User blog:Fairingrey/May 3, 2015 Thoughts About Quitting and Where Ishtaria Is Heading

Another one of these!

Opening
Hi reader. It's me, Fairingrey again. If you don't know who I am, feel free to click on my name in red up above and learn more about me through my profile.

Chances are, this will be the last time you ever see me here, on the Age of Ishtaria wiki, or anywhere within this community. More below.

I don't have anything, really, to say here. I originally had more plans for my next blog post that I really hoped people would enjoy reading but it's too far beyond help, beyond God's love, beyond anything that can help them out there, to save this game and Silicon Studio's poor management and creative directions for this game. So, let's jump straight into the fray.

It's been a long time, really. Recently, I got my challenge reward for logging in 180 consecutive days. Perhaps it's now time to break that streak.

What's to Talk About, Really?
Just to cut it short, I'm going to put it out there that I am quitting Ishtaria and all things related to it. I can't stand it anymore - the company, the rather toxic community, and even the game itself and the effort I'm making to try to get the best experience out of it.

Let's cover a few things. All kinds of things that are or can be multifaceted, sometimes under the cover, and sometimes in your bare face. Ishtaria has a lot of problems. Namely... actually, let's list them all out.


 * High Entry Floor (new players have it MUCH HARDER than old ones do)
 * Ranking absolutely sucks (whether it's UvU or any other sort of personal ranking)
 * A company that really doesn't give two flying shits (they even piss off their japanese players)
 * A community that can sometimes reek of absolute shit (although there are definitely some nice, smart, and awesome people out there)
 * Shitty gacha/summons
 * Reroll galore because of said shitty gacha/summons
 * Hacks
 * Lies about hacks (ref. pt 4)
 * Drama (ref. pt 4)
 * Scammers (once again ref. pt 4)
 * and a whole lot of other shit that probably can't fit on this list

I'm writing from my heart, really. Perhaps I'm mad, or deranged, or simply at a loss of words for where anything Ishtaria and Ishtaria related has went. I've lost hope, really. I think I'm beyond having even a slice of sympathy for this game. So let me talk from my side selfishly, about my union, about what we thought we stood for as a group and how we chose to play this game.

A Call to Arms
UvU, whatever you call it. A Call to Arms brought a new change that at first, we at Scrubs were very, very, very fond of. It was a type of event that required coordination almost to the second, with openers and people mapping out unique strategies to try to take on the enemy team. There were variants of some strategies, and there were just classic ones for others. For us, we sorted out something logical and made it work out on that first day, and I had high hopes we could keep succeeding even more in our matchups. There were quite many flaws, but overall we had somewhat decent hopes of where SS was heading with this after all the usual carbon clone personal ranking events and snores with the gacha.

If you don't know, Scrubs is the union I manage. Perhaps its better to say that I "partly" manage it, as a lot of our own members are the ones who make calls and suggestions to the agenda, and know even more than I do. Perhaps they're a little famous. After all, we did rank 3rd with some difficulty in the last union war, and I guess I'm fairly known on the wiki for being an admin.

Honestly, I try to lead this union best as I can. I don't think I'm a perfect leader, but I do get a lot of input from everyone about what we should do, and I take utmost care to make sure that people are out there enjoying themselves. We have a few changes regarding what our community will be like in the future, but I'll discuss that later.

Anyways, come the second Call to Arms events this has been one of the WORST events I have ever experienced in my life, in any game I've ever even tried. This shit is worse than the farmers in Vindictus or TERA, or whatever have you, where people just lie and cheat each other to get in the lead.

So, let me explain myself. Our roster... is pretty great. I'm bragging a little here, but we're not perfect. We do have a few late show or inactive players from time to time that our union always seems to try to take care of best, even though they're not around. It's a special case.

Yes. We're a union that shares passwords with each other. We trust each other to the extent that we can put our own accounts at risk just because we're in this to win this, but let me elaborate with one single point.

'We have never played a dishonest game. EVER.'

Truth be told, I've seen some ridiculous games, things that I never thought I'd have seen during my time in Ishtaria, or any game, but this is ridiculous. Last UvU when we were paired up against KAIJU we were seriously suspicious -- They lost their first few battles against really shitty unions and then turned it around near the latter end, winning against us with a 100k lead. Yeah, sounds fair, I won't question it. They were a bit fast and had stronger decks than us. We're not perfect, definitely not.

Now they're undefeated. God, I wonder what happened. You know that screenshot right there → on the right? Yeah. That guy, within 28 minutes, had nearly a THIRD of his union's points. Nothing could get past him. You got into a base and you were ripped to shreds in less than 15 seconds. Absolutely unfair. If it wasn't him, it was either Vyra or NuGuyz. We have a fucking album of this shit ready to put into a gallery after we were extremely suspicious the last UvU.

I've never played against such an unfair team. It takes at least 5 seconds to skip the "Your turn" and "Enemy turn" animation sequences, and attacking the enemy, even if you take them out in one burst, takes like 8 seconds. Wiping full teams in a matter of 20-30 seconds? Are you fucking kidding me? From FULL health? There's no way we can win against that!

And it isn't just them either. We just fucking fought another losing battle that was stupidly unfair, against Immortals. Again, more screenshots will come for that.

No matter if we had the full attendance rate, you can't bring a sword to a gunfight. Not unless you're from some edgy shounen manga or something. This shit wasn't caught.

What the fuck happened, Silicon Studio? What the fuck happened to the clause about "Hacks will immediately be banned" or whatever was on your rule page? Whatever happened to even giving a shit about your player base? The clause isn't even THERE anymore. Seriously, read it.

So, you know how we make a problem larger? You just have even more people use their cheats. Make it a problem big enough for Silicon Studio to admit fixing. Cheats aren't hard to find and they can be used with anyone that has a jailbroken or rooted devices. Shit's common knowledge, really. It takes a quick google search to find that out.

Alright, cool! You now can inject your game client with some shit and change the speed of your clock cycles and animations. Boom, voila, now you got sonic level speeds of hacks. A few of our members, actually, experimented with these tools for speedy rerolls, in addition to a few other tools that I'll refrain from mentioning. But it works, and that's what you should know.

It's purposefully wrong of me to advocate this, but frankly, I really hate this game and where it's going. So I'm openly advocating this. Use the tools that Silicon Studio won't even attempt banning you for. Multiple ticket reports have been sent and yet they've never done a single thing about these kinds of things. It's not hard to catch them. Silicon Studio, you need to up your game. Perhaps all you have to do is write something server-sided that checks the timestamps of certain actions from beginning to end. I don't know. I don't study or develop anti-hack shields.

More Comments On This
Yeah, I hate this company. Apparently they can make really good 3DS games like Bravely Default and even Bravely Archives D, but it's only when they seriously get babysitted by the giant publisher Square Enix that they don't make very many mistakes.

But for the life of themselves, perhaps after they were to develop content for Fantasica online by the way, don't play it, it sucks, they had this new idea that perhaps Ishtaria would be an even better mobile game without the mistakes that Fantasica made. Perhaps it was Mobage, their publisher, putting pressure on them to make more money. I don't know. But certainly, things looked very positive for a time.

Let's get this clear. I've never played Fanta. I never want to play Fanta. It sounds terrible and miserable. I played VC and that game apparently has went an even more time-sinky direction, but at least it's better than this. At least you can still kind of get anything Akkey draws for free, and they're still as cute as most of the best units in Ishtaria, and for FREE, for that matter.

I mean, these fuckers reprinted Lucifer... who the fuck reprints an exclusive unit like her? Seriously, you can check JP Ishtaria's events. They were in a fucking riot when it happened too.

Regarding Myself as an Admin
We had high hopes for this game. I became an admin so I could see a knowledge base be completed and do whatever I could to help stir on the community and write a few articles to help encourage contributors and chat. But my hopes have been dashed for too long. Way too long a time now, to be disappointed over, and over, and over again.

I'm emotionally charged because the wiki was something I spent a lot of time trying to make palatable for the rest of the users. Given, I have a _lot_ of edits to my name and I can't take all the credit, but it's something I seriously put a lot of work in, writing policy pages and adjusting the website so that people would kind of like how it looks.

I was in the process of drafting a getting started page back about last month or so when people were really seeking for a comprehensive help guide and I felt like I had the ability to write a very well thought out one, but frankly it's just too damn hard to sometimes. How you get stronger really depends on the kind of commitment you can make to rerolling or doing purchases. It sucks, really, how hard the entry floor is to just even try to get the event 6+2's.

Abandoned that idea. Someone else can work on it if they want. Someone else who still frankly cares about this game, more than I do.

I'm guess I'm somewhat altruistic, but also selfish in that regard. I don't get a whole lot of credit for being the wiki admin and lately I've been really slacking on the job, to the point I don't think I even have the poweruser tag on me anymore. I didn't take this position because I was looking for credit - I originally took it because I enjoyed the game enough to try to maintain information about it. That users wouldn't be as lost as me when figuring out what to do in this game and what units were valued or weren't valued. We're essentially _the_ database that wouldn't be here except for a few dedicated people, and this wiki would look like crap if Miyuki still managed it. Not insulting her skills, but this wiki wasn't set up in the month that this game began.

And I happened to pick it up right before Mikael's event. Ahh, good times.

There have been so many changes I've wanted to make to the wiki to help improve visibility and interest. For example, where I'd sketch out new ideas for what I wanted the Union List to be since it's still cluttered as all heck, with you not really knowing which unions are reliable or not. Those times are long gone.

Scrubs
Yeah, we're kind of a strong union. Perhaps one of the most unique unions in that regard in that we have a signup sheet and use Slack, which is seriously an awesome client if you've never used it.

With me leaving this game leaves the question, where is Scrubs going after this? And in the end I've decided that we're going to stick together. Me quitting, and so encompassing a bunch of other members quitting, means that for the vast majority of us this game is dead. There's nothing in store for us anymore. I won't even be able to stick around for Leviathan on the right. Cute, isn't she? It hurts.

So by sticking together, I mean we're going to still maintain Scrubs -- instead of just being a union, we'll be a community. A community that can be friends beyond just Ishtaria related things. Slack allows us to be communicative and expressive, and really let us just talk about our interests and hone our friendship together as a group.

And this means our invitation policy will be different. We're scrapping our Union page on the Union List on the wiki at Union_List/Scrubs and will scrap our sign up sheet in a few. For everyone who's applied, thank you. You can always come in as a guest. Here's a sample of what Slack looks like below if you're interested. Slack is also available on mobile, and it works like a charm.

I would seriously recommend it, because I am awfully fond of what has happened to the way we communicated because of it.



We're thinking about moving beyond games like Ishtaria. Perhaps we'll start doing lots of Million Chain, or whatever cool and 'better' game comes out than Ishtaria. The point is to think positive, and not to get hung up on things that annoy you. Surely enough we hate this game, and we perhaps think the community is a bit intolerable at times with the numerous eyeroll LINE groups that we rarely participate in.

I have LINE. You can seriously go look at my profile and just add me - I'm not really hiding it. But if you ask me why I'm never in one of those groups is because I'm a rather isolationist person, and I'd rather Scrubs not be a part of anything stupid that happens in those chats -- anything that goes, goes. We're a group that stays together, and I seriously adore that part of my union. The fact that we're like a big family, and that we're really not that averse to anything. Everyone's someone to count on.

We'll still be playing the rest of our matches in UvU, but after this event, will be the last anyone ever sees of our group and community in Ishtaria. We're done, done, and done. The people in our union who still want to play I've suggested will move onto other, better unions, where they can still put up with this stupid game.

I could go on and on about how I dislike Ishtaria, but that's beside the point. I just want us to stick together and be happy, because as a union leader I feel like that's my given privilege to let cultivate.

A Warning to the Community
My warning to the community is just... always be wary of the people around you, especially in games like these. Sounds like common sense, but what I've learned from being here is that there are lot of people that are toxic, and will openly lie and ridicule others just to seem superior or innocent.

In cases like that, believe what you think is right and what is apparent. We were very reluctant at first if anyone was hacking, but in the end when some of our union members kept track of the timing they found it was very suspicious that our bases went down as fast as they did.

How saddening. Unions we used to win against now became unions we couldn't even hold a candle to even if our attendance was full, and even if we tried our hardest to maintain stuff. You fall victim to the weapon, I guess. People will play an unfair fight if only just to make it out for themselves and their own rewards. Ishtaria is a huge investment in time, and having that squandered sucks. If they cheat, they'll cheat. And it seems, after all, like SS will never do anything about it.

One of the oldest unions, Tale of Ishtaria, their leader Xgastan just recently remarked for their union that they'll be quitting this game. Yeah. We are too. I'm sorry that it turns out that way.

We may provide more logs and sorts in the future regarding the stuff that's happened in our chats due to the sheer amount of chaos that has happened this event but just know that shit.... shit's rarely fair when you have just a horde of dishonest people wanting to take advantage of other dishonest people.

And the last thing -- Be skeptical, but don't be an asshole. It's the only thing you can do against people that are inherent assholes, and push the blame on others and ridicule them.

Closing
I have so many people to thank for, for making this experience fun for me while it lasted, being here in Ishtaria. Honestly, back during January or February I was on the brink of just retiring from the wiki, but because of our new influx of members who we've made great friends with, Scrubs and the wiki have continued to foster in such a way I couldn't be more proud of. I guess this will serve as, perhaps, a credit page for them, in addition to just a long dialogue about how I seriously dislike what's happened. But it isn't too late, I guess - I'll remark that I don't regret it all that much.

In the end I'm still leaving, and someone like Kimlasca will have to continue to carry the torch, but I have high hopes for the other admins. Surely they may make a few mistakes here and there, but they're learning and I'm seriously proud of it. Perhaps the wiki will become even prettier than I left it, over time, if there are people who still care about this game and this wiki. It is, after all, a place where anyone willing enough can edit. Do read the Age of Ishtaria Wiki:Manual of Style... as I'll say on and on for eons.

Now, how should I round out this post? I guess it'd be normal to say farewell, and to anyone out there that still enjoys this game, or any mobage in particular... I wish you, seriously, the best of luck in getting all the QT's.

Thank you. I'll see you all goodbye on 5/8.