Yup. It's time for me to bid farewell to the community. It's strange, after having spent so much time on this game and forum, accumulating so many cards and meeting so many friends that I'm going to leave it all behind, but that's just the way it is I suppose.
Probably the biggest reason that I'm going to be leaving is failures. As many of you know, I've spent a lot of time on this forum besides just posting; I've tried to create, build, and innovate, and seeing a lot of those projects bring nothing to fruitation really stings.
The main part of the game is to grind, and honestly, it eventually wears on everyone. I don't find myself having the time or motivation to get 800,000 more points or collect trainer edition. It's just too time-consuming and boring to continuously grind either false gods or the arena.
One of the things I enjoyed a lot on this forum was the CI&A section, allowing users to post their own ideas of cards and critique each others'. To me, that felt like one of the most creative and interesting parts that the forum had to offer, which elements were missing what? What unique ideas would we see? I've made a lot of cards, good ones, and bad ones, and to be honest, having only one of my cards actually move past the crucible level feels really frustrating to me. Apparently my ideas aren't just too well embraced by the community, so I'm abandoning that section.
As for deckbuilding, that was supposed to be another crucial element of the community, coming up with new ideas and strategies. However, with the relatively few updates to the game, the decks created can only stagnate with time. The decks that I've created are hardly great, super original (I've found out later that my decks resembled older decks very closely), or even that fun. I know I sound like that patent officer who resigned because he felt everything worthwhile had been done already, but here, where there are no new raw materials to build from, innovation can only get so far.
This led me to the Wiki. How many people actually visit the wiki, or even know one exists? I felt a strong connection to the wiki ever since I read the articles written on it when I first started. I wanted to write good articles on it just like previous writers, and that's what I did, writing a lot of card articles, as well as other articles. But how many are actually seen? Is the wiki just an esoteric collection of pages that nobody even knows about? I've revived the weekly featured card to help bring more viewing of the wiki, but visiting and wiki usage is still too lukewarm.
The last part of the forums, where the "meat" of it was supposed to be, I don't think I really ever got into. PvP was where the true creativity and thinking of the game came from, but I don't think I fully enjoyed it. PvP turned me off from the beginning with the long load time during a game, and finding a reasonable time with opponents is also hard. As for tournaments, I don't think I could ever cut out such a huge chunk of time in one sitting on a weekend. The one time that I did go in the tourney room at a good time, it was canceled. I've done competitive battling in both BL and CL, but the decks that are often used are trite. Good decks get used, and in their constant usage, they become boring and repetitive, eventually turning the metagame into a rps meta, not to mention the prevalence of shards everywhere.
War seems to be the biggest event of the forum, but it never really stuck out to me. I've been in two wars (and gotten last place in both! Whee!), and I never did see the true fun of it. It had the same problems with PvP and time finding and I suppose I never really did get into it. Trials was supposed to be some place where one could show their ability, and I hoped to use trials as a place to show that I had the ability and power as a player and member of the community instead of some talentless bigmouth. I just wish my last contribution to the forum was a bang instead of a whimper.
In short, there were a lot of things that I wanted to be and do, and seeing most, if not all of them come out in vain hurts. Perhaps it's good that I can leave a white-text member who has achieved nothing, because that way I have no big ties keeping me back. When a place has more memories of failures than fun, it is really quite frustrating. I might not leave forever; I might visit now and then, but don't expect to see me racking up posts like I did when I started. I just really hope that people, if only a single person, can find something useful or interesting in everything that I've done instead of knowing me as "just that spammer."
