Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Well, I have done it - I have gone public with the knowledge that I have handed in my notice with Comic Images.

It's a strange feeling. No-one will care two hoots about me no longer being a playtester and neither will I. I was never a great playtester - more there for the sense-checking of the product and the names and the package as a whole than for the minutae of the cards themselves. It was a privilege, a lucrative privilege.

Being UK Commissioner was the honour. Being the 'leader' of a tight community like the UK RD community is always going to be fulfilling but it is also draining. There is a load of stuff that needs to be done in the background - rankings to be compiled, tournament packs to be sent out, payments to be tracked and made, emails to be responded to and questions to be answered. Your year becomes measured by PPV tournaments and their planning. Even when you have them planned a full year ahead, they still always seemed to be last minute affairs. Will I miss being UK Commish? To be honest, no, I don't think I will. It has been fantastic fun, but terribly time consuming and enveloping. In two weeks time I hand it all over to another player and it ends...what a relief.

The role of being webmaster? Well, that was the power. It placed me as near to the centre of the game as possible, without being an actual employee of the company. I got to know a load of things well in advance of anyone else and indeed, the dessemination of information about the game was pretty much molded around my timetable. Even if I say so myself it felt like being a bit of a celebrity.

However, in the end, even that becomes a bind. Updates become a chore sandwiched between other more pleasurable activities. The will to do any form of clean-up or redesign becomes less and less - and thats not a good thing. I like to think of myself as a pretty conscientious person but when that happens you have to start thinking about cutting both your losses and the companies.

Inevitably, it is not that easy - CI want me to do one final redesign before I go and to radically prune the site. The redesign is done and I am pretty pleased. Tonight I will start the task of populating the new site with old information, culled from the 850+ pages on the current site. It's an eerie task. I know for a fact that if *I* was the incoming new webmaster, the first thing I would do is redesign the site to my own liking and skills. I would not want someone elses artwork and design being attributed to me. Similarly, site design and content management can be quite idiosyncratic and some people might suggest that my methods are incorrect (they are certainly old fashioned). It seems like a wasted last hurrah.

I have the suspicion, somehow, that I will have a number of these 'one last job' requests and that the powers that be at CI might not be taking my departure with the seriousness that it deserves. Or maybe I am just being guilty of unreasonable arrogance.

Either way, I will be seeing some of them in Chicago in a couple of weeks time, which should be a very interesting conversation.

Neil