Behind the Red Name

Most of us read the dev tracker on the official forums and we see the posts made by the people with the red forum names, the SOE employees. Sometimes it's easy to forget that these are real people who, shockingly, have lives outside of the official forums.

I have to give credit for this whole post to the crew over at EQ2 Daily. Best known for their podcasts, they have also been doing a nice job of aggregating EQ2 news. Last week I came across a link on their site which led me to this EBay auction of Everquest collectibles. Yeah, some nice stuff there I suppose, especially the sword. Not really my cup of tea. So what's the story?

Well, take a closer look. The person putting the stuff up for auction says, "I am a former employee of Sony Online Entertainment and was on the Dev team of EQII from pre-beta until last week." Sound familiar? Can you think of anyone who recently left the EQII team? Well, don't strain your brains too much, because she makes no mystery about it in her Live Journal.

"So yeah. I was Faarwolf on the EQ2 forums, for those of you who might know the name. OMG I have been UNMASKED!" It's an interesting read as she discusses forum stalkers and reviews SOE, "Totally depends on the dept. Customer Service [is] awful QA isnt much better, Dev is pretty fun." I edited that quote slightly for language. Let me note here that this person is claiming to be Faarwolf, and I have no way of knowing for sure whether she really is. So please mentally add "allegedly" to every word in this post.

I wasn't really that familiar with Faarwolf's work on the official forums because I mainly read the Dev Tracker and occasionally the Wizard forum. But she seemed to do a good job. I could tell she had a bit of a fan base.

Her Livejournal info page (which also contains a chest x-ray), lists such varied interests as Neverwinter Nights, brass knuckles, women with small feet and, of course, violent porn. Oh, it gets better.

Apparently (and allegedly), Faarwolf, under the name Malice, also runs BeautyDestroyed, a soft-core porn site. Obviously, the link is not safe for work. But here it is. I'd call it, I don't know, intellectual-goth bdsm porn? I can't keep up with the lingo. It's a pretty well designed and wordy site for a soft-core porn site and it seems to have a bit of a following.

Let me pause here to say I personally make no judgments on any sites of this nature. I only found this of interest because we're dealing with an ex-SOE employee who held a prominent public position. I just think it's kind of funny, to be honest.

There's plenty more biographical info (2 dense pages) on the biography page at BeautyDestroyed but I kind of lost interest in playing internet detective at this point. And, um, frankly she kind of scares me. "My 3rd grade journal has an entry that states 'If I could be any animal, I'd be a gigantic wolf bigger than White Fang and no one would dare defy my power.' Some things just never change." That's kind of a coincidence because my 3rd grade journal has some squiggly lines and the sentence, "I hope we get cookies today!" Some things just never change.

I have no idea whether SOE knew about or cared about Faarwolf's extra-curricular activities. I'm guessing they didn't know. That would be too much of a public relations disaster waiting to happen and we all know they've had enough of those.

I actually thought twice about posting this entry, because I do have respect for people's privacy. But, I guess when you sell EQ stuff on EBay and post about it in your live journal, you don't mind the world knowing. Maybe this post will even net her a few bids.

By the way, I'm curious how the EQ2-Daily gang found this link in the first place, so if you guys are reading, let me know. Be sure to check out their site for news and podcast action.

And, remember, I have no way of verifying that it's actually Faarwolf selling the stuff. I've found, much to my surprise, that not everything you read on the internet is true. Shocking!