Fansite name: Earthrise at Firesock
Link: earthrise.firesock.com/news.php
- What is your name? Age (if you don't mind telling us)? Please tell us a bit about yourself.
- My screen name is Balthazar, and my real name is Peter. I am 43 years old and have lived in England, US and Denmark where I am now. I have been involved in technology businesses and the internet for most of my working life. I have a fantastic family (wife and 2 kids) that have moved around with me from country to country.
- How long have you played games? What was your first game? What do you play now?
- My uncle introduced me to a computer game (Pong) when I was around 12 in the mid-seventies, and I have been hooked on computer games since. My first MMO was Ultima Online where I was a counsellor on Catskills. Currently I am primarily playing Warhammer and Dreamlords, and occasionally Eve and Tabula Rasa.
- How did you initially hear about Earthrise and decide to become involved with the community?
- I prefer skill-based as opposed to level-based games so when I read at MMORPG that there was a new skill-based game under development, I knew I had to take a look at it. When I was reading through the forum and web-site it seemed to me that almost all of the design decisions that had been made were in line with how I thought it should be done. It also seemed like the developers had paid a lot of attention to some of the faults made by others, and have tried to make sure to not make the same mistakes.
- What features in Earthrise are you looking forward to seeing the most?
- Large scale PvP, a hopefully intricate system of politics between the various organizations and a player-run economy.
- What was your inspiration for starting a fansite?
- First of all, I want to help myself and others by trying to organize some of the information related to Earthrise. I am also hoping to be able to build up a community around the site, although that probably will not start to really get going till we get closer to launch of the game. I have always found fan-sites for other games very helpful, and would like to try and create something similarly helpful to new players.
- What makes your fansite different from others?
- At the moment there is naturally not that much information available about the game, so it is hard to differentiate, but once the game has been launched we have some great techniques for displaying maps, missions, NPC's, shops etc. There is a very well designed database underlying everything, but the power of that will not be obvious till there is a lot more information out about the game. At this point in time I think the best feature is the searchable knowledge base which contains questions and answers organized by subject from all of the interviews, QOTWs and HoC Chats.
- Have you run any other game sites before or is this your first one?
- I have run a similar type of site for AutoAssault which unfortunately was closed down when they made the decision to close down the game.