Updatey Goodness

MAN, this place gets dusty quickly, doesn’t it?

Anyway. Hi. It’s been awhile. I just thought I’d share a couple of things about what’s happening with me in this strange, strange post-WoW world.

1) SimCity: The launch was unbelievably terrible. We’re talking worse than D3’s Error 37. It was catastrophic. Gameplay is still not great and, honestly, when I think about how I should go play (since my brother Fog and I are collaborating on a region), I just get depressed at how craptastic portions of the game are. It’s a sad state. I haven’t asked for a refund, but I can’t recommend anyone purchase the game at this time. Maybe in a couple of months. I just lost a relatively young city to the rollback/unable to load city bug. Again. Ridiculous.

Don’t even get me started on their customer service. You who still play WoW do not know how lucky you are that Blizzard’s CS is, frankly, outstanding.

I would take a role-playing GM over the imbeciles at EA ANY DATE OF THE WEEK. That’s how bad EA is.

2) Job stuff: I can’t go into any real detail because I signed a non-disclosure agreement, but I recently had four rounds of interviews for a sweet job as community manager for a specific product for a specific video game company. Sadly, I didn’t get it, but it was a fantastic process. Why?

Among other things, they wanted to make sure the job went to a real gamer. So much so that in one of my interviews, the guy had me rattling off my raid progression from WoW.

Let’s think about that for a second.

In order to get a job out there in the real world, I was asked to talk about my in-game achievements. in World of Warcraft. (No, it’s not a job for Blizzard. Like they would hire me after my rants, anyhow. ;D)

But seriously, talking about my in-game achievements? My meta-achievements? My raid leading and guild leading and healing assignments? All in order to get a job in the real world that has nothing to do with WoW?

My head kind of exploded.

We didn’t get into too much detail about my raiding, but this blog, my Blessing of Frost podcast, my Twitter account… all of these had hits and followers and downloads that pointed to the fact that I knew how to build a community. And my raiding accomplishments were used to point out that yes, I am, in fact, a gamer.

Basically, my seven years of playing WoW, of engaging other players, of organizing people, of writing stuff, of doing countless posts that have math in them (UGH), of doing loot lists, of putting up with Majik, for crying out loud… all of it was absolutely worth it if only because it got me farther in a job interview than someone who hadn’t done so.

Granted, it was for a video game company looking for a community manager for a specific upcoming video game product. I don’t know that my raid leading is going to have as much importance in other interviews. But knowing that I went through a screener call from a recruiter, followed by a much more in-depth phone interview by the recruiter, followed by another phone interview with the two people with whom I’d be working, followed by a full afternoon of four interviews with five separate people… all thanks to my past job experience but especially my experience in WoW?

That felt pretty good.

The guy who asked me about my raid progression actually said:

“Soooooooo. Tell me about your guild.”

I think he was trying to throw me for a loop, but it energized me. My passion for what I had put together in Cataclysm really came shining through, my joy at getting to play with these people not just in BC but in Cata as well was evident.

So regardless of whether or not I got the job, I was thrilled by the process. I was so glad to have spent the time that I did in WoW. I was even proud to have done so, because I knew it distinguished me from other candidates. I made it to the final round of interviews and they went with someone else, but I got there, and a lot of it has to do with my guild, this blog, my podcast and my Twitter.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say thank you. I’ve had 350,000 visits, garnering 454,000 pageviews with almost 175,000 unique visitors from December, 2010 until today. Thank you for helping to make me one of the better places for holy paladin knowledge, at least back in Wrath (because I know I fell down on the job a bit in Cata) and thank you for all your emails, comments, tweets and support throughout the years.

I may not play any longer and I may not even post very often anymore, but please know that I appreciate your support, dating back from late 2010 through to the present. Those of you who made it through some of those exceedingly long posts, thank you in particular for dealing with my long-windedness. :)

What’s next for me? Back to square one in the job search. But hey, if you’re looking for a community manager, drop me a line. ;)

(As to the state of the place here, well, I’ll try to drop in more often to keep the dust away!)