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Originally Posted by Regina
It's been pretty eventful here recently. Last week we learned that many of our collegues in Europe and Austin had to be let go. ArenaNet felt the impact in our the Community, Web, Localization, and QA teams. Other teams throughout NCsoft have felt the ripples from the restructuring as well. In the long run, though, this will mean better information flows, workflows, and better cohesion across different departments. Short term, we're going to try our hardest to minimize any negative impacts.
German fans may have heard that ArenaNet was able to extend an offer to Martin Kerstein to come work here at ArenaNet. Martin posted this news on the German forums earlier today. We're super happy that he accepted. But let's not get ahead of ourselves or raise our hopes too high. Nothing is written in stone, because we still have to get past another hurdle -- the work visa. Yes, it all depends on the United States Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services now. So, please keep your fingers crossed for Martin and hope that the immigration process goes in our favor.
We truly regret that we were not able to offer a position to Peter Verhelst. Unfortunately, we are under budgetary and head count constraints, so we were told that it was not possible to bring Peter over, too. I'm really sad about this, as Peter is a super worker and it has been great working him over these past months.
I want to reassure our non-English speaking players that we are going to make every effort to ensure that you have a voice here at ArenaNet. Our Localization team in Europe was unfortunately affected by the restructuring. I know this message is ironic, because we currently don't have a localization pipeline, and it's not likely that our non-English speaking fans are checking my wiki page anyway, but for what it's worth... I am keeping track of website content that we published after the restructuring, and I will try and get those translated as soon as our localization flows are restored. We're hopeful that Martin can come over, and we will be looking for additional community managers in the future (though I can't give you a time frame on that right now).
I'd like to thank everyone who has messaged Martin, Peter, and I in the forums and on instant messenger with greetings of support for the Guild Wars community team. And of course thank you to all the people who posted supportive comments in the fansite forums and on the wiki. It was very thoughtful of you to think of Martin and Peter and to pass along your support. Sometimes when you think about a company, you don't necessarily think of the people behind the products, so it was pretty heartening that many players don't see us as an anonymous corporate monolith. It's nice to know that many of you think of us as real people with real lives (and feelings), so we really appreciated your greetings.
This morning I had a conference call with Martin to get synched up on our short and long term ideas for community, which I discussed with some of the bigwigs last week. At the end of our conference call, Martin and I concluded that these ideas were full of possibility, and will mean a lot of work. I can't talk about them at this time, though, because I can't make any promises and I don't want to raise expectations in case some of them don't materialize.
The prospect of having Martin work here in the studio is pretty exciting. Even though I'm fully aware that it's not 100% certain he's going to be able to come over here, I can't help but look forward to it. It would just be so rad to be able to work with him without having to do conference calls all the time, and there are a lot of creative, ad-hoc ideas that arise spontaneously when you're surrounded by teammates who you have a great working relationship with and who are genuinely awesome people to be around.
Next week, our Senior Vice President of Global Business & Legal Affairs (long title!), Randy Price, is going to be at the Xfire Debate Club to talk with other panelists about MMOGs business models. The title of that Debate Club is "Free to Play Vs. Pay to Play". I think ArenaNet will have some interesting insights to add to the panel, since Guild Wars kind of straddles the line between the two business models. If you'd like to attend, head on over to Xfire to check it out. Transcripts of the chat will be posted later on over on the Xfire site.
I'm going to wrap this up now. Thanks a bunch for reading this far. I hope everyone has an awesome weekend, and please keep Martin, Peter, and the other affected NCsoft staff in your thoughts. Cheers.
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