Gone But Not Forgotten

Today I transferred Justisraiser from the server Mannoroth to the server Malygos.  There are a few reasons why, and I'm sure I'll get into them in a future entry.  Not today, though.

Today I want to talk about the people I'm leaving behind.

Except for a brief two month period in August-September 2009 when I momentarily lost sanity and thought it would be a good idea to start my own guild, my entire raid experience has been PUG-driven.  This wasn't as bad as most people seem to think it is.  I quickly learned the warning signs of bad PUGs (another likely future blog post) and for the most part I had positive experiences.  I was never going to be on the forefront of progression, but I'm not good enough to join a guild on the forefront of progression anyway.  And I got to raid and experience content on my own time, with no guild and schedule to commit to.

If PUGs ever made me feel bad, it was actually because they were a *good* experience.  I'd join one, the other players would be cool, and we'd kill some bosses, get some loot, have a lot of laughs, and I realized I couldn't just log on next week at the same time and repeat the experience.  It was the equivalent of having a great first date with a girl and then her telling you she was moving to Austrailia that weekend.  All I could do was exchange numbers (ie. add them to my friends list) and promise to call, but chances are I'd never see her (them) again.

But there was always a possibility I could see them again, and occassionally when the stars aligned that would happen.  I'd get a whisper and they'd invite me to some other raid.  Sometimes I'd join a group and I'd see them say, "hey, this was that pro Holy Paladin I was telling you about."  Sometimes their guilds even tried to get me to join.  While that was always good for an ego boost, they always raided on some Eastern time schedule and it would never work for me.  Now that I think about it, I was always the one telling people I had to go back to Austrailia that weekend.

But now on another server, I'm not just moving to Austrailia, I'm going to a completely parallel dimension.  Even if my schedule never synchronized with someone I had joined a PUG raid with, they were always just a "/w" away from establishing any sort of communication, or even using using in-game mail.  But now I'm gone with absolutely no way of getting in touch with them.  I debated asking some of them for their e-mail addresses, but decided it was kind of pointless.  I know next to nothing about the personal lives about these people, so what kind of conversations could I even have with them?  Play any good videogames lately?  Oh, World of Warcraft, I think I've heard of that one...

So I didn't do much in terms of goodbyes and keeping in touch, but it's wrong to say that they're out of sight and out of mind.  Some part of me wonders if they'll ever realize I even left, perhaps when they realize Justisraiser has mysteriously vanished from their friends list, but I doubt I'll have even that much significance to them.  But they did have that much significance to me, and much more.

So to all you raiders in Mannoroth, it's been a lot fun.  Thanks for letting me into your raids and thanks for all the good times.  Best of luck, and may your loot always be epic.