I figured this would be a good place to announce my retirement from Tribal Wars. Probably very few of you know me, but it is for those that do which I may not be able to reach otherwise. I am still playing W87, but the dominance condition will be ticking down on that very soon and after that I will not be looking at this game again. Let me tell my story playing this game.
I started playing Tribal Wars when I was 13, about ten years ago at the start of World 1 with my, at the time, best friend at school. At that time, I never planned to take this seriously, it was just another place where a mate and I would mess around. It was trolly things like him convincing my strongest neighbour that I was weak and so he should attack me, whilst we'd brag about who was the biggest pointwhore and had the best rank on our respective continent. Soon enough, he gave up playing but I continued. I joined T:V in W1, at the time the best tribe in the game, even though I sucked donkey balls and also started an account in W2 where I joined TW11 (this was back in the time where family tribes had 12-15 branches).
It was a time before farming, before shared forums between family tribes, before skype, before scripts and Op generators. I remember T:V using Excel to plan its Ops, having external forums. I kept hopping through various tribes over the next few worlds until I ended up in what would become INSO. By this point I was not terrible at the game and the meta had started to move along. By W22, most of what we take for granted today was already known and had started to be implemented, though there were a lot of advances in scripts and the like.
It was around this point, two years later that I really started to get obsessed with TW. To many people, TW is a place to interact with people around the world and have fun over the backdrop of a war game. I was never like that due to a multitude of personal factors. To me, this game is chess. There is a beauty in something so simplistic creating such an intricate and engrossing game, a game where the result is not determined by where you come from or your status in life, but merely how good you are at the game. I desperately wanted to win, to become the best player and this would evolve into being the best leader. I'd play this game 20 hours a day, every day. Nothing mattered more than Tribal Wars, I'd not eat until I was absolutely starving, not sleep until I was absolutely shattered, I dropped out of my life. This was all for that goal, which may seem very insignificant and silly to most, but it mattered to me.
These years were the best TW I ever played. I got rank 1, I won multiple worlds, I discovered things about this game that gave me advantages over my competition just because I was that obsessed with theorycrafting it. Then the game changed.
The early TW was difficult and a lot of work. Tagging 70k incoming by hand requires an obsession and addiction to the game that cannot be found in most people nowadays. Farming was done through bookmarks. You calculated snipes by hand. You built every single building individually. I can't say it was wrong of TW to get rid of some of these more tedious tasks to make the game more accessible to the masses, but I do believe in having a skill floor, even if it is artificial. In Super Smash Brothers Melee, another game I dabble in, L-Canceling has no other purpose than to make execution of moves more difficult. It is essentially the game forcing you to make another button press. It makes accessing the peak play and perfectly executing more difficult, but conversely more rewarding.
What ended my obsession with playing TW was not pay to win itself, but the evolution of TW from a game of chess with a huge amount of depth to a mobile phone game. I can leave my account on W87 for a month and it will grow all my villages for me. All I need to do is log in, send a few nobles out once in a while and automatically tag all incomings when I get a beep on my phone. Pay to Win really sealed the deal, completing the transformation from TW into Clash of Clans. Even Tribal Wars Masters, which I was looking forward to play is now Pay to Win.
When I lost obsession with the game itself, I couldn't give it up. TW at that point was all I had, games (and anime) were all I had between me being perfectly fine and me deciding to just end it all. I'd put so much investment into this game, easily crossing 10,000 hours. You can't just walk away from that. I tried playing other games, in fact I got into League, but it wasn't the same feeling I got out of TW. Tribes at this point, around the 50s, were getting far worse, I couldn't enjoy myself in them. One of the best decisions I made was to start leading properly. I had led tribes before, but I was an awful leader. I decided to give it another go. This decision would eventually lead me to creating SPAM on W60. The first six months of SPAM, asides from the first six months I played TW, were the most enjoyment I ever had playing this game. Leading was something new, exciting, a challenge that I'd been missing. I'd eventually meet some of these people IRL and most of my friends now are from these two or three tribes.
This could only last so long though, after that I went through a plethora of tribes, never really finding the right place so I joined W87 and here is where I am at. W87 is and was a boring world. I remember thinking W85 was boring and now I understand. Rabid was just so much better than everyone else and played completely by the book with no mercy, that the world was boring. I replicated that, though I am not half the leader Garrock is, in W87. So it ends here.
I've wanted to quit for a long time, the same way though that a smoker says they will give up smoking but never does it. Now though it's over, the forums are dead, tribes are not what they used to be, earlygame is determined by the amount of premium you have, not your dedication or ability. I was never the best or even close to it, but now I don't want to be the best anymore. There is nothing that drives me to be the best at Clash of Clans, I wanted to be the best at Tribal Wars. I failed again. Nothing more to say than that.
I hope those continuing to play find some enjoyment out of this game as it spirals further into irrelevance and that the few of you that I befriended through my ten years of playing have happy and healthy lives. I'm always on skype for you guys if you need it, especially that small group of you who I've been pretty much been solely playing with for the last 8 years or so. Sorry for not making it to W100 or seeing the game finally die. I've posted close to 12,000 posts on these forums over various accounts, this will be my second last (the last being when we win W87). It was great whilst it lasted.
Dylan - Nemesis.
