Author: Regina Buenaobra

I have some belated news. In December 2022, I started on a new adventure—I joined Wizards of the Coast and the content marketing team for Dungeons & Dragons as Senior Manager, Content Marketing & Communications.

My first three months at the new job have been absolutely wild (a massive understatement…). Despite the monumental challenges (and it was a lot) during my short time working on Dungeons & Dragons, I ultimately feel that this was a good decision for me and where I wanted to take my career.

As a longtime Dungeons & Dragons player, it’s neat to work on a game that has been a part of my life for decades, and alongside great people who are also passionate about D&D. I am learning a ton every day, and I’m doing my best to contribute and to make a positive impact where I can.

The decision to leave NCSOFT West (and ArenaNet) after 14.5 years was a difficult one. I had a fantastic team, boss, and company, and I will always be grateful for my time there.

I’m sad that the recent layoffs have hit my former team so hard. The team was already small and scrappy, and now they’re even smaller and have to be even more scrappy. I’m doing my best to support those who were impacted where I can.

It’s been years, so these are the major milestones since the last time I posted here:

• 2015: helped launch Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
• 2017: helped launch Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire
• 2019: after the layoffs at ArenaNet, the ArenaNet publishing team became fully integrated into the NCSOFT West publishing team
  • Promoted to Associate Director, Content Marketing
  • Became the department head for content marketing at NCSOFT West
    • The content marketing team had community management, social media management, web content, livestreams, and owned influencer marketing under its umbrella of responsibilities for every game that NCSOFT West published, including Guild Wars 2
• 2020: promoted to Director, Content Marketing
  • Helped launch FUSER
• 2022: helped launch Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons

That’s all for now. Maybe it won’t be 9 years until my next post.

I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted a new position at ArenaNet as the Content Marketing Team Lead.

What does content marketing involve? Content marketing is about creating and curating engaging and relevant content for our fans. This can be achieved through social media channels like Twitter and Tumblr, live broadcasts on Twitch, live events/conventions, the website, and more.

While the title is new, I’ve been in the business of social media and community-focused content marketing at ArenaNet for years. When I started working at ArenaNet in 2008, one of my desires was to bring its fan-facing presence into the modern era of community engagement. I wanted to get ArenaNet involved in the conversations about Guild Wars 2 happening in rapidly growing, emerging social media spaces. I made business cases for and launched ArenaNet’s Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube channels for the studio and for Guild Wars 2. Since then, I have helped drive strategy for the company’s subsequent forays into social media. Our Global Community Team, located both in the US and Europe, has accomplished a lot through hard work and creativity. Through social media, we have reached beyond the core fans that traditional, first-party forum-based, old school community management was concerned with, to include fans further afield. Communities have and will always exist outside official forums, and videogame community management as a profession has been expanding its area of practice and interest to the world outside the first-party forum. From that perspective, social media and content marketing are expansions of the community management discipline.

Among my favorite personal milestones in community-focused content marketing includes building, from the ground up and through daily engagement with fans, the community on the Guild Wars 2 Facebook page. I guided its early growth and developed its cultural atmosphere, and I helped shape one of the most friendly Facebook communities for a videogame out there. Years later, our Facebook community is over 1 million fans strong, with loads of active, engaged, and welcoming members. I fondly remember meeting some of them at conventions, discussing the group and how we could make it better. I introduced them to developers so they could give feedback about the game directly to those working on it. Creating these connections with our community is part of what community management, social media, and community-focused content marketing are all about.

Another favorite milestone is developing the strategy for and spearheading the launch of the Guild Wars 2 Tumblr site, one of the best places to find Guild Wars 2 fan-created works. As a long time Tumblr user (since 2007), I was thrilled to bring Guild Wars 2 to a social platform that has experienced tremendous growth as a home for all sorts of fandom communities, including Guild Wars 2. Launched this year, our Tumblr site is a hub for showcasing the amazing talent and imagination of our fans and it enables them to connect with Guild Wars 2 through a shared passion manifested in creative works. I manage our Tumblr site day-to-day, and I’m constantly amazed at how creative our community is.

Because my new role is more of a strategic one, and one that is focused on social media and our other content marketing channels, I’ll be less active on the official forums. My team will be keeping up the great work we’ve been doing in social media and our livestreams and I look forward to the challenges and projects that lay ahead for us.