4 Years Ago...
...A budding lawyer joined the Official PlayStation Community under the name of Shillingford to ask if he could join a gaming clan so that he had some friends to play Warhawk with. Like most of us when making our first post, he checked back every 5 minutes for responses and was hideously anxious about being flamed.
He got flamed. He posted in the wrong section.
But he persisted, started posting in the Warhawk section properly and became one of OPC's most active users at the time. In the same year he joined, Shillingford had created an event that the Warhawk community couldn't get enough of. It was called TEAM_KILLERS_ANONYMOUS.
In 2008, Shillingford won the Comedy King Community Award, and TKA won the Best Community Event award for its back-stabbingly awesome gameplay.
Shortly afterwards, Community Team Leader Lestrade left SCEE and emmigrated to Australia. MojoSwift sent a PM to Shillingford, who had expressed an interest in working with the community team, asking him to apply.
So he did. 2 weeks later, a chap from SCEE's HR team invited Shillingford for an interview. Nervous as hell and in an ill-fitting suit, he trooped down to London (where he'd never been before) and attended the interview. Then, 1 week later, he attended another interview.
Shortly afterwards, Shillingford got a phone call from SCEE offering him the role of EN Community Team Leader at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. He ditched his Law degree, which sucked anyway, and turned his hobby into the start of an amazing career. From then on, he was known as MusterBuster.
Now, 3 years and 13,000 posts later, it's time for me to leave. And it's breaking my heart.
See, my family and girlfriend live in Nottingham. I live with my girlfriend, who has a fantastic career of her own and can't justifiably move to London. I've been commuting from there to London for 3 years. It's damaged my health, both mental and physical, and its caused havoc with my social life.
So, having pondered the dilema for months, I've decided to resign as Community Team Leader and head back to Nottingham to try and repair the damage.
This is really, really tough for me. Over the last 3 years I've grown irrevocably attached to this community. I get home from work at night and still jump on the forums to see what you're all up to. I've kicked spammer butt at 3AM, I've stayed up way past what normal people call "bedtime" to carry on playing events for just a bit longer and I've even been trampled by an "enthusiastic" Eurogamer mob to bring you Sackboy shaped goodness. This community is constantly on my mind and leaving it is something that, even writing this post, I just can't comprehend.
You guys are outright hillarious, witty, informative, intelligent, caring and (occassionally!) loving. Every day you dedicated fans join forces to make the PlayStation Network an excellent place to be and in that you are hugely successful. PSN is a society of escape artists, a network of gamers out only to have a good time. Gaming is a frustrating hobby at times, and yet when I think of all the things I could do with my spare time - signing in to the PlayStation Network still comes top. In spite of all the work of the games developers, network engineers, producers, products and services - I can only thank you, the community, for that.
My last day at SCEE will be on June 28th. Between now and then, I'll be heading out to E3 (you'd better be posting in our E3 forum!) to bring you my experiences of the show. I'll also be doing loads of admin stuff, like defining strategy for the community going forward and making sure the moderator's tea supply never runs out. Most importantly, in the last couple of weeks, I'll be throwing one hell of a gaming party (more details soon) including prize giveaways and frag-tastic gaming events.
Of course, this also means that there's an opportunity for you to come and work for PlayStation. More on that soon.
So, to the SCEE staff who have supported, trained and nurtured me - to the MVPs without whom this community would fall to bits - and to you, the community members who I've come to love dearly - thank you so, so much for the best 3 years of my life so far, and the start of what will be a fantastic and fruitful career for me.
All my love,
Michael.
(AKA MusterBuster, Pumpkinhead, Shillingford, Link69)
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