The Centre Cannot Hold...

A couple days ago, tehm quit.

Or rather, he decided to go on an extended sabbatical, as some political animals on the global B! channel put it.

Quit in the ATITD context is a little strong. It implies a hissy fit of drama, and an official click-click of menus to immediately cancel billing, which immediately boots you out of Egypt access, no "ten days still remaining" crap like other MMOs who have a commercial impetus to suck as much money as they can from as many people as possible.

So no, tehm didn't really quit. His account is still paid. It might patiently cease to exist if he stops the billing at some point, and his name fade away into the annals of history like hundreds of other people (me included, on shard A.)

What he has declared in his bio (or /info) is that he's taking a break. Possibly for good.

I happen to be one of three other people in his home guild who have a more in-depth knowledge of exactly what drove the decision, by virtue of being in his home guild and overhearing a chat 12 hours ago.

Alas, my skewed timezone only gives a partial chat, so I don't have all the facts, but basically, he seemed to have come to a realization that ATITD was draining all of his time, it was an addiction that he didn't have the discipline to moderate, and he had been out of a job for a year so it was way past time to sally forth and face real life and go for some job interviews.

At which point, my only impulse would be to cheer the guy on and say go for it. We'll miss ya. We wish you'd come back in a more moderate fashion when your life allows, but when the gaming is eating into actual RL functioning, it crosses into addiction territory and it's time to stop and face what you've been avoiding using the game as an escape.

So in that sense, it is a good decision, personally and on an individual scale.

For the virtual social community though, it is a little more of a hollow loss, since he was one of the centres, the drivers, the hubs, the whateveryoucallems that gel together social networks by virtue of knowing everybody and everyone recognising them, etc.

Virtual Egypt B will be a little quieter now that he's chosen not to play.

I'm still hanging in there, by virtue of the fact that I've got lots on my plate being a one-man guild, but as I mentioned, for others who thrive more on the social interaction, that's going to come as a big enough blow that they may start thinking it's no longer worth hanging about.

Folks may start to peel away at the edges, who knows.

See, we hit another bottleneck for the past few weeks. We need to find lithium. So far, we're not getting any handholding like we did for silver, and we probably won't, because a number of GMs and folks have made it very loudly clear on B! that they don't want the handholding, it's within our ability to find. So most likely Teppy will listen.

I'm content enough to wait as is, but who knows if others might.

I've always wondered. Shard B is populated by quitters. :) Or rather, the fallout from those who lost interest and lost the will quickest. Or those who found something way more interesting and renumerating to partake in, if we look from another perspective.

If they quit once, why not a second time?

Will the plummeting population be even more drastic than the steady decline on shard A?