Colder...

At it's peak, World of Warcraft had 12 Million active subscribers. I have to give it to the programmers and designers at Blizzard. That is entirely too many people to keep happy at once. Some people fussed about how easy WoW had become at the end of Wrath because they were catering to the casuals, others fussed about how Blizzard made WoW too hard in Cataclysm. Between the articles, comments on articles, YouTube Videos and forum posts, the uproar from the player base was at an all time high.




For me, it was kind of a fun circus to watch, including my own personal quips, I mean come on, who doesn't enjoy a good online squabble?....That is, until it hit a little closer to home.

Several of the people in our guild, including my closest friends that I had been spending a good 15-30 hours a week with online announced they were quitting the game, and never coming back.

I had always been friendly with people in the guild, but always had that 'meh, it's online, people come and go all the time' attitude, even the ones that I considered 'best' friends.

The announcement that so many of them were quitting at the same time came as a shock to my social circle that was almost as bad as if it happened in the flesh. That's when I realized these people were more than just 'online' people, and I was going to miss them terribly. I wasn't going to hear their voices, I wasn't going to be able to raid with them again. They were just gonna be, gone.

I'm not one for listening to country music all the time, but for some reason, this one song kept appearing when I would scan through stations on the radio. I finally sat down and listened to it. I knew it was the one, the song that was 'Goodbye'.

I had been using Fraps to capture videos ever since the first one, so I had a ton of clips to go through. I was able to convince one of the guys that was leaving to help me finish out the rest of the video. It was quite an undertaking, because some of the shots I wanted could only come from his end, due to Cataclysm phasing issues in certain zones. His computer was a lot better than mine, and the shots he did were stunning.

The file sizes, tho, were HUGE. I got a dropbox account set up to try to find a way for him to get his shots to me, but then we ran into his ISP limiting his bandwidth due to the amount of data he was uploading. I'm sure to them, they thought we were trying to pass copyrighted materials (kind of like in the old Napster days). 3 days of uploading and 2 days of downloading we decided that was enough. Here is is 2011, and we still can't pass data in a timely manner without ISP hiccups. So much for collaboration when you live 1000 miles away from the other person.

Threadjack 1:
Putting together this video was the first time I had really put my heart and soul into a production since I was probably 7 years old (1977). Back then we lived in a really old farmhouse out in the boonies of Missouri. This house was like 100 years old, dusty, falling apart, cold air seeped in everywhere. That was the year my mom was sick a lot, and so I spent a lot of time alone while she slept.

This house had a huge fireplace with a rock hearth that was almost half my height.

Edit: Found a pic of it!

I used to put on this Marty Robbins record, and stand on the fireplace hearth and pretend to sing to the crowd.





Oh I knew I would never make a career of singing and dancing. I wasn't near pretty enough, and had a terrible singing voice (still do). This was before MTV was around, but I knew that I enjoyed listening to a song, and making up the visual story in my head.

I did try to convince my teacher to let me put on a dance to this song for the talent show, but she thought it was a bit too hard core of a song for a bunch of 7 year olds to be exposed to. I ended up not doing anything for the talent show that year.

Threadjack 2:
Now that I think about it, that explains why this part of this song has been stuck in my head lately.....

B.o.B - Airplanes Part. 2

I guess there must be a reason why I missed my plane. I just haven't found it yet.

Back on Topic:

I was trying to get the video done before they were gone for good. Everyone's time was running out on their game cards, and they weren't going to renew.

I didn't have time to make it spruced up, or to play with the Model Viewer. I was only focused on the videos matching the words, and matching the times we spent together. A memorial of this snapshot of our lives at this moment in time.




At the same time that the video was done, Blizzard announced Transmog and other fun features of 4.3, and all of the people that were getting ready to leave decided to stay.

I was honored when WoW Insider featured it.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/09/14/wow-moviewatch-colder/

It's almost kind of bittersweet, knowing that the passion that fueled that creativity is actually something people can relate to. It's too late in the game of life to do anything with it, but as long as I can share it, that is satisfaction enough, for me.