A familiar name around the community is Pirotess, the enthusiastic community
manager ofVanguard
Spheres. What might not be common knowledge is the
fact that Pirotess, although wearing a "girl's" name is actually
a guy. The name itself came from what Piro describes as "a bit of
fate."

When Everquest was in beta3, Pirotess' household, consisting of four
guys living together, got an invitation to test. The fellas not only shared
the EQ beta account but they also shared a huge 60-inch television. One
of Piro's roommates was crazy about anime, and, at the time of EQ beta3,
he was watching a lot of Record of Lodoss War, the anime series. For Piro,
it was his first foray into the genre and he found, to his surprise, that
he quite enjoyed it.

"When I created my first EQ character," he told me, "the
female dark elves looked the coolest and the male dark elves looked really
bad so I went with a female dark elf. 'Pirotess' was a female dark elf
from Record of Lodoss Wars so I used her name and I've never looked back."

We both agreed that it was a little late for him to change the name.

"I've built quite an online persona around the name so changing
would be pretty hard," Pirotess said.

As for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Piro was pretty emphatic.

"I've had my eye on Vanguard ever since I heard Brad and Jeff started
a new gaming company and I've been feeding info to my guild which I lead
for just as long. As guild leader it falls to me to keep an eye out for
new homes for the guild to keep us busy and having fun."

Piro had been running his guild's website for six year. The guild, Shadowed
Soul, was fairly small and he wanted to "do something that I could
use the skills I learned building that site on a larger scale."

A longtime fan of Allakhazam's, Pirotess vividly remembered when it first
opened and set out to build a comparable site for Vanguard. He was certain
it would be the next home for his guild. Back in January, he kicked off
the project by creating the site, then got in contact with Cindy Bowens.
Running a full-fledged fan site took up way too much of his free time
on his own, so he started recruiting staff. He feels Vanguard Spheres
has a long way to go, but he is pleased that thee is a solid foundation.

I asked Piro, why spheres? You've answered why Vanguard but what that
particular part of the game?

"When I was trying to think of a name for the site, I was spending
obscene amounts of time on the OVF," he said. "Every time I
would read something from a dev, it would refer to the Sphere concept.
It seemed so integrated into the game that I figured it would be a good
foundation for a site dedicated to all parts of Vanguard. I also thought
it could refer to the various different servers in the same way shards
referred to the Ultima and Everquest servers."

He added, "Eventually I'd like to have the servers use VS as a place
to host their server boards."

For each of the affiliates, there is a rigorous checklist to accomplish
in order to first be considered for, then finally be accepted into, Vanguard's
affiliate fan site program. Having been through it myself, and recognizing
how valuable it was to achieve it, I wondered how Pirotess felt about
it.

Here is his answer: "Being an affiliate is actually the drive that
keeps me going. I had attempted to run several other sites for EQ2 and
WoW but never really got them off the ground because I couldn't get enough
interest in the site to make them successful. As an affiliate that's not
a problem and I can return the favor to Sigil by getting the word about
Vanguard out to folks. It's really a very special program and Cindy Bowens
should be extremely proud of what she's created."

The thing that Pirotess likes best about being the site admin (or community
manager as he lists under his forum signature) of a Vanguard fansite is,
as he put it…"having the ability to build things that other
users need or want. It's so frustrating trying to find information on
the games we love sometimes and people spend hours scouring the net at
times to get that information. As site admin I might not have the information
a user needs but I can usually get it and put it in a format that's usable."

An achievement that Piro is quite proud of is the fact that he became
extremely successful in his professional career against the traditional
notion that a person has to have a college degree to make anything of
himself in this country.

In 1995, Piro did attend college--Georgia Tech--going for a computer
programmer degree. "Rambling Wreck" he may be, but he only stayed
at GT long enough to realize he really didn't want to be a programmer.
He took what knowledge and skill he had and entered the job market as
a Phone Tech Support Analyst for an ISP. He subsequently got bumped up
to a System Admin when the previous admin left and has been in Network/System
Administration for the last 10 years.

Another milestone in Pirotess' life is his forthcoming marriage to a
fellow gamer. This is one of those stories that we all love to hear. I
had already known about Piro's planned wedding, but I didn't know the
circumstances. I asked him the questions all gamers want to know, even
more than the size and power of his computer: was his intended a gamer?
Would she understand about his gaming urge?

Pirotess grinned and admitted that he had lucked out in that department.
"I actually met the missus in Everquest first as a friend from the
guild my guild was allied with."

He continued the story. "We later met at a RL friend's wedding and
didn't really have any idea we'd be together eventually. That was six
years ago. We lost touch for about three years while I was working in
NYC and she was living in San Jose. Distance does that to you."

The two met later at a guild gathering. "Guild gatherings are where we'd
rent a house on the beach or a big 70' houseboat on Lake Travis, for example,
and just have a big party and enjoy each other's company, " Piro explained."

Then two years ago he got a phone call after having been out of touch
with her for a couple of years. He ended up driving down in a Mustang
during a snowstorm to see her. They hit it off splendidly, dated for eight
months and then set up housekeeping together. The wedding is set for May,
2006.

"We game together in World of Warcraft most nights for now,"
Pirotess added, "and play PS2 and Age of Empires together when we
don't want to deal with all the hassles of being online."

Pirotess admits that his most notable feature is his "legendary
stubbornness." He cites an incident in his EQ days to illustrate
this.

"It's [my stubbornness is] actually part of the history of my guild.
We had a split about a year and a half into Everquest, where half the
guild wanted to go one way and the other half wanted to go the other way.
Afterwards my side of the guild dwindled until we barely had enough people
to field 2 groups at the same time. I could have easily just given up
and gone to join another guild, but I refused to give it up. I couldn't
bear to admit that: a) the opposing side of the guild was better than
us; and b) that I had failed the side of the guild that followed me. We
ended up recovering and are now much healthier for it. We're extremely
tight knit and enjoy gaming together instead of hating half of the guild."

His so-called stubbornness actually derives from a quality that his father
instilled in him: if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Pirotess recalled a time when he finally learned the lesson his father
had been trying to teach him all those years.

"I was playing with one of my friends in our subdivision at probably
15-16 years old. As young boys we did stupid stuff. So we decided to have
a rock war and started lobbing rocks at each other. He took up cover behind
a big metal trailer for construction equipment and I took up cover behind
a fiberglass water pump house." He paused, remembering. "Long
story short, the construction foreman came down and saw us doing this
and chased us in his Bronco till we escaped into the woods. The next day
I came home and the sheriff was sitting at the dining room table with
my muddy shoes and both my parents. I was busted.

"It turns out the water pump house had been damaged and needed to
be replaced, so I had to work through the summer doing lawns and odd jobs
around the subdivision to pay it off.

"I could have done a quick and dirty job on all those jobs, but
I ended up taking my time and doing them well. As a result I earned the
trust of my neighbors and ended up picking up more work the next summer
for a better payoff, which then let me get my own car and get ahead of
the curve on having a lot of debt in my adult life."

Great story, I told him, then asked a Barbara Walters type question:
If you had one thing in your life to do all over again, what would that
be. Piro didn't even hesitate.

"I'd really like to go back and smack myself when I was 17 and got
engaged the first time," he said with a smile. "I had no clue
what it meant to be in love or what it meant to take on the responsibility
of marriage at that young age."

I asked him if he minded telling the story behind it.

"Sure," he said. "Shortly after my run-in with the law
after the rock fiasco, I cleaned up my act and threw myself into my schoolwork.
I ended up graduating high school as a result 9th or 10th in my class,
which was quite the improvement from where I had been at the back of the
class as a hooligan. Anyway that didn't leave much room for a social life
so I didn't have a lot of girlfriends in high school.

"However when I was in my senior year I met a girl who was a friend
of a friend, and we dated for about 6 months before just knowing without
a doubt we were in 'love.' This resulted in me buying her a ring and asking
her to marry me.

"Both our parents were horrified and knew it wouldn't last but let
us learn the hard way. After a year of that which coincided with my Georgia
Tech stint, the fires waned and we ended up breaking up for various reasons.
I was pretty broken up about it, but in the long run I know I got lucky
that it happened because, now that I'm older, I know she's pretty much
everything I didn't want in a significant other."

Piro and I agreed that Life has a way of teaching its lessons whether
we want them or not.

"I've been very lucky that way," he said.

From where I stand, luck didn't have much to do with it. Pirotess admits
that he is a very organized person and loves nothing better than to get
some hands-on fun in organizing things. He's the kind of guy who meets
life head-on with no apologies. With a motto he lives by in doing the
best he can, using his skills and abilities to back it up, I have not
a doubt in the world that Piro will get to where he wants to go.

My thanks to Piro for an engaging and interesting interview.

Editor's Note: Today has been the first in a series
of interviews and articles by Raya. Watch next Wednesday for an article
on the "hot topic at the OVF" for the week. If you have any
subjects that you would like to see in The Vanguardian, write to Raya
at [email protected]. Watch Dec. 28 for The Vanguardian feature of
an interview with Woody Hearn of GU Comics.