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I wanted to have fun.
#1
I'm pretty sure that's how all of us ended up here.

I was pretty sick of retail by the time I left it during Wrath. I wasn’t entirely sure why; I just got bored, I guess. It seemed like the roleplay was stagnating some on my server. I had some friends, but there was infighting that cropped up, and bad blood that sorta sent them apart from one another. It was awkward. I tried to get in touch with them some, but it really wasn’t the same. They went inactive or just stopped roleplaying, and I was still pretty nubbish when it came to actually –playing- WoW back then.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=world+of+warcraft+r...ate+server


So I did the above. Still has the same top result as it did in 2009. In four days that I’ll have been on CotH for four years. I actually wasn’t active at all after I registered the first time. I got on after editing my realmlist and was afraid that I’d somehow get pinched by Blizzard for jostling between retail and CotH, and I was too much of an introvert to actually try and meet people. I joined chat, said hi, looked around a bit, but eventually I just left and ran back to do dailies on retail for a month or so.

Retail didn’t get any better, though. I palled around with the one friend of mine who still roleplayed, but it was just awkward. We were really more adherent to lore, and at the time there was this guild roaming around with inexplicable popularity that had their own island kingdom and goddess that was going to cause the Cataclysm. So dealing with that was strange. After a while I got fed up with it again. I pretty much stopped playing Retail proper for a while if I remember correctly, and got on CotH full time. Ish. I made a gnome named Jalhalla who was some sort of weird semi-paladin but not really gnome who fought like a knight, despite the fact that a gnome really probably couldn’t do much waving a weapon around on a horse. I made Rigley too, and bumbled around being awkward and writing journals where I scribbled down pictures that I thought were pretty funny, and hopefully made other people laugh to.

Rigley was an interesting character to work on, and I probably developed a lot of him here. Before on retail he was pretty inconsistent. I basically went through multiple drafts of him; at one point he was a former scarlet [because I was a WoW roleplaying noob, and that was totally original!], a beefheaded warrior who ran on lolrandom humor and behavior, and finally a diver. Just a diver on retail; he didn’t really pick up any of those stranger mannerisms he has now until near the end, and even then those were on the cusp of Random! humor up until I brought him to CotH and began to figure out his story.

Because a roleplay community means people are going to judge that more, right? I didn’t want to look stupid. I knew I was already treading water with my gnome, who stank of being ‘x race, but not’.

He worked out. Surprisingly, for being a character who was threatened with being shanked shortly after being out the gate. I nudged him slowly into roleplay, getting him put into a Gnomeregan guild [where he was distanced from, reasonably so for being just –weird-], and later I put him in Shipwrecked. And somehow, I actually managed to get him out there interacting with people and being his oddball self. He made a raft, it fell apart, and then he went through his slow mental degradation while trying to be chummy with people.
There were also GMs there. They terrified me. I was pretty sure I was going to get banned or told to leave at some point. Because that’s how I roll.

Fun times.



Wilt was my next ‘main character’ Or maybe Jovana. Then Endling, though I deleted her after not really knowing what to do with her. I joined the Bloodsworn Honorguard and met cool people. BrutalSkars, ChampionMouse, Hawk, Esthrunil, DannyHero, Clovis, Krilari, Loxmardin, Apheteros, I’m probably omitting a ton of people. So I won’t try to say that list is complete. I had a lot of fun. We rolled around Northrend and fought stuff. I got to blow up undead with cleaning supplies, and beat down a blue drakanoid boss with a broom.

It was fun. I had a lot of fun. Then one day I was told I was getting banned.


...Which was a joke. Instead I was being asked to be a GM. I had pretty much no credentials for this. I had tried my best to avoid most GMs, had a irregularly updated journal for one of my characters, and the idea of how to build or even do a simple command over a medium like WoW was a nebulous and strange idea to me. Effectively the only reason I can see by looking back through the thread on my promotion to trial was ‘hey this guy is swell’.

I had no idea what I was doing, but it was fun. I went through my trial period doing... mostly profiles, since that was kinda the lot you were given as a trial back then. We were basically forum helpers, with the caveat that one day we’d be ripe enough to be full greens! Or blue, since there was a differentiation back then. I chose to be the less higher ranked GM, because dealing with interpersonal issues and putting my boot down to troublemakers scared me. I figured I would go make events and try to build some houses somewhere, and maybe I could not get booted from the team for allowing something stupid through.

There was drama shortly after I was promoted, and I was deathly afraid of Grakor (who mostly hid in the GM ventrillo chat), but uh. It was fun. I learned to build stuff and started making things. I actually can’t remember what I did first. It may have been work on Azshara Crater; I know I ended up making an arena there, which was a neat little job. I know I was eventually given the go-ahead to make some place called Mimiron’s Anchorage, which... didn’t really work. Scheduling issues meant that I wasn’t around when the thing launched, and as a result it was put out to sail without its designer being able to run events for the thing.

But hey, it was good experience building. And while it became a running joke with how useless and poorly planned the place was, it was still something I was fairly proud of. The important thing was that I had ideas, man. Fun ideas. Ideas I could put my back behind and try and produce something with. I was really proud of that, even if they never did really reach their fullest potential. I remember writing out scripts and event lines—an extension to the Bubonic Bay event which was never implemented, a second half of the Battlefield: Khaz Modan storyline which I didn’t undertake, several events in both that series and the Stonetalon one in which I had planned out all these nifty little plots and missions that... well, in hindsight were cut for a reason, because you can only do so much with NPCs before the players begin feeling auxiliary or as viewers of someone else’s story.

I joined Kidnapped 2 on Endling and made her a character, then took her to Skin Thieves and tugged at heart strings. I started a new journal which eventually turned into a later aborted prestige thread, and wrote some of the sappiest and saddest stuff I’ve produced yet.

Man, that was fun.



I experimented with events. I tried out something called Dungeoneer, which was a fairly well-received if very time consuming idea. I ran that for a while before ditching it, trying out the aforementioned war events sometime after to try and inject some energy into the war aspect of WoW. It didn’t really work too well.

After another run of Kidnapped and watching a ton of Amnesia and reading SCP and Slenderman stuff, I ended up making Northwind. It was a strange concept which started with me just building a town. I don’t know if I actually asked for permission before building it, I just made stuff and then asked Kretol if I could keep it. It went through a few different ideas; it was going to be a player-ran town at one point. Then it was going to be my response to the desire for a ‘lawless town’ after. Then I started thinking about doing events with it, since it had becoming a fairly massive affair by the time I was done, and it was something I desperately wanted to see put to work.

I made Northwind, and it was probably the biggest success I’ve had through the whole run of my events and GM-ship in general. I ran single-person stuff at first, trying to be all introspective IC and creepy. Then I ran a big event [the only big event of my own] with Grakor’s help, and we clocked a ton of people into it. It was during break for me; I remember that every day during the entire week long run I would get up and rush over to the keyboard. I’d log on and check what people were doing, and I’d start playing monsters and interacting with as many people as I could. Every day of that event I tried to do all I could to make that place –live-. People liked it. I liked it. I was really proud. Grakor-senpai noticed me and we pulled his Skin Thieves event into it.



Then I just sorta stopped. I noticed that I really wasn’t roleplaying much anymore. A lot of my friends weren’t really buddy buddy with me like they had been before, because I’d been too busy to do much with them. There wasn’t any bad blood, they just sorta... drifted off. A good few of them did.

We got the Custom Patch shortly before the launch of Northwind’s big event, and I just went back to building after. I made mansions, forts, two cities, and then just stopped. I don’t know if I just burned myself out, or if I legitimately too busy with college and other obligations to spend time on CotH. For a while I was mostly lurking and building occasionally on the side. Then I was just lurking.

I was like that for a while. I talked about being unmotivated, got back into Retail and pined for the Catalcysm, and went on and off between projects and other such stuff. Funny enough it’s these more recent events that I’m having difficulty fully recalling. It’s probably the nostalgia from further back that has me, or perhaps I just wasn’t putting as much effort and interest into the more recent going-ons.


I don’t really know. But we’re coming up to the present. And there’s a lot of feelings and thoughts I had for my time on CotH, but I can’t say I know if I feel them much at all now. I’ve had the problem before on CotH of getting too emotionally invested in things. I became depressed with a lot of drama storms because I took personal responsibility for things. I thought ‘if I had done this for this player, they wouldn’t be leaving’, or ‘if I had paid attention to this, things would be fine’. It wasn’t my fault, not any more than it was the rest of the GM team; a collective failing of the whole, but not something every person needed to be accountable for.

But that’s how I am. I’m part of a unit, and when that unit is criticized I take it as criticism of me as well. The issue with this and the storms of Drama that came through is that this wasn’t an assignment from a teacher being evaluated, or a performance on my violin that I could tweak or improve on. I was being given complaints that I, myself, the sole person of Rigley, could not make a difference on. I could hope a lot that things got better. I could even try to push the team and myself in the right direction. But I think everyone was just slowing down, myself included. I wanted badly for things to improve, and tried to do so. But I would burn out again, and I think others did as well.

I could be wrong, but that’s my thought on it. We weren’t able to keep up, and I felt as if things were crumbling. I personally didn’t help things. I looked at threads that needed attention and let others handle them. In my head I rationalized it pretty strictly. I was going to college. I had a job. So when I got home I wanted to do fun things; build, draw, other such stuff. So I let other people handle the tougher work. And I just ignored when people needed opinions from the team. I saw private discussions I probably should have commented on, but didn’t. And then when drama happened, I blamed myself. And got depressed. And unmotivated. And then I did nothing.

So on, so forth. It’s still about the same. I do things, I come home, and I log in. I watch the Skype chat crawl by and think of things I should do, but probably won’t. I look at builds I have partially done, and at drama on the forums. And I don’t know where to start.

And I was sad.



This is five pages in Word right now. It’s about to hit six, and so far it’s been me rambling about my past on CotH and being nostalgic over things that I miss. I don’t think I can do it anymore. I’ve already relegated myself to builder only. So I guess that can be official now.

I’m probably done. I’ll continue working on outstanding builds if permitted [so that no one is left to pick up that slack], and may try to remain available if any assistance is needed in that vein of work, so long as Kretol allows it. But I think I’m done. I haven’t been roleplaying at all either way, and all I’ve gotten out of logging on to view the forums is grief.

I won’t even go into why. I could rail at the community and talk about how I feel the playerbase is treating the GMs, or how the GMs are treating the playerbase. But I’m tired, and to do that would just leave more of a bad taste in our mouths. So instead I just thought about when things weren’t so glum for me here.


Have fun, guys. Thanks for reading. Sorry.
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#2
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnZbKOc7EXA[/youtube]
Quote:[8:53AM] Cassius: Xigo is the best guy ever. he doesn't afraid of anything.
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#3
Words can't really describe how this makes me feel, so, have a gif.

[Image: Sad-rapunzel-gif.gif]
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#4
(11-11-2013, 09:09 PM)Rigley Wrote: Have fun, guys. Thanks for reading. Sorry.

You've nothing to apologize for, Rigley. We'll try to bring the fun back here.
[Image: 6RpTZgI.gif]
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#5
But...but...

M-my waifu...
[Image: yEKW9gB.png]
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#6
This is very sad.

... But it is probably for the better that you're stepping back. This place has been going through rough patches, especially of late, and it's not being very healthy to any of us. It's better to step back while you still can and perhaps look to making a return in the future once things settle. If they ever will; it's hard to say at this point.

You're still a pretty swell guy. I regret not getting to know you better or talking to you more, because I did always admire you, what you do and the things you've managed to create. Don't put yourself down with the rest of our mistakes; you don't deserve that.

Have a good one. <3
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#7

A fitting song, IMO. To the subject, your story is, somehow, similar to mine. I am sad, as well, seeing such a great person take his 'leave'. But, as Lox said, it's probably for the better. Swell guy, are you still, master Rigley. May the Force be with you. Peace.
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