Hi everyone
Well, I was born January 30, 1982 in Inglewood, California and was immediately placed in an orphanage by my birth mother. Working quickly to rectify the situation, I found my adoptive parents
within a few weeks and they were, to my eternal surprise, glad to have me.
Once my brother's asthma got too poor to stay, thanks to the colorful brown haze over greater Los Angeles, we moved to Henderson, Nevada, home to the Phillips Petroleum explosion of 1988 which still stands as one of my earliest memories as it scared the (bleep) out of me.
Anyways, on to more current events... After and during high school, I worked in the food industry and learned everything I know about customer service from a man named Mitch who ran a
small deli. He was an absolutely charming man who always had a smile for his customers, flirted openly with the female patrons and shook the hand of almost every person who walked in his store.
In late 2000, I started playing Asheron's Call on the Morningthaw server. It wasn't really my first online game as I had played some Mechwarrior 3 and Diablo but it was the first MMORPG I had played. I bounced around between jobs and school for a year or so, still playing AC. I always seemed to have a knack for having far more wealth in the game than I really needed and one of my in-game friends, Killean, suggested that I could make some side money selling my excess sings and plats. Well, that didn't seem like a bad idea so I actually sold them cheap to him for awhile since he was already an established eBay seller. Eventually I decided I could simply do the sales myself and began selling them on my own ID.
Not long after tinkering came along, another friend of mine, Gholam, who was the top weapon tinkerer on the server decided to quit and let it be known that his account was for sale so I offered to buy it. He was happy that someone he knew would keep the character active.
At that time I was good friends with one of the more controversial figures on the server and VN boards, Smirking Revenge. He is an extraordinary coder and he liked the idea of the challenge of setting up the first 'tinkering bot' program. It only took him a few weeks and low and behold, GholamBot became a regular fixture at Sanctuary where he accepted sing keys for automatic weapon tinks.
I'll leave out the details of the RonUSMC, MikeHext, Eldreth debacle that focused around my 'evil business' as that was all played out here on the boards and in other forums for public consumption...
Anyways, as AC was starting to lose accounts for various reasons, I began looking for another game to put my efforts into... I jumped from SWG, HZ, and a few other games before being invited into the CoH/V beta where I found what I believed was a nice 'sleeper' game.
By this time, I was making enough from gaming to quit 'regular jobs' and focus on it full time. I began selling on a single server and rapidly expanded by buying accounts and currency
from people I knew in the game. I began 'employing' regular American players to supply me with currency and saw the possibilities for expansion into other games.
During that time I had made some contacts overseas in the Chinese 'gold farmer' markets (although this was pre-WoW) and was approached with the possibility of buying into one of them myself. I flew to Hangzhou (near Shanghai) to check out the facilities and introduce myself to the previous owners. I installed one of the finest, hardest working people I've ever met as my on-site manager and continue to this day to run the operations from here in Arizona with the help of my stateside employees. I consider the website and PLing company to be of moderate size (we employ about 60 workers on average) and I have contracts with some of the bigger, more well-known sites that most of you in gaming have probably heard of and my company does their PLing for them in certain games.
I also oversee the operations of other Chinese PLing companies but only keep a 'percentage' as I do not own them outright but we merely facilitate communication, handle client's problems, etc.
We are currently in negotiations to take over the customer service department of one of our larger clients but I don't see that happening any time soon which is fine since I'd have to hire more employees here in the States to handle that kind of obligation. I was offered a position outright at the company but declined as it would entail me moving to the east coast. As it is, I have family obligations here in Tucson as well as Vegas that I can't neglect.
Well, I see I've left out most of the personal aspects of my life like my boyfriend of a few years, my drunkard millionaire brother, and various other semi-interesting tidbits like dating a
mid-level mob guy's son in Vegas for a few months years ago and having to come here to Tucson for awhile to avoid any 'problems', but at this point in my life, my business pretty much consumes most of my life so I spent the time talking mostly about that...
Anyways, hope that was at least worth the time to read.
If anyone has any questions I'll do my best to answer them.
Edit: Here's a few pics that I may or may not have posted before...
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Kristi - Phantasy Star Universe - Level 56 Fortefighter (4) Xbox
Kristi Ann - Lvl 50 Blaster - CoH Justice
Kristi the Sweet - Lvl 160 Archer - AC MT (retired)
