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May 17, 2001
EA: Comments from Cynthe
The following was posted to the Team Comments page on the Ultima Online Web site:Comments from Cynthe
Hey there,
Many of you have seen my name since I pounced onto the boards in March, but some of you may not have any idea who I am. :) I’m Cynthe, otherwise known as Amy Sage in that other thing we call real life.
Like many of the recent Comments from the Team, I’ll start off this one with a bit of an introduction. I’m a native Texan, and attended the University of Texas, studying Music, English, and German. In 1998 I was hired on at Origin to help out the Ultima Ascension team with some database work (okay, so it’s a glorified way of saying data entry, but hey, you have to get your foot in the door somehow). After six months of doing some behind-the-scenes design work, I was hired on as a full designer, and stayed on until the game shipped. After that, I accepted the position of Community Coordinator for Ultima Ascension. The position was a good fit for me, because I knew the game well, and… well… I tend to talk a lot. :) In February of 2000 I moved on to the role of Community Coordinator for Ultima Online 2, later to be called Ultima Worlds Online: ORIGIN. This role included weekly website updates, as well as lots of posting on message boards and answering questions in the community when possible.
So now on to the present… after the decision in March of 2001 to concentrate on Ultima Online, I moved over to UO, filling the position of UO.com Content Editor/Writer. To say the pace has picked up would be an understatement. I used to think that weekly updates kept me pretty busy. The UO site is another beast altogether… the updates are daily, and at any given point in time there are twenty people waiting for information, updates, and changes done to different sections of the site. Talk about a lesson in scheduling!
I’ve had people ask exactly what the Content Editor/Writer does. Well, it's important to note the term "content" in there, since that's my domain. The actual design and appearance of the website, and the coding of the sections is not done by me - we have an extremely talented web team with an incredible knowledge of web design and code. And as for editing and writing, I actually seem to do a lot more of the former than the latter, but that’s mainly because the community’s more interested in hearing the developers talk than the editor. And that’s certainly fine with me! My tasks include things like soliciting/selecting/editing weekly spotlights, Comments from the Team, and the daily alerts (which involves deciphering the emails between the billing department, the network operations group, the development team, and the support group to figure out exactly what these things mean for the players and make sure that there’s something on the site to let people know what’s going on). I’m also now in charge of keeping the site updated, which is a gargantuan task, and one I have only begun.*side note - I’m well aware that there are many pages that could use an update. I’m always cool with getting emails about those pages… I file them into my “list of things to fix” folder.
And since I, for some reason, always find it difficult to pull myself away from the community “front line”, I also try to help Melantus on the boards when I can… which in and of itself could be a full-time job. Since I’m much less experienced with UO than Melantus, I tend to focus more on board moderation and trying to keep things reasonable and civil, leaving him free to address more game-related issues.
So I’m always open to discussion, and I welcome thoughts on the website (keep in mind there’s no way I can actually take all the suggestions I receive, but there’s always the chance it’ll grab my attention and end up in that “list of things to fix” folder).
Till later,
Cynthe
Website Project Supervisor
Origin Systems
Posted by Keith at May 17, 2001 6:36 PM