oday, June 8, we are celebrating our 10th anniversary! Can you imagine that CipSoft is already that old? The company was founded when many of you were not even in school yet.
During all these years, CipSoft has grown into quite a big company. Today, there are more than 60 employees and the four founders: Stephan, Steve, Durin and Guido. All these people are working on three different products: Tibia, TibiaME and Fiction Fighters.

In this month's featured article we want to introduce some people to you who spend a great deal of their time working on Tibia. Unfortunately, we do not have room here to introduce everybody to you who is working for CipSoft, even though their jobs are just as important as everybody else's jobs here. For example, we are going to leave out the entire teams working on Fiction Fighters and TibiaME.
Further, we are not going to introduce our system administrators to you who work in the background mainly. They make sure though that Tibia is running and that you are able to play. They monitor all servers, cooperate with our service providers and improve our service by working on protection measures against DDoS attacks, for example. They sometimes even have to give up their nights if there is a server that needs immediate fixing. In addition to that, they ensure that all other employees have secure computers at their work places and that the internal network is protected and works well.
Another department that we are going to leave out is our staff department and organisation team. You do not see much of them publicly either, however, without them, daily business inside CipSoft simply would not run smoothly.

But, let's start now with the introduction of the remaining departments, and with people that you might have heard of before.

During the next ten work days, we are going to update this featured article every day with an introduction of at least one employee, and a picture of his or her desk. So make sure to check back!
We would also like to invite you to join a little chat with us in the Auditorium. We community managers will be present there, and even some of our colleagues will stop by for a small chat.



So, here we go...

	Mercutio is our marketing manager. He sits in an office all by himself - most of the time. Every once in a while he has the pleasure of a roommate, whenever there is a marketing intern. During such times he supervises the internship, apart from his other tasks that include all things that marketing managers typically do. He works on business cooperations, advertising campaigns and does some research. He also visits computer fairs and game conferences, plans events like lotteries, etc. He is also responsible for the CipSoft reseller programme. His office is right next to our community manager office. He is a pretty quiet neighbour. However, during this spring time, he's been sneezing quite often. So he might be suffering from allergies. This is just a speculation though. His office is the only one with a chocolate machine that is open to the public - well, for all employees, that is. So he gets visitors in his office frequently and is not all lonely. In his spare time, he plays poker, goes on hiking trips and has a pilot's licence. So he seems to be a guy who is not afraid of any risk.
From this desk, the world of Tibia is formed. This is the work place of Chayenne, the lead game content designer of CipSoft. Besides organising the content production for Tibia and TibiaME, she brings many of her ideas to life in Tibia. For example, the Castle Vengoth, the Blood Brothers quest and the Svargrond Arena are her composings. Chayenne gets inspiration by walking through life with open eyes. In her spare time, she's a very passionate gamer, reads books and watches movies, which of course influence her ideas for Tibia as well. She is also very sportive, and having mounts in Tibia might just be connected somehow with her passion for horseback riding in real life. Also, she listens preferably to rock and metal music and loves making music herself. Want to say hello to her? Head over to our celebration thread in the Auditorium.
	These three desks belong to the Tibia product management. Would you have guessed just by looking at the pictures which desk belongs to which product manager? Guido, Craban and Skyrr currently share an office out of which all major decision in and about Tibia are made. Surely you can imagine that this is the office in which some of the most heated discussions take place. Priorities are set here, problems get solved, concepts are discussed and analysed. To ease these processes, Guido has a secret stash of chocolate in his desk drawer. Skyrr and Craban use other means to release their stress. You will often see Craban sitting in front of his desk with his in-ear headphones, listening to loud music. As it seems, Skyrr is the more playful type, and Lego and Star Wars seem to be a hobby of his.
Just from looking at this picture you can probably guess that this desk belongs to one of our graphic artists. This is where Jan works, also known as Penciljack. He's a very talented artist, born and raised in Switzerland. One of his favourite movies is "The Big Lebowski", and yes, he likes White Russian, too. Jan is a total art-addict, but next to this main passion he also enjoys tennis and basketball a lot, both watching and playing. Want to know what his favourite teams are? Ask him in the Auditorium! Jan has been the only inhouse graphic artist for Tibia for a long time, however, in the meantime he has received help. Hannes who sits next to him, has been working together with Jan on Tibia and TibiaMe for quite a while now. The Midnight Panther is only one of many amazing graphics that were made by this young pixel wizard. Two more people complete the artistic environment in this room who mainly work on TibiaME. One of them is Judigator, whom you might remember from being a customer support member some time ago.
	Take a look at the desk of our new guy! This is where Tjured sits almost everyday. You can meet him on the event board, or on the proposal board where he often reads and judges proposals. In addition to his work in Tibia, he is responsible for the fansite programme of TibiaME. So far, he still likes his new job and he profits a great deal from being a dedicated and passionate Tibia player himself. From us CMs, he has the highest level ingame, though he's the youngest in real life. He often eases up the work day by telling all sorts of funny (or not so funny) jokes. If you ask him in our celebration thread in the Auditorium, he might just be more than happy to share one of the funnier ones with you.
The hands and the colourful shirt that you can see in this picture belong to Akananto. He is our head programmer, and some of you have probably met him before on a test server or in the forum, answering questions that only coders would understand. When Akananto first came to CipSoft, he programmed a new content editor for our content team, which eased work tremendously for them. He is still programming for the content team, however, he also does a bunch of other things. For example, he programmed all the necessary changes for the current Tibia client to work along with the Flash client. In addition to his programming tasks, he is also responsible for setting up programming guidelines and other organisational stuff. His schedule is usually very tight, just like the schedule of all of our programmers. In his spare time, he is not only into computer games, he is also a very passionate role player and has visited several life action role play events already. He is sharing his office with three other programmers. One of them is Ihsua Beris, who is our flash expert. The other two programmers are both working on Tibia as well.
	What you can see here is the work place of Solkrin. Solkrin was the very first official employee of CipSoft, hired in the summer of 2003. He has become the team leader of the customer support team in the meantime. Today, there are eight full time and eleven part time employees working in the customer support. As the team leader, Solkrin organises his team, and takes part in all kinds of discussions that involve topics that are relevant for the customer support team, such as discussions concerning billing, email support, rule enforcement and the reporting system, for example. He also still plays an active role in the daily business of the support team. If you have a problem and send us an email, you might receive an answer that was written on this desk. Solkrin shares his office with Grimrath and Isolan. Other names you might know from his team are: Manina, Sidnia, Tavaren, and Gandareva. In his free time, Solkrin is a gamer, however, due to being married and being a parent, he's trying to cut back on the gaming and trying to focus more on his family and his other hobbies, like swimming, reading and writing.
These two desks belong to two further people from the content team. One is the desk of the famous Knightmare who is responsible for some of the craziest stories and quests in Tibia. Knightmare was already working for CipSoft before CipSoft was even called CipSoft. He once even was a wizard, one of the people who kept an eye on Tibia players way before gamemasters were born. Knightmare is a great story teller, who, in his spare time, spends his energy on computer games, MMORPGS, Pen and Paper RPGs, reading and writing fantasy novels. The other desk belongs to Lionet. He's been working in the content team now for quite a while, and besides some awesome mapping, he has already created some great quest lines like "Children of the Revolution" and the stories around NPC Spectulus. Also the famous "sleeping dragon" was his idea. When he is not working for CipSoft, Lionet enjoys everything that contains the words "electronic" and "games". He is also pretty gifted in music, and likes to experiment with all sorts of electronic music.
	This is the desk of Andrej Delany, who was the first official tester for CipSoft. He is responsible for testing many different things. Not only ingame features, but also the payment system, the website and the forum, for example. Besides that, he maintains and sets up our inhouse test systems and tests our inhouse support and organisational tools. In addition to that, he supervises and guides the external tests and evaluates the bug reports and other problems that you report. Of course, he spends lots of time on documenting everything as well. Also, playing Tibia and TibiaME is part of his job. Pretty cool, huh? In the meantime, two more testers have joined the tester team, Bolfrim Gene and Siramal, who both share an office with Andrej.
This is the desk of Count Tofifti. He is sharing an office with Knightmare, Lionet and Chayenne, whose desks you have seen already. His job is closely connected to the job of the other content team members. He's analysing item prices on game worlds, hunting costs and profits and differences between vocations, for example. He's also involved in conceptualising tools to make the balancing job a little easier. In contrast to the other content team members, he does not write stories and questlines, his focus are numbers, and all sorts of statistics. However, he is of course part of the brainstorming and planning meetings, and has numerous discussions with the product management. Count Tofifti likes basketball, just like Jan. His favourite team are the Boston Celtics. Other than being a basketball fan, he is a mountain biker, and also loves games, music, movies and radio plays. He says that he loves to cook, too, but we cannot say whether he's really good at it. So far, none of us CMs has had the pleasure to taste a meal that was prepared by him.

Come celebrate with us!
Your Community Managers