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An abstract painting representing how I don't know how I feel in this post.

What next?

Abstract painting
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I’ve returned to a normal state as compared to where I was in the previous post

While I’m better, thanks to time, and many kind supportive comments by readers of the blog, I’m still grieving a loss. A little over a week ago, I lost my gaming community that I had been a part of on the Turtle WoW private server which I had been a part of for 7 months. While this may seem silly to feel grief over to some, and even though I knew that this gaming community was on the path to doomsday that entire time because of the lawsuit by the WoW (World of Warcraft) creators versus the Turtle WoW developers, it still hurts. I’m still figuring out how I want to write a blog post dedicated to this time as it was meaningful to me. I’m choosing not to continue with my previous community (in gaming terms a guild) to another private server with a similar experience because, frankly, I’m done playing World of Warcraft.

To raid is a multiplayer experience where you take on gaming encounters which require 20-40 players that are impossible to do without a group and build on themselves to progress to harder challenges in the game. If I was to play WoW again with them on a different but similar private server, I would have to start over again and still have the same risk of it being shut down.

Simply put, I am ready for something different. It was a lot of fun gaming with them, and I was ready to continue completing the raiding aspect of the game to its entirety in Turtle WoW for the next 7+ months, but that didn’t happen. In a way it was freeing to just give my all and really be present and dedicated as this lasted, knowing that an end was near.

I’m still on the discord server we used all this time so I can talk to people I knew, but its not the same anymore. This experience is exactly like being laid off from a job where you had good working relationships with many people. You may stay friends with some, however for most of the people you worked with, you won’t see them again. Life has changed and everyone is too.

Unlike job lay offs, it is possible that sometime in the future, I may feel differently and play with these people again. For now, though, I don’t. I’m bitter and angry at Blizzard and Microsoft who sued the Turtle WoW developers. While the lawsuit will not shutdown the TWoW servers until May 15th, that news and the official response by TWoW crashed the active population of players on the server I played, with the active player averages dropping from 5-6k per day, to 500-600 hundred when I last played. That is a problem because that 500-600 players were spread across 1-60 levels, leading to making groups or buying necessary items on the in game auction house statistically impossible.

It was digital genocide.

It’s a complex situation, and I will go into it in detail in a future post. For now, I am in this ambiguous place where the major things in my life that were supportive, engaging, or a community are in the past and have ended this year. I was laid off from my job, I completed my college classes earning a degree, and now my gaming community and hobby has ended. Sometimes I’m in alexithymia mode, and don’t have the capacity to describe everything I’m feeling because my brain is still processing it and in the motions of creating a narrative that fits.

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