My resignation, and an apology of sorts

Greetings everyone,

For all intents and purposes I had already left Istaria over 3 months ago, but at the time I didn't tell anyone about it and now I don't want my friends to be left wondering what happened to me and why, especially once they see my lair disappear a few weeks later when my last sub runs out.

Those of you who have been frequenting the discord over the past 2-3 years already know who I was and no introduction is needed there; others who haven't been using the discord much might instead recognize me by the ingame name of Baalthus the red dragon, and/or his gnome s-, er, "crafting assistant" Tinkero, or less commonly my other dragons Daelun or Zuranthus.

Looking back on things, I'd say the "beginning of the end" was about a year and a half ago, which also happens to have been around the time the combat overhaul was first announced, even though in the end it was not one of the reasons why I decided to leave.
No, while I certainly disagreed with some parts of the overhaul, as a whole I think it looked quite promising at the time I left, and I'm sure that Amon (Jason) and his team will be able to make it good eventually even if it does end up taking a long time to fully "polish" yet.

Along the way there were also numerous other smaller changes (most of them not related to the overhaul) that I disagreed with Amon and the rest of the team about, such as the red potion change, gift scroll changes, attunement changes, etc. - although I found some of these quite annoying and unfortunate, these were certainly not the kinds of disagreements that I would quit Istaria over, certainly not when considered on their own (de)merits; although they ultimately did play some part in my decision to leave by slowly but gradually draining my motivation to keep playing.

The general uncertainty surrounding the overhaul back then certainly did not help matters any, and neither did the notoriously gamebreaking "DoT bug", although ultimately I consider those to have been "contributory causes" at most - in the sense that these further drained me of motivation to play and I ended up more in the discord instead of spending my free time ingame, which as you can see below, didn't go too well at all.

In the end, without a doubt the most barbaric blow was one that I had inflicted myself, by unwisely and repeatedly getting involved on the discord in discussing biped related issues.
That was not only very foolish of me, because ultimately I had no personal stake in the issue, as my biped began existence as a pure crafter and was never seriously meant to be anything else but.
No, it was not merely unwise - it turned out to be particularly destructive, as this ended up doing a lot of damage, quite negatively affecting my mutual relations with the community over an issue I should have not gotten involved into in the first place.

If anyone's curious just how bad it was - well, at the time I left the discord and deleted my account, I think about half of the biped mains in the discord had me on their blocklist; and vice versa, as I generally go by a rule that anyone who blocks me for any reason gets the same treatment in return. The Istaria general chat on my client started to look more like a declassified CIA document because of all the [REDACTED].

As if that wasn't bad enough, even my closer friends and guildies ended up getting caught up in the collateral damage from my carelessness, including at least two former biped mains (and former guildmasters) who quit Istaria in considerable frustration, at least in part due to certain changes that I consider myself responsible for - at least as far as I can reasonably claim responsibility for any ingame changes, having never been formally part of the dev team; however these changes were made in accordance with my feedback so I take full responsibility there.

Yet at the same time, I could not reasonably bring myself to stay silent on all biped related issues - as unlike what some might more or less jokingly assert, bipeds are not really "an entirely different game" (in the sense of "2 completely different games in 1") since they are expected to interact with dragons in various ways, some of them very much by design (ie. the complementary aspects of crafting); and even the very existence of bipeds as a playable race itself imposes some restrictions and limitations on what dragons can and cannot become - such as the limitation of not being able to ever have aerial combat for dragons (any purely technical difficulties aside).

For a long time, I've done a lot to improve the dragon aspect of Istaria in more or less direct ways - by helping other players in/directly, or reporting countless bugs, helping devs with testing, etc.
And while that I consider to have been generally a success on my part, I feel that this has come at an unacceptable price of heavy collateral damage - and by the time I came to understood that, the situation was already too deteriorated to be salvageable anymore for the most part.
It's one thing for me to help improve the dragons while more or less ignoring and "merely tolerating" the bipeds, but already long ago this started to become actively damaging to bipeds instead, even if that was not originally my intention, and arguably was never consciously my intention at any point.

It also certainly does not help that I do not see any feasible way to "fix" this fundamental biped/dragon conflict in any plausible way - and most certainly not in any way that would not result in greatly angering much if not most of the existing playerbase; generally I supported Choloqtzin's then-current view that the "best" way would be to remove or otherwise obsolete bipeds and move all the biped schools to Khutit form instead - but let's face it, better bring your [Dragon's Winter Scarf] along, as it'll be one VERY cold day in the Realm of Fire when that happens.
I don't think I even need to explain why that would be completely unacceptable as a "solution", and most certainly I do not want to even bring up the biped vs dragon subject ever again, since by now I fully understand that any further attempt by me to do so will ultimately only end poorly and cause even more harm. At this point I wouldn't even try to touch that with somebody else's 20 foot adamantium pole, but it's far too late for that now.

So there you have it.
Nothing good ever comes from war, and I have already done more than enough damage here.
At this point there is nothing else left for me to do other than formally resign, and wish all of you the best of luck.

I would also like to say thank you to everyone who had helped me during all of my numerous (mis)adventures, and of course to the dev team for having made all of that possible in the first place.