Interview with Hash Rush Community Manager Tenzin Chiodak

In order to better serve the ever-growing Hash Rush community, we started looking for a community manager (CM). Now, a few weeks later, we can happily say we found an awesome CM — and generally a great guy — , Tenzin Chiodak. To properly introduce Tenzin to our community, we sat down to discuss his experience, role and expectations as the Hash Rush Community Manager.

My role is interacting directly with the Hash Rush community on every platform. / Tenzin Chiodak

Hi Tenzin, it’s great to talk to you today. What are you doing at the moment?

I was just going over Reddit, just seeing how people respond to the entire idea of a gaming-cryptocurrency mix.

Great, so you’re familiarising yourself with the Hash Rush community. And where are you doing this?

Right now I’m in Breda, the Netherlands. It’s quite unexpected that I’m working from here, since I live (and work) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Just last week I saw the job ad for the community manager position at Hash Rush, so I figured that if I would get the job, I’d start in a few weeks or so. But it went a 100 times more faster than I’m used to; that was a bit surprising, but it’s fine with me!

I guess that’s the benefit of working in a distributed team! But when you go back to Karlsruhe, where will you work from? Do you have your own office?

No, I don’t have my own office. I just have my main PC which I use for basically everything. I find it more relaxing to work in my own space; it allows me to get into work quite easily.

Great, then you have a similar ‘work setup’ to Dendy (Hash Rush Lead Concept Artist & Illustrator), it seems. Could you briefly introduce yourself? Who are you and what do you do?

Sure thing. My name is Tenzin Chiodak, I come from all around the world. My mom is from the Czech Republic, my father is from Tibet, and I was brought up in London, but now I’m living in Germany. I always find it quite fun to explain to people where I’m from — and I’m a French national on top of that. That just confuses people a lot.

For the last few years, I worked as a community manager at Gameforge. I’ve always liked working with computer games, and no matter which one I played, I tried helping the community, creating guides, explain to new players how things work. So when I was at university, I realised I really wanted to get a CM job, and afterwards I applied to Gameforge. It took a while for me to start there, but when I did they asked me to come work in their head office in Karlsruhe.

I gained quite a lot of experience with Gameforge on how to be effective as a community manager. I managed to travel to America, Korea, and see some of the developers of the different games I worked with, such as HEX: Shards of Fate.

That’s awesome. What kind of game is HEX?

It’s a TCG [Trading-Card Game], so for anyone who loves TCGs, I’d really recommend it. It has a very good storyline and some cool gameplay elements.

And you play it yourself?

Yes, I still play it. When I was a CM for HEX, I was just not telling everyone that I’m the community manager. It’s interesting to get a feeling from the community when playing anonymously. People are more relaxed then, especially people who are new to the game.

So at Hash Rush, you will also take up the role of Community Manager. Tell us something about that.

Well, I’m quite new to Hash Rush. I wasn’t expecting to jump in so quickly, but it’s a lot of fun. It’s very lively, but ideally, once everything settles down, my role is interacting directly with the community on every platform.

And in that role, what are you looking forward to?

I’m looking forward to playing the game itself, and seeing how hardcore gamers and crypto-fans mix. I’ve got quite an interest in PC hardware, but a lot of these people [hardware enthusiasts] dislike crypto-miners because graphic cards can get really expensive. There can be a lot of animosity, so I’m curious on how it can be branched over so gamers don’t hate on the miners so much.

Sure, so you’ve mined yourself as well?

I haven’t, but I was actually planning to set up a rig. I couldn’t get an AMD570, so I got an AMD470 instead. It’s good for mining and gaming, so I could do both depending on how I felt. But if I get a second 470 I will definitely set up a mining rig for Ethereum.

So then we have another miner on the Hash Rush team! So how did you come to hear about the Hash Rush project?

It was actually completely by chance. I was in the Netherlands looking through some freelancing jobs and saw a job for a ‘cryptocurrency gaming project’. That caught my attention, because of my interest in gaming and graphic cards. Reading through the job description and looking through the Hash Rush homepage, I figured it would be really satisfying if I could work with them. So the same day that I saw it, I pieced together an application. That was on Friday I think, and by Monday I had an interview, and by Thursday I got an offer. That’s the fastest it ever went, I wasn’t expecting that.

Ha right, that’s the advantage of working in a startup; things can go very, very fast. I know you’ve been brought on board just one week ago, but do you have an idea of who you will be working with most?

I’ll be mostly working with Craig [the Director of Marketing] and you [Jochem, PR Manager]. Ideally, we’ll try to make the three of us be a voice for the community. This means that when all goes well, we need to make sure the rest of team knows it. And if not, we need to make sure we know we have to make certain fixes, and make sure these fixes are beneficial to the community and the game at the same time.

So the CM role seems quite challenging. But if you think about your previous position, what is the biggest difference with your current position at Hash Rush?

The biggest difference is that I’ve only worked with gaming communities, no crypto communities. And normally with games you don’t have money involved, or well you do, but not as a potential investment. For HEX, we incorporated this aspect a bit into the game (cards have market value), but Hash Rush is definitely taking it to a new level. I’m confident I can react to gamers quite well, but when it comes to crypto I’ll have to be a bit more careful.

I’m really looking forward to it, because it’s new. After a few years of working as a CM, you know how it’ll go. For me, crypto really is a fun adventure. That may sound a bit cheesy, but it’s cool. I’m looking forward to learning a lot and interacting with the crypto community.

That’s awesome to hear. And besides the community, what makes Hash Rush so interesting for you?

I really like the character design so far. It seems fresh, and the whole world that is built so far is different to what I’m used to. I’ve been doing quite some work with competitive games, and the fact that Hash Rush is not so competitive is also great. I got a bit tired of working with competitive games all the time. I suppose that’s the main part, beyond that it’s an entirely new experience.

Have you looked at the factions? Is there one that appeals to you the most?

Yes, probably the Ernacks. I enjoyed reading the story, about how the Traveler returned to his home planet and faction. And he’s the tallest of all Ernacks, so that resonates with me because I’m pretty tall!

If we talk about gaming, what is your favourite gaming platform, game, and what are you currently playing?

My favourite platform is PC. Also I do quite some mobile casual gaming, such as hero collection games. These days I’m playing Dragonball Z Dokkan Battle, and Stars Wars Galaxy of Heroes. For PC, I really enjoy World of Tanks these days, but most recently I’ve been playing good RPG and RTS games. But one of my biggest annoyances is that there haven’t been any good classical RTS games, such as Age of Empires I or II. So I also still play Age of Empires II, occasionally with some friends but mostly PvE [Player vs. Environment].

My all-time favourite game is Chrono Trigger. I’ve never been bored playing that. You should definitely play it, it’s quite old but it’s one of the masterpieces of RPG games.

And will you play Hash Rush yourself?

Yep, definitely. It’s just something that really appeals to me. I’m finding the general story quite interesting, and that’s one of the first thing that catches my eye in a game. If it has a good story, I will want to look at it more. After reading more about Hash Rush, I started looking at the designs, and these were interesting, and new for me. And it’s a strategy game, which I also really enjoy. So basically it’s a mixture of all these things put together, which makes Hash Rush quite a hype for me personally; so I definitely want to play it.

Great! Thanks Tenzin for your time and interesting answers. We’ve come to the end of our interview, is there anything you want to share with our readers? Maybe a favourite game no one knows about, or something else?

Hmm, maybe something interesting is that I really like to travel everywhere. My main goal is to go to a new country every year. This year it’s the Netherlands, last year was South Korea, and I’m hoping for Japan next year!

That was the end of our interview. If you’re interested in reading some of our previous interviews, take a look at the one with Craig Ritchie (Director of Marketing), Dendy Dhamier (Lead Concept Artist), or Jethro Naude (Chief Game Economist)!

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