[2020] Thank you

As I’ve spent the last hours at Arenanet attempting to stay standing while being overwhelmed by all the feels. I wanted to say Thank you to all of you. I’ve only meet some of you in person at conventions, parties or player meet ups but I’ve spent a stupid amount of time here on reddit. You all have no idea how much this place reads this form, cares about what you say and how you feel, respect that please. This building is insanely empathetic and suffers from the feels in a major way. Not saying stop keep being you just be mindful of your power and wield it responsibility.

If you have met me in person you know I like to talk and I love stories so here are a few.

I played a lot during lunch because it was normally pretty prime time over in Europe and so I would play with those groups I played a lot of GW1(12k hours!!!) a lot of that GvG. I would play with the good teams during practice. One day I was playing with Esoteric Warriors I told them I had a meeting soon and they didn’t care said leave when I need to I remember I was running flag one game and I ran out of time and had to run off to a meeting mid match. It was against a good team and Instead of quitting I just left my keyboard… while holding the flag… The enemy team realized what happen and refused to kill me. So they had to play down 1 person and down a flag. They won after a long long game and I’m pretty sure anytime I see them they give me crap for that game, doesn’t matter how many years or how many drinks we have. It always makes me smile and reminds me how much fun it is to play games with all of you. I also remember I was having a hard time in my personal life and we had invited 8 teams to GDC to do a championship if I remember it was around 68 players I sent them all a message telling them I was going to hang out after GDC and run around Germany and drink. I was blown away when 63 of them joined me…. It was wild ride we had a blast and I wish I could remember the 17 drinking games we taught each other but it was 17 drinking games... It was amazing to see so many different cultures and people all able to connect via a video game.

During one of our Beta weekend events we had an internal contest of who would play the most during our 60 hour event some how I bent space and time and when they pulled the data I had played 62 hours straight. I lived with Mike Z at the time and I played WvW the entire time I remember holding Stonemist castle with Tyler B at 4am against some European guilds for 2 hours, I was on a staff Ele and he was on a Grenade Engineer. (I nerfed both builds after that weekend and repairing because of that night and probably needed to nerf them more). Z made sure I didn’t die at my keyboard keeping me fed and caffeinated (He’s not only a good leader but he’s also a really awesome roommate.) It was amazing I remember I wanted commander tag so much I spent 500 dollars buying gold (the conversation rate was lower) so I could be the first commander in the game. I had so much fun that beta weekend event I remember the end holding Dreaming Bay keep against everyone on the map it was amazing and after that event I slept soooo much. Thank you for all the fun times and many sleepless hours playing and working on this game it’s truly been a Dream.

~Izzy

So long and thanks for all the fish and stay classy Reddit.