OOC: Leaving TSW

I have been thinking about leaving TSW for about half a year for now and today I am making public what a lot of you probably have noticed already. I am leaving TSW.

It was not an easy decision.

In fact, it has been a really tough one. I loved this community, I loved this game and it has been an incredibly large part of my life for the last 4 years.

I have made many friends here and some of them I now count among the closest that I have in my life. I really hope that we can stay in touch with each other, that our friendships extend beyond a single game.

Will I be gone completely?

I considered that for a while. Most part of this year I planed to have Rovena killed / commit suicide and leave forever.

But I won’t.

There are a few factors that changed my mind:

How active will I remain?

For most things I just won’t be there anymore but until Dak has found some good officers for the Phoenix Group and an IC replacement for Rovena I will remain active as PG officer. To a degree.

I will try to make it to all cabal events and help Dak where I can when it comes to redoing the website and recruiting new people.

But there won’t be any more events run by me or personal plots pushed forward.

Especially this means:

If you want to reach me, twitter DMs, google talk / hangouts and email are your best options.

Why am I leaving?

I was thinking a lot about how much I want to to talk about my reasons. Some are very personal and some might make the game / the community sound a worse than it is.

I am a rather public figure and with that comes responsibility. I do not want to cause a huge debate or stir up old drama. Most things stated below are just personal opinions, matters of taste and should be taken as those.

Personal Reasons

I am a very private person and if you never heard of those, it does not mean I don’t trust you or you are not my friend. I am just very uncomfortable talking about them.

My dad has COPD (sometimes called smoker’s lung) in the final stage. He needs to be permanently connected to oxygen and a lot care by now. Thing are getting worse again and we as family will have to take a larger toll than before.

Another issue I am facing is increased stress at work. NDAs, like always, prohibit me from going into details but it is bad enough that I am strongly considering to change careers again.

That all coupled with health issues of my own and a returning depression and a burnout … I have a lot on my plate in RL these days.

RP used to be my hiding place from all of that and sometimes I even hid far too much in the last years. But for over six month now, it has not been a happy place for me anymore. It just added to my anxiety and to my stress levels.

The game

I could go on for days why I don’t like the game anymore from a gamplay / missions perspective. Why I think they coat every good idea in so many bad it is getting worse and worse with every patch.

But there is no gain in that. In the end it all comes down to personal preferences and tastes. And for me, TSW slowly but steadily went from “the best MMO period” to a game I can not stand playing for longer than an hour a week since the release of Tokyo.

I loved the scenarios and AEGIS from a gameplay point of view. But the stories are in large parts not what I enjoy anymore. The random bags and a few other things made me stop pouring more money into the game (I still spend close to 2.5k € on TSW so not like I did not support it).

What broke TSW for me was the token refactor / group finder patches. Since then I am face a large amount of hostility and elitism that I was able to dodge before.

I tried to force myself to play regularly for over half a year now and yes, I had some fun doing that, especially when with friends or when being lucky with the random group.

But I am a hardcore kinda gamer. If I play a game, I really play it. Like several hours a day, for years. And in most of these hours, TSW has been a pain for me. Time to move on.

I still will get my occasional fun with friends (at least I hope to) but I won’t devote that much of my life to a game I don’t enjoy anymore.

(Hint: Yes, some might have guessed it, SC is my new ‘main’ game.)

The RP Community

First thing first: Most of you are the best people I have ever met in a gaming community. You are why I have been around this long!

But the community changed over the last year. We have a lot more OOC drama, more mixing of OOC & IC, a lot less staying true to the game lore. More very verbal special snowflake characters I have to ignore.

Or maybe I just see more of it. Or maybe it is because I am targeted more often by bullying. Maybe it is just my depression taking hits harder than they are.

It does not matter, it increases my anxiety and makes me feel very bad about even looking at twitter or logging in.

I have been living in a bubble where I kinda was able to ignore most of these things because of the awesome RPers around me. Dak, Spell, Nully I have played so incredibly intense scenes with you, but always managed to stay on good terms OOC, we took care of each other after a scene. I can not stress enough how much you three should be seen as a role model. You are how I want my RP partners to be.

Of course there were a lot more people that kept me happy and I thank you all!

The RP Meta

When I joined the English RP scene* most RP was had ingame, in the ingame chat and all around the world. Socializing in London and missions in the field. Most RP happened in real time (aka IC right when it happened OOC) and it was quite common to walk into an ongoing plot.

*(I won’t talk about the German’s back then, differences between German & International RP communities would be worth another article.)

This is pretty much how I enjoy my RP. You have a clear timeline and are taking advantage of the MMO nature of the game.

I started to have a few RPs in skype and etherpad. For occasionally sprinkled in RP fixes when one person was not able to get ingame this was perfect. Especially since it felt much like ingame RP with a fast response cycle. In etherpads you even were able to interrupt your partner when your character would. A really nice dynamic that I only fully played out with one, maybe 2 people.

What it comes to is: For me RP is a task for full attention to be able to truly immerse myself into it. That does not mean a bit casual RP while at work or something like that can not be fun but to intense plots / scenes need to be focused for me to really enjoy.

And this is something that seems to have changed. I have been part of so many drawn out, unfocused gdoc RPs, so many chats that took ages to develop. It just breaks my immersion and with that takes the fun away for me. I finish the scenes, sure but mostly because I committed to them and not because I enjoy it. (Notable exception: Charlie’s recent play by post. That was mind blowing.)

The slow moving plots often result in a lot time wiggly stuff that again, breaks my immersion. I enjoy telling a story from beginning to end, I’m not a fan if they jump in timeline in books or tv shows. And in RP, where is also is causing a lot logic issues (ohh Rov should not have been at party X last weeks Tuesday because she was in hospital that day since she got shot the weekend before. But we just finished the scene so I did not know … ) it makes things a lot worse for me.

I need a suspense of disbelief. Things like magic and all that are perfectly fine, but logic holes, frequent retconing due to unfinished scenes, characters / creatures that are defined differently in lore … all that makes it harder to enjoy a scene for me.

Sadly all of it is much more around in my ‘bubble’ these days.

Conclusion

Nearly all parts that I enjoyed in TSW have changed. I won’t say for the worse, because I know a lot people like it better this way, these people are just not me. It is a matter of personal taste.

Time for me to move on or at least take a longer break.

Like mentioned above, I still will be around for PG things but gone otherwise from now on. I hope we still stay in contact.

And if not:

Thank you for the wonderful 4 years!