Hi everyone, let me first and foremost say that this farewell post is looong overdue; as most of you may have noticed, my activity has been essentially zero for the last month or two.
I joined these forums August 1, 2011 after starting the game in February of March of the same year. I always find it amusing because it took me one day to join chat, so if you looked at my join date in chat it would say August 2, 2011, which was in fact one day off. Some stuff happened in between, but I ended up becoming a TO about 13 months later, a Councilor and Chat Mod a month or two after that (all three I have been ever since), and a GM (yeah, let's not go there) like three months after that. As far as real life goes, I'm an 18-year old Minnesotan who is attending his first of many years in college come this September (three years for my Bachelor's, two years of grad school), and there's not really much else to me but that. So there's a brief background, hope you liked it.
Anyways, from only about three or four months after joining the forums, I made good friends in Jenkar and willng3, which was slightly weird just because they were both a year or two older than me forum-wise. But anywho, I guess you could almost say that when will decided to leave about a year ago, the forums and chat got that bit less exciting for me, and when Jenkar left whenever later, it became inevitable. As you may know, I never really was a big Elements-player. I mean, as of now I have 203,389 score with 6744 games played (3507-3237) with about a fourth of a trainer's edition, but much of that was due to grinding (for example, I wanted a Gravy set) and I never really learned how to strategize or build decks well, and this explains why I had such a poor history in my PvP Events (tournaments, War, Trials, events). So basically, from roughly two years ago (keep in mind this is less than a year after I joined the forums), the main thing keeping me here was the people. No, I'm not saying that you guys are all terrible and you're making me leave, but many of my close friends here (Jenkar and will being the primary) left quite some time ago.
I guess that's the weird thing about being a "vet" is that there's a good chance a lot of your friends and people you remember best leave. I mean, I sometimes consider myself an exception to the veteran "rule", just because knowledge of my newness went away when we switched over to the .org, and becoming a TO for some reason meant that people thought I was here for much longer than I am (it was always amusing to tell people when my two-year "birthday" was coming up a year ago, just for their reactions). Veterancy isn't something that just one day hits you, it's just you realize that there's a giant slot of active people on the forums that you don't really know, and now suddenly there's almost a slight disconnect between you and half of the active community, and you now see the reason why you didn't know the "veterans" of your time as well as you may have liked.
Perhaps the one thing that changes this is staff positions. Staff positions force you to work and talk with people who joined after you did. Without turning this into a 10-page report, I can think of three such primary instances. The first is Opsinis. One of the first things my first Council did was create the position of Newsletter Writer. It had always been the Council's responsibility to create monthly (or less than so) newsletters, and because of it you would be lucky to get two of these in consecutive months. Opsinis was not really a newbie at that time, but he joined probably 6 months after I did, so I didn't really get to know him. However, when he along with whatifidogetcaught? were appointed, they surpassed everyone's expectations for their neatness, organization, and content, and we almost immediately knew we made the right choice with picking those two. Excuse the run-on paragraph, but the second such instance was with Skotadi. He's another person who wasn't exactly new when he was appointed to Bug Hunter, but he joined around the same time Opsinis did and (to the best of my knowledge) never applied for a staff position before. Without getting into specifics, he was one that we liked for his ambition and he won the voting comfortably. However, we had no idea what he would do; we didn't know that in a short amount of time he made the extremely neglected Report a Bug section (due to the previous Bug Hunter who had been inactive for quite some time) well, empty. He did everything he was supposed to do so well and cleaned up the mess so well that there were no more bugs in that section, they had all been moved to their appropriate spots. Now excuse the run-on for a second time, but the last main instance of this was Submachine. He was appointed along with Dm1321 to basically help me, as the other TOs were and still are inactive (I had been organizing and hosting tournaments by myself for basically the two months leading up to the hirings). Dm1321 had been a TO before, and if I recall correctly I even asked him once or twice (same with SpikeSpiegel) to host, which he did flawlessly. Sub, on the other hand, was fresh meat. He also had never had a staff position before, but we liked his enthusiasm and despite the servers being down for all but the first two tournaments after being appointed, he never showed boredom (a big issue when you're potentially partially responsible for hosting and creating a large number of tournaments) was always posting in the TO section.
I guess I already touched on this, but my reason for leaving isn't as simple as just one thing. I could say that the main reason I'm leaving is that many of my friends have, but while that is a big factor, it isn't the whole thing. In the end, I guess I've lost interest in a lot of this. I haven't posted in non-staff related threads in some time (excluding this), and I'm just not as excited about the lot of this as I used to be. I had a fun time being TO for those 20ish months, but now it's just time for me to move on from all of this. I'm not going under a rock nor will I be completely unreachable. If you want to talk to me just whisper/PM Iman00b8 or head to MalFunction, my regular room (where I was made a moderator just under a month ago).
So in the end, and I know I forgot to mention people that also have been great friends, thanks for a very fun 35 months.
Rawr.
-n00b
