Totally Truthful Tuesdays – Kiara (Community Relations)

I’ve decided to start a feature once a month where I interview a member of a gaming company, be it a developer, or a community relations person or someone else (whoever is willing that I can get a hold of) and delve into the person behind the company. There are plenty of people who focus on the journalistic viewpoints, and I’d rather remind everyone that these people who work within the industry are just that – people. 

So thank you to Kiara from Sony Online Entertainment, for answering my questions for me (and thus for the readers). I hope everyone enjoys her answers. I’ll be looking for more people to ask questions for the next feature, idealy I’d like to have this twice a month but I think I’ll start off with just once a month, every 2nd Tuesday. We’ll see how it goes!

1. Online Persona (name) – My handle is Kiara.  I picked it way back when the EQII forums first opened because Ciara was already taken.  Ciara was a girl I knew in high school, who was just neat and had the grooviest name ever, so I snagged it for my own use when I got involved in the whole online forum thing.

 2. Job Title – EverQuest II Community Relations Manager, sounds cool, doesn’t it?

 3. If possible, can you tell readers what an average work day consists of for you?  – That’s actually a great question.  Surprisingly little of my day consists of being on the forums.  I try to drop in as much as I can to play with the community, but more of my day is devoted to writing features that go up on the EQ2Players site, meetings to find out what’s coming up in game that I might need to tell the players about, trying to make sure that feedback is flowing and stuff like that.  We’ve recently started up a dev Q&A thread once a month where the team answers questions from the forums. 

 4. What do you like to do for fun outside of work? – I hang out with friends (this involves watching tv shows we like, playing Rock Band, and any other number of geeky fun stuff)!  I play MMOs (like EQII woot!!)  when I have the time to devote to it.  I also read when time permits (which isn’t nearly as much as I’d like… My to be read pile of books is HUGE).

 5. Can you tell readers two things about yourself that most people wouldn’t guess about you from your online persona? – Oh sure, ask the hard questions!  I have horns and a tail.  I’m not really human, but an advanced robot with really spiffy AI that lets me interact as if I were a “normal” human woman.

 6. Pie or Cake and what type?  – This is a hard question.  Both have great merit and depending on my mood or the situation the answer can vary.  Apple and pumpkin pie are musts around the holidays or when you need a pick me up.  Red velvet cake and chocolate cake are always nice.  My personal favourite though is neither a pie nor a cake, but a tart!  Cheesecake!  It’s always good and doesn’t require any sort of mood to be yummy.

 7. What is your fondest EQ2-related memory? – I have a LOT of them.  It’s really my favourite game on the market (and I’ve played a lot of them… not all by any means, but a lot!).  One of my favourite memories was during the Kingdom of Sky beta.  It was almost the end and one night several members of the guild decided to jump off the islands and see how much personal debt we could build up and how far we could jump, etc.  In Tenebrous Tangle, where you jump off the waterfall to the island below with the frogs, we were aiming for the tree and the rocks instead of the pool of water.  It was hysterical and people thought we were crazy.

 8. If there was anywhere in the world you could visit, where would it be? – There are SO many places that I’d like to go!!  But if I can only pick one, I’d like to visit the Egyptian Pyramids and poke around there.

 9. What’s your favorite type of music? – I like a lot of different kinds of music depending on my mood, but you can never go wrong with classical and show tunes!

 10. Do you have any words of inspiration for readers, or maybe a favorite saying or phrase you can share? Anything at all. – Live Long and Prosper?  I don’t really have a catch phrase or anything else.  The best I can offer is to live your life to the fullest and be yourself.