What's up with Zuluhed?

Had an in-game whisper the other night asking if I still keep up my blog. It was sad to admit that no, I haven't been writing or posting here.

Thinking about the whys and whatevers, it isn't a lack of motivation. Just a feeling that I'd started repeating myself. Looking at why, I realized that a big part of the repeating came from the very nature of the server Azune lives on...Zuluhed has a bad habit of repeating itself.

A smaller server tends to attract and keep the same types of people. Stubborn people. Although there are other types who end up here by accident, the stubborn factor plays a big part in whether or not they leave the moment their toon can travel again. Some people are stubborn when they arrive, others develop that aspect of their personality slogging through the hostile trade chat posts, the eternally disenchanted forum posts, and the endless rounds of attempting to put together a pug.

And stubborn people, by their very nature, tend to repeat behaviors. And it got a little tiring writing about the same bad behavior over and over again. After all, I'm not the server mom...which means I'm not here to beat on a behavior until it changes. I'm a participant as well as an observer, but definitely not a psychiatrist trying to fix the server population. And my posts were starting to feel like psychiatric sessions dealing with the same bad behaviors over and over again.

But a strange thing happened not too long ago...we lost a little bit of that wall we had to pound our heads on thanks to the new LFG (Looking for Group) interface. Just like in AV, we're suddenly running around with people from other servers. People who are used to shorter waits for getting groups and fuller auction houses...we suddenly got a taste of how it felt to be hanging on those servers. Low and behold, the main cities became crowded again on Zulu as we weren't forced to entertain ourselves by ganking lowbies or doing esoteric achievements.

Standing in Dal yesterday I noticed dancing. And chatting. And some actually polite conversations in /trade. Sure, it's the Love is in the Air holiday season, so there are picnics, candies, and other city-type achievements to do, but a simple holiday can't change an entire server's base attitude simply by adding cologne and fru-fru hearts. Nope, we've changed. (Not enough to make Trade Chat safe for normal people -- that would take a miracle.)

I'm not going to be an optimist and suggest that Zulu is a happy and non-stubborn place to play, one that doesn't repeat itself...but I do think that maybe we've reached a population point and game point where we don't have to be quite so grumpy and cynical about life on Zuluhed. And you know what? That's a very very good thing.

So who knows, maybe I'll start writing here again regularly now that there's a possibility for interactions that are new and different. Or maybe Zulu will repeat itself and go back to being the same dang grumpfest of burnt out players too stubborn to transfer or quit. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.