As posted on the official forums today, LOTRO Community Manager Rick Heaton (also known as Sapience) will be leaving Turbine after a six year run in his current position to pursue an opportunity with Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Sapience will be filling the role of Community Manager for a cause that he has graciously supported for years.
Thanks for all you’ve done for the game and for the Extra Life charity drives, Rick!
The LOTRO CM responsibilities will be passed to Frelorn, the onetime CM for Asheron’s Call.
Sapience took the opportunity to proactively answer some questions players may have about his departure:
What about the SHIELD live Streams?
We’ll finish what we started. I will need to change some of the dates and will try to speed things up. Maybe we can even sneak in some weekend runs, but we’ll get it done! Yes, the fastest time will still get a Festival of their choice for a week.What about Extra Life 2014?
Everything promised will happen. From the titles, to the cloaks, to mounts, and the pets. Even that tattoo will happen if we make it to $100k. I still encourage everyone to participate, donate, join Team Turbine, and show the Extra Life Community that the LOTRO Community is the gold standard when it comes to gamers helping kids.
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That’s too bad. I know not everybody had the best opinion of him but I kind of liked him. He seemed playful and did some fun things with the community. He is going off for a noble cause and he should be commended for that. He will be missed.
I liked the dude, and I think he has a good sense of humor, at least that’s the impression I got from all those TTHTI runs. Clearly he loved the game as he did some of those from his home on his days off. I know there is a portion of people who feel he was a little heavy handed with the banhammer but that is definitely a minority.
Good luck to Rick! I have even greater respect that he chose such a noble cause befitting a magnanimous person of Middle Earth!
Well, I’m sorry but I’m not that sad to see him go. I found him too rigid and condescending at times to be a good CM. I do however wish him best of luck with his new job which he seems very passionate about.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Patience has been sorely missed since her departure and the appointment of this idiot.
I really liked Rick after getting to know him better on the twitch streams. I have to speak out against people posting rude messages since his announcement. I think there is no need for people be so nasty even if they disagreed with everything he said or did.
Good Luck Rick! I hope you thrive at your new post. The CMN are lucky to have you. /Sword Salute.
I personally have no animosity toward Sapience – I give him props for having been a player of the game before his time as CM. I think his idea to implement the TTHTI/SHIELD runs was a fantastic opportunity to bolster his duty to implement a two-way flow of conversation between the player and developer (still waiting for a commemoration for the Bridge of Occasional Hobbit Doom!). Because his character was on /follow, that really gave him the chance to focus on reading and replaying the viewer comments, and the times when other staff members could join usually ushered in additional responses/information.
Whether you were fond of him or not, he was there doing his job as community manager (doesn’t seem easy to essentially be the “face” of a gaming company, for its players). I’ll admit I mostly just lurk on the boards when I do visit, so I’m kinda out of the loop in terms of any specific controversies. Regardless, I’m very happy to see that Rick will be joining the ranks over at CMN, especially with taking on a community role with Extra Life. It’s evident he has already been very involved with them over the past years, and I’m sure his passion with that group will show in his work. All the best, Rick.
i once was very vocal about a router site that was linked in lord of the rings facebook page when the servers were down, the site indicated that only 70% of worldwide router services were in operation and thus the poster was blaming the routers for the system downtime
people started commenting about a worldwide crisis and making conspiracy theories about the internet and Syrian crisis then
i posted that it was ridiculous for whoever was in charge to not have clarified why the servers were down and continued to blame the routers for it and also it was ridiculous to not have quelled the stupidity of relating the downtime with the routers
someone even posted that i was the one being ridiculous that i didn’t know a thing about routers to which i responded, i only need common sense to know that it’s not a major world wide router crisis since facebook, youtube, yahoo, world of warcraft sites and most importantly the router site was working!!!
after that post, i got restricted from posting in lord of the rings online facebook page
so i say, good riddance to sapience!!!
and after the servers were up, i went to that router site and it still indicated that only 70% of routers were working
I don’t really know him… but I’m glad he’s gone from LoTRO for good.