Postby MysticalOS » Sun Sep 16, 2018 3:22 am

Jump to latest update post: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=405&start=20#p1227 Below is original post-------------------------------------------------------For health and stress reasons, as well as just having a plain crappy PC, I will be stepping down from the Mythic raiding scene in WoW. I have been raiding in wow since Burning Crusade and been making mods for DBM since Wrath (almost entirely by myself mind you).In Mists I was able to switch to doing it full time and greatly improve the quality and feature of mods as well as pace that mods are released for content. Even now, as I write this, DBM has exceptional mods ready to go for mythic+ dungeons and mythic Uldir up through 8/8, with mythrax and ghuun having as best support possible with limited pull data and datamining available. I continue to monitor progression race and scrap through WCL data as it becomes available to update these mods and better support for final 3 will follow as these bosses are downed and data/information for them becomes public. Despite me stepping back from raiding, I do not expect this to change!. After all, Guild I'm in now is only 2/8 (and I was even sat for both of them), doesn't stop me from watching streams, gathering feedback, looking at other peoples logs and producing great mods. Don't take this post as "oh no, DBM is dead". DBM is very much alive!However, I'm going to be real here. I don't just work on DBM full time. It's all I do period. I have no life, no friends, no time to really do anything else at all. It's not just coding mods here or getting to play the game for money. It's not as peaches as it sounds. It's committing to every ptr/beta even when I have a raid character to maintain on live and raids to go to later that night. It's grinding dungeons, artifact power, world quests, gathering mats, leveling blacksmithing so I can craft even more raid gear, etc. Many hours, EVERY DAY. If there is no ptr/beta, there is always something to catch up on or do. Even then, sometimes something has to give. PVP mods got axed for recently. It's not even just the code refactoring that 8.0 would need (although that's huge reason), it's "where the hell am I going to find time to spam run BGs to make sure these things even work?".In addition, I'm still a caretaker for another human being too. My 70 year old disabled mother needs my help a lot too. I have to step away from computer a lot to help her do something she can't do on own. Do errands or do chores. In fact, since bfa has launched I've been so buried that my grass is now over 2 feet tall. :\I'll be honest, I've become so overwhelmingly stressed with it all, that I'm not even able to enjoy raiding anymore. I miss when I used to enjoy actual progression and getting things down, but I haven't in while now. All this grinding, never getting a chance to slow down and breath a little. It's extremely stressful and mentally breaks me down, because it's twice as bad for me. I do all these things for many hours every single day almost 7 days a week, then turn around and have to go through logs of it to make mods or hop into a PTR/beta and do even more of it. What I wouldn't give to just have more hours in day or ability to clone myself so there was enough me to go around to actually do all this and still have real me time to catch breath.You cannot understand the amount of hours and commitment, all while barely making 1300 (most months)-1450(early expansion) a month. I've wished since I launched Patreon that I'd hit higher goals and be able to bring on help. Expand so I didn't have to do this all alone. Sadly, that just never happened. I absolutely hate asking/begging for money. I always feel I've got to prove to community that I deserve more for the quality of work and effort put in and not beg for charity, which is why up until now I haven't really written this post. Instead, whenever I had a poor month, I only pushed myself harder to try and earn more money. I'd also pay for trips to blizzcon I clearly couldn't afford to try and humanize the person behind the work with some facetime/networking. However, I've been killing myself for almost 2 years now with almost no help. In a game that's only gotten more and more grindy and a content release pace that's only gotten faster and faster, all while amassing CC debt and even refinancing house just to pay annual taxes and living expenses.My PC sucks because I can't afford to upgrade it and even that's begun to impact raid performance and ability to maintain my mythic raider status.I have health issues because I can't afford medical insurance or to have dental surgery I need. I take fish antibiotics to manage an abscess tooth I've had since legion pre expansion event. Unfortunately, as my body has gotten more resistant to antibiotics, the infection has spread to 2 other teeth and even begun to spread to parts of my jaw now and if I don't have it treated soon, it could escalate into a blood infection. I've delayed it as long as I could with self medicating to try and save up money to get treatment.Between both of the above, I'm not even performing well in raids anymore. I've become a liability to my team and am starting to get sat. That's what made me finally realize I need to slow down and try to get myself sorted out. I need to step back from raiding and force myself to take time off to get that dental surgery whether I can afford it or not. Then, once I recover, maybe think about trying to somehow come up with funds to get a PC that doesn't raid at 17fps on Ghuun. After all that, then consider returning to raiding when I can focus and perform at a level that's acceptable to a mythic raiding team.Again, I don't want either of above to sound like I'm asking for anything. This isn't a huge plea for money either, I still hate asking. Merely trying to explain the stresses that have been upon me for a while now and brought me so low some days and made me doubt my work and myself and consider giving up. Any time I'd think about that though, I'd realize I can't do that for two reasons. I'm not comfortable spending 8-12 hours a day working in field and no one watching over mother, which in the last 2 years alone has had two heart attack scares. I need to be at home. Second reason I can't give up is that I just love working on DBM too much and I firmly believe that as long as there is a WoW, there should be a DBM.So onto part some of you have been waiting for, what this means for DBM as a mod? This means I'll be doing less of the mythic mod testing, hands on, myself. I'll need more help than ever in spotting bugs, or feature requests. I still do tons and tons of research and stream watching and communicating with raiders needs, but it's still not the same as pulling boss myself and going "oh x will help with this" or "I could have done better at this if DBM had this". So as a community, I ask that you help with that kind of stuff. No request is a dumb request. If you think something is broken or not good enough, tell me. Even if you don't think it's a bug but is annoying, report it. if you're addon savvy enough, run transcriptor and share transcriptor logs with me. Many ways you can help. Between that and how powerful WCL is and how many twitch streams there are, I have no doubt DBM will still continue to be as amazing as it is now and you should see little difference going forward. Might even see improvement with my focus renewed and stress reduced.I will still be heavily involved in PTR/Beta testing and hopefully kind people will still let me be part of their testing group even if I can't link mythic achievements anymore. Test raid scaling FTW. My mods for ptr/beta will still be king and I'll definitely ensure day 1 mods are still pretty decent (as decent as beta/ptr testing allows). As for live, who knows, maybe you'll still see me in your normal or heroic raid pug testing something in a group that doesn't require my neck to be azerite level x and ilvl over 9000. I may not be a mythic raider anymore but I shall still be around.---------------------------------------------------So the TL/DR of it all:I absolutely love working on DBM and that hasn't changed. Analyzing data and figuring out how things work and coding has never gotten dull to me. I want that much to be clear, those are parts I will always love, that and you guys as a community and helping you guys in discord and seeing your passion for my work. This is just about the other stuff that eats away all my time and sanity and drains me to almost nothing.So why am I stepping down from raiding then? So I can focus on my health for a minute and try to recharge my sanity and lower my stress. So I can renew my passion for world of warcraft. So I can cut my damn grass. So I can maybe do some side oddball work in those regained raid hours for extra income to actually work on getting a better PC and afford proper medical treatments. I'm just one man doing too much for too little and have to make changes.What's this mean for DBM? Best case, mods actually improve with my focus up and stress down. Worst case, more initial bugs. You might have to report more things to me that I might miss early on in new content tier.