Welcome to Seashadow Consulting!

Cindy's career in Community Relations began almost by accident. She married young and had two children. She expected to raise them and live the rest of her life residing in a small town in Colorado.

As her children grew, she began volunteering a few days a week at a center that helped women dealing with unplanned pregnancies. She worked with many young girls as they were faced with life changing decisions and helped them work through their crises. The organization with which she worked helped women in every way they could, from providing maternity and baby clothes and housing for pregnant woman to referring them to other social services to help them get on their feet again.

Over the course of several years, her role grew. She went from being a volunteer once a week to being the Community Manager, a job that turned out to encompass everything from recruiting and training new volunteers to fund raising and public relations for the non-profit organization. She eventually went on to become Director of another center. It was during this time that she planned some of her first events. There were training seminars, fund raising banquets, carnivals, walk-a-thons and staff retreats that had to be organized.

Cindy found that she really enjoyed this work and when her children were a little older, she returned to school full time. She enrolled at the University of Southern Colorado (now University of Colorado, Pueblo) and started working towards a degree in Psychology. Her plan was to continue on to get her Masters degree as well and become a psychotherapist.

As a student, she accepted her second Community Manager title for the Women and Non-Traditional Student's Center. Again she was in charge of fund-raising, events and communication with the community the organization was hoping to reach. Again, she found herself planning things like fund-raising dinners for hundreds and carnivals for thousands. During this time, she also worked with the police department as a Victims' Advocate during this time, assisting victims of crimes and accidents and their families.

In her senior year of college, Cindy suddenly found herself unable to keep up with her studies. She was tired all of the time and unable to remember things that use to be very easy for her. She started suffering from pain in her muscles and joints and feeling cold all of the time. For months, she kept getting worse and nothing seemed to help. She had to drop her classes one by one as things worsened week by week.

Finally, tests showed that Cindy had a rare thyroid condition that was the cause of all of which she was suffering. The good news was that it could be treated with medication and she would be fine. The bad news was that it could take several months to get the dosage correct before she would begin to feel a permanent improvement and go back to work. As it turned out, she was nearly housebound for over 8 months in total.

Unable to work or get out much, Cindy turned to computer gaming to fill the hours. It wasn't long before she discovered the pastime that would change her life- Massively Multi-player Online Games.

The first game that caught Cindy's interest was The Realm Online. It didn't take long for her to discover that she could find not only a fun pastime in this game but a social outlet as well. She joined her first online guild and was soon an officer, organizing the guild's storehouse and recruiting new guild members.

When EverQuest was released, she followed the rest of her guild. She enjoyed playing and making friends with many people across the country. In addition, she became a guide in EverQuest. She even arranged to meet a couple of online friends face to face and found it was a great experience.

As her health improved, she began looking for a new job. She applied to a company that asked her to build a sample website to show what she could do. She decided to build a site that would interest her, so she built the Women of EverQuest site. She never got the job, but the site became a hit and attracted her first online community to manage.

Over the next months, one topic that came up often was how much people would enjoy some sort of gathering where EQ players could meet each other face to face. Cindy had already realized what an enjoyable experience it was to meet her online gaming friends in person. And she had already planned numerous events for various sized groups. So she began to consider how such an event could work.

She put up a page on her site asking how many people would be interested in such an event and where they would most likely attend. She received thousands of responses. She did some research, put it all together and announced what she called the EverQuest Gathering in Saint Louis, Missouri. As registrations began to trickle in, she was put in touch with team members from Verant / Sony Online Entertainment about the event. They decided to sponsor it and send a few people from the company to attend.

Just over 100 people were registered, but over 250 showed up for the event! It was a great success, exceeding anyone's expectations. Attendees loved meeting each other and participating in the activities and demos that Cindy had arranged. Everyone was pleased with the results so with the blessing of the company, she scheduled another event for Las Vegas a few months later. This time, over 200 were registered and over 500 showed up at the door. Again, the event was a great success. So SOE offered her a full time position to plan regular events for EQ players.

Cindy accepted and became Community Manager for EverQuest. She was hired to plan the events but found her position encompassed many other aspects, as most community professionals do. At the time, the forums at SOE were commonly known among players as the “Flame Boards.” Anyone could make a forum account and post anonymously. The boards were out of control, full of profanity and insults. It was decided that it would be best to shut down the boards and reopen them with new rules and accountability, tying a player's game account to their posting privileges. The day the boards reopened was her first day on the job. So one of her first duties was to help restructure the community into a place of good communication and a more welcoming atmosphere.

She began planning and hosting player events every three months in a different city, which became known as the EverQuest Fan Faires. During the two years she spent with SOE, the events continued to grow. By the time she left, they were each selling out with 1500 registered guests and several hundred others showing up to be part of the event without officially attending. They were also making a substantial profit.

During this time, Cindy came to understand the importance of fan sites to the growth and maintenance of an online game community. She developed strong ties with them, making sure they got what they needed from the company and being their mouthpiece to the developers. There weren't too many other Community Managers in the industry at the time and the influence and impact of fan sites had not really been taken into consideration up to that point. Cindy made it a point to get to know these sites and their operators, often giving them a direct line to the company for the first time.

As the events grew and became more and more difficult to manage alone, burnout became a major factor. She decided it was time to leave and strike out on her own. She left SOE and began plans to start her own business. But before she could get things off the ground, she was contacted by Brad McQuaid about his new company, Sigil Games Online.

SGO was working on a new MMOG, but that was the extent of what was known at the time. McQuaid offered her a position anyway. They decided to start building their community before even announcing their project. This was unprecedented, as many companies seem to hire a community professional almost as an afterthought. But hiring someone to build the community before even announcing a title was unheard of. She had a long term plan for the community from pre-release through launch. She was able to see this through up until the beginning of Beta.

It paid off. By the time Vanguard : Saga of Heroes was announced, there were over 100,000 members and over a dozen affiliated fan sites. At release, the community had grown to over 200,000 with over 3 dozen sites, including several international sites. The game was launched with a strong and supportive community already in place.

Cindy also gained some notoriety during this time due to the company's stand on the sale of secondary items by third party companies. SGO had made a public stand that they would not allow secondary sales in their game, nor would they allow any of their affiliates to advertise with such companies and remain affiliates. At some point after the game had been announced, Cindy agreed to do an interview with a fan site regarding secondary sales companies and responded directly to an interview that had been published with a representative of the secondary sales company IGE.

IGE's response to her interview was to begin purchasing the Vanguard fan sites that had been established. They made exorbitant offers to the site operators, and when all was said and done, nearly half had sold and either shut down or were removed as affiliates for Vanguard. So halfway through building the game community, there was an attempt to destroy it. But through perseverance, hard work and the support of those that remained and did not sell, the community was rebuilt. It wasn't long before things were back to normal and the community flourished once again.

Cindy had built the Vanguard community from the ground up and rebuilt it again when things were disrupted. And she had a long term plan for the community after launch to continue building and growing the community. But again, health problems intervened.

During her time at Sigil, she was diagnosed with gastroparesis, a stomach disorder that causes nerve damage to the digestive track, resulting in severe nausea and pain and requiring hospitalization periodically. She continued to work at Sigil but it was getting harder to be there every day due to her condition.

Finally, doctors discovered a tumor on her pancreas and in February of '06, she underwent surgery and much of her pancreas was removed. This in turn aggravated her already serious condition and it took her nearly a year to recover. With great sadness, she officially left SGO in the summer of '06. She moved back to Colorado to be near her family as she recuperated.

Cindy's broad range of experiences in the community relations field has resulted in giving her some very specialized skills, experience and contacts. As she began to recover and think about going back to work again, she began to get inquiries about consulting contracts for things such as community development, driving site traffic and event planning for game companies. So as she began to consider and accept some of these contracts, Seashadow Consulting was born, named after her online Abigale Seashadow. Once again, the next step in her career happened almost by accident.

Seashadow consulting was established in 2007. In addition to offering her services to industry professionals, she also started the Community Professionals Guild, a group for all game industry community professionals. She also began accepting speaking engagements for groups interested in her perspective on and breaking into the MMOG industry, community development and groups that are interested in her journey from being a housewife and mother to being one of the most well known pioneers in the MMOG community relations field.