Victor Wachter Joins BioWare

BioWare has announced that they’ve hired long-time community manager Victor Wachter (who you might recall was in charge of Dungeons & Dragons Online a few years ago) to manage the Dragon Age: Origins community, their forums, and their growing social network. Chris Priestly makes the announcement:

Howdy everyone.

I’ve been given an early Christmas present in the form of an amazingly talented person to help as part of Community here at BioWare. I want you all to meet Victor Wachter.

Victor joins the Community team in the role of Community Facilitator. This means he is going to help take all of the information you supply us (feedback both positive and negative, comments, concerns, suggestions, etc) and help make sure they reach the Dev team. He is also going to work with the Dev team to get information they need (specific questions the team may have or feedback they require) as well as helping present information from them to you.

He comes to us with a vast amount of experience working with or leading Community teams for some of the biggest video game companies around. He has a lot of cool new ideas to help improve communication and information exchange around here and will work with me, the Dev team and volunteer moderators to make sure what is said reaches the ears of those who want or need to hear it.

Over the next few weeks you’ll be seeing some changes (all for the better) to the forums here as we work to improve your experience with Dragon Age and the Social site. I will let Victor speak for himself and he’ll explain more about what he’ll be doing here and some of the changes you’ll be seeing soon.

So please welcome Victor. Treat him AT LEAST as well as you treat me, for like me, he wields the mighty banhammer of justice. Sure, he may not be as kind and nice as you all know me to be (stop laughing), but he’s a pretty good guy.

Say hello Victor.

And then Victor steps in to outline his plans:

Hi all,

Thanks for the welcome from Chris, as well as those who have beat me to posting 🙂

I’m really excited to be here and have the opportunity to work with you. Dragon Age: Origins was already the topic of half my friends’ posts on Facebook, so when I started talking with Bioware about helping out I knew it was something I had to be part of.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be working to help improve the Dragon Age community experience, on the forums, on the social network and beyond. The general plan is to make the communication between you and us here at Bioware better, and I will be looking at every tool we have available to do that. That means improved communication to you. It means highlighting the work that mod makers do. It means delivery of feedback to and from the dev team to make future content releases the best that they can be.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll start with the forums, improving the categories so that information is easier to find. Once we have the basics in place, I hope that you’ll find the social site and forums a lot more useful as we begin using them for more regular communication and feedback gathering. I can’t put a timeframe on this just yet, as the holidays make everyone’s schedule a little whacky, so I’ll fall back to the traditional “soon.”

So, please take a minute to say hello. Hopefully, this will be a great adventure for all of us 🙂

(and, yes, exorzist, that’s me. I’ve been there and a number of other places too)