Asherons Call: Zyrca has logged off.

Zyrca, Live Team Engineer for Asheron's Call is moving onto other projects and has posted a farewell.

My One Year and Five Months

It's funny to think that I've been on the live team for a year and five months. In some ways the time feels so short, and in other ways, I've come so far. On one hand, I want to tell everyone that they can rip me away from Asheron's Call over my dead body, on the other hand, I've been playing this game and working on this game in one form or another since Sudden Season. I was part of the last batch of Advocates to be admitted to the Online Team before it was disbanded. I designed, wrote and supported nine different plug-ins for Decal. I kept Third Party Paradise up to date for some time. I worked as a moderator on Warcry, updated and maintained their list of third party applications for a while, wrote several Decal plug-ins to assist in data collection for the databases and wrote the new patch tree. Then finally, I got a job working on the very game I loved. This game has consumed and become my life.

Not long before I was hired, I wrote a soapbox for Warcy [sic] for the series "My Two Weeks at Turbine, Part #13" It ended up being posted during the interview process. So, you might be wondering, since I did actually get hired, what did I do about those items? Well, I came fairly close to implementing both of them. The multi-spells got beat out by the item spell redirection changes (which doesn't necessarily mean they won't still show up someday), and the bot tags are partially implemented in the API. That is, I've got the API interface set up so you can specify that you are a bot speaking, but the back end isn't hooked up, so it won't actually do anything. Maybe someday it will. Could both of these items be implemented in 2 weeks? Probably, although I'm not counting writing an entire 3rd party API in my estimates for the bot tags!

I did some interesting things on the team. I stuck my nose into most of the different aspects of creating the game. I did a little art, namely the icons for the Battle Pants. I did a little content, have you seen the Small Creepy Statues in a town near you? Another member of the team expanded on those dungeons with the hunting dungeon in the PK only version. I also helped out with the Burun Kings quests in November, as did everyone on the team. (The Violet Ball on the town crier ... that was mine ... )

Do you remember how it used to be that if you went to open a corpse and failed because you decided you wanted to kill the Olthoi spitting on your neck instead, that you would then run towards that corpse every time you went into combat mode until the corpse went away? That was probably the most satisfying bug I've ever fixed, it irked me so badly for so long before I joined the team. The most challenging thing I ever did was the work to bring the chat system to AC1 and use it to create Allegiance Chat. My most amusing goof was probably when I turned everyone NPK.

I wish I wasn't leaving, but I am excited about where I'm going. I'll still be at Turbine, so many of you haven't heard the last of me!

Good Bye Asheron's Call!
-Heather "Zyrca" Cousineau

Please join us in wishing our former ACWarcry staff member and a pillar of the Turbine Community a fond farewell.