Wandering in the Dark Wood at Night

Cast your eyes on the ocean.
Cast your soul to the sea.
When the dark night seems endless.
Please, remember me.

--Loreena McKennitt, "Dante's Prayer"*

 

 

Yesterday, I spoke with a friend with whom I'd not played MMOs for about a month. He left Classic after an incident** concerning several issues in raid, and he hasn't logged on since.

He had told me immediately before he left the game that the WoW Classic was becoming less and less fun, so I believe that the incident was simply the last straw before going cold turkey. He hadn't given up on MMOs themselves, just Classic, so I felt that the time away was doing him some good. I don't think that he's permanently given up on Classic, but we'll see.

It was a good conversation (via Discord messages), and I hope to continue it in the future. But it also got me to thinking about the constant churn that happens in both MMOs and real life.

 ***

Churn is to be expected. People move, change jobs, retire, or even pass away. We change over time too, and what we may have once tolerated or even encouraged is no longer accepted by us. 

My friend's departure from WoW Classic reminded me of others who have come into my (virtual) life and moved on. 

Like the friend who introduced me to the L60 5-mans and encouraged me to explore more of the game than I was content to stay with. Months before the Gates of AQ event, we were in Silithus questing, just kicking around on some quests that he had. At one point we stopped by the Gates, and he told me that he would be here when those gates opened. 

Less than 3 weeks later, he stopped logging in. He'd never joined Discord --he said his computer couldn't handle it and Classic at the same time-- so for all intents he simply vanished. 

Or the other friend I got to know while originally leveling Az; he and I ran several instances together, but eventually work started kicking his ass and he had to cut back on playing as he was constantly working the night shift. He eventually lost his spot in the raiding guild he was in due to lack of attendance, and the last time I spoke with him his wife happened to walk by and she --who he used to play with in Classic-- disparaged the whole MMO genre as a waste of time.

I haven't seen him in months, either.

There are other friends that moved to Retail to check it out --or in one case, return home as it were-- and they've spent by far most of their time in Retail. I see them online, and we occasionally chat, but we never get the chance to group up much any more.

***

And it hasn't been lost on me that my focus on progression raiding has meant that a lot of my time spent online has been focused on getting the mats/pots/whatever for prog raiding together. When I just want to run solo and not chat or anything else, I simply vanish online: I don't mark myself online on Discord, turn myself invisible in Battle.net, and unjoin myself from the raid guild chat channels. It's not perfect, of course, since anybody who has marked me as a friend in game will still see me, but its as good as it gets for silent running.

It is very effective, but almost too effective. More than once I've had a casual friend whisper me that they've not seen me in game for a while, and is there anything wrong. No, not wrong; not really. Just.... Well, just unable to do the things I want when I want to do them, I suppose. And that is very much on me.

That's part of the commitment to progression raiding, that you have to give up something in order to keep going at the forefront of raids. But I do miss other aspects of MMOs, such as 5-person instances, questing, leveling alts, and just socializing.

 

I recognize that the easiest solution to the socializing part is to just switch guilds. At the same time, while I've grown comfortable with the gang, I'm definitely not one of them. And swapping guilds will not change that. After my wife's friend's death --and a lot of soul searching-- I was pretty much ready to pull the trigger and go ahead and join the guild. But then some of them just had to make a very public attempt in Discord to cajol me into joining.

And if there's one way to get me to not do something, it's to lean on me to do that thing. 

I am very much a stoic Midwesterner, and I keep a large portion of myself private. I may be social and chatty --especially for an introvert-- but that is very much a superficial thing. I become emotional and open up with very very few people who have built up a level of trust in me. But I also have a very large contrarian streak in me. One of my previous bosses didn't understand me at first, and an ex-coworker stepped in to explain to her that "Red marches to his own drummer; he has a large amount of pride in doing things his way, and trying to force him into doing something simply won't work." Once she understood that, she changed her approach to managing me and we got along much better.

So, knowing that, you can understand why I saw that Guild push and said "Nope, screw that." You might not agree with it, but now you know where it came from.

***

So coming back to the original thoughts on this topic, the churn I've seen in MMOs is part normal, and part self-inflicted. Perhaps I can repair the self-inflicted part, but I also need to accept the "normal" part of the churn.

And for pete's sake stop trying to force me into doing things.

*The album Dante's Prayer is from, The Book of Secrets, is my favorite album of Loreena's. It's most well known for the surprise one hit wonder song, "The Mummer's Dance", and to be fair nobody --not even Loreena-- saw that one coming. However, the entire album is full of fantastic songs, from her putting the poem The Highwayman to song to the instrumental Marco Polo to Skellig to Dante's Prayer. This version shown below is from the memorial service for 100th commemoration of the Battle of Vimy Ridge in WW1 where many of her fellow Canadians perished.

 

**That incident I will not comment on; it is not my place to say, and as I've said before, I'm not a member of the guild I raid with.