the butt.

Bank Overflow

My life’s mission… at least as far as gaming is concerned… has been to try and gather as many awesome and community minded people as I could together. Then I abscond with them and stuff them neatly into House Stalwart. My guild jokes that my “panel van has the best candy” as I am constantly finding someone else in need of a good home. Last night yet again we welcomed a new member, and I am hoping he enjoyed himself. I was a little off my game in the whole engaging people thing… it was all I could really do to stay vertical. In fact at one point last night I decided I was done being vertical… and went downstairs to try playing on the sofa. Unfortunately that only hastened sleep… and roughly thirty minutes later I was logging out.

One of the negative side effects of putting all these awesome people in one place… is they tend to be extraordinarily generous. The above image is a shot of one of our bank tabs. They are absolutely stuffed to the brim with random things our guildies thought might be useful to other guildies. As a result I am going to need to do a massive cleanout. Some of the items are pretty easy… for example all that raw meat I will just ship to my survivalist and convert to level appropriate food. Other things like the gear… I would really prefer to see them find a home. The other option is to runebreak them and turn them into level appropriate runes.

We have long used tab one as an artifact exchange program. Essentially the idea is that as you are out collecting artifacts, you dump the ones you already have in the guild bank and then extract the ones you need. This has been a great program, the problem is… there are a lot of people that put in way more artifacts than they extract. So hopefully we can induct a few new members into the practice that will hopefully soak up all the unused artifacts so we can start fresh. I funded the first two bank tabs but unfortunately the third one is just too far out of reach. I don’t have anywhere close to the 1500 plat needed to buy it. So for the time being we are going to have to make due with the limited space we have.

Granted having a guild that helps each other so freely… is the kind of problem I enjoy having. I think tonight I might start packaging up various tidbits from the bank into care packages and just sending out to guild members that are in the appropriate level ranges. There are a lot of things in the bank that I view as clutter… like the on use scrolls that give a short term stat boost. But if packaged with a rune and maybe some food… it becomes a nice care package for a leveling guild member. I just don’t want the generosity of the guild to go to waste.

Cthulhu Expansion

I am extremely late to the bandwagon of even bringing this up… but a few days ago Blizzard trademarked the name “The Dark Below” and that set the world a twitter… pun intended. At first there was some debate as to whether or not the name belonged to World of Warcraft, or if it was intended for the upcoming Diablo 3 expansion. However additional data came out yesterday that pegs the name of the D3 Expansion as “Reaper of Souls”. Prior to this however… I assumed that Dark Below was going to be the 5th World of Warcraft expansion simply due to the fact that the name has roots in the Warcraft universe. Apparently the term “Dark Below” was mentioned in the original Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans manual… as well as a section in the Warcraft roleplaying books from which WoWWiki References this quote.

The Dark Below is a place inhabited by demons, devils and infernal creatures, from where some sorcerers take their power directly and sometimes have a patron beast to foster their magic

So on that alone I assumed that this would be the beginning of the fabled “Burning Legion” expansion. I hate to bring this list out… but I still find it curious just how closely the franchise has followed it all these years later. This list first started circulating before the release of The Burning Crusade, and more or less was pretty accurate until Cataclysm. I feel like the whole idea of rebooting the world was a complete monkey wrench thrown into the “master plan”. But I am wondering with the release of Pandaria… are we going back to trying to pick up items from the list?

The Pre-Burning Crusade Expansion List

Draenor Set

Azuremyst Isle – 1 to 10
Bloodmyrk Isle – 10 to 20

Eversong Forest – 1 to 10
Quel’thalas – 10 to 20
Hellfire Peninsula – 58 to 62
Zangarmarsh – 60 to 64
Terokkar Forest – 61 to 65
The Deadlands – 63 to 67
Nagrand – 64 to 68
Blade’s Edge Mountains – 66 to 70
Netherstorm – 67 to 70
Shadowmoon Valley – 69 to 70

Northrend Set

Borean Tundra – 67 to 70
Howling Fjord – 67 to 70
Dragonblight – 69 to 72
Grizzly Hills – 70 to 73
Crystalsong Forest – 72 to 75
Zul’drak – 73 to 76
Sholazar Basin – 75 to 79
Storm Peaks – 76 to 80
Icecrown Glacier – 78 to 80

Maelstrom Set

Gilneas – 77 to 80
Grim Batol – 78 to 81
Kul Tiras – 79 to 82
Kezan – 81 to 86
Tel Abim – 83 to 85
Zandalar – 84 to 87
Plunder Isle – 86 to 88
The Broken Isles – 87 to 90
The Maelstrom – 89 to 90

Plane Set

Pandaria – 1 to 10
Hiji – 10 to 20

Wolfenhold – 1 to 10
Xorothian Plains – 10 to 20

The Green Lands – 88 to 91
The Dying Paradise – 91 to 94
The Emerald Nightmare – 94 to 97
The Eye of Ysera – 97 to 100

Deephome – 88 to 91
Skywall – 91 to 94
The Abyssal Maw – 94 to 97
The Firelands – 97 to 100

Legion Set

K’aresh – 96 to 99
Argus Meadowlands – 97 to 100
Mac’Aree – 99 to 100
Maw of Oblivion – 100+
The Burning Citadel – 100+++

As you can see from the list… up through the close of Wrath of the Lich King… everything pretty much synced with what we were seeing in the game. Some of the zone names were inaccurate, but the list is too close for it to be a complete aberration. So as I said above… when I saw the name and the reference from WoW WIki… I immediately thought this was going to be what is mentioned above as the Legion set. But further evidence has come out that leads elsewhere. Yesterday an article caught my attention pointing out that Ozumat the fiend in Throne of the Tides was in fact from the Dark Below.

So now I have to wonder… is this finally them doing a proper treatment of Nazjatar and Queen Azshara? I almost immediately ruled out this concept when the name first started circulating… because just among my friends Vashj’ir was pretty much a hated experience. So I really could not see blizzard returning us to an underwater setting again. However so far the evidence points in that direction. If the Dark Below lies beneath the crust of Azeroth… then it would make sense that the entry way would be some underwater trench. My biggest concern would be if they do another confused expansion like Cataclysm where there is content scattered throughout Azeroth without one central point of focus.

As bored as I got with Pandaria… it was less about the content and more about my general malaise with World of Warcraft. Everything about that expansion was well done… and had I really cared about the game I probably would have enjoyed it much the same way as I enjoyed the hell out of Northrend. Cataclysm on the other hand felt like a haphazard journey across existing areas of the world. I hope whatever they do for this expansion that they give the players an entire world to explore rather than more piecemeal crap.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to get on the road. Today was a multiple cup of coffee day as my mind wandered quite a bit through the course of this post. While I don’t play World of Warcraft, and I really have no intent of returning… I am still a sucker for Azeroth. You can’t spend a decade immersed in a world and not care about its evolution. I keep hoping that Blizzard will “do the right thing”, but they always seem to make decisions that are half-hearted. It will be interesting to see what Blizzcon provides. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope I make it through the day without falling asleep at my desk.

On Leadership

August 10, 2013 by Belghast

We have entered back to school shopping season and last night we ran around hunting for pants. A nasty side effect of our collective weight loss is the fact that my wife currently appears to have no pants that will fit to start the school season. This manifested itself yesterday when she was trying to get ready to meet some of her teacher friends for a presentation. Of course panic ensued, but she managed to figure something out and as a result last night we began the process of trying to rebuild the clothing archives.

On Leadership

Yesterday I was having a long talk with Sevok about his interest in maybe joining us in the House Stalwart Rift contingency. Sev has been a longtime friend of mine, lasting well over a decade at this point and been involved in many of the previous incarnations of House Stalwart. The problem is he really does not want to start up in Rift unless he brings his wife with him. She on the other hand has not been in a Stalwart guild yet, and is extremely gunshy of guilds in general, namely because we both have a shared moment in our history that likely changed both of us in different ways.

Over the course of the last few weeks I have talked quite a bit about how tanking brings out my protective nature, so I thought I might talk a bit today about what exactly lead me to guild leadership in the first place. In many ways it is this exact same protective nature manifested in trying to create a wonderful environment for my friends to play in. Honestly the roots have always been there, but as an introvert I am always loathe to step up unless I feel like some wrong has been committed. I have a strong sense of justice embedded in me and equality that honestly should not have been there based on my upbringing… but that is a tale for another day.

High School

I did not have the traditional “geek” upbringing of exclusion and ridicule at the hands of the popular masses. In fact I could have very easily been another one of the popular kids. I guess in many was from the outside it probably seemed I was one. I essentially had my geekiness grandfathered into the popular culture of my small home town. My parents friends ended up having what would essentially end up as our crop of “popular kids”, and as a result these were my play dates and birthday party goers all the way through elementary school. So as my geek tendencies manifested themselves for the most part they were just accepted as “me being me”.

My mother was a fairly overbearing sort that insisted that I be involved with everything. Essentially she was brought up in a poor household and had aspirational goals to be more than that and as a result ended up using me many times as the vessel of those aspirations. So as a result I was in 4H, an Eagle Scout, Team Captain of the Academic Bowl, FTA, Student Council, National Honor Society, and many more acronyms that I can barely remember. The result was frustrating for me, because I ended up in the local paper on a regular basis and everyone out in the community seemed to know my business. I want to say I was on 26 pages in my high school year book thanks to all the random organizations I was pushed into being a part of. I feel as thought my mother was trying to build herself a Kennedy… which I very much have no aspirations ever to be.

My Tribe

I could have very easily fallen in the kegger madness that was the life of a small town popular kid, but instead I took a very different path. My friends were essentially the geeky misfits of the town. The edgy art students, the math nerds, the show choir kids… all bound together to form a family of sorts. My mother was a home economics teacher, and as a result we used the small back room of her classroom as a private lunch room of sorts. In there would would plan D&D campaigns, play Wolfenstein on the 486 computer, and a lot of Chess and Pente. This room gave us a moment of sanity in a world that none of us really liked much.

The funny thing is… that as acknowledgement got around that these were my friend… these were my tribe of misfits… each of them started to get extended an invisible veil of protection. I was not a small guy, and at 6’4” the hooligans in high school seemed to fear me just by my seemingly powerful stature. Each of my friends reported getting picked on a lot less, or at least no longer in the form of physical confrontation. I had no clue when I started the little community that it would have the fringe benefits it ultimately did. To some extend it only caused me to expand the group and pull in other people. I feel like this is what started my “collecting people” tendencies that would serve me later.

Past Guilds

When I got addicted to Everquest, I went through a couple of extremely unsatisfying guild experiences. The first was an extremely exclusive group that dated back to a bygone era of gaming. They were friendly enough and active enough, but they were also an extremely closed door society. If you did not go through the initiation rituals to join their secret society… you were forever treated as an outsider regardless of how long and how many games you had played with them. I went through the little initiation, but really did not see the world change much after doing so. The problem is… as I got my friends into these games… they were forever destined to be outsiders… or not allowed in at all. After seeing this injustice play out a few times I decided not to follow them into any new games.

While in Everquest I moved servers to play with a group of locals to Tulsa. At first it was an extremely awesome having a group of locals that I could play with an socialize with. However the longer I played and the more closely I got to the inner core of the guild, I started to see the same problem with injustice. Essentially to be a member in good standing… you had to do whatever the guild leader wanted of you… and more often than not this was to do whatever would keep his wife happy. I saw members miss out on rare drops for their epic weapon quest that would instead go to alt number 307 for his wife. If she wanted this rep from this zone… the entire guild was expected to go there and farm forever until she got whatever she was wanting.

House Stalwart

If you were not in the inner circle, your opinion did not matter. When the wife had a falling out with a member, it was expected that the entire guild would shun them or else you would get kicked out on your ass as well. None of this sat well with me, but I was torn. My group of friends were still mostly in this guild, but I felt as though nothing about this situation was fair. Somehow I ended up as the sounding board for all the players who were sick of the leaders shit, and made some extremely deep ties within the “resistance” of sorts. As we moved on past Everquest and into other games I kept contact with the members of this undercurrent and in many cases they all ended up as members of Stalwart guilds eventually.

World of Warcraft was the next big thing on the horizon that I knew everyone would be playing. As a result I wanted to gather up as many friends under one banner as I possibly could. Prior to launch I started a brand new forum unconnected from any guild or game. Through it I organized all my friends from EQ, DAoC, Horizons and City of Heroes towards the goal of forming a new guild for World of Warcraft. Essentially I never wanted to end up in a situation like i was in the previous two guilds… either with abusive leadership or and elitist inner circle. After talking to some friends about it, I decided that the only way I could ever guarantee that, was to be the leader myself and keep it from happening.

So here we are roughly a decade later and there is still an active House Stalwart presence in several games. World of Warcraft damned near broke me for leading anything. As a result I took roughly a two year break from guild leadership, as I wandered around and joined up with lots of other pools of friends. I am extremely thankful to each person that sheltered me and invited me into their own organizations during this time. Sadly however in each new place I visited… there was something missing… and I would go back into my old ways trying to recruit everyone under a shared banner. I was missing my home, was missing my guild, and was ultimately missing the freedom to make an awesome home for everyone involved.

As a leader I have always tried to enable people to do awesome things and be awesome in the process. As a result I have always tried to keep things simple, only adopting the barest of rules that instill a sense of the larger community rather than a list of “thou shall not”. For the most part this has worked over the last decade. We have had a lot of amazing moments as friends and I have built more of an extended family for myself than a guild. These are all people that I talk to regularly outside of the game, when we travel I try and meet up with ones in the area… they are the family I chose for myself. Still to this day… I have an overwhelming desire to bring new people I meet that are also awesome into the fold.

Wrapping Up

I feel as though this post kind of developed a life of its own. I am not really sure what I intended to right. To some extent I was writing so that Sevok’s wife could see that our time spent in the horrible EQ guild had adverse effects on both of us. I just chose to take that bad experience and roll it into building a long standing family of friends and a much larger community. Hopefully this tale will be at least interesting to other people out there. I hope you all have a great weekend. I desperately need a haircut so that is the number one priority on our list. Also hoping to coax my wife into another trip to the place where she found all those Legos.