Hey Black Lotus, welcome to this month’s Player Spotlight! Let’s kick things off with introductions, tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hello, I’m Black Lotus or more commonly referred to as Lotus. I decided to have this as my username because I simply like the colours of the fictional plant (Black and Purple), and it simply sounds cool to me. No relation to the card game, anime or the car brand, also the LV at the end stands for Latvia, as mostly “BlackLotus” is already taken, so instead of adding a random number, I added something that means something.
I am from a small Eastern European country called Latvia. Currently I’m a student and in my free time I play video games, watch TV shows, movies, anime and read a lot of manga and of course try to moderate The Crew forums, The Crew Discord, keep an eye on The Crew Reddit, review speedruns on The Crew speedrun page and other things that happen behind the scenes.
Readers may know you as the Admin of The Crew Discord server. Tell us a bit more about this server?
Right, so I had found out about Discord on Reddit page for a different game, as an alternative to Skype and TS3 (TeamSpeak), I downloaded it but didn’t use it until I saw someone making a community for League of Legends, so I joined them with the idea to help out as they were just starting out and I wanted to find a server for The Crew because the in-game communication options were and still are not that great for The Crew games, so having a text and voice chat based platform to discuss the game would have been great, but I couldn’t find any server so I decided to make it myself.
So, I created a few channels, thought of some rules so people behave and then I went on the official forums and made a post about the server. Soon after a few people joined and over time it grew in to a very big server of almost 5000 people at this time.
So, about the server itself, it is basically all things the crew and more as we don’t limit the conversations just about the game. We also discuss other games, movies, TV shows, new/old cars and everything else that someone starts the discussion about. We have a news channel where we post all the latest news regarding the games, like maintenances, patch notes, community spotlights and official streams. We also post notifications about upcoming #TC2Weekly events, as well as community created events like the Photo Mode contest from The Crew Exchange or the bi-weekly PvP events (which are actually weekly, but we alternate between the 2 games each week). There are a few language channels so people who don’t speak English can have their place to talk to each other. The Developers are also there a lot, not officially, but to have fun, same as us.
So if you are interested in joining the server just go to https://discord.gg/thecrew or in discord press “Add server” → “Join a server” and simply write “thecrew”
You’ve participated in a few community workshops now, what did you think of the experience?
Yes, I have been invited to meet the developers before the launch of Calling All Units and some time before The Crew 2 was launched.
When I got the message in my forum inbox I didn’t believe that I would be invited. Honestly, until I got the tickets in my e-mail I thought James (at the time Com Manager now Com Dev) was making a practical joke, because I was honestly thinking that I can’t be possibly be invited. I also felt lucky that I could go as I turned 18 just a few months prior to going there.
It was an amazing experience as we could ask questions that we wanted to be answered for so long and play the developer build where CAU was available.
As I already said I was incited for The Crew 2 workshop as well and have to say that from all the trips I’ve been invited that one was the best, even though I was awake from 2 AM till 10 PM I think, maybe later, that was due to my university and the flight times, but getting to see the Ivory Towers studio in person and having all the fancy meetings and idea building exercises was amazing and I would absolutely want to go again cough.
When I was at IVT I also got interviewed for the first time in my life and I was then featured in one of the Behind the Wheel episodes as well as a video that Ubisoft showed at their E3 presentation, after which I got a few Twitter messages of being featured. But honestly I would have liked to re-do the interview after I saw myself, but I thought it was good with that take, so I decided not to do another take.
Here is the Behind the Wheel episode
And the video that was shown at E3
I was also invited to the CRC to discuss things about rewarding people who contribute a lot to the communities and games, as well as see how the support system works and how the CR’s and CM’s do their work, we visited Ubisoft Reflections studio and were shown things like their developer tool to change the physics for the vehicles in Ghost Recon Wildlands, which was interesting to see as they did it in a tool and directly could see and test it in game. I also managed to privately ask about the Driver franchise as a few friends asked me to ask about it prior to going there and they were surprised that there are people who really want it to come back, so here is hoping :)
Overall I have to say it has been amazing to go on all of these trips and have an insight of what happens behind the scenes of a game company and I have to say a big Thank You to people involved in these trips for inviting me.
Moments like this appear all the time, so hard to pick and choose.
When you’re not playing The Crew, what do you get up to in your spare time?
Mostly my free time goes in either doing something for The Crew Discord, watching a TV Show or reading manga.
For example, I really enjoy watching The Grand Tour or the old Top Gear episodes, where, even though I have seen it many times before I just open a Youtube compilation of the funny bits from the show or the news segment and just enjoy a good laugh.
Actually, in the winter we clean the snow from the lake near our house and play Ice Hockey with the neighbors and that is a lot of fun, but mostly my hobby is The Crew.
Lastly, what’s your dream car? And why?
Probably something fancy, like a LaFerrari as it looks really nice and one does not simply not like Ferrari, but really a dream car is a car that you would really like, but would never actually get, thus a dream. Something that I would like to eventually have is a Mazda RX-7 FD because I really like how it looks, the tuning you can go with to make it look even more amazing and I really would like a car with a rotary engine, so I can giggle like a child in the driver seat while the car goes Pop Pop Bang Bang.
As the final thing I want to say – Thank you everyone in The Crew Discord for joining the community as without you all the server would be empty and I wouldn’t have had the possibilities to experience all these trips and events. Thanks to the Community team and the community leaders over all media for helping with getting people in the server. And finally the Mini is OP, but the golf is better. :)
Thank you and see you on the roads, or in the air, or on water!