I don’t think I’m angry anymore; it’s turned into a very deep disappointment.
It’s not that I feel less ‘wronged’ - I still do, very much so. I want to be angry, and I feel at some level that I probably should. Maybe I just used it all up.
I’m in my mid 40s. I started playing shortly after BC released. I had just gotten out of a very bad relationship that hadn’t been a wise choice to begin with, and I stayed in it for years longer than I should have. This game helped keep me absorbed in something outside of myself for long enough that I started to heal, and over the course of the next ten years, this game was the method by which I learned to be okay with myself again: I ended up with friends that I didn’t have before, made progress and accomplishments that felt like big deals to me, irregardless of how small they may have been to others, and realized that I did have worth.
It was in Wrath that I was kindly ‘strongarmed’ into tanking a heroic Utgarde Keep; I’d just maxed my Frost DK and my usual social group needed a tank faster than the queues were popping. That one thing that I wouldn’t have done on my own led to me main tanking that guild’s secondary Naxx 25 alongside a second Frost DK. Some of you that are newer to the game may not understand just why tanking early Naxx prog with not just one but two dual wield Frost was a big deal - yeah, DKs were still massively overpowered, but they weren’t suited for the role as well as most other tanks and a lot of people figured the entire class was just fluff, so there was a lot of derision and scorn at the time.
I still laugh a little when I’d be called out for a liar when I’d talk about our 25s being healed by a single Resto sham in a Noblegarden dress. That’s a synergy that you don’t find often in large groups, and I think it’s even less common now than it was then.
If that experience taught me that I could do amazing things, then the progression of events taught me that I can’t do everything. Once we had Naxx 25 on farm, I asked to run some of our lesser-skilled / geared members who wanted to raid but were never slotted. That raid lead position ended up being not of one, but two full-schedule prog raid teams through Trial and Ulduar. It was at that point that I completely burned out; six days a week, four hours each, was just unsustainable, so I quit.
It reinforced the understanding how critical it is that people be respected. Those left-behinds, who felt incredibly forgotten and disrespected in a place where they should have felt like they belonged, ended up being some of the best raiders that guild had seen and many were shifted into the first team.
I referred to those players as ‘my kids’, even though some were older than me, and I still think of them and hope they’re all happy and doing well.
That’s only a part of what this game, and the people in it, gave me in the first few years I was playing. It was a home in which I could relax, it was a school in where I learned that people are very squishy creatures but if properly taken care of, they can do amazing things that they never thought they could.
I think that’s why I get so riled up when I read the posts that can be boiled down to ‘it’s a game, they’re only pixels, get over it’. Yes, it is a game, but it’s been an experience too. The items that we’ve lost are just items, yes, but to a lot of us they are a (visually) tangible marker of the length of time we’ve been here, the hours we’ve put in, the places we’ve been in this game, and the people that we’ve been there with.
It’s harder to remember things when you don’t have something present to remind you.
Not everyone is a diplomat in situations like what’s happened. We’re squishy; we get hurt, we get offended, we become uncertain. It takes a lot of patience and skill to keep a level dialogue, and I don’t think it’s right to dismiss someone’s concerns or message simply because they’re speaking from a place of distress. In line with that, I don’t think there’s a single person in here that thinks badly of any of the CM or CS folks that have posted here, and I’m sorry if any of the volatility in any of the guild bank threads upset them. I don’t think that it was intentional on anyone’s part.
Linxy, Vrakthis, Kaivax, et al - if any of you felt disrespected or otherwise, then I’d like to apologize. No one should be made to feel that way.
I’ve gone on with this too long, and I’m sorry. TLDR: No, it’s not simply about the pixels.