The first time I met Gaynor was in the Tournament qualification 2012. She and her friends wasn’t so fond of metas so when their ally made friends with former enemies they left and started to fight against their former friends. Misfits had a lof of fun and was troubling for the WW-meta in SouthEast.
In the Final Misfits entered with the goal to do the same against the russians. The question was where to settle to get russians to fight with? As it showed up it was no problem. The russians was everywhere.
To defend against the russians was an art where you have to use all tricks. Gaynor teached me unconsciously about the value of residence timing and it encouraged me to try it myself when I was sitter for a friend around New Year.
This interview, where I asked that she should do the talking, turned out to be very openheartly, with the touch of personallity that gives a real feeling for the person behind.
May I proudly present Gaynor!
GAYNOR
I always move server to escape someone or lots of someones. In truth I got hooked on the game to escape my life at the time. When I first found travian I was married, and spent my days looking after my two 4 year olds.
Before I became a mother I was a driving instructor, and the transition from meeting lots of new people and chatting all day long for a living to changing nappies, making bottles and having no one to talk to was not easy. Every effort I had made in my life after the girls were born to either better myself (college course), help us financially (part time work) or something to do other than house work (cross stitch) went unappreciated by my husband and he didn’t like it so would throw a spanner in the works every time and it created arguments and tension. He’d even drove my brother and his family away with his attitude and I couldn’t even talk to my sister in law and have my niece and nephew round to play with our kids. I didn’t even meet my youngest nephew until he was 6 months old because of my husband causing problems with my family.
So, bored and lonely I found Travian and when I started talking to new people and forming friendships with them the husband again tried to put an end to it. Where I would have given up before and just stopped doing whatever it was that he was objecting to I refused to do so with Travian. The arguments came thick and fast and the cutting remarks. I won’t bore you with the details running up to our split, but 5 months after I started Travian me and the husband were no more and I took the kids and the lap top down to my mums and moved back in.
Before Travian I didn’t think it was possible to feel real emotion for people that you might only talk to via typing and never even see a picture of let alone meet, but I soon found out that you can and I did. It is because of these emotions that I leave servers. I’m not so much leaving the server as running away from the person or persons that have evoked unwanted emotions, from unrequited love to pure hate.
Ukx used to be my home server, I played every round from when I first went there with two friends from my first ever server uk6 (Tom and Si) in 2009 for 7 rounds. I left there because it is extremely inbreed and I never really felt accepted there, and when the unfounded accusations of cheating started flying my way I refused to stay there and be upset by people who thought it was not only ok to call me a cheat because I was beating them at a game they thought they were brilliant at, but because they thought it was ok to attack me personally by insinuating I had a drink problem and that I was an unfit mother and being insulting toward me. I did try to fight back but as far as they were concerned it was ok for them to do it to me, but it wasn’t ok for me to do it back.
I tried moving to different English speaking domains, Australian, Indian and international domains, but there is always someone there that I bump into that knew me from some UK server.
I am at the moment running away from a couple of people that I first met on ukx and dualed with and played alongside for many rounds. They called themselves my friends and I stupidly fell for one of them (the unrequited love I mentioned earlier though I am now very over that). I stopped talking to the one that I fell for, in fact I removed all contacts with him so he couldn’t contact me and ran away from any server we were playing together and steered clear of any future server I knew they might play, I got over him.
A year passed by and we started to talk and decided to play together again, the three of us. I don’t know why I agreed to it because it was a massive mistake. They were never my friend (as I had always suspected). I was just someone they could use, either “G log on to my account and save it from being chiefed/catted” to “set us as sitter so we can use your account to feed our WW”. They made me crazy and they brought out the worst in me, and I don’t want to surround myself with people that only want to keep me around for what I can do for them.
I wanted to delete my account, the hammer village had been 0’d and all the defence lost, but they made me feel like the worst person on the planet for wanting to do so. All they saw was an account that could supply their WW with res/wheat and build def for them. They basically wanted to use me. Another friend came back from holiday and I told him what was happening and he said “G it’s YOUR account, do what YOU want with it. Delete if you want and come join me on mine” so that is what I was going to do. Another mate who was sitting the account said he’d take the account over so we transferred it to him and I moved accounts. Of course when all this was going on my ex’s mum was dying in hospital, to my knowledge neither of the two so called “friends” with the WW knew this information and if they do they most definitely are no friend of mine as I have heard nothing from either regarding my mother in law’s passing.
Basically I don’t like being hurt; I’ve had my heart broken enough times now to not want it to happen again. I get too close to people and when they quit travian as some duals have, die as one dual did, or when there is a case of unrequited love it hurts, so by moving to a server that isn’t in English the chances of me being hurt are slim.
Going to nox isn’t as scary as it might first seem, sure I can’t speak, read or write Norwegian but most people there seem to do the English bit and those that don’t Google translate is a marvellous tool. There are 4 of us on the one account and skype has been wonderfully quiet as I only really talk to my nox duals these days. It suits my current mood; I just want to be a hermit right now. If I don’t talk to anyone or get to know anyone, then they can’t ultimately hurt me.
As to what do I think of the server, well it is less than a week old so it is too early to say if there are many great players here, but it is very small server. We activated day 1 and there were less than a thousand accounts on day 2 there are only 1800 now on day 5. Seems that most of the accounts on the server are banned, maybe because the server is so small the MH finds the cheats a lot easier than on a larger server.
We seem to be finding it pretty easy, currently rank 2 and last time I checked rank 3 in raiders. The language has only caused an issue with the quests when the translator on chrome didn’t work or for one of the duals when he was on his phone. I know on most English speaking servers I have played they say that you aren’t allowed to use any other language other than English so expected English to be forbidden here, but English is accepted so we can communicate with others using English and not risk punishment.
Hero items on the auctions are few and far between due to the lack of accounts, and the costs for most of the items are pretty much the same as other busier servers.
The most expensive servers I have ever played have to be tournament, qualifier and finals, which given the huge amount of issues Travian had with those servers I feel they had an outrageous cheek to charge the normal price for gold. I have never played any server before or since that was so plagued by problems, and since Travian claimed it was the servers being too busy the decision to stick to small servers, whilst not as challenging, has made for trouble free gaming.
After finals ended I and a group of friends moved to the 8x server and that was the most fun I have had in game for a very long time, but end game dragged on for far too long. I do think Travian really need to look at how they can improve the game. End game was always a boring drawn out affair, but since the advent of t4 the vast majority of servers have suffered far longer end games, and far more have resulted in the system ending the game as there is essentially a stalemate, yet saying that the tournament servers that I played ended very quickly.
So if you want a server with a quick end game you have to be willing to endure a substandard not fit for purpose server due to too many extremely active accounts. If you want trouble free round with little to no bugs then you have to be prepared to play for far longer than normal, or as I have seen start to happen on these smaller rounds, the entire server forming a massive meta and build just 1 WW for real, making the end game far less desirable.
I saw today a post on FaceBook from Travian that they intend to change the way the map looks, I was very tempted to comment on it saying “would it not be better for TG to spend it’s time and money on developing the game play and ridding their many servers of so many bugs than trying to make it look “prettier””, but I chickened out.
When all’s said and done though I will no doubt still be sat here playing Travian in 5 years time, swapping servers, making friends and losing them for one reason or another.
Gaynor