User:Mike Zadorojny

Breaking things is easy. Putting them back together...was a job for someone else.

What I do:
I'm the Guild Wars Live Team Producer and the ArenaNet Quality Assurance Manager. I'm responsible for making sure that the Live Team has the resources it needs in order to accomplish our ambitious goals and is able to meet our internal deadlines, all the while making the best possible content we can for Guild Wars players. Sometimes in order to meet the expectations of the team's Lead Designer I have to pick up one of the many hats I can wear from Designer, to Programmer, to Sounding Board, to Diplomat, to Tactician, or whatever the situation dictates. My other responsibilities lay with making sure that the ever growing QA team is supporting the rest of the company in the best possible way. Elijah Miller has taken over most of the day to day leadership for the team and together we have created the foundation for one of the best Quality Assurance teams in the industry. Each week the team redefines our responsibilities and finds new ways to help make the production process for all of the ArenaNet teams as smooth and efficient as possible. We've been used as sounding boards, critics, players, authors, editors and if we're lucky... testers.

Who I am:
I've been working on and off in the gaming industry since the late 1980's. The first game I ever worked on was Dudes with Attitude for the NES as more of a hobby and as one of the two testers. I was responsible for several of the co-op levels that were implemented in the sequel that was released two years later. Later I ended up working at two of the biggest publishers in the industry where I helped launch two next-gen systems before coming to ArenaNet.

Additional contributions:
ArenaNet is a very open workplace where anyone with a good idea can contribute to the game. In my relatively short time here I have provided the original concept and design work on several quests, and introduced a couple holiday NPCs into the world. The previously mentioned quests were later taken by John Stumme turned into works of art.

Nightfall Eye of the North
 * Chasing Zenmai
 * All for One and One for Justice
 * Nornhood
 * Haunted

Now that I'm here:
In the coming days there will be several talk pages linked here where you can submit issues that you have found with Guild Wars. Guild Wars is a complex game with hundreds of thousands of lines of code which leads to some interesting results during play. While it would be nice if my team could catch all of the potential problems before a Live build, realistically this is impossible. Despite a possibly common misbelief that I have 1000+ testers working on the game at any point, reality has only blessed me a handful. I will check in from time to time, to see what has been posted and attempt to respond to issues or help provide resolutions to problems.

Update: The talk pages are copied from Gaile's Discussion area, we're setting up redirectors as I type, so things should be finalized here shortly.

Breaking things is easy. Making sure they get put back together...is now my job. >_>